#CNF Episode 13—Greg Hanlon on the Audacity of Voice and the Value of Struggle

“Putting in the work is confidence building.” —Greg Hanlon

“You struggle and struggle until the end product comes close to your original expectation. It’s all about the struggle.” —Greg Hanlon

Greg Hanlon is a crime editor at People Magazine and also a freelance sports writer. His piece “Sins of the Preacher” was anthologized in the Best American Sports Writing 2015 edition. His “The Many Crimes of Mel Hall” was a notable selection.

Episode 11—Carrie Hagen on Finding the Essence of Story

Written by Brendan O’Meara

The subject at hand is Carrie Hagen, author of We is Got Him. She and I met at grad school where she began fleshing out the story for We is Got Him. It’s her first book, but you’d think it was her third or fourth. I’ll let her do the talking.

As always I’d love for you to sign up for email updates (they arrive on Tuesdays if they arrive at all). Also be sure to subscribe to the podcast that way you’ll get the latest episodes of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast beamed straight to your favorite audio device.

Thanks!

Catch Up on These Three Latest Episodes

By Brendan O’Meara

A photo posted by Brendan O’Meara (@brendanomeara) on Apr 21, 2015 at 1:28pm PDT

There won’t be a new episode this week since my guest, author Carrie Hagen, couldn’t speak last week. No prob. She’s the author of We Is Got Him. If you like Erik Larson you’ll love Carrie’s book. We’ll get into that later.

This gives you plenty of time to catch up on what you may have missed.

Here’s Maggie Messitt, author The Rainy Season.

Here’s John Scheinman, winner of the 2015 Eclipse Award for Feature Writing

Here’s Joe DePaulo, a 2014 Best American Sports Writing notable selection.

I need to buy more storage through my podcast host Podomatic and I’m having a hard time pulling the trigger on that. Money is tight, but I think the interviews are fun and educational. It goes to show you how deep the talent pool is out there. As I said in the intro to the Joe DePaulo interview, this is my excuse to talk shop with people I admire and promote their work in some small way.

Anyway, enjoy those interviews, subscribe on iTunes and please sign up for the weekly email newsletter that feeds your inbox with the latest podcasts and other tasty morsels. No spam, just useful stuff. You can always unsubscribe. No hard feelings.

Thanks for reading and listening. We’ll talk later.

Episode 10—Joe DePaulo on Talese, Kramer, and What It Means to be Edited

Written by Brendan O’Meara

“There’s no downplaying that moment for me. There’s no humble bragging that. It’s a straight-up brag, a measure of pride for me.”—Joe DePaulo

“I can’t abandon it. For me, I don’t know what else I’d do.” —Joe DePaulo

Maybe my favorite part of my conversation with Joe happens toward the end where we briefly touch upon drafting one particular writer in a Fantasy League for Narrative Nonfiction. I should’ve expanded on this, but I figure it’s going to be a much longer segment in the future.

This was a fun one. We talked about writers who inspired Joe and the harsh financial realties of the freelance game. (You can hear Episode 9 guest John Scheinman shed insights into this as well.)

I’ve shortened by Bookshelf for the Apocalypse segment to five books. Good stuff here.

Joe’s BftA

The Complete Works of Shakespeare
Character Studies by Mark Singer
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
The Best American Sports Writing of the Century
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life by Richard Ben Cramer
Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow

Ricky Jay’s Magical Secrets by Mark Singer is a New Yorker profile Joe re-reads over and over again.
The Man Who Knew Too Much by Marie Brenner

Here’s Joe’s SB Nation Longform archive, which includes his profile on Mike Francesa, a story that earned Joe a notable selection in the 2014 volume of Best American Sports Writing.

So let’s get to it. Enjoy!

Hey, if you get a chance subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and throw down your email here at the website. I know that’s asking a lot, but it would mean a lot to me.

Episode 9—Inside the Reporting Mind of John Scheinman

Written by Brendan O’Meara

“You know what? It’s like when you ask a girl on a date. How scary it can be. It’s terrifying sometimes.”—John Scheinman

“I was always a conversation person. I would literally say this, ‘I’m going to earn your trust and you will never be misquoted.’ They loved it!”—John Scheinman

This week I interview my friend and colleague John Scheinman, who won the Eclipse Award for feature writing for his piece about legendary Maryland horse trainer Dickie Small. The piece, titled Memories of a Master, is a long, sweeping profile that took John about three months to craft. Give it a read.

We get into the use of voice recorders versus notebooks, something I find fascinating as different reporters use different methods for gathering information. We also talk about the anxiety that comes from having to interview people and I think that may be particularly helpful to others who feel the same way.

And, of course, there’s John’s Bookshelf for the Apocalypse, the books he’d keep in his survival pack that he could never part with should the world melt down around us. He is the second person to say this is a stupid question in two weeks. Does that mean I should give it up? Not yet. If next week’s guest says it’s stupid maybe I’ll consider.

John’s Bookshelf for the Apocalypse

The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante
Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
The Honest Rainmaker: The Life and Times of Colonel John R. Stingo by A.J. Liebling
Life by Keith Richards
The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Thresholds by James Hamilton-Patterson
Blues People: Negro Music in White America by Leroi Jones
Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story by Nick Tosche

Thanks again for listening. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and sign up for my email newsletter that brings you my book recommendations for the month and anything you may have missed from the podcast.

Episode 8—Maggie Messitt on Shi#y First Drafts and Making Documentaries on Paper

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Tweetables by Maggie Messitt (@maggiemessitt):

“I really embrace the shitty first draft.”

“I was always into true stories, almost at an obsessive level.”

Maggie Messitt wrote a gem of a book in The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa.

We talk about a lot of stuff, certainly about process and the challenge of writing book-length narrative. Maggie is a writer, author, teacher, hiker, dog owner, reporter, super kayaker, all-round liver-of-life.

Also I introduce a new segment called the Bookshelf for the Apocalypse. What’s this? Should the world be ravaged by global pandemic, zombies, meteor strike or nuclear winter, and you were allowed ten books to keep in your survival pack, what would they be?

Hmm….

Below you’ll find a list of books Maggie mentioned that you may want to check out. Thanks for listening and I ask that you please subscribe to the podcast and sign up for the email newsletter.

Thanks so much!

Maggie’s Bookshelf for the Apocalypse

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

T he Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadimann

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, A Writing Life, all by Annie Dillard

Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

Open City by Teju Cole

Portrait with Keys by Ivan Vladislavic

A dictionary

What is Justice? by Robert C. Solomon and Mark C. Murphy

Episode 7—Richard Gilbert Bought a Farm

Richard Gilbert, author of “Shepherd: A Memoir,” stopped by the podcast in 2014.

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Richard Gilbert is the author of Shepherd, a memoir about his days on an Ohio farm fulfilling a lifelong dream to become a farmer. He raised flocks of sheep, got hurt, dealt with ragweed allergies, the list goes on and on. It’s a wonderful book and I think after listening to Richard you’ll want to devour it and also follow his great blog, Draft No. 4, and follow him on Twitter @richardsgilbert.

The audio to the podcast kinda sucks. For that I’m sorry. There are some points where my Skype connection got real choppy. Other times the audio gets uneven. I’m sorry, but brighter days are coming. Subscribe to Hashtag #CNF on iTunes and sign up for the weekly emailer that updates you on the week’s posts. That’s it! Enjoy!

Hashtag #CNF Episode 6: Three Days in Gettysburg

He’s back for more. Brian Mockenhaupt wrote the compelling Byliner Original Three Days in Gettysburg about the war front hitting home.

I wrote this on Amazon about the piece:

Brian Mockenhaupt, an intrepid and elite reporter of the living, turns his eye to those long gone. And as we near the 150th anniversary of that bloodiest battle at Gettysburg, Mockenhaupt, through his deft skill as an information gatherer, writes a compelling story about friendship, love, and loss in the most famous battle of the Civil War and its putrid wake for those left behind.
It culminates with President Lincoln presiding over a newly created memorial to the felled Union soldiers, a speech where he turns the volume down so we may hear the ghosts of Gettysburg.

And in this latest episode of Hashtag #CNF, Mockenhaupt talks about the challenges of writing historical narrative with nothing to consult but the archives.

Like what you hear? Subscribe on iTunes and subscribe to my blog.

Hashtag #CNF Episode 5—Sheri Booker

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Sheri Booker’s memoir Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home chronicles her near-decade long experience immersed the culture of death. Everything from picking up bodies to preserving them in the inner sanctum of Wylie Funeral Home.

In it Booker learns that death knows no age and that a funeral home is every bit a part of a community as a church. She also answers the age-old question of whether bodies move on the embalming table or not.

Hashtag #CNF Episode 4: Harrison Scott Key

View on Zencastr

By Brendan O’Meara

I get to interview some pretty cool people doing this humble little podcast. In this latest episode, I speak with Harrison Scott Key about his award-winning essay The Wishbone. The Wishbone won Creative Nonfiction’s Southern Sin essay contest. It is a wildly funny essay about his father bending the rules to win a football game … a pee-wee football game … in which he recruit’s his 14-year-old son—Harrison—to suit up as the team’s integral 11th player.

In this interview we talk about comedy writing and where Key developed his comedic sensibility. Enjoy and share!

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Stay wild, CNFers!