Transcript
Speaker: Oh, hey, it's high time to start promoting this. Saturday, October 24th, Gratitude Brewing at 1 p.m. Chuck Klosterman is coming to town. For a live recording of the podcast, we're going to be talking about his new book, Rock, a mainstream alternative history of alternative mainstream music.
Speaker: And his book, Football Most Likely, in writing and voice and style because he has got all the goods on writing and voice and style. He is very singular, and you can see him in person. ah RSVP with a free ticket at the link in my newsletters and my Instagram profile. And that's a at Creative Nonfiction Podcast. You knew that.
Speaker: The place will be packed or it better be packed. So secure your free ticket. It's only for a headcount. It's not like you're going to show it at the door to prove that you RSVP'd. It's free to the public, but we just want a headcount so gratitude doesn't get blindsided by Chuck Klosterman fans. Okay? October 24th, Gratitude Brewing, 1 p.m.
Speaker: ah RSVP with a free ticket. For a very sweet-natured man, he's an absolute executioner. Like, it's just... Just there is blood on the page, man.
Speaker: Oh, what do you know? It's that Atavistian time of the month. So you might want to head to magazine.atavist.com to read the latest story, The Bleeding Hearts. Maybe subscribe for $24.99. My subscription just auto-renewed. That's right, I pay.
Speaker: And I don't get kickbacks or commissions to offset that. I do put it in my my tax write-offs, though. ah Whether it does anything, I don't know. It's all weird.
Speaker: You know, it's all magic. It's all magic. Isn't it? Welcome to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where i speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell and the art and craft of telling true stories.
Speaker: Today we welcome back Matthew Wolfe for the third time in about a year. Why, you ask? Well, his first appearance was, I guess, like last August-ish or so. Episode 482 for his out of his story, The Talented Mr. Brousseau. Then, just a few weeks ago, he was on for episode 536 to talk about his first book, Fires in the Night. That was a live podcast recording at HodgePodge Books in Eugene.
Speaker: And now he's got another out of his story. Wild, right? This is the way. Hey, show notes of this episode to and more at brendanamara.com. Okay, listen, here's why you want to visit the show notes.
Speaker: I have links to past episodes that I think you'll enjoy based on the current one. I also have links to 500 and 400 and 300 and 200 and 100 episodes ago, so you can see a taste of the full bounty of the backlog without having to hunt, though you can very well hunt if you'd like.
Speaker: You may also consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash cnfpod.com. Or if you don't want to part with that sweet, sweet burrito money, leaving reviews for the podcast on Apple or ratings on Spotify or ratings and reviews for the front runner at Goodreads and Amazon are free and take you less time than you think. And the additive effect of all of those is worth more than money.
Speaker: It might get me money down the road and that then you can say you contributed. In a meaningful, meaningful way. So Matt's story is titled The Bleeding Hearts. An ex-cop pulled off the largest armed robbery in Austria's history with his friend's mistress as his accomplice.
Speaker: But he wasn't trying to get rich. He wanted to be a real-life Robin Hood. Now, we'll be chatting with Jonah Ogles, the lead editor of this piece, in a moment. And I didn't bring this up with him, and I will down the road, but listen to that deck again.
Speaker: If you want to sell a pitch to the Atavis, can you come up with some sentence like that that sums it up? I'll talk to either Sayward or Jonah about that a few times in the next couple Atavistian podcasts about how that distillation might help your pitches out either for the Atavist or maybe another publication. Can you really boil it down to that?
Speaker: That is what's going to keep us reading, right? Keep scrolling, turning the digital page, turning the page, So let's hear from Jonah right quick. More on Matt when we get to his part of the program. Short parting shot on a cool analog thing I'm trying to learn that might lead to some dollar dollar bills, y'all. But for now, here's Jonah Riff.
Speaker: And of course, you know, deadlines help. and And then sort of sit back from the suck-a-tude. If you want tenacity, get the fuck off social media. Don't be a dick. This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
Speaker: What is doing? Why has he been so successful at landing stories with the Atavist? Yeah, well, Sayward and I were talking about this the other day. like We like that we're starting to have repeat writers a little more frequently. Yeah, it's it's nice to have known entities to work with. like We know Matt.
Speaker: We know how he works. you know like The editing process becomes very, very smooth because you ah you already... like you trust the other person. You've done the hard work in the first round of being like, well, I don't like this and here are my reasons why. then, you know, like not that you ever really butt heads, but you've already like all the friction points you've had a chance to work through once. So the second time it just becomes like, oh, no, we don't have to do that anymore. You know, the third time, this is only the second time I've worked with Matt, but like, um,
Speaker: I just assigned another story to Cassidy Randall. So that will be the third time she and I have worked together. And I'm guessing it will be a pretty, you know, smooth, painless process for both of us.
Speaker: But I also think, you know, from the writers and they, they've landed two stories already you know and they've gone through that edit process themselves and seen the things that we tend to cut and the things that we emphasize and the things we ask for when we do like a first edit and they probably have a much better sense even when they're looking at ideas of like oh this has that thing the atavist wants in its stories
Speaker: they just have like a better idea of, of what makes an out of a story or what we think makes an out of a story. And I suspect that leads to like better pitches. Maybe as they've been reporting, they've been looking, you know, diving deeper on certain aspects that they think will make it more attractive to us.
Speaker: Yeah. And it's not that you have staff writers, but it's got to feel like when you get someone like a Cassidy who's going to be working, you know, working with you for a third time and who made the year's best sports writing anthology again, the one that's coming up again, which they like a shout out to Cassidy for. Yeah. Yeah. Matt being back for a third time, it's. Yeah, they they have a certain understanding, but validating, you know, for you that they're coming back to you guys with with stories that are a good fit for you. But the fact that they want to keep working with you, that's got to feel good, too. That's exactly what I said to say where it is. I was like, I hope it means that like, it's a nice experience for writers because we care. I mean, we care a lot about that.
Speaker: You know, I think we care most about like making great stories, you know, like I'm, I'm not going to be shy about like, You know, if I got to ruffle some writer feathers because I think like this is absolutely the right decision for a story, I'll do it. But like after that, I just want like writers to to think that they're to feel like they're heard, like they're like it's a collaborative process. So I hope this means we're doing it ah the right way and isn't just a reflection of like a dire landscape where like we're one of the old. outlets assigning these kinds of stories, which may be part of it, but I'm hopeful that, and I think that it they're having a good time or they're great liars because like, it seems I'm having a good time and I tell them that and they say, yeah, me too. So hopefully we're all, we're all good.
Speaker: And I know I've run into this a bit with the with the podcast. ah yeah I have ah basically a finite amount of slots per year, um roughly, as do you. And and so when you get like repeat people knocking on your door, like yes, that's awesome. It feels...
Speaker: excuse me, it feels very validating that people want to come either hang out on the podcast or write for the atavist again. and But then there's that fine calculus of you can go to the known thing that you've gone to ah a few times, but then you also want to like broaden the spectrum of the people that you publish or the people that I platform on the podcast. So I imagine that that's kind of the math you guys are doing as well on your end to some extent. Yeah, I mean, the like nurturing early career writers or like giving them a shot, I think, has always been part of atavist DNA, even before Sabred or I were a part of it.
Speaker: and And that matters to us a lot. Like we we like getting... promising ideas from writers who maybe have never done it before. And it is something we're aware of. Like, you know, anytime we have a pitch meeting, basically we pull up our list of assigned stories and we just kind of see where we're at generally, you know, like, do we have...
Speaker: you know enough women in that ah do we have any writers of color you know how are we working with repeat writers do we have too much true crime like the mix that editors always talk about is not just about subject story it's sort of or story subject it's everything you know we're trying to make that make sure that we're a publication that's sort of you know, has open arms as long as stories fit into kind of what we do that we're bringing lots of different people in. And and the only way you find a Cassidy is by assigning a story to somebody you've never worked with before, you know, like you just, you have to do it. And it is really exciting. Like I'm working with a writer now who this will be his first time,
Speaker: ah writing a story of this length or maybe even over like 4,000 words. And it's so cool to see how excited he is about it. You know, it's really easy for me to get jaded because I i have, you know, 40,000 words of copy on my my laptop right now.
Speaker: And I'm just like, yeah, whatever, do you know, do the edit and move it and move it on. But he's like, he's stoked. He wants to talk about the outline and it's infectious, you know, like getting those emails. I'm like, yeah, dude, let's get excited about the story and like make it really good.
Speaker: Yeah. And ah yeah bringing back a point earlier about yeah Matt having been back with a the, um with the Atavis for a third time and having an understanding kind of baked into his bones about the process of, you know, maybe looking at maybe what you cut and, getting an idea of just the the degree of pacing and and the leanness and propulsiveness of Attivist story. This story in particular, in terms of character, is very lean. you know, there aren't a whole lot of names. There isn't a giant ensemble. It stays with two people pretty much the whole time, and that is essentially it. So um just speak to that the degree of leanness and the propulsiveness that Matt was able to bring with a ah leaner cast of characters.
Speaker: Yeah, well, what you need at that point is depth of reporting, which I feel like I probably, there could be a drinking game for when I say this on the podcast. But, you know, like he just spent so much time talking to the two characters that he had enough material. Because if if a new writer were to pitch me a story that was just about two people,
Speaker: um You know, I would have questions about like, how much time have you spent with them? You know, give us a ah sense of like, you know, how deep did you get? Are they the type of source that's good at describing things? You know, those those kinds of questions.
Speaker: And because Matt's coming back, I think he had a sense of how to do that. Well, he i I got to read a draft of the story, so that's part part of it. you know I could see that it was there.
Speaker: And in this case, there's just a lot of action. you know like That's one of the things we talk I've been saying to writers a lot about pitches that I've been rejecting is like there's one good animating event that absolutely feels like the start of an Atavis story, and then nothing happens.
Speaker: You know, like it's all fallout from that. And not that like there aren't interesting bits, but we worry that like, okay, the most interesting thing happens at a thousand words and then you've got 7,000 more to go. But this was a story where he...
Speaker: you know There are sort of interesting things along the way. We start with this heist and then we're able to back up to the to Gabriel's career and Tamara's career and so on and so forth. um There were just enough plot points that had natural drama to them that the piece was going to sort of propel itself if he wrote what happened.
Speaker: Yeah. And I think what struck me, too, is his correspondence with the central figures goes back to 2014 or something. And so it really speaks to sometimes how long you have to be with a cast of characters before a story can really manifest itself.
Speaker: Yes, yes, absolutely. i mean, there was a writer just yesterday who I'd rejected basically the same story twice. And he, you know, he was at a low point. He was like, what? I don't understand. What do I need? What do I need to do? And I was like, look, you just don't have it yet. And I probably should have given Matt as an example because like yeah sometimes you're gathering string for a long time I think Nick Davidson is a great example of this too who i who I've worked with twice now i know he's been on on the pod um but he you know that guy will gather string for years and maybe I'm sure he's doing it on ideas that will never pan out but
Speaker: If a few of them do, you know, and and they sort of resonate with people or they pick up an award or they get optioned or whatever it is, that's the kind of thing that starts to like make a career for yourself.
Speaker: Yeah, I think a lot of people, and i'm I'm guilty of this too, and probably a lot of even mid-career people or people even deem themselves somewhat seasoned, kind of, um I don't know, what's the word, i maybe discount the this notion of that oftentimes you've got to save string on a lot of different things for a long time. And some of them are not going to pan out. Most of them won't. But the the fact of the matter is yeah sometimes one is going to keep giving itself to you and you you have to kind of see a few things through and then just be really patient with them for a long time. yeah The person who you've yeah had to turn away twice.
Speaker: I suspect that maybe he's got all his eggs in that one basket and it's driving him insane. And I'm just presuming, ah but maybe he does. And that's why it's so frustrating. is But it's like you need to have like a diversified portfolio of story ideas and, yeah, save string on a lot.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, i remember in a fiction writing workshop when I was in college, a a professor ah told me or told the whole class, she was like, look, batting, like the best batting averages in the like in history are like 30% of hits, you know, like that's incredible. If you're hitting the ball 30% of the time, you are, you are doing, you're like an all-star.
Speaker: So like it's so you don't have to put pressure on yourself for every idea to pan out for every sentence to be good. What you're doing is you're looking for a cumulative effect. You're just going at it again and again and again so that.
Speaker: ah by repetition enough good things happen that all of a sudden you've got the good idea or the good story. Yeah, I love how you bring up a batting average in baseball. And we we assume because we know that number of if you're a 300 hitter in baseball, you're a 70% failure, but you're also going to be a Hall of Famer if you keep that up. I don't know what the number is for pitches or like yeah for landing stories. But if you know if for me it's 20% or we know that it's like maybe 20% of your pitches are landing, it it can go up higher if you have a relationship, of course, and you have a better understanding. But let's just say like cold pitches, I think you're doing OK.
Speaker: But when people don't know the batting average, it just feels like total failure. But if you know that in baseball, yes, like 30 percent success rate is successful, then, you know, like, oh, you you have a benchmark to measure yourself against. But when you lack that benchmark, it feels like total failure and so frustrating, like you're just spinning your tires in the mud the whole time.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Well, in this frustrated writer, I told him, i was like, dude, I have rejected like 35 ideas this week. This was like on when maybe Wednesday or early yesterday morning. And I have like 10 more in my inbox right now. You know, like and I didn't assign, i I think I'll assign one of them, you know, like one of them seems promising enough that I think it might get assigned if Sabred also reads it and thinks it's great, you know, but like, that's like, we're talking, we're talking like sub 5% on this stuff, you know, like just, it's going to take time.
Speaker: and there are, you know, a lot of those look are just bad or like AI pitches are driving me crazy. You know, probably, probably 10 to 20 of them were just pure AI. um But, you know, the odds are still, they're pretty low and you just got to keep working at it.
Speaker: Yeah, it's frustrating as it is. Oh, my God, truly. And um yeah, and just yeah and kind of pulling it back to Matt just a little bit with this story. As you know, I always love just getting a sense of your side of the table and what were maybe some unique challenges that you had to present to Matt to make the story its best possible version. you know, what were some yeah ah little little potholes in the world that you were looking to pave over?
Speaker: Yeah, well, the draft, when I first got it, there was much more, i think there was just a lot more Matt in it. You know, there was there was like a whole scene with Matt meeting this guy's extended family um and his children and ex-wife and everything and like going to this cafe. You can talk to him about the cafe because he met him at this cafe at Viena where the main character, Gabriel, had had taken his children when they were young.
Speaker: And then, like, after the after the heist, one of the characters goes past it or maybe they drive past it on the way to the heist. I forget exactly. But it was this whole thing, you know. um And Matt, I think, really wanted – he really liked it. And he just wanted it. it it And just every round, I kept trimming a little more. I think initially I cut, like, maybe all of it. The cafe was just gone. And then he told me, hey, this actually this is important. And so he put some more back in. And then every round, I just, like – take another half sentence out and just try to get it really lean. So there was that. There was also this helper syndrome that both of these characters sort of identify as having where they just fit this compulsive need to do good deeds for others.
Speaker: You know, there was more about that in the story. It was sort of more of an emphasis because the story had been assigned elsewhere, which you can talk to Matt about. But, um, you know So another editor had actually like done some work on it and sort of beefed this thing up that I then you know just like na just kept cutting away at it until until it was at a point where I was happy with it. But that Matt was was pretty okay with. um Really, i like at the end of this, I told Matt, this was about as smooth an editing process as we've had, um which is always always nice.
Speaker: Nice. Oh, cool. It's always great getting your your side of the table. And we got to really get into some ah yeah hit some of the intricacies of pitches and rejection and why things don't work. And the fundamental of like, yeah, we got to save a lot of string and a lot of stories it for sometimes a depressingly long time for them to bear fruit, if they bear fruit at all. So it helps to hear that, as sometimes depressing as that Yeah. especially early on, you're like so frustrated. You're like, you're just desperate for traction and you're like, I don't want to wait five years for the story to maybe work. But unfortunately that's kind of the case.
Speaker: Yeah. And I think the story will be better for it, you know, for having spent that much time with it. Really the best stories I think are always the ones that the writer has spent the most time with. Yeah. Oh man. And just learning that patience is, that's a skill unto itself. It's so hard. It's so hard to Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Very nice. Well, Jonah, man, thank you so much for for your insights and everything. And we'll go hear from Matt again in ah in a couple in a couple minutes. All right. Thanks, Brendan. Appreciate it.
Speaker: Yes. All right. So Matthew Wolfe has written for the Atavist on three separate occasions. And he's also the author of Fires in the Night about the Earth Liberation Front. And that's a live podcast recording you can go back and listen to recorded at Eugene Hodgepodge Books and Taps.
Speaker: Matthew's work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The Atlantic, National Geographic, among others. In this conversation, we talk about his love of the baffler, Harper's, and the New Yorker, where his path and ambitions lie, balancing fun, meaning, and value in a story, the almost-working stories that don't, stories that sit in the notebook for years, like this one.
Speaker: periods of spring cleaning, missing the sprawl of book writing, and when a reporter can add commentary to her story. Good, good stuff. And a quick parting shot again about something I'm eager to add as a cool extension of the podcast.
Speaker: Brendan might be learning a new skill, and it could be so lucrative. So lucrative, like drilling for oil. yeah Here's Matt.
Speaker: You're a couple months into the rollout of Fires in the Night. how How's that been going? What's the experience been like so far? So it's been both gratifying and frustrating. i mean, that the folks of the feedback I've gotten from from folks has been by and large, from both folks in the book and and folks...
Speaker: out of the, ah and who have read it, I've been ah been't really lucky as far as it's mostly been positive. Some people who have been involved in the book have pointed out, you know, errors or things I got wrong here and there, which i I'm endeavoring to correct in the and the paperback.
Speaker: ah but But by and large have been supportive or or, you know, have, I think, generally approved my depiction of them in the in the book, for which i'm I'm enormously grateful. And then folks who read the book have seemed to to to like it.
Speaker: It's been sales and nonfiction in general are just terrible right now. And it's rough. It's hard to, it's it's hard to break through. and it's, so it's been, sales wise, it's been, it's been a slow burn, which I'm hoping will continue. But it's, but yeah I mean, I think i I feel grateful to even get to publish a book at this point and talk about it. So I'm um yeah trying to take it in a and a larger, a larger holistic picture.
Speaker: Oh, for sure. Yeah, I hear you with that. Yeah, the similarly with the front runner was yeah a bit yeah sluggish as well. So it's been ah yeah categorically like that across, I think, all nonfiction and yeah To my editor's credit, yeah he wasn't so concerned with it shooting up bestseller lists because he just sees the book as like it being the kind of book that people 20 years from now will buy on Prefontaine. So he's like, we kind of see it as a slow burn book for kind of its entire life, which is all well and good. But sometimes that slow burn book doesn't exactly like...
Speaker: uh let's say like a fire fire up the publisher for like the next book you want to get off the ground because you want to be able to show them robust numbers so that you're a bankable commodity in which it doesn't it doesn't have quite the visceral thrills of of it come with with something that has gone viral on tiktok or that you know uh Anthony Jeselnik is slogging. Yeah, it's not. i get you. it's it's ah It requires a ah certain degree of of patience and maturity that most writers just don't have. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker: exactly included yeah I know. Yeah, the the patience and yeah and the the the maturity to to go along with it and to play that long game, especially when the game doesn't, I don't know, that at mid-age, at middle age, it's like, i don't have that much time left. I think I'm over the hump. I think I might have 40 years left if I'm lucky. And it's like, how many more books are in a 40-year career if I'm just working till the death knell?
Speaker: yes it does it is a motivation to to crank those things out quicker. just in yeah it's its you certainly feel field time visceral in a way that's not true of one's twenty s for sure you know I was also thinking of i took noodling around, um thinking of subscribing to Mountain Gazette, you know this kind of print-only thing. They come out twice a year. It's kind of a spendy subscription, but it looks like it just it's a beautiful-looking magazine, large format. and um This has a point. and I was just ah bringing bringing that up because it it seems like the kind of place I'd like to write for. It looks beautiful. You kind of want to support that kind of thing. and um
Speaker: and Just for you, Matt, like what are some magazine subscriptions that you like are like religious for you? you just like you need them and ah you subscribe to them and you yeah and love them year after year.
Speaker: Man, i mean, so i have i think I've long been a my I read The New Yorker before i read you know, any any real literary nonfiction books. And that's been sort of year in, year out for me, um even when I get frustrated with it. Or i I think if you love something enough, you get mad at sometimes. yeah And I think that's that's always been there. um I read a lot of the, but I still love The Baffler.
Speaker: I read The Baffler and started in college and it's old Thomas Frank instantiation. And it was just so sharp and had some, you know, it was primarily a journal of leftist cultural analysis, but they had some really sharp, funny reporting in there.
Speaker: um N plus one still will throw out something great that nobody else will will publish. And honestly, Harper's is kind of killing it right now. Harper's has been really like doing just, I think this partly speaks to the, the,
Speaker: dearth of of places that are willing to publish, you know, for money, you know, long essayistic ah reportage. and And Harper's has been putting out some really, really killer pieces recently that I sort of can't imagine running anywhere else.
Speaker: And the photography has been great too. So shout out shout out to Harper's for for, you know, after... a century of existence, really, really doing wonderful work.
Speaker: Yeah, what are some goal publications that you have that you're aiming for? and I don't know. I sort of, I think of this, but I mean, I feel like i was, you know, I'm working on a working on a project with a friend right now, and he was a photographer, and and, you know, I was talking about it in publications, and there were sort of some that were more prestigious than others, it was really about, like, what's the one that will allow allow us to do, you know, to work together and to do the best job possible?
Speaker: you know I think there's the in some ways the money is so, for for even the the top ranked magazines right now, is is still pretty humble. I mean, there's a real difference between $2 a word and 25 cents a word. And it's not to you know say that ah getting getting paid the the glossy rates doesn't doesn't matter. I think it really does. It allows people to survive. It allows people to do the work.
Speaker: But at this point, you know, I'm i'm lucky enough to have an income from academic work um that allows me a certain measure of of freedom as far as where where the difference between, you know, $1 and $2 is not going to absolutely kill me. So i'm i'm really trying to write for places that are doing, you know, I think are are editorially doing interesting work right now or are open to it.
Speaker: I have Seth Wickersham's new collection of sports writing that just came out. Yeah, he's he's just so great. He's one of like a great guy and a great writer. I look at that like if I were to rewind the clock, you know, in my ambitions, let's say 25 years ago, we're to kind of be doing that kind of work. And it just hasn't happened for me in that way. And which isn't to say it was ever possible, but that was what where my ambitions lied. And, um you know, things have happened in the course of the years that my path has been altogether different than what I had imagined it. Point of this being, I wonder just for you, Matt, like what was maybe, you know, your ambitions early on and how is, have you come to embrace the path you're currently on? Sure.
Speaker: It's a day by day, sometimes hour by hour chore. ah i mean i always i mean, I've been very lucky in that I you know i think for a while now I really wanted to sort of write long form and and write it you know write narrative long form. And i have been getting to do that or getting you know getting stories and and accepted and getting the enormous privilege of publishing a book.
Speaker: I think the thing I struggle with right now is sort of both being able to, the question about, you know, whether there's any sustainable way of doing that for very long. And then, you know, I think you work in a form for a little bit and you get more ambitious. And I think that you begin to, you think if you, if you feel confident about doing something and you, you begin to sort of figure out like, how do you hopefully, like, how do you, how do you make it better? How do you make it bigger? How do you make it weirder? How do you sustain the kind of interest that that came so easily when you were, you know, in your mid twenties or just starting out and you were very sort of, you know,
Speaker: pumped with wonder. I, and I, so I was, you know, I'm thinking about future projects. I think the thing for me is both, you know, financial question about how do you allow that? How do you, you know, create in in the worst climate ever to be doing this?
Speaker: How do you create a structure that allows you to make the work? And then how do you make the work? You know, how do you make it fun or how do you make it meaningful? Or how do you balance, you know, fun and meaning and value and, and, and, and money?
Speaker: when when you're in this particular area because you can make a lot of choices. Like I had somebody, you know, you can do a story just for money or you can do a story that you know is not going to get paid for anything. And hopefully it's it's you know meaningful in a literary sense or then there's one that you feel like is a real public service.
Speaker: and I feel like being doing journalism is constantly having to make those choices, particularly if you're doing it as a freelancer. That's hard. It's just like I guess you have to develop a certain remove from it emotionally.
Speaker: Well, and to that point of being able to write those kind of ah yeah ah fun stories, weird stories, compelling stories of what you've been able to do for the Atavis now for the for three times. ah like or Or why do you think your your pitches for them over the years have been successful?
Speaker: You know, i think it's, you know, a lot of luck as far as you just find something that works and that you're interested in. i think for me, it really, it it comes down to structure.
Speaker: It also comes down to a little bit, and there are a lot of stories that I come across that almost work or that don't quite work. And early in my career, I think I'd try and, you know, chase stories that that or force them into force them to fit or force them to um be a story when they don't actually work as a story, when there's something just narratively that that doesn't click or there's some the the sort of,
Speaker: themes or or or subject matter that they're underlining don't, aren they aren't really quite, they don't quite match up with each other. there are a million ways that, as as you know from your work, i mean, there are a million ways that stories can just not quite do what you want them to do.
Speaker: And i think I've become more judicious about, or or or maybe more ruthless is a better term, about understanding when a story doesn't work or when it can't when it can't work. and And then moving on to something else or understanding that as much as might be interested in something or as much as there might be a real sort of gut level pull about it, like ah so i can't I can't bend reality to make the story do what I want to do.
Speaker: So the stories I've sent to the out of us have been ones that sometimes take a while or sit in the notebook for for years um until like until they get to a point where they can they can work or I feel like I can i can take them on.
Speaker: and And that might not be an immediate thing. Well, yeah, that that understanding of when a story doesn't work is so ah foundational to um you have to have so many different ideas for maybe one to really strike lightning. And I wonder for you just what's been your experience of maybe a painful experience of a story you just you wanted to work so bad, but just didn't.
Speaker: Man, i mean, so like ah there sometimes it would be like a, I'll give you a really specific example. There's a guy who got, and i maybe i can so it maybe I can still make this story work, but there was a guy who was, when I was doing work, reading about the ELF and reading about radical environmentalism,
Speaker: There was a guy who was wanted by the FBI from a number of years ago for for setting off some pipe bombs in front of an animal testing facility.
Speaker: And fled the country, and the FBI looked at him like looked for him for like 20 years. I was interested in part because he went to my local high school. and I grew up in Marin County, and he went a high school that was you know a few miles from me, and I i think his upbringing was probably and broad strokes not that...
Speaker: similar from mine, but he ended up getting very hard into animal rights activism. And they ended up catching him a couple of years ago. And I was fascinated by the idea of sort of somebody being on the run from the feds for 20 years and how you live that kind of double life. I mean, there have been a few good few fugitive stories, but I haven't seen one particularly in the kind of like with the service surveillance state we had now.
Speaker: And I i really want it to work. And i I was thinking about like, how can I actually, know, get this, get this thing to, to how can I animate it? And that means how can I get like a three act story out of it? How do I get, you know, something that's where there's the kind of granular detail that you,
Speaker: need and then how do you have it so that it feels contemporary or that there's some kind of, crudely speaking, just kind of some kind of nut graph that that you know an editor can see and and can get over the hump and they can justify saying, like okay, this runs now because here's the thing that we're interested in talking about.
Speaker: And i just haven't been able to sort of get enough on him. Like it's something where I can't get an interview with him. I can't sort of figure out enough about his life. It's just texturally, it is not there at the moment.
Speaker: And I probably won't ever sort of get it there. I think it's it's a situation, but it's something where there just isn't enough information fodder As fascinated as I am by it, as much as I sort of imagined the story looking a particular way, i just don't have enough information.
Speaker: And that was actually very true, the out of this story that we're we're going to talk about, where this sat in the notebook for about 12 years. yeah And then it started as as a story that I read about, as ah um like a a short story in like the Daily Mail of all places.
Speaker: And it was one where, you know, a 500 word Daily Mail story and I got super interested in it but I just didn't have enough information to make it into a story for about a decade.
Speaker: Yeah, that's wild. And I yeah had written down you just a long time in my notebook because I know in reading the the bleeding heart story for the Atavists, your correspondence going back with the central figures is like, yeah, to your point, 12 years, like 2014. And that's a long time to be sitting with a story. And it got me thinking, i'm like oh my God, like Matt's been just like gestating this thing for a long, long time. Yeah, no, an embarrassingly long amount of time. So, I mean, that this this partly happened because, so the the story in broad terms is about a ah a guy named Gabriel, who was a former police officer, a very highly trained one, and Vienna, Austria. And he was a ah sort of squad leader in in Vienna, the fiona Viennese police department's equivalent of like a SWAT team. So he was, he was you know, very good what he did.
Speaker: And he ended up um getting obsessed with the idea of starting an orphanage in in Africa um and and ended up committing a multi-million euro heist of an armored car ah run by the the security company Loomis to try and make this thing happen. So it was a kind of Robin Hood story.
Speaker: and And that was about as much information as I had when I, in you know sometime in, I i guess, early 2014, I read about this. This heist something happened in ah in a story the Daily Mail, which had cribbed something from a a story, a very short story published in The Guardian, which had and ah presumably cribbed something from Viennese daily newspaper.
Speaker: And the problem with this, but I thought this was fascinating. mean, it's sort of in the same way that the ELF story or book read was about you know committing yeah a kind of altruistic crime. This was very similar with somebody who was taking their beliefs to a a logical endpoint that necessitated that they They break the law to to help people.
Speaker: And i i was totally interested in this. The problem was that Austria has some of the most restrictive privacy laws in the world with regards to journalists. Like in in Austrian courts, there's no transcript that's taken or publicly available.
Speaker: um Investigative documents or court documents are not you know available to journalists. Journalists aren't even allowed to kind of print the last name of people who are involved, either defendants or or victims.
Speaker: So it meant that i I was really curious about this, but I had absolutely no paper trail or nothing, no none of the kind of meaty documents that you that you can get in the United States with with relative ease, where all the stuff that sort of provides the the grist of which you make an article. And that just was not available to me. And it was enormously frustrating.
Speaker: So how did you initially make the contact with your, with your central figures to start unspooling this? i wrote a couple things. have I think I wrote a, um, uh, I'm sure horrifically translated into German letter to, to Gabriel, who was at at that point incarcerated a, in a Viennese jail. And i I wrote him and said like, look, I, I've write about the story. I'd really like to write about it.
Speaker: And i think he, he, as it happened, my, my wife was, had to go to Vienna anyway, um, for a year a film she was working on was in the, the Biennale, the big Viennese film festival. And so I, had by sheer miraculous coincidence, uh, opportunity to,
Speaker: visit Vienna. And I i ended up, Gabriel wrote back and said, yeah, you can come talk to me. So I went and met him in this, in jail. And he agreed to, you know, talk to, I think the, after some negotiation, I was given, i think a half hour to speak with him.
Speaker: The, the um you the, the, as I mentioned, the article, Austrians are, to use a gross generalization, rule followers. And my arrival at the at the prison was, I think the the warden of the jail even described it as an unusual event and required you know flipping through a sort of rule book about what was what was allowed or or whether my presence was okay or things like that. And they eventually gave me a sort of half hour to talk to him, which was enough to get more of the story, but but not much more. And it was also, there was no way of, it was very difficult to kind of confirm what he was saying. So something where it was enough for me to sort of say like, okay, this is really worth pursuing. Like there's enough here that it's it's genuinely interesting and and there's a lot of detailed of mine and there's a lot of kind of questions to ask and it's going to hold my interest, but I just don't have enough to to to do anything with it at this point. So that was kind of the first step of just sort of justifying this as like, I really want to do this and it could in theory work as a story.
Speaker: Yeah. So what was next steps as you were, yeah, after that first meeting? So I wrote, I wrote the same time when I was in Vienna, miraculously, and I can't remember exactly how this got arranged. I was, I talked to Gabriel's ex-wife um and, and his, his two of his children who I met at a, at a very swanky Viennese coffee house. um The, the,
Speaker: Viennese have ah a wonderful um tradition of coffeehouses as places of intellectual debate and conversation, you know going back to like Klimt and and Freud. So i met it was very sort of high church in there. And it was a place that Gabriel used to actually go on weekends with his children. and so they were willing to discuss a little bit more of the case. But it was a situation where I just sort of had to put it on hold for a while. I had occasion again to visit to sort of pass near um Austria again over the next five, seven years. And I would dip in and see Gabriel once when he was in a different prison, another time when he'd just gotten out and had the little like electronic ankle monitor. it was still the The state was still sort of keeping tabs on him. was able to get sort of more of a story.
Speaker: But it was a frustrating situation and that, again, I didn't really have any way of kind of verifying what he was saying. And I still hadn't been able to find his colleague, Tamara, who was ah ah was not able to reach in prison or did not respond to to letters and who i I took a far longer time to get in touch with. I think I finally ended up speaking with her when she was you know well out of prison in 2022.
Speaker: And so it was situation where i knew I needed an interview with him. I knew I needed an interview with with Tamara. And I also knew I needed some kind of like investigative documents or something to kind of corroborate these things.
Speaker: So i by 2022, I think I had two i two out of the three of those things. So I still couldn't publish, but I was getting there. And it was getting sort of my my notebook on this case was um story was getting getting thicker and and more enticing Well, it's my understanding, too, from talking with Jonah that the piece was assigned elsewhere. Is is that true?
Speaker: Yeah, I pitch this around a lot. This was something where i I was trying to get sort of over the years. I'd sort of reach out to a number of people. the Problem was, it was it was something that had been. um it did not have that kind of nut graph of can can of contemporary interests that you need for most magazine pieces. It was something where I thought it was, you know, again, I think editors were like, this is a really good story, but sort of why now? Or what is the, how would we describe this? Or what sort of larger theme does this speak to? And I hazard it as you do in magazine pieces, sort of different kinds of,
Speaker: attempt i've tried different I tried to hack out some kind of attempt at saying like why this mattered, whether it was a global inequality or or or immigration or or or several things, none of which were very good and none of which really worked.
Speaker: I eventually got it to ah ah to a publication that was really interested, and then and I switched editors, and the the former editor left, and the new editor was not as not quite as into it. and so But the out of us being the lovely folks that they are, the fact that this thing had happened...
Speaker: you know This event had happened 12 years before, didn't phase them. They sort of understood it as ah a story with universal themes and that by that time sort of worked as ah as a three-act story. So they were they were really quite quite wonderful about you treating the story with great care and and proving it in any number of ways and tightening it in some areas and expanding it in others and and um jonah sayward are in general just terrific story editors so i was i was ah after a long bout of an unhousedness it was it was finally given a finally given a home
Speaker: Yeah, and what struck me about the story is how lean the ensemble is. you know You're basically just with two characters the entire time instead of you know several, which a lot of Atavis stories tend to have a lot of moving parts. But this is like really lean on these two people. So what were the challenges in yeah and having such an expansive story that follows really just two people primarily?
Speaker: Yeah, man, I'd never written like a good solid like two-hander before. Like that was that was new. um and it's hard because I think that the foremost challenge is that some they disagree about stuff.
Speaker: And there was some stuff where particularly about sort of whose idea it was to do the the robbery. They fully disagreed. Gabriel said that it was Tamara's idea and that or that he had sort of joked about it and then she really pushed him to do it.
Speaker: And Tamara said that it was Gabriel's idea and that he had come to her and and said, okay, I'm doing this thing. If you want in, you you can you can join. But um if not, you know we won't talk about it any further. And she in her rendering of it, she she you know thought about it a little bit and then agreed. So two sort of diametrically opposed...
Speaker: versions of this event, which i resolved actually by just sort of writing in in there like they totally disagree. And that was interesting. There was this sort of, there was a, ah gave it a little bit of ah a Rashomon quality and and that, you know, there's no sort of authoritative rendition of of truth. It's sort of like both of these are are possibilities of what might might have happened and you as the reader kind of can, you hold on to both of them and and do what you will with them.
Speaker: um But yeah, I mean, the fact that it wasn't, it was very sort of tight in that regard. That was, that was new for me as well. I hadn't done that before. And then talking with Jonah too, he's like, you might want to ask Matt about the cafe in Vienna. He's like, so i'll I'll let you run with that. it was something where it was like, this is very this was very astute of Jonah. i had I don't usually use first person very often, but in introducing it, i I really felt like you needed to get us to Vienna. I needed to sort of explain what I was doing there. So we have this kind of introductory, this kind of cold open where we sort of see the heist.
Speaker: And then it jumps to a a discussion of this sort of open question about why did Gabriel do this thing? And and again, you know posing this particularly unusual thing to do in Austria, a country that where there's enormous respect for rules, and Gabriel was a police officer, so enforcer of rules in a rural-bound country.
Speaker: And I felt that for some reason the the jump to Austria would be sort of too abrupt. And we really needed to have me sort of introduce us to the meeting the the family and sort of getting us in there and sort of setting setting us in this, you know, old world cafe that was, you know, very Viennese and do a little bit of sort place making there.
Speaker: And Jonah was like, no, you don't need to do that. And I was i pushed back a little bit. i was like, no, no, no, no. It'll be too, you have to sort of you know get the get the reader in there. You've got to you've got to transition a little bit. you've got to it's Otherwise, it's it's not going to work. It's going to feel abrupt. He was like, no, it won't.
Speaker: It's fine. And he was right. it's I think it's fine. It's it's something, i think there was a good illustration of one of those things where you convince yourself that you need a thing that you just don't actually don't actually need. That's all in your head. it was a very very judicious bit of emendation by Jonah there.
Speaker: I've ah never had the the joy of, and I do mean joy, of being edited by Jonah, but my understanding is he's, in my conversations with him, is he's very good at economy and gutting scenes that just make things sag. Yeah.
Speaker: For a very sweet-natured man, he's an absolute executioner. Like, it's just... Just there is blood on the page, man. he but But he's, yeah you know, and I think in and the two the few stories I've done with him, I mean, he's, I think, 95% of the time, I've i've usually agreed with him. There have been a few times where I've, you know, poked something back in there, really felt it was necessary for for logic reasons or to, you know, carry a story or just some sort of detail. was unwilling to let go. But yeah, generally, he's he's very economic and very smart about that.
Speaker: Yeah. And it kind of hearkening back to earlier in our conversation about yeah understanding you know when a story works or doesn't work and spending enough time with it to make that judgment. At what point did you know with Gabrielle and Tamara that?
Speaker: Yes, you did have enough to pursue it whole hog. So somebody finally gave me court documents or not court documents, but investigative documents that um offered a sort of independent account of what had happened that sort of talked about the crime and that offered you ah some some accounts that from investigators and from witnesses and from Tamara and Gabrielle themselves. And i think it's it would have been possible to maybe publish based on just their accounts, but I just wasn't comfortable with it. There were sort of too many unknowns for me about, you know, given the fungibility of memory and the fact that, you know, there were things that they both really disagreed about.
Speaker: I really wanted some kind of independent... to to a degree, you know, set of some some way of verifying some of what they'd said. So i it was when I got that, I was I knew that I i could publish at some point. And I was sort of when I when I got slightly less busy, I decided just get this out the door. i think we all have periods of spring cleaning and and that was exactly what this was this was something where i really just wanted to to i was like i've sat with this enough i can i can even though if there's no time pressure here i just want it i just want done with and i just want to have it have it not be something that's that's nagging at the edge of my psyche anymore yeah well what was the the process by which you finally were able to procure these documents
Speaker: That I can't say, but I, it was, since the Austrian privacy laws are very strict, so I don't want to get anybody in trouble. um It's, it's, i' I'm, I'm not sure. I'm genuinely not sure whether I was, whether it was okay for them to to give it to me or not. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna, without consulting and an Austrian attorney, I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep that one on on. the quiet absolutely well that's the that's the thing too um however they came into your possession that's one of those things where i know just through my conversation with say word and jonah about the pitches that they green light it's like access to the people that you say you are going to write about but also getting documents those are things like
Speaker: light them up in a way that it's like, okay, this is a serious writer, serious reporter who's got the juice, who has the material the raw material. It's like, okay, we can make a story from this.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, I think documents are, court I love reading. i love Pacer. I love reading dry court filings, because there's always such there's, say always, there's often such richness in there, often cloaked in, or, you know, stylized and in very, you know,
Speaker: formal, arid prose, ah but you you can pull so much from from court filings or from investigative documents and you know the the sort of ancillary details that are not at all the purpose of what they're what the person writing them is is usually trying to do.
Speaker: are sort of what, for me, what sort of make a story, like these these little factual details. And the the term the job for you is to figure out how to deploy them or figure out which ones sort of tell in a way that's that that furthers your aims. And I'm i'm man happiest when I've got a, well, not happiest, I've got a...
Speaker: I've got a lovely a lovely daughter. So let's say I'm happiest when I have a large stack of of documents on my desk. Let's say professionally happiest um when I've got a large stack of documents on my desk I can kind of dig through and and sift for gold from.
Speaker: the Getting a sense of you know having come off writing Fires in the Night and then being able to give this story altitude. just What's the experience been like for you to like come out of book writing and then kind of back into narrative magazine writing?
Speaker: i don't I sort of miss books a little bit. Like I love narrative magazine writing, but there's something, i miss the sprawl of books. So i I think narrative journalism is its own wonderful form, but there is something about being able to, um and you know there's been plenty of of experimental things you can do and and 5,000 non-fictional words.
Speaker: But i I really do, there are there are such limitations to to the form. i'm I miss out a little bit having a bigger ah bigger canvas to to explore things with or to take you takee take wider, weirder detours and then come back.
Speaker: I think for an out of a story, I think, and i this is not a bad thing at all. I think it's quite necessary, but it's really about, you know, there's not a lot of room to to move the reader away from from the central line of action. You're really, yeah you can, you know, you can have a few paragraphs here and there of exposition or you can have a little bit of a wind up towards something but you're really trying to you know keep them going and and and not lose them and that's its own skill and that's its own really can be a really difficult thing to do but um I think i'm I'm sort of talking about the beginning of the conversation I'm kind of interested in thinking about like how do you retain that that hopefully the the interest of a reader while also
Speaker: going go taking them into stranger places or figuring out things with with language or form that are are are a little unexpected. I think that's what makes ah The Atavist such a great place, almost as ah a way to stress test an idea or a story for like something bigger, like like a book, because they are so yeah they are so tethered to that strong central line, as you as you say. like When the material is like, oh, I have so much more to go on. like This is great, but I have so much more. and then you see the reaction of it, and you see if you can...
Speaker: personally sustain the reporting and research endurance to see something bigger through. But it is a great way to, yeah, like stress test a story. Totally. Yeah. I think it's something where it's,
Speaker: I think I've been talking to a few people after the book came out and they've had projects that they're they're considering and I've really encouraged them to start seeing if something will work as ah as a magazine piece and it's sort of both as a way of kind of getting you to you know dig into the material and organize it but also yeah as you said you say for like is this you can be totally fascinated for something for a fascination that that endures for, you know, 6,000 words, or you can be fascinated for something that's not, you know, 120,000 words. And I think if you do the 6,000 words, you're going to have a pretty good clue about whether this is something you're going to want to live with for a much longer period of time.
Speaker: So I totally agree with you. Yeah. And I always love getting a sense of, you know, just the the hiccups or potholes along the way and crafting a story of this nature, things that stumped you or just frustrated you and then or just gave you pause. And you still had to, of course, work through it, be it in dialogue with Jonah or just hitting your head against the wall. So just for you, what were some experience? What was your experience, you know, with those little struggles with the story?
Speaker: You know, I always suck at saying what a story is about, like in in a very direct way. like And it's something where i I will tend to think in terms of you know themes or or things it brings up that I care about or um you and whether a story sort of, reuse a verb, like carries for and and can carry a reader for a particular purpose.
Speaker: length of time, but I have a very hard time sort of, and some people are really quite adept at this, sort of synthesizing and saying like, ah, this story's about X. And I suck at that. And I i really do sort of like the New Yorker has a kind of sneaky thing they do in a lot of stories where they will sort of get the sort of import of the story up front, like in in traditional magazine pieces.
Speaker: But a lot of the time they won't let a writer really sort of comment on it till the end. Like you have to go through like about 6,000 words. And then the last section or so, they'll sort of let a let a reporter say, you know, here's what this might mean or here's kind of what I think about it when the reporter's largely been in the background for a really long time. And I really like that. i really like having to kind of earn both in sort of that the reader and you are now kind of maybe on the same page about about things, but also there's a sense that you sort of have to earn
Speaker: the ability to talk about something as opposed to a different mode of writing where you just sort of say up front, like, here's what i think. and And, you know, here are my feelings. And, yeah this is going to be, you know, hostage to my subjectivity.
Speaker: not that Not that all reporting isn't, but, but i yeah. So i I really had a hard time sort of phrasing that at the end and sort of saying, like, here's what we're supposed to sort of think about this. I never quite got it to where I wanted to wanted it to be.
Speaker: But it's it's there's there are a couple of paragraphs there where I at least sort of try and say, like, here's maybe how one thinks about this. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a a good way of doing it, like waiting to the end. So the reader has a relationship to the piece and the reporter and the writer ah over the course of it and whether they're going to maybe agree with that summation at the end. That's up to them. but it's kind of like you've now earned their attention to then imbue your meaning on it. And that can fundamentally change what they just read, or maybe it it will reinforce what they just read. But either way, I think it's a good, that that's like a good course of action, I think.
Speaker: No, totally. It's, it's um I don't, there was reading not that long ago, the Rachel Aviv piece about Alice Sable. Do you know, do you know that? Are you familiar with that piece? It's about where she,
Speaker: Accused somebody of her rape that she learned later she was was not her rapist. you know Do you know this piece? I know the story. I haven't read it, but i know i know you're referring to, but I don't know the context around it. So yeah, keep running. All I'll say is it's just like you know like most most of her work. i mean, it's fantastic, but there's something she does at the end where she sort of offers a little commentary on sort of why Sable what sable did this and and how it fits into the um mandate of rape victims to narrativize their trauma that I thought was so good. And it's like two lines. And it's just sort of, again, it's that it's that New Yorker thing of being like, we're going to lay out this whole story for you, and then we're just going to get a little bit of commentary, a little bit of analysis that...
Speaker: may have not been present in the reporting. it wass just I just, you know, hats off to hats off to her for that. um But again, as you say, it's one of those things where it can sort of make you look back at like any good kind of twist ending, look back at what you've seen and before and be like, Oh, okay.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. So i think we're all on seeking that. And similarly, ah my my favorite ah kicker of all time is ah David Foster Wallace's essay on Michael Joyce about being like the 100th best tennis player in the world. And he just builds this whole thing about how futile that is. As good as you are, as great as you are, you are. The cards are so stacked against you that you will never really break in to that elite class of major winning players.
Speaker: tennis players and at the very end it's just the a three syllable three word sentence that just says wish him well and you just know and in those three words you've you sense the futility like you can wish him well it's not going to end well for him and it's just it's so perfect and so so terse when you don't expect terse-ness from wallace it's it is pure it is so pitch perfect perfection in my opinion that is that is a perfect distillation of midwestern fatalism isn't it like it's so good i've read that essay but i forgot about that i kick that's that is terrific i read it frequently because it is it is so it is such it's one of his best pieces if not maybe his best and uh for that i return to over and over again for for what you come to expect from ah a wallace essay just really kind of funny and
Speaker: ah The way he describes tennis is probably his best writing is his tennis writing. And yeah, the way he sums it up at the very end of this mammoth essay and someone that we associate with verbosity and virtuosity to end it with three syllables. It's like, oh, wow, that just cuts against the grain that we know about him.
Speaker: You would not you would not pick that out as a as a Wallace line at all. Yeah. From context. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Well, well, Matt, it's a atavistic in conversations, again, tend to be a little bit shorter. Uh, so I'll bring this conversation down for a landing and, uh, I know you've been studying hard for, for your recommendation. So I'll just extend that to you, uh, what you would recommend to our listeners out there.
Speaker: I'm gonna, I'm gonna say that I've started digging into Mike Davis's corpus. Um, uh, the, the Marxists, um, public intellectual academic, and ah' he's now somebody I've read before, and he is terrific. And it was something where reading the back of the book, I started with City of Courts, and reading the back of it, I was kind of like,
Speaker: excavation of Los Angeles that's sort of mostly archival. I was like, I don't know about this. I think this should, from a Marxist historian, I guess, all right, ah that could be good, but I'm going to not make put this on the you know front of my to-read list and it's and it's phenomenal it's it's as good as everyone says um some people sort of in los angeles refer to that book as kind of the la's answer to to the power broker um in terms of its its ability to sort of define the the physical nature of a city and it's and it's it's really it's really good like it's really um quite good uh so
Speaker: he he He died not that long ago, and i'm I'm excited to to get more get into more of his work, but it's something that really does, is formerly adventurous besides being incredibly erudite and and and the prose is kind of rips, and i just have only nice things to say about it at this point. Maybe he wrote a clunker in there, but I haven't come across it yet. So shout out Mike Davis.
Speaker: Oh, fantastic. Well, Matt, it's so great that we got to talk again. And ah it's so great to yeah unpack how you went about ah your latest out of a story. And yeah, it's a it's a gripping, thrilling Robin Hood kind of story. It's ah it's great stuff that I've come to expect from you. So just thanks so much for the work you do and for coming back on the podcast.
Speaker: Thank you much so much for having me on once again, Brendan. I promise it'll be it'll be oh i i won't I won't trouble your doorstep again for a while, but it's very nice to be back.
Speaker: Yes! Awesome! How great was that? you got You got a full helping of Matthew Wolfe this past year. He was saying at first when we were booking, he's like, I understand that we've been doing this several times in the last year. If you don't want to have me on, I'm like, hey, listen, this listenership will be lucky to get to hear you three times in a year.
Speaker: And that's how it worked out. that And you know what? You're going to get Cassidy Randall again because she was just assigned a story for The Atavist. And hey, that's what we do here. We feature The Atavist writers. And it tells you everything you need to know about what they're doing at The Atavist, that they're getting repeat writers coming back. And those writers know a thing or two. And they're getting these stories commissioned because they're really good at what they do.
Speaker: All right. Follow the show on Instagram at creative nonfiction podcast. And of course, subscribe to pitch club at welcome to pitch club at substack.com over on the substacks.
Speaker: If you want to get better at selling stories, I would check it out.
Speaker: All right, so in a few days, I'm a meeting with ah a friend in town who's going to show me how to lay out a book, like a very basic book. The idea being here, drum roll please, and but is a paper podcast, which are these little individual chapbooks that are transcripts of a single podcast episode with wide margins so you can scribble alongside and mark them all up. I'm debating whether to add like maybe footnotes or my own marginalia that might be adding extra context or commentary from me that I didn't imbue into the actual audio itself. It's just a post-facto thing where I can scribble. Not even scribble, just like to do a little footnote or a marginalia. Whatever.
Speaker: The idea being you could purchase, say, for $10. Just throwing out a number. I don't know. That might be too pricey or it might be too low. I don't know. Episode 500 with John McPhee. And it would be this little booklet.
Speaker: You could tuck into your back pocket and you can highlight it and mark it up. Put it on your bookcase. Save it for later. It would be about like four by six in my mind, you know, give or take a half an inch. Yeah, maybe a little QR code on the back cover so you could go listen to the podcast again or maybe for the first time.
Speaker: But the idea being that you have an analog version of your favorite episodes that you can access without your phone and reference them and draw inspiration from them. And mark them up and make them your own.
Speaker: it might bring in some money for the show while offering you this really cool physical artifact, like a souvenir of a particular podcast. It might make for some cool Patreon perks too. Maybe that'll get people over the edge where they're like, oh, I got this cool physical thing and a sticker or something.
Speaker: I don't know. You won't have any distractions. Like, you even you know, when you're listening to a podcast on your phone and, yeah, whatever, you know, you're you're not always just listening to the thing. Like, right now, I bet you're doing something else.
Speaker: Even if you're not, like, doing dishes or walking the dog, you yeah you're probably scrolling. Yeah, I'm talking to you. I know. Don't think I don't know. Nothing else can possibly interfere with your experience with the paper podcast.
Speaker: I love the idea, but will it be feasible? Do I make a mock-up of every single episode or just the most famous ones? Do I make it solely on demand? I don't want to take a bath on this.
Speaker: And my time is already pretty pretty well ah splintered among many other projects. I just think it'd be really cool. And maybe that's reason enough.
Speaker: So stay wild, CNFers. And if you can't do interviews, see ya.
