A Small, Good Thing
A Small, Good Thing
Podcast Description
"A Small, Good Thing" is a podcast about short fiction. In every episode, I get to discuss the short story form with writers, academics, publishers, and anyone who shares a passion for short stories.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast explores themes around short fiction, including publishing challenges, writing techniques, and the cultural significance of short stories. Episodes feature discussions on specific works by authors such as John Cheever and Yiyun Li, as well as insights into initiatives like short story competitions. Additionally, it touches upon the evolution of narrative styles and engages with the academic perspectives on storytelling.
“A Small, Good Thing” is a podcast about short fiction. In every episode, I get to discuss the short story form with writers, academics, publishers, and anyone who shares a passion for short stories.
What can fictional representations of blocked short story writers teach us about writer’s block and what causes a writer to feel blocked? I discuss these questions with Aaron Colton, Associate Teaching Professor and Director of First-Year Writing in the Department of English at Emory University in Atlanta. Aaron is the author of the book Writing Through Writer’s Block: Lessons from Modern American Fiction, published by the University of Iowa Press in 2025.
Works mentioned:
Aaron Colton, Writing Through Writer’s Block: Lessons from Modern American Fiction (University of Iowa Press, 2025).
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2002).
Elizabeth Tallent, Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism (Harper, 2020).
Mike Rose (ed.), When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writer’s Block and Other Composing-Process Problems (Guilford Press, 1985).
Mike Rose, ‘Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Approach to Writer’s Block.’ College Composition and Communication 31, no. 4 (1980), pp. 389–401.
Tillie Olsen, Silences, 25th edition (Feminist Press at CUNY, 2003).
John W. Aldridge, Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly Line Fiction (Scribner’s, 1992).
Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Lucy Ives, Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World. A Novel. (Soft Skull Press, 2019).
Nam Le, ‘Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,’ in The Boat (Vintage, 2009), pp. 3-28.
Ian Afflerbach, ‘On the Literary History of Selling Out: Craft, Identity, and Commercial Recognition’, in PMLA 137, no. 2 (2022), pp. 238–54.
Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018).
Andrew Martin, ‘No Cops’, in Cool for America: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020).
Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
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