Multidisciplinary writer Joanna Walsh sits down with TW creative director John Vogel to talk about Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters. When Joanna first started writing, lacking IRL community and instruction, she turned early Twitter to find likeminded others to share work with. It wasn’t until after she’d been working as an artist that the schooling aspect came into play, getting her PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and a MSCA postdoctoral fellowship at Maynooth University.

Joanna also founded and ran two activist campaigns on Twitter—@read_women, a movement dedicated to equal treatment for women writers, and @no_entryarts to reshape ideas about age in the arts—and wrote twelve fiction and nonfiction books, including two co-written with self-coded AI.

In this conversation, the two discuss aesthetics through history, funding structures for the arts, and how policy affects access to who’s able to practice art.

Pia Leichter, founder of Kollektiv Studio and author of Welcome to the Creative Club, talks with TW creative director John Vogel about her experience transitioning from the advertising world to the artistic path. A big shift happened in her life about ten years ago, and Pia delves into some very personal details about the events that brought about that shift. As she said in our conversation: “I wasn’t expecting to share such vulnerable stories at all. I mean, I shared stuff some of my closest friends didn’t even know about me.”

The two discuss Pia’s experience with self-promoting her book, the role of the brain’s default mode network in the creative act, and the presence of the cosmos in all people. Also included in the episode are three tracks from her collaborative spoken word album Famished with electronic composer Tyler Bodkins. All the music in the episode came from that album.

In today’s episode author Molly Gaudry sits down with TW founder and publisher Martha Nichols. Molly holds degrees in fiction, poetry, and experimental prose, and her new book that just came out last week is aptly titled Fit Into Me: A Novel, A Memoir. The book weaves a fictional narrative into Molly’s own story along with fragments from a wide range of other authors in an effort to create a sense of self via the combination of different elements. With this format Molly explores her experience as a Korean adoptee raised in the US, meeting her birth family as a teenager, and recovering from a brain injury as an adult.

In this TW conversation, Fit Into Me provides a jumping-off point for big questions about self-creation and the holes in memory that writers inevitably confront when telling their own stories. Martha and Molly discuss how she blended its nonfiction sections with the fictional story of a character (the “tea-house woman”) taken from her two previous works, We Take Me Apart (Ampersand, 2009), which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award; and Desire: A Haunting (Ampersand, 2018).