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

This Independence Day episode of Writer’s Voice explores two remarkable women who believed loving America meant challenging it to live up to its highest ideals.

First, filmmaker, author and activist John de Graaf discusses From Sea to Shining Sea, his documentary about Katharine Lee Bates, author of America the Beautiful. Far from writing a triumphal anthem, Bates created what de Graaf calls a patriotic prayer, a vision of a nation grounded in justice, equality, stewardship of the land, and compassion for all.

“She saw it as a country filled with flaws but with great promise that she wanted to reform.” — John de Graaf

Then novelists Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie talk about A Founding Mother, their richly researched novel told in the voice of Abigail Adams.

Drawing from her letters and historical record, they reveal a woman whose intelligence, independence, and moral clarity shaped both her family and the new republic. Abigail advocated for women’s rights, condemned slavery, built financial independence through her own business ventures, and understood that democracy depends on the participation of every generation.

Together, these conversations remind us that “a more perfect union” was never a description of America. It was, and remains, an aspiration. Katharine Lee Bates and Abigail Adams each understood that patriotism isn’t blind celebration. It’s the willingness to participate fully in the project to create an America that works for all, not just the one percent.

Watch From Sea To Shining Sea

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Tags: America the Beautiful, Katharine Lee Bates, John de Graaf, From Sea to Shining Sea, Abigail Adams, Stephanie Dray, Laura Kamoie, A Founding Mother, American history podcast, Fourth of July, American Revolution, women founders, slavery, historical fiction, Writer’s Voice podcast

You might also like: Stewart Udall and The Politics of Beauty with John de Graaf, What’s An Economy For, Anyway?

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John de Graaf explores the extraordinary life of Katharine Lee Bates, whose poem America the Beautiful was inspired not only by the grandeur of Pikes Peak but also by the poverty, environmental destruction, and inequality she witnessed across America. Bates believed love of country required moral courage, social reform, and stewardship of both democracy and the land. De Graaf explains why her vision feels remarkably contemporary more than a century later.

Abigail Adams helped shape America long before women had political power.

Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie discuss their novel, which draws on more than a thousand surviving letters to recreate Abigail’s voice. They explore her partnership with John Adams, her call to “remember the ladies,” her opposition to slavery, her entrepreneurial spirit, and her belief that each generation must continue the work of building democracy. The conversation reveals Abigail Adams as both a founder and a visionary whose ideas remain deeply relevant today.

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

This week on Writer’s Voice, we talk with media scholar Robin Andersen about her book The Complicit Lens: U.S. Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza. Andersen’s argument is blunt: the American press didn’t just fail to report accurately on Gaza. Through what she calls “the complicit lens,” it helped make the genocide possible.

“It’s no small charge to say that establishment media is complicit in a genocide. And I do believe that they know what they’re doing. They know exactly what’s happening there.”

We discuss media framing, censorship, language, competing narratives about October 7, and why independent journalism has become increasingly important.

Then we revisit part of my 2025 conversation with journalist Nico Lang about American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era. Lang traveled across the country to meet trans young people and their families, documenting not only the challenges posed by anti-trans legislation, but also the resilience, humor, and humanity that rarely make headlines.

“They treat these kids like they’re like monsters and aliens rather than human beings who have the same kinds of human being experiences that they do.”

Both conversations ask a similar question: What happens when people are represented through narratives created by others rather than being allowed to tell their own stories? Whether it’s Palestinians documenting life under bombardment or trans teenagers fighting to define themselves in a hostile political climate, these interviews explore the establishment structures that keep the truth from the public — and how those who are being silenced are fighting back.

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Tags: Gaza media coverage, U.S. media bias, Robin Andersen, Complicit Lens, Israel Palestine journalism, media censorship, Palestinian journalists, media criticism, FAIR media, trans youth, transgender teenagers, Nico Lang, American Teenager, Pride Month, anti-trans legislation, trans kids resilience, Writer’s Voice podcast

You might also like: Nico Lang, AMERICAN TEENAGER, Omar Zahzah, GAZA

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Robin Andersen examines the editorial and structural forces that shaped U.S. media coverage of Gaza from October 7, 2023, onward.

She details the internal CNN memos directing journalists to avoid terms like “genocide,” “massacre,” and “refugee camp,” and describes how the New York Times followed similar editorial directives shaped by Israeli military talking points.

Andersen traces how two distinct realities emerged: the ground-level documentation by Palestinian journalists using cell phones and Arab-language press, and the highly constructed version published by U.S. establishment outlets.

She also examines atrocity propaganda surrounding October 7, the Hannibal Directive, competing narratives about systematic sexual violence, and the structural ties between corporate media boards, fossil fuel interests, and the military-industrial complex. Andersen’s conclusion: American media’s complicity in the Gaza genocide was not accidental. It was chosen.

Read An Excerpt

Award-winning journalist Nico Lang (they/them) traveled to seven states to spend extended time with seven trans youth for their book American Teenager.

Lang discusses their approach to individual storytelling and why they refused to flatten their subjects into a single thesis, letting the particularity of each story carry the universal meaning.

The conversation covers gender dysphoria and non-binary identity, the devastating psychological toll of fighting anti-trans legislation as a teenager, and specific subjects including Micah, a Black gender-fluid teenager in West Virginia who shows up to the state legislature to oppose anti-trans bills and is told by a Republican lobbyist that it doesn’t matter how many kids protest.

Lang reflects on what it means to write about joy under those conditions.

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

The stories we tell can change how we live.

This week on Writer’s Voice, a novel about what happens when we lose our connection to the living systems that sustain us.

Songwriter and author Alex Woodard joins us to talk about Ordinary Soil, a multigenerational saga of a Choctaw farming family in the Oklahoma Panhandle that traces the intertwined health of land, food, and people across more than a century.

“The simplified message of this book is that you get out what you put in. And that goes for the dirt, that goes for your stomach, that goes for your mind, that goes for your spirit, that goes for everything.”

Then, we revisit our 2019 conversation conversation with environmental journalist Carey Gillam about her book The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice. It’s about the groundbreaking case of school groundskeeper Lee Johnson—how he sued Monsanto and won.

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Tags: Alex Woodard, Ordinary Soil, regenerative agriculture, soil health, glyphosate, Roundup, Indigenous farming, environmental fiction, Carey Gillam, Monsanto

You might also like: Exposing Hidden Agendas: Will Potter on Factory Farm Secrecy, Carey Gillam, WHITEWASH

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Alex Woodard’s Ordinary Soil follows six generations of a Choctaw farming family living on the same Oklahoma Panhandle land from the late nineteenth century to the present. At its center is Jake, a struggling modern farmer whose physical and emotional health reflect the accumulated effects of generational trauma, environmental degradation, and the transformation of American agriculture.

In our conversation, Woodard discusses the novel’s roots in both family history and contemporary concerns about industrial agriculture. The book contrasts Indigenous farming traditions, particularly the “Three Sisters” method of planting corn, beans, and squash together, with the rise of chemical-intensive monoculture farming. Through the family’s story, Woodard explores how changes in the soil affect not only ecosystems but human health as well.

We also talk about glyphosate, gut health, regenerative agriculture, and the growing scientific understanding of epigenetics. The novel suggests that both physical and emotional trauma can accumulate across generations, shaping the lives of descendants long after the original wounds occurred. At the same time, Woodard emphasizes that healing is possible, for individuals, communities, and the land itself.

Listen to or Read a Sample from Ordinary Soil

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

What really happened in Syria?

In this episode of Writer’s Voice, we talk with journalist Anand Gopal about his extraordinary book Days of Love and Rage. Drawing on years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, Gopal reconstructs the story of ordinary Syrians who rose up against dictatorship and attempted to build a democratic society in the city of Manbij during the Arab Spring.

“In these complex scenarios, you usually hear about devastation, not about acts of construction.”

We discuss the social contract that sustained the Assad regime for decades, the impact of neoliberal economic reforms and climate-driven drought, and the revolutionary awakening that swept through Syria in 2011. Gopal describes how citizens with no prior experience of democracy organized councils, newspapers, political assemblies, and public debates, creating a vibrant experiment in self-government under impossible conditions.

The conversation also explores the class divisions, economic crises, and political struggles that contributed to the rise of Islamist movements and eventually ISIS. Yet Gopal argues that the democratic experiment was real, meaningful, and not doomed to fail.

In the final part of our conversation, we examine hope, not as a feeling but as a practice, a willingness to remain open to possibility even in dark times.

Tags: Anand Gopal, Days of Love and Rage, Syria, Syrian Revolution, Arab Spring, Assad regime, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, Middle East politics, Writer’s Voice Podcast

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Anand Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage is a sweeping account of Syria’s revolution through the lives of ordinary people in Manbij and the Euphrates countryside.

Beginning with the agrarian world of Ibrahim Qasim and the village of Little Hyena, Gopal traces the transformation of Syrian society under the Ba’ath Party, the erosion of economic security through neoliberal reforms, and the environmental pressures that helped fuel the Arab Spring.

The conversation examines how Syrians who had lived for decades under dictatorship discovered collective political power through protest and democratic organizing. Gopal describes the emergence of the Revolutionary Council and Revolutionary Youth Movement, which attempted to govern Manbij through public participation, debate, elections, and accountability.

We also explore how economic inequality, class conflict, and insecurity opened space for Islamist movements and eventually ISIS. Finally, Gopal reflects on historical contingency, revolutionary tradition, and the meaning of hope in times of uncertainty.

Listen to or read an excerpt

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

What if the story we tell about civilization is wrong?

What if human history isn’t a steady march from “primitive” hunter-gatherers to ever more advanced societies, but something far messier, more inventive, and more fragile — a long experiment of adaptation, collapse, reinvention, and survival?

Our guest, historian and podcaster Patrick Wyman takes readers deep into that story in his new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World.

“Our human past is infinitely bigger than we generally tend to think it is.”

Drawing on breakthroughs in archaeology, ancient DNA, isotope analysis, and climate science, Wyman takes us from Ice Age North America to Bronze Age cities and forgotten civilizations across Europe and the Mediterranean. Along the way, he challenges the idea that history follows a single path toward “civilization.” Instead, he reveals a human story filled with experimentation, adaptation, migration, collapse, and renewal.

At a moment when many people feel trapped by crises that seem beyond our control, Lost Worlds offers a powerful reminder that history is full of alternatives, and that the future remains unwritten. One thing is clear: we’ve always had more choices than we thought.

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Tags: Patrick Wyman, Lost Worlds, Bronze Age collapse, Göbekli Tepe, Trypillia, Mycenaean Greece, Sea Peoples, hunter-gatherers, ancient DNA, archaeology, migration history, collapse and renewal, human prehistory, Writer’s Voice podcast, 

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Segment Summary

The scale of the human past — Wyman opens by making the case that even people who love history dramatically underestimate how much of it there is, how many societies have existed, and how different they were from each other and from our assumptions.

Why civilization didn’t unfold in a straight line — Agriculture was independently invented multiple times, in places that look nothing like each other. The “package” of traits we associate with civilization — farming, cities, hierarchy, writing — didn’t arrive together, and they weren’t inevitable.

Migration as humanity’s oldest survival tool — Wyman pushes back on the idea that people are supposed to be rooted in place. Over long periods of time, moving is the baseline human response to pressure, and new tools like ancient DNA are letting us see those movements more clearly than ever before.

New archaeology and what it reveals — The Kosice mass grave in Poland, the Anzick child burial in Montana, the antler frontlets at Starcar in England: Wyman shows how new scientific methods are turning what used to be anonymous fragments into intimate human stories.

Göbekli Tepe, Trypillia, and the problem with “civilization” — Wyman is skeptical of checklists that define which societies “count” as civilizations. He argues those checklists exclude extraordinary experiments in human organization, and he makes the case for taking the Trypillia megacities seriously on their own terms.

The Bronze Age collapse — Around 1200 BC, one of the most prosperous and interconnected worlds in ancient history fell apart in a cascading systems failure. Wyman argues the same interconnections that made it successful made it fragile — and draws explicit parallels to disruptions in global supply chains today.

Collapse and renewal — Wyman pushes back on apocalyptic collapse narratives. Even the worst collapses left survivors with knowledge, agency, and choices. The end is never the end.

Patrick Wyman is the host of The Tides of History and The Fall of Rome podcasts, author of several books, and creator of the Substack Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future, 

Read a Sample from Lost Worlds

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

In this episode of Writer’s Voice, Francesca speaks with Omar Zahzah, Palestinian-American scholar, activist, journalist, and author of Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle.

“There’s never been a moment in time where Palestinians did not resist their dispossession. And consequently, there is not going to be a moment in time where Palestinians begin to cease resisting.”

Zahzah offers the first book-length analysis of how major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, systematically suppress Palestinian content, and how that suppression is structurally connected to the financial, ideological, and political ties between Silicon Valley and the Israeli state.

The conversation covers the history of Palestinian resistance to silencing, the specific mechanics of digital censorship, the TikTok ban, the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, and the forms of resistance that Zahzah believes can still make a difference.

Then we revisit part of Francesca’s 2025 conversation with Omar El Akkad, about his book, One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This. 

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Tags: Omar Zahzah, Terms of Servitude, Palestinian censorship, social media censorship Palestine, digital settler colonialism, Silicon Valley Israel, TikTok ban Palestine, big tech censorship, AI warfare Palestine, Palestinian liberation, Writer’s Voice podcast, Omar El Akkad

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Zahzah opens by explaining his title: “Terms of Servitude” is a pun on “terms of service,” meant to expose the broader social vision behind the platforms we use daily.

He traces his own path from UCLA activist facing doxxing and blacklisting to journalist and author, and frames Palestinian history as what he calls “a series of failed silencings,” a story not of passive victimhood but of continuous, defiant resistance.

He describes in detail the two-tier content system that operates on major platforms: posts that present Palestinians as depoliticized victims, with grief but no named culprit, tend to spread freely, while posts that name Israel, Zionism, or the colonial roots of Palestinian dispossession are flagged, removed, shadowbanned, or suppressed. He gives specific examples: posts by Palestinian journalists flagged as pornographic, accounts shadowbanned in real time, activists forced to use “algo-speak” and emojis to evade automated censorship.

Zahzah addresses the TikTok story in depth, arguing that the platform became a target precisely because it was so effective at spreading pro-Palestinian content and helping younger generations break from legacy media narratives. He connects the TikTok ban and its acquisition by the Ellison family to a broader consolidation of media control in explicitly pro-Israel hands.

On the question of resistance, Zahzah highlights the No Tech for Apartheid campaign among Google and Amazon workers, the importance of whistleblowing (including his own Electronic Intifada reporting on Dell Technologies’ hardware role in AI targeting systems), and the continued importance of posting and speaking out even under censorship. He ends with a reminder that even as the odds are stacked, people are not powerless.

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

This week, Elizabeth Vartkessian joins me to discuss The Deserving: What the Lives of the Condemned Reveal About American Justice. Drawing on two decades as a mitigation specialist working with people facing the death penalty, she argues that America’s justice system reflects deeper failures in how we value human dignity, mercy, and opportunity.

“What I can do is everything possible to provide the context that people need to understand that my client is a person who has likely done a huge amount of harm that can’t be undone, but they are still a human being who is loved, who has potential, who has the capacity just like any other human being to grow, to change, to redeem.”  

Then we revisit part of my 2020 conversation with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, now a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Michigan. In Healing Politics, he describes what he calls America’s “epidemic of insecurity” and explains why he left medicine to tackle the social and political causes of illness itself.

“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale.”

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Tags: Elizabeth Vartkessian, The Deserving, death penalty, capital punishment, criminal justice, mitigation specialist, prison system, restorative justice, Abdul El-Sayed, Healing Politics, public health, healthcare inequality, Writer’s Voice podcast

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Elizabeth Vartkessian has spent more than two decades working as a mitigation specialist for people facing the death penalty.

In The Deserving, she brings readers inside a rarely seen part of the American legal system, investigating the lives of people condemned to die and the social conditions that shaped them long before they entered a courtroom.  

In our conversation, Vartkessian explains what mitigation work actually involves. She investigates the life histories of defendants, tracing patterns of childhood abuse, poverty, trauma, addiction, racism, and systemic neglect. Rather than excusing violent acts, she argues that understanding the full human context behind them is essential if justice is to mean anything more than punishment.  

We talk in depth about one of her early clients, “Edward,” who was sentenced to death after a robbery gone wrong when he was barely eighteen years old. Through Edward’s story, Vartkessian explores how violence often begins long before a crime itself, in homes and communities shaped by desperation and neglect.

She also discusses the deeply flawed mechanics of the death penalty system itself, from ineffective defense counsel to “death-qualified” juries that are predisposed toward conviction and execution.  

The conversation ultimately becomes a larger meditation on mercy, dignity, and the meaning of justice in America. Vartkessian argues that the death penalty neither deters violence nor creates public safety, and instead reflects a society willing to decide that some people are beyond redemption.  

In this excerpt from our 2020 interview, Abdul El-Sayed argues that America faces not just a healthcare crisis, but what he calls an “epidemic of insecurity.”

Drawing on his training as both a physician and epidemiologist, he describes how collapsing systems of healthcare, housing, employment, and politics leave millions of Americans struggling with chronic instability and fear.

El-Sayed explains how his understanding of public health evolved beyond traditional medicine into what he calls a systems approach, recognizing that disease is shaped not only by biology, but by racism, poverty, environmental exposure, political power, and economic inequality. He illustrates this through his former work as director of the Detroit Health Department, where industrial pollution, asthma, COVID-19, and racial disparities all intersected in the same communities.

The conversation also turns deeply personal. El-Sayed recounts the patient encounter that changed the course of his life, leading him to leave clinical medicine behind in order to address the systemic causes of illness itself. He reflects on water shutoffs in Detroit, the Flint lead crisis, and the failure of political institutions to protect public health.

At its core, Healing Politics argues that healing requires more than medical care. It requires rebuilding social systems that allow people to live with dignity, security, and democratic power.

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

This week on Writer’s Voice, two novels explore what happens when people are forced out of the lives they thought they understood.

First, Tim Weed joins me to talk about The Gatepost, a speculative thriller that blends archaeology, psychedelics, quantum theory and Mesoamerican mythology into a story about grief, consciousness, and humanity’s fractured relationship with nature.

“Our mythologies have collapsed. They no longer explain the world. And so, I consider this to be a fun novel, but it’s also a novel that has a serious aspect to it. And this is part of weaving the new tapestry, the tapestry of a new mythology.”  

Then Farah Naz Rishi discusses The Flightless Birds of New Hope, a funny, tender, and deeply moving novel about three estranged siblings brought back together after the death of their parents and the escape of the family cockatoo.

“I think grief and humor come hand in hand. Usually you’ll find that some of the funniest people are those who have experienced intense hardship or suffering from depression. And they use humor as a way of making sure that people don’t worry about them.”  

Both books ask what it takes to move forward after loss, and whether connection, to family, to nature, or to something larger than ourselves, can help us find our way.

Finally, we listen to Richard Wilbur read his poem “Advice to a Prophet.” Hear our 2009 conversation with Wilbur here.

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Tags: Tim Weed, The Gatepost, psychedelics, Mesoamerican mythology, Inframundo, speculative fiction, Writer’s Voice podcast, Farah Naz Rishi, The Flightless Birds of New Hope, literary fiction, Richard Wilbur

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Tim Weed’s novel The Gatepost combines literary suspense, speculative fiction, and spiritual inquiry in a story that moves between contemporary Vermont and a mysterious alternate realm inspired by Mesoamerican mythology.

The novel follows Esme, a woman investigating the disappearance of her father, Gregory, an amateur archaeologist whose experiments with psilocybin mushrooms and an ancient Olmec stela may have opened a doorway into another world.  

In our conversation, Weed discusses the influence of psychedelic researchers like Albert Hofmann and Gordon Wasson, as well as the Mesoamerican concept of the Inframundo, a hidden realm existing alongside ordinary reality. We talk about the intersection of science and spirituality in the novel, including the parallels Weed sees between ancient cosmologies and the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics.  

Weed also reflects personally on his own experiences with psychedelics as a teenager and how those experiences shaped his imagination as a writer. He describes both the exhilaration and danger of altered states, stressing the seriousness and reverence with which traditional cultures approached entheogenic substances. The conversation explores how experiences of awe, ego dissolution, and interconnectedness influenced the novel’s vision of consciousness and love as a unifying force.  

At its heart, The Gatepost is a novel about humanity’s relationship with nature and the stories we tell about our place in the world. Weed argues that modern society suffers from a collapse of shared mythology, and that literature can help imagine new paradigms rooted in stewardship rather than domination.  

Farah Naz Rishi’s novel The Flightless Birds of New Hope begins with grief and a missing bird.

After the death of their parents, three estranged siblings, Aidan, Eliza, and Sami, are brought back together when the family cockatoo, Coco, escapes. What follows is a road trip story full of emotional reckoning, sharp humor, buried resentment, and hard-earned tenderness.  

In our conversation, Rishi talks about how the novel emerged from her own experience of losing her younger brother. She describes grief as a kind of emotional paralysis, a feeling of being “flightless,” and explains how the novel became a way to explore anger, abandonment, love, and survival. The sibling dynamics are central to the story, especially the tensions between Aidan, the angry eldest brother, and Eliza, who feels abandoned after he leaves the family.  

One of the novel’s most unusual and moving elements is Coco herself. Rishi explains why she chose to give the cockatoo her own perspective chapters, allowing the bird to become not just a symbol but a full participant in the family’s emotional life. We also talk about birding culture, community, and the generosity of strangers the siblings encounter on their journey.  

The conversation also explores the novel’s blend of humor and heartbreak. Rishi reflects on the way grief and comedy coexist, and why imperfect healing felt truer than a neat resolution. In the end, the novel suggests that healing may begin simply with the willingness to keep moving together.  

Read A Sample

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

This week, we begin with a look at how Stephen King’s work strikes at the heart of our most basic fears. Caroline Bicks takes us inside Stephen King’s private archives to explore how horror works, and why King’s stories continue to haunt us. Her book is Monsters In The Archives.

“He doesn’t just write about monsters. He’s really writing about human emotions of grief and trauma and using horror as a way to help us metabolize our own very human experiences and fears.”

Then, another kind of fear: the dizzying precarity plaguing so many college graduates. Novelist Maria Adelmann joins me to talk about Adjunct, her darkly funny and deeply unsettling novel about exploitation, debt, and survival inside higher education.

“I wanted to make the point that a few things go wrong — a medical issue, no family support — and you can, even as a professor at a good college, become so poor that you don’t have a place to live.”

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Tags: Stephen King, Monsters in the Archives, Caroline Bicks, Stephen King archive, Pet Sematary, Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Night Shift, horror writing craft, adjunct professor, Marie Adelmann, Adjunct novel, contingent faculty, academic precarity, student debt, university adjuncts, adjunct pay, adjunct crisis, Writer’s Voice podcast,

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Caroline Bicks is the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine and a scholar of Renaissance literature and Shakespeare.

She spent her sabbatical year inside the Kings’ private archive—reading the first drafts, copy-editor exchanges, and revision notes behind five major works including Pet Sematary, Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and “The Boogeyman.” Her book, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, is the result.

In this conversation, Bicks explains why King’s horror works not just because of monsters, but because of the human emotions—grief, trauma, the fear of abandonment—that the monsters stand in for.

She traces her own childhood fear of the boogeyman back to the specific psychological mechanisms King exploits, and walks us through what the archives reveal: the version of Carrie that was almost an alien, the copy-editor arguments over the word “rattly,” the draft of Salem’s Lot where the town wasn’t a character yet. She also describes what it was like when King himself called her at home—and what happened when he walked into a room full of students, to their huge delight.

Maria Adelmann is the author of three books, including the novel Adjunct.

The book follows Sam, a PhD-holding adjunct professor whose financial situation deteriorates over the course of a single semester—from precarious to genuinely desperate—until she’s hiding under a desk in the adjunct office at 2am. On the surface, the novel is satire — but it might be closer to documentary.

In this conversation, Adelmann and Writer’s Voice host Francesca Rheannon—who was herself an adjunct at Keene State College in the 1990s for $1,500 per course—talk about what the numbers actually mean: 70% of college instructors are contingent laborers, 40% specifically labeled adjuncts, and a quarter of those make less than $25,000 a year.

They discuss how student debt, the gig economy, gender inequality, and a willful institutional blindness all converge in the figure of the adjunct. And they examine the campus novel as a genre: why it’s always been romantic, and why Adelmann’s deliberately isn’t.

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

This week’s Writer’s Voice features two new books that take us into very different realms of hidden history.

First, Julia Cooke joins Francesca to talk about Starry and Restless, her vivid group portrait of Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily Hahn, three adventurous women writers who expanded what journalism could be, often while battling the constraints placed on women in their time.

“Women were central to voice-driven narrative journalism for at least the last century and a half.”

Then, we move from literary history to natural history, as nature journalist Sophie Pavelle takes us into a very different realm with her book To Have or To Hold. It’s a fascinating exploration of symbiosis, parasitism, and the intricate relationships that sustain the living world.

“The natural world is structured and founded upon these really intricate, complicated, ancient relationships.”

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Tags: Julia Cooke, Starry and Restless, Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, Emily Hahn, women journalists, Sophie Pavelle, To Have or To Hold, symbiosis, ecology, biodiversity, Writer’s Voice podcast,

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Julia Cooke’s Starry and Restless brings three remarkable women journalists back into focus: Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily Hahn.

These writers refused to stay within the limits set for women in the early twentieth century. They traveled widely, reported from conflict zones, and wrote with a voice and authority that helped shape what we now call literary journalism. Yet despite their influence and fame in their own time, their contributions were later minimized or left out of the canon.

In our conversation, Cooke makes a strong case that women were not peripheral but central to the development of narrative, voice-driven reporting. She points to the sheer scale of women’s contributions, from immersive reporting to stylistic innovation, and shows how constraints, like being barred from the front lines of war, actually pushed women journalists to tell different kinds of stories. They focused on civilian life, domestic spaces, and the human consequences of conflict, expanding what counted as news.

We also talk about how these writers challenged the idea of objectivity. By inserting themselves into their reporting and questioning authority, they offered a broader, more inclusive view of the world. Cooke highlights how they paid attention to people often overlooked, women, children, and working-class lives, and in doing so widened journalism’s field of vision.

The interview also explores the tension between creative work and domestic life, a thread that runs through the book and still resonates today. Cooke reflects on the ways motherhood, partnership, and economic necessity shaped these women’s careers, and how their “restlessness” was both a personal drive and a form of resistance.

In To Have or To Hold, science journalist Sophie Pavelle takes us into the intricate and often surprising world of symbiosis, the relationships between living things that make life possible.

From parasites to pollinators, from microbes in our bodies to complex marine ecosystems, Pavelle shows that life on Earth is not built on isolation, but on constant interaction, dependence, and exchange.

In our conversation, Pavelle explains that symbiosis is far more complex than the simple idea of mutual benefit. These relationships can be cooperative, exploitative, or somewhere in between, and they are always shifting. She shares vivid examples, like the “mint sauce worm,” a tiny creature that hosts algae inside its body and lives partly like a plant, and parasites that move through multiple hosts, shaping entire ecosystems in the process.

We also talk about how deeply embedded humans are in these systems. Our own bodies are ecosystems, dependent on microbes for health and survival, and our relationship with the natural world is itself symbiotic. Pavelle challenges the idea that humans stand apart from nature, arguing instead that our survival depends on recognizing and respecting these connections.

The interview also turns to what’s at risk. Climate change, habitat loss, and even light pollution are disrupting these delicate relationships. But Pavelle also offers a hopeful perspective. By paying attention to how nature operates, taking only what we need, allowing complexity and balance, we might begin to repair some of the damage and build a more sustainable relationship with the living world.