As Told To

This episode originally aired February 1, 2022.

Amy Ferris writes like a dream. About love. Also: strength, humanity, depression, aging, inspiration, resilience. But mostly about love. It's kind of her thing—a thing that led her to her first gig as a collaborator, a dual memoir from Joseph "Rev Run" Simmons and Justine Simmons calledOld School Love.

Amy's worked primarily as an essayist, an editor, a screenwriter and playwright. She's even published a young adult novel called A Greater Goode. She made a whole bunch of noise with the publication of her 2009 breakout book, Marrying George Clooney: Confessions from a Midlife Crisis, a wildly funny and yet achingly wistful collection of middle-of-the-night musings on life and death and connectedness. (Don't just take our word for it: The New York Times called it "poignant, free-wheeling, cranky and funny.")

The book helped to establish Amy as a voice of her generation and a leading champion of women and women's issues. She is the co-editor of anthology Dancing at the Shame Prom: Sharing the Stories That Kept Us Small, and editor of Shades of Blue: Writers on Depression, Suicide and Feeling Blue, a collection of essays that looked to shine meaningful light on the shadow of depression.

She is a founding board member of the Scranton, PA-based Pages & Places Literary Festival, a co-director of the Story Summit Writer's School, and a frequent guest at writer's conferences and workshops all over the world.

Follow her on Facebook, where she posts almost daily on the stuff of her life and the human condition. Oh, and love...a whole lotta love.

Learn more about Amy Ferris:

• Website
• Twitter

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This episode originally aired March 15, 2022.

Eugene Pack knows a thing or two about what it takes to write a compelling celebrity memoir – and yet he’s never actually written one. As the creator and co-producer of the hit theatrical revue “Celebrity Autobiography,” developed with Dayle Reyfel, he has pushed audiences to consider what it means to live a book-worthy life and how it is that readers have come to accept the wit and wisdom and worldviews of our most celebrated personalities when they are presented on the page.

The show has been staged in theaters all over the country, including runs on Broadway, on London’s West End, and at the Sydney Opera House, with guest performers such as Kristen Wiig, Lily Tomlin, Mandy Patinkin, Paul Rudd, Billy Crystal, Maya Rudoph, Whoopi Goldberg and Martin Short helping to give hilarious voice to the so-called insights and dubious reflections of the famous and infamous. “Celebrity Autobiography” was awarded a Drama Desk Award for “Unique Theatrical Experience” when it debuted in New York to rave reviews, and it continues to delight audiences all over the world, drawing on an ever-changing slush pile of source material and an ever-evolving cast.

An accomplished playwright, Pack’s short original comedies are featured on his uniquely-imagined and endlessly-entertaining podcast, “The Pack Podcast,” performed by an assortment of talented actors, with proceeds going to the Actor’s Fund, an organization that provides a safety net for performing artists and entertainment professionals. His full-length plays include “Columbus and Amsterdam,” “Sharpies” and “The Poets of Amityville,” as well as the autobiographical musical “To Be Loved,” written in collaboration with Motown founder Berry Gordy. Pack is also an Emmy-nominated writer and producer, and the creator and executive producer of CMT’s longest-running series, “Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team.”

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“I love the process, and the craft of writing, and helping people who have a real deep yearning to put their own story on the page,” reflects best-selling author and collaborator Debra Ollivier, who has helped to develop, ghostwrite, and edit more than 20 titles, with a broad and eclectic mix of authors.

Debra, who lived and worked in Paris at the front end of her writing career, is the author of two enlightening and engaging guides on what it means to be a French woman and why it matters—What French Women Knowand Entre Nous—as well as books on wellness, mindfulness, yoga, parenting, cooking and performance training. Her work is featured in the best-selling anthologiesMothers Who Think and Because I Said So. She has served as a contributing editor forSalon and a managing editor for The Huffington Post, and has also written for Harper’s, Playboy, The New York Times, Parents, Le Monde, and other publications.

“I think for me I kind of have to be all in,” she says about the factors she considers when taking on a new project. “I do like working with people who are very purpose driven… I find that I work better when I have an intrinsic level of enthusiasm, and when I feel like I’m not only helping this author-slash-client, but I’m also making a contribution to the world, as cliché as that might sound.”

Learn more about Debra Ollivier:

• Website
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

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“The more you try, the luckier you get…”

Words to live by, from podcast guest Arthur Smith, the pioneering television producer behind some of the longest-running unscripted series in history, and author of the just-published motivational memoir Reach: Hard Lessons and Learned Truths from a Lifetime in Television. Arthur’s long-running hit “Hell’s Kitchen,” with Gordon Ramsey, helped to forge the modern food competition reality genre, while his Emmy-nominated “American Ninja Warrior” has spawned a cultural movement and inspired millions to push themselves to next-level successes in their own lives and careers.

As the founder and chairman of A. Smith & Co. Productions, Arthur has produced over 200 shows, for virtually every network and streaming platform, including “The Titan Games,” “Mental Samurai,” “Kitchen Nightmares,” “The Swan” and “Paradise Hotel.”Prior to launching his own production company, he served as the youngest Head of Sports in the history of the Canada’s CBC television network, and as Executive Vice President of Programming, Production and News for FOX Sports. He also served for four years as Senior Vice President of Dick Clark Productions, producing a wide variety of award shows, special events and non-fiction programming.

In Reach, written in collaboration with podcast host Daniel Paisner, Arthur reflects on his remarkable career and shares some of the lessons he’s learned while pushing himself beyond what he ever thought possible.

“In the nonfiction genre people get tired of the same thing,” he recently told a reporter from theJewish Journal. “The biggest hits in reality/nonfiction television come from originality. So we have to keep reinventing. We have to keep freshening up ideas. We have to keep reaching.”

To learn more about Arthur Smith:

• A. Smith & Co. website
• A. Smith & Co. Facebook
• A. Smith & Co Twitter
• Reach: Hard Lessons and Learned Truths from A Lifetime in Television

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First-time author David Jacks, a veteran video editor and music supervisor, ran into legendary music producer Peter Asher at a Santa Monica taco joint in 2003 and asked if he could interview him. Jacks, a long-time admirer of the man said to be the inspiration for Mike Myers’ “shagadelic” Austin Powers character, who first came to prominence as one-half of the hit-making British pop vocal duo Peter and Gordon and would go on to produce generation-defining albums for artists such as James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, Randy Newman, and Diana Ross, immediately asked Asher if he would sit for an interview.

The aspiring journalist thought he might use the interview as the basis for an article in a music magazine, but the two-time Grammy-winning Producer of the Year didn’t think anyone would want to read it. Nevertheless, that first interview led to another… and another… and on and on.Over the next two decades, the two continued to talk, while Jacks lined up interviews with hundreds of musicians and record industry professionals who had worked with Asher over the years, eventually leading to the publication of Peter Asher: A Life in Music, the first book-length account of the producer’s life and career.

Join us for a two-part conversation with author and subject, as Asher reflects on a book he never thought anyone would be interested in reading, and Jacks shares what it was like to tease out the story of a shape-shifting pioneer—“a fascinating music business anomaly,” according to The New York Times, who could never quite understand what all the fuss was about.

Learn more about our guests:

• Read The New York Times profile of Peter Asher, timed to coincide with the publication of the David Jacks book.
• Read Peter Asher: A Life in Music
• Read Peter Asher’s The Beatles from A to Zed, based on the author’s popular Sirius XM radio show on The Beatles Channel.
• Peter Asher on Instagram
• David Jacks website

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• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog
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• Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
• A Mighty Blaze podcast
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Literary agent Madeleine Morel has made a career out of representing ghostwriters and collaborators—and only ghostwriters and collaborators. Through her Manhattan-based agency 2M Communications, she has successfully paired her clients with top celebrities, thought leaders, health and fitness experts, business executives and change agents on hundreds of book projects, including more than 60 New York Times bestsellers. She sees herself as a kind of “literary matchmaker,” and publishers are inclined to agree. They regularly seek her out when they’re looking for the “right” writer to capture a celebrity author’s voice or vision.

“It’s the best of times and the worst of times,” Madeleine says of the current climate for her clients. “It’s the best because there’s more collaborative work out there than ever, and it’s the worst because there are more collaborators out there than ever.” Join us for a fun, freewheeling conversation on what it takes to write in service of someone else, and how publishers go about putting the famous and infamous together with talented storytellers in pursuit of the next bestseller.

Learn more about Madeleine Morel:

• 2M Communications website
• LinkedIn

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“Songwriting is kind of where my heart is,” says former Second City music director Tara Trudel, a versatile songwriter and composer based in Los Angeles. Tara’s unique talents popped on podcast host Daniel Paisner’s admittedly limited radar during the launch of Postin Fall 2022, when she created a mini-musical based on the early days and growing pains of the new social media site. Tara started her career teaching early childhood and elementary school music for Chicago’s The Merit School of Music and the city’s public school system, before pivoting to comedy and theater—a natural extension of her work with children, she says.

These days, Tara makes her principal living writing music for comedy shorts and theme songs for children’s books—a collaborative niche she seems to have all to herself. Her work has been featured at SXSW, on Amazon Prime, Sony’s Voces Nuevas, and Vulture’s “Best Comedy Shorts of the Year.” Tara’s score for Chelsea Devantez’s short film “Basic” was named “Best Score” at the LA Film Awards and the Festigious International Film Festival. Her debut album, “Fractured: Fairy Tales Remixed,” offers listener’s Tara’s modern take on the classic stories we think we know, featuring guest appearances by her collaborating partners from the Chicago improv scene, including Ashley Nicole Black, Eddie Mujica, and Mary Sohn.

Learn more about Tara Trudel:

• Website
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Post
• Spoutible
• Instagram
• “Fractured: Fairy Tales Remixed”

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“The idea of ‘chasing the panther’ is that the panther serves as this metaphor for art, and so it’s something that you chase after even thought it is in some ways very, very dangerous, and I think Carolyn would say that is one hundred percent the story of her life, chasing art.”

That’s writer and filmmaker Gregory Collins explaining the title to his very first collaboration, Chasing the Panther: Adventures & Misadventures of a Cinematic Life, written with the noted independent film producer Carolyn Pfeiffer, who as a young woman found herself swept up in the roiling waters of the French New Wave and Italian film scenes of the '60s and '70s. Together, Gregory and Carolyn have written a vibrant coming-of-age memoir telling the origin story of one of the film industry’s first female executives—a woman once dubbed a Hollywood “mini-mogul” by The Wall Street Journal.

As the head of Alive Films and Island Alive, Carolyn produced a number of influential films, including “Stop Making Sense,” “Koyaanisqatsi”, “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Trouble in Mind,” “Far North,” and “The Whales of August.”

An accomplished screenwriter and producer in his own right, Gregory’s films have premiered at the Malawi International Film Festival, and at the Sarasota and Seattle film festivals. He has taught producing and screenwriting at Penn State University and has served as the director of development of Burnt Orange Productions, at the University of Texas at Austin.

Join us at the front end of this episode, as Carolyn and Gregory discuss how they worked together, and share some wild stories about Carolyn’s experience on the frontlines of French New Wave cinema, Fellini’s Rome, and Swinging London—and then stay with us after the break, as we visit with Gregory and examine the ways he has shifted his focus as a writer from the screen to the page.

Learn more about our guests:

• Carolyn Pfeiffer, LinkedIn
• Carolyn Pfeiffer, Twitter
• Gregory Collins, website
• Gregory Collins, Twitter

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog
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“A strong argument can be made that Fernando Valenzuela brought more new fans to the game of baseball than anyone going back to probably Babe Ruth’s era,” notes baseball historian and New York Times best-selling collaborator Erik Sherman, author of Daybreak at Chavez Ravine: Fernandomania and the Remaking of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Before tackling the (largely) untold story of the phenom hailed by sportswriters as “the Mexican Sandy Koufax,” and assessing Valenzuela’s impact on the game, Erik made a name for himself as one of publishing’s leading chroniclers of our national pastime. As a ghostwriter, he helped to write Out at Home with Glenn Burke, baseball’s first openly gay player; Steve Blass: A Pirate for Life; Mookie: Life, Baseball, and the ’86 Mets with Mookie Wilson; Davey Johnson: My Wild Ride in Baseball and Beyond; and After the Miracle: The Lasting Brotherhood of the ’69 Mets, with Art Shamsky. On his own, he has also written the companion volumes Kings of Queens and Two Sides of Glory, featuring chapter-length profiles of the Mets and Red Sox players on both sides of the storied 1986 World Series.

A 2023 inductee to the New York State Baseball Hall of Fame for his baseball writing, Erik lectures annually at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. He is the host of the popular podcast “The Erik Sherman Show,” featuring interviews with sportswriters, broadcasters, baseball executives and former players.

Learn more about Erik Sherman:

• Website
• Facebook
• Twitter

(Note: the Gay Talese/Frank Sinatra and Laurence Shames/John Lennon profiles mentioned in this conversation are both hidden behind an Esquire paywall. For more insights into the Talese piece, visit Vulture andfor more on the Shames piece, read this open article on Esquire.)

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• Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton

“Writing is not what you start,” writes podcast guest Nell Scovell in her scathingly funny memoir Just the Funny Parts. “It’s not even what you finish. It’s what you start, finish, and put out there for the world to see.”

Indeed, Nell offers this observation from a place of hard-won experience. A veteran television writer (“Newhart,” “The Simpsons,” “Late Night with David Letterman,” “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” “Murphy Brown,” “Coach,” and on and on), Nell understands what it means to get an idea on its feet and out in front of an audience. As Sheryl Sandberg’s collaborator on the #1 New York Times best-seller Lean In, she helped to create a guidepost for a generation of women looking for a shared compass point in their lives and careers—a book Nell says she wishes she’d read at twenty-five, as a woman working in the male-dominated field of television comedy, instead of helping to write at fifty-two.

Join us as Nell reflects on a lifetime working in collaboration with some of the brightest (and least accommodating!) minds in television, on what it was like to write jokes for President Obama at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner (“Obama, out!”), and on what it was like to be Spy magazine’s first staff writer, and a contributor to Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New York Times.

Learn more about Nell Scobell:

• Website
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• PostNews

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