September 2023 – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Episode 387: Tom Donaghy

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By Brendan O’Meara

“Who Killed the Fudge King?“

Tom Donaghy, a playwright and screenwriter, needed to find out.

Harry Anglemeyer was a fixture of Ocean City with a fudge empire on the Jersey Shore, The Copper Kettle. He wanted to lift up and move forward the ocean-side city. He was openly queer in a time that wasn’t as accepting. In 1964, he was murdered and the case was never solved.

Enter Tom.

Now in Paperback: Jericho Brown

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By Brendan O’Meara

Hi, CNFers, nonfictionistas, verifiably true people, re-upping the brilliant Jericho Brown (@jerichobrown) for your listening pleasure.

As I said in the original intro, and as I re-say in this intro, this entire episode is like an hour-long pull quote. It’s so money, baby.

Since this episode originally aired on April 19, 2019, Jericho won the Pultizer Prize for his poetry collection The Tradition, which is what we talked about in this conversation.

Episode 386: Lana Hall

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By Brendan O’Meara

Friend,

Lana Hall (@curiouslana on … ugh … X) is here! What’s the occasion? She wrote a killer essay for Hazlitt called “We Are All Animals at Night” that riffs on her time working in Toronto’s massage parlor industry juxtaposed against her time at a corporate gig, a quote-unquote good job.

But it’s got levels, man, levels. What I took from it was the honor among people working the night, be it sex workers, cab drivers, or the person behind the counter at 7-Eleven. It’s a wonderful piece and Lana is a brilliant writer.

We talk about how she:

Now in Paperback: Mary Karr

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By Brendan O’Meara

It was bound to happen: re-runs.

But that’s fine! How many people go back through hundreds of conversations and find a gem? My guess is very little, so this is a great chance to showcase some older pods … now out in paperback (haha).

You know Mary Karr. She ushered in the memoir boom with The Liars’ Club and followed that up with Cherry and Lit. Her craft book The Art of Memoir is brilliant, as is her poetry in Tropic of Squalor.

This episode originally aired in 2018 with the publication of ToS, so I hope you’ll enjoy (or re-enjoy) this conversation with Mary Karr!

Episode 385: Robert Kolker

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By Brendan O’Meara

Let me list the accolades and accomplishments of Robert Kolker:

Best-selling author of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family and Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery.
Lost Girls is now a Netflix film
Hidden Valley Road was recommended not only by Oprah, but also Barrack Obama
His features have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Wired, and Oprah Magazine, among others.

His latest is “Dead Reckoning” for The Atavist Magazine, and it chronicles the greatest peacetime nautical disaster in U.S. history. It deals with skepticism over technology, honor, fathers and sons, hubris, and many other juicy themes.