Courtesy Writing Forward
Podcaster Jeff Oloizia and novelist Maggie Ginsberg.
Podcaster Jeff Oloizia talks with his second guest, novelist Maggie Ginsberg.
Listening to Writing Forward, the new weekly podcast hosted by Madison-based freelance writer and former New York Times editor Jeff Oloizia, reinforces just how fertile the state’s writing landscape is. Through candid conversations with “writers from and connected to Wisconsin,” Oloizia celebrates craft, identity and home while also exploring the challenges of building a writing life far away from traditional publishing meccas.
“Obviously, there are still real tangential benefits to being in a place like New York City, where the ‘Big Five’ publishers [Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan] are based,” says Oloizia, who grew up in Brookfield, Wisconsin. “But a central argument of this podcast is that you don’t have to leave [Wisconsin] to make it work.”
Guests during the first 10-week season of Writing Forward, which debuted May 6, included longtime Madison journalist Maggie Ginsberg, author of the 2022 novel Still True and the forthcoming Daisy Chain, as well as bestselling novelists Christina Clancy and Chloe Benjamin, essayist Barrett Swanson, and essayist and novelist Melissa Faliveno.
Even though these are serious discussions intended to appeal to both writers and readers, Oloizia doesn’t hesitate to also ask guests about their all-time favorite Green Bay Packers player or the smell that instantly takes them back to childhood. And he ends nearly every episode the same way: “In the words of Kwik Trip employees everywhere, see you next time.”
“I want it to feel like you’re sort of eavesdropping on writers having a conversation at a coffee shop,” Oloizia says, noting that he chose two of his friends, Swanson and Ginsberg, as his earliest guests. “Being a new podcaster, part of that was strategic — interviewing people I was comfortable with and wouldn’t have to take the time to establish intimacy.”
Swanson, a Harper’s Magazine contributing editor who lives in Madison and teaches creative writing at UW-Whitewater, thinks that the ease of the initial episode’s conversation owed a lot to their friendship as they discussed his debut essay collection, 2021’s Lost in Summerland, and more. “Jeff and I…have both done work for national magazines and understand acutely the ways in which our background as Midwesterners informs the writing that we do.”
Ginsberg and Oloizia worked together when she was managing editor of Madison Magazine, and she opened up on the podcast about sobriety and how it changed her creative process.
“There was this pre-established trust, but Jeff’s also a really thoughtful interviewer,” says the Lake Mills-based author. “To his credit, he didn’t tell me what he was going to ask me, and he did surprise me multiple times.”
That element of surprise extended into later pod episodes, too. Benjamin, a former Madison resident who now lives in her native San Francisco, discussed her struggle with chronic migraines exacerbated by the intense promotional schedule for her 2018 novel The Immortalists. Liam Callanan, a Milwaukee-based novelist (The Cloud Atlas) and essayist who teaches in the English department at UW-Milwaukee, shared details of his 2023 diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease and how it impacts his typing speed, noting that he took medication in order to be “effervescent” during his interview with Oloizia. Both Benjamin and Callanan have new books coming out later this year.
“I wanted to create something that I would like, and I just have to trust that maybe that means somebody else would like it, too,” says Oloizia, who is working on his own novel in between freelancing and a full-time gig as communications director at the Madison nonprofit Ascendium Education Group. “These are the conversations I want to be having, and I am sort of buzzing when we’re done recording.”
With limited podcasting experience, Oloizia turned to more friends — including Wisconsin Public Radio reporter Anya van Wagtendonk, who produces each episode, and Madison Magazine creative director Tim Burton, who designed the podcast’s logo and episode art — and he records many episodes in the Madison Public Library’s media lab. The podcast received a grant from Dane Arts and is named after the state’s motto, “Forward.”
Each episode begins with Oloizia asking his guest to read a brief passage from someone else’s writing that evokes Wisconsin in a memorable way. Selections have included work by the late Fort Atkinson poet Lorine Niedecker and Madison poet Josh Kalscheur (the poem evoked, in part, Chris Farley’s boyhood home in Maple Bluff).
A second season of Writing Forward is expected to drop this fall, potentially with a lineup that could include book publicists and songwriters as guests.
“I sometimes question my wisdom in starting a podcast that has a built-in ceiling — it is pretty niche,” says Oloizia. “But the thing that makes it niche also gives it a reason to exist. I don’t think I would have started something if I didn’t see a place for it.”
