For this week's episode, author Brian Trapp sits down with TW creative director John Vogel to talk about Brian's 2025 novel Range of Motion (Acre Books). The book is semi-autobiographical fiction about twin brothers, one of whom was born with cerebral palsy and severe intellectual disabilities, an experience paralleling Brian's own with his twin brother Danny.

The novel is written with tenderness, humor, and celebration centering twin brothers Michael and Sal, their parents Hannah and Gabe, and the whole family’s experience balancing care, work, school, and social lives.

In 2009, while enrolled in a master’s program for creative writing at the University of Cincinnati (UC), Brian started to write a fictional story based on a week that he and Danny spent at Camp Cheerful in Ohio. He wrote about a hundred pages for his thesis before losing steam. To regain momentum, he backtracked to the twins’ childhood, starting when they were five and going forward from there to catch up to the scenes at the camp when they were 18.

Brian earned his PhD in creative writing and disability studies from UC, and has accumulated a list of grants, fellowships, and residencies, including a Tin House Residency, Borchardt Scholarship, and Steinbeck Fellowship. In 2017, Brian moved with his partner—novelist Marjorie Celona—to Eugene, where the University of Oregon was just starting up a disability studies program. A product of good timing, he “lucked into” a position as director of the program, while teaching fiction and nonfiction and editing the Northwest Review.

For this episode musician and filmmaker Michael Sanchez sits down with TW creative director John Vogel.

Michael grew up in Newcastle, Delaware, where he started playing and recording music. One of his bands from that time, the New Death Show, eventually pared from four-piece to duo and migrated to Seattle. Later Michael would move to Brooklyn, San Francisco, Chicago, and then Philly, settling into different artistic projects along the way, including his band The Way It Is and a solo project, Electric Dylan. In San Francisco he started trying out comedy, which started to become more serious during his time in Chicago. There, he and four other comedians started a showcase called Comedians You Should Know, which ran at a local pub every Wednesday starting in 2010. In 2015 and 2016 the showcase expanded to LA and New York.

Throughout this time period, Michael was also creating videos both for himself and as a contractor for different artists and corporate institutions. Early on he and his friends filmed a no-budget superhero movie called The Return of Great Guy, which stalled due to hard drive issues.

For this interview, Michael fields questions from John's Perfect Recognition project.

Lisa Borders, author of three novels, talks with TW creative director John Vogel to talk about her newest book. Last Night at the Disco (Regal House Publishing, 2025) is a fictitious memoir framed as a letter to the former editor of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner. That context gives the audience their first clue about the book’s narrator, Lynda Boyle.

The introduction to the letter also gives us a few other vague references to crimes, the loss of a teaching position, and a “coke-fueled disco queen” that help fill in a few blanks while raising many more questions.

Although humor had always been a part of Lisa’s personality and writing, for a time she leaned away from it. Her first two books, Cloud Cuckoo Land and The Fifty-First State, reflected this shift, but starting around 2016—as she developed the tone for what would become Last Night at the Disco—she started focusing on humor, including writing a submission for McSweeney's Internet Tendency over the course of a year. That piece was accepted and published as “Signs That You Are a Gen-Xer Going Through Menopause,” which went viral.

In this interview the two discuss narrator Lynda Boyle, satirizing avant-garde poets, and her need to make art as the world falls apart.