The 7am Novelist

Today, we hear from Josh Barkan whose fiction and nonfiction skirts our most pressing political issues, either directly or indirectly, and his advice about how other writers might do the same.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Barkan’s latest book as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Want to join our January write-a-thon. Go here for more information: 7amnovelist.substack.com/p/join-our-january-group-write

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page.

JOSH BARKAN won the Lightship International Short Story Prize and was runner-up for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the Paterson Fiction Prize, the Juniper Prize for Fiction, and the Eric Hoffer Award for memoir. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his writing has appeared in Esquire. He has taught creative writing at Harvard, NYU, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Hollins University and MIT. His books include the novel Blind Speed and short story collections Before Hiroshima and Mexico (Hogarth/Penguin Random House)—named one of the five best story collections of 2017 by Library Journal. His latest book is the memoir Wonder Travels. He lives in Boston.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Today, we get some hilarity (and good advice) from Hilary Isabelle Lahan and Christine Murphy about how the special nature of writing friendships and how to manage your own.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find their latest books here as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Want to join our January write-a-thon? Go here for more information: 7amnovelist.substack.com/p/join-our-january-group-write

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page.

Hilary Isabelle Lahan’s novel-in-progress, Pollen Mitt, Massachusetts, was a 2023 Top Ten Finalist for Reese’s Book Club’s Lit Up Fellowship. In 2021-2022, she attended GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program as a Pauline Scheer Fellow. Previously, she graduated in creative writing and literature from Wheaton College (Norton, MA), where she received the Helen Myers Tate Memorial Prize for Original Verse. For more information, visit www.hilaryisabelle.com.

Christine Murphy has lived, worked, and traveled in more than a hundred countries, including living for eleven months in a tent across the African continent and a year as a resident in a Buddhist nunnery in the Himalayas. A trained Buddhologist, Murphy has a Ph.D. in religious studies. Her first novel, Notes on Surviving the Fire, will be released on February 25. And I’m lucky enough to be interviewing her at Porter Square Books, Boston Editon, at 7pm.

Today, we hear from Grace Talusan and Calvin Hennick about how they made their unique writing partnership work.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Talusan and Hennick’s debuts as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Want to join our January write-a-thon. Go here for more information: 7amnovelist.substack.com/p/join-our-january-group-write

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page.

Grace Talusan is the author of THE BODY PAPERS, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant writing and the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction. In 2022, she was awarded fellowships from United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Brother Thomas Fund. She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University.

Calvin Hennick’s debut memoir, Once More to the Rodeo, won the Pushcart’s 2019 Editors’ Book Award and was published in December 2019 by Pushcart Press. He is also a business and technology writer based in Boston. He wrote for many years for The Boston Globe and his prize-winning work has appeared in over 50 publications.

Photo by Magnus Jonasson on Unsplash

Today, we hear from Whitney Scharer and Celeste Ng about their friendship, how they’ve supported each other through the years as writers, the work they do in their communities to support other writers and their careers, and how they plan to keep working in the new year.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Ng’s and Scharer’s latest books as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Excited about Whitney and Sonya’s new conference? Give them feedback here: https://0c9d64fvmv6.typeform.com/to/EX9NG3ec

Want to join our January write-a-thon? Go here for more information: 7amnovelist.substack.com/p/join-our-january-group-write

Finally, are you looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page.

Whitney Scharer’s first novel, The Age of Light, based on the life of pioneering photographer Lee Miller, was published by Little, Brown (US) and Picador (UK) in February, 2019, and was a Boston Globe and IndieNext bestseller and named one of the best books of 2019 by Parade, Glamour Magazine, Real Simple, Refinery 29, Booklist and Yahoo. Internationally, The Age of Light won Le prix Rive Gauche à Paris, was a coups de couer selection from the American Library in Paris, and has been published in over a dozen other countries. Whitney is the recipient of a 2020 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Fellowship in Fiction, and has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts and Ragdale. She teaches fiction in the Boston area and is a co-founder of the Arlington Author Salon, a quarterly reading series. She lives with her husband and daughter in Arlington, MA, where she is at work on her second novel.

Celeste Ng is a novelist who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You (2014), was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the ALA’s Alex Award. It has been translated into over thirty languages and is being adapted for the screen. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, a #1 Indie Next bestseller, and Amazon's Best Fiction Book of 2017. It was named a best book of the year by over 25 publications, the winner of the Ohioana Award and the Goodreads Readers Choice Award 2017 in Fiction, and has spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Little Fires Everywhere has been published abroad in more than 30 languages and has been adapted as a limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, was published in October 2022 in the US, Canada, and the UK, and was an instant New York Times bestseller.

Celeste and Whitney together attempting to imitate their author photos!

Today, we hear from writers and married couple Lori Ostlund and Anne Raeff and their work with the LGBTQI+ refugee organization, Rainbow Railroad, which also inspires their fiction and their writing process.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Ostlund and Raeff’s latest books as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Want to join our January write-a-thon. Go here for more information: 7amnovelist.substack.com/p/join-our-january-group-write

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page.

Anne Raeff's second novel, Winter Kept Us Warm, published in 2018, won the silver medal for the California Book Award for Fiction. Her short story collection, The Jungle Around Us won the 2015 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. The collection was also a finalist for the California Book Award and was on The San Francisco Chronicle's 100 Best Books of 2017 list. In 2019 she was a finalist for the Simpson Literary Award. Clara Mondschein's Melancholia, also a novel, was published in 2002. Her last novel, Only the River, was published on May 2020. After many years of being a proud high school teacher, she is now retired and lives in San Francisco.

Lori Ostlund’s novel After the Parade (Scribner 2015) was a Barnes & Noble Discover pick and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Ferro-Grumley Award. Her story collection, The Bigness of the World, won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lambda Finalist and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her third book, entitled Are You Happy?, will be published by Astra House in May 2025. The final story in the collection, “Just Another Family,” will appear in the the 2024 Best American Short Stories. She has been a teacher for over twenty-five years in New Mexico, Spain, Malaysia, and North Carolina and is currently on the Mile-High MFA faculty at Regis University in Denver. She is the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and a board member of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, which supports feminist women in the arts. She lives in San Francisco with her wife, the writer Anne Raeff, and their cat Oscar.

Photo by Sharon Pittaway on Unsplash

Today, we hear from Theresa Okokon whose memoir in essays will be released on February 4. We talk about the power of delusions, controlling what your writing means to you, and letting go of the meaning others might try to assign to you. As Okokon says: “That’s not my problem.”

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Okokon’s latest books as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Want to join our January write-a-thon. Go here for more information: 7amnovelist.substack.com/p/join-our-january-group-write

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page.

Theresa Okokon is a Pushcart Prize-nominated essayist whose work (and bathroom selfies!) has appeared in Elle, midnight & indigo, Hippocampus Magazine, the Independent, WBUR's Cognoscenti, and Boston.com. A Wisconsinite living in New England, she is he co-host of Stories From The Stage. In addition to writing and performing her own stories, Theresa also teaches storytelling and writing workshops and classes, coaches other tellers, hosts story slams, and frequently emcees events for nonprofits. An alum of both the Memoir Incubator and Essay Incubator programs at GrubStreet, Theresa's memoir in essays about memory, family stories, and the death of her father -- WHO I ALWAYS WAS-- is available NOW on preorder, and officially publishes with Atria Books at Simon & Schuster on February 4, 2025. Theresa Instagrams gorgeous cocktails, food porn, and pics about Blackness, fatness, and her very cute senior dog on her Instagram at @ohh.jeezzz. She believes very seriously in capitalizing the B in Black and the W in White, and you can read more about that here, with Kwame Anthony Appiah.

This January on the 7am novelist we’re interviewing authors about how they’re sticking to their writing goals despite or maybe because of recent events and their thoughts not only about how other writers might do the same but also about how we might continue to affect change and support each other in both small and large ways.

We’re also holding a large Group-Write for our listeners. That’s right, we’re going to write together over zoom every weekday morning in January from 7 to 8:30 am EST and every Tuesday night from 7 to 8:30pm EST, starting Monday, January 6. We’ll start each session with a few minutes of inspiration and sharing our writing goals on the zoom chat and end each session with turning on our mics and talking about what we accomplished. In between, we’ll have those mics off as we write together. Feel free to come late to a session or only make one or two. No problem. We just want to see you there and support each other as we continue to work in the year ahead.

If you’re interested in joining, email me at [email protected] and I’ll send you the registration link. Subscribe to this Substack page at for updates about our January writing challenge and other news, events, and interviews.

Thanks so much everyone. I hope to see you in January.

Photo by Val Vesa on Unsplash

Tonight, Writers for Blue is offering a special opportunity to learn about writing your first pages. We’ll have four award-winning authors, including myself, Aaron Hamburger, Nancy Johnson, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Jayne Anne Phillips, workshopping seven first-page writing submissions in support of electing Kamala Harris, our first female president—and our 47th. We’ll also hear about ways you might use your words in the upcoming election cycle, including how to write politically-charged topics, canvassing, and more, from writers Charles Coe, Rishi Reddi, Daphne Kalotay, Julia Rold, and Gish Jen.   

All of these authors have donated their time, energy, and talents in support of this event. We’re hoping you might follow suit and consider donating to our Writers for Blue campaign. Go to writersforblue.com to get started.

And, if you’re looking for specific links and resources mentioned during the event, see below.

AUTHORS FEATURED:

Charles Coe, author of five books of poetry and one novel, teaches in the Newport MFA writing program, and is renowned both as a writer and a performer; we are honored to have him speaking as well as kindly reading aloud our sample pages.

Aaron Hamburger is author of four acclaimed books of fiction, winner of the Rome Prize and a 2023 Lambda Literary prize; his new novel HOTEL CUBA has been featured on NPR; Aaron does political activism with Swing Left and is on the faculty at Stonecoast MFA.

Author of nine acclaimed books, most recently a ‘best book’ choice by the Oprah Book Club, NPR and the New Yorker, Gish Jen writes about charged issues with humor and heart, as in her latest collection, THANK YOU, MR NIXON.

Nancy Johnson’s acclaimed debut novel THE KINDEST LIE, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Indie Booksellers choice; Nancy’s also an Emmy-nominated award-winning journalist as well as author of the forthcoming 2025 novel, PEOPLE OF MEANS.

Daphne Kalotay is the author, most recently, of the story collection THE ARCHIVISTS, winner of the Grace Paley Prize, a Boston Authors Club “Notable Book” and long-listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and Massachusetts Book Award. 

National bestselling author of NIGHT SWIM and WOMEN IN BED; Jessica Keener is the Co-Chair with Randy Susan Meyers and, from the start, the driving force of Writers for Blue.

From the iconic story collection BLACK TICKETS through 6 more indelible books of fiction to her 2024 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, NIGHT WATCH Jayne Anne Phillips is—as Caroline Leavitt said on A Mighty Blaze—‘everyone’s literary heroine.’

Rishi Reddi is the PEN New England award winning author of KARMA AND OTHER STORIES and the novel PASSAGE WEST; when not writing, she is an environmental lawyer and lobbies for sound climate policy in her day-job. 

Julia Rold is a writer, playwright and Novel Incubator alum who has worked on political campaigns in Massachusetts, NH, NY, Florida, and her home state of Kentucky.

LINKS TO RESOURCES:

DIRECT LINK TO WritersForBlue DONATION PAGE.

WRITERS FOR BLUE website: https://writersforblue.com/

Our partners:

WRITERS FOR DEMOCRATIC ACTION (WDA)

A MIGHTY BLAZE

Markers for Democracy: https://markersfordemocracy.org/postcarding (get out the vote cards to Democratic voters. has a monthly writing bootcamp online)

Swing Blue: https://swingbluealliance.org/ (coordinating with Working America on postcard campaign focused on Healthcare for independent voters in PA)

VoteForward: https://votefwd.org/instructions (letter-writing you can download yourself. Excellent examples of positive, nonpartisan "let's go vote!" messages)

More suggested messages (specifically for postcards to swing state voters), stats to support the effort, and ways to order postcards: https://turnoutpac.org/

If folks are interested in supporting Dems in Arizona, Wednesday night at 7pm ET, my Swing Left group is hosting an Arizona Zoom Fundraiser. Sign up here.

Door-to-door canvassing resources.

Canvassing in NH:  https://www.mobilize.us/massdems/event/627702/

Canvassing in PA: https://www.mobilize.us/2024pavictory/event/645465/

https://www.31ststreet.org sends out weekly emails with canvassing, donating, phone banking, and letter writing opportunities. Sign up!

One way of targeting critical races is to think about donating to Crimson Goes Blue. It’s a Harvard group, but don’t be put off by that! They do great research, and their record in giving to races that turned out to be super tight, and where money made the difference is impressive. Highly recommended!

Here’s a Slide with a lot of resources about door-to-door canvassing. 

LISTS OF AND INFO ON BANNED BOOKS:

https://socialjusticebooks.org/booklists/banned-books/

SWING LEFT: VOLUNTEER IN A VARIETY OF WAYS— LETTER-WRITING, POST-CARDING, CANVASSING, PHONE-CALLING and MORE for DEMOCRAT CANDIDATES UP AND DOWN THE BALLOT:

PEN AMERICA, sponsoring many activities such as WRITING LETTERS to free political prisoners around the world and teaching writing in prisons; also programs addressing online abuse and misinformation:

Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash

Today, we hear from listeners Lesley Téllez, Kathy Tully, and Elaine Durbach for the last of this summer’s “Listener Roundups.” We hear about what they’ve learned from the past few episodes, what ideas they consider the most important, what questions or confusions they have, and their own advice and/or experience in dealing with the same issues. 

REMINDER OF OUR SPECIAL ZOOM EVENT on September 23. This is a chance for seven lucky listeners to have the first page of a piece of prose workshopped by myself as well as the authors Nancy Johnson, Aaron Hamburger, and Pulitzer Prize winner Jayne Anne Phillips. It’s also a great chance for everyone who registers to learn about what makes a first page work and strategies for how to improve their own. All those who register will receive a full recording of the event. We’ll also be hearing from Charles Coe, Gish Jen, Rishi Reddi, Julia Rold, and Daphne Kalotay about how writers can “Use Your Words” in the upcoming election cycle and more. The event is entirely free but we’re running it support of what we hope will be our first female president, Kamala Harris. Find out more at writersforblue.com.  

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

Mentioned in this episode:

Philip Gerard’s essay “Architecture of Light: Structuring the Novel and Story Collection” from Checkoway’s Creating Fiction, Story Press, 1999.

Steve Almond’s “How to Write Sex Scenes Without Shame” from his craft book Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow, Zando, 2023.

To find books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Lesley Téllez, a writer based in Mexico City, is a former journalist, food writer, and cookbook author, now working on a novel about Mexican food and assimilation.

Kathy Shiels Tully is a freelance writer in the Boston area who, despite an insidious case of Imposter Syndrome, has written about people, food, travel, business, plus essays, in publications including: The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Christian Science Monitor, The Writer, the Erma Bombeck Writing Workshop, and recently, her own “Tiny Love Story” in The New York Times. 

Elaine Durbach, the Zimbabwean-born, New Jersey- based author of two non-fiction books and three self-published novels, was a fact-obsessed journalist for 45 years before discovering the joys of making it all up. 

Photo by Sammie Chaffin on Unsplash

Today, we hear from RO Kwon whose latest novel, EXHIBIT, was released in May. We’re talking to Reese about writing about what scares you.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Kwon’s latest and many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

R. O. Kwon is the author of the nationally bestselling Exhibit, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, which published in May 2024 with Riverhead (US) and will be out in July 2024 with Virago/Little Brown (UK). Kwon’s bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, has been translated into seven languages and was named a best book of the year by over forty publications. The Incendiaries was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award. Kwon and Garth Greenwell co-edited Kink, a New York Times Notable Book and recipient of the inaugural Joy Award. Kwon’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker, Time, Vanity Fair, Guardian, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo. Kwon was the 2024 Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.

Photo: Jesse Dittmar