Written Works For You, By You is a space for short stories, poetry, and creative writing (whether fiction or non-fiction) is read aloud with care. Every piece is shared as it was written — so writers can hear their words and listeners can immerse themselves in unique voices. Submissions are welcome but never required. Whether you’re a writer, a reader, or someone who loves to listen, this podcast is about discovering voices, exploring perspectives, and letting stories breathe.
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Season 2 ends here. Oliver Onions wrote this in 1911. A writer moves into a house to finish his novel. Slowly, politely, reasonably, he loses his mind. There is no ghost at midnight. There is only a presence, a beckoning, a gradual substitution of one voice for another. He believes he is falling in love. He is not. He believes he is still himself. He is not. This is a story about solitude and what…
Season 2 nears its end. We've sat together through coming-of-age and comedy, through philosophy and folk horror, through feminist dread and minimalist survival, through satire and absurdity and fever and laughter. The room has held all of it. Tonight the room grows colder. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "The Body Snatcher" in 1884, based on real events — the Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh,…
A man named Simon Wheeler tells a story that cannot possibly be true — but he tells it with such absolute sincerity that you find yourself leaning in anyway. It involves a gambler named Jim Smiley, a frog named Dan'l Webster, and a stranger who knows exactly how to cheat a cheater. Mark Twain wrote this in 1865, and it is pure American absurdity — a tall tale told in bars, on porches, in rooms…
A scholar of quiet habits develops a taste for green tea — too much of it, drank too late, alone in his study with his books. And then he begins to see something. A small figure. A monkey, with eyes that know him. It sits on his furniture. It turns the pages of his manuscripts. It watches him pray. No one else sees it. Sheridan Le Fanu wrote this in 1869, and he stripped the Gothic of its castles…
A critic discovers his favorite author has hidden a secret in his work — a unified meaning, a pattern, a figure in the carpet. He spends his life searching for it. He never finds it. Or perhaps he does, and cannot say. Henry James wrote this in 1896, and he stripped it of everything except obsession dressed in its Sunday best. Long sentences coil like DNA. Politeness becomes suffocation. The…
A man travels through the Yukon at seventy-five below zero. He is practical. He is experienced. He is not wise enough. Jack London wrote this in 1908 after his own time in the Klondike, and he stripped it of everything except cold, distance, and the small decisions that separate the living from the frozen. There is no villain here. Only temperature, and the certainty that the landscape does not…
A man wakes up. His nose is gone. That is not the strange part. Nikolai Gogol wrote "The Nose" in 1836 and I am fairly certain he was laughing the entire time. A St. Petersburg official chases his own nose through the city — now dressed as a higher-ranking civil servant, refusing to recognize its former face. Bureaucracy happens. Nothing resolves neatly. Gogol publishes it and goes to breakfast.…
A woman. A room. A pattern on the wall that starts to look back. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 1892 after her own experience with the "rest cure" — a prescription for women that mostly meant stay still, stay quiet, don't think too hard. She gave the world a warning. Some people heard it. Some people still don't. This is a story about what happens when rest becomes…
The room is back. I was away for a minute — moving, no WiFi, life in boxes. But the light stayed on, and now the microphone is warm again. Literally. I finally got a real mic. A Snowball Blue. No more skull headphones. So if I sound different tonight, that is why. Today: "The Overcoat" by Nikolai Gogol. Written in 1842, in St. Petersburg, Russia. A clerk named Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin has one…
No story this week. I'm moving, the WiFi is gone, and the room is in boxes. Instead: a personal note about why I started Written Works For You, By You, what I thought it would be, and what it became. The silence, the submissions that didn't come, the dead voices that became the point. The dog who got me through it. The notebook I found while packing. The room moves with me. It always has. It…
A journal found in a house in Baltimore. Dated September to October, 1922. A man named Tom receives a letter from his lost friend Arthur, gone ten years, and goes to find him. He doesn't know what he's walking into. Neither do you. M. Humphreys wrote this — but that name hid a woman. Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes, writing under a man's name because the world didn't think a woman could write this…
