The Resilient Writers Radio Show

Send us a text! We'd love to hear your thoughts on the show.
In this episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show, I’m joined by Aga Maksimowska, author of Becalming and Giant, for a thoughtful conversation about voice, literary fiction, and what it means to return to a character after more than a decade. 
Aga’s latest novel, Becalming, is anything but calm. It’s propulsive, emotionally layered, and deeply attentive to the messy, often contradictory experience of early adulthood—something Aga knew from the beginning she wanted to capture on the page.
We begin by talking about Gosia, the protagonist of Becalming, who readers may recognize from Aga’s earlier novel Giant. Though Aga never intended to write a sequel, Gosia returned—older, more complicated, and shaped by the difficult work of becoming an adult while still carrying the imprint of childhood. 
Aga shares what it was like to revisit a character she already knew and discover how much more there was to uncover once Gosia was placed in new relationships, new responsibilities, and the complicated emotional terrain of adulthood.
Aga also talks about her deep love of first-person narrative and voice-driven fiction. We explore why she’s drawn to intimate, character-rich storytelling and how her background in journalism shaped her curiosity about people and the stories they carry. 
She reflects on the craft choices behind Becalming—particularly her desire to write about frustration, disappointment, and emotional upheaval without creating an angry narrator. Instead, she leans into humor, tenderness, and the kind of emotional complexity that feels deeply human without tipping into sentimentality.
One of the most fascinating parts of our conversation centers on language, migration, and identity. Aga shares how writing across cultures allows her to explore the ways personality shifts through language, and how Gosia is, in many ways, a different person in Polish than she is in English. 
✨ It’s a rich conversation about inheritance, history, and how identity is shaped not only by where we come from, but by the language we move through.
We also talk about titles, process, and Aga’s affection for difficult books—the kind that ask readers to do a little work, to make leaps, and to trust what’s unfolding on the page. She shares why Becalming became the right title, how she wrote much of the book at 5 a.m. and in Toronto libraries, and why she believes some books are meant to stay in the drawer. It’s a generous, thoughtful conversation about writing with depth, trusting your instincts, and allowing the work to become what it wants to be.

Send us a text! We'd love to hear your thoughts on the show.
There’s something fascinating about stories that sit just outside the spotlight—moments in history that don’t always get the same attention, but quietly shape the world we’re living in now. That’s exactly where this conversation with Melanie Anagnos begins.
Melanie’s novel Night Swimming is set in the 1970s—a decade often overshadowed by the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, but one that was just as complex, just as charged, and in many ways, still echoing today. 
As she shares in this episode, it was a time of enormous social change: the women’s movement gaining momentum, early conversations around gay rights, and shifting economic realities. It’s also a moment that feels surprisingly familiar when you look at today’s cultural conversations.
What’s especially interesting is how Melanie came to write this book. Like so many writers, she had a first novel that never made it out into the world. 
But instead of being a dead end, that project became the seed for something new. 
A minor character from that earlier manuscript—Jamie—grew into the central figure of Night Swimming, a young police officer navigating both a homicide investigation and a rapidly changing cultural landscape.
And here’s where it gets even more compelling: Melanie didn’t set out to write a police procedural. In fact, she initially felt completely unqualified to do so. But inspired by a David Bowie quote about pushing beyond your comfort zone, she leaned into the unfamiliar—and discovered not only a new genre, but a new creative energy in her work.
We talk about the deep research that went into bringing this story to life—from listening to police interviews and podcasts like Small Town Dicks, to digging through archives on Newspapers.com to capture the everyday details of the 1970s. Because when you’re writing in a pre-digital world, every small detail matters.
But at the heart of it, this isn’t just a story about crime—it’s a story about character. Melanie is deeply drawn to character-driven fiction, and that’s clear in how she approaches Jamie. 
He’s not perfect. He’s not heroic in the traditional sense. But he’s decent. He’s trying. And that, as Melanie points out, is often what makes a character feel real—and worth following into a series.
We also explore one of the most nuanced challenges of writing historical fiction: how to portray women accurately within the constraints of the time, while still creating characters that resonate with modern readers. It’s a delicate balance, and one Melanie approached with thoughtfulness and care.
This conversation is such a beautiful reminder that writing often asks us to step into uncertainty—to try something we’re not sure we can do, to follow an idea even when it feels unfamiliar. And sometimes, that’s exactly where the most interesting work begins.

Send us a text! We'd love to hear your thoughts on the show.
If you’ve ever found yourself polishing the first chapter of your novel over and over again while the rest of the story stubbornly refuses to move forward, this episode is going to feel very familiar—and very reassuring.
In this conversation, I’m joined by editor, author, and book coach Rebecca Pickens, and we talk about something that doesn’t always get as much attention as plot or structure, but might actually matter more than anything else: emotional impact.
Rebecca works with a lot of writers on their debut novels, and she sees a very common pattern. Writers learn all the craft tools—story structure, narrative arc, opening hooks, character arcs—and they apply them carefully and thoughtfully. But somewhere along the way, they start to lose touch with the very thing that made them want to write the story in the first place: the emotional heart of the story and the characters they fell in love with.
As Rebecca points out, writers often love craft, but readers love characters. Readers remember characters who feel real, complicated, and emotionally alive, even more than they remember perfectly structured plots or beautiful sentences.
We talk about how emotional impact often comes from two key tools: interiority and subtext. Interiority is what the character is thinking and feeling inside—the things they don’t say out loud. When readers are given access to those private thoughts and feelings, they feel closer to the character and more invested in what happens to them.
Subtext, on the other hand, is what’s happening beneath the surface of a scene. Instead of telling the reader exactly what a character is feeling, we show it through their behavior, their reactions, and what they don’t say. Readers get to connect the dots themselves, and that makes the story more engaging and more emotionally powerful.
Rebecca also talks about how emotions become more compelling when they are connected to a character’s identity—who they believe they are, what they fear, what they want their life to mean. When conflict threatens a character’s identity, the emotional stakes become much higher and the story becomes much more compelling.
We also talk about when writers should think about emotional impact—during outlining, drafting, revising, or editing—and why, for many writers, it’s actually easier to put all the emotional material into the first draft and then shape it later, rather than trying to add emotional depth after the story is written.
Finally, we talk about endings—why writers often get stuck when they reach the end of their manuscript, and why a satisfying ending usually depends less on the final chapter and more on whether the character has truly earned that ending through a believable character arc.
Rebecca has also created a free workbook to help writers craft stronger endings, with prompts and checklists you can use to evaluate whether your story is landing the way you want it to. You can download that free workbook here and use it as you revise your ending.
This is a thoughtful, practical, and encouraging conversation about how to make readers not just read your story—but feel it.

Send us a text! We'd love to hear your thoughts on the show.
In this episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show, I’m talking with novelist Whitney Cubbison, who lives in Paris and writes romantic comedies inspired by her experiences as an American expat navigating dating, divorce, friendship, and life abroad. 
But what makes Whitney’s story so interesting isn’t just the Paris setting or the dating disasters—it’s how she became a novelist in the first place.
Whitney didn’t grow up planning to write novels. She spent many years working in communications and PR for Microsoft, writing speeches and corporate communications. Writing was always part of her life—she journaled for years—but fiction wasn’t something she had seriously considered. 
That all changed after her divorce, when she found herself going on a series of truly terrible dates in Paris. Every time she told the stories to friends, they kept saying the same thing: “You have to write a book.”
Eventually, she did.
She started writing down her experiences on a plane after a work trip, without really knowing how novels worked or how to structure a story. Like many first-time writers, she wrote first and figured out structure later. 
She describes that early draft as basically pouring her life onto the page and then trying to figure out how to turn that into an actual novel. What followed was a long learning process—hiring editors, restructuring the story, rewriting large sections, pitching agents, getting rejected, hiring another editor, and rewriting again. 
Through that process, she learned how novels are built and what it really takes to turn a story into a book.
Her first novel, Will There Be Wine?, grew out of that experience and became a romantic comedy about an American expat in Paris trying to rebuild her life after divorce. 
But her second novel, Will There Be Love?, was a completely different challenge. This time she wrote a fully fictional story told from four different points of view and set mostly over the course of a single dramatic weekend in Ibiza. She intentionally wanted to challenge herself as a writer by working with multiple narrators, writing from male perspectives, and compressing the timeline of the story.
One of my favorite moments in this conversation was when Whitney said that after her first book, she still wasn’t sure she was really a writer. But after writing the second book—from a blank page, building characters and story from scratch—that was when she finally thought, “Okay, I think I’m a writer now.”
We also talked about self-publishing and marketing, because of course when you self-publish, you’re not just the writer—you’re also the marketing department. Whitn

Send us a text! We'd love to hear your thoughts on the show.
If you love stories that explore art, history, identity, and the lives of women artists across time, this episode will absolutely fascinate you.
In this conversation on The Resilient Writers Radio Show, I’m joined by writer, translator, and literary critic Merav Fima, author of the short story collection Late Blossoms and the forthcoming novel The Rose of Thirteen Petals and the Pomegranate Tree. 
Merav’s work explores the lives, struggles, and artistic legacies of Jewish women artists across history, and this conversation is a wonderful deep dive into how a book can grow slowly over many years and eventually become something much larger than originally imagined.
Merav shares that Late Blossoms actually began as part of her master’s thesis in creative writing, but the earliest story in the collection was written even earlier, inspired by a painting she encountered while studying art history. That moment sparked a story about Else Lasker-Schüler, a Jewish expressionist poet and artist persecuted by the Nazis, and that story eventually became the seed for an entire collection focused on Jewish women artists and their lives, struggles, and creative work.
One of the most fascinating parts of this conversation is how the collection came together over more than twenty years. Rather than writing all the stories at once, Merav wrote them slowly—sometimes only one story per year—until she eventually realized she had a full collection. 
We also talk about the challenge of structuring a short story collection and how important it is to think about the book as a whole, not just individual pieces. Merav shares how organizing the stories chronologically and thematically helped create a narrative arc across the collection.
We also talk about her upcoming novel, The Rose of Thirteen Petals and the Pomegranate Tree, which follows a contemporary Sephardic family tracing their lineage back through history to medieval Spain. The novel moves backward through time across different countries and generations, exploring migration, memory, identity, and cultural legacy. Merav explains how this novel grew out of her doctoral research and required extensive historical and literary research to bring the settings and time periods to life.
Another wonderful part of this conversation is our discussion about writing across different genres. Merav has written short stories, novels, memoir, scholarly writing, and even picture books, and she shares how each form requires a different mindset and writing process. She talks about how short stories focus on a single turning point, while novels require expansion and deeper emotional exploration, and memoir required a completely different drafting process.
We also talk about perfectionism, mindset, and learning to see a book as a whole project rather than just individual chapters or stories — something so many writers struggle with.
This is a thoughtful, inspiring conversation about writing across genres, writing about art and history, and how books sometimes take many years to become what they are meant to be.