By Brendan O’Meara
Betsy Golden Kellem (@bgkellem) is an attorney, a historian, and a “scholar of the unusual.”
Her piece, “City on Fire,” chronicles “the night violent anti-government conspirators sowed chaos in the heart of Manhattan” … in 1864. It’s a wild piece that shows how history has a way of feeling very fresh.
Continue reading “Episode 432: Betsy Golden Kellem, Scholar of the Unusual, Closet Historian, Atavist Writer”
By Brendan O’Meara
Sean Enfield (@seanseanclan) is the author of Holy American Burnout (Split/Lip Press), a fine essay collection that pushes the boundaries of form and is a cross-section of teaching, music, race, and a whole lot more.
Sean is an educator, a bassist, a poet, an essayist, and a whole lot more.
In this conversation, we talk about how Sean hates the word burnout, how he encourages his students to be creative kleptomaniacs, and a whole lot more.
Continue reading “Episode 431: Sean Enfield, Author of ‘Holy American Burnout’ Hates the Word Burnout”
By Brendan O’Meara
Nice to have Louisa Thomas back on the show to talk about profile writing, teaching, and kickers. Louisa is a staff writer for The New Yorker and one of my “appointment reading” writers: I see her byline, I make a date with it.
In this episode we talk about a profile she wrote on Nikola Jokic, perhaps the best player in the NBA. In talking about kickers, we riff on her column about the ennui of the Oakland Athletics and a smattering of other kickers. She says she’s not good at them and credits her editor more than herself, but I think she’s just being modest.
Louisa also is the author of the brilliantly biography Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams and a co-editor of Losers: Dispatches from the Other Side of the Scoreboard.
Continue reading “Episode 430: Louisa Thomas Knows How to End a Story”
By Brendan O’Meara
What is a “hungry author”? Setting aside pre-breakfast jokes, what does it mean?
Authors Ariel Curry (@arielkcurry) and Liz Morrow (@liz_morrow), it’s:
A writer who is determined to succeed. They want to and will be published. They take feedback well and don’t shy away from the hard work. You will find their butts in the chairs and fingers on the keyboard. They believe in their ideas and know they will impact others.
And so it is in their book Hungry Authors: The Indispensable Guide to Planning, Writing, and Publishing a Nonfiction Book (Rowman & Littlefield). Lots of great, juicy tidbits in this book that really makes you think your Big Idea through.
Ariel and Liz also co-host the helpful Hungry Authors (@hungryauthors) podcast, another fine resource to lean into.
Continue reading “Episode 429: What Does It Mean to be a ‘Hungry Author’?”
By Brendan O’Meara
Brin-Jonathan Butler is a frequent guest of the podcast, and he returned to talk about Flacco the Owl, among other things.
Brin is the kinda guy I can just listen to for ours. He’s operating on another level, certainly a level far above my Windows 95 operating system.
Brin is the author of a few books, namely The Grandmaster and The Domino Diaries.
Continue reading “Episode 428: Brin-Jonathan Butler Remembers Flacco the Owl”
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”
By Brendan O’Meara
Tommy Tomlinson (@tommyltomlinson) is on the show to talk about dogs … and writing … and about his book Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show (Avid Reader Press).
Tommy is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in Esquire, ESPN the Magazine, Garden & Gun, and a million other places. He’s also the author of the brilliant memoir Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America.
I have a soft spot in my heart for very accomplished writers and journalists who speak so openly and candidly about writing and doing the work, and Tommy brings all that to this conversation.
Continue reading “Episode 424: Tommy Tomlinson on Aiming for One-Word Summations, the Blurt, and ‘Dogland’”
Rhana Natour and Eman Mohammed
Become a Patron!By Brendan O’Meara
Heavy one, CNFers, heavy one, this for the Atavist. Rhana Natour and Eman Mohammed profile Layan Albaz, a Palestinian teenager who lost her legs in an Israeli airstrike. This is the journey of a young girl who came to the U.S. to be fitted for prosthetics, but as Rhana writes, it’s like learning two musical instruments at the same time.
Not only that, Layan’s story is one of THOUSANDS of children who have lost limbs during these horrific bombings. Rhana and Eman speak about this far better than I can describe, so let’s give you some info on them.
Continue reading “Episode 423: Rhana Natour and Eman Mohammed Take You Up Close for The Atavist”
By Brendan O’Meara
Darcy Frey’s The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams (Mariner Books, Spiegel & Grau audio) is a masterpiece in writing, structure, and immersive journalism — not participatory — but true immersion. It’s also a master class in how best to use the first person in a work that predominantly focuses on its core group of central figures.
Darcy’s essays and journalism for Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine have received numerous awards, including a National Magazine Award, a Livingston Award, and an Award for Public Service from the Society for Professional Journalists. His work has been adapted for stage and screen, and anthologized in The Best American Essays, Best American Science Writing, and the Library of America series. He teaches in the English department at Harvard.
The Last Shot was recommended to me by the late great Dick Todd, who worked on this book with Darcy. So we talk a little bit about Dick and how Darcy came to know and work with him.
Continue reading “Episode 422: Thirty Years of “The Last Shot,” Lessons from Obstacles, and Old-School Note Taking with Darcy Frey”