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In this episode, Kate welcomes Scott W. Stern and Dr. Charles O'Malley to the show.

Scott is a writer and lawyer who is the author of two previous books of narrative nonfiction and has written for many media outlets and scholarly journals. Charlie is a dramaturg and writer who has worked at theaters across the country.

Together, they teamed up to write a new book titled Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen. In it, they explore Shakespeare's character Margaret, a woman loosely based on a historical figure who is the only Shakespearean character, male or female, whose entire life appears on stage. They introduce readers to her historical model, her creation by Shakespeare, and her evolution across centuries of performances to show how the character of Margaret illuminates the world in which she is created and brought to life. As they put it, her story "shows how Shakespeare's plays have always been living collaborations among actors, directors, writers, critics, and history itself." It seems only fitting that the book itself was a close collaboration. Scott and Charlie are co-writers, but they also began working on the book together shortly after they got married. By the time they were in the final editing stages, their twin sons had been born. We talked about how they navigated intertwined domestic and writing lives, as well as the challenges of bringing different voices and backgrounds together on the page.

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Mentioned in this episode:

• Charles O'Malley and Scott Stern, Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen
• Scott Stern, The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison 'Promiscuous' Women
• Scott Stern, There is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou
• Charles O'Malley, Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance
• Scott and Charlie's LitHub piece on writing together: "What Co-Writing a Book on Shakespeare Taught Us About Marriage and Parenthood"
• The Internet Archive's blog posts about the Controlled Digital Lending Program
• Sam Quinones, The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work
• Daniel Hahn, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation