First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

First Draft stands out in the creative writing podcast world because of who shows up to talk. Mitzi Rapkin regularly lands interviews with literary heavyweights — George Saunders, Ann Packer, Torrey Peters — and the conversations run deep. These aren't 20-minute promotional hits. Episodes typically stretch to an hour or more, giving writers room to talk about their actual process, their doubts, and the specific decisions that shaped their books. Rapkin's interview style is what makes the long format work. She does her homework. Reviewers consistently praise how thoroughly she reads her guests' work before sitting down to talk, and it shows — she asks the kind of questions that get authors past their rehearsed answers and into genuinely useful territory. The show covers fiction, nonfiction, essays, and poetry, so the craft discussions range widely. With nearly 560 episodes over the years, the archive alone is worth exploring. You can find conversations with Man Booker Prize winners sitting alongside interviews with debut novelists, and the quality stays remarkably consistent across both. The show has a 4.6-star rating from 185 reviews. If your interest leans literary — if you care about sentence-level craft, thematic ambition, and what it actually feels like to wrestle a book into existence — First Draft is the interview show to follow. Rapkin treats writing as an art form first, and the conversations reflect that seriousness without ever becoming pretentious. It's the closest thing to sitting in on a really good MFA seminar, except the guest list is better.