This is an interview with memoirist and travel author Pico Iyer, about his book Sun After Dark. It is about traveling and empathy–what does it mean to dwell in someone else’s culture for a while, especially we who come from the States, who are more privileged than most of the world? What does our home become, in […]

Here I discuss writing how-to books, the ones I like in particular. I also talk about the writing process–what it’s like to dedicate your days to your story or poems. Hours up hours, you work until something in your brain clicks–the story comes alive in your skull. I also share with you one of my […]

So, you’ve got a great story that you want to tell. It’s all made up, complete fiction, and you’re ready and raring to hit the computer keys and crank out a three hundred page novel. Or a ten page short story. Or a novella of eighty, ninety, one hundred pages. You’ve got the story in […]

¡El primer podcast en español! (But, like any Salvadoran party, everyone is welcome)  Aquí hablo de la vida del pocho–que significa, una fruta podrida, y un Latino que no sabe nada de su cultura, que no habla español, que está lejos de sus raíces. Pero, este pocho decidió, en su juventud, meterse en la cultura salvadoreña para […]

T. C. Boyle is one of our own southern California writers, and is an international figure. You can’t pin him down, can’t pigeonhole him. One novel is about the love between migrant farm workers and gringos who live in gated communities (Tortilla Curtain),  another is about an eco-warrior whose daughter lives in a tree (A Friend […]

The one thing about keeping a journal–your subconscious leaks onto the page. That is, if you let it, which you should. This means dealing with disturbing images, notions, thoughts that come and you don’t know why. Unwelcome thoughts, perhaps. But the one who is a committed journal writer will allow that to happen, will even […]

My first girlfriend, Nancy, gave me a journal when we were in high school. That was in 1977. Forty-one years later, I now have forty-five tomes on my shelves, over ten thousand pages that chronicle my life and the lives of those around me. They are a wealth of information. All my notes for my […]

This is a special segment of TWB podcast, called Nighttime Reading with Marcos. I read every night, and sometimes, when I’m really getting into it, I talk to myself. So I thought, what the heck, turn on the recorder and share it with listeners. This first one is on a poem by Chilean Pablo Neruda, […]

As much as there is an art to creative writing, I also believe there is an art to reading. Most everyone can read. But most of us read only for information. Our eyes run across the Facebook page, taking in the news feeds and other people’s lives. Then our eyes move on. But, real reading–that is, reading […]

In class, we talk a lot about aesthetics, or the study of art–both appreciating it and creating it. It’s something the writer (the literary writer) is thinking about all the time, even if she doesn’t know she is. Walk with me into the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, where I once held a classroom with a […]