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.
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.
It blends memoir and journalism into a gripping tale of grifters and when secrets become an inheritance.
We talk about about her story, her love being edited, and being a “sentence thief.”
We also hear from lead editor and editor-in-chief Seyward Darby about the experience of editing this piece, as well as other themes that cropped regarding Christine’s piece.
In this episode we talk about how she turned her reporter’s eye on herself. She had journal entries and recorded conversations with the key characters in this book.
The story chronicles her journey into the world of polyamory (she’s still non-monogamous). But what ensued was a toxic relationship that became manipulative and gaslit. Through it all, Rachel tells a riveting and gutting story.
Rachel also is a fellow plant-based eater, so we talk a little bit about our favorite vegan mac and cheese recipes.
If you care to share, please link up to the show on social media.
A little more about Rachel: Her work has appeared on Vox, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, NPR, the Daily Beast, Vice, and USA Today, just to name a few.
The show has a new Instagram handle, @creativenonfictionpodcast, and you can always keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod.
And you know I’d rather you sign up for my Up-to-11 Newsletter. Signup form is below you and to your right. Book recs, book raffles, cool stuff curated by me for you, CNFin’ happy hour or writing group, writing prompts, fun and entertaining. First of the month. No spam. Can’t beat it.
Consider supporting the show via Patreon patreon.com/cnfpod. Shop around if you want to support the community. I just paid out the writers from the last audio magazine. You make that possible. The show is free but it ain’t cheap.
Free ways to support the show?
Subscribe and download and share across your socials. And don’t forget to consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts. Those go a LONG way.
Bradford Pearson (@bradfordpearson) on Twitter and IG, is the author of The Eagles of Heart Mountain. Must be a story of a gritty football team, right? Well, sorta, the subtitle is a true story of football, incarceration, and resistance in World War II America.
OK, that still might not get at the 100% heart of the tragedy of this book. It’s about the incarceration of Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945, whereupon thousands upon thousands, many of which were naturalized American citizens, were stripped from their homes largely on the west coast and moved inland to often inhospitable lands, namely heart mountain in northwest Wyoming living in horrible conditions and subject to impossible racism and prejudice.
For us football fans out there, we know that watching the grid iron on a Saturday or a Sunday provides some relief and distraction, so too did the Eagles of Heart Mountain.
This conversation I did as part of Goucher College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction. It was a live event, rebroadcast with my slick editing skills for you.
Wil has been a long-time reporter for The Washington Post, where his piece on Eugene Allen, the butler for several presidents in the White House became a book and was the basis for Lee Daniels The Butler, starring Forrest Whittaker and Oprah Winfrey. You might have heard of them.
Wil has also written books on Sugar Ray Robinson and Thurgood Marshall and Sammy Davis Jr. His talent, ability, and rigor might only be surpassed by his generosity. How generous? He blurbed my book Six Weeks in Saratoga way back in early 2011 before the book came out that summer.
Mike Damiano brings 2021 to a close with his piece for the Atavist Magazine about an unlikely revolutionary who helped the people of Easter Island earn rights they deserved from an oppressive Chilean naval regime. It’s the story of Alfonso Rapu a school teacher turned revolutionary via nonviolence. It’s called “We Wish to Be Able to Sing.”
Mike is a staff writer for Boston Magazine, but like many people writing stories for the Atavist, he’d been working on this Easter Island story for years. Atavist becomes like this benevolent foster home for stories that are too long for traditional magazines and too short to be books. And Seyward and Jonah say, come here little story, we’re gonna make you a STAR!
The show has a new Instagram handle, @creativenonfictionpodcast, and you can always keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod.
And you know I’d rather you sign up for my Up-to-11 Newsletter. Signup form is below you and to your right. Book recs, book raffles, cool stuff curated by me for you, CNFin’ happy hour or writing group, writing prompts, fun and entertaining. First of the month. No spam. Can’t beat it.
Consider supporting the show via Patreon patreon.com/cnfpod. Shop around if you want to support the community. I just paid out the writers from the last audio magazine. You make that possible. The show is free but it ain’t cheap.
Free ways to support the show?
Subscribe and download and share across your socials. And don’t forget to consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts. Those go a LONG way.
