This week, Grant and Brooke talk with Dennis James Sweeney about his new book, How to Submit. If you’ve ever felt intimidated by the submissions process; wondered what some of the common pitfalls are when it comes to submitting, or if you need a reframe about how to think about submitting, this show is for you. Dennis has an encouraging and helpful way of submitting—thinking about it as based on community, conversation, and through the lens of trying to find the best home for your work—whether it’s an op-ed, an essay, a poem, or a book. Dennis is one of the most encouraging guests we’ve had in a while—and if you’re wanting to get published, this is an episode you’ll come back to again!

This week we’re focusing on a little celebrated but much important aspect of storytelling: your story’s scope. How much ground are you trying to cover and how do you execute the pacing? These are the questions you must answer if you know and understand your scope. This week’s guest, Tara Dorabji, has a new novel, Call Her Freedom, that spans more than five decades, and yet, it’s a relatively short book. And so, it packs a punch. Books can cover a single day or a hundred years, and consideration for how to unfold stories of such extremes and everything in between originates with the author. Join us for a bit of a deep dive into this fascinating conversation, and Tara Dorabji’s insights about writing, publishing, and more.

This week we’re looking into the stories that inspire and move us, focusing on those that focus on everyday characters who are extraordinary in their very ordinariness. We speak to guest Sadeqa Johnson about the characters who’ve called to her, those voices that became well-rounded characters who she brought to life. This episode touches on a bit of magic, and what it’s like to listen to and get to know the characters who end up in the books we want to write. There’s much to love about this episode, not the least of which is Sadeqa’s energy and enthusiasm for her craft.

Are you considering doing a writers’ retreat this year? Whether you want to create your own, find something far-flung and exotic, or consider the writing retreat’s bigger cousin, the writers’ conference, this episode gives insights, definitions, and parameters for retreating. Guests Ellen Sussman and Connie Hale are both writing retreat leaders who share about their own programs and so much more.

On Substackin’ this week, we salute our friend and colleague, Dan Blank, for the great and encouraging work he’s doing at The Creative Shift, and point you to his Substack.

On this week’s show, we’re recognizing and honoring how far we’ve come in the world of fiction in the past decades since everyone in this week’s conversation remembers a time when there was no such thing as a gay protagonist. Guest Lee Wind talks to us about his new novel and his LGBTQ advocacy—for writers and readers. We also talk about James Bond, great books for queer youth, and why we love the Independent Book Publishers Association.

This week we touch upon the struggle that presents itself for memoirists who can’t or won’t let the past stay in the past, especially when other people wish you would. Guest Susan Lieu shares powerfully in this week’s show about how her mother became the central force and inspiration for her work after she died due to complications from a tummy tuck. In the process of writing about her mother and making sense of what happened, Susan discovered so much about her family’s silence, their trauma, and about her living parent—her father. If you are looking for a case study for how memoir heals and reveals, don’t miss this episode.

We welcome you to 2025 with a show that explores the exploration of form. In this conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Forrest Gander, we consider the nature of the writing journey—and its connection to landscape, the multiplicity of selves, and the kaleidoscopic experience of bringing together multiple eras of a lived life. Gander calls his new book a novel poem, and you’ll find out why, along with other beautiful insights about love and loss and the journey of being a writer—and a human.

Welcome to Write-minded’s 7th New Year’s show—where Grant and Brooke always circle around their challenge with resolutions, even as they make them and break them and every so often vow not to bother with them. This year they look back to certain resolutions declared and uncompleted, and grapple with the reckoning that must come when you assert such intentions out loud. And yet, Write-minded is also all about the fact that this writing business takes the time it takes, and this show comes around each year to help unpack goals asserted and achieved, goals shifted and morphed, goal posts moved and realigned, and much more. Happy 2025, dear writers, listeners, and creatives. Happy to be on this journey with you!

This week’s show focuses on endings, and beginnings. Guest Zahid Rafiq, who’s written a short story collection whose endings serve the stories and his characters, speaks to how he thinks about endings, including those that others might find less than satisfying. We’re defending a particular type of ending, those in which writers may feel less than compelled to tie their story in a bow for readers. Brooke points to a series of YouTube shorts she did on beginnings and endings in memoir that we invite memoirists to check out, and we close the show with a Substackin’ post Brooke wrote inspired by Salman Rushdie’s keynote at the Kauai Writers Conference in November: https://brookewarner.substack.com/p/writing-is-a-mess