By Brendan O’Meara
It’s that Atavistian time of the month, and we’ve got Kate McQueen on loan from the Pollen Initiative to talk about “The Good Traitor,” how a group of journalists in Nazi Germany sought to free one of their own from a concentration by means of … winning him the Nobel Peace Prize. Where do people find these stories?
Kate has a Ph.D. in literature from Stanford University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She’s the editorial director of the Pollen Initiative, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to cultivating media centers inside prisons across the country.”
She served as an editorial advisor for San Quentin News’s magazine and the managing editor for Prison Journalism Project’s PJP Inside. Pretty wild stuff. Her work has appeared in Alta Journal, Next City, and Literary Journalism Studies, to name just a few.
In this conversation, we hear from Jonah Ogles, the lead editor of this piece, about when his eyes begin to glaze over when editing. Kate talks about imposter syndrome and wrestling with the doubt inherent to this kind of work, and the challenge of world building in historical nonfiction.
Have any show feedback, you can email the pod at creativenonfictionpodcast at gmail dot com, and, if you’re feeling generous, we’ll always take a kind review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify. If nothing else, it validates the show for a wayward CNFer looking for a new forever podcast.
