Yaram Yahu is the author of My Afro is a Rising Sun, out with Running Press Kids, an imprint of Hachette, in 2024. He’s now working on several other picture books and a novel for adults and developing screenplays for television. In this episode, we discuss the importance of market research and the intricacies of the children’s picture book market, and he shares tested strategies for overcoming burnout as a full-time writer.

In this episode, we read one of our short stories, “Ten Years,” originally published in Modern Literature, a work of speculative fiction that examines the toll that societal pressures and generational trauma can take on the body and mind and asks what happens when your own country leaves you behind. We follow the reading with a discussion of these themes and share the story behind this story: how it came to be.

David Crespy is a playwright, biographer, and scholar. He’s the founder and co-director of Mizzou’s Writing for Performance Program, and he’s played an instrumental role in establishing and shaping the trajectories of many other programs, including the Missouri Playwright’s Workshop, the Mizzou New Play Series, and Summer Rep’s Comedy in Concert Series. His latest projects include a late-career biography of the playwright Edward F. Albee, whom he considered a colleague and friend. In this episode, he reads excerpts from two of his plays, shares insights gleaned from studying Albee’s legacy, and recounts the story of a little-known 18th-century Jewish heresiarch from Smyrna who rose to fame by claiming to be the Messiah.

In addition to his day job as a semiconductors analyst, Wesley is a Fulbright scholar, a seasoned traveler, and a storyteller. Most recently, he’s set out to try his hand at travel writing. In this episode, he makes a powerful case for the importance of stepping outside your comfort zone, and we trade embarrassing stories from Togo, India, and Uzbekistan.

Michael Wendroff is the son of an editor, the stepson of a literary agent, and most recently the author of a debut political thriller, What Goes Around. In this episode, we discuss the hurdles one must overcome to polish, market, and sell a novel in the contemporary market.

Luna Westish is a self-published author, parent, and wanderer whose interests include sustainability, business, motherhood, and more. In this episode, she shares the study-abroad stories that gave rise to her first novel, and we discuss the difficulties of self-publishing novels and escaping from cults.

Douglas Glenn Clark has been a playwright, screenwriter, novelist, journalist, speech writer, blogger, singer-songwriter, and most recently a ghostwriter. In this episode, we discuss the many hats he’s worn, the proliferation of “content”—as opposed to stories worth telling—and the rise of AI, and he shares his advice for young writers struggling to navigate this brave new world.

Dipika Mukherjee is a writer and traveler. She teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and the Graham School of the University of Chicago, writes a literary column for The Edge of Malaysia, and has published eight books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In this episode, we discuss how her background in sociolinguistics enriches her fiction, why she chose to write in English, the role of the writer in the globalized 21st century, and more.