By Brendan O’Meara
“What I wanted to do was show the commonality of all life on earth…it seemed important to me that we’re related.” —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.
You’ll excuse that there’s not traditional intro and outro to this show. You might even prefer it. I’ve had what I can only hope is a MINOR complication with recent oral surgery and don’t want to talk and thus compound the problem at hand. I won’t bore you.
It’s The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to artists about telling true stories. Leaders in narrative journalism (like Bronwen Dickey), memoir (like Maddy Blais), essay (like Erica Berry), radio (like Joe Donahue), and documentary film (like Penny Lane) talk about their origins, routines, processes, and key influences so you, kind listener, can apply those tools of mastery to your own work.
EMT returns to the show to talk about her new book The Hidden Life of Life: A Walk Through the Reaches of Time (Penn State University Press, 2018).
Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words, writes, “We are lucky to have shared some time on Earth with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas…Reading her is like looking through a telescope and realizing that the brightness you see actually happened long, long ago and has taken all this time to reach your own eyes.”
Dig the show? Leave a review for a review! What’s that? Consider leaving an honest review on iTunes and I will coach up a piece of your writing up to 2,000 words. Reviews are the currency that drives the podcast economy and I’d be thrilled if you added your two cents. Show me proof via electronic mail and we’ll get it done. You give me a minute of your review time, I’ll give you a few hours of mine (that’s how long it takes to read a piece three times and give good notes.) You give you get.
Also, in an effort to be less dependent on social media (@CNFPod, @BrendanOMeara, @CNFPodast, and @BrendanOMeara), my monthly newsletter is the bedrock of my little community here. It’s my monthly book recommendations and what you’ve missed from the world of the podcast. I’d love it if you signed up. Once a month. No spam. Can’t beat it.
Maybe I’ll be able to talk next week. In the meantime, enjoy Episode 93, and if you want to hear far more from Elizabeth, be sure to check out Episode 80 with her.
