The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara

"You start to wonder was it all worth it? Or what's the point in trying to do it again? You know, if there's going to be more disappointment in the future. I think it is something that you know probably just changes as you go on, regardless, right? I want to get that second book under my belt so it's not all just on this one, this one baby, you know?" says Maggie Mertens.

Maggie is the author of Better, Faster, Farther: How Running ...

"I have this desire to write as a novelist might write but write nonfiction," says Sasha Bonét, the author of The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters (Knopf).

Today we have the brilliant writer, the brilliant mind, Sasha Bonét, author of The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters. This book is a masterpiece that chronicles the matriarchal lineage of Sasha’s family, and the pain, and the struggle, and the triumph...

"I kinda hate it when people say writing is fun," says Jack Rodolico, author The Atavist original "The Blue Book Burglar."

Today we feature Jack Rodolico, who is a bit of an audio maven, but he comes to us hot off the Atavist presses to talk about "The Blue Book Burglar: The Social Register was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful— the heirs of robber barons, scions of political dynasties, and descendants of Mayflower passenge...

“So much misery. It is so much misery. It is so hard. It's not natural, locking yourself in your room for three years to focus on one person is not mentally healthy. Leigh Montville, great, great writer, said to me years ago, he's like, ‘It's an unnatural thing. You spend two years in a hole to come out for two weeks, you know?’” — Jeff Pearlman, author of Only God Can Judge Me.

Today we have Jeff Pearlman returning to the show to t...

"When I came in [to Longreads], I didn't come in and say, I think we need to grow aggressively. I said, 'Let's figure out who we are. Let's figure out what other people aren't doing, that we do , and that we can do better.' And so the only real thing that changed when I first came in was to try to make the editors known quantities," says Peter Rubin, head of  publishing at Automattic, where he works primarily with Longreads, b...

"As a reader, if I were a fan reading this book, I want the good, the bad and the ugly. I want you to rip the band aid off and tell the truth. Because, from my from my experience, I've read a lot of memoirs that are super boring and just fluff," says Jeremy X. Wagner, co-author of Curtis Duffy's Fireproof: Memoir of a Chef (Dead Sky Publishing).

We have Jeremy X. Wagner on the show today. This dude is a stone-cold badass and the co-...

"This has to be meaningful to you. It has to be a story that won't leave you alone, a story that you're willing to rearrange your calendar for," says Masha Hamilton, whose Atavist Magazine story is titled "I've     Gone to Look for America."

Today we have Masha Hamilton, a journalist, a novelist, a fan of the show, a fan of Pitch Club. You’ll want to visit mashahamilton.com to learn more about her wide-ranging ca...

"My editor was like, hold on, you need to put your thumb on the scale of why this matters. Now, there's no first person in this, but you have your thumb on the scale, you need to assert your own point of view. Like, this matters, why? says Brendan O'Meara, author of The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine Mariner Books.

Who the heck does this host think he is being a guest on his own podcast? The nerve of this guy. That’s ri...

"Writing a book is so overwhelming. I need to have a book that's like so many steps in between. So what I do to manage my own anxiety and overwhelm about that is I'm really, really obsessed with breaking everything into little steps so that all I need to do is the next step and then I don't get overwhelmed," says Tracy Slater, author of Together in Manzanar.

It’s another Super Size Me CNFin’ Double Feature, Ep. 491 with Tracy Slater...

"When I got back to [writing], it was like an athlete or a martial artist coming back to the practice, and the endorphins start running back. And you remember the joy that you had in it, also the struggles of it, but you're back in it, and then I couldn't be stopped," says Jeff Chang, author of Water,  Mirror, Echo.

Today we have Jeff Chang, and what a great conversation this was. He’s the author of the beefy biography Water, M...

"For many of us, myself included, it's easy to want to be on the New York Times bestseller list, or the USA Today bestseller list, and to try to get an amazing number of week-one sales, but it's important to remember that those lists are really hard to get on, and there can be this nice long tail in terms of the impact of a book where maybe it doesn't necessarily get a ton of sales in that first week or that first month. But over t...

"The point of my book and the point of this big day of action that we're doing across the country is to drive that notion away that this isn't alternative energy, that it's the obvious, straightforward, common sense and very beautiful way to power the world going forward. To use the analogy I've been using, it's not any longer the Whole Foods of energy: nice, but pricey. It is now the Costco of energy: cheap available in bulk on th...

Robert Weintraub is a best selling author and, most recently, wrote "American Hindenburg" for The Atavist Magazine..

We’re going to hear from lead editor Jonah Ogles about his side of the table and how he advises people to model their stories after previously published ones and how there’s never really a wasted moment by doing as much research as possible. Either you find out there’s nothing there, or you find out there’s there ther...

"I really love this medium. I think cartooning is an incredible medium. There aren't a lot of rules. You can, if you can, really make it up. You can make it suit you," says Roz Chast a cartoonist and artist whose work routinely appears in The New Yorker.

So today we have Roz Chast. You know Roz Chast, and if you don’t, quite frankly I hope we never meet. She’s a long time cartoonist for The New Yorker whose work is kinda of panicky ...

"God, I feel like I'm still enduring that, like it's this sort of ongoing thing where I'm not sure I ever if I'll ever get to a place where I feel like my work and ambitions for the work and daydreams about writing and art-making ever meet my taste," says Patrycja Humienik.

For Ep. 485 we've got Patrycja Humienik. She’s a poet and her debut collection is We Contain Landscapes and it is published by Tin House. Patrycja is the daughte...

"I am tyrannical about noise and about quiet. I don't feel that I can control the amount of mess I make. I mean, I know I can, but I kind of can't. And there's just so many things about my character that are really detrimental to having a writing process, which I need, and it's just so opposed to everything that's going on in my disgustoid little spirit," says Rax King, author of Sloppy.

As I tell Rax in this conversation, I hadn’t ...

"That is the main difference between storytelling for the ear and writing, is that the cost of revisions is so much higher," says Julia Barton.

We have Julia Barton. Julia was the third hire, I think I have that right, with Pushkin Industries, the podcast giant founded by Malcolm Gladwell. She was the executive editor of Pushkin and helped develop Revisionist History and Against the Rules, the latter by the journalist and uber best ...

"You have to finish it out. You have to report it, even if it's financially a terrible idea," says Matthew Wolfe.

OK, it’s that Atavistian time of the month so we’re here to talk about Matthew Wolfe’s “The Talented Mr. Bruseaux: He made his name in Chicago investigating racial violence, solving crimes, and exposing corruption. But American’s first Black private detective was hiding secrets of his own.” Go to magazone.atavist.com to ...

"Listening to podcasts, it's like, how do I start making them?  That's been my approach, essentially try and take that beginner mindset into anything and try to teach myself new skills," says Mark Armstrong.

Who do we have today? It’s Mark Armstrong! He is a producer, a writer, a singer, working at the intersection of storytelling and digital media. Does that make him intersectional? Hell, yes.

Mark is the founder of Longreads, ...