March 2025 – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Episode 460: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographer Megan Marshall Takes on Personal Essays in ‘After Lives’

Friday, March 28, 2025

“You can’t think of anything more pleasing, I guess, to a biographer, than that they would be able to look in the coffin of their subject, but I did,” says Megan Marshall, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. Her latest book, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (Mariner Books) takes a more personal turn.

She’s also the author of Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (a Pulitzer finalist).

Episode 459: Cassidy Randall Talks Forgotten Histories, Sticky Notes, and the Power of Listening

Friday, March 21, 2025

FINAL WEEK!!! Promotional support is brought to you by the Power of Narrative Conference, celebrating its 26th year on the last weekend of March 28 and 29. 300-400 journalists from around the world are coming. Keynote speakers Susan Orlean, Connie Schultz, Dan Zak and Connie Chung will deliver the knowledge. Listeners of this podcast can get 15% off your enrollment fee by using the code CNF15. To learn more visit combeyond.bu.edu … and use that CNF15 code.

Become a Patron!

Companion podstack.

“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 the masterpiece new book Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women’s Ascent of Denali (Abrams Books).

Cassidy has been on the podcast before (and she be on a third time in about two months since she has ANOTHER Atavist story coming out).

Cassidy (@_cassidyrandall) is an adventure and outdoors writer, primarily, and focuses much of her reportorial eye on women, who for so long were discounted as “weaker” in every sense of the word. And it’s Cassidy’s writing of Thirty Below that illustrated just how ignorant and misogynistic the establishment was (and, likely, still is to a degree).

Episode 458: Jaydra Johnson Had to Get Weird

Friday, March 14, 2025

Promotional support is brought to you by the Power of Narrative Conference, celebrating its 26th year on the last weekend of March 28 and 29. 300-400 journalists from around the world are coming. Keynote speakers Susan Orlean, Connie Schultz, Dan Zak and Connie Chung will deliver the knowledge. Listeners of this podcast can get 15% off your enrollment fee by using the code CNF15. To learn more visit combeyond.bu.edu … and use that CNF15 code.

Become a Patron!

Jaydra Johnson‘s debut essay collection, Low: Notes on Art & Trash, isn’t what you’d expect. At least it wasn’t what I was expecting heading into it.

It was judged by Maggie Nelson and won the Fonograf essay collection contest. Here’s a tidbit of what Maggie had to say about it:

“Jaydra Johnson’s Low is part instruction manual, part genealogy, part art criticism, and part memoir–all of it pushing with urgency and necessity. It’s written in wry, straight-ahead prose that hits no false notes, and feels honest and earned at every juncture … I found myself rooting hard for its narrator – while also realizing that there is no need, as she has clearly found her way, and is now our teacher.”

Episode 457: Poynter’s Neil Brown Says Editing Isn’t Discussed Enough

Friday, March 14, 2025

Become a Patron!

If you’re an editing nut, a reporting nut, a journalism nut, you’re in luck. Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute, has been in the journalism racket for four decades with tours at the Miami Herald and being on the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Episode 456: Neko Case Wrote Her Memoir in Bed

Friday, March 7, 2025

Become a Patron!

Neko Case is here! She’s a founding member of The New Pornographers and a Grammy-nominated musical artist. Her debut memoir is The Harder I Fight the More I Love You (Grand Central).

Had a fine time chatting about childhood, empathy, exercises in memory, and writing in your bed.

Episode 455: Will McGrath’s Season on the Sidelines for The Believer

Friday, March 7, 2025

Become a Patron!

Will McGrath says, “I’ve heard people describe anthropology as deep hanging out. It’s the the minutia of everyday life. It’s the quotidian stuff that is actually really interesting.”

Will wrote a brilliant reported essay for The Believer Magazine as he followed a cast of young men and their basketball season titled “American Boys.” If you loved Darcy Frey‘s book The Last Shot, you’ll love Will’s piece.