Girls Who Became Writers: A Podcast on Craft

In this episode I speak with Kelcey Parker Ervick about her hybrid memoir that recounts both the life of the mysterious and storied Czech fairytale writer Božena Němcová as well as the ending of Ervick's marriage through letters, collage, and art. Ervick is the author of three award-winning books of fiction and nonfiction, and is currently working on a graphic novel. Her comics appear The Believer, The Rumpus, Quarterly West, Passages North, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor, with Tom Hart, of the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature forthcoming in 2021. She teaches creative writing and comics at Indiana University South Bend. More info at her website: kelceyervick.com

In this episode, I speak with Danielle Geller about her essay that appeared in The New Yorker. The piece uses the unique form of an annotated dictionary to tell the story of her relationship with her mother and the Navajo language. We discuss the form she chose, the inspiration for and evolutions of the essay, and how feedback fueled her creative process. Danielle Geller is a writer of personal essays and memoir. Her first book, Dog Flowers, is forthcoming from One World/Random House in 2020. She received her MFA in Creative Writing, Nonfiction at the University of Arizona and is a recipient of the 2016 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Awards. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Brevity, and Arizona Highways Magazine and has been anthologized in This Is the Place (Seal Press, 2017). She is a member of the Navajo Nation: born to the Tsi’naajinii, born for the bilagaana. To keep up with Danielle and to read her pieces available online, including the essay we discuss in this episode, visit her website at https://daniellegeller.com.

In the second episode, I’ll talk with author Daisy Hernández and discuss her book, A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir, and her relationship to language, details, and memory. Listen for her thoughts on "emotional drafts," showing versus telling, and what she knows and what she doesn't when launching into a new piece of writing. Daisy Hernandez is the author of A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir and coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. The former editor of ColorLines , a newsmagazine on race and politics, she has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, and NPR's All Things Considered. Her essays have appeared in Brevity, the Bellingham Review, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, and The Rumpus. She is a regular contributor to the Buddhist magazine Tricycle, and her writing was nominated for a 2009 GLAAD Media Award. She is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at Miami University in Ohio. To see more of her work, visit www.daisyhernandez.com. Read her latest article for National Geographic on Chagas disease and the kissing bug here. And find her most recent essay for Tricycle on dealing with family members with opposing political views and achieving equanimity here. To purchase A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir, please visit the Beacon Press site or order from other major online retailers.

Author TaraShea Nesbit will discuss her essay, “See What You Do to Me,” from the Summer 2018 issue of Granta. We’ll dive into her journey as a writer and discuss the choices she made in writing about girlhood, vulnerability, sexual trauma, and class.  TaraShea Nesbit is the author of The Wives of Los Alamos, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, an Indies Next Pick, a Library Journal Best Debut, and the recipient of two New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. Her prose has been featured in Granta, The Guardian, Fourth Genre, The Collagist, Quarterly West, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Iowa Review and elsewhere. Her second novel, BEHELD, about the Mayflower pilgrims, will be published in March 2020. She is an Assistant Professor in Fiction and Nonfiction at Miami University. More of her work can be located at www.tarasheanesbit.com. To purchase her book, you can order it on Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, Powell's, and other major retailers.