In this special Sunday episode of The Write Question, our team gathers some of their favorite moments from 2021. Featuring excerpts from conversations with Caroline Patterson, Raymond Antrobus, Kerri Arsenault, Anthony W. Wood, and Stephen Graham Jones.

This week’s episode is an encore broadcast of Sarah Aronson’s conversation with Stephanie Land about her 2019 memoir, MAID: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive. 2021 brought a Netflix adaptation of the memoir. The critically acclaimed series prompted a surge in memoir sales for Land, as well as a renewed interest in labor rights and conversations about America’s working poor.

This week during The Write Question, Lauren talks with cultural critic Anne Helen Petersen, co-author, alongside Charlie Warzel, of Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home, who re-imagines a future wherein our work lives are no longer our entire lives.

This week on The Write Question, Lauren talks with Bozeman, Montana-based essayist Amy Leach about her modern bestiary, The Everybody Ensemble, in which she brings together a cacophony of voices—of the many, many animals that populate our world.

This week during The Write Question, Idaho-based poet and essayist Robert Wrigley talks to trees. (And to Lauren! About the difference between poetry and prose, about fatherhood, about music, and more!)

This week Lauren chats with fiction writer Robin McLean, author of Pity the Beast, a contemporary, eco-feminist Western in which a woman escapes to the northern Rocky Mountains after a violent encounter with a number of people close to her, including her husband and her half-sister. With leanings into and outside of the contemporary American West, into and outside of morality and goodness, this novel is a deep dive into myth, landscape, and freedom.

This week’s episode is an encore broadcast of Sarah Aronson’s conversation with CMarie Fuhrman about her nonfiction and work as co-editor for the anthology, Native Voices. This program was recorded in Spokane, Washington, during their Get Lit! literary festival with the generous support of Spokane Public Radio.

This week, Lauren talks with physician and writer Laura Kolbe, author of Little Pharma (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), a book that uses poetry as the doctor’s tool into empathy, into the interior lives of patients and beyond the material relationships between bodies.

This week, Lauren chats with Stephen Graham Jones, author of My Heart Is a Chainsaw (Gallery Books, Saga Press). My Heart Is a Chainsaw is a meta-narrative homage to classic slasher films like Scream and Friday the 13th. Indeed, there are nearly 200 film references in this novel, hiding in plain sight, and they are a joy to encounter for horror film aficionados and novices alike.

This week, Lauren chats with wildlife biologist and journalist Doug Chadwick, the author of Four Fifths a Grizzly (Patagonia Works), a book that challenges the idea that humans are separate from nature, from the non-human world.