When the pandemic shut down writing conferences in 2020, I was unmoored, cut off from the writing community that had sustained me for almost two decades. Living in Montana, the issue of isolation felt both immediate and unsurmountable. Conferences that had previously provided my annual touchpoints with writing friends and peers, times when we sat in the hotel bar and discussed the challenges of surprising today’s savvy thriller readers, talked about the pitfalls of outlining or not, the struggles with writers block, and the complications of the books and the business—all vanished overnight. Writing crime fiction in a state with more cattle than people, the distance between my desk and the nearest crime writer colleague felt massive.
Killer Women, a podcast focused on the women who create today’s best crime fiction, was born as my response to isolation. Starting the podcast was equal parts ambition and desperation. I needed those conversations as much as I hoped others would. Now, after more than four years, it has grown into a genuine community for creators, guests, and listeners interested in the particular challenges of being women who write about violence, darkness, and moral complexity.
The decision to focus specifically on women wasn’t arbitrary. I wanted to create space for conversations about how writing crime as women differs from writing it as men—as mothers balancing school pickups with murder scenes, as people socialized to be “the softer sex” who spend their days imagining brutal acts, and as writers whose relationship to violence and darkness is inevitably shaped by moving through the world in female bodies. These aren’t conversations that happen easily in mixed company or in the brief windows of conference panels. They require time, trust, and a thoughtful approach.
Finding My Own Community
There is no question that I was the first beneficiary of what I was building. Hosting weekly conversations transformed my isolation into connection and gave structure and purpose to uncertain times. But more than that, the podcast deepened my own understanding of craft and characters in ways I hadn’t anticipated. In education, they say that teaching is the best way to learn, and I discovered that hosting operates by the same logic. When you’re responsible for guiding a conversation, you listen differently. You notice patterns across multiple guests’ responses and formulate questions that clarify, expand and deepen conversations around the issues that arise again and again.
I love the crazy chaos of interactions at writers’ conferences, the frantic banter captured in ten-minute gaps between events, but the relationships I’ve built through the podcast are different. The opportunity to spend a half hour or forty-five minutes in one-on-one conversation and hear a guest work through her ideas, laugh at shared frustrations, and reveal the thinking behind her work creates real intimacy. These are genuine exchanges that often continue long after the recording ends. The podcast became my lifeline to the community I couldn’t physically access, but it also built something conferences can’t: an ongoing, documented conversation I could return to and build upon. Readers can access Killer Women on YouTube or their favorite podcast channel, like Spotify.
Creating Space for Guests
For the guests of the podcast, I’ve tried to offer something different from typical promotional interviews by inviting them to discuss what being a woman brings to the work. How the experience of writing as a woman differs from writing as a man matters to me and I suspect it also matters to readers. The podcast strives to push past the typical “How do you plot a thriller?” and into the “How do you navigate writing violence when you’re also hyperaware of violence against women?” or “How do you balance your identity as a caregiver with creating characters who do terrible things?”
I intentionally create time and space to dig deeper and make room for conversations about the specific challenges of being a woman writer. Challenges like: sometimes being taken less seriously, having to juggle domestic responsibilities with dark imaginings, and dealing with readers’ gendered expectations about what women should write and how. I hear my guests’ relief at these discussions and the validation that their struggles aren’t unique. One writer’s difficulty drafting a scene about a murdered woman without it feeling exploitative isn’t just hers; her challenge carving out writing time around childcare isn’t a personal failing; and her awareness that readers will judge her female villain differently than they would a male one isn’t paranoia.
I’ve also watched the podcast create a growing network as each guest becomes part of an ongoing conversation, their episode joining an archive of women grappling with similar questions. They hear each other’s approaches, discover shared challenges, and often connect with other guests to continue the dialogue.
The Listeners Who Found Us
The most expansive community around Killer Women has formed among listeners, and this continues to be both surprising and humbling. Some of our listeners are aspiring authors, writing in home offices, commuting to day jobs, folding laundry, walking dogs—and they report that the podcast makes them feel less alone. For writers who can’t attend conferences, whether because of cost, caregiving responsibilities, health issues, or geography, the podcast provides access to the kind of professional development and peer connection I had once taken for granted. Listeners discover which authors’ approaches resonate with their own, building both reading lists and understanding that their interests and concerns aren’t unusual.
Other listeners are crime fiction enthusiasts, readers longing for a glimpse under the hood of the writing world and the writer’s brain. I’ve been told the podcast’s pre-recorded format frees them to participate on their own schedules, absorbing conversations during the stolen moments of their days. Unlike the limitations of attending conferences, the podcast offers knowledge and community to anyone with an internet connection. Meanwhile, the archive functions as a growing resource where new listeners can dive deep, binge past episodes, and trace the evolution of themes across multiple conversations.
Why the Vodcast (Video Podcast) Works
The vodcast format itself creates intimacy that is impossible to capture in written interviews as voice conveys what text can’t—laughter, pauses, the way someone works through an idea in real time. I hear the moment when a guest discovers something by articulating it, times when our conversation sparks genuine insight rather than rehearsed talking points. Long-form conversation allows for the kind of nuance that gets edited out of magazine Q&As or rushed through in conference panels. And for listeners who choose to watch episodes on YouTube, they get the added experience of seeing facial expressions and gestures, as close to being in person as we can get at such a distance.
With episodes releasing most Thursdays, I also strive to create consistency that helps build on the sense of the podcast as an ongoing discussion rather than a series of finite episodes providing definitive answers. The crime fiction community has historically been more collaborative than competitive, more welcoming than exclusive, and I’ve sought to tap into that tradition with Killer Women by creating space for the specific conversations that women in the community need to have with each other.
The Power of Specificity
One of the things that makes Killer Women work is my natural desire to be both specific and deep. A general writing podcast covers everything shallowly while a podcast focused on women writing crime urges us to dig down into the challenges and the joys of this work. Acknowledging that gender shapes perspective isn’t reductive; it’s honest. Women writing about darkness and violence are already breaking conventions and Killer Women extends that conversation, examining not just the breaking but what it means and costs.
We discuss motherhood alongside murder, softness intersecting brutality, nurturing children while creating characters who do terrible things, and openly acknowledge that these contradictions aren’t problems to solve but realities to navigate. When a guest talks about writing a scene where a child is in danger and then describes picking up her own child from school, I recognize that specific vertigo. I’ve lived it. And my hope is that these conversations allow all of us who write, and read, crime fiction to know we’re not alone in what sometimes seem like inherent contradictions of our female humanness. For my upcoming release, Pinky Swear, a number of my guests, including Jennifer Hillier and Jeneva Rose, are returning to participate in a series of short conversations about broken promises and secrets and the way they affect us. We’re even bringing in some male authors, including Will Dean, John Fram and Don Bentley. Readers can access those episodes here.
What Isolation Built
When I started recording conversations from Montana, I was solving a personal problem, but solutions to issues that impact a larger group have a way of becoming communal resources. What began as my response to isolation became a gathering place for hundreds—creators and listeners finding each other across distance, building relationships through regular conversation, creating the community that didn’t exist before I was lonely enough to build it.
The pandemic may have been the catalyst, but the need was always there. Geography, economics, caregiving responsibilities, health issues—these have always isolated writers from each other. Killer Women proved to me that community doesn’t require physical proximity. It requires intention, consistency, and genuine interest in each other’s perspectives. It requires someone willing to press record and ask questions that matter.
Killer Women aired its 200th episode in December and each conversation adds to our collective understanding. I watch the circles keep expanding: me to my guests to listeners to listener-to-listener, each connection creating possibility for more. Killer Women stands as proof that sometimes the most powerful communities form not despite our constraints but because of them.
I started this podcast alone at my desk in Montana, looking for connection. What I found was an entire community who needed the same thing, and we’ve built it together, one conversation at a time.
