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

Friday, March 28, 2025

“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).

Episode 459: Cassidy Randall Talks Forgotten Histories, Sticky Notes, and the Power of Listening

Friday, March 21, 2025

FINAL WEEK!!! Promotional support is brought to you by the Power of Narrative Conference, celebrating its 26th year on the last weekend of March 28 and 29. 300-400 journalists from around the world are coming. Keynote speakers Susan Orlean, Connie Schultz, Dan Zak and Connie Chung will deliver the knowledge. Listeners of this podcast can get 15% off your enrollment fee by using the code CNF15. To learn more visit combeyond.bu.edu … and use that CNF15 code.

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Link to mostly accurate transcript for Ep. 459.

“I could suddenly see — and this is how I know when I’m supposed to start writing — is that words start putting themselves together in my head, and I just have to get them out, right? Which doesn’t happen all the time, but it did for this,” says Cassidy Randall, author of the masterpiece new book Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women’s Ascent of Denali (Abrams Books).

Cassidy has been on the podcast before (and she be on a third time in about two months since she has ANOTHER Atavist story coming out).

Cassidy (@_cassidyrandall) is an adventure and outdoors writer, primarily, and focuses much of her reportorial eye on women, who for so long were discounted as “weaker” in every sense of the word. And it’s Cassidy’s writing of Thirty Below that illustrated just how ignorant and misogynistic the establishment was (and, likely, still is to a degree).

Episode 458: Jaydra Johnson Had to Get Weird

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“Part of that essay is my time spent working as a maid when I was young and the fact that my mom had been a maid and my grandma had been a maid, and I hated that job. I hated that job so much, and partly because it felt so demeaning, or that I was demeaned through the job. And because it’s not like I think that housekeeping is not valuable work; obviously it is, but the way I was treated by people in that job was probably the worst of any job I’ve ever had.” — Jaydra Johnson

Episode 457: Poynter’s Neil Brown Says Editing Isn’t Discussed Enough

Friday, March 14, 2025

Promotional support is brought to you by the Power of Narrative Conference, celebrating its 26th year on the last weekend of March 28 and 29. 300-400 journalists from around the world are coming. Keynote speakers Susan Orlean, Connie Schultz, Dan Zak and Connie Chung will deliver the knowledge. Listeners of this podcast can get 15% off your enrollment fee by using the code CNF15. To learn more visit combeyond.bu.edu … and use that CNF15 code.

Become a Patron!

“I believe in writers. I believe in writing and being able to bring back a story then tell it is fundamental. But what I was fortunate enough to get exposed to very early in my career, and I really believe is now the way to go, which is the nature of editing as thinking, right? And so we all need a thinking partner.” — Neil Brown

If you’re an editing nut, a reporting nut, a journalism nut, you’re in luck. Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute, has been in the journalism racket for four decades with tours at the Miami Herald and being on the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Episode 456: Neko Case Wrote Her Memoir in Bed

Friday, March 7, 2025

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Neko Case is here! She’s a founding member of The New Pornographers and a Grammy-nominated musical artist. Her debut memoir is The Harder I Fight the More I Love You (Grand Central).

Had a fine time chatting about childhood, empathy, exercises in memory, and writing in your bed.

Episode 455: Will McGrath’s Season on the Sidelines for The Believer

Friday, March 7, 2025

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Will McGrath says, “I’ve heard people describe anthropology as deep hanging out. It’s the the minutia of everyday life. It’s the quotidian stuff that is actually really interesting.”

Will wrote a brilliant reported essay for The Believer Magazine as he followed a cast of young men and their basketball season titled “American Boys.” If you loved Darcy Frey‘s book The Last Shot, you’ll love Will’s piece.

Episode 453: Chandlor Henderson, Live at Gratitude Brewing, Says ‘Focus on the Skill’

Friday, Feb. 28, 2025

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There isn’t much Chandlor Henderson (nywele_hendo) doesn’t do. He’s an editor, a writer, a journalist, a filmmaker, a comic book writer, a student at the University of Oregon, a Google Scholar, so it was a great pleasure to speak with him in the first in a series of quarterly live podcasts, this one recorded at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene.

(Allow me the space to thank Jesse Springer for letting me borrow his speakers for this event).

This was a great conversation and what Ruby McConnell and I hope will be a regular thing in Eugene, to turn the city into the same kind of draw that Portland is for many authors coming through the PNW.

I Did It! I Read The New Yorker Cover to Cover! I Am Complete!

One of the sample covers of the anniversary issue of The New Yorker, a brilliant tech-riff on the classic Eustace Tilley, by Kerry James Marshall.

Monday, Feb. 24, 2025

There’s a gag in the brilliant Michael Schur’s philosophy-and-ethics vehicle The Good Place where one of the torture scenarios for the Bad Place was a room where issues of The New Yorker won’t stop delivering. It’s impossible to keep up. Michael (a character on the show played by Ted Danson), a demon, laughs and says something to the effect of, “They just keep coming!”

That’s always the feeling. I barely have time to read the cartoons before the next issue arrives at my door. The hundreds and hundreds of unread New Yorkers that have come through my house is upsetting and dispiriting. I’m wasting the gift subscription my mother-in-law gives me every year. It’s not a cheap subscription.

But with all the hullabaloo surrounding the 100th anniversary of The New Yorker, I put my foot down and said, “THIS is the week I read The New Yorker cover to cover.” And I did!

Episode 452: lamb of god’s Randy Blythe’s Search for Perspective in ‘Just Beyond the Light’

Friday, Feb. 21, 2025

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If Randy Blythe’s first book, Dark Days, was about accountability, his second book, Just Beyond the Light: Making Peace with the Wars Inside Our Head (Grand Central), is about perspective.

In essays ranging from the premature death of a young fan to surfing waves to revering his beloved grandmother, Randy talks about art and music and the messiness of being a creative person.

Episode 451: When Beach Read Meets a System with Lindsay Jill Roth

Friday, Feb. 14, 2025

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When Lindsay Jill Roth (@lindsayjillroth) described her latest book as beach read meets system, that was pretty spot-on. There’s a breezy, conversational tone to Romances & Practicalities: A Love Story (Maybe Yours?) in 250 Questions (William Morrow). It weaves the research and interviews Lindsay did along with her personal story of finding her partner.

Lindsay is an award-winning television producer and writer, with novel under her belt as well, What Pretty Girls Are Made Of (Simon & Schuster). She has worked events like The Grammys, The TONYs, and The Masters.