Author Kirstin Chen graduated college with thoughts of getting a “practical” job. Two acclaimed novels later, Chen takes time out from a hectic book tour to join the GrottoPod and talk about how her new book, Bury What We Cannot Take, differs from her debut, Soy Sauce for Beginners. She also describes her “regimented” work style — and how a journey that began in Singapore and went through New Hampshire and the Banana Republic corporate offices now sees her producing 1,000 words of fiction every day.

This week, New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Evison joins us for our last live show from Boise’s Storyfort literary festival. Evison, who’s the executive editor of The Nervous Breakdown, rose to fame with his 2008 novel All About Lulu. For this episode, Evison — who appeared with Stewart O’Nan on our podcast a couple of weeks ago — leaves no stone unturned, touching on a wild array of topics ranging from his newest book, Lawn Boy, his writing process, thoughts on characters and narrative, and his optimistic outlook on his home team, the Seattle Seahawks, in 2018.

A Boise hotel suite is the GrottoPod’s roving studio this week as our Storyfort Festival episodes continue. We talk with five-time novelist — and Richmond Fontaine and The Delines frontman — Willy Vlautin. X guitarist (and BQ crush) John Doe calls Vlautin’s newest book, Don’t Skip Out On Me, “Beautifully crushing and complete,” so you know it’s good. A hotel room in the West might be ideal for sitting down with Vlautin, whose first novel, The Motel Life, is set in his Reno hometown. We talk about growing up working-class in the West, and expecting to find adulthood mostly on a barstool but writing novels and songs instead. Our conversation ranges from the necessity of treating writing like any tough job, why janitors deserve to be protagonists, how you should always have back-up batteries and why playing in a band is a great way to make friends.

When one-time model and actress August McLaughlin set out to become a writer, she never imagined she’d become a brand. Inspired after overcoming struggles with body image and an eating disorder, McLaughlin emerged to become an author, podcast host, activist and one of the country’s leading experts on women’s and sexual empowerment. This week, the host of Girl Boner Radio, and author of the forthcoming book Girl Boner: The Good Girl’s Guide to Sexual Empowerment, joins BQ and Larry for a live podcast at Storyfort 2018 to share her revelations and turning points, her future, and how anorexia is like a bad relationship.

For the first of four episodes recorded at the Storyfort Festival in Idaho, the GrottoPod breaks format and sits in a Boise nightspot with Stewart O’Nan, whose 16 novels include Snow Angels, West of Sunset, and City of Secrets, and New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Evison. There — minus BQ, and just prior to the release of Evison’s newest book, Lawn Boy — O’Nan, Evison and host Larry Rosen go granular on the nuts and bolts of writing, publishing, promoting and why a Pittsburgh native would write a book about the Boston Red Sox.

Natalie Baszile’s ascent from working in her family’s business to publishing her first novel is the classic story of a 20-year “overnight” success, one that ends with a TV deal and a playdate with Oprah. Join Natalie as she steps into the GrottoPod to talk about the ups and downs of her journey, including how she bounced back from “the darkest summer” of her life, how her novel Queen Sugar caught the eye of Harpo Productions and director Ava DuVernay and became a TV series, and why fiction writers can benefit from the teachings of Robert McKee.

In 1993, Pete Mulvihill chose an uncertain future in San Francisco over graduate school in Oregon, then “stumbled into a temp job” at iconic local bookstore Green Apple Books. Flash-forward a quarter century: Mulvihill is now co-owner of two Green Apple stores and a member of the American Booksellers Association Board of Directors. He joins the GrottoPod this week to talk about how he found his life’s work, why he’s committed to local businesses, how Green Apple addresses the ongoing challenges of technology and how a self-described “library kid” became a pillar of the San Francisco literary community.

One of the best places to find compelling stories and characters is public spaces. Like, say, the bus. Launched a decade ago by a San Francisco State class assignment, the Muni Diaries blog quickly grew into a multimedia mini-empire. Now it’s known as San Francisco Diaries, the newly-rebranded brainchild of one-time journalism major Eugenia Chien and former local newspaper reporter Tara Ramroop, who produce a website, live shows and a podcast, all dedicated to stories about living in San Francisco. This week, Eugenia and Tara join the GrottoPod to share their own San Francisco stories, their roles as journalists, emcees and editors, and why they chose to expand their focus beyond “transit stories” and tales of “shoulder humpers” and cigarette-smoking personal bus drivers.

Anna Brones followed her heart, and it led her around the world — and into a career writing books about her favorite things: bicycles, food and Swedish culture. Her latest, Live Lagom: Balanced Living the Swedish Way, explores the Swedish way of finding balance in life and work. This week, Brones joins the GrottoPod to discuss her journey from “small town hippie” to traveler, epicurean, artist, activist and writer, her struggles with “I should” vs. “I am,” and why she’s not at all bitter about not being her high school’s valedictorian.

Tamara Barak Aparton got more than than she expected when she left the San Francisco Examiner for a post with San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s office. The former reporter found that, far from being the dry, staid environment one might expect in city government, California’s only elected Public Defender encouraged his new public information officer to be creative. This week, Aparton tells us how humor can engage the public, what she’s learned from a career that’s ping-ponged between newspapers and public relations, some of the ways writers and journalists can survive and thrive in a constantly changing media landscape, and how, in a different universe, she and Bridget were best friends in high school.

Everybody, it seems, aspires to be a travel writer. This week’s guest, Kimberley Lovato, author of Unique Eats and Eateries of San Francisco and two more books, is already there. Join us as Lovato shows us how the travel-writer sausage is made, including both the glamour and the grind, the journalism behind the glitz, the challenges of writing a food guide, what happens when all the copies of your new book burn up in a warehouse fire — and why it’s better to be a writer who travels than a traveler who writes.

Many authors come to writing later in life, but few make the kind of splash Julie Lythcott-Haims did. She was a Dean at Stanford (and, before that, an attorney) when she quit to pursue an MFA in her 40s. Flash forward, and she is now the author of two successful books: the anti-helicopter parenting manifesto How to Raise an Adult, and her new memoir on race, Real American. Lythcott-Haims joins us on the GrottoPod this week to discuss her journey, her strategies as a writer, her family and her feelings about overparenting. Don’t miss her at Babylon Salon in San Francisco on Saturday, March 3.

Ben Marks, the general manager of Collectors Weekly, brings his colorful backstory to the GrottoPod on this week’s episode. Join us as we trace his wanderings from a childhood in San Rafael to a career that has included working on a lobster boat in Maine, co-owning a restaurant in Seattle, making it as a writer in Los Angeles, landing a cushy job at Sunset magazine, and finally coming to the Grotto, where he and two colleagues produce an online magazine dedicated to deep dives into backstories as colorful as his own.

Some people want to meet their heroes; writer/historian Dennis McNally made a career out of meeting his. Already the author of the definitive Beat biography, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America, his life changed when he met with Jerry Garcia in 1980. He became the Grateful Dead’s biographer, and then a few years later the band’s publicist, a role he held for more than a decade. He came away from the experience with another book, A Long, Strange Trip: The Inside Story of the Grateful Dead, and too many stories to for a one-hour podcast. Join us this week as McNally shares some of his adventures in rock and roll and academia and recounts his own long, strange trip from military brat to chronicler of American Bohemia.

Writer Mary Ladd was carving out a niche for herself as a San Francisco food and nightlife scribe when she ran headlong into a diagnosis of breast cancer. Looking ahead to a long road of treatment, illness, fear and a concerned husband and small child, she chose to tackle the crisis with humor. This week, on the eve of her “nipple launch” party, Ladd joins BQ and Larry to discuss how cancer changed her writing and her approach to freelancing, and how facing the worst sometimes brings out the best. She’s currently shopping her book The Wig Report, illustrated by Don Asmussen, based on her blog of the same name. Keep an eye out for it.

What’s your New Year’s resolution? Does it have something to do with writing? Do you want to write and publish more (or less)? Ease into the new year — and your literary resolutions — with Larry and BQ, who toss around some thoughts about how to approach writing, how to keep yourself in the flow and how to manage your writing career.

For next “best of” GrottoPod episode we return to our roots — and the San Francisco Writers Grotto’s roots — with guests Po Bronson and Ethan Watters. The Grotto co-founders joined us for GrottoPod Episode 2 to discuss the Grotto’s humble beginnings and subsequent growth, tracing a path that traverses more than two decades from a rickety Victorian home to an abandoned pet hospital, and finally, to the present-day Grotto, 100-plus members strong and a fixture of the Bay Area literary community. If you missed this stellar conversation the first time around, now’s your chance to dig into it.

This week, we travel back in time to visit with GrottoPod producer Lee Kravetz as he anticipates the release of his second book, Strange Contagion, last June — and then return to the present as Lee recaps the mania of his past six months. He talks about endless touring and his efforts to raise awareness of social contagions and their impact. He also shares a few thoughts on finding a renewed enthusiasm about writing — and Hanukkah leather jackets. Yep, they’re a thing.

2017 has been quite a year for our inaugural GrottoPod guest, Shanthi Sekeran. Her novel, Lucky Boy, has been named to several “best of” lists, including NPR’s Best Books of 2017, and she’s travelled far and wide — from Nashville to Honolulu to Edinburgh — for readings. In November, Eva Longoria’s production company announced it is developing Lucky Boy as a television series for Universal TV, to be adapted by David Schooner (Do No Harm) and directed by Nisa Ganatra (Transparent, Dear White People). All of this was ahead of her way back in February, though, when she agreed to be the first GrottoPod guest. Travel back in time with us to revisit that day when Shanthi stepped into our tiny studio to discuss expectations for her then-new book, motherhood and the challenges presented by both.

Guinevere de la Mare, author of I’d Rather Be Reading, calls the compilation of art and essays “a love letter to reading.” De la Mare’s life-long love of reading led her to create the Silent Book Club, a “happy hour for introverts” that now has chapters in more than 50 cities worldwide. Listen in as Guinevere explains how a kindergarten rebellion kicked off her love of reading, how her two-year-old indirectly contributed to the birth of the Silent Book Club, how to say “Captain Underpants” in Italian and how to treasure reading in an age of shrinking attention spans.

How do agents spend their time? This week, Jennifer March Soloway, associate agent at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency, joins her old running buddy BQ and Larry in the GrottoPod to clear up some of the mysteries surrounding the agent-writer relationship. She also talks query strategy, revisions, “the prologue question,” why some query letters receive “radio silence,” how agents work as advocates for their clients — and how an ex-amateur boxer found her bliss by becoming a literary agent.

This week, seven-time novelist Cristina Garcia joins the GrottoPod to discuss the evolution of both her best-selling debut novel Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and herself, tracking her path from Havana to the Bay Area (with stops in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Frankfurt), from would-be Pampers marketer to Time magazine bureau chief to best-selling author to playwright. Along the way, she discusses stories that cannot be told through journalism; what brought her to Berlin for her latest book, Here in Berlin; how good timing helped make Dreaming in Cuban a literary sensation; Fidel Castro’s basketball obsession and what happens when your mother insists you get your hair done for the national book awards ceremony.

How’s your NaNoWriMo coming? This week, Larry and BQ pause at the annual novel-writing sprint’s halfway point to reflect on their experiences keeping up a 1,700-words-per-day pace, and to discuss the ins and outs of speed-dating your latest writing project. Then, having analyzed the heck out of their respective triumphs and challenges, they dive into the hidden controversies surrounding book blurbs. And don’t miss our recent interview with the man who started it all: the impeccably named Grant Faulkner, who offers some pep talks to get you through the halfway slump.

Activist, sex worker, lecturer, Juggalo, editor and writer Kitty Stryker has no shortage of interests and no trouble staying busy. Already a widely-published journalist and essayist, her new book Ask: Building Consent Culture, shows that she’s also no stranger to excellent timing. The anthology features work from other activist writers, including Carol Queen and Virgie Tovar. Kitty brings her effervescent personality to the GrottoPod this week to discuss her unique life and outlook — and equally unique approach to a book tour.

Kaitlin Solimine thought her future would be in international business — until a high-school Mandarin class changed the course of her life. Two decades later, this former exchange student, East Asian Studies major, Harvard-Yenching scholar and U.S. Department of State Fulbright Creative Arts Fellow considers China her “second home.” Her first novel, Empire of Glass, is the culmination of this lifelong interest and has been shortlisted for the 2017 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. This week, Kaitlin joins the GrottoPod this week to discuss the genesis of her novel, her brush with the C.I.A. and the challenges of taking a toddler on book tour.