Lisa Borders, author of three novels, talks with TW creative director John Vogel to talk about her newest book. Last Night at the Disco (Regal House Publishing, 2025) is a fictitious memoir framed as a letter to the former editor of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner. That context gives the audience their first clue about the book’s narrator, Lynda Boyle.

The introduction to the letter also gives us a few other vague references to crimes, the loss of a teaching position, and a “coke-fueled disco queen” that help fill in a few blanks while raising many more questions.

Although humor had always been a part of Lisa’s personality and writing, for a time she leaned away from it. Her first two books, Cloud Cuckoo Land and The Fifty-First State, reflected this shift, but starting around 2016—as she developed the tone for what would become Last Night at the Disco—she started focusing on humor, including writing a submission for McSweeney's Internet Tendency over the course of a year. That piece was accepted and published as “Signs That You Are a Gen-Xer Going Through Menopause,” which went viral.

In this interview the two discuss narrator Lynda Boyle, satirizing avant-garde poets, and her need to make art as the world falls apart.

For this episode TW creative director John Vogel sat down with television writer and showrunner Michael Jamin about his collection of personal essays, A Paper Orchestra.

Michael’s television career started in the mid-90’s with an episode of Lois and Clark, followed by more involved work on Just Shoot Me! and King of the Hill. Other writing and production credits include Beavis and Butthead, Rules of Engagement, Maron, and Wilfred.

He self-published A Paper Orchestra through his company 3 Girls Jumping, and the book was named one of the best comedy books of 2024 by Vulture. Partially inspired by David Sedaris, Michael has also developed a stage show of the essays that has evolved from readings to reenacted performances of the scenes. In this conversation Michael and John talk about different themes throughout the essays, his transition to the stage, and balancing family life with work.

Author and musician Antonio Michael Downing sits down with TW creative director John Vogel to talk about Antonio Michael's books Black Cherokee and Saga Boy, music audience expectation regarding race and incorporating varied genres, and the disregard of the tech industry when it comes to profiting off of the work of artists without compensation.

If his memoir Saga Boy is a personal story grappling with the effects of colonialism on his psychology, his first full-length novel, Black Cherokee, is a story constructed to show the ways that everyone is living underneath unseen layers of history that they don’t understand.

The story follows Ophelia Blue Rivers, whose Black grandmother married the Cherokee Chief Trouthands, through four slices of time from 1993 to 2005. The book begins with Grandma Blue raising her on the Cherokee reservation while the disbanded tribe figures out how to handle a cattle farm that’s polluting the river. When she’s shipped off to live with her aunt in the nearby town, Ophelia has to integrate herself into typical southern society and finding temporary fellowship in a Baptist church. As she enters high school, she again has to assimilate, this time into affluent white society.

This episode is scored with the John Orpheus song, “Fela Awoke (I Will Miss You).”