Caro De Robertis, whose pronouns are they/theirs, is a Uruguayan-American author and full tenured professor in the creative writing dept at San Francisco State University. They are the author of five novels and the editor of an award-winning anthology, Radical Hope. Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Their new book is The Palace of Eros, just out from Atria Books. Listen in as we discuss how to write characters' interior lives, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Writer and novelist Juli Min is the editor-in-chief and fiction editor of the Shanghai Literary Review. Currently a resident of Shanghai, she was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in New Jersey, and has just published her debut novel. Entitled Shanghailanders, the book is just out from Spiegel and Grau. Listen in as she and I discuss book structure, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project's free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts, and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Suzette Mullen is the author of the new memoir, The Only Way Through is Out, just out from the University of Wisconsin Press. She is the founder of Your Story Finder, where she provides nonfiction book coaching. In 2021, she published a Tiny Love Story in The New York Times that was the seed that became her new book. Listen as she and host Marion Roach Smith discuss how to go from a short piece of memoir to a book, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Music journalist Andy Aledort on how to turn a passion into a writing career.

Non-fiction writer Joseph Dalton discusses how to write someone else's story.

Non-fiction writer Richard Zacks discusses how to write from who you really are.

Bestselling author Ada Calhoun talks to Qwerty podcast host Marion Roach Smith about how to go from idea to publication.

Novelist Alice Lichtenstein discusses spending time with life's tough topics and the fiction that can result.

Trauma recovery is writer Diane Cameron's area of expertise, and on this episode of QWERTY, she shares with us how to write through life's toughest material.

On this episode of the QWERTY podcast, writer Anthony D'Aries talks about how to interview your family when writing memoir.

Jeff Goins answers questions on how to find your writer's voice on this episode of the QWERTY podcast.

Jack Hitt, author, magazine writer and winner of two Peabody awards for his radio work, discusses how to craft a story.

Joe Bunting, Creator of The Write Practice, visits the QWERTY podcast and talks about how to promote a self-published book.

Author, historian, essayist, bestselling novelist and commentator Kevin Baker has just published part one of his long-awaited two-part look into baseball and the city that formed it and was formed by it. Called The New York Game: Baseball and The Rise of a New City (Knopf, 2024), this was a labor of love from a super fan of both the city and the game. In our interview on the Qwerty podcast, we discuss the sport, the city and how a historian does his work. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Food writer David Leite and memoir coach and teacher, Marion Roach Smith, discuss the art and science of food writing.

How do you get an agent for your writing? This, and other questions on the business of publishing, are discussed when Jane Friedman visits the QWERTY podcast and talks with author, writer and teacher Marion Roach Smith.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Genius grant, William Kennedy knows about how to write from home. He has brought Albany, New York to the world through his work. Marion and David speak to one of America's greatest living writers.

In this second Annotations segment, Marion and David sit down together to discuss best writing practices and answer several listeners' questions.

Journalist and author Jill Smolowe discusses her memoir "Four Funerals and a Wedding" and the challenges she faced writing about the many facets of grief and healing.

Author and memoir writing teacher Marion Roach Smith and memorist and cookbook author David Leite kick off Season Two of QWERTY with a previerw of upcoming guests.

Two-time best-selling nonfiction author Julia Flynn Siler gives excellent advice to writers about writing what you believe in, testing your material and setting writing deadlines and goals to have a writing life.

Best-selling memoirist Elissa Altman discusses with Marion and David the hard work of writing about family, getting to the truth, and the importance of what to include and what to leave out in her latest book, Motherland.

Writer Corvette Hunt recounts how to control your personal details when writing memoir, how to get an essay published in The New York Times and then turn that into a book-length memoir.

Marion and David ask a lifetime New York Times reporter about writing on deadline and how to identify when you know enough to publish.

Author, essayist, poet and activist Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born poet, literary translator, writer, and author of Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013). A finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and 2011 May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize, she moved to the US at age 18 and earned an MA in English at Simmons College and an MFA in poetry at Boston University. Her honors include awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, English PEN, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, Framingham State University's Miriam Levine Reader Award, and the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize. Her poetry appears in Seneca Review, Salamander, Plume, From the Fishouse, and elsewhere. Her new book is An Unruled Body: A Poet’s Memoir, just out from Restless Books, which is the winner of the 2021 Restless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize. Listen in and she and host Marion Roach Smith discuss writing into trauma in this new episode of the Qwerty podcast. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

In this first Annotations segment, Marion and David discuss the difficult process of reporting on one's own life when writing memoir.

Author Marcia Butler's first book, The Skin Above My Knee, chronicled surviving abuse through art, which brought her national acclaim. In this moving episode, she speaks about this gorgeous, notable memoir.

Gary Taubes has turned investigative journalism into a science. With three cover stories for the New York Times Magazine and a string of books, he has brought his skeptical scrutiny to topics as diverse as high-energy physics, salt, and dietary fat.

Author Asha Dornfest has built a successful writing life one platform at a time. In this episode, she explains exactly how she did it and how her decisions led to several successful books.

Bestselling author Sloane Tanen talks about her writing process and the tough choice of whether to tell your story as fiction or memoir.

Bestselling cookbook author Zoë François, who has more than 800,000 copies of her work in print, talks with Marion and David about the process of revising and updating your work.

Lisa Cron is the brain behind the brain science of writing. Marion and David speak with her about why we are all wired for story.

In the first episode, Marion Roach Smith and David Leite chat with author Boris Fishman about memoir writing, the power of food, and writing about depression.

Qwerty is the podcast for writers on how to live the writing life. Host Marion Roach Smith interviews well-published writers for their writing tips, their advice on how to write and their insights into how to get published.

Writer and author Meg Kissinger spent more than two decades traveling across the country to report on America’s mental health system for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, she has won two George Polk Awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors, and two National Journalism Awards. Kissinger teaches investigative reporting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was a visiting professor at DePauw University, her alma mater. Her stories on the abysmal living conditions for people with mental illness inspired changes to Wisconsin law and led to the creation of hundreds of new housing units. Now, she has brought the knowledge, insights, determination and humility of a reporter’s eye to the vulnerability needed to get to heart of her own origin story and published her new book, While You Were Out: The Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Writer, essayist, speaker and activist Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil, Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, a NYT Editors’ Choice published in 2022 by Liveright, a division of W.W. Norton. He is also the author of Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and he is the co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, LitHub, Orion Magazine, The Arkansas International, Southern Humanities Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and numerous anthologies. He is a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Known nationally and internationally as the woman who lived in one of the world’s smallest apartments, Felice Cohen is the award-winning author of the bestselling books Half In: A Coming-of-Age Memoir of Forbidden Love, 90 Lessons for Living Large in 90 Square Feet (...or More) (inspired by the YouTube video of her tiny NYC studio with over 25 million views) and What Papa Told Me, about her grandfather’s life before, during and after the Holocaust. Felice has been featured on Good Morning America, NBC, CBS, NPR, Time, Globe & Mail, New York Daily News, the Daily Mail and more. She speaks around the country leading memoir workshops, talking about how living tiny made her life larger as well as offering tips on organizing and decluttering, and about writing a book with her grandfather. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Washington Post contributing columnist and author Kate Cohen writes about American culture. Her new book, We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should Too), is just out. Listen in as we discuss her book, writing about faith and the loss of it, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Mega-bestselling author Joanna Penn, whose 40 books span several genres, has now written a memoir after making three separate solo pilgrimage walks. The walks and this new book, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways, allowed her to define for herself her personal definition of being a seeker. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the bookThe Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

When writer, author and advocate Kristin Jarvis Adams pitched a potential publisher on her book, she began with a sentence so startling that it made the publisher ask her to breakfast. The book that followed was full of such sentences. This is a conversation about an unlikely book on an nearly impossible topic to sell that worked. Be inspired by her tale. Listen in and learn how to live this writing life. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Writer, author and advocate Virginia Sole-Smith knows how to write into other's biases, and she writes right into them, giving us new language while she explores diet culture, anti-fat bias, feminism and health. Listen in and learn how to live this writing life.

The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Deborah Paredez is the author of the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke 2009) and the poetry collections, This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA 2020). Her poetry, essays, and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, National Public Radio, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Feminist Studies, and elsewhere. She is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University and is the Co-Founder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poets. At Columbia, Professor Pah Red dez Paredez is a recipient of a Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. Her new book is American Diva, just published by W.W. Norton. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Allison K. Williams utilized her years as what she calls an "unkind editor" to write and publish her fine book, Seven Drafts: Self-Edit like a Pro from Page to Book, which she discusses here on the Qwerty podcast. This skillfully constructed book breaks down the process of writing and self-editing into seven definitive drafts – the vomit draft, the story draft, the Character draft, the technical draft, the personal copyedit, the friend read and the editor read. Listen in and learn.

The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all my free webinars and instructive posts, as well as our online classes, our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Kerri Maher knows how to choose topics to write about. The author of the USA Today bestseller, The Paris Bookseller, is back with one of the most compelling topics of our time. Listen in and learn how to live this writing life. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know.

Matt Mendez is the author of Barely Missing Everything, his debut novel, and the short story collection Twitching Heart. He writes from places that have been traiditonally ignored and brings his perspective to his work. Listen in and learn how to live this writing life. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know.

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Alice Carriere has written a dynamic debut memoir from her unconventional, big downtown New York life. Raised in the art scene, she is practically burdened with great, vivid material, including a supporting cast of celebrity artists, actors and infuencers. How to write a memoir from a vivid, troubled upbringing? Like this. Listen in and learn how to live this writing life. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know.

How to write memoir from the middle of the mess? Perhaps the expert on this is author Michele Cushatt, whose books from Zondervan, provide readers with the guidance to read and live through life's complications. Listen in and learn how to live this writing life. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know.

Dave Pelzer, bestselling author of A Child Called It and Qwerty podcast host Marion Roach Smith talk about writing from a place of helping others. Listen in and learn how to live this writing life. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know.

How to write an anonymous memoir with Lamya H, author of Hijab Butch Blues. Listen in and learn how to live this writing life. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know.