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PODCAST

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara

Brendan O"Meara

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara is a weekly podcast that showcases leaders in narrative journalism, essay, memoir, documentary film, radio and podcasts about the art and craft of telling true stories. Follow the show @creativenonfictionpodcast on Instagram and visit patreon.com/cnfpod to support!

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All Episodes

83:20

Episode 482: Matthew Wolfe and the Grammar of Delight

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/08/08

"You have to finish it out. You have to report it, even if it's financially a terrible idea," says Matthew Wolfe.OK, it’s that Atavistian time of the month so we’re here to talk about Matthew Wolfe’s “The Talented Mr. Bruseaux: He made his name in Chicago investigating racial violence, solving crimes, and exposing corruption. But American’s first Black private detective was hiding secrets of his own.” Go to magazone.atavist.com to read it.So we’ll be hearing from Matt in due time. It’s not Matt’s

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66:33

Episode 481: Nieman Storyboard's Mark Armstrong...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/08/01

"Listening to podcasts, it's like, how do I start making them? That's been my approach, essentially try and take that beginner mindset into anything and try to teach myself new skills," says Mark Armstrong.Who do we have today? It’s Mark Armstrong! He is a producer, a writer, a singer, working at the intersection of storytelling and digital media. Does that make him intersectional? Hell, yes.Mark is the founder of Longreads, the hashtag phenomenon back when social media was cool. Now he’s the editor

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58:42

Episode 480: Dana Jeri Maier Doesn't Trust Anyone...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/07/25

"Yeah, join the club of people who feel inadequate," says Dana Jeri Maier, a cartoonist and author of the graphic book on creativity Skip to the Fun Parts.This incredible artist is the author of Skip to the Fun Parts: Cartoons and Complaints About the Creative Process. It’s one of the best books on creativity because it deals with doubt, it deals with jealousy, it deals with ideas, it deals with perfectionism. Dana is a hilarious cartoonist and you should pick up a Front Runner and also a copy of

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75:59

Episode 479: Jeff Sharlet and Finding Real Toads in...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/07/18

"You're an outsider. And as you linger in that space, you start to become an insider ... but you're still an outsider. Don't forget that, even though you know more about it, you're an insider and an outsider," says Jeff Sharlet about when he's reporting on, say, far-right religious groups.OK, we’ve got Jeff Sharlet, which is pretty stunning when you think about it. I mean, this guy is the author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, The Family, among other books. He often covers the far

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66:22

Episode 478: Nick Paumgarten says, 'The Reporting...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/07/11

"I'm a guy who needs a lede. I need the lede to work. I need it to be compelling. And it doesn't have to be the best place to begin. It just has to be a place to begin that works and that amuses and sucks you in. I. So once I have a lede, then that will lead to another place," says Nick Paumgarten.Wow, so today we have Nick Paumgarten and can I tell you something? Nick has long been my favorite New Yorker profile writer. Whether it’s profiling Mikaela Shiffrin or Mr. Money Mustache, or features

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90:37

Episode 477: David Howard and the Search for Stories...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/07/04

"It's honestly one of the biggest gambles I've taken in my career," says David Howard, the journalist behind "Conversations with a Hit Man," this for the Atavist Magazine.David is a journalist and author, and in this conversation we talk about: Nonverbal stuff, so the importance of doing this stuff in person The grand puzzle of a piece Looking for stories to believe in Keeping his mind as clear as possible when he starts to write Taking gambles Learning from losses And what the tape recorder

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76:24

Episde 476: Amanda Heckert Helps the Rider Stay on...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/06/27

"The story is the horse, and the writer is the rider of the horse, and you as the editor, need to help guide them along. And if the rider starts to fall off, you put them back on, and it's your job to lead them safely into the barn. At no point should you shove the rider off the horse, get on yourself and ride it into the distance," says Amanda Heckert, executive editor of Garden & Gun.Amanda Heckert is something of a wunderkind and an absolute boss of an editor.In this episode we talk about:

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79:31

Episode 475: For Dane Huckelbridge, Spacing Out is...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/06/27

"If you don't cultivate other interests or travel or spend time with friends, this and that, you don't have anything to write about," says Dane Huckelbridge, author of Queen of All Mayhem (William Morrow).Dane returns to the show to talk about his latest book, but also a smattering of other juicy writer topics such as: Procrastination Writing around the uncertainty Not having much of a routine Spacing out Niche hobbies And staying motivatedDane can be found at danehuckelbridge.com and on IG

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63:39

Episode 474: How to Reconfigure the Fireworks with Yi...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/06/20

"One of the things I've done is to reconfigure the fireworks. The fireworks for me now are getting to have this thing off my desk so I get to work on something new. That's the firework," says Yi Shun Lai, an author, writer, and instructor.Our occasion for this show was an essay she wrote for Writer Magazine about "arrival fallacy," this notion that once we get "there," wherever "there" is, we will have made it.She's the author of three books, all in different genres, the YA novel A Suffragist's

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70:10

Episode 473: Finding the Frame with Hampton Sides

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/06/13

"I would say my books are about three quarters research and sort of mining my research, and then one quarter writing," says Hampton Sides, author of several New York Times bestselling works of narrative history, including his latest, now in paperback, The Wide Wide Sea. It's published by Doubleday.So Hampton was great. There was a moment halfway through where my dogs got to barking, then howling, which made me give them a stern talkin’ to. I think I edited that out. I should have. Hope I did. I can

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70:13

Episode 472: Melissa Febos and the Art of Personal...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/06/06

"I talked to my wife, and she was like, 'You're probably tired. You've been writing this book non stop for six months, and you probably just need a break. Like, go get a gelato and chill out.' And I was like, 'I can't,' then I was like, 'All right, fine, I will.' And then I ate a bunch of ice cream and watched the Pam Anderson documentary on Netflix in the middle of the day. And after, I don't know, four or five days, I had an idea, and I was like, ready to get back to work," says Melissa Febos on

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71:10

Episode 471: The Cassidy Randall Residency at CNF Pod...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/06/06

"We are sort of drinking from a fire hose of content right now. And it makes me wonder, because I feel like I'm stuck on this wheel that I have to produce all the time. Do I even want to write for money anymore? I don't know," says Cassidy Randall, author of the book Thirty Below, and back for her second Atavist story "The Longest Journey."Writing is in her bones, so she's not quitting, but the freelance production wheel is tough.We talk about: The productivity wheel Earning trust for stories

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63:47

Episode 470: Megan Baxter is Into Rewilding Her Writing

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/05/30

"I've also learned in this rewilding experiment that so much of our time as writers takes place off the page, as we're thinking about our concepts, as we're doing research, and when I actually do come to the page and have a chance to actually type out these ideas, I've done so much pre-writing over the course of the previous season that that draft comes really easily to me," says Megan Baxter, author of three books of nonfiction, including Farm Girl: A Memoir (Green Writers Press).Megan has got it

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66:12

Episode 469: John O'Connor on the Meaning of Bigfoot

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/05/23

"I don't feel envy. I don't think. Maybe in some deeper and maybe even more troubling psychological level. I do feel competition with with people, competition over resources, trying to claim certain ideas, stake a claim to certain ideas before other people can, especially when you're working with the subject that's in the public sphere. You don't have any personal, any real wider claim to something than somebody else. It can be nerve wracking," says John O'Connor, author of The Secret History of

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80:28

Episode 468: Local Journalism and the Folly of Fame...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/05/16

"I genuinely feel that those of us writing books need to remember that we are writing them simply because we feel the desperate need to write that particular thing. And unless I feel that way, I shouldn't be writing it because it's not for the financial benefit. It is not because it gives me more time to do things with other people. It doesn't matter how many books or lengthy features you write, it's all kind of a painful process. So you have to do it because you're really invested in the things

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82:38

Episode 467: How to Bounce Back from 'Viscerally...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/05/09

Will Bardenwerper grew up playing baseball and even was a member of his college team at Princeton. As a result, he has a great perspective to write about baseball as he does in Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America (Doubleday).That soul, in this book, is partially under attack from private equity firms gobbling up and eradicating minor league baseball teams. It's just one of the many threads of Will's wonderful book.Podcast Specific Substack at

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73:24

Episode 466: Katie Goh on Issues of Identity and the...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/05/09

"Mythology can be really a dangerous thing, because mythology feels like it can't be changed, or it's always been something," says Katie Goh, author of Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange (Tin House Books).Katie Goh is a writer and editor based out of Edinburgh, Scotland. She’s also the author of the slim book “The End: Surviving the World through Imagined Disasters” about disaster movies. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Extra Teeth, and VICE. You can learn more about her at

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80:06

Episode 465: Miranda Green Searches for the Harm

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/05/02

"You want to be able to nab the details, but then you also want to be able to tell the story of why this matters and who's harmed by this, and finding the harm is oftentimes the hardest part of investigative reporting," Miranda Green, an investigative reporter.Her latest piece is for The Atavist Magazine titled "All That Glitters" about the seedy underbelly of diamond sales, crypto, and sports ticketing and the man at the center of it all.In this conversation, we talk about: How she earns trust

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58:09

Episode 464: John Glionna is a Clown Who Makes...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/04/25

"We're sadistic motherf*ckers," says John Glionna, @johnglionna on the Instagrams.John is a longtime journalist and author of No Friday Night Lights (Bison Books). He made a name for himself at the Los Angeles Times pursuing what would be called "Glionna stories," stories about invisible people who have rich lives all their own.In this episode we talk about The Glionna Story How John didn’t punch down in his writing Working with Glenn Stout on this book What he loves most about this kind of work

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63:19

Episode 463: Leah Sottile on Building Scenes, Sagging...

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O"Meara ·

2025/04/18

"It's kind of a mix of reporting to the very last minute to put off writing, and then when I have to write, having a panic attack, and then, like, booking a hotel room for a week and not leaving that room. This is the thing I have done until I figure it out," says Leah Sottile, in a live event at Gratitude Brewing.She is the author of Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age (Grand Central). She's also the author of When the Moon Turns to Blood,

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