By Brendan O’Meara
Leigh Baldwin and Sean Williams are here to talk about “Follow the Leader,” their latest piece for The Atavist.
Here’s the teaser for it:
“In the waning days of the Iron Curtain, Rainier Sonntag helped fuel the neo-Nazi movement that still plagues Germany today. He was also a Communist spy—and he was working for Vladimir Putin.”
Go ahead, TRY and not read it.
Continue reading “Episode 323: Leigh Baldwin and Sean Williams”
By Brendan O’Meara
Greg Donahue (@GregJDonahue) is a freelance journalist, and he returns to The Atavist Magazine for “The Fugitive Next Door.”
It’s a riveting story, but what else would you expect from the Atavist or Greg?
Greg talks about some of his writerly insecurities, the power of endings, and a dynamite recommendation dealing with sentences.
We start off this episode speaking with Jonah Ogles, the lead editor of this piece.
More show notes TK. I promise!
Continue reading “Episode 318: Greg Donahue”
Guess who’s back? It’s Chip Scanlan (@chipscanlan), and he’s here to talk about 33 Ways to Not Screw Up Your Journalism.
It’s a zippy little book that uses contemporary examples that point out blindspots in our reporting and writing and help us fix them for the next day’s work, the next piece.
He hopped on the pod for Ep. 292 about his book Writers on Writing, which is a multi-vitamin of inspiration and writing tips. Actionable to boot.
Continue reading “Episode 316: Chip Scanlan”
Become a Patron!View on Zencastr
Katia Savchuk speaks fluent Russian. She went to Harvard. She went to the Columbia School of Journalism. She’s written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Forbes and … The Atavist!
And that’s what brings Katia (@katiasav) to the podcast this week as we talk about her piece “A Crime Beyond Belief.” It’s an incredible feat of reporting, writing, structure, tension, all the things.
We talk about her Talk of the Town in a recent issue of The New Yorker, “Vlog of War.” We talk about how her viral tweet got her grandmother and father out of Kyiv.
My 94 yo grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, is trapped in her Kyiv apartment with my father. She can’t really walk, and he can’t drive due to a disability. If anyone knows of any resources that can help with evacuation, please let me know.
— Katia Savchuk (@katiasav) March 5, 2022
A rare instance of social media doing some good in this world.
Anyway …
We also talk about tape recorders, empathy, organization, it’s a great chat.
The show’s Instagram handle, @creativenonfictionpodcast, and you can always keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod.
And you know I’d rather you sign up for my rage-against-the-algorithm, Up-to-11 Newsletter. Here’s the latest. Signup form is below you and to your right. Book recs, book raffles, cool stuff curated by me for you, CNFin’ happy hour or writing group, writing prompts, fun and entertaining. First of the month. No spam. Can’t beat it.
Consider supporting the show via Patreon patreon.com/cnfpod. Shop around if you want to support the community. I just paid out the writers from the last audio magazine. You make that possible. The show is free but it ain’t cheap.
Free ways to support the show?
Subscribe and download and share across your socials. And don’t forget to consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts. Those go a LONG way.
It’s that Atavistian time of the of month and I get to welcome the journalist Bill Donahue to the podcast to talk about his new piece “The Voyagers.”
Naturally, it’s an incredible piece that is a voyage across the Bering Strait, but, as Bill notes, a voyage across the Cold War.
I also speak with Jonah Ogles, the lead editor of this piece, about what makes for great profile writing and how an editor can help a writer get to “that good place.”
Lot’s of great rawhide to gnaw on in this podcast.
Continue reading “Episode 304: Bill Donahue”
If you’re like me, you like a memoir where the author is hunting for something. Neda Toloui-Semnani is on a quest of sorts in They Said They Wanted Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents (Little a, 2022).
Neda’s father was an Iranian revolutionary who was executed in the early 1980s by the shah’s regime. Neda was a toddler at the time. Neda’s mother and father were part of the protests in Berkley, California and mobilized for change.
While in Iran in the early 80s, Neda recounts the harrowing story of how she and her family escaped Iran after her father was arrested. This book is nuanced and layered and a wonderful read.
Continue reading “Episode 302: Neda Toloui-Semnani”
Sponsor love: West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing
Christine Grimaldi (@chgrimaldi) is here to talk about her piece for The Atavist Magazine called “The Shadow and the Ghost.“
It blends memoir and journalism into a gripping tale of grifters and when secrets become an inheritance.
We talk about about her story, her love being edited, and being a “sentence thief.”
We also hear from lead editor and editor-in-chief Seyward Darby about the experience of editing this piece, as well as other themes that cropped regarding Christine’s piece.
Continue reading “Episode 299: Christine Grimaldi and “The Shadow and the Ghost””
Sponsor love: West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing
Become a Patron!Who’s on the show this week, Hank?
Bradford Pearson (@bradfordpearson) on Twitter and IG, is the author of The Eagles of Heart Mountain. Must be a story of a gritty football team, right? Well, sorta, the subtitle is a true story of football, incarceration, and resistance in World War II America.
OK, that still might not get at the 100% heart of the tragedy of this book. It’s about the incarceration of Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945, whereupon thousands upon thousands, many of which were naturalized American citizens, were stripped from their homes largely on the west coast and moved inland to often inhospitable lands, namely heart mountain in northwest Wyoming living in horrible conditions and subject to impossible racism and prejudice.
For us football fans out there, we know that watching the grid iron on a Saturday or a Sunday provides some relief and distraction, so too did the Eagles of Heart Mountain.
Continue reading “Episode 296: Bradford Pearson on Reporting, Ambition, and ‘The Eagles of Heart Mountain’”
Sponsor love: West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing
Become a Patron!Wil Haygood is here. I’m going to repeat that: Wil Haygood is here.
He’s here to talk about his latest book, Colorization: 100 Years of Black Films in a White World (Knopf, 2021).
This conversation I did as part of Goucher College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction. It was a live event, rebroadcast with my slick editing skills for you.
Wil has been a long-time reporter for The Washington Post, where his piece on Eugene Allen, the butler for several presidents in the White House became a book and was the basis for Lee Daniels The Butler, starring Forrest Whittaker and Oprah Winfrey. You might have heard of them.
Wil has also written books on Sugar Ray Robinson and Thurgood Marshall and Sammy Davis Jr. His talent, ability, and rigor might only be surpassed by his generosity. How generous? He blurbed my book Six Weeks in Saratoga way back in early 2011 before the book came out that summer.
Continue reading “Episode 295: Wil Haygood Talks ‘Colorization,’ Black Films in a White World, and Meeting James Baldwin”
Sponsor love: West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing
Become a Patron!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!
The show has a new Instagram handle, @creativenonfictionpodcast, and you can always keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod.
And you know I’d rather you sign up for my Up-to-11 Newsletter. Signup form is below you and to your right. Book recs, book raffles, cool stuff curated by me for you, CNFin’ happy hour or writing group, writing prompts, fun and entertaining. First of the month. No spam. Can’t beat it.
Consider supporting the show via Patreon patreon.com/cnfpod. Shop around if you want to support the community. I just paid out the writers from the last audio magazine. You make that possible. The show is free but it ain’t cheap.
Free ways to support the show?
Subscribe and download and share across your socials. And don’t forget to consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts. Those go a LONG way.