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“I kinda hate it when people say writing is fun.” — Jack Rodolico, author The Atavist original “The Blue Book Burglar“
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“So much misery. It is so much misery. It is so hard. It’s not natural, locking yourself in your room for three years to focus on one person is not mentally healthy. Leigh Montville, great, great writer, said to me years ago, he’s like, ‘It’s an unnatural thing. You spend two years in a hole to come out for two weeks, you know?’” — Jeff Pearlman, author of Only God Can Judge Me.
Continue reading “Episode 496: Jeff Pearlman Finds the Little Guys”Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever!
“When I came in [to Longreads], I didn’t come in and say, I think we need to grow aggressively. I said, ‘Let’s figure out who we are. Let’s figure out what other people aren’t doing, that we do , and that we can do better.’ And so the only real thing that changed when I first came in was to try to make the editors known quantities.” — Peter Rubin, head of publishing at Automattic, where he works primarily with Longreads, but also The Atavist Magazine.
Continue reading “Episode 495: On Being Merciless with Peter Rubin of Longreads”Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever!
“As a reader, if I were a fan reading this book, I want the good, the bad and the ugly. I want you to rip the band aid off and tell the truth. Because, from my from my experience, I’ve read a lot of memoirs that are super boring and just fluff.” — Jeremy X. Wagner, co-author of Curtis Duffy’s Fireproof: Memoir of a Chef (Dead Sky Publishing)
Continue reading “Episode 494: Co-Writing a Memoir, Becoming a Publisher, and Finding the Passion with Jeremy X. Wagner”Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever!
“This has to be meaningful to you. It has to be a story that won’t leave you alone, a story that you’re willing to rearrange your calendar for.” — Masha Hamilton, whose piece for The Atavist is titled “I’ve Gone to Look for America.”
Hey CNFers, it’s CNF Pod, and it’s the Atavistian time of the month so consider heading to magazine.atavist.com to subscribe. I did. I don’t get handouts or kickbacks.
Yeah.
I am in route to Idaho at this very moment. Got two things in Ketchum, two things in Boise. I have too many books. I’m on the hook for more than a $1,000 worth of Front Runners. I’m so screwed.
OK, this is the show where I — if I’d just shut the fuck up — talk to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. Today we have Masha Hamilton, a journalist, a novelist, a fan of the show, a fan of Pitch Club. You’ll want to visit mashahamilton.com to learn more about her wide-ranging career covering the world. She’s the author of five novels and trying to sell her sixth. She was at one point the director of communications and public diplomacy at the US embassy in Kabul.
Her story for the Atavist is about her driving the entire length of I-95 with her photographer son Cheney, and stopping at just about every rest stop to speak with strangers about how they feel about our country. “Conversations and revelations about an ailing nation along Interstate 95.” Man, those Atavist editors sure can write the hell out of a dek.
And guess who’s back!? Seyward Darby! Do your best Kermit the Frog dance. Very nice to hear her and this piece challenged Seyward in ways I didn’t see coming: Meaning, she didn’t share Masha’s optimism … or hope. Seyward, for lack of a better word, disagreed with it, so there was an interesting tension she brought to the edit.
As for Masha Hamilton, this piece really illustrates the things we carry, that politics isn’t a monolith. We talk about a lot of great stuff like:
Rate, review, do it up.
Pilates
Awesome, thanks to Masha, Seyward, and you. Visit magazine.atavist.com to read Masha’s story and be sure you’re newlettered up with my Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter and Pitch Club, welcometopitchclub.substack.com.
Not a terribly long parting shot, but figured I’d riff on the Florence Festival of Books, which was a fun time, tabling The Front Runner. I’d say most of the authors at this event were self-published. Not all, but a good chunk, so there was an little crackle in the air when a few authors approached me and asked if I was self-published. I said, no, it was an imprint of HarperCollins, to which the eyebrows raised and they kinda looked at you in disbelief. And the tone they take stinks of their years of frustration of trying to find an agent and not, of trying to land a Big 5 deal, and not.
And I understand deeply that frustration, I do. Truly.
I was approached by a guy whose wife, tabled her self-pubbed titles. And he went down the line of questioning with me. Do you have an agent? Did you self-publish? Yes. No. There was a lot of judgement in the air. And I don’t judge and begrudge the indie publishing scene. It’s pretty punk rock, but to do it well takes significant personal investment. I’ve seen any number of self-published things and there are typos all over the place and it feels unfinished; it feels hasty. I imagine there were some great indie authors there and some can lock into an audience and make a living, be fulfilled, not be beholden to gate keepers.
I sold my books for $15 apiece. As many of you know, it retails for $32.99. I only sold 12 books, so there was no way I was selling anything at full price so I figured it was best to take a loss than to sell zero copies.
I forgot what it was like to sell books. The spiel. I did this a lot with Six Weeks in Saratoga, it was odd doing it for The Front Runner. You soon get used to it.
Then Ruby McConnell and I had a fruitful discussion and Q&A sitting on the edge of the stage for the dozen or so people who stuck around. Ruby talked about radical incrementalism as it pertained to a literary career and I loved that notion of the small, done repeatedly, over geologic time, leads to something seismic.
I had fun, and I’d do it again.
The Hidden Life of Life with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Allison Fallon — Find Your Voice
The ‘Supremely Tiny Acts’ of Sonya Huber
Katya Cengal and Finding Enough ‘There’ There for The Atavist
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Hey CNFers, it’s the creative nonfiction podcast, the show I speak to primarily writers about the art and craft of telling true stories. I’m Brendan O’Meara, very tired, very tired, had a big, eventful weekend and my battery has bottomed out. And I’m going to the Redwoods for 3 days so I’m producing this episode on a Monday and what do you know? Who the fuck does this host think he is being a guest on his own fuckin’ podcast? The fuckin’ nerve of this guy. That’s right, for the third live taping of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast at Gratitude Brewing, I was interviewed by the brilliant Daniel Littlewood, who kinda makes me look and sound like a jabroni’s jabroni.
Continue reading “Episode 492: The Host Becomes the Hosted — Brendan O’Meara in conversation with Daniel Littlewood”View on Zencastr
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“Writing a book is so overwhelming. So what I do to manage my own anxiety and overwhelm about that is I’m really, really obsessed with breaking everything into little steps so that all I need to do is the next step and then I don’t get overwhelmed.” — Tracy Slater, author of Together in Manzanar
Continue reading “Episode 491: How Tracy Slater Broke Her Book into Steps”
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“When I got back to [writing], it was like an athlete or a martial artist coming back to the practice, and the endorphins start running back. And you remember the joy that you had in it, also the struggles of it, but you’re back in it, and then I couldn’t be stopped.” — Jeff Chang, author of Water, Mirror, Echo.
Continue reading “Episode 490: Seeing the Fish and the Tank with Jeff Chang”
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“The point of my book and the point of this big day of action that we’re doing across the country is to drive that notion away, that [solar] isn’t alternative energy, that it’s the obvious, straightforward, common sense and very beautiful way to power the world going forward. To use the analogy I’ve been using, it’s not any longer the Whole Foods of energy: nice, but pricey. It is now the Costco of energy: cheap available in bulk on the shelf, ready to go.” — Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun.
Continue reading “Episode 488: Bill McKibben, the Dark Realist, Faces the Light”
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“Writing is so easily not done.” — Robert Weintraub
Continue reading “Episode 487: Robert Weintraub and the ‘American Hindenburg’”