sports – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Episode 426: Asking for Blurbs, Unauthorized Biographies, and the Mystery of Aaron Rodgers with Ian O’Connor

Ian O’Connor is a modern-day master of the sports biography, the unauthorized sports biography. Unauthorized is not a dirty word, though the industry needs to rebrand around it. We’ll workshop that …

Unauthorized = true journalism, no editorial input from the central figure, more likely closer to the truth instead of the central figure’s truth. It is not a collaboration.

This is the biography you want to read.

And in the hands of someone like Ian, there’s no better reader experience. Ian handled his latest mammoth figure in Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers (Mariner Books) with utmost fairness and showed the grayness of Rodgers’s character, which makes for a gripping and complicated read.

Episode 415: Sam Jefferies, Hammering Out Screed

By Brendan O’Meara

Sam Jefferies is a freelance writer and communications specialist and his first book is Legacy on Ice: Blake Geoffrion and the Fastest Game on Earth. Credit The University of Wisconsin Press for publication.

It’s a book that chronicles the college hockey and the rise of hockey in the South. And at the heart of it is the Geoffrion familly whose bloodline in hockey goes back to the formation of the slapshot.

Blake Geoffrion had the pressure to keep the generational NHL lineage alive. And he did, though his career was cut short by a devastating head injury.

This is a story of the weight of that legacy.

Episode 253: Julie DiCaro Won’t Be ‘Sidelined’

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By Brendan O’Meara

Julie DiCaro came by the show to talk about her new book Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America.

It’s a fine read, written by someone who definitively has something of value to say. You can find her on Twitter @juliedicaro.

It’s an engaging, entertaining, and sobering read about feminism and the sorry state of women’s representation in sports journalism.

Episode 128—David Lee Morgan on Positivity, Trust, and Telling the Story Straight

David Lee Morgan, a prolific sports writer, now teaches high school English in his native Ohio.

“Let them tell the story, let them find the story that maybe they didn’t even know was the story.” —David Lee Morgan (@DavidLeeMorgan)

“That’s how I overcome that self doubt. ‘Hey, do you trust yourself? Do you have enough material for people to say he is an expert or he really knows the topic of which he’s writing?’ Then if you do then you just write on.” —David Lee Morgan

If you’re anything like me, and one assumes you are because you find some value in this humble little podcast, you need constant prodding in a sense. That can either be to get your work done or to get your brain in check. I’m one of those dudes who gets pretty down pretty easily, so it helps to have guests on who inspire me.

Enter David Lee Morgan, @davidleemorgan on Twitter.

David was a long time sports writer for the Akron Beacon Journal and most recently he turned his attention to teaching high school English, a move he doesn’t regret in the slightest. For the people who say “If you can’t do teach,” one of the more insulting things you can say to any artist who teaches or teachers who don’t make art, I give you David, who not only is a brilliant writer, but by the very nature of his attitude and approach, makes him that rare teacher that inspires with every lesson.

To be frank, I haven’t been in David’s classroom, but if my 90 minutes with him is any indication of what it’s like to sit at a desk in his class, well, sign me up. I might have done better on the SAT.