"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 right and far-right fundamentalism and what’s he’s been able to document is scary and often unsettling. We don’t dig too much into that, because mainly we just talk about doing this kind of work. It was really a fun and illuminating conversation and I’m pretty stoked.

He teaches writing and creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College. That was where I desperately wanted to go to school. I was set to be their starting shortstop, but I couldn’t get my goddam SATs above remedial and thus I attended good ol’ UMass … back in the late 1990s, if you could funnel a beer in five seconds you got a scholarship #yolo

In this episode, Jeff and I riff about:

 * His key influences
 * Treating your book badly as a way of treating it well
 * Using your outsiderness to your advantage
 * His love of sportswriting, or interest in sportswriting, despite not following sports
 * And real toads in imaginary gardens

You can learn more about Jeff and his work @jeffsharlet on Substack and his newsletter there called Scenes from a Slow Civil War … I admire people like Jeff who are just so damn smart in how they articulate things seemingly on the fly. Meanwhile, ya boi BO sounds about as coherent as a chimpanzee.

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Episode 479: Jeff Sharlet and Finding Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens

"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 about elevators, teaching birds to migrate, the Eagles winning the Super Bowl, or a feature about a sketchy restaurateur; he is appointment reading. 

I see his name in the table of contents of an issue of The New Yorker and I will stop just about everything I’m doing and spend the next hour or so reading Nick’s work. Over the years, he’s been the model, for me, as the perfect profile writer.

Nick is a long-time New Yorker staff writer. You know, it’s funny, since I’ve never landed a big feature at a big magazine like the New Yorker, I kinda feel like a phony, a fake writer, even though I have two books under my belt. When Nick and I were off mic, he was saying how because he hasn’t published a book yet, he feels like a fake writer. This is Nick Paumgarten (!) saying he feels like a phony. It goes to show, none of us feel good about ourselves.

In this episode, we talk about:

 * The reporting suggesting the root system of a piece
 * Loosening your grip
 * Stories being like a rip tide
 * Need a lede to work first
 * Befriending chronology
 * And the nerdery

I mean, great stuff. I was finally put in touch with Nick by CNF Pod alum Jared Sullivan, the author of the brilliant book Valley So Low, of Ep. 443 fame, and I’m so glad we got to make this happen.

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



Episode 478: Nick Paumgarten says, ‘The Reporting Suggests the Root System’

"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 frees him up for

We also hear from lead editor Jonah Ogles about his side of the table. If you want to learn more about David, visit davidhowardauthor.com and follow him on Instagram @davehoward99.

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

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

Episode 477: David Howard and the Search for Stories He Believes In

"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:

 * How she tells her writers to let it rip (within reason)
 * How she found empathy for the writer side of the table, and how writers can better understand the POV of the editor side
 * Writing a great pitch
 * How a story is a horse the writer is the rider
 * And the arc of her career that brought her back to her native South Carolina

You can learn more about Amanda at gardenandgun.com and follow her on IG @amandaheckert.

This episodes opens with an audio excerpt of The Front Runner, read by Roger Wayne.

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

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

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

"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 motivated

Dane can be found at danehuckelbridge.com [http://danehuckelbridge.com/] and on IG @huckelbridge.

This episodes opens with an audio excerpt of The Front Runner, read by Roger Wayne.

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

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

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

Episode 475: For Dane Huckelbridge, Spacing Out is Part of the Process

"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 Guide to the Antarctic, the novel Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu, and the micro memoir Pin Ups.

Learn more about Yi Shun at thegooddirt.org and follower her on social media @yishunlai.

In this episode, we talk about:

 * How to reconfigure the fireworks
 * Arrival fallacy
 * Money
 * Privilege
 * And being kind to yourself.

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

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

Episode 474: How to Reconfigure the Fireworks with Yi Shun Lai

"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 tolerate a little barking in the background, but the howling is obnoxious. Hampton got a laugh out of all of it … He’s the author of eight books including In the Kingdom of Ice [https://hamptonsides.com/in-the-kingdom-of-ice/], Hellhound on his Trail [https://hamptonsides.com/hellhound-on-his-trail/], and Ghost Soldiers [https://hamptonsides.com/ghost-soldiers/].

Here we talk about:

 * How he found his lane of book writing
 * Of transitioning from a journalist to a popular historian
 * Finding the frame
 * Writing in coffee shops
 * Running to the computer in the middle of the night
 * And an April Fool’s Day joke gone horribly wrong

Learn more about Hampton at hamptonsides.com [http://hamptonsides.com/] and follow him on the gram @hamptonsidesauthor.

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

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

Episode 473: Finding the Frame with Hampton Sides

"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 Episode 472.

Melissa is the author of five books of nonfiction, including her latest, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex (Knopf).

In this conversation, we talk about:

 * Writing in community
 * Literary stardom
 * Being a weirdo
 * Wile E. Coyote
 * The jealousy dragon
 * The theory of bottoms
 * And the liberation of quitting things

Really rich stuff. You can learn more about Melissa at melissafebos.com and follow her on IG @melissafebos.

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



Episode 472: Melissa Febos and the Art of Personal Exploration with ‘The Dry Season’

"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
 * Constructing a headline and subhead to focus a story
 * And how best to immerse readers in a story

Learn more about Cassidy at cassidyrandall.com and @cassidyrandall on Instagram.

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

Episode 471: The Cassidy Randall Residency at CNF Pod Continues!

"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 figured out, man. She has won numerous national awards, including a Pushcart Prize. Her essay collection Twenty Square Feet of Skin was longlisted for the 2024 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Megan got on my radar when I was doing Prefontaine research and I was thumbing through my stack of True Stories, that chapbook Creative Nonfiction used to put out. I saw this essay titled “On Running” and I was like well shoot, I need to study this. Then I reached out to her and she sent me her essay collections and her memoir Farm Girl, so we dig into that.

Megan’s work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Hotel Amerika, River Teeth, and others. She lives in New Hampshire where she runs her own small farm and teaches creative writing through online courses and lessons. You can learn more about her at meganbaxterwriting.com [http://meganbaxterwriting.com/] and follow her on Instagram megan-baxter [https://drive.google.com/open?id=10MR0lUdHUx5rPmd7egtnvdluKGhX82LJ]

 * We talk about: 
 * Rewilding her writing
 * Rabbit holes
 * Actually living the ream
 * Hyperattention
 * The real housewives edit
 * And how Pinterest helps with her writing

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

Episode 470: Megan Baxter is Into Rewilding Her Writing

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 Threads and visit patreon.com/cnfpod to support!

Brendan O'Meara

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