It’s not often this show features stone-cold, bad ass editors. But that’s what we bring you today. I’m sure Leah Flickinger (@LeahFlickinger) will recoil at the remark, but it’s true.
She has edited pieces that made their way to Best American Sports Writing, won the National Magazine Award, and, oh, by the way, the Pulitzer Prize.
So Leah is here to talk about how she developed these pieces and how she frames conversations with writers to get the most out of them and the pieces they’re working on.
Hey CNFers, welcome to CNF Pod, the creative nonfiction podcast, the show where I usually speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I say usually because this week I don’t have a guest.
Booooo…
Hey, hey, hey before you start hurling tomatoes up that the stage, hear me out. My guest this week wasn’t feeling good so we had to reschedule. You might be like, “BO, thought you had some of these in the can. Get your house in order.” And yes, in an ideal world I have a few in the can, but you’d be surprised how many of these interviews are done the week of and packaged soon thereafter.
I could’ve scrambled for a guest but I wanted to try something new. I don’t think this’ll be a regular thing in the podcast feed. I DO think it’ll be a normal thing for the Patreon crew so consider heading to patreon.com/cnfpod to support the podcast to get special podcasts like this one you’re about to hear.
So what’s the deal? In an effort to up the production value and to make the show seem a little bit more zippy, I’ve always been inspired by the structure of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Here are these episodes that focus on one guest, they film all day, so hours and hours of footage, for what, 15 minutes of final product? What must that edit be like?
Ever been starved for knowledge about meteorites? You came to the right place!
Greg Brennecka is a cosmochemist studying meteoritics and the author of Impact: How Space Rocks Led to Life, Culture, and Donkey Kong. It’s published by William Morrow.
Greg is wicked smaht and works as a staff scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He received the prestigious Sofia Kovalevskaja Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2014 to study the early Solar System at the Institute for Planetology in Munster, Germany, where he led the Solar System Forensics group for five years. His research has appeared in Science, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
We talk about how the moon formed, how meteorites shaped our culture, and how he goes about snagging a space rock for his research.
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OK, but, for real, Dan is a freelance journo whose most recent piece came out in the Atlantic. It deals with climate change and how local meteorologists are the best vectors for convincing the skeptics about the climate cancer. Read it here.
Fun fact: I wrote about a local weatherman. Not as adeptly as Dan handles his piece for the Atlantic, but, hey, I’m a man in the arena, bruh.
It’s that Atavistian time of the of month and I get to welcome the journalist Bill Donahue to the podcast to talk about his new piece “The Voyagers.”
Naturally, it’s an incredible piece that is a voyage across the Bering Strait, but, as Bill notes, a voyage across the Cold War.
I also speak with Jonah Ogles, the lead editor of this piece, about what makes for great profile writing and how an editor can help a writer get to “that good place.”
Lot’s of great rawhide to gnaw on in this podcast.
He writes that his southern African American relatives would often get the scraps of the pig, and they’d have to get creative and use everything. I’ll let you connect the dots. What Damon means is, “There is nothing wasted.”
And so we’ve come to his new book about parlaying the skills you’ve got into any gig you want.
This is Damon’s third trip back to the podcast and he always brings it. He’s the author of more than twenty books including Bring Your Worth and The Bite-Sized Entrepreneur.
Neda’s father was an Iranian revolutionary who was executed in the early 1980s by the shah’s regime. Neda was a toddler at the time. Neda’s mother and father were part of the protests in Berkley, California and mobilized for change.
While in Iran in the early 80s, Neda recounts the harrowing story of how she and her family escaped Iran after her father was arrested. This book is nuanced and layered and a wonderful read.
Debbie might be most known for her incredible work in branding, where at one point or another in her illustrious career she had “touched” roughly 25% of most things on the grocery store shelves. She worked on Burger King’s logo, Tropicana, Twizzlers, and more.
But I know Debbie because of her amazing podcast Design Matters. It started in 2005 and has developed over the years to be one of the greatest interview shows in the podcast-o-sphere. As you know, there are quite a bit.
There are two faces on Mt. Podmore and it’s Debbie Millman and Joe Donahue. That’s it.
She’s a former features editor for Outside Magazine, and it was a reported essay she wrote for outside about burnout and the meaning of life that prompted this conversation. Can’t find a link to that story, but her piece on garages is awesome, as is this piece on money, as well as the housing crisis in a ski town.
We chat about her journey in freelancing. She’s on her second rodeo with freelancing, after a stint as features editor for Outside. Her background is in finance and business, so we dig into some lessons she learned from that that help her in freelancing.
