"I spent several months  trying to narrow down the cast. I had access to so many people with interesting stories. But what [my agent] said to me over and over again was, 'narrative arc, narrative arc,' all the time. What he needed to know in order to sell the book was like, 'Where does this book start? And if you can't tell me where it ends, at least tell me what are the ups and downs? What's gonna happen along the way?" says Alison Lyn Miller, author of Rough House: A Father, a Son, and the Pursuit of Pro Wrestling Glory (Norton).

Who is our guest this week? It would appear to be Alison Lyn Miller (@alisonlynmiller on IG), author of Rough House: A Father, a Son and the Pursuit of Pro Wrestling Glory. It’s published by Norton.

This is a great book and it’s an immersive story in an oddball subculture of amateur professional wrestling. It follows Hunter James, a young man who eschewed the traditional path, the path his father wanted for him, to pursue this dream of becoming the next superstar of the WWE. You’re gonna think I’m crazy, but this book has so many parallels to being a writer. The luck you need, the timing you need, the skill you need, the perseverance you need, the envy they feel, the subjectivity, voice, style, individuality. But we writers rarely need the abs. But don’t we all want the abs.

So Alison is a freelance journalist based out of Georgia, which put her in direct overlap with this subculture of “backyarders,” these aspirational wrestlers and hobby wrestlers. It’s easy to poke fun at wrestling as fake. Well, it isn’t fake, so much as it’s scripted brutality. It’s danger adjacent, though there’s always physical risk when jumping, flipping, and kicking. Alison witnessed it all and delivers a heartfelt tale of ambition and striving, of a blind belief in the self.

In this conversation, we talk about:

 * Not being able to throw everything in the book
 * Being motivated by slights
 * Finding the narrative arc
 * The year it took Alison to write her proposal
 * How wrestling mirrors humanity
 * Making the writing approachable
 * And maybe we should all be play fighting in our underwear

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Episode 508: Motivated by Slights and Play Fighting in Our Underwear with Alison Lyn Miller

"Practically speaking, mostly what I'm doing is I'm  writing in a hotel room and then writing in the taxi, and then if the TSA queue is long, I might whip my laptop out and balance it on the stanchion and do some more writing, and then get on the other side and write in the lounge and then write on the plane, and whether that means that the laptop's nearly vertical because I'm on a discount airline with with terrible seat pitch, just writing. And so that's it, right? What my real practice is ... I just goddamn write," says Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

This is exciting. We’ve got Cory Doctorow on the podcast today for Ep. 507. Cory is the author of more than 30 books of nonfiction and fiction, his latest being Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About it. It’s published by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Ever wonder why Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and Apple suck ass? This book will explain why they do and how they got there and maybe, just maybe, how we can get out of this mess. Did you know that Apple factories in China installed suicide nets so workers couldn’t kill themselves? Think about that the next time you upgrade your phone. I’m ready for a new computer and it will likely be a Mac, even though they’ve gotten shitty over the years. Point is we all have blood on our hands.

Cory is prolific, his blog posts epic, his books prescient and important. You can learn more about him at craphound.com [http://craphound.com/] or read his blog at pluralistic.net [http://pluralistic.net/]. He is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. In 2020 he was inducted into the Candadian Science Fiction Hall of Fame and he is a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foudnation (eff.org [http://eff.org/]), a nonprofit group that defnds freedom in tech law, policy, standards and treaties. You could spend a year or two reading nothing but Cory Doctorow books and, I might add, you’d be better for it.

He’s one of the good guys, man, and he’s out to help us understand the internet. So in this episode we talk about:

 * Internet literacy
 * His ongoing relationship with his audience
 * Getting a book done in six weeks
 * Platform decay
 * What exactly enshittification is and how Substack is slouching toward it
 * And the influence of the writer Judith Merril

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Show notes: brendanomeara.com [http://brendanomeara.com/]

Episode 507: ‘Enshittification’ Author Cory Doctorow Believes in a New, Good Internet

"I feel like many of us can relate to that, like, that's the trough of despair, right? Like, that moment where you're energetic optimism, diving in, and then, like, that's the wall of regret, where you're like, 'What was I thinking? This is not a story,'" says Alexandra Marvar, whose piece on Lummie Jenkins was revived by The Atavist.

Today we Alex Marvar, this month’s featured Atavist writer, but this is something of a twist. Seyward Darby, who we will hear from in a sec, has launched an initiative called “Revived.” The idea being to resurrect long lost stories that are no longer available online. These stories that for one reason or another … disappeared. Seyward calls it a crisis of impermanence. You can learn and read more at magazine.atavist.com [http://magazine.atavist.com/].

Alex is a freelance writer and photographer. Her work has been appeared in the Believer, The Guardian, The New York Times, Vanity Fair and many others. She’s kind of a boss. She even won the prestigious East Knox Middle School’s 1995 DARE Student Essay Contest. She interviewed Iggy Pop for a documentary and got her picture taken with the punk legend, so, yeah, Alex is kinda sorta wicked cool.

In our part of the conversation we talk about:

 * Money
 * Revisiting her younger self
 * The trough of despair and the wall of regret
 * Borrowing trust
 * Saggy middles

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Episode 506: Alexandra Marvar and the Trough of Despair, the Wall of Regret

"We always were having conversations about, if we can't solve it, what then? What is this about? Why isn't it solved? And what is our job? Is the job of a journalist to solve crimes? No, it's to document. So what are we documenting? We're documenting what had to happen for there to be no answer in a situation where there should be an answer," says Leah Sottile, reporter, writer, Hush.

"Sometimes making yourself uncomfortable is the way to find new creativity, or to challenge yourself to find a smart idea within that," says Ryan Haas, reporter, producer.

Today we’ve got a fun one with CNF Pod regular Leah Sottile, investigative journalist, podcaster, author of Blazing Eye Sees All and When the Moon Turns to Blood.

And we also have her long-time collaborative partner Ryan Haas. They are primarily here to talk about season 2 of Hush, an incredible series put out by Oregon Public Broadcasting that chronicles how a small town has, to date, failed to bring closure on the death of 18-year-old Sarah Zuber in 2019. The red herring of it all is that it starts like a classic true crime show, but it quickly becomes an interrogation of the true crime genre. One of Leah’s great lines is that this isn’t true crime so much as it is bureaucratic horror in the rural town of Rainier, Oregon.

I love getting a chance to chat with Leah, and this was special to hear from Ryan Haas, too, who up until recently spent more than a dozen years at OPB. She and Leah worked on the epic Bundyville Podcast together and two seasons of Hush. I’m gonna miss Hush because I would run five miles listening to primarily Leah, though Ryan pops in every now and again, narrate this incredible story about what happens when journalism folds up shop in a small town, when the greek choir of Facebook is the primary news source, when power-hungry people leverage a tragedy for personal gain, when law enforcement becomes lax.

In this episode, they talk about:

 * The Grid of Doom
 * The evolution of their partnership
 * How they push each other
 * Interrogating the true crime genre
 * White board conversations
 * Being open to where the reporting goes
 * Being open to complication
 * Finding the cliff hangers
 * And breaking news! The future of Leah and Ryan’s work

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Show notes: brendanomeara.com [http://brendanomeara.com/]

Episode 505: Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas Talk ‘Hush’, Investigative Reporting, and Breaking New Trail in Their Careers

"You're constantly asking lean, open, neutral questions that start broad and then narrow, and you're asking more lean, open, neutral questions based on their answers. When you do that, it tells the subjects that you're actually listening to them very intensely, and you're asking questions based on the things that they say. And that accelerates trust and intimacy, I think, in a better way than kind of betting on your personality," says Seth Wickersham, the bestselling author of American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback and an ESPN.com senior writer.

Seth Wickersham is back. He is an ESPN.com [http://espn.com/] senior writer, investigative reporter, the NYT best-selling author of It’s Better to Be Feared and, most recently, his best selling American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback, it’s published by Hyperion.

We had a tight window to get this interview done. It was 30 minutes and after the edit it was closer to 25. He was gassed. I think he did this as a favor since I’d been on his ass since July about this book. Well, mainly on his publicists’ asses, then I had to go over their heads. Sidebar: sometimes I think tight interviews are GREAT. Tony the Tiger level great. You can’t cover quite as much ground and get into the granularity of certain things, but there’s still so many great takeaways from this episode even though it’s half as long as the usual. Seth talks about:

 * Getting to the heart of the matter
 * Interviewing vs. conversations, and how he bristles at the “conversation” angle
 * Establishing trust
 * Writing out questions, but being OK with deviating
 * How doing all this book promotion is just pennies in the bank
 * His relationship to quarterbacking
 * How he vetted the main quarterbacks he featured in American Kings
 * And how the quarterback is a vector for American ambition

Seth is one of the good guys. You can’t say that about everyone. He’s a heavy hitter, he’s steady in the pocket, and his eyes are always downfield.

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Show notes: brendanomeara.com [http://brendanomeara.com/]

Episode 504: Seth Wickersham and the Macbethian Tragedy of the American Quarterback

"I will always go back to the well, and I will write until I die," says Jason Brown, author of Character Witness.

Jason Brown is here. He is a brilliant short story writer and the author of the memoir Character Witness (University of Nebraska Press). It’s an incredible book and we recorded this conversation at the end of October as the fourth and final LIVE podcast of the year at Gratitude Brewing here in Eugene. 

Jason, as luck would have it, teaches at the University of Oregon in its writing department, forging the young minds who will publish in the most obscure lit journals, the future bitter podcasters of America, sorry, speaking from experience. I’m projecting, OK?

But thanks to Jason and his clout with the University, we had our biggest gathering of the year, live and in person. There’s something pretty rad about the in-person jam.

Jason can be found at writerjasonbrown.com [http://writerjasonbrown.com/]. He writes fiction and nonfiction and was a Stegner Fellow and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University where he taught as a Jones Lecturer. He has received fellowships from Yaddo and Macdowell colonies. He taught for the MFA program at the University of Arizona and directs the MFA program at the U of O here in Eugene. He’s the author of the collection Driving the Heart and Other Stories, Why the Devil Chose New England For His work and his work as also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, The L.A. Times, and The Guardian, among many others. This is getting obnoxious.

In this conversation we talk about:

 * Persistence
 * Hiking out from the moment
 * The atmospheric river of rejection
 * Escape velocity
 * Woodworking
 * Rule breakers
 * Maturing around himself
 * And working with Tobias Wolff

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Show notes: brendanomeara.com [http://brendanomeara.com/]

Episode 503: An Atmospheric River of Rejection with Jason Brown

"Take pride in your rejections. It's a tough industry for putting yourself out there. You're like, doing a ton of work up front, not knowing if anyone will be interested in it. It's very easy to feel deflated about it. Your rejections are reaching for things that maybe aren't easy reaches," says Christa Hillstrom, writer of 14,445 and Counting for The Atavist.

It’s that Atavistian time of the month. Not much by way of spoilers, but you know you’re in for a double dose of CNFin’  insights as we will hear from editor-in-chief Seyward Darby and, of course, the writer of this month’s feature, Christa Hillstrom. Her story is titled 14,445 and Counting: Inside a Texas nurse’s quest to document the life and death of every woman killed by a man in America. You can read the story at magazine.atavist.com [http://magazine.atavist.com/]. A sub is only $25 a year. No, I don’t get kickbacks; yes, I pay to subscribe as well. I’m the hipster doofus of the people.

The Atavist doesn’t usually do profiles, per se, but this profile is of Dawn Wilcox and her “sacred work” of logging every femicide in the country, which is to say violent deaths directly against women by men. It’s a tough one, not gonna lie. Not because it’s not well done, but because, well, read the title.

OK, so this piece is pretty heavy, but it’s a story of obsession and what the central figure calls her “sacred work” to bring attention to this epidemic of sorts.

The credits for this piece are: Ed Johnson was the art director, Sean Cooper copy edited it, Emily Injeian fact checked it, Naheebah Al-Ghadban illustrated it and Jonah Ogles and Seyward Darby edited this suckah.

Christa Hillstrom is a freelance journalist based in the Pac Northwest, but hailed from Minnesota originally and even attended Northwestern’s grad program in journalism. Doesn’t get better than that.

She’s an award-winning reporter, editor, and multimedia producer in human rights, global health, gender-based violence, and trauma/resilience.

We talk about:

 * The little treasures in research
 * The cost of doing this kind of reporting
 * Outlining
 * Task initiation
 * How she wrote herself into this story
 * Justing doing the writing
 * And taking pride in your rejections

Check out her story at magazine.atavist.com [http://magazine.atavist.com/] and check out this conversation … right now.

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Episode 502: Christa Hillstrom Takes Pride in Her Rejections

"It's not actually about the questions you ask. It's about shutting up," says Julian Brave NoiseCat, author of We Survived the Night.

It’s episode 501 with Julian Brave NoiseCat, author of the memoir We Survived the Night. It’s published by Knopf. It’s a pretty spectacular debut and we have a lively chat about it and the writing and structuring of it. Julian is a writer, filmmaker, powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. 

Julian, man, what a cool dude. He really came to play ball, which is fun for me. His memoir blends personal history, family history, cultural  history, coyote lore, and even some journalistic spurs in the storytelling, which makes it a shapeshifting text, much like his coyote ancestors. The book has been getting a lot of attention and deservedly so.

His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post. He has won many awards for his journalism and his debut documentary, Sugarcane, premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. He is a proud member of the Canim Lake Band. He is @jnoisecat on IG and in this conversation we talk about:

 * His early vision for the book
 * Hidden histories
 * How he aimed for a woven text
 * How the book was a study in transformation
 * Non-uni-direction assimilation
 * Writing what you don’t know
 * And his Bob Caro story

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Episode 501: Julian Brave NoiseCat Aimed for a Woven Text

"Anything beats writing. Writing is tough," says John McPhee, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of more than thirty books of nonfiction.

Hey CNFers, this is Episode 500 of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. There are kilometer stones like 100, 200, 300, and 400, but this one, this is a milestone and it features the writer and journalist who made me want to write narrative nonfiction in the first place: John McPhee.

John is a titan, a soft-spoken titan. He is the author of more than 30 books, including A Sense of Where You Are, Levels of the Game, his Pulitzer Prize-winning Annals of the Former World, and the book that made me want to write nonfiction: The Survival of the Bark Canoe. John is 94 years young, still lives in Princeton where he has taught an exclusive masterclass on factual storytelling, a class taken by the likes of David Remnick and the late Grant Wahl, I believe, among countless people who have gone on to write and report with distinction.

He's been a staff writer for The New Yorker since the 1960s when William Shawn was the editor. Not long thereafter, he was offered a job to teach at his alma mater Princeton University and he famously edited students’ submissions not unlike how Shawn edited him at The New Yorker. He’s written about such wide ranging topics from basketball, to tennis, to bark canoes, to Alaska, to lacrosse, to oranges, to myriad topics in geology.

John is synonymous with thinking through structure and coming up with unique structures for most of his stories, each one something of a fingerprint: no two are alike and the facts borne out from this intensive, slow reporting dictate the shape of the story he has locked into.

His work is methodical and patient. He hangs out. He fills notebook after notebook, rarely uses a recorder, maybe only if there’s someone speaking in such technical jargon that there’s no way to keep pace. His career has been this wonderful balance of give and take: teach for most of the year and not write; then write and not teach. John is unassuming and gentle and an example of how you can do this work without bombast or pyro and still be riveting and sometimes downright hilarious.

So we talk about:

 * The influence of his high school English teacher Olive McKee
 * Living room fighters
 * Writing on spec
 * The notebooks he’s used for decades
 * How a lack of confidences is an asset
 * What a good editor does
 * Writing as teaching
 * How having a plan frees you to write
 * The panic of having not written leads to productivity
 * And how proud of his daughters he is

Parting shot on what it all means at 500 and maybe where I see the show going for the next 500.

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Episode 500: Structure, Spec, and Panic with John McPhee

"You start to wonder was it all worth it? Or what's the point in trying to do it again? You know, if there's going to be more disappointment in the future. I think it is something that you know probably just changes as you go on, regardless, right? I want to get that second book under my belt so it's not all just on this one, this one baby, you know?" says Maggie Mertens.

Maggie is the author of Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books). It’s a brilliant book that traces the advancement of women’s athletics through running. Hard as it is to believe, but it was thought that women couldn’t, nay, shouldn’t run farther than 800 meters. Running might affect their fragile constitution, they might even ruin the work place … there’s a name for headlines like that one: They’re called subscription cancellers. [Context: The New York Times ran a podcast headline with its conservative columnist asking “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” Anyhoo …

Maggie is making the freelance workplace a good time, thank you very much, and it’s a pleasure to get to celebrate her approach to the work and her incredible book that came out in 2024.

So Maggie’s work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, NPR, Sports Illustrated, ESPNw, Creative Nonfiction, among others. She has a Substack called My So Called Feminist Life at maggiemertens.substack.com [http://maggiemertens.substack.com/] and she does much of social media-ing on IG @maggiejmertens and you can learn more about her and her work at maggiemertens.com [http://maggiemertens.com/].

So Maggie and I talk about:

 * The long book writing process
 * Community
 * Time pegs
 * Strict deadlines for the self
 * How she named her chapters in Better Faster Farther
 * Taking the wins
 * And the post-book malaise

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Show notes: brendanomeara.com [http://brendanomeara.com/]

Episode 499: The Post-Book Malaise is Real with Maggie Mertens

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!

Brendan O'Meara

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