In a different kind of episode, Ted is joined by Jim Lang, an emeritus professor of English at Assumption University and current professor of the practice at the University of Notre Dame’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence.

Jim is one of Ted’s favorite people to talk writing with in three-dimensional spaces—i.e., in-person, no internet connection needed—because he brings a teacher’s mentality to his work, which probably explains why he’s always up for a conversation about craft. And unlike Ted and most of the guests on this show, Jim writes nonfiction, including his seventh and most recent book, one that explores the writing process itself.

Titled Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience, it is a guide for academics that distills the elements of good classroom teaching into strategies for writing for the general public. But while the book is pitched at that those who teach in colleges and universities, the topics he digs into will resonate with anyone who tries to create engaging prose.

Focusing on the book’s chapter on “Invitational Language,” Jim and Ted discuss challenging readers without alienating them, why the passive voice gets a worse rap than it deserves, and approaching your writing as an effort to be good company to your readers. Currently involved with a project on how AI might support teaching, Jim also shares his thoughts on AI’s relationship to writing: what it can and cannot do, the value of learning from other humans, and what we lose when we allow machines to choose words for us.

Find Jim and his books online at jamesmlang.com.

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

Ted is joined by Nishant Batsha, whose second novel, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart, was published this month by ecco/HarperCollins. He is also the author of Mother Ocean Father Nation (ecco/HarperCollins), which, among other honors, was named one of the best books of 2022 by NPR.

Nishant holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, so it’s no surprise that his fiction draws heavily on real-life people and events. He describes this latest book as a “socialist, anti-colonial coming-of-age love story set in 1917,” one that is loosely based on a real-life couple, M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, who together founded the Communist Party of Mexico before an acrimonious divorce led to Roy basically writing Trent out of the history of the movement they led together.

With A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart now out in the world, Nishant is at work on his next book. He and Ted talk about the circuitous route he’s taken to get there, including an entire novel set in the present day that he finished writing before realizing he didn’t want to deviate from historical fiction.

Nishant discusses being a historian who wanted to become a novelist (compared to the other way around) and what that means for the way he approaches his writing. He then shares details about his work in progress, which is told from the perspective of a Civil War veteran who has left society behind to join a Shaker colony in Maine.

Find Nishant and his books at nishantbatsha.com.

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

No guest this month, so Ted revisits a previous solo pod, during which he talked about the challenges of navigating the months in between when you submit your final manuscript and when the book actually comes out. In that episode, he shared how, for him, a big part of managing those challenges involves getting started on a new project.

Well, it’s now been a year since that finished manuscript was published as his second novel, and the work in progress he introduced on that podcast is something he’s been wrestling with through a series of starts and stops for even longer. As a result, it’s probably a good moment to rethink what he previously referred to as “the in-between time.”

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.