Four Paths, One Impossible Dream

Announcing New Podcast Season!

Image from BIO’s website

I’ll be honest with you. I produced this season of BIO Podcast partly for selfish reasons.

I’m working on my own biography. David Walker, the radical abolitionist who published his incendiary Appeal in 1829 and was dead within a year. I’m just starting to research and I’m not sure what I’m doing yet. I am equal parts scared out of my mind and beyond excited about it. Following four biographers through eight months of the real work felt like a very useful exercise.

I’ve been the producer at BIO Podcast for two years (I was assistant producer for three). I’ve sat with Pulitzer Prize winners and New York Times bestselling authors and asked them how they do this. But this season, I wanted to get into the nitty gritty stuff before the book deal and publication hullabaloo.

I wanted to learn from the people still mired in the minutiae of writing and research.

Sara Benincasa is a comedian writing about Abraham Lincoln and still can’t quite believe it. Kate Culkin is a professor whose book on the Emerson sisters came out last July, and nobody taught her how to promote it. (Note: we are reading her book this month!) Kevin McGruder first heard about Harlem Renaissance writer Rudolph Fisher in 1982 and hasn’t stopped thinking about him since. And Katie Rose Quandt is a journalist with two kids, a third on the way, and a book proposal she’s determined to finish before the baby comes.

Over six episodes, we get into the parts of this work that don’t get talked about enough: dead ends in the archives, academic publishing woes, what it costs to challenge the historical canon, and what keeps writers going when nobody’s watching.

I made this for everyone in the middle of their own impossible projects. It’s for life writers, biographers, and memoirists who know that finishing a book is an act of stubbornness as much as craft. For agents and editors who want to understand what writers are actually living through before the manuscript lands on your desk. But mostly, for myself…because I needed to see that it’s possible. Watching all four of them made me realize how hard my bio of David Walker is going to be, but as Roy Skoog’s daughter, I refuse to shy away from a real challenge!

Episode 1, “Who Gets to Write Biography?”, is out now wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen, share it with someone who needs it, and come back here as the season unfolds.