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 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
Monday Apr 18, 2022
Monday Apr 18, 2022
Emily picked up The Fellowship of the Ring and bought in hard. What makes the whimsical and meandering opening work so well?
Ben and Emily also discuss listener mail and workshop peer pet peeves.
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 11, 2022
Monday Apr 11, 2022
Author and editor John Trefry joins us to discuss (among many other things) the ways in which language itself has aesthetic value, the unknowable contours of spacetime, why writing without emotion can lead you to interesting places, and death metal. Read John's writing on the Neutral Spaces blog. Visit Inside the Castle here.
The Amityville films on Tubi.
"Claustrophobic Dysentery" by Cabinet
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 04, 2022
Monday Apr 04, 2022
Today on the Good Writing Podcast we are joined by flash fiction author Brett Bieble. Topics discussed include the ways in which flash fiction approaches "perfection," the advantages of brevity, the ways that stories utilize objects, and comma patrol.
Josephine Rowe's "The Vending Machine at the End of the World"
Brett's Twitter
Brett's story "Big Red Nation"
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 Mar 28, 2022
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Texas poet Esteban Rodriguez joins us to discuss an excerpt from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). We talk about writing about stuff you hate and combining long and short sentence lengths for realism and momentum.
Esteban recommends The Folly by Ivan Vladislavic (2015), An Explanation of the Birds by António Lobo Antunes (translated by Richard Zenith) (1981), and Rapture by Susan Mitchell (1992)
Follow Esteban Rodriguez on Twitter at @estebanjrod11
Emily recommends Melissa Febos’s new craft essay “A Big Shitty Party: Six Parables of Writing About Other People” in Kenyon Review
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 Mar 21, 2022
Monday Mar 21, 2022
John-Paul Hurley joins us to discuss an excerpt from Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth. How can writers make the readers feel lost in memories? We also discuss unlikeable protagonists.
Other links from this week:
Follow J.P. Hurley on Twitter here
Hear about how a fantasy writer raised $31M on Kickstarter to self-publish four books on the Print Run Podcast here
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.