The Writers Institute

In 2026, the Washington Post closed its book review section, where the critic Becca Rothfeld worked. She soon became a staff writer at The New Yorker, which recently published an essay of hers about the loss of book criticism in general-interest newspapers. “A newspaper," Rothfeld wrote, "is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing.” In this episode, Rothfeld says, “Algorithms sort us into advertising buckets, and it’s very rare that you would encounter something that is totally out of left field for you, or that you might not expect, or not know that you like yet.”

Critics, on the other hand, can surprise us. In this episode, you'll hear the novelist and critic John Updike, at the Writers Institute in Albany, delivering a wide-ranging talk on a writer whose work might also surprise and change readers: Albany’s own Herman Melville. As Updike—a New Yorker critic, like Rothfeld—says: “The preliminary feat of the creative imagination is to imagine the responder—the reader, the viewer, the listener—who will consent to be astonished, amused, and changed by the work of art.” Here, you can listen to the entirety of Updike's talk on the author of Moby-Dick.

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“I’m always looking for contemporary literature that’s going to actually tell me what it’s like being in the world now,” says Andrew Martin, author of the new novel Down Time, in this episode of The Writers Institute. Fiction can bring us especially close to the textures of reality, in strange ways. We listen here to the Writers Institute’s archival sound of Mary Gaitskill, reading from and speaking about her novel The Mare, a book that deals with horses—even though, at the time of the early draft, Gaitskill says, “I knew nothing about horses. So I completely invented all the horse stuff. And it was wrong. I mean stuff in there was just completely wrong.” And yet, by working through the unknowns, writers can find their way to something true—in The Mare, for instance, a character considers the world experienced via art as “a place more real than anything in ‘real’ life.”

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Writers are musical—you can hear it in their best readings and interviews. In this episode, Catherine Lacey, author of The Biography of X and Pew, describes Lorrie Moore’s fiction as especially influential for reasons that go beyond situations and characters; it "really has to do with the musicality of her sentences,” she says. As Rick Moody mentioned in the second episode this season, speaking more generally about writing: “I think the writing is music.” You’ll hear the music of Lorrie Moore in this episode, too. There’s sound from the Writers Institute’s archives of Moore reading from her novel A Gate at the Stairs.

Writing's musical quality might help move writers and readers beyond themselves. Lacey mentions how “in the reading experience, you do kind of lose yourself a little bit,” and she says, “I will spend hours writing because I like the sense of dissolving my experience and making it kind of meaningless and entering the realm of this invented person.” This experience beyond self can lead to new complexities when the writer then brings work to the world in person. There’s archival sound in this episode of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black, who describes some of that strangeness experienced when taking a new book into the world.

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The filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and the novelist William Kennedy—author of Ironweed and founder of the New York State Writers Institute—worked together in the 1980s on Coppola’s film The Cotton Club, a crime epic. In 2019, Coppola traveled to Albany, New York, to screen The Cotton Club for the New York State Writers Institute, and to speak with Bill Kennedy about filmmaking. In this episode, we’ll hear Coppola and Kennedy at that event.

At one point, Coppola mentions that he was inspired to bring an unfinished Apocalypse Now to the Cannes Film Festival—where it ended up winning the Palme D’Or—by James Joyce’s publication of parts of Finnegans Wake with the title “Work in Progress. “My idea,” Coppola says, “was to go to Cannes with the unfinished Apocalypse Now: Work in Progress. And I just wanted to show it so that they would stop imagining what a disaster it was. And then, surprisingly, we won the prize with it.”

Rick Moody, whose novel The Ice Storm was adapted into an Ang Lee film, listens in to that archival tape of Coppola’s conversation with Kennedy, and he talks about bringing his own work into the world through different media. From Coppola to Kennedy to Moody, we hear a similar openness to trying out new things. Moody says, of his own work, “It's not about Rick Moody explicating Rick Moody's experience—not at all. It's me being a vessel for language doing what language wants to do."

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Here comes everybody for season two of The Writers Institute, the podcast from the New York State Writers Institute and Lit Hub. In this season, you’ll hear Toni Morrison, Francis Ford Coppola, Seamus Heaney, Lorrie Moore, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, John Updike, Catherine Lacey, Rick Moody, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Becca Rothfeld, Andrew Martin, Mary Gaitskill, and William Kennedy. The Writers Institute is a show about how writers interact with the world off the page, but this time, we’re also hearing about literary adventures that take us beyond ourselves or through ourselves in new ways. This is the trailer, and our five new episodes are rolling out now, each Wednesday.

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Welcome to the new season of The Writers Institute, the podcast from the New York State Writers Institute and Lit Hub. This is the first episode of five, and new episodes will come out on Wednesdays. In this season’s conversations with writers—who all listen to the institute's archival sound of writers across decades—a new theme emerges. We’re going to hear, often, about how literary exploration leads us beyond a usual sense of who we are.

Some writers take their exploration through history. In this episode, you’ll hear archival sound of Toni Morrison, Nobel-winning author of Beloved and Song of Solomon, who says in an interview from the 1980s: “It seems to me that uncharted terrain, unfathomed depths, are yet to be plumbed in the material that’s yet to be written about.”

Another Nobel laureate, the poet Seamus Heaney, describes here (in Writers Institute sound that's also from the 1980s) how engaging the world through literature can take us into a kind of mind-place while using material from history. “When we open a book,” he says, “be it about Billy Budd or Billy the Kid, we are reading language into ourselves.”

And in this episode’s interview, the novelist Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, talks about her fiction that deals with Colombian history, and she considers her own investigation of something beyond familiar selfhood. “Sometimes,” she says, “I think when I’m entering the best writing moments, I’m almost completely not present. I’m gone from myself, and I’m somewhere else, and in a sort of fugue state. For me, when I’m writing, I’m trying to collaborate with an intelligence in myself that isn’t present all the time.”

Rojas Contreras reflects on her experience of memory loss, too: “In the time when I didn’t have memory,” she says, “one of my favorite things was to just stare at my brain.” There, she found intimations of something else. She says, “It’s sort of like when you’re looking at yourself in the mirror, and sometimes you’re conscious that you’re looking at yourself, and sometimes it almost feels like there’s something staring back at you as you’re staring at yourself.”

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The novelist Jonathan Lethem listens here to recordings of his own New York State Writers Institute events over the past two decades. This propels conversation into wild places. It turns out that going into familiar moments—even listening to one’s own voice—can prompt discoveries. There’s a chance to find, as Lethem puts it, “worlds within the world.”

William Kennedy describes a similar discovery here. Going back as a journalist to his hometown of Albany, NY, was “a revelation,” he says. The city that once bored him became, to the writer in search of stories, a place of proliferating character, of drama—a world full of worlds.

You’ll hear in this episode the reward of applying mind to matter. Says Lethem: “We have tables and chairs and apples and cherries and shirts and pants and socks, but everything else seems to me pretty much up for grabs. Once you put subjectivity and consciousness in the mix, it all gets pretty strange.”

On this episode:

Jonathan Lethem (conversation with Adam Colman). Books: Motherless Brooklyn and The Arrest.

Samuel Delany (from the archives). Books: Dhalgren and Nova.

Ann Beattie (from the archives). Books: What Was Mine and Another You.

Denis Johnson (from the archives). Books: Jesus' Son and Train Dreams.

William Kennedy (conversation with Adam Colman). Books: Very Old Bones and The Flaming Corsage.

Find out more about the New York State Writers Institute at https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org.

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In this series, you hear about writers' words coming to life in different places—in conversation, in TV writers’ rooms, at public readings. When those writers are poets, an especially intense attention to language can do something similarly intense to the places where they read or speak. In this episode, Saeed Jones—author of the new poetry collection Alive at the End of the World—explains how he learned that “my education in poetry as a craft could serve me outside of the context of writing a poem.” Poetic economy of language, he says, informed his work in a newsroom and his presence on social media.

You’ll also hear archival sound from poets Alice Notley, John Ashbery, and Yusef Komunyakaa, thanks to the New York State Writers Institute. And you’ll hear how poetry can echo through an audience, across media, into thought.

On this episode:

Saeed Jones (conversation with Adam Colman). Books: Alive at the End of the World and Prelude to Bruise.

Alice Notley (from the archives). Books: Close to Me & Closer... (The Language of Heaven) and Desamere and Disobedience.

John Ashbery (from the archives). Books: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and The Tennis Court Oath.

Yusef Komunyakaa (from the archives). Books: The Emperor of Water Clocks and Taboo.

William Kennedy (conversation with Adam Colman). Books: Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes and Riding the Yellow Trolley Car.

Find out more about the New York State Writers Institute at https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org.

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You’ll hear Don DeLillo say in this episode that “the best sort of television has almost replaced a certain kind of novel.” That’s from a Writers Institute event nearly fifteen years ago, and while conversations about novelistic TV have changed since then, novelists continue to bring their sensibilities to television. Among those writers is Amelia Gray—author of startling short stories and novels—who’s written for shows including Maniac and Mr. Robot. Gray says here that “TV is a writer’s medium. In features they’ll still take it away from you, and have you do a bunch of rewrites, and then it’s the director’s baby, and that’s just how it is. But TV is so big and unwieldy that they need the writers.”

On the subject of writers struggling with feature films, we listen to the novelist Russell Banks in conversation with Don DeLillo about their friend Nelson Algren, whose novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, was adapted into a 1955 Otto Preminger film with Frank Sinatra—a film Algren loathed. Banks has had happier experiences with film adaptations of his novels, on the other hand, and DeLillo’s White Noise has now been adapted into a film by Noah Baumbach. The question is: what makes things go right or wrong for novelists in Hollywood?

On this episode:

Amelia Gray (conversation with Adam Colman). Books: Isadora and Museum of the Weird.

Don DeLillo (from the archives). Books: White Noise and Underworld.

Russell Banks (from the archives). Books: The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction.

William Kennedy (conversation with Adam Colman). Books: Legs and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game.

Find out more about the New York State Writers Institute at https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org.

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The future of in-person author events seems shaky after years of remote book talks. What happens if we no longer have bookstore readings, library lectures, and interviews before live audiences? Jonathan Franzen tells Adam Colman in this episode, “If we lose live book events, I would experience it as a great loss.” He describes here the humor, community, and conversation at those gatherings. Says Franzen: “To me, it’s consistently moving to do an event and look out at people who care about books and then to have a chance to find some kind of moment of connection.” Those connections with the public can be surprising, with results ranging from enduring correspondences to international incidents. (“I’ve never been invited back to Brazil,” Franzen says.)

Here, Jonathan Franzen also listens to Don DeLillo, Jamaica Kincaid, and Joseph Heller via the New York State Writers Institute’s archives, and he considers the links between his fiction, his public readings, and writing for the stage. 

On this episode:

Jonathan Franzen (conversation with Adam Colman). Books: The Corrections and Crossroads.

Don DeLillo (from the archives). Books: Underworld and Libra.

Joseph Heller (from the archives). Books: Catch-22 and Good as Gold.

Margaret Atwood (from the archives). Books: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake.

Jamaica Kincaid (from the archives). Books: Lucy and A Small Place.

William Kennedy (conversation with Adam Colman). Books: Roscoe and O Albany!

Find out more about the New York State Writers Institute at https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org.

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