September 2021 – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Episode 279: Athena Dixon on Opening Doors, Day Jobs, and the Personal Essay

Sponsor love: West Virginia m Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing and The Facing Project’s Empathy Prize for Nonfiction

By Brendan O’Meara

What a treat!

It’s Athena Dixon (@AthenaDDixon), the author of the essay collection The Incredible Shrinking Woman (Split Lip Press).

Had a great chat about day jobs and threading the work you want to do around that, how there’s no “writer’s life,” but rather just a “writer living.” That’s a direct quote from her Hippocamp talk this year.

Her essay collection delves into her identity as a Black woman, divorce, relationships, sex, the masks we where, and so on. Highly recommend.

Episode 278: Having a ‘Blast’ with Volcanologist Jess Phoenix

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Sponsor love: West Virginia m Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing and The Facing Project’s Empathy Prize for Nonfiction

By Brendan O’Meara

Jess Phoenix. What else is there to say? She’s the author of Ms. Adventure: My Wild Explorations in Science, Lava, and Life (Timber Press, 2021). She’s a volcanologist and geologist (that might be like saying a square is also a rectangle, but we’ll leave it at that, mmkay?). She’s the founder of Blueprint Earth. She has studied English, history, geology, and earned an MFA in creative nonfiction. She also ran for Congress in 2018. She co-owns a horse farm where she rescues retired thoroughbreds from potential slaughter and re-trains them to be jumpers.

How’s your life going?

Oh, and she delivered a pretty baller TEDx talk.

You might wonder why someone like her would talk to a scrub like me. And you’d be correct to wonder, but here we are!

Episode 277: Allison K. Williams Talks Planned Practice, Living a Writer’s Life, and Her New Craft Book ‘Seven Drafts’

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By Brendan O’Meara

Allison K. Williams is back! (@guerillamemoir) She is here to talk about her incredible new craft book Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book, a book that digs into the nitty gritty of editing.

What is so great about this book is you can be a seasoned, skilled writer/editor and this book will level you up. The book is a gift, and so too is Allison.

She’s the 2021 Literary Citizen of the Year for Hippocamp. She’s also the social media editor (?) for Brevity Magazine, and many of her craft essays for Brevity are adapted in Seven Drafts. Dig it.

In any case, we dig into lots of stuff about editing, story holes, retyping entire manuscripts, and what it means to cultivate a “writer’s life.”

Consider supporting the podcast and the audio magazine by heading to Patreon.com/cnfpod. There, you can earn transcripts, coaching, editing, and get exclusive access to the audio magazine.

Episode 276: Earl Swift Takes Us to the Moon

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By Brendan O’Meara

Earl Swift returns!

He’s back as we take a deep dive into Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings, an epic book that details the creative genius and the people behind the “moon car” and the three greatest feats of human exploration, largely forgotten.

Earl is an incredible reporter and writer, spinning intrepid yarns that are densely packed but not weighed down. Incredible stuff.

In this episode we dig into:

Writing and reporting the book during the pandemic
Breaking up longer chapters into shorter chapters
What surprised him about his moon research
And his incredible collaborative relationship with his book editor
And much much more.

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