Written Works For You, By You

We're opening a new season with something a little different this year: Letters. Real words, written for one person, meant for no one else — until now.

Tonight's letter is one of the oldest in the collection: a Civil War major, one week before battle, writing to his wife with the kind of honesty most of us only manage once in a lifetime. He had a feeling he wouldn't come home. He was right.

Pull up a chair. This one's short, but it earns every second.

A bonus, between-seasons stop by the fire.

Sylvia has finally gotten what she wanted — her husband, out of the city, settled at his old country house at Yessney. She calls it peace. The hill behind the house might call it something else.

Saki was a master of the short and the sharp, and this one is both — quiet, strange, and a little older than it looks. Something in these woods was worshipped once, and it hasn't forgotten.

Curl up. Keep the lights low. I'm still listening.

Season 2 ends here.

Oliver Onions wrote this in 1911. A writer moves into a house to finish his novel. Slowly, politely, reasonably, he loses his mind. There is no ghost at midnight. There is only a presence, a beckoning, a gradual substitution of one voice for another. He believes he is falling in love. He is not. He believes he is still himself. He is not.

This is a story about solitude and what it breeds. About the voice that replaces your own when you have been alone too long. Literary, meta, deeply unsettling.

I read this one with the fire low and the door slightly open. Some stories need air. Some stories are the air, and they are not breathing with you.

Written Works for You, By You — where your words get their first yes, out loud, where someone can hear them.

Season 2 nears its end. We've sat together through coming-of-age and comedy, through philosophy and folk horror, through feminist dread and minimalist survival, through satire and absurdity and fever and laughter. The room has held all of it.

Tonight the room grows colder.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "The Body Snatcher" in 1884, based on real events — the Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh, where men killed to sell corpses to medical schools. Stevenson strips the Gothic of its romance. No haunted castles. Just anatomy rooms, graveyards, and the slow realization that the corpse on the table was someone you knew.It is a story about the body — what we owe it, what we fear from it, what we will do when no one is watching the men who need it.

I read this one with the lamp turned low, but not for atmosphere. For respect.

Written Works for You, By You — where your words get their first yes, out loud, where someone can hear them.

A man named Simon Wheeler tells a story that cannot possibly be true — but he tells it with such absolute sincerity that you find yourself leaning in anyway. It involves a gambler named Jim Smiley, a frog named Dan'l Webster, and a stranger who knows exactly how to cheat a cheater.

Mark Twain wrote this in 1865, and it is pure American absurdity — a tall tale told in bars, on porches, in rooms where the fire is high and nobody checks the facts. No secret meaning, no hidden pattern, no demon in the corner. Just a man, a frog, and the absolute certainty that human gullibility is infinite.

I read this one with a smile. After the last few stories, the room needed to laugh.

Written Works for You, By You — where your words get their first yes, out loud, where someone can hear them.

A scholar of quiet habits develops a taste for green tea — too much of it, drank too late, alone in his study with his books. And then he begins to see something. A small figure. A monkey, with eyes that know him. It sits on his furniture. It turns the pages of his manuscripts. It watches him pray.

No one else sees it.

Sheridan Le Fanu wrote this in 1869, and he stripped the Gothic of its castles and moors. This horror is intimate, domestic, feverish. A study in London. A man coming apart in polite, reasonable increments. The tea is still warm. But the cup is not empty.

I read this with the lamp turned low. Some stories require darkness to breathe.

Written Works for You, By You — where your words get their first yes, out loud, where someone can hear them.

A critic discovers his favorite author has hidden a secret in his work — a unified meaning, a pattern, a figure in the carpet. He spends his life searching for it. He never finds it. Or perhaps he does, and cannot say.

Henry James wrote this in 1896, and he stripped it of everything except obsession dressed in its Sunday best. Long sentences coil like DNA. Politeness becomes suffocation. The silence at the end is the point.

I sat with this one for a long time. It is impenetrable, frustrating, and strangely beautiful. The room held it anyway.

Written Works for You, By You — where your words get their first yes, out loud, where someone can hear them.

A man travels through the Yukon at seventy-five below zero. He is practical. He is experienced. He is not wise enough.

Jack London wrote this in 1908 after his own time in the Klondike, and he stripped it of everything except cold, distance, and the small decisions that separate the living from the frozen. There is no villain here. Only temperature, and the certainty that the landscape does not forgive.

Recorded in the room, but tonight the room is very far away. Some stories take you somewhere the fire cannot follow.

Written Works for You, By You — where your words get their first yes, out loud, where someone can hear them.

A man wakes up. His nose is gone. That is not the strange part.

Nikolai Gogol wrote "The Nose" in 1836 and I am fairly certain he was laughing the entire time. A St. Petersburg official chases his own nose through the city — now dressed as a higher-ranking civil servant, refusing to recognize its former face. Bureaucracy happens. Nothing resolves neatly. Gogol publishes it and goes to breakfast.

Absurdist, satirical, slightly horrifying, and genuinely funny. I still don't know if it's a nightmare or a joke. Maybe it's both.

Written Works for You, By You — where your words get their first yes, out loud, where someone can hear them.

A woman. A room. A pattern on the wall that starts to look back.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 1892 after her own experience with the "rest cure" — a prescription for women that mostly meant stay still, stay quiet, don't think too hard. She gave the world a warning. Some people heard it. Some people still don't.

This is a story about what happens when rest becomes prison, when wallpaper becomes obsession, and when the only voice left is the one no one believes.

Recorded in the room with the fire low. Some stories need that.

Written Works for You, By You — where your words get their first yes, out loud, where someone can hear them.

The room is back. I was away for a minute — moving, no WiFi, life in boxes. But the light stayed on, and now the microphone is warm again. Literally. I finally got a real mic. A Snowball Blue. No more skull headphones. So if I sound different tonight, that is why.

Today: "The Overcoat" by Nikolai Gogol. Written in 1842, in St. Petersburg, Russia. A clerk named Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin has one threadbare overcoat. When it falls apart, he saves every kopeck to have a new one made. The names are absurd. The bureaucracy is absurd. But underneath the satire, there is something real: a man who wants dignity, who wants to be seen, who freezes in the Russian winter and dreams of warmth.

Gogol wrote comedy, but he never forgot the person underneath.

I read whatever you send me — fragments, poems, screenplays, journal entries, 3am thoughts, any genre. Real or imagined, anonymous or named. No judgement, no critique, just your words out loud. Your first yes.

No story this week. I'm moving, the WiFi is gone, and the room is in boxes.

Instead: a personal note about why I started Written Works For You, By You, what I thought it would be, and what it became. The silence, the submissions that didn't come, the dead voices that became the point. The dog who got me through it. The notebook I found while packing.

The room moves with me. It always has. It always will.

Back next week with "The Overcoat" by Gogol.

A journal found in a house in Baltimore. Dated September to October, 1922. A man named Tom receives a letter from his lost friend Arthur, gone ten years, and goes to find him. He doesn't know what he's walking into. Neither do you.

M. Humphreys wrote this — but that name hid a woman. Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes, writing under a man's name because the world didn't think a woman could write this kind of horror. She wrote about Jack the Ripper, about murder, about the darkness in ordinary houses. And she had to do it in disguise.

The horror here is not blood or monsters. It's time stopped. A friendship frozen in decay. The inability to leave, the inability to save someone already lost. The smile that isn't a smile. The blue complexion. The fact that Tom stays for a month, knowing something is wrong, unable to act.

I read whatever you send me — fragments, poems, screenplays, 3am thoughts, any genre. No judgement, no critique. Just your words, out loud. Your first yes.

You know the need. A place to sit when the night is long and the heart is hollow. Somewhere with light, with someone who doesn't rush you. Somewhere to be alone without being lonely.

Hemingway wrote this in 1933. An old man in a Spanish café, drinking alone. Two waiters watching him. One young, impatient, wants to go home. The other older, and he understands — the need for a clean, well-lighted place against the dark.

I read whatever you send me. Fragments, poems, 3am thoughts, any genre. No judgement, no critique. Just your words, out loud. Your first yes.

You know Alcott for Little Women. This is the Alcott who wrote in the dark.

A young woman, trapped in a house with a man who smiles while he takes her voice. Who tells her she's mad until she almost believes it. Who locks her away for speaking the truth.

It's heavy. It builds slowly, like a room filling with water. But the fear underneath is the fear of not being believed — and that's older than 1863.

Send me what you wrote — fragments, poems, 3am thoughts. I'll read it back to you. No judgement, just air.

A warm room for your words, whatever they are.

Today: Alexei Tolstoy's 1839 folk horror, "The Family of the Vourdalak." A father hunts in the Serbian woods and returns... not quite right. The oldest son sees it first. But the house cannot hold what it has become.

One voice, one microphone, no performance pressure. Just someone reading to you in the dark.

I read whatever you send me — fragments, poems, screenplays, 3am thoughts, any genre. No judgement, no critique. Your first yes.

A warm room for your words. This week: Chekhov's "The Bet" — fifteen years of solitude, a piano, and a mind left alone with itself. A meditation on time and what we become when no one is watching.

A warm room for your words.

We hit a thousand streams this week. A thousand times someone opened the door and sat down. Thank you for being here.

Next week: 'The Bet' by Anton Chekhov — fifteen years of solitude, a piano, and a mind left alone with itself. A meditation on time and what we become when no one is watching.I read whatever you send me — fragments, poems, screenplays, 3am thoughts, any genre. No judgement, no critique. Your first yes.

Welcome back.

O. Henry was a pharmacist, a ranch hand, a bank teller, and a fugitive before he was a writer. He wrote this while he was hiding from the law, and you can feel it — two kidnappers who think they've got it all figured out, and a kid who absolutely refuses to cooperate.

It's funny, it's ridiculous, and it's somehow deeply human.

O. Henry sent this out into the world not knowing if anyone would read it. They did. They still do.

If you've got something you're not sure about — something funny, something weird, something you wrote at 3am and almost deleted — send it to me. I'll read it out loud. Anonymous or named. I'm still listening.

Season 2 opens with Matthew Pelton — the writer who gave us "Dear Mr. Supertramp..." during the break. This time: four friends at a boarding school, one last night, one fire. A goodbye that doesn't feel like a goodbye yet.

A break between seasons, but the room stays open.

This week: a poem from Matthew Pelton — screenwriter, award-winning short film writer, poet. A Creative Writing major turned filmmaker, currently completing his master's in directing and writing narrative fiction.

"Dear Mr. Supertramp & whomever this poem may find" is a letter. A response. A confession written in the space between someone else's pilgrimage ending and the speaker's just beginning. It's about identity, spiritual revolution, and the long game of hide and seek we play with our own souls.

Season 1 ended last week. Season 2 opens in two weeks with a submitted screenplay, then moves into old stories, unknown voices, public domain, no single genre. But for now — a pause, a breath, a voice finding its way home.

Submissions always open. This is Written Works For You, By You.

Instagram: @WrittenWorksForYouByYou

Reddit: WWFYBY

Chapter Eight. The last one for now.

Tom, Petra, Jenn, and Ryan are still driving. Ten hours, then the road stops being just road. What happens there—I won't tell you. But I will say: someone tries to make it right, and someone else tries to end it.

I read this one in pieces. Had to stop. Walk away. Come back. Some chapters ask that of you.

Sixteen episodes in this Season. Eight chapters. Three weeks now to rest, to plan, to find the next voices. But the room stays open. Send me what you're writing—the messy drafts, the finished pieces, the things you almost threw away. I'll be here.

Thank you for showing up, week after week. See you soon.

—LourdesWritten Works for You, By You

Chapter Seven. Tyrell.

I wasn't sure how to voice this one. Too much happens. Too fast. I had to stop twice, walk away, come back. Some stories ask that of you.

This chapter moves from a crash to a run to a doorway that doesn't open the way it should. Tyrell is trying to get home. He's trying to protect what he loves. He's trying, and that's what breaks your heart.

As always, this is shared exactly as written. I read it because it mattered. I hope it matters to you.

If you write—stories, poems, anything—send them. I'm here. I'm listening.

Today's voice isn't mine.

Benjamin F. Bird found the podcast, sent three poems, and recorded them himself:

"My Dead Acquaintances."

"Memory of a Saguaro."

"Rhomburiffic."

Each one a different room in the same house.

This isn't a story episode. This is just me, taking a breath, saying thank you.

To everyone who's listened. Who commented on HitRecord. Who left a review—three of you now, and every star matters. To the friend who left a comment, and to the strangers who found their way here, episode by episode. You're why I keep recording.

Eleven episodes in. Four chapters deep. And I'm still here, every week, because you're here too.

If you want to help this grow—leave a review. It tells the algorithms people care. It tells other listeners this is worth their time. It tells me I'm not shouting into the void.

And if you have words of your own—stories, poems, anything—send them to me. Instagram, Reddit, email. I'm listening. That's what this is. Written Works for You, By You.

Thank you for being in this room with me. Chapter Five next week.

Come at me:

Instagram: @writtenworksforyoubyyou

Reddit: r/WWFYBY

*The following chapters contain intense and gritty moments; listener discretion is advised.*

Chapter Four finds us in a small desert hospital, where the heat outside doesn't match the layers on a man who shouldn't be cold. Dr. Petra Segura is just covering a shift—until the numbers start looking familiar in ways she can't yet explain.

This chapter is shared exactly as it was written, inviting you to experience the story without spoilers, guides, or reassurances. Listen closely, follow the rhythm, and let the pattern emerge.

If you enjoy immersive storytelling, you're welcome to share it or connect:

Instagram: @writtenworksforyoubyyou

Reddit: r/WWFYBY

This episode of Written Works For You, By You brings together three distinct voices.

An excerpt from a short story, a fantastical submission shaped by wit and long memory, and a brief, unguarded reflection that lingers more like a thought than a narrative.

Each piece is read aloud exactly as it was written, allowing different tones and perspectives to sit side by side—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in contrast.

Settle in, and listen closely.