"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!

"Those people who shaped the people are often more important than the subject, because they have insight into this young person that they were working with. It's crucial," says Keith O'Brien, bestselling author of Heartland: A Forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird.

Today we have Keith O’Brien, author of five books, including his latest book Heartland: A forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird. It’s published by Atria Books.

It’s a lean, propulsive biography framed as an origin story of Larry Bird before he went to the NBA to later become one of the ten best players in history.

Keith is the New York Times bestselling author of Outside Shot, Fly Girls, Paradise Falls, Charlie Hustle, which won the PEN America award for biography, and now Heartland. You can learn more about Keith at keithob.com and follow him on the ol’ IG @obrienstory. This book has been crushing it. His events have been overflowing. In this episode we talk about:

 * The dispiriting change we’re seeing in sports journalism
 * Finding the people who shaped the people
 * Sitting under the prism of history
 * Writing an origin story
 * His favorite part of the job
 * And how writing a book is like a miracle every time you finish
 * Lost of great stuff to chew on …

Promotional support: The 2026 Power of Narrative Conference. Use narrative20 at checkout for 20% off your tuition. Visit combeyond.bu.edu.

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 517: The Miracle of Writing a Book with Keith O’Brien

"A book is not a long magazine article, and it took me a long, long time to understand that, to even understand what it means. It's something that you can say, but you have to live it to understand it," says Tom Junod, author of the memoir In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man.

Wow, look who visited the digital CNF Pod HQ: It’s Tom Junod.

Listen, I don’t have all day to sing the praises and list the back-of-the-baseball-card details of Tom’s illustrious career writing for GQ, Esquire, and ESPN. He’s a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award. His piece in Esquire titled The Falling Man is a re-read for many of us around 9/11 and it takes a meditative and reportorial look at the man who had not chosen his fate, but appeared to embrace it. Tom wrote the iconic profile of Fred Rodgers that was turned a movie starring Tom Hanks. In many ways, so much of Tom’s work is writing about father figures, which of course brings us to the ultimate: In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man, a memoir about his father. It’s published by Double Day.

Tom can be found on Instagram @tom_junod and on the Facebooks and stuff. Google his work to read wildly ambitious stories from that particularly crazy era that was pre-internet magazine culture. Dude was in a watch ad.

In this episode:

 * We talk about that watch ad
 * The Mountain of writing a book
 * The difference between writing a magazine story vs. a book
 * The no nut-graf philosophy
 * Saying yes
 * Telling his life story from the work he does about other lives
 * The one arrow in his quiver
 * How there should be principles in journalism, but no rules
 * Writing beginnings that hint at the ending
 * Writing before referring to notes
 * And combining love and truth telling in his memoir

Really an amazing conversation.

Promotional support: The 2026 Power of Narrative Conference. Use narrative20 at checkout for 20% off your tuition. Visit combeyond.bu.edu.

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 516: Tom Junod Wrote One of the Best Memoirs You’ll Ever Read

"The worst thing you can do is pitch a topic, not a story. You start with a topic. I like to talk to a few people before I write a pitch, which can be difficult because people you're asking to talk to don't know where it's going. I just look for topics that interest me first, and I dig down to an expert, and then from the expert, I try and find individual stories within that," says Peter Ward, whose "Master and Commander" appeared in The Atavist Magazine.

It’s that Atavistian time of the month, so there might be some spoilers here. I can’t remember. Good chance of it. Visit magazine.atavist.com [http://magazine.atavist.com/] to read the story by Peter Ward, a writer whose work has appeared in GQ, The Atlantic, Wired, The Guardian, and others. He’s the author of two books of nonfiction, The Consequential Frontier and The Price of Immortality. This story for The Atavist titled Master and Commander is wild. Here’s the deck: When a scraggly band of folk musicians arrived to tour the UK, residents of a small Welsh town were enamored—until they learned that the band’s leader ruled with an iron fist.

There’s sea shanties, people.

We’re gonna hear from lead editor Jonah Ogles first and dive into the Atavist’s national magazine award nominations, namely Drew Philp’s story “There Will Be No Mercy.” You can hear out chat about it on Episode 449.

Peter is here to talk about how he arrived at this story.

 * Pitching a story, not a topic
 * Off the record conversations for trust
 * His cheat code
 * How the story was a house of cards
 * Better Call Saul
 * Finding voice
 * Interview prep
 * And the video clip of Matt Stone and Trey Parker that really helps with story development

Promotional support: The 2026 Power of Narrative Conference. Use narrative20 at checkout for 20% off your tuition. Visit combeyond.bu.edu.

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 515: Pitching Stories and Not Topics with Atavist Writer Peter Ward

"Come to editors with solutions, not with problems. A lot of young freelance writers will be like, 'Hey, hook me up with this editor. Do this and do that.' And I'm like, 'I can connect you, but you better have pitches. If you don't come with the idea you're just a problem,'" says Tony Rehagen, a long-time freelance writer.

Seth Wickersham put me in touch with a colleague of his, someone he went to grad school with by the name of Tony Rehagen. Now, he’s a special kind of freelancer in that he’s a grinder. Much like Pete Croatto and other freelancer types who are balancing all kinds of work: content work, copy writing, alumni magazine work, and pure journalism, Tony has been in the thick of the freelance morass for a long, long time. He was featured in the 2015 anthology “Next Wave” for his piece called The Last Trawlers, a work of journalism that really reads like a short story.

His work has appeared in myriad places like Indianapolis Monthly, Atlanta Magazine, Men's Journal, and Bloomberg.

Tony was a blast … there are too many great nuggets from this conversation to list out, but I’ll list out a few. We talk about:

 * His filing system for stories
 * How many stories he’s working at a time
 * Being on the clock and off the clock all the time
 * Treating his writing as a service or a trade like plumbing or carpentry
 * Treating editors more like clients
 * Taking risks with how much skin he puts into a certain story
 * And where his ambitions lie now.
 * And that just scratches the surface.

Promotional support: The 2026 Power of Narrative Conference. Use narrative20 at checkout for 20% off your tuition. Visit combeyond.bu.edu.

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 514: Tony Rehagen is Never and Always on the Clock

"I wanted to keep reporting, and I'm like, it's not ready yet. And [a friend] reminded me over and over that this is a sales pitch. It's a proposal. The agents and publishers just want to know you can put a story together and tell a story that's longer than 2,000 words, and that there's some narrative arc to it," says Melanie D.G. Kaplan, author of Lab Dog: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research (Hachette).

Today we have Melanie DG Kaplan, author of Lab Dog. Not gonna lie, if you’re an animal lover and a believer in animal rights, it’s a tough read. I don’t mean it’s a bad book, it’s a very good book, it’s just … tough. Brought no fewer than 88 tears to my eyes at various points. The late Jane Goodall called it “remarkable.” So, there you go.

Melanie is a journalist, an author, and when she’s feeling brave an ukulele player. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, among many, many others. She interviewed Miss Piggy. How many people can say that? Lab Dog is her first book and it chronicles her and her rescue beagle Hammy as they illuminate the world of animal testing and thus the testing that Hammy was subjected to for the first few years of his life. They find out where he was born, where he was subjected to various cruelties and indignities all in the name of science and progress. Her book details the advances in technologies and models that are proving to be just as effective as animal testing without the torture.

In this conversation we also hit on:

 * The dialogue between the animal research world and the animal activist world
 * Changing her physical environment so she can focus and write
 * Overcoming not being a “name” in this business
 * Book proposal craft
 * And the power of tech shabbat and how she turned me on to the “Light Phone”

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 513: Cutting the Toothbrush in Half with Melanie D.G. Kaplan

"A certain sort of dogged obsessiveness seems to help. I remember hearing Tobias Wolfe speak once that talent is wonderful  and widely distributed on Earth, but sitting down and putting in the hours is where it's at," says Mary Margaret Alvarado, who wrote "That's Somebody's Son" for The Atavist.

It’s a little later than planned, but here we feature Mary Margaret Alvarado’s piece for The Atavist Magazine titled “That’s Somebody’s Son: Three Mothers, One Struggle: saving their children with schizophrenia.” It’s a piece that that Mia, as Mary Margaret goes by, pitched more than a year ago and it was rejected. But Mia went back to the drawing board, basically wrote the entire thing, came back, and boom here we are.

We’re going to hear from Seyward Darby about her side of the table and why this piece was at first rejected and that special feeling when a great pitch comes across the transom.

Mary Margaret Alvarado is a multi-faceted writer with her poetry and nonfiction appearing in The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, VQR, Outside, and The Georgia Review, among other publications. She is the author of the poetry collection Hey Folly [https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/hey-folly-by-mary-margaret-alvarado/] and the nonfiction book American Weather [https://springs.rawtools.org/product/american-weather-book/]. She lives in Colorado.

In our chat we talk about:

 * Dogged obsessiveness
 * Cold drafts
 * Ambition
 * Trust
 * Reimagining the MFA
 * And stocking produce

Promotional support: The 2026 Power of Narrative Conference. Use narrative20 at checkout for 20% off your tuition. Visit combeyond.bu.edu.

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 512: Mary Margaret Alvarado Likes Her Drafts Ice Cold

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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