The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara

Nick Davidson, @nickgdavidson on IG, says, "We usually think of hunting stories and looking for ideas, but I feel like it's the other way around: stories hunt the storyteller, and I'm just prey." Nick's latest piece is for The Atavist Magazine titled "The Balloon That Fell From the Sky."  His work has appeared in Outside, VICE Sports, Garden & Gun, and a million other places of note.&nbsp...

Megan Marshall is the author of After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (Mariner Books), a new collection of essays. Megan won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. Podcast Specific Substack at creativenonfictionpodcast.substrack.com. Pre-order The Front Runner Promotional Sponsor: The Power of Narrative Conference . Use CNF15 at checkout for a...

“I could suddenly see — and this is how I know when I'm supposed to start writing — is that words start putting themselves together in my head, and I just have to get them out, right? Which doesn't happen all the time, but it did for this," says Cassidy Randall, author of Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All Women's Ascent of Denali (Abrams Books). Cassidy's work has appea...

"And then this person said, 'Hey, you know, this needs to be, like, more weird or less weird, but it's in this kind of odd place that isn't working.' And I was like, she's so, right," says Jaydra Johnson, @jaydranicole, and author of Low: Notes on Art & Trash (Fonograf). Lots of good stuff in this episode. We talk about: Luck Growing up poor Dialing up the weirdness And binge-buying books on e...

"What I was fortunate enough to get exposed to very early in my career, and I really believe is now the way to go, which is the nature of editing as thinking," says Poynter Institute president Neil Brown. Neil has spent more than forty years as a reporter and editor, and he just wrapped up his tenure on the Pulitzer Prize Board. He's one of the more nimble minds in journalism and a champion of the...

Neko Case is best known for her career as a musical performing artist and as a founding member of The New Pornographers, but her debut memoir The Harder I Fight the More I Love You (Grand Central) is all the evidence we need to see that she's got the chops for narrative. Podcast Specific Substack Pre-order The Front Runner Promotional Sponsor: The Power of Narrative Conference . Use CNF15 at check...

Will McGrath often thinks he's a phony, a fake writer, a fake journalist. But he isn't. He's very much real, and his piece for The Believer, "American Boys," chronicles the season and the lives of a group of young basketball players. It harkens back to Darcy Frey's brilliant book The Last Shot. Podcast Specific Substack: https://substack.com/@creativenonfictionpodcast Pre-order The Front Runner Pr...

Allegra Rosenberg became obsessed with polar exploration narratives during the pandemic. She soon came across the journals of Harry Pennell and learned of his love for Edward Atkinson. Set amongst the backdrop of the South Pole and the looming possibility of WWI, Allegra weaves a brilliant and tragic story. Pre-order The Front Runner Promotional Sponsor: The Power of Narrative Conference . Use CNF...

Chandlor Henderson is the very definition of a multi-hypenate: a writer, editor, comic book writer, filmmaker, and podcaster. This conversation was recorded live at Gratitude Brewing as part of a quarterly series between the Oregon Writers Colony and The Creative Nonfiction Podcast. In this conversation we talk about his journey to Oregon from the East Coast, to focus on skills, and how graphic no...

If Randy Blythe's first book, Dark Days, was about accountability, his second book, Just Beyond the Light, is about perspective. In essays ranging from the premature death of a young fan to surfing waves to revering his beloved grandmother, Randy talks about art and music and the messiness of being a creative person.  Visit randyblythe.com to learn more and to see  dates for his spoken-w...

Lindsay Jill Roth was told by a tutor at a young age that she'd become a writer one day. At the time she laughed, but it came to be. Lindsay is the author of the novel What Pretty Girls Are Made Of and her latest is Romances & Practicalities: A Love Story (Maybe Yours) in 250 Questions. Lindsay talks about the writing of the book, structuring it, and how working in television and radio informe...

John Eisenberg grew up surrounded by books. It was no surprise then that he wanted to write them one day. He has written eleven, his latest being Rocket Men: The Black Quarterbacks Who Revolutionized Pro Football. Pre-order The Front Runner Sponsor: The Power of Narrative Conference . Use CNF15 at checkout for a 15% discount. Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm Show notes: brendanomeara.com Sup...

Drew Philp went to Ethiopia to report on the front lines of what was likely a genocide that largely went ignored. His story, " There Will Be No Mercy ," is for The Atavist Magazine. Pre-order The Front Runner Sponsor: The Power of Narrative Conference . Use CNF15 at checkout for a 15% discount. Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm Show notes: brendanomeara.com Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod

Evan Ratliff's work often overlaps with the tech industry whether he's disappearing himself as he did for Wired Magazine, or exploring the murky world of AI voice agents as he did with his blockbuster, smashing, DIY podcast Shell Game.  Pre-order The Front Runner Sponsor: The Power of Narrative Conference . Use CNF15 at checkout for a 15% discount. Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm Show...

Brooke Champagne (@champagne_brooke) is a writer in the thick of it: the grind of it, the messiness of it, the working-out-of-it. One minute with Brooke and you know you're in for rollicking fun conversation about the essay, about writing, and about Nola Face: A Latina's Life in the Big Easy (University of Georgia Press). Pre-order The Front Runner Sponsor: The Power of Narrative Conference . Use...

Harrison Scott Key knows how to write a funny book, and he did it again, this time with How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told (Avid Reader Press). Only this time, he found a way to find the funny as his marriage was under duress. Pre-order The Front Runner Sponsor: The Power of Narrative Conference . Use CNF15 at checkout for a 15% discount. Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorit...

For Andrew Dubbins, stories of this nature are resource intensive, so he’s always seeking the story engine, what drives the narrative forward. In this case, it’s a cops-and-robbers story with sibling discord at the center. It’s that Atavisitan time of the month and we have Andrew Dubbins, a journalist based out of L.A. who tells the tale about the After Dark Bandit: The Police couldn't’ figure out...

Stephanie Gorton once fretted over her not-neat process of writing books and soon came to embrace her messiness as a feature, not a bug, while she wrote The Icon & the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America (Ecco). (Photo credit Sasha Israel) Pre-order The Front Runner Sponsor: The Power of Narrative Conference . Use CNF15 at checkou...

Jared Sullivan got his start primarily editing and admired the kinds of writers and reporters who do both well, like a David Remnick. Valley So Low is Jared's new book, and it is along the lines of Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action and illustrates the toll that greed and negligence exert on the people exposed to toxins and the cost cases of this nature take on the legal team, both financial and physi...

Steven Hyden (@steven_hydenwriter) is a music critic for Uproxx, producer of Break Stuff, the podcast about Woodstock 99, story producer for the the documentary Yacht Rock, and the author of Twilight of the Gods, This Isn’t Happening, Hard to Handle, and Long Road. His latest is There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springtseen’s ‘Born in the USA’ and the End of the Heartland (Hachette Books). For...

Seth Wickersham (@seth.wickersham on IG) didn't always want to be a sports writer, but he found his way to it by being a high school quarterback,  covering the University of Missouri Tigers, and "crashing the party" at the Super Bowl with fellow writers Wright Thompson and Justin Heckert.  This episode was a chance to revisit his amazing story on its ten-year anniversary, " Awakening the...

Kate McQueen is the editorial director for the Pollen Initiative and a literary journalist whose work is featured this month for The Atavist Magazine. The story chronicles the story of Carl von Ossietzky, a German journalist imprisoned for his dissent at the start of Hitler's rise to power. A cohort of fellow journalists sought a means to break him out. How did they do it? Newsletter: Rage Against...

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Paul Peart-Smith talk about how and why graphic interpretations are such a powerful vector for storytelling. Roxanne's An Indigenous People's History of the United States is a must-read and Paul's rendering is the perfect gateway in. Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm Show notes: brendanomeara.com Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod

Taiyon J. Coleman a professor and the author of Traveling without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America (Univ. of Minnesota Press). Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm Show notes: brendanomeara.com Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod  

Wudan Yan (@wudanyan) is a freelancer writer and founder of Factual , a one-of-a-kind agency committed to fact-checking. Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm Show notes: brendanomeara.com Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod