Ledger: A Writing Podcast

SHORT FICTION! This is the official audio release of my story "Hate to Meet You," which was originally published in Edgar Allan Poe's Snifter of Death, issue #06, by Ahoy Comics. Two high school coaches meet each other for the first time and realize immediately that they hate each other. They also realize they'll not be able to escape one another...

Watch out for more featured short fiction right here on Ledger!

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Brent Forrester is an Emmy Award-winning writer who has worked on an incredible list of shows including The Office (where he also executive produced and ran the writer's room at one point), The Simpsons, The Ben Stiller Show, King of the Hill, The Larry Sanders Show, and more!

He stopped by Ledger to chat about how to overcome writing pressure, managing expectations, and failure; what it's like to pitch a TV show to studio executi...

Today’s guest is screenwriter Laura Kroeger, one of two winners of the 2024 Final Draft Big Break contest. Disclaimer: Final Draft is not sponsoring today’s episode.

Laura Won the Big Break Contest with her script BIGGER IN TEXAS. She talks about the genesis of that script as well as how the Women In Film & Video (WIF) fellowship helped her writing; how her own reading and writing groups and their dedication to the craft/art ha...

Christine Wenc is a former staff member for The Onion and the author of Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire, out right now in hardcover!

Christine stopped by to chat about how she started researching the book in 2018; searching for (and maybe never finding) objective truth; coming to terms with the ways in which others can live in perceptually-generated realities, and how academics can cut, li...

Jessica Berg is the founder and chief literary agent at Rosecliff Literary. Recently, they hired Tommy Dean, former guest of the show and the EIC of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Mag, two literary journals that publish a lot of great fiction.

Jessica and I discuss whether a literary agent needs to be a lawyer, what a day of work looks like for her, how to handle multiple rejections of a project, and how important community is to writ...

"Am I a writer?" is NOT the question, but it's absolutely related to the most important and revealing question a writer can ask themselves.

Today on Ledger I talk about how I've struggled with defining myself as a writer in the past and the way I get past that weird mental battle.

This is the first of my non-interview episodes for the new phase of Ledger, with more on the way, including some audio fiction!

To watch the Andre Dubus ...

Ledger is changing! 

The craft of writing has so much that goes into it, so many people who help writers produce, finish, and publish their work, so instead of only interviewing writers, Ledger will also begin featuring chats with everyone from Beta readers to editors, to publicists and publishers!

Along with those new interviews there will be shorter episodes offering bits of writing advice. These will be quick and to the point, s...

Alex Wrekk is the writer and creator of Stolen Sharpie Revolution, a fantastic book now two decades into its print run and continuing to influence zinemaking and zinemakers the world over.

Alex also creates the zine Brainscan, and, sometimes, a handful of years will go by before a new issue shows up - but! - it’s always being worked on.

We chat about doing multiple drafts of zines, about the presentation of the zines themselves, an...

Carolyn J Carpenter is a cofounder of Hollywood Gatekeepers and a story analyst, writer, producer, and script reader, which is how I met her! This is another entry in my “Austin went to a film festival” series (along with Drew Larimore and Jim Burnstein) because I met Carolyn at Austin Film Festival in October 2024.

Carolyn has a ton of industry experience as a reader and writer, and has worked as a story analyst on movies like "B...

Jim Burnstein, the John H. Mitchell Professor of Entertainment and Director of Screenwriting Program at the University of Michigan stopped by Ledger to talk about his career as a screenwriter. He's written such films as Renaissance Man, starring Danny DeVito and directed by Penny Marhsall, Mighty Ducks 3, a particular childhood favorite of mine, and more.

We discussed how he became a successful screenwriter without moving from Plym...

Playwright Drew Larimore joins Ledger today for a special reason: I read his play UPSTATE in the very first round of submissions as a script reader for the Austin Film Festival, which is THE film festival/contest/conference for writers. I happily put Drew's play through to the next round and also wrote that it had a serious chance of winning the category. It made it to the semifinals and Drew dropped by to talk about the difficult...

Today’s guest is cartoonist, designer, teacher, and Pinball Wizard Ryan Claytor. I’m one of his stops on the digital (and AFK) book tour for his brand-new book, One Bite At a Time: The First 20 years of Elephant Eater Comics. You can purchase the book at OneBiteAtaTimeBook.com along with more of his work

Ryan stopped by to talk about his path from Marvel Comics intern to auto-bio cartoonist to totally unhinged (in a fun way) pinbal...

Rana Tahir writes poetry, non-fiction, and fiction, and is the author of Heroes and Monsters, the Stranger Things Choose Your Own Adventure novel as well as SPIES: Noor Inayat Khan, a CYOA tale of the eponymous WWII spy.

During the interview I reference a chat she had on the Books With a Past show, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/live/-0IiY5wkreo?si=JoUvs-FSfzNaqHkl

Rana and I discuss how you never know who is seei...

Glenn Stout is a writer, editor, consultant, teacher, and more. Perhaps most best known as the series editor of The Best American Sports Writing series, which ran from 1991 to 2020, Glenn has been involved with narrative non-fiction in some form since the late '80s and early '90s. His book The Young Woman and the Sea was recently adapted for Disney, starring Daisy Ridley. It is the tale of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to ever swim...

Eugenio Volpe is the author of I, Caravaggio, out now from Clash Books. Go to Clash Books.com or EugenioVolpe.com to grab a copy and find out more about what Eugenio is up to. We cover the warring halves of an artist, Caravaggio's prescient nature as a thinker/creative, Catholicism, and yes also we talk about civets. This one is NSFW in places so heads up!

Thank you so much to Eugenio for stopping by and thank you to Clash Books fo...

Beyond the Bounds of Infinity is a fiction anthology featuring 20 stories from marginalized voices, all inspired by the works and worlds of H.P. Lovecraft. Stephanie Pearre and Vaughn A. Jackson are the anthology's editors and both joined Ledger to chat about the successful Kickstarter launch in 2023 as well as the book's publication on July 10, 2024.

We cover the horrible nature of Lovecraft the person and the ways in which it mus...

Ken Lowery is a tabletop roll-playing game (TTRPG) writer most well-known for writing the fantastic game VOID 1680 AM. He stopped by Ledger to discuss his journey in starting Bannerless Games and the process of writing VOID as well as other games like Lighthouse At the End of the World and Hell Grinders.

We chat about the community aspect of VOID 1680 AM, including how he actually has his own AM radio broadcaster from which he broa...

Brian Allen Carr is a novelist originally from Texas, author of the books Sip; Opioid, Indiana, and his newest book, Bad Foundations, which is out via Clash Books as of January 23, 2024.

It is a peek into a hidden and ignored world beneath the feet of midwesterners, a world that literally supports their entire lives. The narrator is a man named Cook, someone who will essentially become a coworker to readers as they open this book.

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Debut novelist David Connor joins me to chat about his book Oh God, the Sun Goes which is out TODAY, August 1st, 2023 from Melville House.

Although this is his first novel he has in fact always been writing, which we talk about for sure. He has an undergrad degree in neuroscience and during that time in school he took a writing workshop with Maggie Nelson. Things changed after that.

Also, what’s becoming a touchstone for the show, ...