Episode #84: Eli Cranor

Eli Cranor traces his unlikely path from high school football coach to bestselling crime noir author, reflecting on the failures, rejections, and unexpected turns along the way. With humor and humility, he explores how his experiences on the football field continue to shape his writing and storytelling, and considers what the game reveals about the culture we inhabit.

On this episode of Rewrite Radio, Amanda Held Opelt explores how writing can deepen our love for the places we call home. Drawing from Appalachian history, literature, and her faith, Opelt challenges writers to look beyond stereotypes, uncover local stories, and discover how being particular about place can shape meaningful stories and nurture community.

On this episode of Rewrite Radio, Anne Bogel, Byron Borger, and Karen Swallow Prior join Jennifer Holberg to explore how reading shapes empathy, humility, and imagination. Drawing from bookselling, teaching, and curation, this lively conversation considers why stories matter in distracted, polarized times—and how reading in community can transform how we understand others.Theme music is Modern Attempt by TrackTribe and June 11 by Andrew Starr.

“Enneagram godmother” Suzanne Stabile joins poet and pastor Sam Gutierrez at the 2024 Festival of Faith & Writing for a wide-ranging conversation on wisdom, creativity, and compassion. Stabile reflects on writing, faith, and the Enneagram as a spiritual tool for deeper self-understanding, healthier relationships, and a kinder world.

In this episode of Rewrite Radio, journalist and author Jim Dahlman reflects on the perceived tension between faith and journalism. Drawing on stories from his reporting and writing, Dahlman explores objectivity, curiosity, and the moral responsibilities of storytelling—inviting listeners to see journalism as a practice that can honor truth, humility, and the sacred in everyday lives.

What is the source of power in fantasy literature? Listen along as author Matthew Dickerson investigates the magical universes of C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, and J.R.R. Tolkien, discussing how each author portrays magic as power, with inevitably severe implications regarding good and evil. In an uncanny reflection of the state of modern humanity, Dickerson unveils how he finds and holds onto hope in this amusing yet pointed lecture.

Can AI create art? And is that the question we ought to be asking? On this episode of Rewrite Radio, author and filmmaker Laleh Khadivi urges listeners to remember, in an age of increasing artistic blurriness, the necessity of the individual human being’s creativity. She links the creative process to prayer and asks, if AI is already creating and praying, must the human still too? Theme music is Modern Attempt by TrackTribe and June 11 by Andrew Starr.

In this episode, Dr. Sabrina Lee sits down with acclaimed novelist Peter Ho Davies for a wide-ranging conversation about craft, identity, and the stories that shape us. Together they explore several of his books, diving into themes of shame, race, joke-telling, and what it means to write from the in-between spaces of a biracial identity. With characteristic insight and generosity, Davies reflects on how revision deepens his work and how he’s learned to inhabit the “hyphen” in his own life and fiction.

This week on Rewrite Radio, poet and essayist Christian Wiman explores what it means to stay spiritually alert in a world shadowed by loneliness and lit by sudden joy. Drawing on poems by Wallace Stevens, Anne Carson, and his own collections—including Zero at the Bone—Wiman reflects on beauty as a form of justice, on grief as grace, and on the mysterious ways poetry calls us to pay attention.Christian Wiman was raised in West Texas and earned a BA at Washington and Lee University. A former Guggenheim fellow, Wiman served as the editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013. He received an honorary doctorate from North Central College. Making use of—and at times gently disassembling—musical and metrical structures, Wiman often explores themes of spiritual faith and doubt in his spare, precise poems. Wiman is the author of numerous books of poetry, prose, and poetry in translation. Survival Is a Style (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) is Wiman's most recent collection; the collection Every Riven Thing (2010) won the Commonwealth Prize from the English Speaking Union, was a finalist for the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award, and was named one of the New Yorker’s top 11 poetry books of 2010. His collection, Once in the West (2014) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. His debut collection, The Long Home (1998), won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Stolen Air (2012) contains Wiman’s translations of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry. With Don Share, Wiman coedited The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine (2012). Wiman’s essay collections include He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (2018), My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (2013) and Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (2007).

Situating herself in the contexts of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Ukrainian diaspora, Sonya Bilocerkowycz presents the roles and responsibilities of the reader, writer and artist in wartime. Bilocerkowycz emphasises the power writers have in influencing memory and narrative through their work in such times, and calls for the writer not only to prepare, learn, and inform, but to also use art to defend and save lives when the moment comes. Sonya Bilocerkowycz is a Ukrainian-American writer and artist from the Black Hills of South Dakota. She is the author of On Our Way Home from the Revolution (Ohio State University Press/Mad Creek Books, 2019), selected by David Lazar and Patrick Madden as winner of the Gournay Prize for a debut essay collection. Sonya's work has appeared in Guernica, Ninth Letter, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Colorado Review, The Normal School, and in the anthology Sad Happens: A Celebration of Tears, edited by Brandon Stosuy (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Before completing her MFA at Ohio State, she served as a Fulbright Fellow in Belarus, an educational recruiter in the Republic of Georgia, and an instructor at Ukrainian Catholic University in L'viv. Currently, Sonya is the Director of Creative Writing at SUNY Geneseo in western New York. She has been named a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and is at work on a second book.