cnf – 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 473: Finding the Frame with Hampton Sides

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“It’s like trying on clothes when you’re a young writer, early in your career, you’re constantly trying to figure out who you are.” — Hampton Sides, Ep. 473

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 471: The Cassidy Randall Residency at CNF Pod Continues!

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A mostly accurate transcript for Ep. 471¹

“I can’t imagine if somebody asked me to share these really vulnerable things and didn’t acknowledge that it’s a gift that that person is giving, and it’s not a gift to the writer. It’s a gift to everybody who will read it.” — Cassidy Randall, from Ep. 471

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 468: Local Journalism and the Folly of Fame with Maggie Messitt

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Episode 467: How to Bounce Back from ‘Viscerally Negative’ Feedback with Will Bardenwerper

Friday, May 9, 2025

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Who’s on the docket for the Friday matinee, looks like it’s Will Bardenwerper, author of The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid and most recently, Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America (Doubleday).

The story takes us to Batavia, New York in the western part of the state not too far from Buffalo. Batavia used to be home to the minor league Muckdogs but was wiped out during Major League Baseball’s consolidation of dozens of minor league teams, teams that were often the beating hearts of so many communities. What took that team’s place was a wood-bat college baseball summer league similar to the Cape Cod League, but not quite as awash in talent.

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.