Friday, March 7, 2025
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Become a Patron!Will McGrath says, “I’ve heard people describe anthropology as deep hanging out. It’s the the minutia of everyday life. It’s the quotidian stuff that is actually really interesting.”
Will wrote a brilliant reported essay for The Believer Magazine as he followed a cast of young men and their basketball season titled “American Boys.” If you loved Darcy Frey‘s book The Last Shot, you’ll love Will’s piece.
Will is the author of Farewell Transmission: Notes from Hidden Spaces and Everything Lost is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, Guernica, and The Rumpus, among others.
Really great chat where we talk about his feeling like a “fake writer” or a “fake journalist,” but also, “It’s pretty fun when when your work is like, ‘Oh, time to go hang out at the gym with these hilarious guys and just like, talk shit and shoot hoops and listen to their hilarious dumb stories and tell my own hilarious dumb stories. It’s not a bad gig if you could get it.”
I’ve also created a podcast-specific — an episode specifice weekly email — on … Substack. I know. I bag on Substack for reasons that I won’t repeat here. But this is a new list to add some extra seasoning to your listening experience. Here’s the link to check it out. I hope you subscribe to receive full transcripts, the parting shot, and whatever else might be in support of that week’s particular episode.
Here’s the naked link: https://substack.com/@creativenonfictionpodcast
And Will’s specific one: https://open.substack.com/pub/creativenonfictionpodcast/p/will-mcgrath-at-times-thinks-hes?r=ujb19&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
A fair question is: Is that just show notes? Aren’t they the same? Should you just put it all in the show notes section on your website? And not deal with an entirely new thing? These are great questions for a forthcoming blog post. The short answer is the Substack is a value-add for the transcripts free from the rest of my website’s content. Plus, it’s another funnel, but I’ll riff on that another time.
For now, enjoy this conversation with Will McGrath!
