Sponsor love: West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing and HippoCamp21. Use CNFPod21 for $50 off your registration!
Become a Patron!Cecilia Brown (@cecilbrownn) is on the show to talk about “So Nice to Hear Your Voice,” her This American Life essay about her grandmother. We get into the behind-the-scenes of the piece. Great stuff.
What else do we get into?
Continue reading “Episode 269: The Visionary Life of Cecilia Brown, Making Pictures, and This American Life”
Sponsors: West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing and HippoCamp 2021.
Become a Patron!Alison Herman (@aherman2006) is a staff writer for The Ringer, who writes about all kinds of TV and movies and the like.
What prompted this conversation was her piece about David Gelb, the filmmaker behind Jiro Dreams of Sushi and Chef’s Table.
In this episode we talk about:
Continue reading “Episode 268: Overcoming Bad Viewing Hygiene with The Ringer’s Alison Herman”
Lovely sponsors: West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing and HippoCamp21.
Become a Patron!The writer Suzanne Roberts (@suzanneroberts28) came by CNF Pod HQ to talk all things writing and memoir and Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (University of Nebraska Press, 2020).
Had a wonderful time talking to her about:
Continue reading “Episode 267: Suzanne Roberts on Big Wins, Rejection Clubs, and ‘Bad Tourist’”Become a Patron!View on Zencastr
Kristen Radtke is the author of Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness. Let me tell you, CNFers, this book spoke to me like few others do. Such is the life as a lonely podcaster.
Continue reading “Episode 266: The Expansive Nothing You Have to Fill with Kristen Radtke”
Sponsors: West Virginia Weslyen College’s MFA in Creative Writing and HippoCamp2021 (Enter CNFPod21 for $50 off your registration!)
Become a Patron!Rachel Monroe (@rachmonroe) is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and myriad other places.
Her latest piece for The New Yorker is about ransomware and hacker negotiators. She wrote a piece about #vanlife for The New Yorker back in 2017 that garnered all kinds of buzz.
Continue reading “Episode 264: Rachel Monroe Talks About the Things Writers Don’t Tweet About”
Michelle Weber and Catherine Cusick are the editor-in-chief and publisher of Pipe Wrench Magazine, a new venture that aims to fix what’s broken in journalism and publishing.
This is a fun conversation about the founding of the magazine and Michelle and Catherine are doing to help change the culture. You can find Issue 1 here, and they just went live with Issue 2 this week.
The pair overlapped at Longreads and parlayed much of that experience into Pipe Wrench, so we talk about that, among other things.
At one point Cartherine brings up this notion of “ramen startups,” and she’s referring to a blog post from Paul Graham. This means keeping things lean and nimble and not overextending and growing too fast.
Great talk!
OK, so keep the conversation alive @CNFPod and consider becoming a CNFin’ member at Patreon. There’s where you get exclusive access to the audio magazine, get asked to ask questions of guests, transcripts, coaching, and more. For just $2 a month, you get access to a killer audio product, and we’re going live with Issue 2 in mere days! Patreon.com/cnfpod
Wudan Yan and Jenni Gritters are back!
They host The Writers’ Co-op Podcast, and it is back for Season 3, a season in which they focus on coaching.
Lots of good stuff here including:
Follow Wudan and Jenni on Twitter, as well as @CNFPod, and learn more about them, their work, and their services at their websites.
Lilly Dancyger (@lillydancyger) is here to talk about her new book Negative Space. She also edited the collection Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger.
Negative Space is a detective story as Lilly seeks out her father’s past. He passed away when she was a very young girl. He was a brilliant artists, but tortured by addiction.
Continue reading “Episode 259: Lilly Dancyger on Building Community and Finding Her Father in ‘Negative Space’”
Every now and again you read a book that blows your brains out. Brian Broome‘s (@bbromb) Punch Me Up to the Gods is one of those books.
It deals with identity, Black masculinity, shame, family, oppression, racism, and community. What a book, man, what a book.
We also dig into Brian’s writing process and how he goes about the work.
“I’m the queen of the run-on sentence,” he says.
And the grind of it all.
“I’m the queen of quitting,” he says.
Consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/cnfpod for transcripts and for exclusive access to the audio magazine. Your dollars go into making the production possible and put money in the pockets of writers. Patrons also get a chance to submit questions that I ask of guests and coaching.
Sponsorship for this episode is brought to you by West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing.
Promotional partner is HippoCamp 2021! Go register!
Joe Drape is back to talk about his latest book, The Saint Makers: Inside the Catholic Church and How a War Hero Inspired a Journey of Faith.
Joe is a sports writer for The New York Times covering college football and horse racing, among other feature assignments.
In this episode we talk about diagramming stories the way you would diagram a sentence and
Joe is the author of several books including American Pharoah, Our Boys, and Black Maestro.
I want to give a shoutout to Hippocamp 2021! It is happening! Registration opens May 15. It’s a writers’ conference for CNFers like you. Check it out.