First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (Simon & Schuster), and Kapitoil (Harper Perennial). He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A columnist for the New York Times, he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and McSweeney’s and has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Bausch was born in Georgia, at the end of World War II, and was raised in the Washington, D.C., area. He has worked as a salesman--of automobiles, appliances, and hardware--a taxi driver, waiter, production planner, and library assistant. He was educated at George Mason University, earning a BA, an MA and an MFA, and he says he has been a writer all his life. He spent time in the military teaching survival, and worked his way through college.   His eighth and latest novel is called The Legend of Jesse Smoke. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patrick Ryan is the author of the short story collection The Dream Life of Astronauts and the novels Send Me and Saint Augustine among others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jane Smiley is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Thousand Acres.  She has written more than twenty books including Private Life, Moo, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Editors' Choice, which has received a starred Kirkus Review and is deemed one of the best books to read this summer and beyond by New York Times, NPR, BBC, BuzzFeed, Book Riot, Bookish, Miami Herald, Elle, O Magazine, Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, Flavorwire, After Ellen, BookPage, Cosmopolitan, Brooklyn Magazine, among others. Dennis-Benn has also been shortlisted for the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Barry was born in Limerick in 1969 and now lives in Dublin. He writes sketches and columns for the Sunday Herald in Glasgow and the Irish Examiner in Cork. He has written about travel and literature for the Guardian, the Irish Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications. His short fiction has appeared widely on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently in the New Yorker. His recent short story collection is called Dark Lies the Island. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leigh Stein is the author of the novel The Fallback Plan, a collection of poetry called Dispatch from the Future, and a memoir, Land of Enchantment. She is co-founder and Executive Director fo the nonprofit literary organization Out of the Binders, and lives outside New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic.  He is the author of How to Read a Novelist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lev Grossman's first novel, Warp, came out in 1997. His second, Codex, was published in 2004 and became an international bestseller. The Magicians was published in 2009 and was a New York Times bestseller and one of the New Yorker‘s best books of the year. The sequel, The Magician King, came out in 2011 and was a Times bestseller too. The third and (almost certainly) last Magicians book, The Magician’s Land, was published in 2014 and debuted at #1 on the bestseller list. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ramona Ausubel grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of a new novel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty as well as the novel No One is Here Except All of Us (2012), and a collection of short stories A Guide to Being Born (2013).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices