Sometimes writers just need a pep talk. Fortunately, Grant Faulkner’s new book provides 52 of them. Faulkner, the author of Pep Talks: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo and Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month joins the GrottoPod this week — on the eve of NaNoWriMo — to discuss the process of writing a novel in one month, his hopes for his new book, his role in the rising popularity of flash fiction and his own writing. If you’d like to try your hand at writing a novel in 30 days during the month of November, check out the official NaNoWriMo website.

The Long Winters frontman John Roderick joins us on the GrottoPod this week and talks about how making a splash — anywhere — can lead to a book deal. Roderick, who formed the long-running Seattle band with fellow ex-Harvey Danger member Sean Nelson, also hosts two podcasts (Roderick on the Line, with writer and 43 Folders founder Merlin Mann, and Road Work, with 5by5 founder Dan Benjamin), has hosted live cabaret and YouTube travel videos, and ran for Seattle City Council (he came in third). All of this — plus massive followings on Twitter and Instagram — have led multiple agents to beg Roderick to write a book. He tells us what he might write, and our hosts offer a GrottoPod first: 35 seconds of mid-podcast rock and roll.

This week, Larry and BQ honor San Francisco’s biggest (and liveliest) literary festival, Litquake, by focusing this guest-free episode on literary readings: what makes them succeed (or not!), how they build community and why writers — and aspiring writers — should attend as many readings as they can. As a bonus, BQ shares her tips for readers, and Larry explains why he can’t stand “poetry voice.” You know what we’re talking about.

On the eve of Litquake, San Francisco’s renowned literary arts festival, co-founder Jack Boulware joins the GrottoPod to talk about his life in the literary scene. Boulware is also the co-founder of the legendary comedy magazine The Nose, the author of several books, including San Francisco Bizarro, a local bon vivant and a native Montanan. Join us as Boulware weaves tales from his colorful, creative life and explains how long hours, low pay and impossible logistics add up to literary glory. Litquake kicks off Oct. 6. Click here for the full schedule.

This week, Laurie Ann Doyle — author of the new short-story collection World Gone Missing, founder of the Babylon Salon literary performance series and GrottoPod co-producer — sits down for a warm, honest and revealing discussion about her writing process, her career and the themes that inspire and compel her work. She has also contributed recent pieces to the Los Angeles Review and the resistance anthology Speak and Speak Again. Don’t miss her at a number of upcoming readings and events around the Bay Area; check out her schedule here.

This week, the GrottoPod travels to the downtown Oakland office of Grotto alum Mary Roach, the New York Times best-selling author of six titles, including Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, and her most recent work, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. Join us for a wide-ranging conversation with one of the Bay Area’s favorite writers.

What do you do when a music industry meltdown kills your band’s record sales? If you’re “Dr. Frank” Portman of East Bay pop-punk pioneers The Mr. T Experience, you get to work becoming a successful YA author. Portman, author of King Dork and Andromeda Klein, joins the GrottoPod this week to explain his process, his path from punk rock to literature and why he recorded a companion album for the paperback release of his latest book, King Dork Approximately.

What are the unique challenges of being a best-selling author? Find out this week as Janelle Brown — whose latest book, Watch Me Disappear, debuted at #13 on the New York Times bestseller list — joins the GrottoPod to talk about expectations, process, why she doesn’t like it when her characters are called “difficult” and the contrasts between living and writing in Los Angeles and doing the same in the Bay Area. Brown is also the author of This Is Where We Live and All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. Watch Me Disappear was recently optioned for film by The Gotham Group.

When Christian Winn moved from Seattle to Boise, he didn’t realize that he was also jump-starting his writing career. Twenty years later, he’s Idaho’s writer-in-residence and a central piece of Boise’s literary scene. Winn, author of the short story collection Naked Me, respected writing teacher and founder of the Storyfort Literary Festival, joins the GrottoPod this week to ruminate on his path, the nature of “western” writing and how it feels to be Boise’s prodigal son.

Journalist and writer Roberto Lovato has spent his life running toward — rather than away from — conflict. Through it all, he has never stopped seeking the truth and has never wavered from his belief in the spirituality of the written word. This week, the San Francisco native joins the GrottoPod to recount his journey, share his point of view and explain why he’ll never stop trying to bring levity to a complicated and often dangerous world.

Critically-acclaimed poet, Grotto member and former New York Times poetry editor Matthew Zapruder releases his newest book, Why Poetry?, today. To celebrate, we’re revisiting his April interview with GrottoPod hosts Bridget Quinn and Larry Rosen, where he talked about his life in poetry and the reasons this often-misunderstood genre of writing is so important. Zapruder embarks on a book tour this week, including stops in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. For his complete schedule, check out his calendar of upcoming events.

Laura Fraser is, among other things, a best-selling memoirist; an instinctive muckraking journalist; a celebrated travel writer; the founder of Shebooks, a publishing imprint dedicated to women authors; and a Grotto O.G. (Original Gangsta). This week she joins the GrottoPod to discuss her travels and travails, mentors and mentoring, and the halcyon early days of the San Francisco Writers Grotto.

Why do you write? Or, rather, how do you write? This week, hosts Bridget Quinn and Larry Rosen address these issues, landing on questions of motivation, ambition and outcome as they share their respective “state-of-the-writer” stories. This episode closes with a pair of unexpected twists: we’re proposing a 500-word-a-day “GrottoPod Challenge” — and we bring you a new track from our house band, Sugartown.

Can you create community and ritual without religion, raise moral and ethical children without the guiding hand of the church, find grace without God? This week, we address big questions like these when award-winning journalist Katherine Ozment joins the GrottoPod to talk about her book Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose and Belonging in a Secular Age. Born in Arkansas, Ozment is a former senior editor for National Geographic.

Bridget Watson Payne is the embodiment of the GrottoPod motto “read, write and just keep working.” In addition to her responsibilities as Chronicle Books’ art books editor, she is an illustrator and artist and recently published two (!) books, How Art Can Make You Happy and The Secret Art of Being a Grown-up. This week, she joins us to discuss her work, the writer-editor relationship and the mysteries of publishing. She also offers tips on how to be an effective adult.

Oscar Villalon didn’t set out to become a literary gatekeeper, but that’s part of his job description as the managing editor of Zyzzyva, arguably the most prominent literary journal in the Bay Area. Join us this week as we welcome Oscar to the GrottoPod and discuss his career as a reader, writer and journalist and pull away some of the opaque drapery that often shrouds the publishing process.

Can you “catch” a behavior like you’d catch a cold? Lee Kravetz, co-author of Supersurvivors, thinks so. This week, he joins the GrottoPod to explain how. Kravetz (also a producer of our podcast) lays it out in his new book, Strange Contagion, which is released this week. Strange Contagion explores how social contagion — communicable ideas, thoughts and actions — turned volatile in Kravetz’s home of Palo Alto, California, creating a rash of teenage suicides. He also looks at how a similar kind of contagion helped the community recover from those tragedies.

Michael Frank, author of the acclaimed new memoir The Mighty Franks, grew up in an unusual, “intertwined” family. He was swept up into the world of his childless aunt and uncle, a pair of prominent Hollywood screenwriters who helped create such films as Norma Rae and The Long, Hot Summer. They taught him about art, literature and culture — and that “fitting in is death.” Things got complicated, though, when he tried to establish some boundaries as a teenager. What were the costs of his coming-of-age? Find out this week on the GrottoPod.

To retreat or not to retreat? That is the question on this week’s special, guest-free episode of the GrottoPod. Join BQ and Larry as they engage in a spirited conversation about what makes writing retreats and conferences irresistible (BQ) or easily resistible and somewhat enigmatic (Larry) — and where writers of all kinds can go to find their community. Also, in a GrottoPod first, BQ gets bleeped.

How does a “typical Nigerian-Norse American girl” get from rural Washington State to Harvard, Thailand and then San Francisco? Faith Adiele, the product of Sunnyside, Washington’s “only mixed-race, Marxist anti-war family,” who became Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun, joins the GrottoPod this week to share the fantastical twists, turns and happy accidents that led her to become a celebrated memoirist (Finding Faith), filmmaker (My Journey Home), teacher and speaker.

You may not find working with inmates at San Quentin uplifting, but prominent tech journalist Yukari Kane does. This week Kane, a one-time Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote the definitive book on Apple after Steve Jobs, fills the GrottoPod with tales of health challenges, snap career decisions, suspicious sources, world tours and the genesis of her decision to teach at one of California’s most infamous prisons.

Todd Oppenheimer was an actor, a mime and a successful journalist who published in all the major magazines and won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest Reporting. But it wasn’t until he started his own publication, Craftsmanship Quarterly, that he found his life’s work. This week, Todd joins us in the GrottoPod to talk about his magazine, the Craftsmanship Initiative, his passion for craft and “working with your hands,” and the challenges of doing mime in Central Park with a young, untamable Robin Williams.

Some writers take unorthodox paths to success; for Joe Loya, author of The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell, that path includes a childhood full of spiritual, sometimes violent and tragic, twists and turns, followed by a stint as a bank robber known as “The Beirut Bandit.” He spent seven years in federal prison, where a months-long stint in solitary confinement led to the epiphany that began his writing career. A born storyteller, Loya covers all of it — and sets a GrottoPod record for colorful language — on this week’s show.

What if the hand of God (in the form of Stephen Colbert) reached down and helped make your first published novel a New York Times best-seller? It happened to Edan Lepucki, whose post-apocalyptic novel California was the unwitting beneficiary of a Colbert vs. Amazon feud in 2014. Now, on the publication day of her new book, Woman No. 17, Lepucki joins us in the GrottoPod to explain how she went from hoping for “okay reviews” to signing 10,000 books in one weekend, how she feels about “difficult” protagonists, her preference for L.A. over Berkeley, and much more.

How are the stakes changed when a journalist pursues a personal story? This week, veteran tech writer Fred Vogelstein enters the GrottoPod to share his journey from Freshman remedial English to Wired, Fortune, U.S. News & World Report and his book Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. He also addresses the challenges he faced when he chose to write about his family’s battle to secure a ground-breaking drug to treat his son’s epilepsy.