Write The Book

Vermont author and poet Rebecca Valley, author of the chapbook The Salvageman, whose new book is Curious Cases: True Crime for Kids - Hijinks, Heists, Mysteries and More (Bloom Books for Young Readers). This week’s Write the Book Prompt was generously suggested by my guest, Rebecca Valley. Let a main character or a community about which you are writing grapple with an unsolved mystery. This mystery could be the main thrust of the story, or it could linger in the background, serving to amplify your characters, and possibly contributing to the ways in which they change. Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. NaNoWriMo is coming! Get in touch if you'd like to come on the  show to talk about how it's going for you.  Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 751

An interview from the archives with veteran Boston Globe Reporter Stephen Kurkjian, author of Master Thieves, the story of the the largest art theft in history, published by PublicAffairs. This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to write 300 words about a theft that goes wrong in some way. The stolen items could involve art, jewels, people, pets, or even just penny candy. Who steals what and why? What goes wrong? Does this create a problem for the thief, or for the victim of the theft? Where does this take place? Who might have seen something? Did they tell anyone, or keep quiet? What happens to the stolen items, and how does the ordeal affect each of the involved characters? Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 750

The editors of Vermont Almanac discuss their work. A recording of a Green Mountain Book Festival panel discussion featuring Virginia Barlow, Dave Mance III, and Patrick White.  This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to write about an insect or arachnid. We aren’t all as focused on insects as Virginia Barlow, but they are vital. This is a quote from the Florida Museum at the University of Florida: a diverse range of insect species is critical to the survival of most life on Earth, including bats, birds, freshwater fishes and even humans! Along with plants, insects are at the foundation of the food web, and most of the plants and animals we eat rely on insects for pollination or food. A couple of weeks ago I saw a praying mantis outside my front door. Last week, I photographed an amazing, scary-looking spider on my front walk. It turned out to be a shamrock spider. So, consider your favorite arthropod, and write about it. Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or su

Guest Interviewer Kim MacQueen speaks with John Killacky, author of Because Art, and Mark Redmond, author of Called, both published by Onion River Press.  Last week the Green Mountain Book Festival came to Burlington and it was a fantastic event! I'm on the board. As the festival plans for next year, we'd love to hear ideas for panels. So your Write the Book Prompt this week is to write to me (Shelagh) and share your panel ideas! Thanks so much.  Good luck with your work in the coming week and please tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 748

Writer, editor and photographer Kimberly Garrett Brown, whose new book is Cora's Kitchen (Inanna Publications).  This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to consider an unlikely friendship. Who are the individuals and why would a friendship between them be unexpected? How do they meet? Are they in the same town, on vacation, at a rest area, in a nursing home? Do they hit it off from the start, or do they find common ground gradually? Consider these questions and these characters, find a setting that perhaps enhances the specific challenges of their relationship, and write. Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 747

A new interview with Vermont author Doug Wilhelm about his nonfiction book, Catalysts for Change: How Nonprofits and a Foundation Are Helping Shape Vermont's Future (Rootstock).  This week’s Write the Book Prompt was kindly suggested by my guest, Doug Wilhelm, who thinks about stories all the time. Find one observation: something you’ve overhead or seen, and make a story from it. This can be a piece of conversation or part of an argument, an interesting person who stood out for some reason. Take note of this small observation, and start writing. Story involves tension, so see what tension might emerge from what you began with, and then see if the tension will resolve somehow.  Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 746

Two interviews from the archives - with our old music! -  with Vermont author and editor Angela Palm and Vermont poet Malisa Garlieb. Angela Palm's collection Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here  won the Graywolf nonfiction award, was an Oprah.com pick for "Powerful Memoirs by Powerful Women," an Indie Next List pick, and A Kirkus Best Book in 2016. Poet Malisa Garlieb's work has appeared in Qu, RHINO Poetry, Rust + Moth, Rathalla Review, Tar River Poetry, Calyx, Painted Bride Quarterly, So to Speak, Gyroscope Review, Cold Lake Anthology and many many more. Her poetry collection, Handing Out Apples in Eden., was published in 2014 by Wind Ridge Books of Vermont.    This week's Write the Book Prompt, as we approach Banned Books Week is to buy, read, and write about a banned book and the effects of book banning. Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. 745

Vermont Poet Daniel Lusk, who's new collection is Every Slow Thing (Kelsay Books).  This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to consider what Daniel calls his “farthings,” tiny Zen-like poems that share wit, irony, natural beauty, and wisdom. Here are a few of his, kindly shared with us: Sepals - As if priests were magpies and souls were shiny objects. As if brothels were little seminaries of corporeal art.  After the Storm - And Noah sent forth birds, voiceless gestures over the fathomless silence in search of something that might be said. Lyric - Listen! There is saffron on the poet‟s bow.  So those are a few of Daniel Lusk's "Farthings." The new collection Farthings is published by Yavanika Press. See if you can come up with some of your own.    Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 744

New York Times bestselling author Fiona Barton, whose new novel is Local Gone Missing (Berkley).  This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to write about an altercation between someone who lives full time in a small town and a visitor, seasonal homeowner, or tourist. What sets them off and what preceded the incident for each of them? How does the full-time resident feel about outsiders before this event, and what changes? Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 743

An interview from the archives (with our old music!) with Vermont poet and UVM Professor Stephen Cramer. We discussed his book From the Hip: A Concise History of Hip Hop (in sonnets). Since that time, Stephen has published a number of other books. His latest collection, The Disintegration Loops, "attempts to uncover the music within the world's dissolution and fragmentation, from Italian masters painting over the work of previous artists, to the innocence of childhood giving way to scars, to the description of badly stored tapes being looped and played over and over again until they begin to flake." This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to consider the world's "dissolution and fragmentation" and write about something that changes with time, for better or for worse. Good luck with this exercise and please listen next week for another. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 743

A new interview with the author Mohsin Hamid, whose latest novel is The Last White Man (Riverhead).  This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to write about a drastic change in a character’s life - even something unlikely or impossible - that changes their world in some way, bringing both difficulty and relief.  Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 742

Vermont poet Laura Budofsky Wisniewski, the author of Sanctuary, Vermont (Orison).  This week’s Write the Book Prompt was generously suggested by my guest, Laura Budofsky Wisniewski. Set a timer and start writing. Do not stop. Even if you have to occasionally write the same word over and over until the next word comes, keep it up. When the timer goes off at whatever point you designated - two minutes, five minutes, twenty - stop writing. If what you were creating was poetry, use the next little while to make line breaks in the piece. Then delete everything that’s not interesting and see what you have come up with.  Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 741

Vermont photographer and writer across genres Shanta Lee Gander, whose debut poetry collection, Ghettoclaustrophobia: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues (Diode Editions), won the Vermont Book Award for Poetry in 2021.  This week’s Write the Book Prompt was generously suggested by my guest, Shanta Lee Gander, who mentioned her own version of this during our conversation.  What are your impossible things that are all true?   The Shenanigans List “Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.' I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!” Are there funny things that people in your life have shared or things that they say?  For Shanta, the shenanigans list includes real vignettes and quotes of the ridiculous, the absurd and the most surreal things that usually has one

An interview from the archives with novelist and story writer J. Robert Lennon. We discussed his story collection, See You in Paradise, published by Graywolf Press. Last year he published two more books with Graywolf, a novel called Subdivision and a story collection, Let Me Think.  This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to write a paragraph about a moment that takes place in a park. Maybe a dog breaks free of her leash and runs away from her owner. Write about whatever moment you choose to present. Then write the paragraph again from two different perspectives. Perhaps that of the dog, or another dog, a person who feeds birds from a bench, a person who sleeps on that bench at night, a policeman, a young child in a stroller, that child’s grandfather, who is taking her for a walk. See what happens to the moment you’re creating when you let it be seen through these varied perspectives. Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

An interview from the archives with award winning writer, educator and translator Wendy Call.  This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to choose one of the following sentences, and translate it into a language of your own design.  Tomorrow morning, as the sun shines up and over the eastern wall of your house, you will awaken to a gift of joy.  He ran through the woods and hopped the stones in a bright, cold stream, shouting that he had won. Alone, without purpose or thought, she brings a hand to her face and feels the cool touch of her own comfort.  Pick one of these sentences, or really any sentence you come up with, and translate it into a language of your own invention. Make up sounds that feel like these sounds, shape them into words, see what other sentences come out of your unusual translation. Try to create a sense of the sentence that another reader might come close to understanding, if not intellectually. Sure, it might be nonsense, but it might feel just right, too. Good luck with your work in the co

An interview with Pulitzer-Prize winning author Jennifer Egan about her new novel The Candy House (Scribner). This week’s Write the Book Prompt was generously suggested by my guest, Jennifer Egan—an exercise she assigns her students that she says has been helpful. Imagine yourself in a physical place, such as a room that you know well from an earlier point of your life. Describe what is to your left. What’s to the right? Is there a drawer open? What's inside the drawer? Move through the space mentally, looking in every direction, looking out the window and under the rugs. The second part of the prompt is to write about who comes into the space and what they do or say. Because physical spaces lead to people,  and quickly. Jennifer says the real wonder of this is to see how much detail we retain. And it’s also a way of defying the fragmentation of memory. If we imagine ourselves in a space, how much we can recall about tiny particulars of that place? And then who comes in, and what are they moved to do there?

An interview with 2019 Quill Prose Prize winner, Carlos Allende,  about his novel, Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love (Red Hen Press).  This week’s Write the Book Prompt was generously suggested by my guest Carlos Allende. Create a character that does something reprehensible or immoral. The person can be anyone: from a child who broke the rules to a serial killer. Make that character sympathetic by making their pain salient and undeserved, so that the reader feels compassion for him or her.  Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 736

Author Jori Lewis, whose debut nonfiction book is Slaves for Peanuts (The New Press). This week’s Write the Book Prompt was generously suggested by my guest, Jori Lewis. If you’re working on something and it’s not moving along well, try changing the perspective. And in doing this, keep in mind  the way one focuses a camera: focus in, pull out. Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

An interview from the archives with bestselling author Meg Wolitzer, about her novel for young adults, Belzhar (Dutton Books for Young Readers). One of her latest projects is hosting Selected Shorts at New York's Symphony Space, hosted by Public Radio International. Seedlings, soil, compost, fertilizer. It’s gardening season. This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to write about a garden. Perhaps a small mystery: a missing plant, a wrong fruit, an illegally felled tree. If a mystery doesn’t inspire you, maybe write a poem or a scene that takes place in a secret or famous garden. Or a former garden, paved over and turned into a parking lot.  Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 734

This month, the words of celebrated Vermont poet David Budbill take center stage in Sutras for a Suffering World, a concert featuring Vermont and New York artists and music by composers William Parker, Erik Nielsen, and Evan Premo. I spoke with Vermont artists Lois Eby and Nadine Budbill, wife and daughter of the late David Budbill, about these concerts.  As literary executor of David Budbill's estate, Nadine Budbill once said of her father's book, Broken Wing, that it was "the ultimate culmination of his legacy—encouraging all of us to slow down, to notice, to contemplate, to honor, to engage, to love and mourn and be fully alive." For a new Write the Book Prompt, try to write with these goals in mind: slowing down, noticing, contemplating, honoring, engaging, loving, mourning, and being fully alive.  Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion. Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro 733