Tag: profiles

Episode 478: Nick Paumgarten says, ‘The Reporting Suggests the Root System’

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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.

Next two events are July 17 at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle at 7 p.m. and July 27 at Gratitude Brewing for a live taping of the podcast, 1 p.m.

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.

“I don’t have to state too baldly what that all means. And because I think part of it is that I’m incapable of stating things like that baldly. I’m not smart enough. I lack the language and the real rhetorical muscle to state things baldly. I’d rather not hit it on the nose, because I have bad aim.” — Nick Paumgarten, staff writer for The New Yorker

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Episode 194: Michael Schulman — Driven by Joy, New Yorker Profiles, and the ‘Secret Word’

By Brendan O’Meara

“Selection is as creative as generation,” says Michael Schulman on the podcast.

Michael Schulman is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Her Again, a biography of the early life of Meryl Streep. Go check it out. I haven’t read it yet, as I came to Michael’s work through his profiles in The New Yorker.

As coincidence would have it, once I had lined up Michael to be on the show, he appeared on This American Life during the introduction to the Everyone’s a Critic show.

In any case, it was Michael’s profile on James Cordon that prompted me to reach out, but I also loved his work on Adam Driver and Bo Burnham as well.

In this show we talk about how his work is driven by joy, how he boils down each story down to a single, secret word, and how his background in theater led to his break at the magazine. Some great stuff here.

This episode is sponsored in part by Bay Path University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing.

Follow the podcast on social media @CNFPod across all the various platforms and sign up for that newsletter.

And did you listen to the long introduction to this episode yet? I’m publishing the first CNF Pod audio magazine with the theme Social Distancing: Essays from/of Isolation. Word limit is 2,000 as we want the reading to be 15 minutes or less. Email submissions to creativenonfictionpodcast at gmail dot com. DEADLINE IS MAY 1, 2020.

In this time of social distancing and isolation, hearing essays from this challenging time can bring us together. I hope you’ll submit your best work. I’d be honored to publish it three or four of however many submissions I receive.

OK, readyyyyyy, break!

PS: I’m having technical difficulties uploading photographs, so that’s why you haven’t seen author photos for the past few episodes. Hoping the host I pay money to will figure it out.

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