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.
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.
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.
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.
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Susan Orlean makes her third trip back to the podcast (Ep. 61 and 121), this time to celebrate her latest book, a collection of her magazine work on animals titled … On Animals.
She’s the best selling author The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, and The Orchid Thief. She’s been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1990s and, as many of you know, seeing a Susan Orlean byline is something like appointment reading. It’s special.
Laura Todd Carns is here to talk about her latest feature for The Atavist Magazine. It’s called “Searching for Mr. X: For eight years, a man without a memory lived among strangers at a hospital in Mississippi. But was recovering his identity the happy ending he was looking for?”
Laura is a novelist, essayist, and journalist whose work has appeared in many places. You can find out more at her website.
In this episode we talk about approaching a story as fiction vs. nonfiction, the challenge of the structure of the piece, collaborating with an editor and how it’s like a record producer and a musician, and more.
First I talk to Seyward Darby, as she was the lead editor of the piece. Enjoy!
First I speak with editor-in-chief Seyward Darby and then let Nile take it from there.
With Nile, we talk about the writing lessons she’s gleaned from bouldering, how she got into true crime as a kind of self-preservation, and how she determines what stories are “worthy.” We also dig into how she got her foot in the door to full time freelancing.
Please enjoy, and consider supporting the show in myriad ways, be that subscribing, leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts, or even plunking down a few bucks at patreon.com/cnfpod.
What an experience Hippocamp was this year. Donna Talarico stuck the landing in pandemic times. The degree of difficulty is Simone Biles-esque!
I don’t I’ve worked as hard on any one thing like I did on this Hippocamp talk in a long, long while. I put everything I had into it. That said, I had a very hard time gauging what the audience thought of it. It was a pretty sparse turnout, so far as Hippocamp talks go. Everyone was masked, so I couldn’t tell if people were smiling or dying inside. There were only two questions, whereas most breakout sessions of this nature have several questions.
Naturally I felt like a comic who bombed.
Still, some people came up to me and said they loved it. Not meaning to undercut their good will, I was like, “Really? Cuz it felt dead to me up there and there were no questions …”
They usually said the talk itself didn’t lend itself to questions. It leant itself to thought. In any case, I still gave it my all to the gracious folks who showed up.
I tell you, it was a privilege to put this together. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, consider becoming a Patron at patreon.com/cnfpod, as I think I’ll start doing similar things like this (much, much shorter) as Patreon exclusives.
