About Upstart Crow

Upstart Crow is a literary podcast affiliated with Watershed Lit Radio.

​Why Upstart Crow?

We chose it because the phrase is part of a good story, with lots of twists in the plotline but no real resolution, centered on two of history’s best-known writers.

​An upstart, of course, is someone who climbs the ladder—social, cultural or political—but lacks the standard credentials to hold the position he or she has attained. And a crow, as a bird, is well known for stealing from others.

A well-known dramatist and poet of his time, Robert Greene, pinned the label on Shakespeare in 1592, in a pamphlet A Groats-Worth of Wit. He said Shakespeare was “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers.” Greene was much more successful than Shakespeare was. Indeed, Greene may have been the first professional writer in England. He also was known for critiquing his colleagues. Of course, over the years, a whole argument has grown up about whether Shakespeare was who he is said to be or, instead, was Christopher Marlowe writing pseudonymously. There is evidence on both sides of the Marlowe-as-Shakespeare argument, leaving mainstream scholars seeing the two as separate writers and having a strong case but the other side also having a case in that Marlowe was facing arrest for something he wrote and if he were dead, he would escape prosecution. The debate has sparked some interesting fiction, including a play that quite specifically portrays Marlowe faking his death and becoming Shakespeare and a prize-winning novel that goes so far as to contain the story in blank-verse form.In 2012, a movie portrayed Marlowe as a vampire who talks of writing Hamlet. Then, in 2016, as part of the commemoration of Shakespeare’s death 400 years earlier, along came a BBC sitcom “Upstart Crow” to stand the debate on its ear. It portrays Marlowe as a spy and has Shakespeare writing works for Marlowe to help maintain his spy cover story.

So we chose the name for its backstory, and because we are ourselves, to at least some extent, upstart crows.

​There are three of us. The initial idea belongs to Jennifer Disano, chair of the board of the Fall for the Book festival based at George Mason and a well-regarded executive of non-profits,recognized for leadership in advocacy and education. She recruited Ken Budd, a Mason MA alum, freelance writer and editor with extensive experience as an interviewer and himself author of an award-winning memoir The Voluntourist as well as numerous articles for most major magazines and many of the daily newspapers published today; and William Miller, a former (long-time) journalist and then (even longer-time) English professor at Mason, where he directed the creative writing program, often taught undergrad creative writing courses, and helped start the Fall for the Book festival.

​Our goal is to make available interviews and presentations centered on books and their writers, interviews and presentations that give you information you won’t hear other places, that probe the whys and wherefores of writers and their work, including how they practice their craft and the challenges they face in accomplishing it. We hope to inform and inspire you, our listeners, to more fully explore books for all that they are and all that they can be.