On this week’s episode of Working, Rumaan Alam talked with children’s author Stuart Gibbs about writing mystery novels for young readers. They talked about his shift to writing for kids, how he manages multiple projects, and his relationship with readers. This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Rumaan Alam: You talk about the complexity of writing a plot that is a crime plot that also talks about the extinction of an animal species. That’s a very serious thing. In the new FunJungle book, which is coming out in May,
, you’re doing a similar thing. There’s the fun plot that animates the story, which is, did this wild bear somehow accidentally steal this very expensive piece of jewelry? But underneath that, there’s a conversation about some serious things: sophisticated ideas about the relationship between white Americans and Native Americans, for example, or the stewardship of America’s public lands. As someone who has read these books to my
Are there things from your medical training that you use in your writing practice?
A number of the shows that I’ve worked on have been set in the medical world. That was a big part of my early career. The first show I did [
Cardiac Arrest] it was a little like
Scrubs is probably the best example. It was a comedy-drama built around the experiences of interns and residents. Then I did another show a few years later that was a much darker and more complex piece. It was an out-and-out drama set in obstetrics and gynecology, in a department that had multiple dysfunctions. It was an examination of how things can go wrong in the medical world. I guess the universal factor is that I’ve got primary experience of seeing very stressful life-or-death situations and have seen lots of people in those situations, coping with them and responding to them in different ways. So that gives me a template to write about that kind of scenario.
On this week’s episode of Working, June Thomas spoke with photographer, filmmaker, and activist Joan E. Biren (also known as JEB) about her groundbreaking 1979 book,
Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. They discussed how she found a diverse cross-section of the community to photograph, the barriers that affected how the book came together, and the gratifying creative process of reissuing the volume in 2021. This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
June Thomas: I can tell from these photos that you didn’t meet these women, take the photos five minutes later, and move on.
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Joan E. Biren: If somebody had been identified to me as a possible person who might be in the book, I would usually write to them or meet them or talk to them without a camera being present. I would explain what I was doing. I would be very clear that this was meant for publication. I had designed special release forms that said, “I can be identified as a lesbian. I ca
On this week’s episode of Working, June Thomas spoke with actor and award-winning audiobook narrator Abby Craden about her voice work. They discussed the technical aspects that go into recording an audiobook, her creative license in making narration decisions, and the differences between working on fiction and nonfiction projects. This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
June Thomas: Let’s talk about the accents, the different tones of voices. I noticed that you do a lot with different pitches, different amounts of gravel, you might say. How do you describe how you do different voices?
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