Good Writing Podcast
The Good Writing Podcast is a show for creative writers who want to nerd out on craft. Two friends, Emily Donovan and Benjamin Kerns, read their favorite sentences, paragraphs, and other short excerpts and present craft lessons and writing exercises for fellow writers.
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Episodes
Monday Mar 13, 2023
Monday Mar 13, 2023
Emily has Ben read sections from Eula Biss's Having and Being Had this week because she knows he loves to think about capitalism.
How can you come up with rules to how you write about a topic? Eula Biss sets out with constraints that make her essays both dreamlike and punchy.
Good Writing is a podcast where two MFA friends read like writers and lay out craft ideas for fellow writers to steal. Co-hosted by Emily Donovan and Benjamin Kerns.
Twitter: @goodwritingpod
Email: goodwritingpodcast@gmail.com
Monday Jan 23, 2023
Monday Jan 23, 2023
Happy (belated) Halloween, Good Writing subscribers! In today's episode, we discuss Shirley Jackson's 1959 gothic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House.
What makes this "psychological ghost story" work so well? Subjectivity. The characters tell us their subjection version of the events, which leaves the reader to fill in the gaps with maximum spookiness.
Plus, we discuss a sentence that Ben called "a literary kickflip" and a terrifying walk that Emily is nominating for most romantic moment of 1959.
Emily recommends Abandon Me
Ben recommends (with caveats) the 2022 movie The Whale
Good Writing is a podcast where two MFA friends read like writers and lay out craft ideas for fellow writers to steal. Co-hosted by Emily Donovan and Benjamin Kerns.
Twitter: @goodwritingpod
Email: goodwritingpodcast@gmail.com
Monday Jul 11, 2022
Monday Jul 11, 2022
Dune is a weird book. Some might even say, a bad book. Emily does on this episode, and so does Ben (sort of). Herbert’s prose style is definitely stilted, but what Ben and Emily get into on this episode is the absolutely strange choice he’s made to write the entire thing in third person omniscient, and they try to figure out how thinking works in fiction.
Ben recommends Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said
Emily recommends One Hundred Years of Solitude
Good Writing is a podcast where two MFA friends read like writers and lay out craft ideas for fellow writers to steal. Co-hosted by Emily Donovan and Benjamin Kerns.
Twitter: @goodwritingpod
Email: goodwritingpodcast@gmail.com
Monday Jun 13, 2022
Monday Jun 13, 2022
We love insights and character motivation on this podcast! 😤 But we also like scenes that move the story forward.
This week, we discuss the hilarious Milk Fed by Melissa Broder (2021) and how she introduces a therapist character who feels realistic while still creating all of the insights that we expect when a character goes to therapy.
A link we promised to include in the show notes: Listen to Danez Smith read their poem “Dear White America”
Good Writing is a podcast where two MFA friends read like writers and lay out craft ideas for fellow writers to steal. Co-hosted by Emily Donovan and Benjamin Kerns.
Twitter: @goodwritingpod
Email: goodwritingpodcast@gmail.com
Monday May 30, 2022
Monday May 30, 2022
In this episode of the Good Writing Podcast, Ben and Emily discuss what it means to write an image that by no right can actually be seen.
Good Writing is a podcast where two MFA friends read like writers and lay out craft ideas for fellow writers to steal. Co-hosted by Emily Donovan and Benjamin Kerns.
Twitter: @goodwritingpod
Email: goodwritingpodcast@gmail.com
Monday May 09, 2022
Monday May 09, 2022
It's been 6 months of podcasting! Ben and Emily review some of their favorite prompts and exercises from the past 25 episodes of the Good Writing Podcast.
Listen to the full episodes clipped here:
Brett Biebel - On Compactness, Objects and Perfection with Josephine Rowe
How to Write with Yourself as the Subject - Megan Boyle’s Liveblog
Real Settings That Mess With Your Characters from Kristen Arnett & Patricia Lockwood
The Best Sentence in Pride and Prejudice
Good Writing is a podcast where two MFA friends read like writers and lay out craft ideas for fellow writers to steal. Co-hosted by Emily Donovan and Benjamin Kerns.
Twitter: @goodwritingpod
Email: goodwritingpodcast@gmail.com
Monday May 02, 2022
Monday May 02, 2022
This episode of the Good Writing Podcast deals with the ethics that the writer must grapple with when writing, especially when that writing deals with people from the so-called real world with the help of Melissa Febos' parables.
"A Big Shitty Party" by Melissa Febos.
Good Writing is a podcast where two MFA friends read like writers and lay out craft ideas for fellow writers to steal. Co-hosted by Emily Donovan and Benjamin Kerns.
Twitter: @goodwritingpod
Email: goodwritingpodcast@gmail.com
Monday Apr 25, 2022
Monday Apr 25, 2022
Borges often looked to his work as an essayist and literary critic when looking for inspiration for his fiction, be it in the form of using that fiction to better understand writing or taking on the forms of non-fiction directly. While the first of these is inevitably touched upon in this episode, we focus more directly on the formal effort of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" to discuss ways in which writers can take formal inspiration from the world of non-fiction.
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" - Jorge Luis Borges
Good Writing is a podcast where two MFA friends read like writers and lay out craft ideas for fellow writers to steal. Co-hosted by Emily Donovan and Benjamin Kerns.
Twitter: @goodwritingpod
Email: goodwritingpodcast@gmail.com
Benjamin Kerns
Ben (co-host) is a writer living in Florida with his wife and their cat. He writes fiction with a penchant for the weird and unexpected.
Follow him on Twitter @benjaminkerns22.
Emily Donovan
Emily (co-host) is writer living in Colorado with her girlfriend, their dog, and several struggling houseplants. She writes jokes disguised as fiction.
Find her recent publications online at emilydonovan.com.