Welcome to the Reading & Writing podcast. My name is Jeff Rutherford, and since 2009, I've been interviewing authors about their books, their writing habits, their favorite novels, and how they got started writing.
I’d rather that you dive into one of many hundreds of episodes that I’ve recorded, but if you’re curious about me here’s some info:
Born in Macon, Georgia in the late 1960s, I’ve been a passionate reader since childhood.
My Mom loves to tell a story about when she took me shopping at a department store when I was 10 or 11 years old. When she couldn’t find me, she panicked and thought I’d been kidnapped or wandered off. Nope, I wasn’t lost or yanked into a stranger’s car. She found me sitting down underneath a rack of merchandise reading a paperback book.
When I moved to New York City in the mid-90s after college, I ended up getting a job in publishing. I started out with a temporary position as an editorial assistant at HarperCollins while the assistant I was replacing recovered from major surgery. From there, I ended up working at the Denise Marcil Literary Agency for 3.5 years or so.
Even though I left book publishing as a career, I continued reading voraciously after I started working in public relations for technology and software companies.
I heard about podcasts within a month or two of the first regularly updated podcasts. Yes, I’m that generation that remembers pre-iTunes podcasts. When I started listening to podcasts, I manually synced podcasts to my iPod and listened in my car. This was years before Serial, Joe Rogan, etc.
The first books/author podcasts that I remember were Books on the Nightstand, Shaun Farrell’s Adventures in Sci-fi Publishing, and The Book Show (which was technically a radio show on the Albany, NY NPR station and the episodes were uploaded to an RSS feed). Alas, all of those shows are no more.
Given that I had worked as a disc jockey at WUOG, the college radio station at the University of Georgia, I decided to start my own podcast - The Reading and Writing Podcast. And here I am, 775 episodes later . . . and I’m still recording interviews.
If you’d like a list of my favorite episodes that I’ve recorded, that would be a very long list indeed.
But, for the curious, here are some of my favorites:
Thomas Cook
