Episode 109 Doron Keren
As Told To
“Memory without responsibility is just nostalgia,” reflects podcast guest Doron Keren, the keeper of his family’s harrowing Holocaust survival story. “Someone has to make sure that stories like this live and are experienced by future generations.” Keren, a retired dentist, has determined to do just that, working tirelessly to help shepherd first his mother’s story (, by Krystyna Chiger, co-written with podcast host Daniel Paisner), and now his grandfather’s memoir, (, by Ignacy Chiger), to bookstore shelves. His grandfather’s gripping, historically significant account, just...
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Episode 108: John Rosengren
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“It’s a constant hustle,” reflects podcast guest John Rosengren on the life of a freelance journalist. “Ginning up ideas, developing them into pitches, sending them around, facing rejection… sometimes it can wear me down.” But sometimes, too, it can be endlessly rewarding, as we can hear as John looks back on a rich, wildly prolific journalism career. Over the years, John’s articles have appeared in The Atavist, GQ, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Men’s Health, and The Washington Post Magazine. His 2016 expose on the ways casinos enable gambling addicts, originally...
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Episode 107: Holly Gleason
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Award-winning music journalist, critic and artist development consultant Holly Gleason returns to the podcast for a solo outing to discuss her eclectic and electric career as one of the music industry’s leading voices. Over the years, she has written for Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Playboy, Spin, and the Miami Herald. Holly’s most recent collaboration, the #1 New York Times best-selling memoir , written with country music superstar Kenny Chesney, has helped to cement Holly’s reputation as an in-demand ghostwriter who pushes her subjects to reflect on...
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Episode 106: Jenna Glatzer
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As a freelance writer, Jenna Glatzer has lent her voice to books, articles, essays, blog posts, scripts—even greeting cards and doormats, she’s proud to say. She is the author or co-author of more than 35 books, many of them written in collaboration with some of our leading actors, athletes, CEOs, models, reality television stars, medical professionals and news personalities. Oh, and ! (How’s that for a ghostwriting credit?) Jenna joins us on the podcast to discuss the very many twists and turns her career has taken over the years, including a discouraging turn of late as she...
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Episode 105: Bizzy Coy & Lia Strasser
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What makes a good New Yorker cartoon? More to the point, who makes a good New Yorker cartoon? In our latest episode of As Told To: The Ghostwriting Podcast, we visit with the magazine’s self-described “toonsome twosome,” the cartooning team of Bizzy Coy and Lia Strasser, and discover what it takes to tap the talents of a like-minded soul to help you discover your best creative self. “It was out of frustration that I reached out to Bizzy,” reflects Lia, the illustrator of this dynamic duo. “I was struggling in the sense that I’d had these ideas that I thought were great and...
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Episode 104: Paul Rappaport
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“This is the best book about how it used to be,” writes the influential music critic and record industry analysts Bob Lefsetz, in praise of Paul Rappaport’s wild ride of a memoir, . “[It’s] the only book I can remember that truly details what it was like inside the star factory.” After a career spanning more than three decades in rock promotion at Columbia Records, “Rap” knows as much as anyone what it takes to launch a new act, pump up a new record, or beat the drums on behalf of a world tour. Before capping his career at the label as a senior vice president, he had played a...
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Episode 103: Joanne Gordon
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"It's off the record until it's on the page." That’s a line from our As Told To podcast conversation with award-winning author/ghostwriter Joanne Gordon, reflecting on the level of trust that exists between author and subject in a successful book collaboration. A former staff writer and contributing editor at Forbes, where she wrote about management, career, and workplace issues, Joanne is the author of more than a dozen books, with a focus on helping business and thought leaders elevate their voices and share their stories. She is the co-author, most recently, of , written with former Coach...
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Second Printing: Bruce Vilanch
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This episode originally aired on June 7, 2022. Two-time Emmy Award-winner Bruce Vilanch has written jokes for Bob Hope, Lily Tomlin, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and virtually every Hollywood star to grace the Academy Awards stage from 1989 – 2014. As one of the entertainment industry’s most sought-after joke writers, the actor, comedian and songwriter was perhaps best-known to audiences for his work behind-the-scenes at the Oscars, supplying one-liners to hosts and presenters. (Oscar-watchers are still talking about the year Jack Palance did...
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Episode 102: Gathering of the Ghosts 2025
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Join podcast host Daniel Paisner as he moderates a panel discussion at the second annual ghostwriting conference earlier this year. Dan is joined by former As Told To guests , , and , as the veteran collaborators compare notes on craft and process—a fun, spirited, insightful reflection on the very many ways authors and journalists are writing in collaboration. Learn more: Please support the sponsors who support our show: Daniel Paisner's Daniel Paisner's (PODCAST) | 30% discount (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership ...
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Episode 101: Samantha Rose
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“As a ghostwriter, I’ve trained my ear to listen for what’s really there or not there, to discern what’s underneath or between someone’s words,” writes veteran collaborator Samantha Rose, in her stirring, soaring new memoir . “I hear what’s implied, what’s withheld…” Samantha’s gifts as a storyteller are very much on display in the pages of her new book—a heartbreaking account of her mother’s suicide, published earlier this year by Sybilline Press. An Emmy Award-winning television writer and a New York Times best-selling collaborator, Samantha has written...
info_outline“Memory without responsibility is just nostalgia,” reflects podcast guest Doron Keren, the keeper of his family’s harrowing Holocaust survival story. “Someone has to make sure that stories like this live and are experienced by future generations.”
Keren, a retired dentist, has determined to do just that, working tirelessly to help shepherd first his mother’s story (The Girl in the Green Sweater, by Krystyna Chiger, co-written with podcast host Daniel Paisner), and now his grandfather’s memoir, (Beneath the Lightless Sky, by Ignacy Chiger), to bookstore shelves.
His grandfather’s gripping, historically significant account, just published by Amsterdam Publishers, revisits Ignacy Chiger’s desperate struggle to evade Nazi persecution in wartime Lvov, Poland, where he hid with his family for 14 months in the city’s underground sewers, with the help of an unlikely hero.
The book stands as a compelling companion piece to Krystyna Chiger’s 2008 international best-seller, the inspiration behind the 2011 film “In Darkness,” from acclaimed Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss called the movie “a thrilling adventure picture—as if Anne Frank had found an Inglourious Basterd to help her make ‘The Great Escape.’”
In his foreword to Beneath the Lightless Sky, Keren calls his grandfather “a real-life superhero”—a description that is well-earned. “[He] outwitted interrogators,” Keren writes, “evaded deportation, engineered the survival of a small underground community, and kept alive the faintest flicker of hope in a place where even light could not enter.”
Join us as Keren shares what it was like to grow up beneath the shadow of the Holocaust, and what it means to keep sharing the stories that give our lives shape and meaning.
Learn more about Beneath the Lightless Sky:
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