What makes a story so compelling you can't shake it from your mind? To find out we called up veteran public radio broadcaster and award-winning storyteller Tony Kahn, a special correspondent on the news magazine The World, and the creator of Morning Stories, a weekly feature on WGBH Boston radio and web where people tell true tales in their own voice -- tales that stick.

Tony has honed his storytelling skills by writing, producing, narrating and hosting over 50 radio and TV programs and series for PBS, NPR, Nickelodeon and others. In an interview we read on the online Transom Review, he says:

Veneta Masson has practiced nursing for 35 years, mostly in inner-city Washington, DC. Along the way, she found an outlet to express everything she was witnessing and experiencing -- poetry. Veneta started putting together essays and poems about her nursing life and today has two collections in print, Ninth Street Notebook (short pieces) and Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill (poems). She's also part of a community of nurses who write verse influenced by their profession. Call them Nurse Poets.

VT: How did you get started writing poetry?

We here at the Visual Thesaurus receive a lot of emails from subscribers around the world. Not long ago we got a nice note from Sandra Dolores Becker of Porto Alegre, Brazil. She wrote:

"The Visual Thesaurus has become a friend, a colleague, and my companion when I'm trying to find the specific word that will fit perfectly in a verse of my early period poetry or when I'm writing another chapter of my book. It's wondrous! I spend my time researching, finding and reflecting on the meaning of words. Simple words? No, words are never simple. They can move mountains, change a nation, make a friend or cause pain. Words can make us dream, see what isn't there at the moment? Accept my gratitude for showing me how to increase my vocabulary with ease!"

Thank you, Sandra! Her note got us curious about her work and the challenges she faces writing in both Portuguese and English. We wanted to ask Sandra for her advice to writers whose native tongue isn't English. So we contacted Sandra in Brazil. We were surprised to learn she had lived the first half of her life in Indiana and works for an American multi-national company, in addition to writing poetry and fiction in both languages. With this unique perspective, here's what Sandra shared with us:

Lisa Napoli, a senior reporter on public radio's Marketplace, has led a busy 20-year career as a journalist, covering diverse stories like the first Clinton campaign, the culture of the Internet and NASCAR racing; producing for CNN and Fox; writing for the New York Times; appearing on MSNBC; and, of course, telling stories on the radio. With Lisa's broad experience, we here at the Visual Thesaurus wondered how she writes differently for the ear -- and what we can learn from it. So we called up Lisa and asked her.

VT: What's unique about writing for radio?

Lisa: You have to get a lot of information across with very few words -- and you have to write it like you'd speak it. That sounds really simple but you're usually not taught to write conversationally. You have to make sure you read your stuff out loud. If it doesn't make sense when you say it, it's not conveying any information.

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As the executive editor of the award-winning magazine Saveur and author of the soon-to-be-released W. W. Norton book Cradle of Flavor, on the cooking of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, James Oseland is celebrated for his writing about food -- just don't call him a "food writer." We caught up with James to ask him to parse this distinction, and tell us what makes for compelling writing on the subject of food:

VT: Is there such a thing as "food writing?"

James: We have a tendency to categorize in our culture, so we think of "food writing" as a thing, "science writing" as a thing, the work of a novelist as a thing. But good writing is good writing. It's essentially all the same thing, you know what I'm saying?

Paul Slansky writes biting political commentary that's, well, funny. His work appears as political quizzes in the New Yorker and in books like his latest, My Bad: 25 Years of Public Apologies and the Appalling Behavior That Inspired Them. But don't call it satire. "There's not really a word for what I do, which is to point out the reality in things and show what it adds up to," he explains. Paul talked to us about his unique style of political humor.

When we heard that multi-platinum hit songwriter Wayne Cohen was a fan of the Visual Thesaurus we gave him a call, quick. Wayne says "the idea of seeing a whole array of possibilities from one word gets my mind moving." How he writes songs for stars like Jennifer Love Hewitt and soul sensation Curtis Stigers got our mind moving, too. So we asked Wayne a few questions about his songwriting craft:

VT: What do you write about in your songs?

Wayne: They're pop songs, so the main topics are love and loss and heartbreak. But I'm also a big fan of "message" songs like the Black Eyed Peas' "Gone Going," a tune about materialism and how people don't appreciate what they have.