August 2024 – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Episode 426: Asking for Blurbs, Unauthorized Biographies, and the Mystery of Aaron Rodgers with Ian O’Connor

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.

Episode 425: The Most Brazen of Genres with Madeleine Blais

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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.

Episode 424: Tommy Tomlinson on Aiming for One-Word Summations, the Blurt, and ‘Dogland’

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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.

Episode 423: Rhana Natour and Eman Mohammed Take You Up Close for The Atavist

Rhana Natour and Eman Mohammed

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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.