- Hosted by John Seigenthaler for more than 40 years, "A Word on Words" explored the art of storytelling, the impact of literature, and the lives of authors.

After Seigenthaler's passing, the show took a brief pause, but the spirit of "A Word on Words" was too important to let go.

The show was re-imagined and updated for a new generation of book lovers, as well as fans of the original show.

Now in its 10th season, "A Word on Words" continues to foster a love of reading and a deep appreciation for literature.

Join us as we celebrate a decade of "A Word on Words," and remember, keep reading.

(light jazz music) Hi, I am JT Ellison.

- And I'm Jeremy Finley.

- And we're the hosts of "A Word on Words."

I can't believe this show has been on for 10 years.

- Right?

I think about when I first came to Nashville all those years ago when I would watch the show.

- Me too.

- And it just, I was like, this is such a great thing for the city.

- You've been host now for three years.

- Three years.

- Gosh, I mean, (snaps fingers) time just goes.

- Right, when we were talking about that before, I thought, no, it's been two years.

No, it's actually been three years.

- No, it's been three, and this has been 10.

And you know, my very first interview that I ever did in my entire career was with John Seigenthaler on this show.

So I like that it's come full circle.

- I like that too, and speaking of which, I thought it might be kind of fun for us to take a look at the very first episode.

(playful jazz music) - Let's talk about young adult, the YA label.

Why do people wanna go back and read a voice of a teenager?

- A lot of times in these conversations, we're always kind of touching upon the universal component of things.

We were all teenagers, we all remember first love, first heartbreak, first grief, all these powerful moments in our life.

I kind of prefer that versus a lot of the stories about, you know, things in the adult life territory that I personally haven't experienced that either too.

You know, like I've never been married.

I haven't been divorced yet either, as a result.

- Your book is called "More Happy than Not."

I just love that mother character, and she's a hoot.

I mean, she has the spelling bees where she let the boys use all curse words just so they can get it out of their system.

Well, I was gonna ask you- - Where'd you get that?

- Yeah, I was gonna ask you, how similar is that mom to your mom?

- She's very similar.

Yeah.

You know, my mom has definitely read, she's read the book a couple times now and she refers to the character as herself.

She'll read the book and she'll be like, "Oh, I love where you did this."

I'm like, "That wasn't me.

That was Erin."

- Mim, in "Mosquitoland" has an aunt who gives her advice.

She says, "You should write, it's better than succumbing to the madness of the world."

Do you feel like characters trying to avoid the madness of the world is sort of a theme in both your books?

- I think so, and I think the definition of madness is certainly called into question.

Teens want to understand the value of the world and have the world understand their own value.

If you can answer that, you can answer almost anything.

- Thanks for joining us for "A Word on Words."

I'm Mary Laura Philpott.

- Keep Reading.

- I thought we weren't supposed to say it.

- Aw, Mary Laura.

- Mary Laura.

- We miss Mary Laura, we had so much fun.

- She is a delight, she's a great writer, and of course, I watched the show in the beginning with her, hosting and just, she brought such light and such energy to the show, and you guys made a good team.

- We had so much fun.

But you know, we used to shoot on location, and we went to all of these cool places around town, but neither of us knew who we were interviewing and we didn't know where the other one was shooting.

So when we watched the episode, that was the first time we found out, and so it was always a fun surprise to see, oh, hey, oh look, we're at the climbing gym.

Oh hey, we're over here at the jail.

- And it's always such a challenge, right, to find a place that matches what the author's book is about.

- Right, thematically finding the perfect match, especially because not all of these books are from Nashville authors.

Most are not.

- Are not.

- So finding something thematically, and we did that for several seasons, six seasons I think.

It strikes me just how incredible that our city was able to be the backdrop for so many episodes of the show.

How about we take a look at some of the places that we recorded?

(carefree music) (buoyant piano music) So tell me about the idea of love.

- Whenever I'm on the road, people often tell me their stories.

And I joke around and say that there are only a few people that people love to tell their secret stories to, not their public stories, but their secret stories, and those are bartenders.

- Yeah.

- And right?

- Absolutely.

- And hairdressers.

- And hairdressers.

- And novelists.

- Right.

- And often people say to me, "Will you write that story?"

And I always say, "I don't wanna steal your story."

So I started to wonder why I kept saying that, and what does that even mean?

And so I decided to write about a screenwriter who had had some flops, and needed to steal a story, and how he believed that the answer was on the outside.

Because we both know that creatively the answer's on the inside.

(buoyant piano music) The stories we tell was about letterpress.

And I knew that the main character would run a letterpress before I knew what the book was even about.

(buoyant piano music) (bell rings) (typewriter rattles) - I'm Celeste Ng and my book is "Little Fires Everywhere."

Shaker Heights was one of the first planned communities in the United States, and they planned everything from the layout of the roads to the colors of the houses.

It is a real place, and I really grew up there.

The suburbs, which we think of as being a sort of quintessentially American kind of place, green lawns, parks, trees, kids riding their bikes, hopscotch on the sidewalk, Shaker Heights was all of those things.

But I also, once I moved away from Shaker Heights, realized that there were a lot of things about that upbringing that were sort of quote unquote, "Typical American," and then some things that were really atypical, both for better and for worse.

And I wanted to kind of tease apart that idea of what that American suburban life really was.

- This book is populated largely by teenagers, and I think it can be a tricky thing the further you get from teenage-hood yourself to write a teen voice well.

What is the secret to doing that?

How did you do it?

- I wrote a lot of this book at the Cambridge Public Library, which is right next to Cambridge's Public High School.

And the teenagers from the high school would come to the library to do their work, to eat their lunch, they'd flirt with each other, they'd complain about their teachers, they'd do all that.

And I'd sit there and kind of listen to them and watch them, and mostly what I thought was, I thank God I'm not a teenager anymore.

(laughs) (gentle music) (bell rings) (typewriter rattles) - I am Ariel Lawhon, and my novel is "Flight of Dreams."

- Tell me about "Flight of Dreams."

How did you decide to chart the last flight of the Hindenburg?

- It was an accident, actually.

It was a newspaper article I'd clipped about nine years ago, and it was an article about the last flight.

And on it was the image of the Hindenburg, that really famous image we're all familiar with.

And the airship is in flames and it's very horrific and startling, but if you look closely at that image, you will see very small specs, and those specks are people that are running and jumping from the airship.

And it wasn't until that moment that I realized people actually survived, and I wanted to know who they were and what that last flight was like for them.

(jazzy music) - One of the things that is very interesting to me is the details that you put in, the sizes of the sleeping quarters, what they looked like, the bar, the meals that were served.

Talk a little bit about the details that you picked to make this come alive.

- All of them accurate, all of them pulled straight from historical accounts, partly because I like getting it right.

I'm enough of a perfectionist that I want to make sure I get it right, but I also don't wanna get hate mail.

(laughs) And I will because it's such a well known event, and there are so many historians and avid airship followers that they know this, they know these details, they know those names, they know those events, they know the mechanics of the airship.

And it was sort of a nod to them as well, sort of a, "Here's your ship."

(bell rings) (typewriter rattles) (sassy music) - When you're desperate, you'll do pretty much anything to survive, right?

Do you think that that holds true for all of us?

- Okay, so if that were not true about the human species, we probably wouldn't have done so well.

So when the plane crashes and there's some dead bodies, those people would not eat those other people.

- Right, but then they would die.

- But then they would die, yeah.

So I once knew somebody who had been in the resistance in World War II, and she said to me, "Pray that you will never have the opportunity to be a hero."

I think that's one of the attractions of reading books about people in extreme situations.

- [JT Ellison] Let's talk about the book for a minute.

Stan and Charmaine take a deal where they get to go- - Well first of all, why would they even think of that?

- Why would they even think of that?

- Why would they even find that of interest?

They have lost their jobs and shortly after that, they have been unable to pay the mortgage on their house, and they've lost their house.

So they are living in their car with no prospects.

So, then they see on the television an ad for a proposal, a project you can get into, if you're accepted.

Totally safe.

Yes, and full employment for everyone.

The only catch is the full employment comes because you spend one month in jail, and then the next month living in your house and being a civilian in the town that services the jail, and the next month you're in jail again.

(cool jazzy music) (bell rings) (typewriter rattles) (dramatic music) - I'm Jeremy Finley.

This is "The Dark Above."

(dramatic music) - [JT Ellison] I need to ask you the question, do you believe in aliens?

- I believe the people, the people that have had these encounters, who have seen things, have experienced things, they have nothing to gain, right?

- Right.

- It's only scrutiny.

It's only hostility in a lot of cases, and they're coming forward, telling "This happened to me."

I believe those people.

(otherworldly music) - [JT Ellison] Why do you think speculative, science fiction stories are seeing a renaissance?

- I think what happens with the supernatural and speculative fiction is it's deeply rooted in reality, but then it gives you an explanation of, "Hey, maybe there's something more."

What scares me, JT, and I'll be completely honest with you, is how the events of what I've made up in my head are occurring in the real world right now.

- Yeah.

- When this book came out, I'd obviously, in this book, written about hurricanes and wildfires and sudden violence, and the book comes out and there's a hurricane in New Orleans, and the rainforest right now is burning, and there's this horrible violence that has happened in our country in the last couple weeks.

And that's scary to me because I wrote that as a way, as a kind of what I wanted to be, like a really scary thing that these characters are encountering to fuel them through this journey, and here we're dealing with it in our real lives.

- And it's supposed to be inconceivable.

- Inconceivable, and it's happening as we go about.

And I think that is the thing that has been kind of troubling.

(bright music) - That was so much fun.

- It was a lot of fun.

It was such an honor to be asked to be on the show, and then to again, go to that location.

That was a very cool day.

- Yeah, it was a cool day, and we got to tour the observatory.

Yeah, that was a really fun episode, and seeing you on camera, talking about books, that's kind of when it got in the back of my mind that you would be a really great host of this show.

- I'll never forget getting that email from you, and then talking about it.

I'm like, "Are you kidding me?"

- No, just get on camera.

- Yeah, and I remember telling my wife, I was like, "You know that show I watch, you know the show that they featured me on too, they're asking me to come do it.

And I was like, "I can't believe how fortunate I am."

It's so much fun.

It never feels like work.

You know, even when you've got like seven books to read in a short amount of time and you've got all these... You know, you've gotta get your questions right.

You gotta have your research right.

None of it's work 'cause we're, at the heart of it all, just readers.

- Yeah.

- And the fact that we get to pick the brains of the people that we interview is incredible.

- Going to jail with Margaret Atwood was possibly the coolest thing I have ever done.

I mean, I think that needs to go in my resume forever.

I went to jail with Margaret Atwood.

- "Behind bars with Margaret Atwood," by JT Ellison.

Well speaking of legends, in my world, there is especially one author who is a legend to me.

And the fact that I was able to profile him and interview him is one of the highlights.

So let's take a look at that.

- I'm Rick Bragg, and my book is "The Speckled Beauty."

- What is it about this dog that made him the foundation of this book?

- He had been a stray.

Someone just threw him away.

And he's a beautiful merle-coated Australian shepherd.

One day he just left and came back a few days later and he was, again, torn to pieces again.

He was torn to pieces When I got him, when I found him, and then he was torn to pieces again.

I told my mom, "Stay here with him, I'm gonna run in and call the vet."

And I came back out and she was talking to him, and she was saying, "I think we're gonna name you after our third cousin."

She had these freckles all over, had a million freckles, and my daddy nicknamed her the Speckled Beauty.

"Because you've got freckles, I think that's what we're gonna name you."

I could see the title on the book Jacket, "The Speckled Beauty," which I think is one of the three or four best book titles, he said modestly, that he'd ever heard.

- I mean, thank God for mothers.

- Yeah.

- I mean, just that- - "The Speckled Beauty."

(gentle music) - [Jeremy Finley] What is it about dogs?

(Rick laughs) They can't talk, they don't feed us, they don't pay our bills, but we'd do anything for 'em.

- I think that might be it.

I think the fact that... You read things into 'em.

I mean, everybody gets to read their own narrative into their dog, and what's the dog going to do?

I mean, the dog gonna say, "No, that ain't it."

You know, "No, you read me all wrong."

They project their own feelings, and no matter what they project into the dog, and I don't want this to sound highfalutin 'cause I am not that smart, but whatever they project into the dog, what they pull out is happiness.

(gentle music) - I gotta be honest with you, I still can't believe I got to interview Rick Bragg!

- There is a commonality through so many of the authors that we get to talk about, their humility.

- Oh, right.

- Isn't that incredible?

- Right.

- Usually even the more successful they are, the more humble they are.

- Right, and here's a Pulitzer Prize winner, and he's the second Pulitzer Prize winner I've been able to interview on this show.

And it's incredible to me that these people will come and you kind of get a little nervous, right, before some of them come on, and you're like, okay, how's this gonna go?

And it's the humility, every time.

So did you ever have anybody that you were super nervous to interview?

- Oh, I did, and I think we're getting ready to watch that episode now.

- I'm John Grisham.

My book is "Camino Island."

My wife and I were driving to Florida and we heard an NPR piece on stolen books.

And for 25 years, I've been collecting modern first editions.

I'm not a serious collector, I don't trade 'em, but I'm fascinated by the world of rare books.

And to think that there are people who actually steal 'em and trade in stolen books was pretty fascinating.

And so I got the idea of not books, but something even more valuable, manuscripts by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

There are only five of 'em.

They're in one place, as opposed to being scattered.

So that became my target.

(playful music) - [JT Ellison] It is a departure for you from your normal legal thriller.

- Well, it's sort of a mystery.

My goal was to write a complete novel with no lawyers in it, and I almost succeeded.

- Almost succeeded.

- Yeah.

- (laughs) Almost.

- I got to the very end.

I had to have a couple of lawyers to clean up some mess, but they're minor characters and I got 'em off the page pretty fast.

- [JT Ellison] Do you have anyone that you share the manuscript with, or is your editor your first reader?

- My wife, she has to kind of check off on the story before I start.

And we did this from the very beginning when I didn't know what I was doing with "A Time to Kill."

And she has got to like the idea.

But it's a give and take in both my wife and my agent, slash editor.

They read the story and the deal is, anybody can say anything.

If you have a problem with anything, you say it, and we'll talk about it.

And if we sort of all agree something needs to be changed, I'll change it.

- (laughs) John Grisham.

- John Grisham, how cool.

- (laughs) I'm not Worthy.

- Right?

- That was so incredibly intimidating because he's just a legend.

He's one of my favorite writers.

I've been reading him since "A Time to Kill" and to be able to sit down and talk to him, by the end of the interview, he and I were buddies.

That is one of the beauties of the show is you can go in scared to death, and meet a hero and walk out friends.

- Right, what comes through, I think, especially for you, hopefully for me, is that we are such big fans, and sometimes we don't even know an author until we've read their book, and then we become a fan of theirs.

And you know, you don't want to gush too much because everybody at home would be like, "Okay, we get it," but sometimes it's hard because they're such a hero.

And so I know which ones are our favorite episodes, but we should take a look now at the most popular shows that we've done so far.

- My name is Anne Patchett.

This is "The Dutch House."

(melancholy music) I've had readers say to me, "This book has really helped me to think about the grudges and the angers I have from my own childhood and how I have lugged them through my life."

And that sort of both surprised me and pleased me.

I was like, "Oh wow."

If there's some therapeutic quality to this book, I hadn't recognized.

- Right.

- That's really great, here are the damages of holding onto the hurts of your childhood.

(melancholy music) - [Mary Laura Philpott] What was the spark that ignited this story for you?

- I started to think about the celebration of extreme wealth and the idea that there could be nothing in the world better than being the very, very richest person you could be.

And thinking, wouldn't it be interesting to write a novel about someone who was in fact not interested in being blindingly wealthy?

(melancholy music) - What was it like living with Danny and Maeve in your head?

- It's interesting because I hadn't written a first person narrator in such a long time, and it's very different to write in first person because once you get the voice, that is the voice in your head all the time, and it kind of follows you around.

It was very easy for me to write from Danny's perspective because Danny is the picture of entitlement.

Everybody likes him, but everything is done on his terms.

He is held up by a cast of women, and he has no idea that he's held up by a cast of women.

And strangely enough, I've met men like this before in my life and I was able to draw on that knowledge with no problem whatsoever.

- I'm John Scalzi and this is "Starter Villain."

It's an average Joe inherits his mysterious uncle's James Bond super villain business.

Things go from there.

- Can we start the discussion with a conversation about what may be the best book cover of all time?

- (laughs) Yes, absolutely, let's have that conversation.

- Is this what you always imagined you wanted the cover of this book to be?

- I honestly didn't know what the cover was going to be.

While I was writing it, a lot of things lent itself to that.

I mean, it is very much of a book that is taking a sort of unswerving sarcastic hit to the James Bond villains, and stuff like that.

So I figured there might be something along that line.

But when they showed me the current cover, the first time I saw it, I just laughed, right?

And like a good laugh, not like a, "Oh my God, I can't believe they're gonna saddle me with this cover."

- Right.

- And so I loved it.

We showed it to our marketing people, the marketing people loved it.

We showed it to the publisher of Tor Books and she loved it, and here's a fun fact, when the publisher really likes the cover of your book, guess what, that's the cover of your book.

One of the things that I like doing in my books kind of examine a lot of cultural tropes that we have, and go, "Why, why is this?"

So for example, with "Starter Villain," if you think about the James Bond villain, like their plans were like actually successful and they were not, you know, thwarted by Jimmy Bond throwing them into a volcano, or whatever.

You're like, "Okay, what then," right?

It's like you now rule the world.

Congratulations, now you have to worry about crop outputs in Uganda, right?

- (laughs) Right.

- Because if you don't, then people are gonna starve.

No one ever talks about all the work.

(gentle music) - Hi, my name is Oyinkan Braithwaite.

This is "My Sister, the Serial Killer."

(buoyant music) - [Mary Laura Philpott] I am curious, do you have siblings?

- [Oyinkan] Yes, I do, two sisters and a brother.

- What about your sibling experience did you tap into?

- At the time, I didn't think I was tapping into anything, but looking back on it, I do realize that.

So the girl after me, there's just two years between us.

There were period where we couldn't stand one another.

At some point, I was convinced one of us was adopted, and it wasn't me 'cause I look like my mom.

(Mary Laura laughs) So it had to have been her.

Like, I'm not sure where she came from.

You know, we did have a very tempestuous relationship, but I also knew that when push came to shove, she would be there.

That's probably what I drew from in some respects, creating these two.

(bright music) - This book is, in many ways, about the things we hide or cover up, including sometimes, literally, the things we clean up, such as a bathroom where a murder may have taken place.

What about that intrigues you?

- Whatever goes on in a family is usually kept within those walls.

Whatever your culture you're from, I don't think people are quick to talk about certain things with outsiders.

Also this idea of maintaining appearances, which again, it's a very universal thing that we do.

These days, we do it with social media even.

We construct these perceptions of ourselves that aren't necessarily real.

So I think I was just fascinated with that, the duplicitous nature of people and just the idea of, you know, why we're so attracted to beauty and perfection and maintaining ideals like this.

(buoyant music) - You know, we haven't even scratched the surface of the 10 years of episodes that we have out there that people can watch on the PBS app.

They can listen to full episodes as a podcast.

They can go to awordonwords.org and see all of these amazing authors and all the shows that we've had.

- Man, it's been a lot of fun, watching these episodes, and just seeing how far the show has come in 10 years, and what an honor to both of us to be able to be a part of it.

- And being able to keep John Seigenthaler's literary legacy in this town, it's absolutely fantastic.

I'm JT Ellison.

- And I'm Jeremy Finley.

- Keep reading.

(bell rings) [Jeremy Finley] Real quick.

I had a woman out of Atlanta - Reach out to me and said, "I listen to your podcast."

- And that's how she found some of her newest writers.

- And I thought that was so great that outside of Nashville you know, it's having that kind of impact.

- [JT Ellison] Our viewers, and listeners now, are the life blood of this show and we are so incredibly grateful for them.