~a podcast about how writing gets made~
✦ On the show, authors read a passage from their own work and then break it down, taking you behind the scenes to reveal everything from the first spark of inspiration to the final edits. ✦
What’s The Passage?
The Passage is a literary podcast featuring in-depth conversations with writers across all genres, from travel to literary fiction, science fiction to memoir, history to food writing, and more. The format is simple: each guest selects a short passage of their work, reads it at the top of the episode, and then walks us through the details of how it came to be.
Co-hosts Jon and Cory are former book editors who love nerding out over the minutiae of writing and the (many) different ways to approach the creative process. If you’ve ever read something great and thought, “It would be cool to hear an author interview that explained exactly how it was written...", this is your favorite new show.
Our guests have been recognized as winners, finalists, and honorees with a range of accolades, including:
- MacArthur Fellowship
- National Book Award
- James Beard Award
- PEN/Faulkner Award
- Shirley Jackson Award
- Philip K. Dick Award
Episodes
M Lin
“The Memory Museum” from The Memory Museum
M Lin discusses the title story from her collection The Memory Museum, stories spanning contemporary China and imagined futures that explore memory, family, and censorship. She talks writing utopian vs. dystopian speculative fiction, the influence of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and abandoning the rigid outlining habits of her screenwriting past.
▸ Apple
▸ Spotify
▸ YouTube
“The Memory Museum” from The Memory Museum
M Lin discusses the title story from her collection The Memory Museum, stories spanning contemporary China and imagined futures that explore memory, family, and censorship. She talks writing utopian vs. dystopian speculative fiction, the influence of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and abandoning the rigid outlining habits of her screenwriting past.
▸ Apple
▸ Spotify
▸ YouTube
Sonya Walger
Wifehouse
Author and actor Sonya Walger discusses her novel Wifehouse, about a wife and mother who has an affair with a younger tutor. She talks about “writing into a question,” how interrogating a script as an actor lends itself to novel-writing, and why airplanes make great places to work (hint: you're trapped).
▸ Apple
▸ Spotify
▸ YouTube
John Keene
“Gloss” from Counternarratives
John Keene reads from “Gloss…”, a novella structured as an 80 page footnote that “swallows” the history it annotates. He talks to Jon and Cory about losing a draft to a computer crash, how his protagonist’s (supernatural) power let her claim her own ending, and the Latin American experimentalists who shaped his fiction.
▸ Apple ▸ Spotify ▸ YouTube
Sam Shelstad
The Cobra and the Key
Sam Shelstad reads from his fictional creative writing guide/novel narrated by a delusional aspiring genius. He talks about a "silly" Lord of the Rings riff that unlocked the book's humor and taking inspiration from James Wood's How Fiction Works (then making the dumbest version of it).
▸ Apple
▸ Spotify
▸ YouTube
’Pemi Aguda
One Leg on Earth
'Pemi Aguda reads from her debut novel and talks to Jon and Cory about short vs. long-form writing, the writers who keep her inspired, and the liberation of scrapping a manuscript to start over, plus the supernatural, folk-horror instincts behind her fiction.
▸ Apple ▸ Spotify ▸ YouTube
Jan Swafford
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph
Jan Swafford reads from his biographies of Charles Ives and Beethoven, including the Eroica symphony passage he calls the hardest he's ever written. He talks to Jon and Cory about starting as a "hack writer" of Civil War history, why a biography should mirror its subject, and retyping old letters.
▸ Apple ▸ Spotify ▸ YouTube
Nathan Ballingrud
“The Butcher’s Table” from Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell/The Atlas of Hell
Nathan Ballingrud reads from his pirates-sailing-to-the-shores-of-Hell novella and talks about fearing pulpy fiction would cost him credibility, how Mike Mignola's Hellboy gave him permission to commit to an angel-possessed squid, his love of the Gormenghast books, and why he avoids reviews.
▸ Apple ▸ Spotify ▸ YouTube
Michael Katz
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Translation)
Michael Katz reads from his translation of the Dostoevsky classic. He talks to Jon and Cory about translation as a "recreative," not purely creative, act, the hard limitations translators work within, what keeps readers returning to Dostoevsky's strange books, and why a good translation only lasts 20 or 30 years.
▸ Apple ▸ Spotify ▸ YouTube
Caspar Geon (Tom Toner)
The Immeasurable Heaven
Tom Toner reads from his space opera The Immeasurable Heaven, published under the pen name Caspar Geon. He talks to Jon and Cory about his notebooks of longhand worldbuilding, finding alien inspiration in David Attenborough documentaries, writing under contract vs. on spec, and a drafting process built around addition rather than subtraction.
▸ Apple ▸ Spotify ▸ YouTube
Anya von Bremzen
National Dish
Anya von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, reads from the epilogue of her latest book, National Dish. She talks to Jon and Cory about what happens when world-historical events force last-minute rewrites and how a project can turn unexpectedly personal.
▸ Apple ▸ Spotify ▸ YouTube
Gabby Squailia
Dead Boys
Gabby Squailia reads a passage from her debut fantasy novel about larger-than-life corpses navigating the afterlife. She talks about the rules of animated corpses, Roberto Bolaño, twelve drafts per page (minimum), and what happens when a finished manuscript reaches editors.
▸ Apple ▸ Spotify ▸ YouTube
Rolf Potts
“Storming ‘The Beach’” from Marco Polo Didn’t Go There
Rolf Potts, bestselling author of the classic travel handbook Vagabonding, reads from his breakout essay "Storming the Beach." He talks to Jon and Cory about infiltrating the set of a Leonardo DiCaprio movie in Thailand, the idea behind the stunt, and how he figured out how to turn it into a article for Salon.
▸ Apple ▸ Spotify ▸ YouTube
