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Episode 182: Jake Gronsky — Discipline, Sticking Up for Your Work, and Always Having an Apprentice Mindset

Jake Gronsky (middle) is an author and journalist.

By Brendan O’Meara

Jake Gronsky joins me this fine CNFriday to talk about his transition from playing professional baseball in the Minor Leagues to becoming a writer.

It’s good stuff.

He’s the co-author of A Short Season: Faith, Family, and a Boy’s Love of Baseball.

Jake made the notable selections for Best American Sports Writing 2019 with his two-part feature titled Nine Days in Cape Cod.

We dig into lots of good stuff and the craft of writing, about getting out of the way of the story and always having that apprentice mindset.

If you have questions you want answered, shoot me an email, CNFer.

Episode 181: Amy Fish — Starting Late, Dealing with Rejections, and How to Get Someone to Clean Up After Their Dog

By Brendan O’Meara

Amy Fish is here to talk about her book I Wanted Fried With That (New World Library).

We talk about her approach to writing the book, revisiting old essays, dealing with the flood of rejections and the art of the crafty complaint.

We brought up her 100 rejections in a year manifesto, something she said at HippoCamp 2019, something she took from Lisa Romeo.

Amy talks about drawing inspiration from David Sedaris, Malcolm Gladwell, and the mystery genre.

Make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast (wherever!) and, more importantly, the monthly newsletter. You can subscribe at the form at the bottom of this post. You can subscribe by this link. Or you can put your name in the task bar at the very top of this web page. It’s that easy.

Thanks for listening, CNFers. It means the world to me. Seriously.

Episode 180: Lindsay McCrae — A Year Among Penguins

By Brendan O’Meara
[email creativenonfictionpodcast at gmail dot com for questions you want answered!]

Lindsay McCrae is here to talk about his year with the penguins in My Penguin Year: Life Among the Emperors (William Morrow, 2019).

We talk a lot about his eleven months in Antarctica and the grind that was. We learn about how he got into this line of work, of being a freelancer, and helping the penguins when they were in peril.

I hope I’ve made something worth sharing. I’ll be taking an indefinite leave of social media starting in 2020, so feel free to follow @CNFPod, but if I don’t respond, you know why. I’m not being rude. In fact, I want to keep in touch via email or via the newsletter. The newsletter is where it’s at, so please subscribe to that and the podcast. Duh.

Lindsay always wanted to write a book and he wrote a fine one here.

Thanks for listening and thanks to Bay Path University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing for the support.

Episode 179: John O’Connor — Finding Your Donkey

By Brendan O’Meara

John O’Connor is here to talk about his essay “Everything Gets Worse,” Issue 32 of Creative Nonfiction’s True Story.

In this episode we talk about the genesis of this essay, what it says about him and finding a donkey for your story.

Towards the end, he also brings up Jenny Odell and wanting to read her book How to Do Nothing. You can listen to my conversation with Jenny if you’d like. No presh. You might also like Eric Ducker, who wrote a great profile on Jenny for The Ringer.

Support the show by linking up to it on your social platforms, engaging with the show on Twitter, IG or Facebook, and consider leaving a review or rating on Apple Podcasts. We’re real close to 100. Let’s get there and see what happens.

Episode 178: Elisa Gabbert — Tweet-Size Ideas and Letting Time Do the Work

By Brendan O’Meara

“Time is doing so much work.” — Elisa Gabbert (@egabbert)

Here we are again, friend. Elisa Gabbert is here to talk about how she comes up with her ideas for essays and not being afraid to cast a book aside because there’s so little time to waste time not finding a mind-blowing book.

You can pre-order her new book, which comes out in August 2020. We don’t talk about what it is, but you can still pre-order the thing. The Unreality of Memory.

We talk about her essay collection The Word Pretty, quite a bit, and how she goes about the work while having a full-time job in a non-writing field. It’s good stuff.

You might want to pair this episode with Elena Passarello or Leslie Jamison or Natalie Singer.

Keep the conversation going on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. It’s all @CNFPod. I’d love to hear from you.

Episode 177: Steven Moore — Essays About to Break, Keeping Track of the Positive, and ‘The Longer We Were There’

By Brendan O’Meara

Steven Moore is here to talk about his memoir The Longer We Were There: A Memoir of a Part-Time Soldier (University of Georgia Press, 2019).

It’s in my Top 3 Memoirs of the year. My faves were Meredith May’s The Honey Bus and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering.

In any case, Steven and I randomly met in November 2018 in line at a talk during the Portland Book Festival. We were in line to hear Elizabeth Rush give a talk. He heard my voice from this thing and here we are.

You see? You never know where your next podcast guest might come from.

Thanks, of course, to Bay Path University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction for the support. Check them out.

Episode 176: Kevin Robbins — Limitations vs. Ambitions, Chasing the Greats, and ‘The Last Stand of Payne Stewart’

By Brendan O’Meara

This episode was nice in that Kevin Robbins says, among lots of other things, that, “I’m still trying to figure out why the greats are great.”

It’s ephemeral. You can’t put a finger on it. And so here we are.

Kevin was on the show three years ago. Check it out. There’s tremendous skill and restraint evident in Kevin’s work. Understating things is difficult because you want to look like Simone Biles during a floor routine, which is to stay WTF??!!

Kevin’s latest book is The Last Stand of Payne Stewart: The Year Golf Changed Forever. You don’t have to like or know golf to love this book. Kevin draws out what made Stewart human, which is what we all want, right? We want to know that we have the capacity to improve and be better, not optimized in this world of hyper productivity, but better.

His previous book was about the iconic golf instructor Harvey Pennick.

In any case, I hope you enjoy this conversation. Let us know what you think @CNFPod on Twitter.

Party on, CNFers.

In Order to Keep Going, You Must Start

By Brendan O’Meara

More than an anything else these days, we need to heed the advice from Austin Kleon who said:

Maybe the world will always be crazy, and creative work will always be hard. Then the question becomes: How do you keep going?

As hard as it is to keep going, sometimes it’s equally hard to start. It’s daunting. How can you write all those words? It’s overwhelming, so you don’t even start.

And so it was great when Kleon shared a quote from the author Stephen Harrigan that makes starting that much easier. Harrigan says:

I think that when it comes to writing books, you have to start before you think you’re ready, because you will always feel like you are never ready. I find that as you write the book, the road ahead becomes clearer; before that, the road ahead is just a distraction.

Isaac Newton’s laws of motion say that bodies in motion want to stay in motion and that items not in motion want to stay in put. Of course, I’m butchering that, but it’s all about inertia.

Artistic projects are the same. Once they’re in motion, they want to stay in motion and then, as Kleon said, you keep going.

Episode 175: Cassandra King Conroy — Mid-life Resurgence and Her Time with Pat Conroy in ‘Tell Me a Story’

By Brendan O’Meara

Cassandra King Conroy is the author of several works of fiction and, most recently, the memoir Tell Me a Story: My Life with Pat Conroy.

Be sure to subscribe to the show and keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod or @BrendanOMeara. I love to hear what resonates with you, so please reach out and certainly share across your networks.

My Favorite Book on Writing

Figured I’d take a slight departure and offer you my book on writing.

It’s not Bird by Bird. It’s not Writing Tools. It’s not Steven King’s On Writing and it isn’t Tracy Kidder and Dick Todd’s Good Prose.

It’s Denny O’Neill’s The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics.

This book was assigned/recommended to me by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas French.

There are universal lessons from this book that apply to any genre of writing, not just graphic novels.

Here’s a few great highlights I made throughout the book for you to chew on:

People are interested in people, not things.

In nonfiction, do your reporting. Talk to as many people as possible. Talk to those people as long as possible. People are more interesting than things.

Know the ending of the story before you writing the beginning.

In this week’s upcoming conversation with Cassandra King Conroy, we get into this a little bit, but you’ve heard me talk about the lighthouse in the distance. I love knowing the ending as early in the process as possible. You might not know it on Day 1, but the sooner you get a sense of the ending write to it with abandon.

Telling your story as clearly as possible.

My greatest weakness in my first ten years as a writer was trying to be flashy or showy, trying to light up the page with my prose. This is a mistake most of the time. The story is the star. Not you. Get out of way. Be the conduit for the story. Tell it straight. Tell it clearly.

Never write a scene, or a single panel, that does not contribute directly to your plot. … Every word should contribute to the emotion you’re trying to engender in the reader.

This often means you have to kill your darlings, right? Even if you love a scene, love that turn of phrase, that great quote you must ask yourself: Does it advance the story or reveal a critical character trait? Yes, it stays. No, it’s gotta go.

Look at DVD extras, ideally with commentary, and you’ll get some great insight into why things make the cut and the things that don’t.

So that’s it, my favorite book on writing, Denny O’Neill’s DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics.

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