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The Writer's Archive

The Writer's Archive

By: Douglas Ryan Favero
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Get caught up on this week in literary history, hear a poem from the week, and get a writer's prompt, all in under 10 minutes. (Based on The Writer's Almanac, which was discontinued in 2017.) While AI helps with research and script production, the final content is reviewed, edited, and read by a human who loves literature.Douglas Ryan Favero Art
Episodes
  • The Writer's Archive for the Week of Oct. 18th, 2026

    The Writer's Archive for the Week of Oct. 18th, 2026
    18 Oct 2026
    Today's Features: The 172nd birthday of Arthur Rimbaud, the 127th birthday of Miguel Ángel Asturias, and the 66th anniversary of the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial.In-Depth:Arthur Rimbaud: At fifteen he was in a Paris jail for riding a train without a ticket. At sixteen he wrote "I is another" and "The Drunken Boat." At eighteen he was shot in the wrist by the poet Paul Verlaine. By twenty-one he had stopped writing poetry for good, and he spent the rest of his short life trading coffee and rifles in Ethiopia while France discovered his poems.Miguel Ángel Asturias: Born in Guatemala City in 1899, raised partly on stories told by the young Indigenous woman who looked after him. He wrote El Señor Presidente, one of the first great Latin American novels about a dictator, and then waited thirteen years to publish it because another dictator was in power. Exiled after the 1954 coup, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967.The Lady Chatterley Trial: On October 20, 1960, Penguin Books went on trial at the Old Bailey for publishing D. H. Lawrence's last novel, uncut, thirty years after his death. The prosecutor asked the jury whether they would want their wives or servants to read it. The jury took three hours to say not guilty, and Penguin sold some three million copies.Poem: "Piano" by D. H. Lawrence (Public Domain — New Poems, Martin Secker, 1918).Writing Prompt: Think of a song that takes you back somewhere. Where are you? Who's there? Write that moment. (300–500 words.)Support the Show: Like, follow, subscribe.Sources:Project Gutenberg: D. H. Lawrence, New Poems (1918)Project Gutenberg: Louis Untermeyer, ed., Modern British Poetry (1920)Academy of American Poets: "Piano" by D. H. LawrenceWikisource (French): Rimbaud's letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871Wikipedia: Arthur RimbaudAcademy of American Poets: Arthur RimbaudWikipedia (French): Une saison en enferWikipedia (French): Le Bateau ivreNobel Prize: Miguel Ángel Asturias, BiographicalNobel Prize: Miguel Ángel Asturias, Nobel Lecture, December 12 1967Wikipedia: Miguel Ángel AsturiasWikipedia: El Señor PresidenteWikipedia: R v Penguin Books LtdWikipedia: Lady Chatterley's LoverThe Globe and Mail: The day the courts freed Lady Chatterley's LoverWikipedia: D. H. LawrenceWikipedia: The RainbowPublic Domain Author Archive Links:Arthur Rimbaud (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)Miguel Ángel Asturias (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)D. H. Lawrence (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
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    8 min
  • The Writer's Archive for the Week of Oct. 11th, 2026

    The Writer's Archive for the Week of Oct. 11th, 2026
    11 Oct 2026
    Today's Features: The 138th birthday of Katherine Mansfield, the 103rd birthday of Italo Calvino, and the 172nd birthday of Oscar Wilde.In-Depth:Katherine Mansfield: Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888 — left at nineteen, never returned. Her short stories compressed Chekhovian precision into colonial and domestic subjects Chekhov never wrote from the inside. Diagnosed with tuberculosis at thirty, she finished her finest collection while barely able to breathe. She died at thirty-four. The journal entry that opens this episode was written on her last birthday.Italo Calvino: Born in Cuba to Italian botanists in 1923, grew up in San Remo, fought in the Italian Resistance, spent his career as an editor at Einaudi, and wrote some of the most imaginative fiction of the twentieth century — from realist novels of the Resistance to fables about noblemen who refuse to come down from their trees. He was being considered for the Nobel Prize when he died in 1985.Oscar Wilde: Born in Dublin in 1854, the son of a surgeon-antiquarian and a revolutionary nationalist poet. At the height of his fame — the week The Importance of Being Earnest opened — he sued the wrong man for libel and was sentenced to two years of hard labor. He served every day of it, was released in 1897, wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and died broke in Paris in 1900.Poem: "Requiescat" by Oscar Wilde (Public Domain — Poems, 1881).Writing Prompt: All three writers this week worked at the edge of what they could physically sustain — Mansfield writing through tuberculosis, Calvino editing and writing through what turned out to be his final years, Wilde writing De Profundis in a prison cell with one hour of paper per week. Write a scene in which a character finishes something. What does it feel like to stop?Support the Show: Like, follow, subscribe. Sources:Academy of American Poets: "Requiescat" by Oscar Wilde (confirmed public domain)Poetry Lovers' Page: "Requiescat" — verbatim text confirmed, publication history, Isola Wilde context confirmedBritannica: Katherine Mansfield — birth date October 14 1888 Wellington, tuberculosis diagnosis 1918, The Garden Party, death January 9 1923 Fontainebleau confirmedTe Ara / Dictionary of New Zealand Biography: Katherine Mansfield — father's career, childhood, Queen's College 1903–06, return to England 1908, Gurdjieff Institute confirmedWikiquote: Katherine Mansfield — "Risk! Risk anything!" quote confirmed, sourced to Journal entry, October 14 1922, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927)Britannica: Italo Calvino — birth date October 15 1923 Santiago de las Vegas, family moved to Italy 1925, Italian Resistance, Einaudi, Invisible Cities 1972, If on a winter's night a traveler 1979, Nobel contender, death September 19 1985 Siena confirmedItaly on This Day: Calvino — parents both Italian botanists, name Italo chosen by mother confirmedCalvino — "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say" — confirmed from Why Read the Classics? (1986), cited across Goodreads, BrainyQuote, and AZQuotesBritannica: Oscar Wilde — birth date October 16 1854 Dublin, parents' backgrounds, Oxford, Earnest premiere February 1895, trial, two years hard labor, De Profundis, Ballad of Reading Gaol 1898, death 1900 Paris confirmedRoyal Berkshire Archives: Oscar Wilde at Reading Gaol — imprisonment 1895–97, De Profundis written in prison confirmedWilde — "To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life" — confirmed from De Profundis, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, OUP, p. 105, via AZQuotes and GoodreadsPoets and Lovers: "Requiescat" — Isola Wilde died February 1867, age 9, Wilde was 12; poem written during Oxford years; published Poems 1881 confirmedPublic Domain Author Archive Links:Katherine Mansfield (Portrait via Wikimedia Commons)Italo Calvino (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)Oscar Wilde (Portrait via Wikimedia Commons)
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    8 min
  • The Writer's Archive for the Week of Oct. 4th, 2026

    The Writer's Archive for the Week of Oct. 4th, 2026
    4 Oct 2026
    Today's Features: The 90th birthday of Václav Havel, Nobel Prize in Literature week, and the poetry of Claude McKay.In-Depth:Václav Havel: Born into a prominent Prague family whose property was seized when the Communists came to power in 1948. Denied education, reduced to manual work, eventually employed in a brewery. Wrote absurdist plays that exposed totalitarianism in its own bureaucratic language, spent four years in prison for his human rights activism, and became president of Czechoslovakia six weeks after the first protest marches began in 1989.Nobel Prize in Literature Week: Awarded since 1901, the prize long reflected a narrow European understanding of world literature — passing over Tolstoy, Chekhov, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Woolf, and Borges. From the 1980s onward it broadened: Soyinka, Mahfouz, Morrison, Pamuk, Mo Yan, Gurnah. Naguib Mahfouz, who won in 1988 as the first Arabic-language laureate, learned of the prize by radio in a Cairo café at seventy-six — and was stabbed in the neck by a religious extremist six years later for work he had published decades before.Claude McKay (1889–1948): Jamaican-born, came to New York at twenty-three, worked as a railroad waiter during the Red Summer of 1919, and wrote one of the most important poems in American literature in the locked toilet of a train car between stops.Poem: "If We Must Die" by Claude McKay (Public Domain — first published in The Liberator, July 1919).Writing Prompt: McKay's poem takes a terrible situation and refuses to accept the terms it's offered on. It doesn't argue with the situation — it reframes what a person can do inside it. Write a scene in which a character is in a genuinely bad spot, and makes a single choice that changes what the spot means — not the facts of it, but what it costs to be there. (400–600 words.)Support the Show: Like, follow, subscribe.Sources:BlackPast.org: "If We Must Die" by Claude McKay — original publication The Liberator, July 1919, confirmed (public domain)Scalar/Lehigh University African American Poetry Digital Anthology: "If We Must Die" — verbatim text confirmed from The Liberator, July 1919Wikipedia: "If We Must Die" — publication history, Red Summer context, Churchill account confirmedBritannica: Václav Havel — birth date, family history, Lucerna Palace, Garden Party 1963, Charter 77, prison 1979–83, Velvet Revolution, elected president December 29 1989 confirmedColumbia University: Havel Timeline — family property confiscated 1948, night school, Technical University, stagehand work, Academy of Arts confirmedHavel — "If the main pillar of the system is living a lie" quote — confirmed from "The Power of the Powerless," ch. 7 (1978), tr. Paul Wilson, in The Power of the Powerless, ed. John Keane (1985)Havel — "Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism" quote — confirmed from Disturbing the Peace (1986), widely attributed across Goodreads, AZQuotes, and BritannicaNobel Prize: Naguib Mahfouz — 1988 prize announcement, October 13 1988 confirmedArab News: Naguib Mahfouz — Nobel Prize biography, 1994 stabbing, death 2006 confirmedMahfouz — "I am the son of two civilizations" quote — confirmed from Nobel Lecture, Nobel Prize.orgWikipedia: Nobel Prize in Literature — award history, notable omissions (Tolstoy, Joyce, Woolf, Borges etc.) confirmedPublic Domain Author Archive Links:Václav Havel (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)Claude McKay (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)Naguib Mahfouz (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
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    7 min
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