In Rewrite Radio Episode #50, Jen Hatmaker and Jennifer Holberg discuss the truths that humor conveys, the need for good friends, and the problems facing evangelicals.

In Rewrite Radio Episode #49, Lee Smith talks about and reads from her novel Saving Grace. Smith lets us into the stories behind her novels, her experiences with southern churches, and her fascination with all forms of ecstatic religion.

In Rewrite Radio Episode #48, Walter Wangerin, Jr. begins his Festival talk by comparing hard rain on a roof to the sound of applause and praise, and he says that he found it his job to seek God in the common things and know that the whole earth is filled with God’s glory. He also dives into the whole process of writing - from observation to idea to final product.

In Rewrite Radio Episode #47, CCFW co-director Jennifer Holberg interviews some who have been there since the beginning of Festival: Henry J. Baron, Donald Hettinga, and Gary D. Schmidt. This episode shares the journey of the Festival’s past 30 years- its speakers, triumphs, difficulties - all driven by the idea for a place where writers of faith can learn from, appreciate, support, and affirm one another.

Episode 46 of Rewrite Radio features a collection of excerpts from our second season of the podcast, curated and edited together by CCFW media producer Jon Brown and program coordinator Natalie Rowland. Join us as we journey through past Festival sessions in an exploration of stories as service. Speakers in order of appearance in this episode: Gene Luen Yang (2014), Richard Rodriguez (2010), Li-Young Lee & Nick Samaras (2004), Marie How (2018), Kwame Alexander & Nate Marshall (2018), Jacqueline Woodson (2004), Madeleine L’Engle (1996), Dorothy Fortenberry (2018), and Elie Wiesel (1998).

In Episode #45 of Rewrite Radio, we go back to the first night of Festival 1998 and Nobel-prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel, who offers powerful and prophetic words as applicable today as they were then. The author of over 60 books, Elie Wiesel was born in what is now Romania. At 15, he was deported to Auschwitz. By the time of liberation in 1945, Wiesel had lost his mother, his father, and his younger sister. After the war, he became a journalist and out of an interview, he was persuaded to write what would become his memoir, Night - now translated into more than 30 languages.

In Episode #44 of Rewrite Radio, we bring you Nikki Grimes, speaking at Festival 2018 about the potential story and poetry have to teach us about empathy. Drawing examples from her own work, Grimes talks about the way that words can connect people across time and cultures.

Episode #43 of Rewrite Radio features a recording of Will Campbell from the very first Festival in 1990. Campbell, a Baptist minister, is perhaps best known for his involvement in the Civil Rights movement, first through the National Council of Churches and then through the Committee of Southern Churchmen, through which he published Katallagete, the New Testament Greek for “be reconciled”. He was on the front lines of integration efforts: one of the four people who escorted the black students who integrated the Little Rock public schools, the only white person present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King, and a marcher with King in Birmingham and Selma. His activism led him as well to protest other issues, such as Vietnam and the death penalty.

Campbell was the author of numerous works, and his memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly, was a National Book Award finalist in 1978. He was also a pop culture icon: the inspiration for the character Will B. Dunn in the cartoon Kudzu. In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Campbell the National Humanities Medal. He passed away in 2013.

In Episode #42 of Rewrite Radio, we listen back to a conversation with writer Yann Martel from Festival 2008. Interviewed by Otto Selles, a French professor and poet, Martel lets us into the stories behind his stories, the quirks of his freewheeling curiosity, and the ideas at play in his art and mind. Yann Martel is the author of four novels: The Life of Pi, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2002, as well as The High Mountains of Portugal, Beatrice and Virgil, and Self.

In Episode #41 of Rewrite Radio, we are joined by Marilynne Robinson. Robinson is the author of four novels: Housekeeper, Gilead, Home, and Lila. She has also written books of non-fiction including Mother Country, The Death of Adam, Absence of Mind, When I Was a Child I Read Book, and The Givenness of Things.

In Episode #40 of Rewrite Radio, we are joined by Abigail Disney and Dorothy Fortenberry. Working in the television and movie industry, Abigail and Dorothy are involved in making some of the most significant media today. In this wide-ranging conversation with Jennifer Holberg, co-director of the CCFW, they discuss the ethical imperatives that shape — and should shape — the stories we tell on-screen.

In Episode #39 of Rewrite Radio, we bring you a session from Festival 2004. Listen in as two poets - Li-Young Lee and Nick Samaras - define the “demonization” of lyrical language and explore the meaning of pauses articulate in poems. Along the way, they reminisce about their own stories as pilgrimage.

In Episode #38 of Rewrite Radio, Calvin College chaplain, Mary Hulst — first woman ordained in the Christian Reformed Church in the US — interviews Rabbi Sandy Sasso, the first woman to have been ordained a rabbi in Reconstructionist Judaism. Sasso and Hulst discuss Judaism, feminism, and why children’s books are so significant.

In Episode #37 of Rewrite Radio, Scott Hoezee, a noted preacher himself and the director of the Center for Excellence in Preaching at Calvin Theological Seminary, conducts a wide-ranging interview with Fleming Rutledge. Fleming Rutledge is an Episcopal priest and writer of nine books, including the award-winning The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. Ordained to the diaconate in 1975, two years later, she became one of the first women to be ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church.

In Episode #36 of Rewrite Radio, independent scholar Sarina Gruver Moore talks with author Afaa Michael Weaver about how his journey took him from factory work to a Fulbright and ultimately to a professorship and an established writing career — and the spiritual practices that helped him along the way.

In Episode #35 of Rewrite Radio, we listen back to the 2004 Festival as Jacqueline Woodson considers how her upbringing, including her family’s faith commitments, prepared her for life as a writer, a mother, and a humanitarian.

Episode #34 of Rewrite Radio features a conversation between the writers Jamie Quatro & April Ayers Lawson, hosted by Amy Frykholm. Titled, “Sex, the Spirit, Short Stories, and South”, this conversation takes up the complicated work of writing about religious experience and sexual experience. It may not be appropriate for all listeners.

In episode #33 of Rewrite Radio, Kathleen Dean Moore, a philosopher and nature writer, proposes that the art of spiritual nature writing is to explore unfathomable ideas - mystery, astonishment, sanctity, despair - in the plain language of ice and frogs, returning stars, bells, birdsong, and pawprints in snow.

In Episode #32 of Rewrite Radio, Gary Schmidt discusses the ethical implications of using memories in fiction at the 2006 Festival.