Writer and Quote Slinger Michael Jerome Plunkett sits down with various authors to discuss literature and all the ways it can shape our identity. War, in its simplest definition, is merely a struggle between opposing forces for a particular end. The LitWar podcast explores this notion and seeks the elusive emotional truth in all literature. Guests include Elliot Ackerman, Steven Pressfield, Phil Klay, and many more.
Publisher
Lethal Minds Journal & The Literature of War Foundation
Stan Lake, a writer, photographer, and filmmaker from Bethania, North Carolina, joins us to talk about his debut poetry collection, A Toad In A Glass Jar. His work appears in The War Horse, Havok Journal, Reptiles Magazine, and Lethal Minds Journal; he also writes a weekly Substack. See more at www.stanlakecreates.com.We trace a childhood of creeks and BB guns to a 2005 deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom—and the dissonant return from convoys to college classrooms. Stan reflects on faith and doubt, ministry and punk rock’s DIY ethos, and the pressure to turn authentic experience into “content.”He walks us through shaping a “poetic memoir” around the toad’s life cycle and the rigorous editing that sharpened it at Dead Reckoning Collective. His advice to new writers: stop aspiring, start doing.
5 Nov 2025
LW39: Kyle Seibel
In this episode, we sit down with Kyle Seibel. He is a Navy veteran, copywriter, and author of the kinetic story collection Hey You Assholes (Clash Books).Kyle shares the unlikely nudge that set him on a writing path. We dig into how military garrison life, corporate bureaucracy, and blue-collar jobs inform his fiction; why short stories feel truer to the episodic way we remember our lives; and how humor and heartbreak can toggle line by line. We also get into performing stories on stage, the discipline of finishing “novel-shaped objects,” and why war writing matters: to resist being reduced to a single tidy paragraph.Bio:
Kyle Seibel served seven years in the U.S. Navy with tours that included a helicopter squadron, a Reserve Seabee battalion, Bahrain, and the final deployments of the USS Enterprise. He moved into advertising as a copywriter and began publishing short fiction. His debut collection, Hey You Assholes, is out from Clash Books. He reads widely, writes daily when he can (and in sprints when the work demands it), and believes the short story is not a waystation to the novel but a destination all its own.
22 Oct 2025
LW38: Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor (author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and the acclaimed new novel Minor Black Figures) joins host Michael Jerome Plunkett on the LitWar Podcast by Lethal Minds Journal.In this conversation, Brandon reflects on the creative pivot that led him to abandon years of work and begin anew in a Paris hotel room with the novel he truly wanted to write. We talk about Wyeth, the young painter at the heart of Minor Black Figures, and how the book became both a meditation on art and politics in contemporary America and an exploration of individuality, cynicism, and belief.From the quiet intimacy of art restoration to the noise of online discourse, Brandon speaks candidly about millennial disillusionment, the commodification of the self, and the role of fiction in reclaiming life from abstraction. It’s a deeply thoughtful, funny, and searching conversation with one of today’s sharpest literary minds.
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
13 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
12 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 28 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
28
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
71
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Guest appearances
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