February 2025 – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Episode 454: Allegra Rosenberg’s Tale of Love on Ice for The Atavist

Friday, Feb. 28, 2025

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Two pods in one day? It happened! Allegra Rosenberg (@tchotchke.bsky.social) is here to talk about her Atavist story “From Antarctica with Love“: Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed journey to the South Pole captivated the world. But hidden with the legend was a story that has never been told—a love affair between two of the crew who survived.

Allegra’s work has appeared in WIRED, National Geographic, Slate, and The Atlantic. She writes about tech, fandom, media, AI, history, science, music and, of course, polar exploration.

Episode 453: Chandlor Henderson, Live at Gratitude Brewing, Says ‘Focus on the Skill’

Friday, Feb. 28, 2025

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There isn’t much Chandlor Henderson (nywele_hendo) doesn’t do. He’s an editor, a writer, a journalist, a filmmaker, a comic book writer, a student at the University of Oregon, a Google Scholar, so it was a great pleasure to speak with him in the first in a series of quarterly live podcasts, this one recorded at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene.

(Allow me the space to thank Jesse Springer for letting me borrow his speakers for this event).

This was a great conversation and what Ruby McConnell and I hope will be a regular thing in Eugene, to turn the city into the same kind of draw that Portland is for many authors coming through the PNW.

I Did It! I Read The New Yorker Cover to Cover! I Am Complete!

One of the sample covers of the anniversary issue of The New Yorker, a brilliant tech-riff on the classic Eustace Tilley, by Kerry James Marshall.

Monday, Feb. 24, 2025

There’s a gag in the brilliant Michael Schur’s philosophy-and-ethics vehicle The Good Place where one of the torture scenarios for the Bad Place was a room where issues of The New Yorker won’t stop delivering. It’s impossible to keep up. Michael (a character on the show played by Ted Danson), a demon, laughs and says something to the effect of, “They just keep coming!”

That’s always the feeling. I barely have time to read the cartoons before the next issue arrives at my door. The hundreds and hundreds of unread New Yorkers that have come through my house is upsetting and dispiriting. I’m wasting the gift subscription my mother-in-law gives me every year. It’s not a cheap subscription.

But with all the hullabaloo surrounding the 100th anniversary of The New Yorker, I put my foot down and said, “THIS is the week I read The New Yorker cover to cover.” And I did!

Episode 452: lamb of god’s Randy Blythe’s Search for Perspective in ‘Just Beyond the Light’

Friday, Feb. 21, 2025

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If Randy Blythe’s first book, Dark Days, was about accountability, his second book, Just Beyond the Light: Making Peace with the Wars Inside Our Head (Grand Central), 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.

Is That a Paper-Bag Book Cover? Yes, It Is!

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

I was looking Etsy for a vegan slip cover for my Field Notes journals. I wanted something that would protect a volume should I tuck it in a bag or pocket. I found a good one, and it wasn’t that expensive, but then I thought, why don’t I try to make one?

Then I thought back to middle school and high school and how part of our assignments at the start of the school year was to take a paper bag from that week’s grocery run and make book covers.

Episode 451: When Beach Read Meets a System with Lindsay Jill Roth

Friday, Feb. 14, 2025

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When Lindsay Jill Roth (@lindsayjillroth) described her latest book as beach read meets system, that was pretty spot-on. There’s a breezy, conversational tone to Romances & Practicalities: A Love Story (Maybe Yours?) in 250 Questions (William Morrow). It weaves the research and interviews Lindsay did along with her personal story of finding her partner.

Lindsay is an award-winning television producer and writer, with novel under her belt as well, What Pretty Girls Are Made Of (Simon & Schuster). She has worked events like The Grammys, The TONYs, and The Masters.

Episode 450: Ahead of Super Bowl LIX, John Eisenberg Chronicles the Long Journey of the Black Quarterback

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John Eisenberg knew he wanted to write books from a very young age. He has written eleven … his latest being Rocket Men: The Black Quarterbacks Who Revolutionized Pro Football (Basic Books).

It’s an amazing history that tackles (pardon the football pun) the institutionalized/structural racism of the NFL from the perspective of the quarterback position.¹

There was a time when Black men were thought mentally incapable of handling the position, but they were encouraged to change positions to less intellectually demanding positions. Yeah.

Having Run, Having Written

Wednesday, Febrary 5, 2025

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I can’t be sure of how many of these short essays on long running I’ll write.

Each run births an idea or two, a little riff.

I only had a four-mile run the other day, a nice little scamper on Pre’s Trail. I felt bouncy for the first time in a long time. But once I hit Mile 4 (3 down), things got heavy for some reason. An unsettling feeling. For seasoned marathoners, this happens around Mile 20.

All runners, no matter the distance, encounter discomfort and you come to expect this, so where do you put it? I knew through pain comes growth, and I knew that by walking or stopping my future self would be unhappy.

I don’t necessarily enjoy running (I do, at times), but I love having run. I don’t necessarily enjoy writing, either, but I love having written.

Present You knows this about Future You, but Present You isn’t concerned with Future You until Future You becomes Present You and it can flip the grammar.

All of this is to say unpleasantness is part of the game — every game — and those who make peace with that, dance with that, tend to have a more satisfying experience.

You Have All You Need

Monday, February 3, 2025

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The joys of running with a notebook and pencil is you get a pretty good cracking idea every 1-2 miles and it behooves you to have a means to write it down.

I’m two weeks into a twelve-week plan (still have to register for the event I want to do at the end of April), and there’s a tendency to look at the gear I have, the clothes I wear, and think I really could use a wrist watch so I can have a hands-free stopwatch? Or maybe one that keeps track of distance and pace?

I quickly snap out of it. I have all I need. I have a hydration backpack that has a pocket for a phone, and phones have stopwatches. I don’t need fancy tech shirts¹, shorts, and shoes (though shoes are naturally a good place to upgrade).

The point is, with running as it is with writing, you have all you need. There’s often a rush to over-complicate things, to purchase that thing that will grease the skids or make you feel less like an imposter.

If you want to write, any writing implement and any piece of paper will do. You don’t need MS Word (unless Mariner Books demands it). Just use Google Docs or whatever free software you have. You don’t need to go on a retreat. You don’t need to attend exorbitantly priced writing conferences². Don’t be seduced by MFA programs to legitimize your pursuit.

I’m about to push my comfort zone into the YouTube Universe and I’m nervous about the gear or software I need. I remind myself. To get started, I have all I need. It was like when I started podcasting in 2013: I didn’t overthink it. I had a landline on speaker phone attached to a tripod by rubber band aimed at my laptop as I recorded the phone call. Now I have a nice set up that sounds way more polished, but I didn’t wait for the perfect set up to start.

It’s a good mantra: in most cases, you have all you need.

I have a couple from back in the day. By and large, I just deal with nipple chafing. TMI? Nah. ↩︎
Though, at some point, you’ll want to to build your community and to be a good literary citizen. ↩︎