Jeff Gomez: The 10 Commandments of Successful Corporate Narratives

The 10 Commandments of Successful Corporate Narratives – Jeff Gomez & Alan Berkson – Intelligist Press – Paperback – 9798218853914 – 138 pages – $24.00 – February 15, 2026 – Kindle version $14.99 (Amazon only)

Jeff Gomez is an amazing guy. We met years ago in some now forgotten business connection, but I always remembered being impressed by his innate understanding of narrative. He seems to always have been able to use that understanding to engage in brilliantly executed world building for a range of brands and entertainment properties.

For the many years he has been in the entertainment industry, he has worked on some of the most iconic properties in the world with many brands and companies, including Coca-Cola, Hasbro, Pirates of the Caribbean, Spiderman, and many more. His work has doubtless touched the lives of millions of people.

Jeff has also recognized how much the media world has changed as the internet as grown and new media has arisen. Many of us recognize how different the media landscape is today, but most of us do not fully understand exactly what has changed and similarly, while we can feel that society and culture have changed inalterably, understanding how to operate in this new environment is deeply challenging, not only to creators and entertainment industries, but to all of us as consumers and citizens.

Jeff has written about this under the rubric “The Collective Journey: Storytelling architecture for the post-digital age.” Follow this link to read the entire piece. Here is a quote to get you started:

For centuries, every agency, company, studio, and writer has relied on the Hero’s Journey as a standard for storytelling. But nonlinear, trans-platform communication has entirely disrupted that model. To rising generations, the standard tropes of classic storytelling have begun to feel slow, obvious, and dated. We yearn for a new, far more dynamic and participative approach…

Society is grappling with seismic, accelerated, and seemingly chaotic change.”

Together with his long-time colleague Alan Berkson, Jeff has also written on this topic in the book we started out to discuss, The 10 Commandments of Successful Corporate Narratives. It’s a short book and is well worth reading. While it is directed at and oriented toward business executives trying to understand and navigate our fractured and challening media landscape, it is really useful for anyone who wants to grapple with the implications of a highly connected culture.t to

The core insight is that the now famous structure of “The Hero’s Journey” has been transformed into what they call “the lightning bolt” of the Collective Journey.

Jeff posits and I agree, that this understanding is crucial for all of us, not just as consumers of media, but more importantly as citizens in a democracy that is subject to all of the pressures and tensions of this new world. If you do not understand what is happening, you will not be able to work successfully to achieve your goals, whether they are cultural or political.

I hope you will enjoy listening to our conversation as an entry point to Jeff’s thinking and writing. The Collective Journey comprises an eight part series of essays published on Medium (available for free). I think it’s an important piece of writing that should be read more widely.

Jeff Gomez is the CEO of Starlight Runner, a transmedia entertainment company. He is a brand and cause-related consultant, producer of franchise storyworlds and transmedia entertainment properties.

Alan Berkson has provided top-tier service to companies from one-person firms to enterprise-level corporations—across Wall Street, the United Nations and Main Street—by wielding his own brand of non-traditional business strategy. Alan was named one of The Top 100 Most Social Customer Service Pros On Twitter and is the Director of Community Outreach for SaaS helpdesk company Freshdesk.

You can buy The 10 Commandments of Successful Corporate Narratives on Amazon.

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William Loving: Fells Point: A Novel

Fells Point: A Novel – William Loving – Rare Bird Books – Hardcover – 9781644285558 – 240 pages – $28.00 – June 9, 2026 – ebook available at lower prices

Fells Point is a bit of a noirish, bit of a postmodernish novel set in modern day Baltimore. In all honesty, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. For some reason I just did not expect to get into it so easily. Maybe because the writing is clear and the author clearly loves his characters and the city of Baltimore where the book takes place.

The novel’s protagonist is Daniel Doyle Jr., who comes off as bored with his life and aware that there must be something more. We kind of like him but we don’t quite know why. Maybe it is because now that he has reached the time he might have had his mid-life crisis, he finds out that he has a congenital heart defect that could kill him at any moment. Imminent death does seem to be a wake up call for Doyle so he starts exploring his home city for the first time. He makes a “bucket list” of places he has missed or taken for granted for his entire life that he can actually see for the first time.

Just as he’s beginning to get comfortable with his new understanding of Baltimore’s hidden treasures, Doyle starts to realize that he is being followed by a mysterious stranger who seems to appear wherever he goes. He wonders whether this is actually real, or some sort of fantasy he has created for himself, but it turns out to be real in a surprising and complicated way that makes the novel completely engrossing for the reader (and for the characters in it as well). Difficult life questions are asked and possibly answered.

Bill and I had an excellent conversation about this novel and Loving’s approach to fiction. And given the surprising twists and turns in this story, we were careful to avoid any spoilers. You will have to read the book to find out why it is so compelling. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

Before turning to fiction, Loving was an accomplished journalist at the Los Angeles Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In addition to Fells Point, he is also the the author of two other novels,  City of Angles (set in Los Angeles) and Blue Earth River (set in Minneapolis). In his fiction, he has tended to explore the cities he has lived in, using his journalist’s skills to create stories that reflect those places in vivid ways. He currently lives in Pasadena, California with his wife.

William Loving has crafted a maze of identity and irony that leads to a climax that will stay with the reader long after the last page.”—David Bolton, author of Whispering Pines and Love Thief

“As thought-provoking as it is hilarious, Fells Point is a page-turning masterpiece of existential wit and suspense.”—J. Paul Rieger, author of A Most Unlikely Man and Sunscreen Shower

Buy the book at Bookshop.org

Author website

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David Margolick: When Caesar Was King

When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy – David Margolick – Shocken Books – Hardcover – 9780805242553 – 400 pages – $35.00 – November 11, 2025 – ebook edition available at lower cost, audio book also available.

I am almost the same age as author David Margolick, so was born too late to see any of Sid’s early classic shows that aired when he was establishing the way comedy would work on the then new medium, television. Growing up with a comedy writer father, Sid Caesar was legendary in our house as a revered progenitor of the current crop of television comedy, but by the time I was old enough to know who he was, Sid Caesar was no longer at the pinnacle of his success. Despite being active on TV through the sixties, seventies and beyond, he was no longer culturally relevant as he had been earlier in his career. Yet his impact on television and its audiences was massive, and I remember hearing my parents and their friends talk about Sid Caesar, Imogen Coca, Carl Reiner, and Mel Brooks and their less well-known writers, always with admiration and joy.

Whether you are lucky enough to have seen Sid Caesar in action in his early days, or know nothing about him at all, David Margolick’s biography brings Sid to life. He provides us with a vivid rendering of an extremely complicated actor/comedian. In the early 1950s, Caesar was television’s first real star, his show drawing am audience of twenty million people at a time before televisions were not even present in most homes in America. His sketches helped define the nature of television comedy for generations to come even to this day. (All you have to do is watch a Caesar sketch followed by a modern SNL sketch and you will get it.)

Most of Caesar’s writers and actors went on to their own successful and influential careers and helped define television culture for decades. His writers included Neil Simon (The Odd Couple), Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H), Mel Tolkin (All in the Family), Woody Allen (too many to list), Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles, The Producer) and Carl Reiner (Dick Van Dyke Show).

Sid Caesar success was relatively short-lived. As television moved to take over the heartland of America, other stars supplanted him. As Margolick makes clear, Caesar was a complicated, introverted, socially awkward person, completely unlike the public personae he portrayed in performance. He could not or would not adapt to the changing tastes of television audiences—perhaps because Caesar’s humor was based on and drawn from 20th century urban American Jewish experience, and was more sophisticated than what mass market television would support. And Caesar’s personality was not suited for the massive success he achieved.

Margolick’s research and attention to detail, interviews with key people involved in Caesar’s life and his obvious love for Caesar’s humor and culture all contribute to make this a highly readable and enjoyable book for anyone who is interested in American culture and especially television comedy.

David Margolick was a reporter on legal affairs for the New York Times, where he wrote the weekly “At the Bar” column and covered, among other stories, the trial of O. J. Simpson. He was subsequently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His books include Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, At the Bar, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns; and Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, and The Promise and the Dream. He lives in New York City.

I very much enjoyed reading this biography, which is appropriately entertaining as well as informative. It broadened and deepened my appreciation for early television comedy, a milieu I enjoy. With the ubiquity of old television clips now available on YouTube, I was able to sample some of the sketches that are described in the book, including some I had never seen. Watching Caesar in action with his great supporting casts, while reading about those people in the book will change the way you see them now. David and I had a terrific conversation which I hope you will enjoy as much as I did.

Buy the book here.

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Thomas W. Gilbert: Death in the Strike Zone

Death in the Strike Zone: The Mystery of America’s First Baseball Hero — Thomas W. Gilbert — David Godine — Hardcover — 978-1-56792-759-7 — 192 pages — $27.95 — March 24th, 2026 – ebook edition available at lower cost

As most of my listeners probably know by now, I love baseball and I really love books about baseball. At one time I thought I knew alot about baseball history, but I have come to realize that I am a rank amateur in a world where there are true baseball historians at work on almost any baseball related subject one could imagine.

I loved reading Tom Gilbert’s wonderful book about James Creighton, arguably the first true baseball star, whose brief career took place in the heated era of early baseball in New York City. Pre-Civil War baseball is really not the same game as the one we play today. It was a precursor even to the game played in the late 19th century and early twentieth century, an era that at least some rabid fans today know something about. But baseball as it was played in the 1850s and 1860s was far different, and perhaps no more so than how pitching was done.

Reading this vividly written book, we learn about an era that is both strangely foreign and similar to our own in many ways. Baseball this early was still being defined by its players, and the game was emerging from pure amateur club sport played only in the big eastern cities, showing signs of popularity that would enable baseball to become the dominant sport in the entire country in less than 50 years.

Creighton was his era’s Babe Ruth and Shohei Ohtani, someone whose skills and manner of playing changed the game completely. What I learned from Tom Gilbert is that in this early time, pitching was much more like today’s slow pitch softball than what we recognize as hardball pitching today. The mount was much closer to home plate, and there were no balls and strikes – hitters just waited for a pitch “served” to them that they could hit, and it was fielding and running that made the game interesting, not today’s “inside game” where the pitcher and hitter define so much of what will happen.

Even if you don’t care as much about baseball as I do, Gilbert’s narrative weaves together the history of nineteenth century America into his narrative in a way that will interest many in the story of American culture.

Thomas W. Gilbert is also the author of How Baseball Happened: Outrageous Lies Exposed, The Truth Revealed, Baseball and the Color Line, Roberto Clemente, and Playing First. He grew up in Connecticut and lives in Brooklyn, not far from where James Creighton played and is buried.

We had a great conversation I hope you will enjoy as much as I did.

Author website

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Kim Dower reading her poems for National Poetry Month, 2026

Authors Voices gives writers and poets a platform for reading their work. It’s been too infrequent a series in the past. Starting in 2026, inaugurated by this wonderful reading by Los Angeles poet Kim Dower, we will be presenting a monthly reading series with a representation of poets I feel have not received enough attention for their work.

Kim’s reading took place on April 1, 2026, the first day of National Poetry Month. Unfortunately we were delayed in publishing this episode, so apologies are due to the poet.

In this reading, Kim presents a range of her poems from her previously published books.

Kim Dower was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and has lived in Los Angeles for many years, where she is well known both for her poetry as well as her work in book publicity under the name “Kim from LA.”

Kim is the former City Poet Laureate for West Hollywood, California and is the author of five acclaimed books of poetry. Among her books has been a Los Angeles Times bestseller, a finalist for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom­.

Dower’s poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, as well as in many anthologies and journals, including Ploughshares, James Dickey Review, Plume, and Barrow Street. She teaches poetry workshops for Antioch University, UCLA Extension, and the West Hollywood Library. Kim lives with her family in West Hollywood, California.

Her books are all wonderful and frequently funny.

I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom­

What She Wants

Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave

Last Train to the Missing Planet

Her website is here.

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Jack El-Hai: The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII — Jack El-Hai — PublicAffairs — 9781610394635 — 304 pages — Published September 2, 2014 — Paperback — $21.99 (ebook available at lower prices; audiobook download also available)

The Nazi and the Psychiatrist was originally published more than ten years ago. It had some terrific reviews, and then became, like most books published today, a “backlist” title mostly available from online retailers. But now that it has become the basis of the well received film, Nuremburg, directed by James Vanderbilt, with a star studded cast, including Rami Malek, Russell Crowe, and Michael Shannon, the book has been re-issued in paperback and has deservedly found many new readers.

In my conversation with its author, Jack El-Hai, we talked mostly about the book itself, and not so much about what it is like for an author to find his book rediscovered because of a movie, though Jack did explain that the film only focuses on a small part of the story El-Hai explored in the book. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist takes on what was a complex relationship between the American psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley and the 22 Nazis who became his patients as they were imprisoned before their trial as war criminals in the 1945-46 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Of course the key figure among the Nazis was Herman Göring, who was not only an important early supporter of Hitler, as well as one of the central figures in the rise of Nazism, the conduct of WWII as head of the Luftwaffe, and of course one of the architects of the Holocaust. At the time he was captured by the Americans, he expected to become the next leader of Germany.

Kelley was brought in to examine the Nazi leaders who were to be the first tried for war crimes by the Allies – the idea being to determine whether they were each rational enough to stand trial for their horrific actions. As a psychiatrist, this gave him an exceptional opportunity – to gather information about the psychology of Nazis and to understand whether they were indeed within the range of normal human behavior or pathological.

Kelley became especially close with Göring, a formidable figure, who ultimately committed suicide rather than experience the humiliating death by hanging to which he was sentenced by the Tribunal. Kelley’s life was deeply influenced by his experiences with the Nazis, and El-Hai, who had access to Kelley’s files and talked extensively with his surviving children, paints a compelling portrait of a man whose suffering was extreme and led ultimately to his own unfortunate suicide some years later.

Given our present circumstances, a book about the psychological components of authoritarianism and the individuals who led Germany’s fascist enterprise cannot help to resonate. Reading this book will make you think about the nature of evil (and Arendt’s calling it “banal”) as well as the way that fascism masks the personal greed and pursuit of power that drove it.

I do recommend this book at anyone who is trying to grapple with what is happening to us now. And this conversation will be illuminating as well.

Jack El-Hai is an award-winning writer who has published innumerable articles and more than a dozen books. Jack’s other books include Face in the Mirror, The Lost Brothers,  and The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness.

He has contributed articles to Scientific American, Wired, Discover, GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Aeon, The Washington Post Magazine, and many other publications. He lives in Minneapolis.

“This intimate and insightful portrait of two intersecting, outsized personalities‑‑one an exemplar of public service and the other an avatar of evil‑‑is as suspenseful as a classic Hitchcock film that hinges on an eerie psychological secret. Readers of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist will be riveted by Jack El‑Hai’s moving study of how good and evil can converge in a heightened instant and across a lifetime.”—Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winning author of Far from the Tree

Author website
Buy the book

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Carla Malden: Playback (a novel)

Playback (A Novel) — Carla Malden — 9781644284872 — Hardcover — 216 pages — Rare Bird Books — Published August 12, 2025 — $28 — ebook versions available at lower prices

Time travel fiction is among my favorite literary genres. I’ve been reading time travel novels avidly since I was a kid. I am sure the first one I read was HG Wells’s Time Machine, probably before I was even 10 years old. And I’ve since read many more. Time and Again by Jack Finney and If I Never Get Back by Daryl Brock are two of the best books I have ever read, so good that I have read each of them more than once. Now I can add Carla Malden’s Playback to my running list of time travel favorites.

When I was offered this book to read, I had no idea of the subject. I wanted to read it simply because Carla and I have known each other since we were children, and long ago, our parents were friends. I’ve read Carla’s work in the past and knew that she is a terrific writer, but I did not know what this book would be like. As it turns Playback was a welcome treat. It’s a wonderful book.

I also did not realize that Playback is the sequel to Carla’s previous novel, Shine Until Tomorrow in which her main character, Mari Caldwell, finds herself time traveling from her modern life as an unhappy 17 year-old to San Francisco in 1967 and the extraordinary period of the Summer of Love. In that book, she becomes an influential figure in a nascent rock and roll band’s story of success.

Fortunately for me, one does not need to have read Shine before reading Playback in which Mari, now 34, travels back in time once more—this time to the fall of 1967, when in a whirlwind of activity, her life is changed again.

Previously, she experienced and believed in the idealism of the sixties but now she feels only disillusionment. She’s been divorced from what she thought would be a fulfilling marriage and she’s stuck doing photography work she does not care about. She’s disappointed in life and particularly does not feel she is doing right by her daughter. Playback takes Mari back to the Haight-Ashbury of 1967 at just the moment in her life when she needs it to be restarted. It’s an adventure story that unfolds her inner being in surprising and meaningful ways.

Playback captivated me, and brought me back to my own past in many ways. Carla’s characters are fully drawn, she deals well with the anomalies and intricacies of the concept of time and how changes in the past alter the future without making too big of a deal about it and distracting us from the emotional core of the book. I did not want it to end, and of course now I want her to write another book to finish Mari’s story and complete a trilogy.

It was great fun for me to talk to Carla about her book, her characters and the two novels that tell Mari’s story, and also to revisit the touchstone place and time that has meant so much to our cultural history. Whether you lived through the sixties or just have heard about it in stories and books, Playback will take you there and like Mari, you will find yourself torn between staying or returning to your own life, maybe changed for the better as she was.

Carla Malden was born and raised in Los Angeles. She worked in film production and development and then as a screenwriter. Working with her father, Academy Award winning actor Karl Malden, she co-authored his critically acclaimed memoir When Do I Start? Carla has written features for the Los Angeles Times, and her previous novels include Search Heartache, Shine Until Tomorrow, and My Two and Only. She is a member of the Board of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.

Author website.

Rare Bird (publisher) website.

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Helen Sheehy: Just Willa (a novel)

Just Willa (a novel)—Helen Sheehy—Cave Hollow Press—978-2-7342678-3-9—paperback—428 pages—$21.95—April 13, 2025—ebook versions available at varying lower prices

As many Writerscast listeners know, I only interview writers about books I like and enjoyed reading enough to want to share with my listeners. So every episode of this podcast does represent a certain “best of” approach to my reading, since you will never hear about the books I did not love, or could not bring myself to finish.

From among those many books I like, Helen Sheehy’s Just Willa is a special one – this is a flat out just a wonderful novel. It focuses entirely on the story of one woman and her family, Willa Hardesty, and her difficult farm life in dusty, dry Oklahoma. Her story follows seven decades of one woman’s life, a twentieth century family chronicle that focuses on the small struggles of daily life, a difficult husband, the challenges of raising children and the heartbreak that goes with a large family.

Willa is tough because her world requires her to be tough. She is the daughter of a homesteader who somehow manages to be a single mother in an era that provides almost no support, then marries a bootlegging cowboy who is never honest with her. Her seemingly “small” life is really a world that is far greater than it seems, and she lives it with indomitable strength despite all her hardships and struggles to understand who she really is.

Like most great fiction, we come to realize that this novel is entirely true.

I really enjoyed speaking with Helen about her book, her writing process, and her past work as a biographer. I think you will enjoy this conversation, and I hope it might spur you to read Just Willa yourself, and because she is a really fine writer, and this book is autobiographical fiction, perhaps you will be interested in reading her biographies as well.

Helen Sheehy grew up on farms in Oklahoma and Kansas, although she’s lived in Connecticut most of her life. She’s been a dramaturg at Hartford Stage Company and written biographies of theatre pioneers; Margo Jones, Eva Le Gallienne, and Eleonora Duse.

Sheehy taught theatre and English in high schools in Kansas and Connecticut, which was the basis of her first book, a textbook titled All About Theatre. She was Adjunct Professor of Theatre at Southern Connecticut State University for over twenty years. Sheehy has also taught acting and improvisation to inmates in a maximum security prison in Connecticut.

She lives in Hamden, Connecticut. Just Willa is her first novel.

“Helen Sheehy’s masterful prose immerses you in Willa Hardesty’s world with such rich detail and emotional depth that you feel the dust of the Oklahoma plains and the quiet strength it takes to hold a family together. It’s a powerful reminder that even the women who shape our lives can hold truths we only come to understand with time. This book is for anyone who has ever known their mother—or thought they did.”—Michael Sucsy, Emmy-winning writer/director of Grey Gardens

Author website.
Buy the book on Bookshop.org

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Annalee Newitz: Automatic Noodle

Automatic Noodle – Annalee Newitz – Tordotcom – 9781250357465 – Hardcover – 176 pages – August 5, 2025 – $24.99 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Annalee Newitz is one of the best and most original science fiction writers I have read in a long time. I read their last novel, The Future of Another Timeline (it’s brilliant!) and couldn’t wait to read their next book. Automatic Noodle is simultaneously hilariously funny, sneakily political, and highly original. It’s pretty hard to resist and aside from the fact that it is a short book that leaves you wanting much more, it is one of my favorite books I have read in a long time. Newitz takes us into a future that is recognizable, and while it is as scary as any future looking book must be in our dystopian present, while positing that our future includes a bloody and destructive civil war, the book is somehow optmimistic and hopeful.

Automatic Noodle takes place in Annalee’s favorite city, San Francisco, in the near enough future that it is a recognizable place. California has fought a bloody, destructive, technologically advanced civil war to free itself from the United States. In its newfound freedom, robots have limited rights and must struggle to find their way in a new society. If that sounds eerily reminiscent of the 1870s, it’s not accidental. Annalee weaves together a set of wonderfully humane characters, all of whom are seeking to build new identities in a strange new world. It’s a wonderful story that makes you think and also feel. Great fun carrying along some really important ideas about humanity and freedom.

I really enjoyed talking to Annalee and hope you will not only enjoy our conversation, but go out and buy the book at once – then let me know if you like it as much as I do.

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the nationally bestselling author of the books Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, as well as the novels The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline (winner of the Sidewise Award), and Autonomous (winner of a Lambda Literary Award). As a science journalist, they are a writer for the New York Times and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are also the co-host of the three-time Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

“This is a story—about building community despite adversity, fighting for your rights and individuality, and creating art that you want to see in the world—that I didn’t know I needed right now. And it was so much fun to read!”—Martha Wells, author of The Murderbot Diaries and Witch King

Author website.

Buy the book.

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Dennis James Sweeney: How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses

How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses – Dennis James Sweeney – New World Library – Paperback – 9781608689361 – 216 pages – $18.95 – February 25, 2025 – ebook versions available at lower prices

This book is described by its publisher as “A comprehensive guide to getting published and building a literary reputation through small presses and magazines — and taking ownership of your own publishing life.” While I am very familiar with publishing marketing lingo, I think this description, while literally accurate, actually undervalues Sweeney’s book. He does offer us much more than just a “guide to getting published.” By talking to writers as a colleague and exploring his own journey as a writer, he turns what could have been a mechanical self help guide into something much more interesting and engaging.

I’ve been on both sides of the process this book is about – as a writer submitting work for publication and more often as a publisher and editor, combing through submissions of all kinds and qualities. This book provides much more than simply guidance, tools and support for writers. In it, Sweeney personalizes what is so often a depersonalized process, and helps writers see themselves as active agents in a complex ecosystem with many levels and activities. And in many ways, he reveals the process of “submitting” one’s work as an almost spiritual practice, not just a means to an end.

All of the podcast interviews I do are unstructured and informal – I like to start without notes or an agenda and see where the conversation goes. Talking to Dennis was truly a pleasure, and I think we ended up having a wonderfully organic and interesting conversation about the independent literary world, contemporary writing, and the role of the writer in that community. Whether you  are already a published author, or a publisher or magazine that works with author submissions, this book has a great deal to offer you.

Dennis James Sweeney is a writer and teacher. His books have been published by small independent presses, including Autumn House Press, Essay Press, Ricochet Editions, and Stillhouse Press, and his writing has appeared in Ecotone, The Southern Review, Witness, and The New York Times. Sweeney lives, writes, and teaches in Amherst, Massachusetts. Author website here.

But the book here.

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