500 episodes listed below
Close readings of writers and their inner weather.
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing centers long, attentive conversations with writers. Its best moments move from process and biography into larger questions about loneliness, tenderness, history, and what language can hold.
PRESS PLAY
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing is a long-running literary interview show shaped by patience, emotional attention, and respect for the strange private pressure behind finished books. Its conversations begin with writers and their work, but they rarely stay only at the level of publication. A novel's plot can become a question about class. A poem can open onto death. A character's choice can reveal a writer's own unfinished argument with courage, care, or memory. The show has a reflective center. It gives writers room to describe not only what they made, but what they discovered by making it. In the excerpts, Camille Dungy connects writing practice to beauty, magic, order, rigor, and scientific investigation. Ada Limon's anniversary episode lingers on tenderness, mortality, human connection, sorrow, and the need to be seen. Andrea Mara describes main characters as versions of the self, sometimes doing what the writer wishes she could do better. Philip Schultz's conversation moves through death, childhood, Holocaust stories, displaced people from the camps, Yiddish translation, and the long afterlife of inherited memory. Tayari Jones's episode turns on rejection, unequal chances, family care, and the difference between being wounded and being traumatized. Bret Anthony Johnston speaks from a place of curiosity, resisting the idea that a story must begin with a declared purpose. The show is not hurried. It listens for origins, hesitations, and the craft choices that carry feeling without flattening it. Anniversary episodes also reveal its archive-minded nature, with selected conversations returning because they changed how the interviewer thought or felt. That gives the series the quality of a literary room revisited over time. Its pleasures are cumulative rather than flashy. The reward is not gossip or quick advice, but the experience of hearing writers think carefully about art, life, and the sentences that try to join them.
Made for: For readers, writers, poets, teachers, and literary listeners who prefer patient craft conversations to quick promotional interviews. It especially suits anyone interested in how books carry grief, memory, family, history, and longing.
What sets it apart: The show stands apart through its unusually intimate pacing and willingness to let craft questions become human questions. It treats form and process as entrances into mortality, connection, trauma, beauty, and artistic discovery.
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, non-fiction, essay, and poetry writers. First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing highlights the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. This weekly show hosted by Mitzi Rapkin is a celebration of creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Close reading becomes generous conversation as Mitzi Rapkin connects formal choices, revision, and character to the pressures shaping a writer's work.
Mitzi Rapkin treats an author's choices as evidence, following details of narration, structure, character, and revision until they disclose the larger pressures inside a work.
A tense shift catches Mitzi Rapkin's eye; you get a closer look at how stories turn.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A reflective episode on how mortality reaches writing through family memory, childhood stories, and letters to the dead.
Death sits at the center of this single-episode review, not as an abstract theme but as something the guest has carried through family history, childhood fear, and the work of writing.
A measured First Draft conversation about family, class, and the line between care and love.
Tayari Jones's First Draft conversation lingers on Vernice and Annie, two small-town girls whose lives are shaped by family, care, and a slight class divide.
A patient craft talk that treats one story as a whole world of feeling and form.
Bret Anthony Johnston's appearance on First Draft centers on a single story and the question of how it came to be. Mitzi Rapkin listens closely as the discussion moves among Holly, the father trying to protect his son, the retrospective narrator, and a brief turn toward future…
A careful conversation about private selves, institutional harm, and the nerve it takes to let a difficult book face readers.
Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time comes through as a study of the private self, shaped by Tom's life as a policeman and by Irish systems that could send children to orphanages and pull escapees back inside.
A focused look at how distance helped a stalled satire find the move it needed.
Revision becomes diagnosis in this account of a book that sat unsold for 18 months before revealing the thing it had left half-used. The manuscript already satirized publishing, writers, editors, and writing communities, but Twitter kept the social-media piece too literal.
A branching migration story uses page-by-page choice to make uncertainty feel intimate, unstable, and consequential.
Ruben Reyes Jr.'s conversation with Mitzi Rapkin keeps the pressure on how a story's shape can hold feeling. In "Variations on Your Migrant Life," the choose-your-own-adventure form follows a boy in El Salvador as his parents leave for America in different combinations, and as…
A live literary conversation on how friendship can shape a writer's thinking.
Claire Massoud and Amitava Kumar join Mitzi Rapkin at the Writers Workshop in Denver for a live conversation about literary friendship and the work of writing.
Two classical-education teachers slow-read novels like Jane Eyre, chapter by chapter.
Book talk with room to wander.
Friendship opens this conversation.
A story turns into a set of crossings.
This episode features an interview with author Paula Saunders about her novel Starting From Here, exploring writing craft, rhythm in language, and connections between dance and prose.
This episode celebrates the 12th anniversary of the writing podcast First Draft by revisiting 12 favorite interviews from over 550 episodes, exploring craft, the writing life, and human themes.
This episode features an interview with author Erica Krause about her short story collection 'Save Me Stranger' and the craft of writing.
This episode features an interview with author Torrey Peters discussing writing for trans audiences and raising the bar in literature.
This episode features an interview with author Elizabeth Strout about her writing process, including her aversion to outlining and insights into her novel 'Tell Me Everything'.
This episode celebrates the 12th anniversary of the First Draft podcast by revisiting 12 favorite interviews from over 550 episodes, focusing on writing craft and the human experience.
This episode features an interview with poet Camille Dungy about her writing practice, exploring how scientific rigor intersects with beauty and creativity in her work.
This episode celebrates the 12th anniversary of the First Draft podcast by revisiting 12 favorite interviews from over 550 conversations with writers about craft, the writing life, and human themes.
This special anniversary episode features a meaningful interview with poet Ada Limón, focusing on human connection, tenderness, death, and the craft of writing.
This episode features an interview with author Andrea Mara about her novel 'It Should Have Been You', exploring writing craft and character development.
Death sits close to the work.
The interview opens on wounds.
A story turns on a pivot.
Protection can turn horribly inside out.
The missing piece was Crave.