Jen Spyra, BIG TIME: STORIES
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 643 Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2021
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jen Spyra, a former writer for The Onion and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, joins Zibby to talk about her new book of short stories, Big Time. Jen shares how she wanted to write stories that weren't TV-friendly (and that wouldn't be rejected in a writer's room), as well as how she drew inspiration by recalling events from her life and asking, "What if this had turned out differently?"
Amazon: https://amzn.to/3oDHEG5
Bookshop: https://bit.ly/3yA45Rc
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Libby Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, |
| 0:12.2 | which you should run out and buy called Moms Don't Have Time to, a quarantine anthology. |
| 0:16.8 | All proceeds of that book go to COVID-19 vaccine research. |
| 0:20.4 | And I'm the editor-in-chief of M don't have time to write a new publication on Medium. |
| 0:25.0 | And we're accepting submissions. |
| 0:26.8 | So please send your personal essays there. |
| 0:29.1 | And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens. |
| 0:32.9 | And my website is Zibby Owens.com. |
| 0:34.8 | Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. |
| 0:39.5 | Today is the last day of my official book blast and these did not fit into any neat categories, but they were still here. So |
| 0:45.4 | I'm putting them all together. We have one thriller, one story, and one travel book. So I am |
| 0:52.6 | calling this thriller, travel, and tales. Enjoy this last day. I hope you've |
| 0:57.9 | had fun following along on the book blast where I've released multiple episodes a day. Sometimes |
| 1:02.6 | I do this when I don't schedule properly and I have too many at a time. So I hope that you |
| 1:07.8 | have found in the last, what, 12 days or something, books and episodes |
| 1:12.3 | that spoke to you. |
| 1:13.2 | I hope you've ordered some of the books and enjoyed and keep listening because I'll |
| 1:17.2 | have an episode, at least one episode a day all summer long. |
| 1:20.8 | Jen Spira is the author of Big Time Stories. |
| 1:24.5 | Jen is a writer and performer. |
| 1:26.0 | You may have seen her stuff on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where she was a staff writer for four seasons. Before that, she was a senior writer for The Onion, where she also headed the editorial video department as a writer, director, and producer. Her debut short story collection, Big Time is published by Random House. Beyond the Onion, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney's, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. As an improviser, she's performed on teams at I.O. Chicago, I.O. L.A., and at UCB in New York. She voiced the character of Hillary Clinton on Showtimes, our cartoon president, and is the announcer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. |
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