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Darrow Farr, author of THE BOMBSHELL
Darrow Farr is a Salvadoran-American writer who was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University from 2017-2019 and received an MFA in Creative Writing from The Michener Center at the University of Texas. She was born and raised outside of Philadelphia, where she now lives with her husband and son. The Bombshell is her debut novel. Darrow joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about why she chose a 17-year-old female protagonist and single POV—until the ending of the book, placing the story in Corsica, 1990, writing sympathetic villains, cribbing from her life, keeping track of everything that goes into your novel, the title, 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 find hundreds of past interviews on our website. 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. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners! (Recorded on May 1, 2025) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
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Richard Russo, author of LIFE AND ART: ESSAYS
Richard Russo is the author of ten novels, most recently Somebody’s Fool, Chances Are, Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; one previous essay collection about writing — The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, won multiple awards for its screen adaptation, and in 2023 his novel Straight Man was adapted into the television series Lucky Hank. His latest, Life and Art, contains 13 essays touching on many of the topics we grapple with on the show. How to imagine your way into another person’s skin. When it is inappropriate to try. What should writers be making of this current moment in history and their role in it. Where and how do we find meaning in our work. It feels very much born out of the pandemic, and out of this cultural moment, so it’s got a lot of insights about our country and Richard’s unique socio-economic experiences living in it for 75 years. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about 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 find hundreds of past interviews on our website. 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. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners! (Recorded on May 12, 2025) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
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Charlotte Wood, author of STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL
Charlotte Wood is the author of seven novels and three books of non-fiction. Her novel Stone Yard Devotional was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. It was described by the UK Guardian as ‘a quiet novel of immense power’ and has been praised by authors Anne Enright, Tim Winton, Karen Joy Fowler, Hannah Kent and Paula Hawkins among others. Her previous books include The Luminous Solution, a book of essays on the creative process; the international bestseller, The Weekend; and The Natural Way of Things which won a number of prizes including The Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Her features and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The Sydney Morning Herald andThe Saturday Paper among other publications. In 2023 Belvoir Theatre Company staged an adaptation of her novel The Weekend, and her novel The Natural Way of Thingsfeatured in ABC Television’s 2021 series The Books That Made Us. Charlotte joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about pacing a quiet novel, her main character who is never named, why she set the novel at the start of the pandemic, plagues, slowing down your writing and paying attention to small details, her relationship with plot, revision, and voice, and 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 find hundreds of past interviews on our website. 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. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners! (Recorded on April 23, 2025) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
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Vauhini Vara, author of SEARCHES: SELFHOOD IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Vauhini Vara grew up alongside internet startup companies. She was in middle school when AOL sent those first floppy discs to our homes, inviting us to dial up to the world wide web. A graduate of Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she became a tech writer for The Wall Street Journal and a business reporter for The Atlantic, The New Yorker and other publications. In 2017, Vara profiled Sam Altman, a cofounder of OpenAI, and gained early access to ChatGPT. She used the program to write about a topic that had long eluded her — the grief she experienced over the death of her sister. “Ghosts” came out in The Believer in the summer of 2021 and quickly went viral (as evidenced by its adaptation on This American Life). That piece, and several others, are part of Vara’s latest book, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. Vara’s 2022 novel, The Immortal King Rao — also steeped in the tech industry — was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and her story collection, This is Salvaged, came out the following year. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about how these technologies, including ChatGPT and other A.I. models are impacting writers and where she sees things going. Her insights are both hopeful and terrifying. She also talks about writing in different genres as a journalist, a novelist, a writer of creative nonfiction and short stories. She shares her insights about playing with different structures and how to release yourself from conventional forms of storytelling. 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 find hundreds of past interviews on our website. 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. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners! (Recorded on April 29, 2025) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
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Jennifer Haigh, author of RABBIT MOON
Jennifer Haigh’s first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Mercy Street, was named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker and won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her short stories have been published widely, in the Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories, and many other places. Published in eighteen languages, her work has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michener Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Boston. Her new novel, Rabbit Moon, is the focus of our talk today. Jennifer joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. They talk about her time in Shanghai and how being there inspired the novel, why she wrote a novel about sisters, writing multiple points of view, writing minor characters, what she reads when she’s writing fiction, how much she knows going in, why she doesn’t plot, 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 find hundreds of past interviews on our website. 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. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners! (Recorded on April 4, 2025) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
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