Ted is joined by Rob Harvilla, the host of the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s and a senior staff writer at The Ringer. A professional rock critic for 20-plus years, Rob has had stops at the Village Voice, SPIN, Deadspin, and various other alt-weeklies.

His podcast, which has now moved beyond the 1990s to consider the music of the 2000s, was the basis for his 2023 book 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s. And as a regular listener of the show, Ted knows that in making it, Rob pens scripts that see him produce the same number of words as a novel roughly every eight to 10 episodes. It’s a writing feat that is equal parts distinctive and impressive—which of course meant Ted wanted to talk with him about it.

Together, they discuss the premise and evolution of the podcast, how Rob approaches picking songs and artists to feature, and his surprise at how pieces of his personal life have found their way into his scripts. Using Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me” as an example, he also gives us a look inside the shaping of an episode.

He and Ted then dive into the relationship between lyrics and the vague legal requirements Rob has to meet to include clips of songs on the show as well as the challenge of not repeating himself across such a large body of written work. But they save perhaps the most important question for last:

What does the term “classic rock” actually mean in 2025?

Episode Links:

• Rob’s Website
• Rob’s Podcast

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

Ted is joined by Dave Cohen, a writer, comedian, founding member of the Comedy Store Players, and one of the most respected teachers of comedy writing in the UK. A former standup comedian, he has written for radio and TV shows and is an eight-time BAFTA winner for his songs for the BBC hit Horrible Histories.

Dave is also the author of the Barry Goldman novels, a series set in the world of the 1970s and ’80s British alternative comedy scene. The third and final book comes out in January, which means that the writing challenges of finishing the series are fresh in his mind even as he thinks about what he’d like to do next.

That’s an interesting time to talk with any writer. Yet for Dave, who’s spent 40 years in comedy but always had an interest in being a novelist, it represents a particularly notable inflection point.

He talks with Ted about the evolution of his fiction over the course of the three Barry Goldman books, the difference between writing comedy and pretty much everything else, and not knowing whether he wants to write more novels. That leads to a frank conversation between the two of them about navigating self-doubt and staying open to the new things that might fulfill us creatively.

Episode Links:

• Stand Up, Barry Goldman (Book 1)
• Barry Goldman: The Wilderness Years (Book 2)
• Dave’s Website

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

In a different kind of episode, Ted is joined by Jim Lang, an emeritus professor of English at Assumption University and current professor of the practice at the University of Notre Dame’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence.

Jim is one of Ted’s favorite people to talk writing with in three-dimensional spaces—i.e., in-person, no internet connection needed—because he brings a teacher’s mentality to his work, which probably explains why he’s always up for a conversation about craft. And unlike Ted and most of the guests on this show, Jim writes nonfiction, including his seventh and most recent book, one that explores the writing process itself.

Titled Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience, it is a guide for academics that distills the elements of good classroom teaching into strategies for writing for the general public. But while the book is pitched at that those who teach in colleges and universities, the topics he digs into will resonate with anyone who tries to create engaging prose.

Focusing on the book’s chapter on “Invitational Language,” Jim and Ted discuss challenging readers without alienating them, why the passive voice gets a worse rap than it deserves, and approaching your writing as an effort to be good company to your readers. Currently involved with a project on how AI might support teaching, Jim also shares his thoughts on AI’s relationship to writing: what it can and cannot do, the value of learning from other humans, and what we lose when we allow machines to choose words for us.

Find Jim and his books online at jamesmlang.com.

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

Ted is joined by Nishant Batsha, whose second novel, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart, was published this month by ecco/HarperCollins. He is also the author of Mother Ocean Father Nation (ecco/HarperCollins), which, among other honors, was named one of the best books of 2022 by NPR.

Nishant holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, so it’s no surprise that his fiction draws heavily on real-life people and events. He describes this latest book as a “socialist, anti-colonial coming-of-age love story set in 1917,” one that is loosely based on a real-life couple, M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, who together founded the Communist Party of Mexico before an acrimonious divorce led to Roy basically writing Trent out of the history of the movement they led together.

With A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart now out in the world, Nishant is at work on his next book. He and Ted talk about the circuitous route he’s taken to get there, including an entire novel set in the present day that he finished writing before realizing he didn’t want to deviate from historical fiction.

Nishant discusses being a historian who wanted to become a novelist (compared to the other way around) and what that means for the way he approaches his writing. He then shares details about his work in progress, which is told from the perspective of a Civil War veteran who has left society behind to join a Shaker colony in Maine.
 
Find Nishant and his books at nishantbatsha.com.

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

No guest this month, so Ted revisits a previous solo pod, during which he talked about the challenges of navigating the months in between when you submit your final manuscript and when the book actually comes out. In that episode, he shared how, for him, a big part of managing those challenges involves getting started on a new project.

Well, it’s now been a year since that finished manuscript was published as his second novel, and the work in progress he introduced on that podcast is something he’s been wrestling with through a series of starts and stops for even longer. As a result, it’s probably a good moment to rethink what he previously referred to as “the in-between time.”

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

Ted is joined this month by not one but two amazing guests, Jennifer Acker and Emily Everett. Jennifer is the founder and editor in chief of The Common, an award-winning print and digital literary journal based at Amherst College, and author of the novel The Limits of the World, which was one of three fiction honorees for the Massachusetts Book Award.
 
Emily works with Jennifer as managing editor at The Common. She is also a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction and author of the novel All That Life Can Afford, the Reese’s Book Club pick for April 2025.
 
Considering the closest Ted has come to that latter honor is watching Big Little Lies, he starts the conversation by asking Emily what it was like to find out Reese had selected her book. (Spoiler: pretty freakin’ exciting.)
 
Emily then shares a little bit about All That Life Can Afford, a story with a main character whose idealized version of London doesn’t quite track with her reality when she moves there after college. The role of the city proves to be a great segue to ask Jennifer about The Common, as it is a magazine devoted to deepening “our individual and collective sense of place.”
 
Both Jennifer and Emily go on to talk about the relationship of their editorial work to their own writing, the difference in the writing challenge between novels and short stories (besides, you know, the length), how they’ve helped each other grow as writers, and the books they’re working on now.

Episode Links:

• Jennifer’s Website
• Emily’s Website
• The Common

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

Ted is joined by Maggie Su, whose debut novel, Blob: A Love Story, was published in January to praise from The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly (starred review), The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Goodreads, among others.

Maggie and Ted begin by discussing the short story and dramatic origins of Blob, which is a work of speculative fiction about a young woman who tries to mold a sentient blob into her perfect partner. The conversation then turns to the challenge of starting again from scratch for book number two, a project where Maggie has found that some but not all of the practices she used to create Blob are useful to her this time around.

Still speculative fiction, this new novel is more inspired by the horror genre, and Maggie explains why she’s taking it as an opportunity to push herself to depart from writing in the first person. She and Ted talk about the nuances of trying to tell a story from different POV styles, the relevance of her work as a journal editor to her own writing process, and finding the particular feedback environment that suits your own creativity. 

Episode Links:

• Maggie’s Debut: Blob: A Love Story
• Maggie’s Instagram: @litmagreject

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

Ted is joined by Annie B. Jones, the author of the soon-to-be-released Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put. A book of essays, it draws on her experiences living in a small town in the area where she grew up. Those experiences include owning and running an independent bookstore, The Bookshelf, through which she also talks books, small business, and life in the South as the host of the store’s popular podcast, From the Front Porch.

In one of her first interviews about her book—and yes, if #humblebrag were still a thing, that would absolutely be a Working Drafts #humblebrag—Annie talks with Ted about what it’s been like to go from bookseller and reader to the person with your name on the cover. She also shares why she chose to write essays given her well-known love of fiction, the process of titling those pieces, deciding how much of her life to include, and what just might be the frontrunner for her favorite essay in the book.
 
In the process, Annie and Ted discover they both read what they write out loud—oftentimes to a canine companion—in order to get their words in their final form.

Episode Links:

• Annie’s Website
• The Bookshelf (Annie’s bookstore)
• From the Front Porch Podcast (plus wherever you get your pods)

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

Ted is joined by Angela Montoya, whose debut novel, Sinner’s Isle, received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly and trade reviews from Booklist and The Bulletin. Her second novel, A Cruel Thirst, was published last month and has been chosen as a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection and an Editor’s Pick: Best YA of December by Amazon Books.

Angela also co-hosts the podcast Of the Publishing Persuasion, which is where she and Ted first talked. He had so much fun that he asked her to come on Working Drafts to celebrate the release of A Cruel Thirst—which she describes as “Zorro meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer”—and dive into what she’s working on now.

Titled Carnival Fantástico, that third novel, scheduled for release in spring 2026, is a second-chance romance set amidst a traveling carnival, with a dose of secrets and magic.

Here, Angela describes the process of writing a book while you’re actively seeing readers respond to your previous one and how she finds ways to draw on that feedback to make the next novel even better, a skill Ted freely admits to envying. In addition, they discuss the genesis of Angela’s idea for Carnival Fantástico, the collaborative process that has shaped the book into its current form, and the struggle that comes with knowing you have to cut your word count—along with realizing everyone isn’t going to think your first draft is brilliant as is.

Episode Links:

• Angela’s Website
• Of the Publishing Persuasion Podcast (+ wherever you get your pods)

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

Ted is joined by Katherine J. Igoe, a writer and editor who’s been freelancing since 2011. At the moment, she is also a contributing syndications editor at Marie Claire. She has written for The New York Times, The Cut, Cosmopolitan, InStyle, Parents, and The Boston Globe, among others.
 
Katherine and Ted have known each other for a number of years and have bonded over their shared love of the written word—along with the challenges said love presents. One of these is how to make a living from writing, which, as her bylines indicate, she’s done by contributing pieces to some of the country’s most recognizable media outlets.
 
But as successful as she’s been in this nonfiction space, Katherine has wanted to write fiction since she was a kid. She and Ted have often talked about how to go from one type of writing to the other, and in this episode, she takes us inside the strategies she’s using to overcome the nagging self-censor of impostor syndrome and pursue her book aspirations. That journey has started with a book coach, something called The Artist’s Way, and short-story writing, where she has found an interest in speculative fiction that she didn’t know she had.

Episode Links

• Katherine’s Instagram
• The Artist’s Way

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.