In 2015, several women from the small town of Chillicothe, Ohio began disappearing. Some were found dead in a nearby river and others were never found at all. The victims were drug addicted and supported their addiction with prostitution. They became known as the “Chillicothe Six,” although the body count kept rising. The case caught the attention of novelist Tiffany McDaniel, who grew up near the town and went to school with one of the victims.

On the Savage Side reimagines the lives of women like these. Set in the 1990s, before iPhones and social media, McDaniel brings backstories, faces, names and humanity to women society often forgets.

Author of the international bestselling novel Betty (2020) and the award-winning novel The Summer That Melted Everything (2016), McDaniel is of Cherokee heritage and brings those myths and legends to her novels. As a self-taught author with no formal education, McDaniel wrote over 20 unpublished novels before her first publication in 2016. McDaniel joins Marrie Stone to talk about On the Savage Side, as well as working without an agent, selling a novel 20 years after it was written, how social and cultural changes allowed her to publish previously rejected work, and more. She also shares some craft insights regarding structure, character development, incorporating visual arts into her novels, and more.

For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.

(Recorded on February 9, 2023) 

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett

A more personal author description than usual: I recently learned that fiction writer Melissa Bank passed away last August. (When I recorded the intro to this rerun, I thought it had been longer. My apologies.) I loved Melissa Bank’s fiction, her light touch. Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing was wonderful, as was The Wonder Spot. When I was in NYC, Melissa and I would meet for coffee or lunch. I loved her writing and her entire vibe.

Melissa Bank won the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and taught at Stony Brook University. When The Wonder Spot came out, I asked her to talk about how to write a novel. She said, “I don’t know how to write a novel.” What she knew how to do, she was, was write stories. Stories became chapters and chapters become a book, she said.

Melissa died from lung cancer on August 2, 2022. She was 61 years old.

For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.

(Recorded on January 25, 2023) 

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett

Barack Obama called Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers one of his favorite reads of 2022. The NYT bestseller comes out in paperback on February 7.

Every year, thousands of children are removed from their parents’ custody by the state, often for good reasons, but not always. Set in a dystopian future not so far from now, The School for Good Mothers follows Frieda’s tortured journey after losing her daughter following “a very bad day.” Chan calls the book “1984 for mothers.”

Jessamine joins Marrie Stone to talk about the 20 years she spent writing before the book was published, and how one inspiring day of writing changed everything (spoiler alert: don’t try this at home). She talks about writing in longhand, over-writing and learning to cut, how visiting her setting changed the feel of the book, naming her characters and other craft insights. She also discusses MFAs and writing residencies, finding an agent, the long editing process after the book was sold and more.

For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.

(Recorded on January 25, 2023) 

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett

Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) and the craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision.

He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Matt joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about—what else—revision, and his new book, Refuse to be Done.

For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.

(Recorded on January 12, 2023) 

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett

Writers use language with intention. So when V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night uses the word “terrorist” six times on the first page of a novel about the Sri Lankan civil war, and incorporates the second person, the reader understands they’re as much active participant as passive observer in the book.

Sugi joins Marrie Stone to talk about the novel’s origin and why she initially didn’t have the “chops” to write it. She talks about her own relationship with Sri Lanka and the research that went into rendering this period of history to life.

Writers may find interest in Sugi’s decision to write in the first (and second) person; the power of writing in the subjunctive; how to describe a foreign time and place (with its particular dishes and unfamiliar names) without being overly explanatory; how Sugi deals with difficult writing challenges the same way she deals with going to the dentist; finding trusted readers; and more.

Sugi is the author of Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

Read more about Brotherless Night in the January 15, 2023 NYT Book Review.

For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.

(Recorded on January 12, 2023) 

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett

Ed Humes is a  Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of more than a dozen nonfiction books, including Mississippi Mud, Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation and Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash, and Burned: A Story of Murder and the Crime that Wasn’t. Ed received his Pulitzer for his newspaper coverage of the military, and a PEN Award for nonfiction for No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court. He has taught writing, journalism, and literary nonfiction at graduate and undergraduate levels, and has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Sierra Magazine, and Los Angeles Magazine.

Ed joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about his new book, The Forever Witness: How DNA and Geneology solved a cold case double murder.

For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.

(Recorded in December 2022) 

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett

Menstruation is a strangely taboo topic in our culture. Back in the 1970s and 80s, teenagers read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Our Bodies, Ourselves under their covers with a flashlight. Girls were largely left to figure things out for themselves or confide in each other to discover what was normal.

After hearing a harrowing coming-of-age story from her great aunt, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff started gathering stories about menstruation in her family that had never been told. What began as an oral history project quickly snowballed. Our Red Book (Simon & Schuster, 2022) takes us through stories of first periods, last periods, missing periods, and everything about bleeding that people wish they had been told.

Rachel joins Marrie Stone to talk about publishing her first anthology (My Little Red Book, 2009) when she was a college freshman and how a high school English teacher gave her the confidence of her convictions. Much has changed in our society in those intervening years and Rachel talks about how Our Red Book expanded the conversation to be more gender inclusive, as well as inviting voices from different generations and cultures.

Their conversation also covers several writing-related topics, including advice about assembling and structuring an anthology, finding contributors, the delicate process of editing, book proposals, Rachel’s work at 3 Hole Press, and more.

For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.

(Recorded in December 2022) 

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett

The youngest of six children, Lisa Cupolo grew up in the Honeymoon Capital of the World: Niagara Falls, Canada. At thirteen, she was diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, and spent much of her teens and twenties battling illness. She has spoken about how this trial was actually one of the blessings of her life, because it led her to writing. She learned to escape, creating stories when reality got difficult, and she imagined herself living the lives of her characters, and in the real world, she became an observer. Always a spiritual seeker, Lisa has a BA in philosophy from The University of Western Ontario. In her second year, her single mother put a second mortgage on their suburban home so Lisa could study in Nice, France. That changed everything. 

She spent the next decade in Europe and her health improved dramatically. She completed a graduate degree in Portrait Photography from The London Institute in England and worked a stint as a paparazzi photographer in London and published celebrity photos in Hello Magazine and The Daily Telegraph and travel shots with Dorling Kindersley and Thomas Cook travel guidebooks. She continued to dream of being a writer.
Back in Canada, her professional life turned toward championing artists, as a photo editor at a stock agency in Toronto and at the Banff Centre for the Arts supporting visual artist residencies. She spent a year in Kisumu, Kenya working at an orphanage and traveling in east Africa and eastern Europe.
 

After reading Carol Shield’s novel, "Unless," Lisa knew she had to pursue her passion for writing and was offered an entry level job at HarperCollins back in Toronto. While there, she wrote in the early mornings before work. In time, she became a literary publicist and represented some of her favorite writers: Elmore Leonard, Neil Gaiman, Lionel Shriver, Helen Humphreys, among others, and threw some terrific literary parties with Brick Magazine.
 

When she met her husband, writer Richard Bausch, Lisa moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where they had their daughter Lila.  She completed an MFA in fiction at the University of Memphis and began publishing stories and finished her novel.  They now live in Southern California and Lisa is at work on a memoir and teaches creative writing at Chapman University.

For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.

(Recorded in December 2022) 

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett

Melissa Chadburn’s debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, is part serial killer thriller, part magical realism folklore, part love story, part coming of age story, and fully riveting. Its narrator is an aswang—otherwise known as a Philippine shapeshifter, a ghoul, a spinstress, a vampire, a soul-sucker with a proboscis. Over a decade in the making, Chadburn’s novel contains beautifully unique prose and haunting imagery. She joins Marrie to talk about it.

Along the way, they talk about how Chadburn struggled with structure, and how real-life serial killer William Pickton provided it. They talk about the different shapes novels can take, including Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode and Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. They talk about the power of lists in fiction, how to engage in the writerly art of witnessing, and Lynda Barry’s What It Is. They discuss writing sex and violence, including the best advice Chadburn received from former guest and Tin House editor Steve Almond. And they discuss how being a good literary citizen may have made a difference in marketing this novel, and what it means to be a good literary citizen.

Melissa and Marrie are both fans of Tin House, their workshops, and their craft lectures. To discover some of those craft essays, click here. For the Tin House collection on love and sex, click here.

For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.

(Recorded in December 2022) 

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett

Erica Ferencik, author of Girl in Ice, and Aaron Phillip Clark, author of Blue like Me, join me at Sisters in Crime Orange County to talk about their new novels as well as the art, craft, and business of writing. If you’d like to watch the panel we did on Zoom, visit YouTube.

For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.

(Recorded in November 2022) 

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett