Craft Talk Book Club

Mary and Nicole are taking a break before season 2. Catch up on The Idiot by Elif Batuman before they return later this year. See you next season!

A common challenge for writers of memoir is how to create emotional safety while bringing readers in close. One of the ways McCandless does this is by including photos, artifacts and documents as a starting point for essaying. Nicole + Mary discuss the many ways McCandless brings a sense of play to her exploration of difficult truths in Persephone's Children.

Persephone's Children doesn't follow a traditional narrative arc; it doesn't even have a consistent first-person narrator. And yet the story McCandless tells feels perfectly cohesive. Nicole and Mary consider key elements that unify the book and speculate on the placement of a visual metaphor that gave them pause.

A contract, a word search, a play, a grimoire. How does a writer go about finding the right container to shape their story? Mary and Nicole discuss their favorite essays in Persephone's Children, why they work so well, and how a writer might discover the right form to tell their own vulnerable stories.

What is a mosaic memoir? And why go about writing one vs a traditional straightforward narrative? Nicole + Mary dig into the ways crafting a memoir-in-essays helped Rowan McCandless grapple with difficult subject matter like racism, intergenerational trauma, and domestic abuse.

Perhaps the most significant and explicit symbol in this novel is black cake, and it's rich (pun intended) indeed. In this final episode discussing Black Cake, we unpack Wilkerson's choice to build a world around this one dessert, and all the implications of that choice.

Writing character descriptions is the bane of Mary's existence...and Wilkerson does it so well in this book. In this episode, we analyze a couple of her character descriptions and why they work so well, and Mary shares a trick she uses to describe characters.

Black Cake is a story told from many points of view, and not in an omniscient way. Wilkerson skips POVs chapter to chapter, delineating the shifts in point of view with breaks. What are the costs and benefits of writing a novel in this way? We discuss in this episode.

Wilkerson structures her novel Black Cake in a series of short, linked chapters that jump from point of view to point of view. How does she do this so that it works? We discuss.

Before he wrote Solito, Zamora wrote about his migration to La USA in poetry. For writers dealing with traumatic childhood memories, Nicole + Mary discuss how poetry can be a natural starting point for working with gaps and fragments.

Nicole and Mary unpack the possibilities of what "solito" means as a title that encapsulates this harrowing story about love and yearning, risk and danger, fear and hope...

Can "world building" apply to memoir if a story revisits a world the author no longer inhabits? Mary + Nicole discuss how Zamora creates a full immersion experience in Solito.

Ever wondered how to re-capture the voice of childhood in your memoir? Nicole + Mary recount the ways Zamora invites us into the mind and heart of his 9-year-old self.

From waves to Magic Eye, this novel is full of recurring images and metaphors. In this final episode discussing Zevin's novel, Mary and Nicole identify these motifs and how she uses them to deepen our reading experience.

Writing a story within a story is tricky (Mary knows, she did it in her first novel When You Read This), but Gabrielle Zevin not only writes about gamers, she creates truly genius game concepts inside her story. In this episode, the hosts unpack how she does it so well.

When Nicole and Mary met up to record this episode, they were both wiping away tears from having just re-read this one chapter. The death scene of Marx is a masterpiece. Why? Why does it work so well? They discuss.

"Is this an omniscient point of view?" Nicole asks Mary at the top of this episode. What a journey in point of view this novel was! Mary and Nicole dissect Zevin's point of view choices and admire her bold moves.

Who doesn't love a book that entertains AND makes you feel smarter? One of the things Mary and Nicole enjoyed most about Lost & Found is its glimpse into the author's scholarly mind, from her interest in the ideas of William James to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Whose writings would you reference to add depth and texture to your memoir?

Think in order to write memoir you have to spill your secrets? Think again! Nicole and Mary identify the ways Schulz is in full control of her story, choosing what to reveal—and when—for maximum impact. Tune in to learn how to create delight for your reader while maintaining boundaries around your privacy.

One of the biggest challenges for memoir writers is figuring out what to cut and what to keep. In part 2 of our discussion of Lost & Found, Nicole and Mary highlight how Schulz uses structure to narrow her scope and shape the story she wants to tell.

Nicole and Mary begin their four-part conversation about Kathryn Schulz's memoir, Lost & Found, by asking: What makes this book a memoir? And how might Schulz's unusual approach to personal narrative help us tell our own stories?

Both Mary and Nicole were slapped by the last line of Jonas's novel. In this final discussion of Vladimir, they unpack the significance of that final line, and why it packs such a punch. What can we learn about how to end our own stories? Catch up on the next book: Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz!

CW: This episode discusses child abuse present in the book Lolita. If this is a subject you're sensitive to, you might consider skipping this episode. The book is called Vladimir and is about an obsession with a younger man that leads to a kidnapping. But the similarities to Nabokov's Lolita don't end there. Mary and Nicole talk about how Vladimir echoes Lolita, and what it means to write a book in conversation with another book.

Not name the main character? Write philosophical debate inside a story? In part 2 of the Vladimir discussion, Mary and Nicole discuss the choices author Jonas makes that seem to subvert fiction conventions...to great effect, inspiring us as writers.

In the premier episode of the Craft Talk Book Club podcast, Mary & Nicole kick off our four-part discussion of Julia May Jonas's debut novel Vladimir, which both hosts were obsessed with after reading. Specifically, they talk about how Jonas subverts tropes, which we all want to do as writers.

Craft Talk Book Club is a podcast for writers who want to improve their craft by reading great books. Each month, Nicole Breit (Spark Your Story Lab creator and Best American Essays notable essayist) and Mary Adkins (The Book Incubator founder and HarperCollins novelist) choose a recently published novel or memoir to unpack the craft choices made by the author—which they discuss over four weekly episodes. Together, we'll read and learn from some of the best writers publishing today.