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.”
Kesley Rexroat brings you a beautiful love story for The Atavist Magazine, this one titled “Love, Interrupted.” The dek reads, “Two women promised they would see the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time once they were together. They had no idea how long that would take.”
It’s a wonderful, redemptive story that proves the power of commitment and following one’s true path.
Kelsey is a “meticulous copy editor and dynamic content writer based in San Francisco, California. She specializes in technology, health, and lifestyle.”
Tom Donaghy, a playwright and screenwriter, needed to find out.
Harry Anglemeyer was a fixture of Ocean City with a fudge empire on the Jersey Shore, The Copper Kettle. He wanted to lift up and move forward the ocean-side city. He was openly queer in a time that wasn’t as accepting. In 1964, he was murdered and the case was never solved.
My first rough draft is my outline. That’s what I’m learning about myself. My first drafts are very rough. It’s literally a dump from my head of what I want to say how I want to say it, how I think it should be structured.
Tyler cites the great Erik Larson as an influence and you can feel the pulse of that throughout this nautical-disaster piece about the sinking and tragedy surrounding The Valencia. Tyler writes a bit of the backstory at his Medium page here.
Tyler is a writer, podcaster, and storyteller living on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. He has a master’s degree in history and has worked as a journalist.
Cassidy Randall is a freelance writer based out of Montana, and her piece for The Atavist Magazine, “Alone at the Edge of the World,” just dropped.
It’s a harrowing piece and one that really flexes the muscles of what a reporter/writer can do to re-create scenes when they weren’t present for the “main action.”
We talk about how reading fiction helps her with her nonfiction, dealing with rejection, attention to rhythm in sentences, pacing, and a whole lot more.
Mike Damiano brings 2021 to a close with his piece for the Atavist Magazine about an unlikely revolutionary who helped the people of Easter Island earn rights they deserved from an oppressive Chilean naval regime. It’s the story of Alfonso Rapu a school teacher turned revolutionary via nonviolence. It’s called “We Wish to Be Able to Sing.”
Mike is a staff writer for Boston Magazine, but like many people writing stories for the Atavist, he’d been working on this Easter Island story for years. Atavist becomes like this benevolent foster home for stories that are too long for traditional magazines and too short to be books. And Seyward and Jonah say, come here little story, we’re gonna make you a STAR!
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It’s called “The Snitch,” and details the story around the serial killer Scott Kimball, but, more specifically, the mistakes made by the FBI, thus turning this true-crime yarn on its head.
Consider subscribing to The Atavist and its once-a-month blockbuster piece of narrative nonfiction. Once a month, can’t beat it … sounds like my newsletter!
Anyway …
We dig into a lot of might juice, and I hope it brightens up your day and wherever you are on your writer journey.
