I spent 13 years producing a popular spoken word series in Los Angeles where I had the opportunity to meet an incredible array of storytellers. This month I'm introducing one of them to you—Annie Korzen—who at the seasoned age of 83 has become a TikTok sensation. She shares her candid thoughts on life and variety of taboo topics in her new book The Book of Annie.  ANNIE KORZEN is a colorful actress with a decades-long career in TV, film, and theater—including a recurring role on Seinfeld and a center-stage spot touring with The Moth. In The Book of Annie, she off ..read more

This month features my conversation with Abigail Thomas, whom Stephen King refers to as the "Emily Dickinson of memoirists." It was wonderful to have many of you there for this live event where she invited us into her home and her creative process, offering a rare and unvarnished peek into how she thinks about memoir; also reading from her latest book Still Life at 80: The Next Interesting Thing. I am sharing an abridged version of the interview below, in written form, and have also posted the video replay for you to watch in case you missed it. Be sure to check out the upcoming live author ..read more

There are a few women on my radar who are spearheading a reinvention of the way we talk about personal narrative and memoir—and Sari Botton is one of them. She is a seasoned editor and the author of the memoir And You May Find Yourself... Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. In our conversation below, we discuss everything from the ethics of memoir and how to navigate writing about other people to how different editors define what an essay is. She raises some revolutionary points about owning our stories and the kind of language we permit ourselves to use in describing them.   ..read more

The birthing process of a book is... well, a process. It starts with the seed of an idea, goes through story development, into a first draft, followed by many rewrites, and then hopefully, eventually, it makes its way into the world, into the hands of readers. Today a special book hits the shelves: Sushi Tuesdays: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Resilience by Charlotte Maya. I have been privileged to be on this book birthing journey with Charlotte through the story coaching and editing process, which she shares about in the video below. It is deeply rewarding to support a book that I ..read more

I am excited to share the thought-provoking conversation I had with Rebecca Woolf, author of All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire. We talked about the return to long-form blogging on Substack, the question of boundaries and secrets and shame when writing memoir, and reinventing story structure through a female lens. This woman needs to do a TEDTalk! Rebecca will be signing books at the grand opening of Zibby's Bookshop on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica the weekend of February 18th & 19th. Come on down to check it out and meet some other local authors including Leslie Lehr, Terri Chen ..read more

I had the great honor of interviewing John Truby, a revered story consultant, legendary writing teacher, and author of the seminal book The Anatomy of Story, which guides writers towards constructing effective, multifaceted narratives. His latest book The Anatomy of Genres is another deep dive, this time into the study of genres. We talked specifically about the unique advantages and challenges of the memoir genre, and John gave some incredible insights about how blending memoir with another genre (can you guess which one?) can offer a brilliant solution. John Truby is the founder a ..read more

It's back to school season, and my 10-year-old daughter has been reading some of my old favorite Judy Blume titles. Remember Deenie and Are You There God, It's Me Margaret? She has also been enjoying the Owl Crate, which is a monthly book subscription. We've just started reading aloud The School for What Nots by Margaret Peterson Haddix, where all the characters get their own voices! Equally exciting is the conversation I had with Zibby Owens, a book-loving, creative force. Zibby created the award-winning podcast Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books and is making major strides to transform the ..read more

Below you’ll find my interview with Nashville author Mary Laura Philpott, whose memoir Bomb Shelter (which she calls a "domestic memoir") hit the shelves in April. She shares about how the pandemic revealed some new insights about her working habits, how she approaches essay writing, and how the emotional plot informs a story's structure. She also talks about her personal ethics when it comes to writing about her family. MARY LAURA PHILPOTT, nationally bestselling author of I Miss You When I Blink and Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives, writes about the overlap of the absurd and t ..read more

This month I had the good fortune to dialogue with author Madhushree Ghosh, whose debut food narrative memoir, Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey, is written using a braided structure, weaving the stories of her refugee Bengali parents, her own immigration from India to America, and South Asian chefs. We discussed diversity in publishing, dispelled some writing myths, and defined what it means to be a good literary citizen. Scroll down to read the full interview! Madhushree Ghosh’s work is focused on food, immigrant journeys, social justice in particular, about women-of-color-in-science. Her work ..read more

This month I had the good fortune to dialogue with author Madhushree Ghosh, whose debut food narrative memoir, Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey, is written using a braided structure, weaving the stories of her refugee Bengali parents, her own immigration from India to America, and South Asian chefs. We discussed diversity in publishing, dispelled some writing myths, and defined what it means to be a good literary citizen. Scroll down to read the full interview! Madhushree Ghosh’s work is focused on food, immigrant journeys, social justice in particular, about women-of-color-in-science. Her work ..read more