Podcast – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Episode 474: How to Reconfigure the Fireworks with Yi Shun Lai

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Personal News and/or Shoutouts for Pals

Hey CNFers, The Front Runner is officially out. I like to think I don’t ask for much, but now is the time buy a copy or three and, if you read it, you know the drill, need ratings and reviews. I won’t read them because I don’t want to be driven insane, but that’s the world we live in: ratings and reviews. Your call to action to support the book, me, and ye ol’ CNF Pod. If you’re still on the fence, and why would you be, there’s an excerpt of the book over at Lit Hub. Dig it.

I also started what’s proving to be a pretty popular venture called Pitch Club. It’s at welcometopitchclub.substack.com and I have a writer audio annotate a pitch. It’s tactical and it’s practical. It’s going to help you get where you want to go.

“There is this myth that you are a writer only if you are butt in chair, banging away at your keyboard for eight hours and then the rest of the time on a fainting couch somewhere, noodling over your ideas. And that kind of imagery does a lot of damage to young writers today.” — Yi Shun Lai

Episode 472: Melissa Febos and the Art of Personal Exploration with ‘The Dry Season’

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A mostly accurate transcript for Ep. 472¹

“As soon as I heard people refer to writers as actual people, I thought, ‘oh, my god, is that an option? Because I choose that option.’ And I just latched onto it immediately.” — Melissa Febos, from Ep. 472

Episode 470: Megan Baxter is Into Rewilding Her Writing

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A mostly accurate transcript for Ep. 470¹.

“It’s also just confidence and knowing that it’s still there, and knowing that you are a writer when you are not writing.” — Megan Baxter, from Ep. 470

Episode 469: John O’Connor on the Meaning of Bigfoot

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A mostly accurate transcript for Ep. 469¹

“I don’t feel envy. I don’t think. Maybe in some deeper and maybe even more troubling psychological level. I do feel competition with people, competition over resources, trying to claim certain ideas, stake a claim to certain ideas before other people can, especially when you’re working with a subject that’s in the public sphere. You don’t have any personal, any real wider claim to something than somebody else. It can be nerve wracking.” — John O’Connor, from Ep. 469

Episode 466: Katie Goh on Issues of Identity and the Trappings of Mythology

Friday, May 9, 2025

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For Ep. 466 we’ve got Katie Goh (@katie_goh on IG), author of Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange. It’s published by Tin House. This is a book that blends memoir and biography: biography of a fruit, that is.

I didn’t tell Katie this, but John McPhee’s slim book Oranges was one of the seminal books that made me want to write narrative nonfiction, that and McPhee’s Survival of the Bark Canoe. Katie, who is of southeast Asian and northern Irish descent, the book tackles issues of identity, colonialism, capitalism, xenophobia and racism, still life art and mythology. It’s dense, it’s expansive, it’s a really fine book.

Episode 465: Miranda Green Searches for the Harm

Friday, May 2, 2025

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Hey CNFers, it’s the Atavistian time of the month, so there are some saucy details about this month’s story titled “All That Glitters: His alleged victims say he bribed New York Police Department officials, stole millions in diamonds, and persuaded Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Kim Kardahsian to shill for scam cryptocurrency. So why is Jona Rechnitz still free?“

This gives us a chance to speak with Miranda Green, (@randi_green) an investigative reporter, about this piece.

Episode 464: John Glionna is a Clown Who Makes Balloons That Kids Don’t Like

Friday, April 25, 2025

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We have John Glionna (@johnglionna) here today. Spoke to him in December 2024, so, you know, we’re making good time here at CNF Pod HQ.

For the people who follow up with me from like a week ago, I’m like, ‘you might want to get a burrito and a Pepsi Zero Sugar.’ John’s a fun guy, one of those great journalists cut from a different fabric, a pre-internet vintage. He spent 26 years at the LA Times and he’s the author of No Friday Night Lights: Reservation Football on the Edge of America (Bison Books). Except there’s not really much football in the book.

This story takes place in a small, secluded town of McDermitt, Nevada, on the border of Oregon and Nevada. The high school rarely has enough kids to field a team of eight or so players. If they play, they lose and they lose big. It’s the story about a town trying to keeps its nose above water. It’s a town abandoned by the mining-industry boom times of the the late 20th century. John’s story is one of resilience and pride, of losing but not being a loser.

Episode 462: On Podcasting and Gardens with Debbie Millman

Friday, April 11, 2025

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Link to full transcript.¹

“[The early podcasts are] essentially unlistenable, unless you want to get a sense of how bad a person could be in early podcasting.” —Debbie Millman, host of Design Matters and author of Love Letter to a Garden

C’mon, really? Debbie Millman (@debbiemillman on IG) not only appeared here for Ep. 462, but it’s her third trip to CNF Pod HQ (her first and second are here and here). It’s when people return — and by all accounts seem happy to return — that validates the enterprise all the more.

Debbie has a new book out, Love Letter to a Garden (Timber Press), which is a bountiful book with her tight, concise, philosophical voice, much of it in her beautiful hand lettering. The book also has recipes from her wife, Roxane Gay. You may have heard of her.

Episode 461: For Nick Davidson, Stories Hunt the Storyteller

Friday, April 4, 2025

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Nick Davidson, @nickgdavidson on IG, a freelance journalist, says, “We usually think of hunting stories and looking for ideas, but I feel like it’s the other way around: stories hunt the storyteller, and I’m just prey.”

I love that sentiment.

Nick is on the show to talk about his piece for The Atavist Magazine titled “The Balloon that Fell From the Sky.” It’s a remarkable and tragic story of a gas balloon race where one of the teams was shot out of the sky by a Belarusian helicopter. It’s a gripping story that Nick spent the better part of three years reporting and writing.

Episode 460: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographer Megan Marshall Takes on Personal Essays in ‘After Lives’

Friday, March 28, 2025

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“You can’t think of anything more pleasing, I guess, to a biographer, than that they would be able to look in the coffin of their subject, but I did,” says Megan Marshall, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. Her latest book, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (Mariner Books) takes a more personal turn.

She’s also the author of Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (a Pulitzer finalist).