Writer's Voice with Francesca Rheannon

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

We talk with Ray Nayler about his new novel, Palaces of the Crow, in which four young people survive World War II in a Lithuanian forest with help from extraordinarily intelligent crows.

We explore how his years in Central Asia and the Balkans shaped the book, and why he turned to the Eastern Front to examine questions that still confront us.

What happens when trauma becomes revenge? How do we preserve a community’s memory? And what kinds of intelligence do we miss in other animals?

“I was trying to capture this memory of care…and also how much memory is under threat.” – Ray Nayler

Nayler describes care as something passed between generations, across communities, and even across species. Our conversation explores how relationships, stories, and the examples of others can help us interrupt cycles of harm.

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Jacob Mikanowski, GOODBYE EASTERN EUROPE, Ray Nayler, THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SEA

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

This week Writer’s Voice talks with Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan about Against Tech Oligarchy. They helped build the tech worker movement, and they’re candid about both its victories and the limits of its organizing strategies. We talk about Google’s Project Maven, the Kickstarter union drive, and why winning union recognition doesn’t automatically give workers the leverage they need.

“The only way to hold our bosses and our companies and institutions accountable is by having pressure from below.” — Clarissa Redwine

Then I revisit my conversation with Noam Scheiber about Hollywood writers, AI and the growing solidarity among college-educated workers. He also recommends Redwine and Tan’s book.

“Their book is called Against Tech Oligarchy, Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry. And I learned a lot from reading a galley of that book and I’ve learned a lot from the work over the years.” — Noam Scheiber

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Noam Scheiber on the Mutiny of the New Working Class, Maria Adelmann on Adjunct Labor

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Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan talk about Against Tech Oligarchy and the movement they helped organize.

Drawing on their experiences at Kickstarter and Microsoft, they explain how tech workers’ belief in their employers’ missions gave way to conflict over the companies’ actions.

We discuss Google’s Project Maven, public pressure campaigns, retaliation, and the turn toward legally recognized unions.

Redwine and Tan also examine the limits of strategies they once championed. When software keeps generating revenue without workers at their desks, a strike requires a different understanding of leverage.

Our conversation asks how workers can test their power, defend their wins, and connect workplace organizing to larger questions about AI and corporate control.

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In this archived excerpt, I talk with Noam Scheiber about Mutiny and the insecurity facing college-educated workers. We begin with Hollywood writers, whose once-stable careers became more precarious as streaming shortened employment and disrupted established paths into the profession.

Scheiber explains how that insecurity, combined with fears of AI replacement, helped sustain the writers’ strike. We then explore growing worker consciousness in the tech industry and the possibility of solidarity between workers with and without college degrees.

He closes by recommending Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan’s Against Tech Oligarchy, connecting this discussion of economic insecurity to the first segment’s examination of organizing and worker power.

Listen to the full interview

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

This week, we talk with Tom Lin about his novel, Babylon, South Dakota. It follows a Chinese immigrant family whose new home shares its landscape with a nuclear missile silo. We talk about magical realism, family stories, belonging, dementia, and the relationship between science fiction and the weapons people build.

I think the power of magical realism is to introduce amazing things which are treated as totally ordinary, which I hope encourages people to think, ‘what about my life that I actually do live is amazing and magical and lucky that I’ve gotten used to?’ — Tom Lin

Then, on the third anniversary of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel and the beginning of Israel’s genocide of Gaza, we revisit our March 2025 conversation with Omar El Akkad about One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. In this selected excerpt, we discuss the genocide in Gaza, Western complicity, and his argument that people will eventually claim they always opposed an atrocity they tolerated while it was happening.

Our conversation explores language that sanitizes violence, restrictions on dissent, and the failures of mainstream liberalism. El Akkad also explains why genocide became an absolute moral boundary for him.

It just seemed to me a particularly self-evident thing that when it’s too late to do anything about any of this, it’ll just be acceptable…to talk about how you’ve always been against it. — Omar El Akkad

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: U.S. Media’s Gaza Failure with Robin Andersen, Daniel Ellsberg, THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

This week, two works of fiction look at the relationships that shape us, and the systems of power we often carry within ourselves.

First, Malavika Kannan talks about Unprecedented Times, her coming-of-age novel about Rishi, a queer Indian American student whose arrival at Stanford coincides with a crisis of faith in activism, institutions and the American promise itself.

As 2020 transforms the world around her, Rishi wrestles with family expectations, friendship, sex, consent, political disillusionment and her desire to become a writer. Kannan talks about Gen Z’s growing refusal to follow rules that no longer seem to deliver what they promise.

“One of the main themes that I was trying to explore in this book and that I think about a lot as a person is the question of agency.” — Malavika Kannan

Then Lauren Acampora talks about The Animal Room, her connected collection of stories about the many ways human beings love, use, protect, fear and exploit animals.

But these stories are also mirrors. They ask us to look at ourselves, and at what care, empathy and responsibility mean in our relationships with other people.

“The dominance isn’t working out so well.” — Lauren Acampora

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Short Stories by George Saunders & Jennifer Haigh, Vauhini Vara, THIS IS SALVAGED

Tags: Malavika Kannan, Unprecedented Times, Lauren Acampora, The Animal Room, Writer’s Voice, Gen Z fiction, queer fiction, Indian American fiction, coming of age novel, human animal relationships, Francesca Rheannon

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Malavika Kannan talks about Unprecedented Times, her funny, searching novel about Gen Z, climate anxiety, queer identity and finding your own way.

Key Topics

Lauren Acampora talks about The Animal Room, interconnected stories exploring what our relationships with animals reveal about care, power, privilege and empathy.

Key Topics

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

In Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism, journalist Sonali Kolhatkar looks at communities that aren’t waiting for someone else to answer that question.

“Nobody is coming to save us from this machinery. We have to do it ourselves.” — Sonali Kolhatkar

Kolhatkar tells us about ordinary people who have organized patrols to document ICE operations, created rapid-response networks, warned vulnerable neighbors and provided food, rent money, childcare and transportation to families affected by detention and deportation.

We also talk about why she connects immigrant rights with labor rights and Black struggles against policing and state violence, and why she believes mutual aid can build political solidarity across unexpected divides.

Finally, we discuss electoral politics. Kolhatkar argues that movements shouldn’t organize themselves around politicians. Instead, elected officials should be treated as public servants accountable to organized communities.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Lauren Markham, The Far Away Brothers, ILLEGALIZED: Rafael Martinez on Undocumented Youth Movements

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host, and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali and the author of Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories, 2026), Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible(Seven Stories, 2025), and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice(City Lights, 2023). Her first book, co-authored with James Ingalls, is Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2006, Seven Stories).

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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This week, I talk with Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, his biography of James Baldwin told through four relationships that shaped Baldwin’s life and art. Boggs describes love as central not only to Baldwin’s novels but to his political writing, and traces his journey from a difficult Harlem childhood and the Black church to his role as a writer, messenger and witness.

All of Baldwin’s work was about love. All of his novels were love stories… And his nonfiction writings, political writings, were also about love.” — Nicholas Boggs

Then, I revisit part of my 2024 conversation with Brad Gooch about Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. Haring challenged the boundary between high and popular art, from his subway drawings to the Pop Shop. Gooch talks about Haring’s collaborations, his determination to communicate across class and cultural lines, and the legacy of his belief in “art for everybody.”

“Keith did everything that he could do to blow that system [the art market] apart.” — Brad Gooch

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: DaMaris Hill, A BOUND WOMAN IS A DANGEROUS THING, Ta-Nahisi Coates, THE BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE

Tags: Black history, James Baldwin, queer artists, Keith Haring, Brad Gooch, Nicholas Bogss, queer writers, Writer’s Voice

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James Baldwin wrote about race, sexuality and America with a piercing clarity. But beneath all of those subjects was another one, love. In Baldwin: A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs tells Baldwin’s life through four relationships that shaped both the man and the writer.

We talk about Baldwin’s difficult journey toward self-love, his bond with the painter Beauford Delaney, the lovers who influenced novels like Giovanni’s Room and If Beale Street Could Talk, and the complicated relationship between Baldwin’s private life and his public role as a witness to America.

We also talk about why Baldwin’s later work matters, and why, as Boggs says, we don’t have to imagine what Baldwin might say about many of the questions confronting us now. He was already writing about them. Baldwin A Love Story is Nicholas Boggs’ first book — and a New York Times bestseller.

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Keith Haring wanted art to belong to everybody. He drew in the New York subway, collaborated with graffiti artists and sold T-shirts and pins at his Pop Shop. And for that, much of the established art world treated him with suspicion.

In this excerpt from my 2024 conversation with Brad Gooch about his biography Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring, we talk about Haring’s determination to break down the boundary between high art and popular culture, his collaborations with the teenage graffiti artist LA2, and the ideas behind Haring’s instantly recognizable visual language.

We also talk about Haring’s legacy, as an artist, an activist and an influence on later generations who share his belief in bringing art out of elite institutions and into public life. 

Listen to the full interview with Brad Gooch

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What do we do when the systems that created modern prosperity begin to undermine the conditions for life itself?

I talk with James Crawford about The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction. Crawford grew up in a family shaped by coal, copper and North Sea oil. Now he’s asking what that history means in a world where extraction reaches into virtually everything we do.

We talk about lithium mining in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the limits of a purely technological green transition, the rights of nature, climate litigation and the poisoned landscape of Butte, Montana, where environmental repair will have to continue indefinitely.

“The repair isn’t about returning us to what we were, it’s about facing what we are now.” — James Crawford

Then, to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we return to my 2009 interview with Max Page about The City’s End. Page traces two centuries of imagined catastrophes in New York, from political and economic collapse to nuclear annihilation and climate disaster.

His surprising argument is that destroying New York in our imagination isn’t only an expression of fear. It can also reveal how deeply we value the city and what we fear losing.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Richard Heinberg, SNAKE OIL & Bill McKibben, OIL AND HONEY, Hope For The Climate Crisis: Michael Mann, OUR FRAGILE MOMENT

Tags: extraction, economic growth, rights of nature, public trust doctrine, James Crawford, The Vanishing Earth, green energy, lithium, 9/11, New York City, World Trade Center, Max Page, The City’s End

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James Crawford traces extraction from his own family history in North Sea oil to the global economy. He argues that replacing fossil fuels with new technologies won’t be enough if we leave the underlying logic of extraction untouched. We talk about lithium mining, Indigenous rights, the public trust doctrine, successful youth climate litigation in Montana and the poisoned legacy of copper mining in Butte. Crawford finds hope not in returning to an untouched past, but in accepting our responsibility for repair.

Before Al Qaeda’s jets crashed into the twin towers in the real world, millions of players of the software game Flight Simulator had crashed their fantasy jets into the same towers for years. Before that, King Kong threatened the Empire State Building. New York has been destroyed by flood, a sudden ice age, aliens from other planets, anarchists and immigrants and nuclear war — all in the imagination of American writers, filmmakers, and artists. What is it about the New York that excites such fantasies of destruction?

Max Page explores that question in THE CITY’S END: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction. Page teaches history and architecture at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Listen to the full interview with Max Page

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

This week on Writer’s Voice, two writers explore that profound reversal, and the practical, emotional and even spiritual challenges it brings.

First, personal finance journalist Beth Pinsker talks about My Mother’s Money. When her fiercely independent mother became ill, Pinsker suddenly found herself managing everything from bank accounts and bills to the staggering costs of long-term care. And despite decades of expertise in personal finance, she discovered just how unprepared most of us are.

“We make it so hard for everybody. Oh, my gosh, it is just a morass of red tape out there.” — Beth Pinsker

Then, an interview from our archives: novelist L. Annette Binder talks about Child of Earth and Starry Heaven, her memoir of caring for her mother through Alzheimer’s disease. Binder writes about grief and memory, but also about something unexpected, the moments of love, presence and even grace she found as her mother’s world grew smaller.

“The love that my mom was capable of feeling and that I felt for her survived her cognitive decline.” L. Annette Binder

Two daughters, two different journeys, and one question many of us will face. How do we care for the people who once cared for us?

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: L. Annette Binder on Child of Earth & Starry Heaven, Caring for Elders: Susan Jacoby, NEVER SAY DIE & Allan Teel: ALONE & INVISIBLE NO MORE

Tags: caring for aging parents, elder care, Beth Pinsker, My Mother’s Money, L. Annette Binder, Child of Earth and Starry Heaven, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, financial caregiving, long-term care, Medicare, memory care, aging parents, Writer’s Voice, podcast,

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Pinsker talks about the hidden labor of financial caregiving, why power of attorney is only the beginning, and how quickly long-term care can consume a lifetime of savings.

Key Topics

Binder reflects on her mother’s Alzheimer’s, the mystery of consciousness, and what living alongside dementia taught her about memory, love and being fully present.

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

America’s road to fascism began with a big lie about who counts as fully human. That’s what historian Joseph Kelly reveals in his book, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915. Kelly traces a long struggle between two visions of the country. One rests on the Declaration’s promise of equality. The other claims that people aren’t equal, that white people are superior to Black people and therefore have the right to dominate them.

We follow that ideology from the Missouri crisis through pseudoscientific racism, Indian removal, slavery and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. Kelly explains how the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, Jim Crow and The Birth of a Nation used fear, myth and racialized sexual panic to defend white rule.

We also look at a road not taken, multiracial democracy and class-based political cooperation. Those possibilities were repeatedly attacked by elites who weaponized fears of replacement and Black political power.

Kelly connects domestic white supremacy to American empire in Cuba and the Philippines. He argues that fascism is a corruption of democracy, built when dissent is silenced, violence is celebrated and allegiance to the tribe and its leader replaces truth. That history, he says, can help us understand the battle over democracy today.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Aran Shetterly on The Greensboro Massacre, Paul Kix on the fight to end Jim Crow

Tags: Joseph Kelly, The Biggest Lie, American fascism, white supremacy, racism, slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, replacement theory, multiracial democracy

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

A machine that never judges us may also teach us to forget how human relationships work.

Writer’s Voice talks with Victoria Hetherington about The Friend Machine, her investigation into people who seek friendship, therapy and love from AI. We explore loneliness, simulated care, privacy, emotional dependence and the extraordinary power of the corporations building these systems.

“That’s probably my primary concern, that moral de-skilling might occur.” — Victoria Hetherington

Then, we revisit our 2025 conversation with Silvia Park about her sci-fi novel Luminous. Set in a reunified future Korea, the novel follows a family whose estranged siblings include two humans and a robot.

“What I really question is, if robots exist in this world, would they serve as an outlet or would they amplify our dark urges?” — Silvia Park

Together, these books grapple with salient questions arising from AI and monopoly corporate power. Can programmed affection become love? And what does how we treat A.I. entities say about ourselves?

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Bruce Holsinger on AI’s Moral Dilemmas, Ray Nayler on AI and Autocracy

Tags: Victoria Hetherington, The Friend Machine, Silvia Park, Luminous, AI companions, artificial intelligence, AI friendship, AI therapy, sentient robots, AI ethics, AI privacy, Writer’s Voice

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What happens when an AI companion becomes your closest friend, your therapist, or even your romantic partner?

Victoria Hetherington’s The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship investigates why people form powerful emotional bonds with chatbots.

Hetherington finds that the real story isn’t whether AI is conscious. It’s why so many of us are ready to treat it as if it were.

In our conversation, We talk about loneliness, simulated care, AI therapy, privacy, and the risks of replacing difficult human relationships with frictionless digital ones. We also ask what guardrails are needed when a handful of enormously powerful companies control technologies that can learn our most intimate secrets.

Victoria Hetherington is a journalist, broadcaster, and author whose work explores technology, intimacy, and what it means to be human in an AI-driven world.

Set in a reunified Korea, Luminous follows a family with a unique dynamic: two human siblings and their robot brother Yo-Yo.

The novel explores complex relationships between humans and robots, examining questions of love, memory, and what constitutes consciousness.