 

"Even people who have been writing fiction for a long time feel that from book to book they have a lot to learn."

— Neal Lipschutz

About This Episode

Neal Lipschutz grew up in Brooklyn as a big reader with a strong urge to write, and as a teenager he fell in love with the New York newspapers. Practicality won out: he spent more than four decades in journalism, first as a reporter and then mostly as an editor, including a stint as deputy editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal. Only after retiring did he take up fiction full-time, treating it as a new job he showed up for every day. Neal talks with Mike about which newsroom habits carried over to fiction and which he had to unlearn, what it felt like to be on the other side of the editor's desk, and why he finished his first novel before looking for a publisher. He also introduces Long Arm of the Past, the sequel to his debut No Write Way to Die. In it, management consultant Scott Morgan investigates the suspicious death of his firm's former chairman, and his partner is the retired NYPD detective who was his antagonist in book one. Along the way, the secrets Scott buried in the first book start working their way back to the surface.

Key Takeaways

 1. The clarity that journalism demands carries straight over to fiction. Decades of making copy clear, precise and accurate gave Neal skills he uses on every page. In his view, even great fiction is often simple and fairly straightforward.
 2. Former journalists have to give themselves permission to let go. A clean, clear sentence isn't always enough in a novel. Neal pushes himself to get into his characters' heads and to allow some flourish in key descriptions, without overdoing it.
 3. Be the writer you would want to edit. After editing other people's work for a living, Neal went into his own edits determined to be open-minded and cooperative, as a novice with a lot to learn. Even small conventions, like how quotes and paragraphs are set up, work differently in a novel than in a newspaper.
 4. Developmental edits are a conversation, not an order. Feedback on plot or character is a free lesson, not an attack. Most editors will hear you out if you disagree, as long as you make your case.
 5. Finish the book before you go looking for a publisher. Neal wrote No Write Way to Die in full before approaching anyone. For him, making the manuscript as strong as possible was "job one," and the search for a publisher came after.
 6. Every book in a series should stand on its own. Neal wants a reader who starts with book two to understand everything and enjoy it. That means referring to what happened earlier without spoiling book one for anyone who goes back to read it.
 7. Place shapes character. Scott Morgan's affluent Westchester suburb is only a few miles from the Brooklyn neighborhood he grew up in, but in Neal's words the psychic distance is huge. New York and its surroundings drive both the crimes and the people in the series.

Get the Book

Long Arm of the Past by Neal Lipschutz Publisher: Tucker DS Press Release date: August 2026 ISBN: 9781959748502

 * Amazon [https://www.amazon.com/dp/1959748505?tag=returntocasag-20]
 * Bookshop.org [https://bookshop.org/a/54587/9781959748502]

Support your local indie bookstore — if it's not on the shelf, ask them to order it.

Connect with Neal

 * Website: neallipschutz.com [https://neallipschutz.com/]
 * Instagram: @nlipschutz [https://www.instagram.com/nlipschutz/]
 * TikTok:

From Newsroom to Novelist with Neal Lipshutz

"The show started as a way for me to prove that I can get a stranger to tell me their story. And 500 episodes later, I think strangers have taught me more about mine." — Mike Carlon


ABOUT THIS EPISODE

For the 500th episode, Mike turns the microphone on himself. He goes back to 2011, when he was a brand-new focus group moderator who started a podcast because he couldn't show clients his proprietary work, and to the publicist who told him to make the show about authors. From there he walks through what 500 conversations have taught him: where writing careers really begin, why there's no such thing as an overnight success, and why it's never too late to start. He also gets personal about losing his brother Greg and his mother a year and a month apart, how writing carried him through it, and the 3 a.m. "download" that became The Waiting Room. And he finally answers the question he's asked every guest: what would you whisper to your younger self?


KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Most writing careers start with a grown-up who noticed. When Mike asks guests where their story as an author begins, he expects book deals and hears about childhood instead. April Henry mailed a story to Roald Dahl at nine, and he wrote back. Kara Ruda's school librarian laminated her first little book and put it on the shelf. If you're a parent, teacher or librarian, what you did for a kid decades ago may be chapter one of their career.

2. There are no overnight successes. In 500 episodes, Mike has yet to meet a guest who had no turbulence on the road to publication. April Henry's fourth book sold in three days, after nine years of trying. Camille Di Maio's debut took four years, 43 rejections and 17 drafts. And as K Smith Blum put it, better rejections are still progress.

3. It's never too late. Some of Mike's most moving conversations are with people who found their voice in their 60s and 70s, after retiring, raising kids or a career that had nothing to do with books. Iris Mittlin Lav decided to write at 72. If you've been sitting on a story because you think the window has closed, 500 episodes say otherwise.

4. Everyone is creative. Mike dreaded art class even more than gym, and spent years believing creativity meant crayons and talent he didn't have. Zara Marielle changed that: everyone has something inside them worth nurturing; some people have just been taught it isn't valuable. Nine books later, Mike agrees.

5. Write from the scar, not the wound. Memoirists Mike interviews nearly always describe writing their hardest chapter as cathartic. The ones who tell the hardest stories well tend to wait until the wound has scarred over. And not everything has to be published: therapist Lauren Tettenbaum tells clients to write it all down, curse words included, and just not hit send.

6. Grief is the price of love, and fiction can heal too. Mike talks openly about losing his brother Greg to lung cancer and his mother a year and a month later. Writing didn't end the grief, but it helped, and he's come to believe that's as true for fiction as for memoir. Stacey Bass gave him the line he still uses: grief is the price of love.

7. Sometimes the story comes through you. Sick in a guest bedroom at 3 a.m. one Christmas, Mike started getting "downloads" of a story he had no plan to write. It became The Waiting Room, his most successful book, and only when writing the back cover did he notice his characters were Mary and Joseph, at Holy Family Hospital, on Christmas Eve. Other guests describe the same experience, and it's changed how he thinks of writing: some days it's closer to prayer.


GET THE BOOK

The Waiting Room by Mike Carlon

Publisher: Uncorking a Story Publishing
Release date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781732184695

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732184690?tag=rettocasgra-20
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/54587/9781732184695

Support your local indie bookstore — i

What I've Learned from 500 Authors

BOUNCING BACK, WITH ELLEN HOLTZMAN

"It's confusing, it's awful, it's terrible, but you can survive it and you could actually have an even better life than you ever imagined."
— Ellen Holtzman


ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Ellen Holtzman didn't grow up writing. She was a history graduate student who taught herself to write by working through The Elements of Style page by page. When her husband decided he didn't want children, and then that he didn't want the marriage, her plans for an academic career fell apart along with it. She couldn't find a tenure-track job and had to support herself, so she went back to school for a second doctorate and became a psychotherapist. Years later, after her son left for college, she took writing courses at Grub Street in Boston. There she learned to tell stories instead of making arguments. Bouncing Back weaves her own divorce together with the stories of two of her therapy clients: Lisa, fifty, whose husband of thirty years kept returning to an affair, and Megan, thirty, whose husband told her he didn't want a second child. Ellen tells all three stories twice, once as a memoirist living through it and once as a therapist asking what it all means. In this conversation she talks about why she couldn't have written the book in the first ten years, how women lose themselves in marriage, and the recurring dream that finally stopped once the book was done.


KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Writing can be learned, even if you were never a "natural." Ellen says plainly that she wasn't a good writer and didn't always write. As a grad student she sat down with The Elements of Style and a grammar textbook and worked through a paper sentence by sentence, following it like a recipe. Later she learned story structure the same way, one course at a time.

2. You can't write the story while you're still in the wound. Ellen believes that if she had tried to write the book within ten years of her divorce, it would have read like a journal: raw venting that no reader wants to sit through. Distance is what turns pain into a story someone else can use.

3. Losing yourself in marriage often looks like accommodation, not abuse. Compromise is necessary, but Ellen sees many women become too accommodating, raised to please and unsure it's okay to be assertive. Her ex-husband went silent when he was angry, and she grew afraid to speak up or advocate for herself.

4. If a couple can't argue well, the marriage is in trouble. Looking back, Ellen isn't surprised her husband walked out. He never told her what bothered him, so years of anger built up unspoken while she assumed everything was fine. Learning to disagree constructively is a skill most people never get taught.

5. Surviving the "unsurvivable" becomes a lasting source of confidence. At the time, Ellen thought her life was over. Getting through it gave her something to look back on whenever something else felt impossible. She also saw many women come out of divorce feeling like a different person, with abilities they didn't know they had.

6. Writing can heal what time alone doesn't. For decades Ellen had what she called her "divorce dream," in which someone was leaving her. After she wrote the book, the dream never came back. She believes working through the story in such detail finally dissolved the shock that years alone hadn't touched.

7. Recovery is slow, and that's not a failure. Clients often ask Ellen why they aren't better yet. Her answer is that the confusion and pain are normal, grief takes time, and the process has lessons of its own. The book's purpose is to make readers feel understood, and to show them a good life is waiting on the other side.


GET THE BOOK

Bouncing Back: How Women Lose & Find Themselves in Marriage & Divorce by Ellen Holtzman

ISBN: 9798989803118

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D6FTLGTJ?tag=returntocasag-20
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/545

Bouncing Back, with Ellen Holtzman

 

"We do more damage to ourselves than any alien species could ever do to us. We kick our own asses every day." — Sal Amato


ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Sal Amato has spent almost five decades in entertainment — he started as a kid actor in a 1978 Betty Crocker commercial, became one of the youngest members ever at Chicago's Second City, and has film and TV credits including The Untouchables, My Best Friend's Wedding, Chicago Overcoat, and Chicago Fire. On this episode he talks about his debut novel, Hidden Powers Disclosure from Within, a political sci-fi thriller built around the alleged 1954 Eisenhower UFO meeting. Sal traces his fascination with the unexplained back to childhood — Chariots of the Gods, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Star Wars — but he's quick to say the book isn't really about aliens. It's about tribalism, the algorithms and bots that keep us divided online, and the fact that people do more damage to each other than any outside force ever could. He also opens up about writing and revising the book while his mother was dying, and how his Second City improv training still shapes the way he writes and edits today.


KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. His debut novel uses a real conspiracy theory as its launchpad. Hidden Powers Disclosure from Within imagines what might actually have been discussed at the alleged 1954 Eisenhower meeting with extraterrestrials — and what it would have meant for a Cold War administration deciding whether, and how, to tell the public.

2. The book isn't really about aliens — it's about us. Sal says the story is ultimately about "the damage we do to ourselves," pointing out that in the book, and in life, people cause each other more harm than any outside force ever could.

3. He blames the algorithms, not just the people, for our divisions. Sal argues that social platforms are loaded with bots and manufactured engagement built to generate ad revenue, and that this manufactured outrage is what keeps people tribal and unwilling to question their own side.

4. His Second City training still shapes how he writes. Sal got into Second City at seventeen (with a fake ID) after working on films like Bad Boys and Doctor Detroit, and he says improv's "power of yes" mindset is exactly how he approaches a first draft — keep the door open, keep building, and only later learn when to stop editing.

5. He wrote through his mother's death. Sal's mom passed away on New Year's Eve without getting to read the finished book. He processed the loss by burying himself in work, including finishing the manuscript, and later realized that stepping away and coming back with fresh eyes made the book stronger.

6. He beta-tested the book with 70 to 80 friends before finalizing it. Sal asked readers not to hold back, and says the near-universal reaction was surprise that the story isn't really the alien thriller they expected — it's about fanaticism and how hard it is to break free of the "team" you've already picked.


CONNECT WITH SAL

Website: salamato.com
Instagram: @salinchicago
Twitter/X: @hiddenpowersusa
Facebook: @salamato711
TikTok: @backinthedayshow
YouTube: @hiddenpowersofficial


CONNECT WITH YOUR HOST

Mike Carlon | Uncorking a Story

Website: uncorkingastory.com
YouTube: @uncorkingastory
Instagram: @uncorkingastory
Facebook: Uncorking a Story
TikTok: @uncorkingastory
Twitter/X: @uncorkingastory

Subscribe & Leave a Review — It helps more readers and writers find the show!

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/uncorking-a-story/id563636205
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Uncorking a Story is produced by Mike Carlon. New episodes drop every Tuesday.


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Our Own Worst Enemy, with Sal Amato

"I'm about five years old and I'm so tired. I say, Abba, which is what I call my father, can you carry me? I'm so tired. And I remember him saying, Deanch, I can't carry you, but I'll carry you with my stories."
— Dena Schusterman


ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Dena Schusterman was about five years old, walking a mile and a half to synagogue on Shabbat, too tired to go another step. She asked her father to carry her. He told her he couldn't — but he'd carry her with his stories, and by the time he finished she was at the synagogue door with no memory of the walk. Forty years later, sitting in a room with two thousand women while someone told one of her father's stories without using his name, she decided those stories needed to be reclaimed. What started as a plan to write her father's memoir became something else entirely, because you cannot write someone else's life. In this conversation, Dena and Mike talk about the oral tradition both of them grew up inside, what happens when a writer traces a coping mechanism back four generations and finds it still running in her own kitchen, why rejection never derailed her, and what it costs to look at the people who came before you with compassion instead of judgment.


KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. You cannot write somebody else's memoir. Dena set out to write her father's story and discovered fairly quickly that the form wouldn't allow it — a memoir has to be told from inside a life, and the only life she could write from inside of was her own. The book that resulted still holds her father's stories, but the person carrying them is her.

2. Writing a memoir will crack you open, and you should expect that. Her husband warned her before she started that it would take her places she hadn't gone. She waved him off. It took her places she hadn't gone. Knowing the punchline of a family story turned out to be very different from asking her parents how they felt about what happened.

3. Inherited coping mechanisms don't announce themselves. Dena's grandmother survived the Holocaust in part by trading food for slivers of soap to stay clean. Two generations later, Dena found herself raging at her kids about a messy house and realized she was running a script she'd never consciously received: a clean house is how you stay alive. Naming it was what let her stop.

4. Bringing something into the light makes it smaller, not bigger. The energy spent keeping a difficult thing stuffed down is what generates the anxiety around it. Put it on the page and it turns out to be survivable — and, in Dena's experience, one sentence on paper pulls the next one out behind it.

5. Start at the end and rewind. Dena's process is to know the ending first and then work backwards asking how she got there. The ending, she points out, is rarely the interesting part. The route is.

6. A "smooth path" to publication can still include every rejection. She never found an agent. She got the rejections. She was ready to pay a hybrid publisher until a lawyer told her not to sign, which sent her to Mercer University Press — where her editor had been telling her to go for eight years. She kept a reminder in her pocket that The Queen's Gambit was rejected for thirty-two years, and treated every no as proof she was closer to a yes.

7. Compassion for the people who came before you is out of fashion, and worth doing anyway. Dena's read on the moment is that we've gotten very good at being kind to ourselves and very quick to judge our parents and grandparents. Her hope for readers is that they look at their own inherited stories the way she learned to look at hers — not to excuse anything, but because every family story eventually becomes a choice about how you show up.


GET THE BOOK

Stories Carry: We All Carry Them. Some Even Carry Us by Dena Schusterman

- Publisher: Mercer University Press
- Release date: (to confirm)
- ISBN: 979-8897360475
- Buy on Amazon: ht

Some Stories Carry You, with Dena Shusterman

"Everyone has that thing inside of them that they could nurture, but maybe some people have been taught that they can't or they shouldn't because it's not valuable in society. But to me, everyone has that." - Zara Marielle



Zara Marielle was the kind of introverted kid who wrote plays and then talked everyone she knew into performing them. She'll tell you those plays were bad. What stuck was the impulse. After undergrad she cycled through three barista jobs and a stint as an assistant talent agent for film and TV in San Francisco - a job that sounded cooler on paper than it felt in the chair - before deciding she could be writing in Scotland instead, and going. A one-year master's at the University of Edinburgh gave her twelve months with no excuse not to write, and she has arranged her life around the work ever since. In this conversation, Zara and Mike talk about her debut, an empowering portal fantasy about a trapped housewife who takes a secret job in a magical cafe; how the eclectic cafe she grew up above became the one in the book; why improv made her braver on the page and off it; and her conviction that creativity is in everyone and only needs the will to nurture it.



Key Takeaways:



1. Creativity isn't a gift you're issued at birth. Zara doesn't believe some people are simply good at it and others aren't. What separates people is the willingness to work, and the work never finishes - there's no point where you've reached peak ability and can stop.



2. Her debut is the third novel she finished. The first she never queried; she just needed to prove she could complete a book. The second went nowhere. The third got the deal. Her verdict: always be improving.



3. Braided storylines keep a draft moving. Zara writes multiple interwoven strands on purpose. When one stalls she hops to another, and the stuck one untangles itself while she's away.



4. "Strong female character" can mean starting small and claiming your power. She's less interested in a sword-swinging badass than in a woman blooming into herself. She notes the odd double standard too: readers flinch at a story about a toxic marriage, then happily read about murder.



5. Improv teaches you that people will say yes. Built on "yes, and," it forces everyone to get on board with your idea - transformative if you grew up shy and braced for people to think your ideas were dumb. It shows up in her drafting: she resists locking a plot's trajectory.



6. Life becomes material, usually without asking. The magical cafe borrows from her parents' cafe, the one she grew up in a loft above. The protagonist's escape from a controlling marriage draws on a relationship Zara got out of.



7. A book deal is a beginning, not an arrival. Her agent ended their relationship twenty-four hours after the publisher contract was signed, leaving her seven months with an editor and no advocate. Getting new representation meant rewriting an entirely different novel from scratch.



Buy The Cafe of Infinite Doors:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1454961279?linkCode=ll2&tag=rettocasgra-20

Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/a/54587/9781454961277



Support your local indie bookstore - if it's not on the shelf, ask them to order it.



Connect with Zara:

Website: https://zaramarielle.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zaramarielle/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ZaraMarielleAuthor

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@zaramarielle



Connect with Mike:

Website: https://uncorkingastory.com/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@uncorkingastory

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uncorkingastory/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/uncorkingastory

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@uncorkingastory

Everyone is Creative, with Zara Marielle

"It's not selfish to want to find a sense of self. It's not selfish to really be pushing the question of what is deeply etched in my heart that leads me to take the decisions I take."

— Margaret Eastman Smith





ABOUT THIS EPISODE



Margaret Eastman Smith was born into a remarkable and complicated inheritance. Her parents met inside Moral Re-Armament — the Christian-based global movement once known as the Oxford Group — and Margaret grew up with no home of her own, moving between continents, living in community, and absorbing the movement's demand for total commitment and unselfishness. It took until she was thirty-five for her to admit that a world she genuinely loved wasn't serving the person she was becoming. In this conversation, Margaret and Mike talk about what it means to have your adolescent crisis and your midlife crisis at the same time, why leaving a group is only half the work (building a new life is the other half), the surprising things she chose to keep, and how a memoir forty years in the making became a story about untangling family, faith, and self — and finally learning what love actually asks of us.





KEY TAKEAWAYS



1. Wanting a self is not selfish. Raised inside a movement that prized total commitment and unselfishness, Margaret had to unlearn the idea that seeking her own identity was a moral failure. Discovering what was "deeply etched in her heart" — and telling it apart from phrases she'd simply absorbed — became the real work.



2. Leaving late is its own kind of hard. Margaret didn't walk away as a rebellious teenager. She left at thirty-five, which meant her adolescent search for identity and her midlife reckoning arrived at the same moment. Some doors were open, some had closed, and she had to start over anyway.



3. Getting out is only half the story. She argues that too many accounts of leaving powerful groups stop at the exit. The harder, less-told chapter is building a new circle of friends, a new set of values, and a new place to put your feet down.



4. You don't have to reject everything you were given. The subtitle — What I Kept and What I Left Behind — is literal. Margaret kept a gift for hospitality, an instinct for reading a room, and a quieter, less literal faith that there's still a path worth listening for.



5. A path reveals itself by trying, not by waiting for a sign. She grew up believing God would make the way obvious. Instead she learned you have to test things — journalism, medicine, history, counseling — and only afterward sense whether they fit.



6. The scholar and the subject were the same person. Margaret spent nearly two decades studying how divided societies reckon with contested history, including Northern Ireland. Writing this memoir, she was finally turning that same lens on her own family.



7. Love starts with acceptance. "Absolute love" was one of the movement's standards, but Margaret felt it was never truly explored there. The book ends where her own understanding landed: love means accepting a person — and yourself — as you actually are.





GET THE BOOK



A Spectacular Inheritance: What I Kept and What I Left Behind by Margaret Eastman Smith

Publisher: Sibylline Press

Release Date: August 4, 2026

ISBN: 9798897400201

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G6S4R5R6?linkCode=ll2&tag=rettocasgra-20&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl

Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/54587/9798897400201



Also by Margaret Eastman Smith: Reckoning with the Past: Teaching History in Northern Ireland





CONNECT WITH MARGARET



Website: https://www.margareteastmansmith.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=

The Search for Self, with Margaret Eastman Smith

"What must it have felt like to be a white attorney defending a Black man in 1890, at the height of racism in the United States? I think there are lessons to be learned by those stories that we can tell about history in general." - Gerald Patnode



ABOUT THIS EPISODE



Gerald Patnode has lived many lives - Navy veteran, police officer, serial entrepreneur, television host, political analyst, university professor, academic dean - and now, bestselling author. His debut novel The Stirling Defense transforms a largely forgotten true story from 1889 Baltimore into a gripping historical legal thriller about forced labor, racial injustice, and one attorney's quest to defend a Black man at enormous personal cost. Mike and Gerry talk about discovering a family connection to the story in his grandmother's attic at age fifteen, how his academic research skills gave his fiction its backbone, why he arrested his first wife at a pot party in Ocean City, and how Archibald Stirling's fight for justice led to the creation of the public defender's office.



KEY TAKEAWAYS



1. Great stories start with a question, not an answer. Gerry's academic career taught him that facts alone don't move people. When he started asking "What must it have been like to be those people?" - that's when the fiction came alive.



2. History has a way of repeating itself. The racial injustice at the heart of The Stirling Defense - set in 1890 - still resonates today. Gerry believes uncovering these forgotten stories is a form of truth-telling that we need now more than ever.



3. A family secret lit the fuse. At fifteen, Gerry found a steamer trunk in his grandmother's attic filled with his great-grandfather's diaries, maps, and letters - revealing a direct family connection to Navassa Island and the incident that inspired the novel. His great-grandfather wasn't the man the family stories made him out to be.



4. Justice has a price. The real Archibald Stirling lost his family, his fortune, and his law practice for defending a Black man. But his sacrifice helped establish the principle that everyone - regardless of race or wealth - deserves legal representation.



5. Every life you've lived feeds the work. From undercover vice work to academia to broadcast television, Gerry draws on the totality of his experience. "We are all the sum of our parts," he says - and he tries to make that sum bigger than the individual pieces.



6. Give historical figures grace. Rather than judging people of the past by today's moral standards, Gerry tries to understand the times they lived in. That empathy is what makes his characters feel human rather than like moral lessons.



GET THE BOOK



The Stirling Defense by Gerald Patnode

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3Un7rWY

Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=The+Stirling+Defense

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/250703966-the-stirling-defense



CONNECT WITH GERRY



Website: https://patnodemedia.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geraldrpatnode/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gerald.patnode



CONNECT WITH YOUR HOST



Mike Carlon | Uncorking a Story

Website: https://uncorkingastory.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@uncorkingastory

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uncorkingastory/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/uncorkingastory

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@uncorkingastory

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/uncorkingastory



Subscribe & Leave a Review - It helps more readers and writers find the show!

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Gerald Patnode on History, Empathy, and Untold Stories

"Good writing should help readers see their own experiences and feel their own emotions through the characters and ideally understand that they are not alone and that they can prevail, survive, triumph even. And the way that we do that is connection to other people." — Ginger Pinholster



ABOUT THIS EPISODE



Ginger Pinholster returns to Uncorking a Story to talk about her third novel, THE TRAIN TO SANTA FE. A Pushcart Prize nominee and former science writer who spent nearly four decades at institutions like AAAS and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Ginger now splits her time between Florida's Ponce Inlet — where she volunteers with the Volusia Turtle Patrol — and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her new book is a braided historical novel spanning three generations: a gifted sixteen-year-old Tewa potter who boards one of the first trains from Espanola to Santa Fe in the 1880s, her granddaughter Rose who's ninety-four and desperate to reclaim her stolen Native heritage, and a modern-day love story between a wounded veteran and a cowboy-hat-wearing orderly. Mike and Ginger talk about how a hot cowboy on a work trip inspired the book, the technical challenge of weaving multiple timelines together, using pottery as connective tissue between past and present, the healing power of landscape and community, and why broken things — pottery, bodies, hearts — can still become whole.



KEY TAKEAWAYS



1. Sometimes a story finds you. Ginger had already begun working on a Southwestern historical novel when a work trip to Santa Fe introduced her to a real-life cowboy who became the inspiration for her male protagonist, Jonah. The personal and the creative merged.



2. Connective tissue holds a braided novel together. Inspired by Sarah Penner's workshop on dual-timeline fiction (The Lost Apothecary), Ginger needed a physical artifact to link her timelines. Her anthropologist daughter pointed her toward New Mexico's indigenous pottery — and the structure clicked into place.



3. The railroad changed everything for Indigenous communities. The Chili Line Railroad brought opportunity but also exploitation: bisecting irrigation channels, replacing barter with cash currency, and transforming Native artwork for tourist consumption. Ginger imagines what happened to one young woman caught in that upheaval.



4. Broken things are a throughline. Broken pottery, a broken body, broken hearts — the novel keeps returning to the question of how we remain resilient and ultimately heal after trauma. For Ginger, the answer is always community.



5. Writing is healing. Newly divorced and sending a daughter off to college when she began the book, Ginger channeled her own sense of being adrift into Jemi — a wounded veteran who urgently wants to climb a mountain where she once felt whole.



6. Landscape is a character. The purple shawls falling over mountaintops, the luminous butterscotch of cottonwood trees — Ginger makes the physical setting integral to how her characters live and feel. She even hiked Santa Fe Baldy with a roller bag to experience what her protagonist might feel.



7. Readers make the world a better place. Literature is a form of community. Reading about experiences outside our own connects us to one another and enriches the fabric of society.



GET THE BOOK



THE TRAIN TO SANTA FE by Ginger Pinholster

Publisher: Regal House Publishing

Release Date: August 25, 2026

ISBN: 978-1646037452

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1646037456

Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-train-to-santa-fe-ginger-pinholster/21733970



UPCOMING EVENTS



September 2 — Tombolo Books, St. Petersburg, FL (with Jessica Handler, author of The World to See), 7 p.m.

September 4 — Book La

Cowboys, Pottery, and Broken Things

"You really have to love the process. It can't be about, 'Oh, if I am an author, everyone will respect me so much.' You really have to love the process of it or there kind of isn't any point to doing it."

— Carol Snow



About This Episode



Carol Snow is the author of ten books spanning romantic comedy, young adult fiction, and now psychological thrillers. She holds a BA in psychology from Brown University and a master's in teaching English from Boston College. Originally from New Jersey, she now splits her time between Cape Cod and Southern California. Her latest novel, The Girl on the Beach, is a gripping psychological thriller set along the coastline of Santa Barbara's American Riviera. It follows a wealthy Montecito couple, their four-year-old daughter, and the babysitter whose summer with the family ends in tragedy — and whose obsession with the truth may be the only thing keeping hope alive. Mike and Carol talk about growing up as an avid reader in Chatham, Massachusetts (where they share deep roots), the 16-year journey from first serious writing to first publication, switching genres multiple times, recovering from creative burnout, and why aspiring writers should focus on craft long before they worry about getting published.



Key Takeaways



1. Readers become writers. Carol grew up in a family of avid readers, spent summers at a Cape Cod beach house without television, and devoured stacks of library books. That foundation — reading widely and constantly — is where her writing life began.



2. Sixteen years is not unusual. From the time Carol got serious about writing to the publication of her first novel, roughly sixteen years passed. Overnight success stories exist but are rare. Persistence and love of the craft are what carry you through.



3. Writing groups matter. After taking a fiction-writing class at Harvard Extension School, Carol and half the class formed a monthly writing group that applied the critique principles they'd been taught. That community kept the work moving forward.



4. Switching genres follows your reading life. Carol moved from romantic comedy to YA to psychological thrillers not out of strategy but because her reading interests evolved. She writes what she wants to read — and her psychology degree gives her thrillers an extra layer of character insight.



5. Burnout is real — and recoverable. After nine books in ten years, Carol hit a wall. She took time away, learned oil painting, and eventually returned with renewed gratitude and a fresh perspective. The ten-year gap between books taught her that stepping back can be a form of progress.



6. Wealth can't replace connection. In The Girl on the Beach, the ultra-wealthy parents are paradoxically the most isolated when tragedy strikes. Their money insulated them from building deep relationships, and when they need support most, no one is truly there.



7. Focus on craft before publication. Carol's single biggest piece of advice for aspiring writers: work on the writing itself before worrying about getting published. If you rush to publication before your craft is ready, you won't be prepared to sustain a career even if you get lucky early.



8. Don't take rejection personally — but do listen to feedback. A college professor told Carol she wasn't good enough. She ignored the verdict but kept working. The key distinction: rejection stings, but using feedback to improve is what separates writers who grow from those who quit.



Get the Book



The Girl on the Beach by Carol Snow

Amazon: https://amzn.to/4wwfTjS

Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/54587/9798892425773



Connect with Carol



Website: h

Carol Snow on The Girl on the Beach

Stories influence, teach and inspire us, but what about the storytellers who create them? Uncorking a Story profiles storytellers to uncover how their background and life experiences influence the sto

Uncorking a Story · Zencastr

Uncorking a Story

Stories influence, teach and inspire us, but what about the storytellers who create them? Uncorking a Story profiles storytellers to uncover how their background and life experiences influence the stories they create. We learn what motivates them, their path to success, and what fuels them to keep creating. It all starts by asking one simple question, where does your story begin? Welcome to uncorking a story. All of the books promoted on Uncorking a Story can be viewed and purchased here: https://bookshop.org/shop/UncorkingaStory