Writers on Writing

Sophie, Standing There is Meg Mason’s fourth published novel, out in the States just last week and already Reese Witherspoon’s October Book Club Pick. Her last novel, Sorrow and Bliss, became an international bestseller after it was published in 2020. It won the British Book Industry Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about her publication journey, her transition from journalism to fiction, and what she had to learn and unlearn. They also dissect how she expands and compresses time in a single paragraph, how she delivers backstory while maintaining forward momentum, how she gives us a deep dive into a character’s psyche with just little brush strokes of color, and how she creates tension and suspense in everyday experiences. There’s a lot for writers to study in this novel, and Meg does a deep dive into particular passages to show how it’s done. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded on October 3, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.)

Virginia Evans and the story behind the story of her runaway debut novel, The Correspondent, is one of those that helps us writers keep getting out of bed in the morning and back to the page. It’s an anomaly on every level. But it’s embedded with the lessons we talk about every day on this show — perseverance, resilience, and immunity from rejection, the importance of writing the story only you can tell and writing for writing’s sake and not publication’s sake. In many ways, The Correspondent breaks some conventional writing rules. But in its breaking, its tapped into something universal, relatable, and loved by well over 2 million readers and counting. When The Correspondent came out in April of 2025, it was not an instant NYT bestseller. It gained momentum by word-of-mouth, by wonderful booksellers, book clubs, and maybe some Ann Patchett pixie dust. The book had been out for eight months before hitting the NYT bestseller list, where it’s been for 41 weeks and counting. Usually it’s Oprah who boosts a book with her book club picks. This time, Oprah ran to catch up to The Correspondence success. It’s now being turned into a film starring Jane Fonda. It also won the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction and the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Beyond the publication story is the book itself and what it has to teach us writers. This may be Virginia’s debut, but it’s hardly the first book she’s written. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. We find out what she’s learned – especially from some of the wonderful professors she’s had along the way like Claire Keegan. We talk about the pleasures and perils of the epistolary novel, tackling voice from a bunch of different and challenging perspectives, managing time in fiction, writing your fears, and more. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interview on our website. (Recorded on September 2, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.)

Douglas Stuart is one of those unicorn authors who seemed to have appeared out of thin air and took the literary world by storm. His 2019 debut novel, Shuggie Bain, would be rejected 44 times before winning the Booker Prize, becoming a finalist for the National Book Award and being named the Sunday Time’s 25 Best Novels of the 21st Century. Then would come Young Mungo in 2022, which sealed Douglas’s standing as a literary genius. He has since been published in the New Yorker at least three times. John of John came out in May. It was an instant Oprah pick and another literary masterpiece. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. They chat about Douglas’s unlikely path to success and how he taught himself the craft. They discuss his research process and how he immersed himself in a part of the world – and a part of his own country – that he didn’t know. And he shares how his approach to every novel has differed, what his 20 years in the textile industry taught him about writing, why he feels unqualified to offer any advice, and so much more. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded on June 23, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Annie Hartnett is the award-winning author of three novels: Rabbit Cake, Unlikely Animals, and the national bestseller The Road to Tender Hearts, which won the 2025 New England Book Award for fiction and was named a best book of 2025 from NPR, LitHub, and Southern Living. It’s now out and available in paperback, published by Ballentine. Along with the writer Tessa Fontaine, Annie co-runs Accountability Workshops for writers, helping writers commit to routines and embrace the long, slow, joyful, terrible process of doing the work. The Road to Tender Hearts gives us writers a lot to talk about. Structuring a novel around a road trip and how to weave in backstory while maintaining forward momentum. Writing heavy topics like death, addiction, grief, and abandonment with humor. Annie’s approach to third-person multiple points of view, tackling a range of viewpoints, and so much more. We also talked about her ambivalent relationship with Scrivener, how she uses spreadsheets, working with mind maps, and the importance of accountability for writers. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded June 2, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Tom Perrotta’s eleven works of fiction include Election and Little Children, both of which were made into Oscar-nominated films, and The Leftovers, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed, Peabody Award-winning HBO series. He’s now been on the podcast five times with Marrie. First in 2007 with The Abstinence Teacher, again in 2011 for The Leftovers, Mrs. Fletcher in 2017, and Tracy Flick Can’t Win in 2022. We return to familiar New Jersey territory in Ghost Town, a place reminiscent of where Tom grew up, which gives him a chance to talk again about writers’ obsessions with childhood homes. He also talks about writing about race and American politics in fiction, as well as what seemingly simple and straight-forward writing can do for your story, and how he tackled point of view. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded May 22, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Ada Limón is likely best known for her role as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. Her signature project, "You Are Here," focused on connecting poetry with the natural world, including installations in seven National Parks. She also wrote "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa," which was engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft which launched in 2024 to explore Jupiter’s icy moon. Ada is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Startlement, The Hurting Kind, which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim and was named a 2024 Time Woman of the Year. Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, is the speech she delivered when she left her post as Poet Laureate last year. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about her work as Poet Laureate and how she used her platform to talk back against this political moment. She discusses her job as a creative and her job as an advocate and gives us a glimpse behind her process. She also reads and discusses her poem, “The Endlessness,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 2023. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded May 12, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Jayne Anne Phillips has been on the podcast at least three times. First in 2000, with her novel MotherKind. Again in 2014 with Quiet Dell, and the last time in 2023 with Night Watch, before it was announced as the Pulitzer Prize winner. Raymond Carver pronounced her first story collection Black Tickets “stories unlike any in our literature…a crooked beauty” and established Jayne Anne as a writer “in love with the American language.” She published that collection in 1979 when she was only 26. She was praised by Nadine Gordimer as “the best short story writer since Eudora Welty” and Black Tickets has since become a classic of the short story genre. She’s also the author of Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, Lark and Termite, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2009. Her latest memoir-in-essays, Small Town Girls, is comprised of 22 pieces tackling everything from the profoundly personal to the historical and sociological. We learn the backstory behind the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys and the long and complicated history of West Virginia. We learn about Jayne Anne’s close relationship with her mother, her experiences with religion, abortion, a mass shooting, and — most important for today’s discussion — her lifelong relationship with writing. There are essays about other writers, essays reflecting on the difficulty and necessity of writing, and what this practice has given Jayne Anne, and us, for her entire career. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about all of it. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded April 13, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)