In this week’s episode, Grant and Brooke speak with the ever-charming storyteller and best-selling author Luis Alberto Urrea about borders and how borders are often bridges to understanding. In this interview, Luis shares the rejection and pushback he experienced early in his career for tackling Mexican subjects and showcasing Mexican characters, and the pressure he got from the publishing industry to Anglicize his name. Listeners will be treated to fabulous stories and advice, and will also hear about why Luis feels hopeful about the future for writers of color.

Even though Mary Karr has called memoir “a bastard,” and “an ugly little genre,” she’s also its biggest defender and champion. This interview, which kicks off the third year of Write-minded, covers some of the big topics that weigh on memoirists’ minds about truth and whether to fictionalize, as well as the importance of sensory details and why memoir is so popular despite its complex reputation. And since we reference Brooke’s 2015 onstage interview with Mary, we’re enclosing the link here, just in case, like us, you wish you could spend a little more time listening to Mary: https://youtu.be/PfdQutk506A

It’s back to school—in the weirdest possible iteration we’ve ever known, but still . . . And it’s in the back-to-school spirit that Brooke, Grant, and guest Courtney Maum talk about how to get published and how to stay published, the topic of Courtney’s latest book, Before and After the Book Deal. We’re covering good author etiquette, why you should never feel too confident about your own work, and how writers are—and are not writing—through the pandemic. This is our final episode of Year 2, so a big shout out to our listeners this week, too. Thank you.

Young Adult novels are all the rage—because they’re not exclusively for young-adult readers; really these books are for everyone. These two interviews with YA superstar authors Nic Stone and Elizabeth Acevedo are both inspiring and timely. Both authors weave social justice issues into their fiction, which is a trend we will continue to see as young writers are coming of age in a world that is increasingly giving permission, but also demanding, that writers speak up and speak out. What a gift these two bring to Write-minded, and to the world. Enjoy!

If you listen to Write-minded regularly, you know we have a soft spot for memoir—Brooke teaches it; Grant is wavering about whether to write one himself. So we’re bringing back two favorite guest interviews, best-selling authors Kiese Laymon (Heavy) and Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle) because these interviews are deep and inspiring, and above all else supportive to memoirists and by extension this increasingly popular genre. We’re sending our listeners positive summer vibes!

This week Grant and Brooke are digging into their archived interviews to feature the first of three genre-specific mash-up episodes, starting with dystopian fiction—because, as Cory Doctorow’s novel Radicalized claims, “Dystopia is now!” As counterintuitive as it seems, listening to these two dystopian novelists will actually calm your anxieties, and hopefully inspire you to read (or write) more dystopian fiction.

In this week’s episode, Grant and Brooke share their worst moments of procrastination, and both come to the awareness that they probably are productive procrastinators. This week’s guest, Bridget Quinn, has some important insights into this topic, too, and shares about how she sold three books in five years after the devastating rejection of her memoir, and how keeping lots of irons in the fire is an effective strategy for writing success.

This week Brooke and Grant are challenging all kinds of assumptions—starting with unpacking books we’ve read that have challenged our own assumptions, and then with this week’s guest, Mary Pipher. Pipher, the best-selling author of Reviving Ophelia and Women Rowing North, gives us her take on ageism, “moral imagination,” and how and why she writes “for the reader, for the world.”

The publishing industry is on the front lines of the national conversation around diversity, equity, and inclusion—for good reason. The industry has a known race problem, but has been slow to do anything about it. Enter 2020. Today’s show dives into one of many of the stories making headlines this year that are calling publishing out and holding the industry to account. Guest L.L. McKinney started the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag—and talks with Grant and Brooke about advances, disparities in the publishing industry, and what’s at stake for BIPOC authors.