Write-minded: Weekly Inspiration for Writers is currently in its fourth year. We are a weekly podcast for writers craving a unique blend of inspiration and real talk about the ups and downs of the writing life. Hosted by Brooke Warner of She Writes and Grant Faulkner of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), each theme-focused episode of Write-minded features an interview with a writer, author, or publishing industry professional.

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This week’s show focuses on endings, and beginnings. Guest Zahid Rafiq, who’s written a short story collection whose endings serve the stories and his characters, speaks to how he thinks about endings, including those that others might find less than satisfying. We’re defending a particular type of ending, those in which writers may feel less than compelled to tie their story in a bow for readers. Brooke points to a series of YouTube shorts she did on beginnings and endings in memoir that we invite memoirists to check out, and we close the show with a Substackin’ post Brooke wrote inspired by Salman Rushdie’s keynote at the Kauai Writers Conference in November.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Zahid Rafiq is a writer and former journalist based in Kashmir. His first collection of short stories, The World With Its Mouth Open, came out this year. He studied Journalism as a Fulbright scholar from University of California, Berkeley, and he did an MFA in fiction at Cornell University. He has been teaching online at the Bard College since 2022.