View on Zencastr
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever!
“When I got back to [writing], it was like an athlete or a martial artist coming back to the practice, and the endorphins start running back. And you remember the joy that you had in it, also the struggles of it, but you’re back in it, and then I couldn’t be stopped.” — Jeff Chang, author of Water, Mirror, Echo.
Continue reading “Episode 490: Seeing the Fish and the Tank with Jeff Chang”Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever!
Hey CNFers, The Front Runner is officially out. I like to think I don’t ask for much, but now is the time buy a copy or three and, if you read it, you know the drill, need ratings and reviews. I won’t read them because I don’t want to be driven insane, but that’s the world we live in: ratings and reviews. Your call to action to support the book, me, and ye ol’ CNF Pod. If you’re still on the fence, and why would you be, there’s an excerpt of the book over at Lit Hub. Dig it.
I also started what’s proving to be a pretty popular venture called Pitch Club. It’s at welcometopitchclub.substack.com and I have a writer audio annotate a pitch. It’s tactical and it’s practical. It’s going to help you get where you want to go.
Continue reading “Episode 475: For Dane Huckelbridge, Spacing Out is Part of the Process”Friday, March 28, 2025
Become a Patron!“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).
Continue reading “Episode 460: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographer Megan Marshall Takes on Personal Essays in ‘After Lives’”
Updated Oct. 15, 2025
Next Stops:
By Brendan O’Meara
“Elegant biography… O’Meara’s loving portrait also celebrates Prefontaine’s legacy off the field, most notably his campaign against the Amateur Athletic Union’s rules disqualifying athletes who attempted to monetize their success. Nimble and comprehensive, this is a stirring tribute to a generational runner gone too soon.” — Publisher’s Weekly [FULL REVIEW]
“Surging prose,” from LitHub.
We got a nice review in the Wall Street Journal, you can check that out here.
Hey, CNFers, The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine, is officially out. I’m experiencing all the feels, and I can’t wait for you to read it.
This is the link: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338
Continue reading ““The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine,” out now! Plus, an October event!”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, and Dan Zak 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.
By Brendan O’Meara
On the tracking of the podcast, I said that Stephanie Gorton hadn’t been on the podcast in 2.5 years. It’s been 4.5 years. But she’s back! This to celebrate The Icon & the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America (Ecco).
It’s a tremendous book and one that has received a lot of positive attention in places like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Continue reading “Episode 444: Stephanie Gorton Embraces the Messiness”Link to Transcript. If you plan on citing this imperfect transcript, first check it against the original audio and give credit to me and the podcast.
Ian O’Connor is a modern-day master of the sports biography, the unauthorized sports biography. Unauthorized is not a dirty word, though the industry needs to rebrand around it. We’ll workshop that …
Unauthorized = true journalism, no editorial input from the central figure, more likely closer to the truth instead of the central figure’s truth. It is not a collaboration.
This is the biography you want to read.
And in the hands of someone like Ian, there’s no better reader experience. Ian handled his latest mammoth figure in Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers (Mariner Books) with utmost fairness and showed the grayness of Rodgers’s character, which makes for a gripping and complicated read.
Continue reading “Episode 426: Asking for Blurbs, Unauthorized Biographies, and the Mystery of Aaron Rodgers with Ian O’Connor”
By Brendan O’Meara
Madeleine Blais, author of several books, her latest (now in paperback) is Queen of the Court: The Many Lives of Tennis Legend Alice Marble. It’s published by Grove Press.
Maddy is a special person in my life, has been a friend and mentor going on twenty-one years, dating back to a Diaries, Memoirs, and Journals class I took with her at the helm in Tobin (?) at UMass, Amherst back in the fall of 2003. May you have someone in your corner as generous and kind as I’ve had in Maddy over a couple decades.
Continue reading “Episode 425: The Most Brazen of Genres with Madeleine Blais”Sam Jefferies is a freelance writer and communications specialist and his first book is Legacy on Ice: Blake Geoffrion and the Fastest Game on Earth. Credit The University of Wisconsin Press for publication.
It’s a book that chronicles the college hockey and the rise of hockey in the South. And at the heart of it is the Geoffrion familly whose bloodline in hockey goes back to the formation of the slapshot.
Blake Geoffrion had the pressure to keep the generational NHL lineage alive. And he did, though his career was cut short by a devastating head injury.
This is a story of the weight of that legacy.
Continue reading “Episode 415: Sam Jefferies, Hammering Out Screed”
Always a treat with the one and only Glenn Stout visits the show be it to talk about new books he’s written or, in this case, to celebrate the cinematic release of Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (Mariner Books).
Of the many books I’ve read of Glenn’s, this one’s my favorite and it, at long last, is in movie theaters starring Daisy Ridley.
In this episode, we talk about the journey of how this book came to be adapted, the hiccups along the way, how serendipity played a role in the adaptation, and a lot more book-writing stuff you’ll love to hear about.
Continue reading “Episode 413: Young Woman and the Sea, from Book to Movie”
This episode originally aired on June 10, 2022 as Episode 320.
What a great interview to re-up. Tremendous insights into the craft of biography and the perfect way to lobby subjects about what it’s important for a credible journalist to tell their stories: Everybody gets forgotten. They might not thinks so, but it’s true. And Howard made that case to Rickey Henderson for Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original.
Howard is the author of several books including The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron, The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism, and Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston.
Continue reading “Now in Paperback: Howard Bryant says ‘Everybody Gets Forgotten’”