As we make our way through our Craft-Minded series this fall, heading straight into NaNoWriMo, we have a special topic for memoirists—but which will benefit any writer who thinks about reflecting, musing, or meaning-making as a way to reach their readers’ minds and hearts. This week’s guest, Prince Shakur, takes us on a journey of how and why reflection matters, and offers examples and tips, too. This episode offers up other writers who reflect masterfully, and as has been the case with each of these craft episodes, we invite listeners to consider how and whether you might invite new ways of seeing into your own creative process.

This week Write-minded is exploring the ways authors place themselves into stories with broader cultural or historical contexts. Guest Danyel Smith has done just that with her new genre-crossing book, Shine Bright, that’s both an examination of black female music artists and those artists’ impact on Danyel. Books like these are popular and often difficult to pull off, since writers must be aware of the balance between journalism and personal story—which is why Shine Bright is such a satisfying example of how to do this style of writing well. As a bonus, this episode also offers up a music fandom, an inside story about Whitney Houston, and a peek behind the curtain of Danyel’s journey with this book.

As we continue on with our Craft-minded series, Write-minded is honored to have Jeff VanderMeer speaking about imagination and how to mine the depths of your imagination to make yourself a better writer. Jeff’s classic craft book, Wonderbook, is written for the “imaginative fiction writer” rather than the “realistic fiction writer,” so we’re taking a dive into imagination, into creativity. This is an episode about keeping an open mind and having fun, which is the kind of energy anyone who’s going into NaNoWriMo next month needs to cultivate. So come on the journey with us. We have your supplies all ready for you!

In this third of six episodes in the Craft-minded series, Grant and Brooke speak with guest Morgan Talty about story form and how to listen for what your book wants to be. If, as a writer, you believe in the power of being in conversation with your own book, you’ll find a lot of comfort in Morgan’s articulation of that relationship between self and creative output, in addition to concrete ideas about how we shape our work by listening, patching together bits and pieces from here and there, and growing alongside our stories. An episode for the spirit, as well as the craft-minded.

This week kicks off a 6-week craft-minded series, starting with the great A.M. Holmes on characterization. In this episode we talk about dialogue, indirect and direct characterization, character tics, and how to pay attention to your own writing tics and “bad habits.” Homes is a seasoned writer of many books and teaches creative writing at Princeton, and she’s known for her depth and breadth of character—so you’re in for a treat on this topic that feels like it could be endlessly mind. Much food for thought for the craft-minded!

This week’s episode is a celebration of opinion, of boldly stating what you mean and what matters to you and why. Writing is an exercise in truth-telling, and when it’s your personal truth—no matter what your genre—it’s scary as hell. And while this week centers memoir, the episode is for anyone who’s trying to write what they think. It’s about why it matters that writers synthesize, interpret, make meaning, extrapolate, and also examines consequences—for you as a writer, and also for the world outside of you. If you’re wrestling with truth, with fallout, with consequences, with what’s at stake—Mychal Denzel Smith will provoke many questions and leave you inspired.

In her profound and moving new memoir, What My Bones Know, guest Stephanie Foo writes about trauma, and about a diagnosis of Complex PTSD that is lacking first-person narratives. In this week’s episode, the first of Write-minded’s fifth year, co-hosts Brooke and Grant talk about why trauma is a slippery subject to sell to publishers, and why Stephanie’s book is a breakthrough kind of memoir that paves the way for more of these kinds of narratives in the future. Stephanie is an insightful guest, offering valuable tips for how to write trauma and sharing how this was a book she had to write, and some of the considerations and fears she faced on the memoir journey.

In our final summer episode, we bring you two voices of advocacy in an episode that will both stoke your passions and remind you to be gentle with yourself at the same time. Guests Charlie Jane Anders and Azar Nafisi both speak to why we must write our truths, pay attention, bear witness, and remember the power of one person’s voice and words to save and change lives.

This week Write-minded revisits two powerful interviews in which guests Erica Jong and Lilly Dancyger shared with us about the power of emotion on the page. Erica Jong’s work has often centered fear and desire while Lilly Dancyger’s work has circled anger. Both women share the power of unlocking emotion on the page, and touch upon the ways in which women are expected to be more confined in their emotional expression. This is exactly why it’s so important to feel those emotions and express them on the page, and these two authors give the absolute permission to do so, and model how in their wonderful works of fiction and nonfiction.