Hey listeners, Matthew Cher here. A long time ago, 10 years ago, I can believe it. I was lucky enough to be a guest on Longform, one of my favorite podcasts of all time.

Listening to Longform was, to me, like being in a master class in storytelling. It taught me more about creativity than any book I ever read.

Like you, I miss it all the time. But good news, maybe, I'm here to tell you about a show that

might fill some of the long form shaped hole in your heart. It's called origin stories. And here's

the basic gist.

Every week, I talk to a different writer or director about the creation of a single work

close to their own hearts.

We look at the frustrations and the joys, the setbacks, and the successes, and those big

breakthrough moments.

Among the guests appearing in the early episodes are Stephanie Fu,

the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, What My Bones Know, John Hoffman,

the creator of only murders in the building, and Patrick Radin-Keefe, the New Yorker staff writer,

and also former long-form host Evan Ratliff himself.

To give you a sense, I'm going to play you a bit of my interview with Noah Hawley,

the showrunner behind the new FX series Alien Earth.

Meantime, you can listen to origin stories wherever you get your podcasts.

More after the interview.

I'm sorry. get your podcasts. More after the interview. How do you think about influence? No, a lot of writers can't write without sitting down and listening or reading a book by an author they love or watching a

movie. The flip side of that is people are natural mimics,

and if we read something right before we sit down and write,

it will often turn out to be in that style.

How do you think about that?

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