"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 and follow her on Instagram megan-baxter

• 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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"I don't feel envy. I don't think. Maybe in some deeper and maybe even more troubling psychological level. I do feel competition with with people, competition over resources, trying to claim certain ideas, stake a claim to certain ideas before other people can, especially when you're working with the subject that's in the public sphere. You don't have any personal, any real wider claim to something than somebody else. It can be nerve wracking," says John O'Connor, author of The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster (Source Books).

John returns to talk about his first book, tackling the mythology of Bigfoot and the psyche of those who believe. He talks about writing with humor, making himself the butt of most jokes, and trafficking in a subculture that many — including John — are skeptical of.

Find more about him at johnmoconnor.com and follow him on Instagram @centerforhighenergymetaphysics.

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"I genuinely feel that those of us writing books need to remember that we are writing them simply because we feel the desperate need to write that particular thing. And unless I feel that way, I shouldn't be writing it because it's not for the financial benefit. It is not because it gives me more time to do things with other people. It doesn't matter how many books or lengthy features you write, it's all kind of a painful process. So you have to do it because you're really invested in the things that you are focused on," says Maggie Messitt, author of Newspaper and The Rainy Season.

Maggie is a professor and a journalist and an author. She's was the founding national director for Report for America and currently is the Norman Eberly professor of practice in journalism. 

Find more about her at maggiemessitt.com and follow her on Instagram @maggiemessitt.

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Will Bardenwerper grew up playing baseball and even was a member of his college team at Princeton. As a result, he has a great perspective to write about baseball as he does in Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America (Doubleday).

That soul, in this book, is partially under attack from private equity firms gobbling up and eradicating minor league baseball teams. It's just one of the many threads of Will's wonderful book.

Podcast Specific Substack at creativenonfictionpodcast.substrack.com.

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"Mythology can be really a dangerous thing, because  mythology feels like it can't be changed, or it's always been something," says Katie Goh, author of Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange (Tin House Books).

Katie Goh is a writer and editor based out of Edinburgh, Scotland. She’s also the author of the slim book “The End: Surviving the World through Imagined Disasters” about disaster movies. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Extra Teeth, and VICE. You can learn more about her at katiegoh.co.uk or follow her on IG @katie_goh. 

In this conversation we tackle:

• The love of being edited
• Having to selfish to be a writer
• Finding obsessions
• Issues of identity
• Style and voice
• And the trappings of mythology

Podcast Specific Substack at creativenonfictionpodcast.substrack.com.

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"You want to be able to nab the details, but then you also want to be able to tell the story of why this matters and who's harmed by this, and finding the harm is oftentimes the hardest part of investigative reporting," Miranda Green, an investigative reporter.

Her latest piece is for The Atavist Magazine titled "All That Glitters" about the seedy underbelly of diamond sales, crypto, and sports ticketing and the man at the center of it all.

In this conversation, we talk about:

• How she earns trust
• How she navigates background
• The structure of the piece
• Finding the harm in an investigative story
• And her routine (or lack of one)

Podcast Specific Substack at creativenonfictionpodcast.substrack.com.

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"We're sadistic motherf*ckers," says John Glionna, @johnglionna on the Instagrams.

John is a longtime journalist and author of No Friday Night Lights (Bison Books). He made a name for himself at the Los Angeles Times pursuing what would be called "Glionna stories," stories about invisible people who have rich lives all their own. 

In this episode we talk about

• The Glionna Story
• How John didn’t punch down in his writing
• Working with Glenn Stout on this book
• What he loves most about this kind of work
• And solving that thorny question of whether a story needs better writing or better reporting

Podcast Specific Substack at creativenonfictionpodcast.substrack.com.

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"It's kind of a mix of reporting to the very last minute to put off writing, and then when I have to write, having a panic attack, and then, like, booking a hotel room for a week and not leaving that room. This is the thing I have done until I figure it out," says Leah Sottile, in a live event at Gratitude Brewing.

She is the author of Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age (Grand Central). She's also the author of When the Moon Turns to Blood, an Oregon Book Award Finalist.

Leah is a freelance journalism whose work has appeared in The Atavist Magazine, the Washing Post, High Country News, and Outisde. She's the creator of the podcasts Hush, Burn Wild, and Bundyville. 

In this podcast we talk about:

• The work of John Vaillant (See  Ep. 376(
• How writing this book made Leah crazy
• How New Ageism and Far Right Extremism overlap
• Sagging Middles
• And not re-victimizing sources
• And much more…

Learn more about Leah at leahsottile.com and follower her on Instagram @leah.sottile.

Podcast Specific Substack at creativenonfictionpodcast.substrack.com.

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"I'm much more interested in how a person achieves something than in what they specifically achieved," says Debbie Millman, the "Pod Mother" and OG podcaster, twenty years in for Design Matters. 

She's also the author of the new book Love Letter to a Garden (Timber Press).

In this episode, we talk about:

• The 20 year arc of Design Matters
• What people she’s most drawn to
• How she views the narrative arc of an interview
• The research
• As well as the evergreen themes of her new book on her quest for a garden

You can find Debbie at debbiemillman.com and on Instagram @debbiemillman.

Podcast Specific Substack at creativenonfictionpodcast.substrack.com.

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Nick Davidson, @nickgdavidson on IG, says, "We usually think of hunting stories and looking for ideas, but I feel like it's the other way around: stories hunt the storyteller, and I'm just prey."

Nick's latest piece is for The Atavist Magazine titled "The Balloon That Fell From the Sky." 

His work has appeared in Outside, VICE Sports, Garden & Gun, and a million other places of note. 

Podcast Specific Substack at creativenonfictionpodcast.substrack.com.

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Show notes: brendanomeara.com