"I say this all the time, and I'll say it again: the truth is a block of wood, and I know the sculpture I carve out of that block of wood looks different than the sculpture my mother carves out of that block of wood, right? But the truth — the block of wood — is what what happens, but the art we make out of that is up to us," says Isaac Fitzgerald, author of American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed.

We’ve got Isaac Fitzgerald returning to the podcast. He’s going to be at Powells on May 29, 7 p.m., in convo with Lidia Yuknavitch, and I’ll likely be heading up the 5 to photo bomb them because Isaac has a new book out called American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed. It is published by Knopf. Great talk. We were buzzin’, man. In any case, you know Isaac maybe from his bookish appearances on The Today Show, and he’s also the author of the brilliant memoir Dirtbag, Massachusetts, a coming of age story.

I liken American Rambler to a coming of middle-age story and as Isaac walks and drives in the footsteps of one John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed. It’s a book that deals with that squishy time as we crest into our forties and reckon with mortality as well as the greater disconnection we’re collectively experiencing, which is why Isaac set out, largely on foot, to put his phone down and live in the world. His essay on walking for The Guardian, linked up in the show notes, very much informed and even catalyzed American Rambler.

So Isaac is a pretty special dude. I love the posture he takes in the world. When I had lunch with Lidia before her live appearance on the show, we talked about how Isaac had jumped into the comments on a couple of our Instagram posts and Lidia asked me, “Is Isaac coming to this?”

I said, “I don’t think so. I mean he’s in New York.”

“It would totally be like him to just show up.”

And I kinda love that idea. I want to make more of that effort myself.

So in this episode we talk about:

 * Putting the phone down
 * Living in the world
 * Walking 20,000 steps a day
 * The tension between building community and withdrawing into solitude
 * The scaffolding of the story
 * How he was late to the arc of his own story
 * Stories become what they’re supposed to be
 * How the truth is like a block of wood
 * The black dog as literary device
 * First lines
 * And how On The Road informed American Rambler

Isaac can be found on Instagram at isaac.fitzgerald and you can join his Substack list Walk It Off and learn more about him at his website isaacfitzgerald.net [http://isaacfitzgerald.net/]. He’s also collaborated with the brilliant cartoonist Wendy McNaughton on two books about tattoos, Pen and Ink and Knives and Ink. Great stuff.

If you like this episode, I would definitely check out Isaac’s first appearance on Ep. 353. I’d also check out:

 * Ep. 100 with Mary Karr
 * Episode 200 with Nick Flynn
 * Ep. 358: Erica J. Berry
 * Ep. 472 with Melissa Febos
 * Ep. 503 with Jason Brown

Episode 527: Isaac Fitzgerald says the Truth is a Block of Wood

"This is also me saying here's a literary reading of the universe through physics. There's a way you can read The Edge of Space-Time as me  doing close-reading for a few 100 pages. I'm close-reading equations. I'm close-reading Dirac. I'm close-reading Hawking and Ellis, but it's all different versions of a literary practice," says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie (Pantheon Books).

Coming at you at the speed of sound, CNFers, with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who is the author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred and her latest book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. It’s published by Pantheon Books.

She is an associate professor of physics and core faculty member in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her work lives at the intersection of particle physics, cosmology, and astrophysics and she’s also a theorist of Black feminist science studies.

Her book is accessible, for sure, but it’s mind-bendy and it strikes me as the kind of book you want to read twice. One, it’s good company, and two, the material she translates is really difficult to get your head around, but that’s the nature of the quantum mechanics, and general relativity, and particle physics, and how the hell did we get here in the first place? Gah!

So Chanda talks about:

 * The publishing business in conversations she had with CNF Pod alum Keith O’Brien
 * Writing for Black and queer audiences
 * The different selves who approach the page
 * Paying attention to acknowledgements
 * Epigraph rights and how they set the vibe
 * The fork in the road researchers face when they write a pop science book
 * Physicist brain
 * A literary reading of the universe
 * The world keeps happening while you’re writing
 * Understanding metaphors
 * And what Newton and Einstein might talk about if they sat down at a bar together

Be sure you visit Chanda’s website chanda.science and follow her on Instagram at chanda.prescod.weinstein.

This episode will pair well with:

 * Episode 103: Persistent, Constant, Careful Work with Dennis Overbye
 * Episode 111: The Empowering and Exciting Nature of Film with Emer Reynolds
 * Episode 307: Greg Brennecka
 * Episode 334: Katrina Miller
 * Episode 395: “The Six,” Mini-Deadlines and the Twang with Loren Grush

Episode 526: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s Literary Reading of the Universe

"I'm very comfortable not writing perfectly. I think a lot of writers have difficulty writing because they can be such good editors that there's almost this like, inherent need of sometimes rereading the same chapter over and over again and trying to make it perfect. And so I think, for me, I'm  very comfortable with the idea of, like, let me just get stuff on paper," says Mary Cain, author of This is Not About Running: A Memoir.

It’s Mary Cain! She’s @runmarycain on Instagram and she serves on the board of The Army of Survivors and the founder of the nonprofit Atalanta NYC which employs professional female runners to serve as mentors to girls in underserved part so the city.  For a certain subset of people they’re gonna be like, Who dat? To them, I say, Mary was a running prodigy in the 2010s, the fastest high school girl in America and one of the fastest across all ages before the age of 18 in events like the 800 meters and the 1,500. She was recruited by the now disgraced Alberto Salazar for the Nike Oregon Project where she was physically, emotionally, and psychologically abused by Salazar in a win-at-all-costs culture.

In 2019, she published a video op-ed with the New York Times that brought down the Nike Oregon Project and Alberto Salazar. It lit a fire and this book is also lighting a firestorm as well.

This was a really fun conversation. I was working in specialty running retail when Mary exploded onto the scene, so it was just really cool to chat with her. Part of the appeal for her coming on this show was to talk about the writing, which she’s not really going to experience on this book tour, which will primarily be on the running shows. She was very generous with her time and we talked for almost 90 minutes on topics like:

Her love of Hemingway

 * Procrastination
 * Writing in the present tense
 * The benefits of reading when you’re writing
 * Finishing as a skill
 * Not writing perfectly
 * Sticking to artificial deadlines
 * Seasonality in writing
 * Support networks
 * Starting from pure anger
 * The monetization of fake advocacy
 * And the one sentence she wrote that I wish I wrote

Mary is a medical student now at STanford University and basically runs for fun. This episode will pair well with my conversations with Maggie Mertens, Christine Yu, Lauren Fleshman and Renee Hess.

I had a real blast talking to her and I think you’l enjoy as well. Parting shot on my marathon experience, but for now, here’s the super cool Mary Cain.

Episode 525: Mary Cain Started with Pure Anger in ‘This Is Not About Running’

"In the case of being a storyteller, I keep a document that I call my nonfiction compost pile. I keep little snippets of things that I've heard but it didn't really dive deeper into it. When you have other things to fall back on, it's easier to to pivot and say, 'Okay, this one didn't work out.' If you really believe in a story, you're going to find somebody else who believes in it too," says Nick Davidson, whose "Big Game" is this month's featured Atavist story.

We’ve got Nick Davidson (@nickgdavidson on IG) returning to the pod because he has within the span of about two years landed ANOTHER story with our dear friends at the Atavist Magazine. Nose to tail, this is one of the best Atavist pods you’re going to hear. I don’t know what was in the air, but Jonah Ogles, the lead editor, and Nick, were in the zone. I’m very excited for you to sink into this one for reasons I think that’ll be clear once you sit with it. Head to magazine.atavist.com [http://magazine.atavist.com/] to read the story and consider subscribing, and no, I don’t get kickbacks and I, in fact, pay for my own subscription, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Nick’s story chronicles the undercover operation to take down dozens of poachers in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. The federal agent at the heart of it, George Morrison, goes undercover and what follows is a riveting story that raises all kinds of questions and blurs the lines between right and wrong. It's titled: Big Game: Colorado’s San Luis Valley was a wildlife poacher’s paradise. Then an undercover federal agent arrived.

Nick  can be found at nickgdavidson.com [http://nickgdavidson.com/]. His work has appeared in Outside, Men’s Journal, Truly Adventurous, Garden & Gun, High Country News, Backpacker, VICE Sports, and Popular Science.

There’s a Buddhist vibe to Nick in that he’s an eternal optimistic and he surrenders to the current, not in a passive way, I know that sounds contradictory, but what I mean is he’s not one to frantically paddle upstream. He practices in the martial arts, which imbues him with a sense of confidence of mind and body; he preaches non-attachment, which is always good materialistically but also when it comes to stories that might not pan out. He’s of abundant mindset and he  very much had me questioning my headspace, which as you know is a cesspool of toxic goo.

So in our conversation, we talk about:

 * How he established a freelance career
 * Pitching
 * Excitement for the story
 * Having a positive attitude
 * Telling the story that’s right in front of you
 * Google alerts
 * Writing long
 * Developing character
 * Beginnings and endings
 * And when the magic happens

I think you’re really going to leave this chat feeling energized at possibility. Maybe that’s just me.

Order The Front Runner [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338]

Welcome to Pitch Club [https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/]

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

Episode 524: Nick Davidson Was Writing an Atavist Story All Along

"The Chronology of Water story was an 11-page story written in tiny fragments. And the MFA program I was in, they told me, that's not a story. It's a poem or something. It's a list of fragments. I'm like, 'Fuck you!' My whole enterprise has been to trouble the edges," says Lidia Yuknavitch, bestselling author of several books, most recently a memoir titled Reading the Waves.

Lidia Yuknavitch makes her thrilling return to the podcast, this a live recording of the show at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene in partnership with the revival of the Northwest Review. My understanding is that there’s a significant literary prize, including creative nonfiction essays. You might want to try you filthy animals. The Northwest Review was the first place that ever published Lidia, a short, 11-page story called the Chronology of Water, so, maybe YOU could be the next Lidia Yuknavitch, though we know that’s impossible so don’t even try.

She’s the author of eight books of fiction, nonfiction, and the editor of an essay collection on menopause called The Big M. She’s best known for her memoir, or anti-memoir called The Chronology of Water, the novels Thrust, Verge, and The Small Backs of Children. And her most recent nonlinear, fractured memoir is the brilliant Reading the Waves.

She won the Oregon Book Award in 2016 and also stood on the TED stage and delivered a beautiful talk about misfits. Her work has appeared  in Guernica, Ms., and Another Chicago Magazine. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland, Oregon. She is a very good swimmer.

We talk about:

 * Getting rid of the good/bad binary
 * Writing in a group setting
 * Inventing your own rituals
 * The beautiful and the brutal living next to each other
 * Taking your turn
 * Troubling the edges
 * Being good compost
 * And how her market days are over and she’s cool with that

You’ll want to pair this episode with 217, Lidia’s first time as well as:

 * Episode 447: Brooke Champagne Sits Back from the Suckitude
 * Episode 498: Sasha Bonet on Not Holding Back, and 
 * Episode 123: Elena Passarello on Listening to the book, Polaroids, and Self-Doubt

Dig it, friend.

Order The Front Runner [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338]

Welcome to Pitch Club [https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/]

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

Episode 523: Lidia Yuknavitch Troubles the Edges

“Not to confuse journalism with newspapers. Newspapers are one set of communication methods. But it's certainly not the only one. If they have the right mindset, and that's what I try to get them to do, there are so many more opportunities. You can go out and do a podcast, or you can do a newsletter. You can't think of it as I need to work at The New York Times. You have to think of it as I need — I need — to tell stories, and I've got this curiosity.”

Anthony DePalma is a journalist and professor at Columbia University. He’s the author of several books, his latest being On This Ground: Hardship and Hope at the Toughest Prep School in America. It’s published by Mariner Books.

He spent 22 years as a reporter for The New York Times, and another 8 as a stringer for them, so, let’s do the math … that’s 30 years. He reported a lot on Mexico and Cuba, as well as Albania, Guyana, and Suriname. You can find him at anthonydepalma.com [http://anthondydepalma.com/] and on the Facebooks and Substacks, at anthontyrdepalma

Anthony DePalma has been all over the world telling true stories. He’s the author of The Cubans, City of Dust, The Man Who Invented Fidel, and Here: A Biography of the New American Continent.

In this conversation we talk about:

 * How not to confuse journalism with newspapers
 * The NEED to tell stories
 * The stunning lack of curiosity among young journalists
 * Not wearing headphones on walks
 * Accelerated intimacy
 * Challenge of being of satisfied with the writing
 * Still being a WIP
 * What to do when you can’t be everywhere at once
 * Cutting 30-40% of his ms
 * Radical pragmatism
 * What makes St. Benedict’s tough
 * And how grafting apple trees is like writing

Order The Front Runner [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338]

Welcome to Pitch Club [https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/]

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

Episode 522: Anthony DePalma Won’t Wear Headphones on a Walk

"When I was writing the book, I used a lot of my interest in art criticism and nature writing to get cross pollinate into my sports writing. And I really try not to fall into a rut and just read only adjacent to my own subject or my own field," says Giri Nathan, author of Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis.

Today we have Giri Nathan (@giricube on IG), he is a staff writer/cofounder of Defector and the author of Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last couple years. It’s funny and voicey and if David Foster Wallace’s tennis writing made sweet, sweet love to John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, you get Changeover. How Giri is able to illustrate why Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner are so captivating and capable of inheriting the mantle held by Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, and Novak Djokavic (who’s still going) is a triumph. This book may very well be the future of sports biography in that access to principal figures is almost impossible so you have to approach your subject more with a critical eye, like an art critic, and we talk about that …

Giri Nathan’s work has appeared in New York Magazine, The NYT Book Review, The Believer, and National Geographic. He made the 2025 edition of the Year’s Best Sports Writing and The Best American Food & Travel Writing.

In this conversation we talk about:

 * Him taking John McPhee’s CNF class at Princeton
 * Art criticism and nature writing as influences for Changeover
 * Losing fandom
 * The relationship to personality and style
 * Writing from contemporaneous excitement
 * Writing the fun scenes
 * The insider-outsider perspective
 * And keeping a running list of adjectives so he doesn’t repeat himself

Really fun stuff here.

Order The Front Runner [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338]

Welcome to Pitch Club [https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/]

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

Episode 521: Giri Nathan Takes the Insider-Outsider Perspective

"I think, like all writers, I will feel an itch that I have to scratch. There will be an idea in my head that I've got to get down on paper, whether I follow through with it or not," says R. Renee Hess, author of Blackness is a Gift I Can Give Her: On Race, Community, and Black Women in Hockey.

Who do we have this week? It’s R. Renee Hess, but you can all her Renee, of Black Girl Hockey Club. She wrote the essay collection Blackness is a Gift I can Give Her: On Race, Community, and Black Women in Hockey. It’s published by McClelland & Stewart.

After Renee finished her schooling and got a job and had some money, she sought to find a sport to follow that cut against the grain. Instead of baseball, football, or basketball, she thought, maybe hockey and it didn’t take long to realize that there very few Black people on the ice and in the stands. And even fewer Black women in the stands. In 2018, she launched Black Girl Hockey Club, a nonprofit organization that focuses on equity and including for Black women in ice hockey.

Renee was named one of three finalists for the NHL’s Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award in 2021 for positively impacting the community, culture, or society through the sport of hockey. Her work has appeared in Black Nerd Problems, Spectrum Magazine, and Racebaitr. You can learn more about Renee and her work at blackgirlhockeyclub.org [http://blackgirlhockeyclub.org/] and find her on the socials at @blackgirlhockeyclub

In this conversation we talk about:

 * Tackling other genres
 * Short Fiction
 * Reading as a writer
 * Going back to the classics
 * What sustains the writing
 * Taking representation further
 * And focusing inward vs. outward in her BGHC work

Really fun conversation about the important work she’s doing and the work she draws inspiration from.

Order The Front Runner [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338]

Welcome to Pitch Club [https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/]

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

Episode 520: R. Renee Hess on the Work that Inspires her and the Founding of Black Girl Hockey Club

"I'm always calibrating when I'm interviewing somebody, like, how much of a prompt are they going to need, and what is what is going to get something out of them?" — Stephen Wood, whose Buffalo Raiders [https://magazine.atavist.com/2026/buffalo-raiders-vietnam-draft] piece appears in The Atavist Magazine.

What is the meaning of this Wednesday podcast! Middle of the week! It’s hump day, this holy day! It’s April 1st, is this some kind of joke! NO! Point being, it’s that Atavistian time of the month and I’m trying to get back to making the Atavist pod an extra pod, not just another Friday pod. So, consider your podcast feed warned, you filthy animal.

Stephen Wood [https://sbrycewood2.wixsite.com/stephenwood/about-1] is here! Find him on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/hey-its-stephen/], the professional that he is. He’s a journalist who writes about sports, history, and politics and he’s here to talk about his Atavist story “The Buffalo Raiders: With thousands of U.S. soldiers dying in Vietnam, a group of young Catholics in New York embarked on a secret mission to bring the war machine to its knees. [https://magazine.atavist.com/2026/buffalo-raiders-vietnam-draft]” I’ll give Stephen a more formal introduction — top hat and monocle — just before his segment of the show.

We’re gonna hear from Seyward Darby about her side of the table, which is always fun. Name another show where you get an editor talking about a piece, and then the writer talking about it. Exactly, visit patreon.com/cnfpod [http://patreon.com/cnfpod] to contribute to the cause.

Also, head to magazine.atavist.com [http://magazine.atavist.com/] to read Stephen’s story and maybe subscribe. I pay $25 a year to subscribe and I don’t get kickbacks or commissions. Yeah, I pay, too. 

Stephen Wood can be found at https://sbrycewood2.wixsite.com/ or, per his preference, at LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/hey-its-stephen/ … His work has appeared in The Guardian, Current Affairs, Jacobin, The Athletic, and McSweeney’s. He was a producer with Gilded Audio where he worked on shows including Snafu with Ed Helms and The Reason We’re All Still Here.

In this chat, we talk about:

 * Calibrating an interview
 * How sometimes podcasts hosts don't even do the interviewing
 * What to do when there’s too much meat on the bone #toomuchmeat
 * What’s a load-bearing element to the story
 * Going in fear of the abstraction
 * And a lot more.

Order The Front Runner [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338]

Welcome to Pitch Club [https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/]

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

Episode 519: Stephen Wood’s ‘Ocean’s 11’ Anti-Government Caper

"You can't go and find all of our stories. You can't just click a button and and be served up. You really have to appreciate them in person by holding the magazine in your hands, and that, to me, makes it more special," says Laura LeBleu, co-founder of Geezer Magazine.

It’s Laura LeBleu and Paul von Zielbauer, the founders of Geezer Magazine, a new, print-only magazine exploring the Gen-X aging experience. It’s a killer experience. Issue 1 came out several months ago and it’s this 11x15-inch-sized thing and it has pieces by Kim Cross and Tommy Tomlinson. Issue 2 comes out any day now and features an essay from ya boi. You can read my pitch for the essay at welcometopitchclub.substack.com [http://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/] titled Pitchin’ from the Hip.

So Laura  dreamed up Geezer Magazine in the shower, that incubator of great ideas. She's been an Emmy award winning TV producer, a lead singer of an Italian band, voice of a virtual character, stilt-walking circus ringmaster, minor gay icon, and an NYC cabaret performer. She worked in tech for a bit and it was draining her soul and her creativity muscles were atrophying, she needed to do something, so she decided to bootstrap a magazine. I subscribed.

Paul has ridden a bicycle from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, spent 11 years as a journalist with the New York Times, where his work was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, that little thing. As the Great Recession hit, he launched a business that got volunteers to build playgrounds for disadvantaged children overseas — kaboom kaboom kaboom, IYKYK. According to Geezer’s website, he works quietly in the basement until Laura tells him it’s okay to come upstairs.

Fun chat that covers:

 * The appeal of print in a digital world
 * The cost of paper
 * That fine line between being print only but how much should be digital, call it digital fish bait, maybe?
 * Influences such as Mountain Gazette
 * Zigging while others zag
 * The strange creature coming out of the forest
 * The oyster that forms the pearl
 * The people trying to pick up the fountain
 * And metaphors, all the metaphor!

Really fun chat from a great magazine that needs your support. Visit geezermagazine.com [http://geezermagazine.com/] to check them out and consider subscribing. It’s not cheap, but you get such a unique experience. It truly is one of a kind. I did and no, I don’t get kick backs or commissions.

Order The Front Runner [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338]

Welcome to Pitch Club [https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/]

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

Episode 518: All Hail Gen-X with Geezer Magazine!

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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