I first got to know Landis Wade in his role as the founder and host (now co-host) of the Charlotte Readers Podcast. In this role, he has interviewed hundreds of writers. Landis, however, is also an author in his own right. He has published several books, including Deadly Declarations: An Indie Retirement Mystery, which came out last year. Landis is himself a retired trial lawyer. He never studied fiction writing during his years as a history major at Davidson College or while earning his J.D. degree at Wake Forest School of Law, but since founding his podcast in 2018, he has learned a lot about the art of writing by interviewing authors. When writing Deadly Declarations, he drew heavily on the insights he gained through conducting these interviews. For Landis, hosting the Charlotte Readers Podcast has functioned as his own private M.F.A. program in creative writing.
Landis has now decided to share with the general public some of the insights and pointers that he has learned through hosting Charlotte Readers Podcast. He has just released The Writing Life, a collection of “inspirational and practical reflections” that he has compiled from some of the interviews that he has conducted with authors. Intrigued, I contacted Landis and asked him for more information about this project. Here is what he sent to me:
I did not launch Charlotte Readers Podcast to publish a series of books about writing, but a funny thing happened on the way to and from the studio. The writers who appeared on the podcast inspired me with their tales of how they do what they do and it helped my own writing journey so much that I wanted to give back by sharing what I’d learned. And what better way to do that than to let the authors speak for themselves?
In Book 1 of the series, authors share their honest reflections on The Writing Life. We find inspirational and practical reflections of hard-working, award-winning, and New York Times bestselling authors in more than 33 U.S. states and five countries.
What I found from the quotes in book 1 is that writers grab for their pens and fire up their computers for the love of writing. They have a common urge to create, to use letters, words, and sentences to tell stories, either about themselves, or others, or about characters they create in their writing chambers. They write for therapy or to understand themselves and the world around them. They write for the sake of writing. They write for publication. They write to be remembered. They write to be heard and understood. And as more than one author says, they write because they can’t not write.
Through a painstaking seven-month process of listening to and transcribing excerpts from 500+ audio and video interviews, I realized I had the makings of more than one book. My co-hosts Sarah Archer and Hannah Larrew jumped in and helped me organize the content into eight separate books, and they also wrote forewords for the books. I wrote reflections for each book about what I learned from the quotes in each book.
Authors quoted in book 1 include David Baldacci, Therese Anne Fowler, Steve Berry, Lisa Jewell, John Hart, Sophie Cousens, Ron Rash, C.J. Box, Craig Johnson, Wylie Cash, Kristy Harvey, Brad Taylor, Charlie Lovett, Judy Goldman, Chris Fabry, Amber Smith, Tracy Clark, John Gilstrap, Kimmery Martin, A.J. Hartley, Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Jason Mott, Mark de Castrique, Cathy Pickens, Mark West, David Joy, and many more local, regional, and nationally recognized authors.
Eight print books will release monthly, beginning March 1st, and ebooks 2 through 8 in the series will release monthly, beginning April 1st. We decided to make the first ebook our gift to the writing universe. It can be downloaded for FREE at this universal link: HERE.
Charlotte Readers Podcast began with the tagline: “where authors give voice to their written words.” With this series, we’ve flipped the tagline to: “where authors give text to their spoken words.”
Readers who are interested in learning more about Landis’s latest project are in luck. On March 1st, from 6:00 to 7:00 pm on Zoom, there will be a community conversation celebrating the release of Book 1, where the founders of Charlotte Lit and the three podcast co-hosts engage in a wide-ranging discussion with participants about The Writing Life, prompted by some of the best and most useful quotes in the book. Anyone can sign up for FREE for this conversation HERE.
I congratulate Landis on the publication of The Writing Life, and I look forward to the release of the other volumes in this series. The contributions that Landis has made to Storied Charlotte are many and varied, and they now include a unique and insightful series of books about writing.