The Inner Loop Radio: A Creative Writing Podcast

If you're having trouble putting your story together, it might be because you don't have the right information. Rhaina Cohen, author of "The Other Significant Others," discusses journalistic methods and solutions that apply to all writing conundrums. She takes us through one of her favorite writing exercises involving a series of questions that nail down the details of our stories, and she shares how to get in the right headspace to find the answers.

Writers conferences. What are they? What are they good for? And are they worth the time and money? President of the Washington Independent Review of Books, Jennifer Yacovissi, joins us to discuss the merits of writers conferences, how to choose the right conference for you, and the upcoming Washington Writers Conference. Plus, Courtney and Jennifer choose their own adventures in a writer’s odyssey!

Abi catches up with writer and Senior Nonfiction Features Editor for the Rumpus, Darcy Gagnon. They discuss a new take on approaching the work of your younger self, reading three books at a time, and a detective-like character Darcy really feels he embodies.

From the mystical to the fantastical, there's a spectrum of magic within writing. Courtney Sexton and Abi Newhouse sit down with local author, Len Kruger, to discuss the ways adding magic to your writing can create different opportunities for storytelling. Plus, we let tarot cards guide our next writing exercise...

Every writer experiences the ebb and flow of creativity, but sometimes we need a little push to get into the flow. Nonfiction writer and cofounder of The Inner Loop, Rachel Coonce finds rhythm in her writing routine through the rhythm of her words. She revisits familiar concepts of poetry as they appear in prose, and offers a prompt inspired by Raymond Carver in this Inspiration Takeover, a series of mini-episodes with different writers who offer us a little dose of inspiration.

What’s the value in a writing retreat? From concentrated time to write to communing with other writers, writing retreats can serve to jumpstart your writing when you’re stuck in a rut. Abi Newhouse and Aeriel Merillat join Rachel and Courtney to talk about how their latest retreat helped their writing and their writing lives. Plus, the four revisit one of our favorite games… the exquisite corpse!

Strap in for the silliest installment yet of The Inner Loop Radio in celebration of our 100th episode! From hot pockets to small batch murders, there are even more laughs than usual, as Rachel and Courtney remember their favorite episodes, get sentimental with community memories of the past 10 years of TIL, and laugh all the way through our best “off-camera” moments in a beyond-funny bloopers reel.

If you find it easy to forget your strengths as a writer, you’re not alone. There are so many voices around us all the time—in our podcasts, our reading, even our music—that can make us wonder what we might be missing in comparison. Nonfiction writer and The Inner Loop’s Author’s Corner program manager Abi Newhouse takes us through the ways she works to remember her own voice when, as an editor and podcast producer, others’ voices rule her working world. Plus, ‘tis the season: she offers us a prompt on twisting a traditional dish or dessert to tell a larger story about your own culture in this Inspiration Takeover, a series of mini-episodes with different writers who offer us a little dose of inspiration. Abi Newhouse is a writer, editor, and audio producer living in Washington, DC. A graduate of George Mason University's MFA in creative nonfiction, her work won The Hunger Journal's 2021 Spring Prose Contest and can be found in The Rumpus and The American Scholar, among others. A grant recipient of DC’s Commission on the Arts & Humanities, she is at work on a book of essays.

Courtney catches up with nonfiction writer Timothy Denevi, who does his best Bob Dylan impression as they talk about Joan Didion, the dilation and expansion of narrow worlds, and how life can get complicated quickly, whether in an Atlas of Remote Islands or in MILF Island.

Writing in a Second Language with Pantea Amin Tofangchi by Rachel Coonce and Courtney Sexton

Food is what we all have in common, and often it’s what brings us together around the holidays. First released in November 2019, former Washington City Paper food editor Laura Hayes and food journalist Susan Lutz, tell us how writing about food can be a vehicle for staging a scene, accessing difficult topics, or exploring the world around us, and how food writing as a genre has taken on new meaning. Plus, we hear food-related writing from local authors Sherrie Flick and Eric Kozlik.

Is ten years long or short in the life of a writer? Fiction writer and journalist Joanne Leedom-Ackerman shows us how her perspective on this has shifted. She offers us a prompt via Rainer Maria Rilke to get us thinking about our own writing lives and to get us to build narrative with what she describes as concentric circles in this Inspiration Takeover, a series of mini-episodes with different writers who offer us a little dose of inspiration. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Her works of fiction include upcoming novel The Far Side of the Desert and also Burning Distance, The Dark Path to the River, and No Marble Angels. Her nonfiction book PEN Journeys: Memoir of Literature on the Line was recently published, and she is the senior editor and contributor to The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate. She has also published fiction and essays in books and anthologies, including Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement; Remembering Arthur Miller; Snakes: An Anthology of Serpent Tales, Fiction and Poetry by Texas Women, the Bicentennial Collection of Texas Short Stories and Beyond Literacy. A reporter for The Christian Science Monitor early in her career, Joanne has won awards for her nonfiction and published articles in newspapers and magazines, including World Literature Today, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, GlobalPost, and others. Joanne is a Vice President of PEN International and the former International Secretary of PEN International and former Chair of International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee. She also serves on the boards of the International Center for Journalists, Refugees International, the American Writers Museum and Words Without Borders and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Edward R. Murrow Center at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the ICRW Leadership Council. She is a former board member and Vice President of PEN American Center and past President of PEN Center USA. She is an Emeritus Director of Poets and Writers, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and Human Rights Watch, where she served as Chair of the Asia Advisory Committee. She is an Emeritus Trustee of Johns Hopkins University and Brown University and has served on the Board of Trustees of Save the Children and the International Crisis Group.

Courtney catches up with writer, former TIL Author's Corner program coordinator, and current Olive B. O'Connor Fellow at Colgate University, Lena Crown. They talk about writing in a fellowship capacity (and in a small town), how poetry and nonfiction inform each other, and bringing the world into the classroom all on this month's episode of Just Checking In, a series of informal chats with some of our favorite writers.

According to the NIH, writing lowers blood pressure and boosts immunity, but what are the other healing effects of writing? Poet and nonfiction writer Bernardine Watson joins Rachel and Courtney to discuss how the writing process changed her experience of living with an incurable disease, and reads from her book, Transplant: A Memoir from Day Eight Press and The Inner Loop Author’s Corner October spotlight. Plus, from renting a hotel room to balancing on their heads, writers have always found creative ways to combine self-care and writing, and we get the details with some trivia!

Writing comes in waves, and sometimes even the most disciplined of approaches needs a little refresh. Author Rachel Louise Snyder takes us through her writing process: what it used to look like, what it looks like now, and how she gets inspiration from unexpected places. Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of "Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade," the novels "What We’ve Lost is Nothing," "No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us" and the memoir "Women We Buried, Women We Burned." Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, the Washington Post and on NPR, and she was a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. "No Visible Bruises" was awarded the 2018 Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the 2020 Book Tube Prize, the 2020 New York Public Library’s Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Sidney Hillman Book Award for social justice. It won Best Book in Translation in Taiwan in 2021 and has been translated into Russian, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Spanish, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, and others. It received starred reviews from Kirkus, Book Riot and Publisher’s Weekly and was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Amazon, Kirkus, the Library Journal, the Economist, and BookPage; the New York Times included it in their “Top Ten” books of 2019. "No Visible Bruises" was also a finalist for the Kirkus Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award, and the Silver Gavel Award. Over the past two decades, Snyder has traveled to sixty countries, covering stories of human rights, gender-based violence, natural disasters, displacement and war. She lived, for six years, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and two years in London before relocating to Washington, DC in 2009. Originally from Chicago, Snyder holds a B.A. from North Central College and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2020-2021. Originally from Chicago, she has a joint appointment as a professor in journalism and literature at American University.

With Halloween coming up, we discuss ghosts and goblins in writing, how they present themselves in fiction, and how they can be used to process our mortality. First released in October 2018, Journalist Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson tells us about The Woman Who Invented Forensic Training with Dollhouses and reads from her New Yorker article. No tricks this episode, but we have a special treat with Dan Knowlton and Kate Heller!

Rachel catches up with writer, Anna Qu, and they talk about getting back to writing after the whirlwind of book publication, the brain teaser of switching from nonfiction to fiction, and tomatoes versus zucchini, all on this month’s episode of Just Checking In, a series of informal chats with some of our favorite writers.

Crossing genres can be fun, invigorating, and a new source of inspiration, so why does it sometimes feel like eating our vegetables? Poet, playwright, and ghost writer Alyson Gold Weinberg explains how all her outlets inform one another and reads from her latest collection of poetry, Bellow & Hiss from Finishing Line Press and The Inner Loop Author’s Corner September spotlight. Plus, Rachel, Courtney, and Alyson demonstrate just how fun it can be to switch genres!

Often stories come to us in fragments: as a vivid image or a perfect sentence, but how do we turn those fragments into stories? Fiction writer, Jung Yun, shows how to create linear stories from nonlinear fragments and what happens when patience runs thin in this Inspiration Takeover, a series of mini-episodes with different writers who offer us a little dose of inspiration. Jung Yun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. She studied at Vassar College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Tin House, the Massachusetts Review, the Indiana Review, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She is the recipient of individual artist’s grants in fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, and the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. She has also received residential fellowships from MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the National Humanities Center. Currently, Jung lives in Baltimore with her husband and is an associate professor of English at the George Washington University. She serves on the board of directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

It’s back to school season and it’s time to get back to work, writers! First released in October 2019, Emily Mitchell joins Rachel and Courtney to discuss how teaching can inspire our creative writing, and we get to hear Emily read from her short story collection, Viral: Stories. Plus, Rachel and Courtney demonstrate the power of writing prompts for upcoming Inktober!