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Episode 379: Alison Mariella Desir

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By Brendan O’Meara

Alison Mariella Desir (@alisonmdesir) is a runner, activist, and author of Running While Black: Finding Freedom in a Sport That Wasn’t Built for Us (Portfolio).

A couple months ago I recommended Running While Black not only as a great read, but an important read. It gets into uncomfortable territory, but that’s what we need, it’s what we want, if we’re serious about inclusion, equity, diversity.

We start our conversation talking about procrastination and how running is part of Alison’s writing practice.

Episode 378: Steven Moore

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By Brendan O’Meara

Look who came back! It’s Steven Moore! He’s the author of The Distance from Slaughter County: Lessons from Flyover Country (UNC Press). Growing up in Iowa and spending the last several years on the west coast — many in Oregon — Steven toggles between when it meant to grow up in the midwest and the view from afar.

His essays range from riffs on the sitcom “Home Improvement,” Blockbuster Video, Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, and political coverage of a state that had voted for Obama, then flipped, you know, the other way.

Steven also is the author of The Longer We Were There: A Memoir of a Part-Time Soldier, which won the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction.

In this episode we talk about:

Episode 377: Carlos Barragan

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By Brendan O’Meara

Always nice to reach that Atavistian time of the month and this month has a great piece that combines the personal and the journalistic, “The Romance Scammer on My Sofa.”

These scammers, Yahoo Boys, as they’re called, spam people — the lonelier the better — in an effort to steal money. They’re based largely out of Lagos, Nigeria and there’s a great chance one of these Yahoo Boys has knocked on your door in one way or another.

They prey on the vulnerable, the lonely, and, for a short time, victimized Carlos’ mother, which led him on something of a manhunt to find the scammer, but what he found was a greater understanding of his mom.

Carlos is a journalist and student at the Columbia School of Journalism. You can find him on Twitter @CarolosBarraganT, and I hope you’ll head to magazine.atavist.com to read his piece and potentially subscribe. And, no, I don’t get any kickbacks, CNFer.

Episode 376: John Vaillant

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By Brendan O’Meara

John Vaillant is here, CNFErs, to talk about Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (Knopf). It’s an incredible feat of writing, reporting, and research and takes us to the devastating 2016 wildfire that tore through Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada.

John is the author a The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed, and The Jaguar’s Children.

You can find him on Twitter @johnvaillant and in this conversation he notes how Twitter actually helped him (what?!), and we also dig into interviewing for scene, not treating interviewing as an extraction industry, but more renewable, and fire, lots of fire.

Episode 375: Hattie Fletcher and Stephen Knezovich

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By Brendan O’Meara

Got a two-for-one deal here, CNFers. It’s Hattie Fletcher and Stephen Knezovich, two of the brilliant minds behind Short Reads, a weekly email missive of flash nonfiction.

They are formerly of Creative Nonfiction Magazine until a failure in leadership forced Hattie, Stephen, and a handful of others to leave the magazine. What came of that experience is Short Reads.

So in this episode we talk about email marketing, building an email list, writing short nonfiction vs. long nonfiction. It’s a concentrated dose of goodness.

Stephen also is an accomplished collage artists, so be sure to check out his website to get a sense of what his work is about. Collage is the bomb.

Episode 374: Christine Yu

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By Brendan O’Meara

Christine Yu (@cyu888) is the author of Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes (Riverhead Books).

This is a great conversation about what the athletic science community has gotten wrong — or just straight-up lazy — when it comes to the science behind women’s athletics. The book deals largely with the male-female binary and doesn’t really delve into the experiences of trans athletes. That’s for another book, one presumes.

Episode 373: Seth Godin

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By Brendan O’Meara

What a treat! Seth Godin returns, this time to talk about leadership in his new book The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams (Portfolio).

Seth talks about leadership vs. management and also how we develop leadership like a muscle. There’s a tension when someone wants to lead, but maybe doesn’t know how for fear of failure, fear of rocking the status quo, fear of judgement. Seth makes the impossible feel possible. It was a thrill and honor to spend some time with this wonderful person.

Episode 372: Anna Altman

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By Brendan O’Meara

Anna Altman (@bananaaltman) is a freelance journalist and a social worker in training, and she just wrote and reported her second feature for The Atavist Magazine called “The Quality of Mercy.” It deals with compassionate release for the terminally ill and the one man at the center of it advocating for his fellow inmates.

In this episode we dig into how she arrived at this story and the unique challenges of reporting this piece in the ten-minute chunks Anna had with her central figure, Gary Settle, as they spoke through the prison phone system.

Episode 371: Jen A. Miller

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By Brendan O’Meara

Jen A. Miller (@byJenAMiller) is back with another ebook, Freelance Writing for Laid-Off Journalists (and Those Who Want to Quit).

If Jen is good at anything, it’s breaking down how possible it is to make a nice living as a freelance writer. I mean, I SUCK at it, but that’s not Jen’s fault.

Discovery and Writing Before You’re Ready

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By by by Brendan O’Meara

Hey CNFers, I didn’t have an interview in the can for this week, so I figured I’d try something a little new. Kinda new. Sorta.

This podcast is something of a craft essay. It’s similar to my parting shot … if I only published the parting shot. (Sidebar: This has me thinking, maybe I should bottle up my parting shots and run them on, say, Wednesday, as a mid-week pick me up. If they’re craft based, not if it’s personal. You can email me if you think you’d like that, similar to my flounder (defunct?) Casualty of Words, a writing podcast for people in a hurry. How did it not catch on?)