Craft Talk Book Club
Craft Talk Book Club is a podcast for writers who want to improve their craft by reading great books. Each month, Nicole Breit (Spark Your Story Lab creator and Best American Essays notable essayist) and Mary Adkins (The Book Incubator founder and HarperCollins novelist) choose a recently published novel or memoir to unpack the craft choices made by the author—which they discuss over four weekly episodes. Together, we’ll read and learn from some of the best writers publishing today.
Episodes
Wednesday Mar 08, 2023
We’re Taking a Break!
Wednesday Mar 08, 2023
Wednesday Mar 08, 2023
Mary and Nicole are taking a break before season 2. Catch up on The Idiot by Elif Batuman before they return later this year. See you next season!
Monday Mar 06, 2023
”Persephone’s Children”, part 4: Proximal vs emotional distance...
Monday Mar 06, 2023
Monday Mar 06, 2023
A common challenge for writers of memoir is how to create emotional safety while bringing readers in close. One of the ways McCandless does this is by including photos, artifacts and documents as a starting point for essaying. Nicole + Mary discuss the many ways McCandless brings a sense of play to her exploration of difficult truths in Persephone's Children.
Monday Feb 27, 2023
”Persephone’s Children”, part 3: What holds it all together?
Monday Feb 27, 2023
Monday Feb 27, 2023
Persephone's Children doesn't follow a traditional narrative arc; it doesn't even have a consistent first-person narrator. And yet the story McCandless tells feels perfectly cohesive. Nicole and Mary consider key elements that unify the book and speculate on the placement of a visual metaphor that gave them pause.
Monday Feb 20, 2023
”Persephone’s Children”, part 2: Hermit Crab Essay 101...
Monday Feb 20, 2023
Monday Feb 20, 2023
A contract, a word search, a play, a grimoire. How does a writer go about finding the right container to shape their story? Mary and Nicole discuss their favorite essays in Persephone's Children, why they work so well, and how a writer might discover the right form to tell their own vulnerable stories.
Monday Feb 13, 2023
”Persephone’s Children”, part 1: Mosaic memoir, deconstructed.
Monday Feb 13, 2023
Monday Feb 13, 2023
What is a mosaic memoir? And why go about writing one vs a traditional straightforward narrative? Nicole + Mary dig into the ways crafting a memoir-in-essays helped Rowan McCandless grapple with difficult subject matter like racism, intergenerational trauma, and domestic abuse.
Monday Jan 30, 2023
”Black Cake” by Charmaine Wilkerson: Symbols
Monday Jan 30, 2023
Monday Jan 30, 2023
Perhaps the most significant and explicit symbol in this novel is black cake, and it's rich (pun intended) indeed. In this final episode discussing Black Cake, we unpack Wilkerson's choice to build a world around this one dessert, and all the implications of that choice.
Monday Jan 23, 2023
”Black Cake” by Charmaine Wilkerson: Character descriptions
Monday Jan 23, 2023
Monday Jan 23, 2023
Writing character descriptions is the bane of Mary's existence...and Wilkerson does it so well in this book. In this episode, we analyze a couple of her character descriptions and why they work so well, and Mary shares a trick she uses to describe characters.
Monday Jan 16, 2023
”Black Cake” by Charmaine Wilkerson: Point of view...many of them
Monday Jan 16, 2023
Monday Jan 16, 2023
Black Cake is a story told from many points of view, and not in an omniscient way. Wilkerson skips POVs chapter to chapter, delineating the shifts in point of view with breaks. What are the costs and benefits of writing a novel in this way? We discuss in this episode.
Monday Jan 09, 2023
”Black Cake” by Charmaine Wilkerson: Linked narratives
Monday Jan 09, 2023
Monday Jan 09, 2023
Wilkerson structures her novel Black Cake in a series of short, linked chapters that jump from point of view to point of view. How does she do this so that it works? We discuss.
Monday Jan 02, 2023
”Solito” by Javier Zamora, part 4: What about memory gaps?
Monday Jan 02, 2023
Monday Jan 02, 2023
Before he wrote Solito, Zamora wrote about his migration to La USA in poetry. For writers dealing with traumatic childhood memories, Nicole + Mary discuss how poetry can be a natural starting point for working with gaps and fragments.