QWERTY: A Podcast for Writers on How to Live the Writing Life

Writer and author Kyle Austin Young has a debut book that is for anyone who has ever dreamed of having a side-hustle, starting a business or following a dream. The book, Success is a Numbers Game: Achieve Bigger Goals by Changing the Odds, is just out from Hay House Business. Clear, practical, fun and a terrific read, this book will show you how to make your idea happen. The book includes a simple test for knowing which of our biggest goals to prioritize and which to quit immediately. Kyle Austin Young has written for the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, The Boston Globe, CNBC, Psychology Today, Forbes, and Business Insider. Among his many roles for many teams, Kyle is the Operations Manager here at The Memoir Project. His core principles have shaped everything we do. 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, 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.

Khadijah VanBrackle's debut novel, Fatima Takes the Cake, brings us to the intersection of culture, gender and religion and throws in some baking, which is a very fun addition. Her new novel, My Perfect Family, gives us an intergenerational narrative that covers the complex relationships mothers and daughter and explores what it means to be a Black Muslin woman in America. As a Black Muslim woman in America and as the mother of five, she is a living example of the adage to write what you know. That debut novel was a 2024 NAACP Image Award finalist for Outstanding Youth/Teens literature, a School Library journal’s Teen Librarian Toolbox Favorite Young Adult Read of 2023 and a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection. In 2021, she was selected for the Highlights Foundation Muslim Storytellers Fellowship. Her new novel pormises to be award-winning, as well. Listen in as she and I discuss her themes of being a Black Muslim in America, that ever-popular topic of family secrets as well what it means to be a young person forging one’s own path. 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, 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 author Joanna Choi Kalbus was born in North Korea and emigrated in wartime to The United States as a child, speaking no English. She was immersed in the California school system before the existence of English as a second language programs. She succeeded and eventually earned her PhD in Educational Administration from the University of California and served as a teacher, principal, and regional superintendent for 35 years. At eighty-four years old, Joanna has just published her first book, a memoir, called The Boat Not Taken, just out from BETTY Books, an imprint of WTAW books. It has been named by Ms. Magazine as one of The Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2025. 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, 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.

Calliope Nicholas is the Co-Director and Manager of Residency Programs at Millay Arts, the artists residency program situated at the former home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Austerlitz, New York. The mission of Millay Arts is to support "the work and creative process of multidisciplinary artists through a range of residencies that enrich lives and communities locally and globally.” For those who do not know, a residency is a gift of time and space for creatives. Listen in as Calliope Nicholas and Qwerty Podcast host, Marion Roach Smith, talk about how and when to apply, why to apply and what to expect from an artist's residency. 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, 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.

Bridgett M. Davis is the author of the 2019 memoir, The World According to Fannie Davis, which was a New York Times editor’s choice, and a BuzzFeed, Parade and Kirkus best book of 2019. She is also the writer/director of the award-winning film Naked Acts, rediscovered and re-released in 2024 to critical acclaim. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. The author of two novels, she just published a new memoir, Love, Rita An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss and Legacy, just out from Harper Collins. 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 author Callan Wink has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Playboy, Men’s Journal, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of a novel, August, and a collection of short stories, Dog Run Moon. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River. His new book is Beartooth, just out from Spiegel and Grau. 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.

While Joan Wickersham is best known for her astonishing book, The Suicide Index, a National Book Award finalist, her work over her many years as a professional journalist, writer and tuhor, has taken her nearly everywhere, including to Stockholm to witness a mysterious object: the seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa, which sank only minutes into its maiden voyage and lay underwater for more than three hundred years until it was rediscovered, raised and housed in a museum built to show it to the world. Her poetic and meditative book on her experience with the Vasa is titled, No Ship Sets Out to be a Shipwreck. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her op-ed column appears regularly in The Boston Globe; she has published essays and reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the International Herald Tribune; and she has contributed on-air essays to National Public Radio. 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.

Today my guest is author Nicole Graev Lipson, whose work has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, LA Review of Books, The Millions, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other venues. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, nominated for a National Magazine Award, and selected for The Best American Essays anthology. She is the author of the just-out memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, published by Chronicle Books. Listen in as we talk about the fine art of the persoanl essay, writing essays and how to write a book-length collcetion of them. 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.