Upstart Crow is a literary podcast affiliated with Watershed Lit Radio. We recently got the chance to interview the hosts, William Miller, Ken Budd, and Jennifer Disano. The initial idea belongs to Disano, chair of the board of the Fall for the Book festival based at George Mason University. She recruited Ken Budd, a Mason MA alum, freelance writer and editor, and William Miller, long-time journalist and former English professor at Mason, where he directed the creative writing program, often taught undergrad creative writing courses, and helped start the Fall for the Book festival.
Upstart Crow’s interviews centered on books and their writers and provide conversations you won’t hear other places, conversations that probe the whys and wherefores of writers and their work, including how they practice their craft and the challenges they face in accomplishing it.
The team answered as a collective below—except for the final question. And be sure and give them a listen at https://upstartcrow.org/.
Upstart Crow is under Watershed Lit and appears on the Cheuse Center website. What is Upstart Crow’s relationship with Watershed Lit, and with the Cheuse Center specifically?
Upstart Crow was born out of an appreciation that we share for both writers and readers. Watershed Lit is the perfect platform for our podcast collaboration, as we are all connected at Mason through our professional and volunteer roles and share the desire to champion literacy, history, culture, community, and the literary arts. One of our main goals, of course, is to celebrate the literary arts and help foster an environment in which they thrive.
The focus of the Cheuse Center is international, as ours is sometimes—international writers looking at America or sharing their own writing about their countries, or American writers traveling and looking back at America. When our interests or focuses overlap with those of the Cheuse Center, we’re natural partners. We’re not limited to the Cheuse Center’s focus, per se, but we are happy when it fits to have the Cheuse Center’s support just as we are happy to promote the work of the Cheuse Center, a sister organization under the Watershed Lit Center.
Fall for the Book has its own podcast, which also features interviews with writers. How do the founders of Upstart Crow see their mission as distinct from what the Fall for the Book podcast does?
The Fall For The Book podcast is awesome! The focus there is on writers who participate in the festival or who want to participate. Though we have had a couple of guests who also appeared on the Fall for the Book podcast, the Upstart Crow podcast is not limited to writers who are connected to the festival.
Upstart Crow, of course, is in only its first year of programming. Our episodes have included voices from many topic areas and writers, both established and still-emerging. We like to explore freely. So we have gone from first-novel writers to those who have published 14; from those with their first, award-winning short story collection to those celebrating their tenth. We’ve covered race and religion, self-improvement, history, public events and policy, and works translated from other languages. We have featured small-press works from selected publishers like Restless Books in Amherst or Plamen Press in DC, books from teaching presses such as Mason’s own Stillhouse Press, and internationally distributed works from big houses like Oxford University Press and St. Martin’s. The world of books is so varied. We like making Upstart Crow as open and broadly focused as books are.
Several of the guests on the podcast have been associated with Mason. How does the podcast seek to serve the Mason community—either by spotlighting Mason professors/writers or with a specific eye to Mason as an audience?
We love George Mason University. There is an amazing array of talented people at Mason—writers, researchers, and change makers. Upstart Crow is always happy to share the insights, stories and successes of our Mason colleagues.
We do see Upstart Crow as a conduit of sorts—letting the world know about the books coming out by Mason people as well as letting the world beyond Mason know about the larger global goings-on in publishing. We want to serve the Mason audience of listeners, and we want to spread to the outside world the many accomplishments of the people at Mason. We also want to bring to listeners everywhere, including at Mason, the accomplishments of all sorts of writers, scholars, and thinkers. Ideally, people will glean an idea or get a creative spark from listening to Upstart Crow and will benefit from it but also will go get the book the episode was about and read it, going deeper into the trove of riches the book contains than a podcast episode can go.
For us, what we do is about the culture of reading and writing books.
What is Upstart Crow's pre-interview process like? What kind of prep work do you do, and how do you decide what questions to ask?
In some cases, we invite folks whose work we’re already familiar with and perhaps even admire. In every case, though, we begin by reading. We think about our guests’ work and then start to go through the work imagining questions that will encourage a dialogue between us and the writers that listeners will find engaging, awareness-building, informative, and, in the end, curiosity-building, so they will want to read the book about which we’re talking. One of the challenges, we’ve learned, of making a podcast is remembering that listeners are just that—listeners. They probably are doing something else at the same time they’re listening. So we think that whatever else our conversation does, it has to entertain the hearer of it. Grab attention and hold onto it.
Who is one guest who has changed your perspective on writing or the writing industry? Alternatively, what is one thing a guest has said that has stuck with you?
Jennifer Disano: When I interviewed Paula Johnson, a curator at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, she commented on the importance of being a careful listener when creating content. She had the good fortune of meeting Julia Child in person during the curation of “Julia Child’s Kitchen,” and that skill of careful listening helped her tell a story through artifacts, a story that resonates with the audience now and will continue to on into the future. By being good listeners, we can be great storytellers!
Ken Budd: I interviewed a recovering addict named Scott Strode, who wrote a powerful memoir about his journey and how he started a nonprofit to help others. Scott is not a professional writer. But he’s brave. He had the courage to share painful memories and dark, desperate moments. It was a reminder not only that honesty and vulnerability are essential in memoir, but that we are all storytellers, and that we all possess the power to move others and discover hidden truths about ourselves.
William Miller: Every guest has said something that changed my perspective in some way, which is why I keep wanting to interview more guests and pass along their perspectives to listeners. I say this not just in terms of the writing and publishing industry but in the sense of my enlarging world. That is my larger takeaway from the episodes, collectively, that I have done. It is about the constructed nature of so much of what we take as solid stuff—knowledge, history, science, perspectives and philosophy, never mind the more obvious myths, beliefs, etc. So far it has been fascinating to be the interviewer. I look forward to more.
December 08, 2025