Cary Street and Trail Blazer
Cary Street and Trail Blazer

J Hirtle The Last Storyteller

Award-winning writer Carly Street talks with J Hirtle about her motorsport thriller Trail Blazer, the realities of independent authorship, and keeping control of your stories. Their conversation touches on fandom, family, and the courage to create for the people who truly matter.

InspiringAuthenticInformativeEncouragingSupportive

36:21•22 May 2026

RSS Feed

Speed, Guilt, and Owning Your Story with Carly Street

Episode Overview

Carly Street wrote Trail Blazer to appeal to a wide range of motorsport fans, not just hardcore F1 followers.
Her years in motorsport journalism fed into the book, blending real paddock politics with heightened fictional drama.
She contrasts the tight constraints of scriptwriting with the freedom of novels, where description and inner life can fully breathe.
Resurrection Films was formed so she and her collaborators could keep control of their stories rather than see scripts buried and altered.
Both Carly and Jim stress that writing for meaning and a small, genuine audience beats chasing sales and external approval.

“I just wanted somebody like my dad to read it and enjoy it and know that I'd been to places and I'd had a good time.”

What makes a recovery story truly inspiring? For poet, screenwriter and host J Hirtle, it often starts with someone brave enough to tell the truth on their own terms. In this conversation, he chats with award-winning screenwriter and author Carly Street about creative control, risk, and writing stories that matter to you first. Carly’s latest book, *Trail Blazer*, is described as “a motorsport story of speed, guilt, and redemption”.

She explains how it began as a very Formula 1–heavy idea but slowly shifted into a broader psychological thriller that any racing fan could enjoy. Her goal? To write something where “you will interpret your own love of the sport through it,” whether you follow F1, NASCAR, IndyCar or European racing. The chat has an easy, slightly cheeky feel, with plenty of jokes about F1 fandom and British vs American car terms (“boot” vs “trunk”).

One of the most touching moments comes when she admits, “I just wanted somebody like my dad to read it and enjoy it and know that I'd been to places and I'd had a good time.” Jim connects this with a heartfelt reminder to younger writers: if you chase only sales and approval, “it’s probably always going to be out of focus.” If you’re rebuilding your life, your creativity, or your confidence, this chat may nudge you to ask: who are you really creating your new story for—everyone else, or the one person whose opinion truly counts?

Yet underneath the laughs sits a serious theme that anyone in recovery or reinvention will recognise: holding on to your own story when bigger systems want to reshape it. Carly talks candidly about selling scripts that vanish into drawers, the emotional toll of losing control of your work, and why she helped form Resurrection Films so she and her team could make their own projects.

PreviousThe Time Travelers