Every few months, I sit with sound engineer Charlie Fleishman at the studio of Port Townsend, WA’s all volunteer FM station KPTZ.org and record conversations with four writers. Each of these Sundays includes telephone conversations with writers from anywhere in the country and in studio conversations local writers. ?Each program plays two to three times over two weeks and so eight weeks later, it is time to record more programs. After a few years of archiving permanent links to these conversations on our website as mp3 file podcasts, Writing It Real co-founder and tech guy Kurt VanderSluis has begun converting all of them to YouTube recordings so anyone can listen, no matter what Internet browser they use (as browsers like Safari update, the updated versions have interfered with the mp3 file format).

To celebrate the beginnings of my YouTube channel, we are directing you this week to three of the new recordings. Memoirist Mandy Smith did early work on her recently released memoir, Secrets in Big Sky Country, in a Writing It Real Online Personal Essay workshop. Jan Eliot is a personal friend of Charlie Fleishman’s and we talk about how she came to writing her cartoon strip Stone Soup. The third conversation is with novelist and essayist Janice Eidus?who writes regularly now for the online publication Purple Clover.

After you’ve listened to these three podcasts, I hope you’ll tune into the many others in our archive. You can also always click on the “on air” icon at writingitreal.com and find them all.

Listen to Sheila Bender’s conversation with cartoonist Jan Eliot?here.

Listen to Sheila Bender’s conversation with memoirist Mandy Smith here.

Listen to Sheila Bender’s conversation with journalist Janice Eidus?here.

We’d love to hear from you on these conversations. Please?leave a?comment below.