The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara

"For me, it's about being a grown up. I think what I projected even at an early age was I've been doing this a while. I plan on doing it for years to come. There's nothing about me that suggests I'm going to scoop up your words and run away and never be heard from again. I'm not leaving town. I'm not leaving the career. You can trust me because it's in my best interest to be trustworthy, too. And then, of course, I listen more than I talk," says Robert Kolker, the bestselling author of The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia.

It’s Robert Kolker, returning to the podcast to talk about his latest book, which is, I have to say, the odds-on favorite to win the 2nd annual CNFy for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence. Last year Cassidy Randall won the wooden plaque. If all awards are ultimately meaningless, I’m happy to contribute. Oh, yeah, you want the book title don’t you? It’s The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia. It’s published by Double Day. I don’t say this as hyperbole: This book is a masterpiece.

Bob is also the author of Hidden Valley Road, a No. 1 NYT bestseller and a selection of Oprah’s Book Club and a top 10 book of the year by the NYT, WaPo, and the fat cats on Wall Street at the Wall Street Journal. The Vanishing Family was one of those “noted books” in The New Yorker. Yeah, it’s THAT good. I’ll give you a little more about Bob in a minute.

Bob Kolker is a writer for the New York Times Magazine and his work has also appeared in the Atavist Magazine, check out his last appearance on Ep. 385. His journalism most often takes the form of gripping, humane narratives. He’s a national magazine award finalist with work appearing in Wired, The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Oprah Magazine, and New York magazine. It’s … impressive. Learn more about Bob at robertkolker.com and follow him on IG @bobkolker.

You’re in for a fun ride with this podcast. Among many things, we talk about:

• The gear he uses
• Timeline files
• His crisis of confidence at the start of a story
• What is the self?
• The power of timelining
• His reportorial approach
• Interviewing chronologically as a means to creating a rough draft
• Balancing the confidential information of the family in his reporting
• And a lot more, a LOT more.

Parting shot this week about having an emergency book nearby. I recorded this as a video for the Patreon crew. No b-roll, but I might go in and pretty up my parting shots as vlogs for Patreon and YouTube. Visit Patreon.com/cnfpod to see the first video. Again, no b-roll so it’s just me riffing.

"It's all about consistency, and I know that that's the most boring answer on the planet, and the answer I didn't want to hear when I started my Substack three years ago. I just published every single week, trying out different niches, seeing what I could offer value in, until I got exactly where I wanted to land with it," says ghost writer and author Amy Suto.

I got an email out of the blue, wouldn't you know, and it was this writer Amy Suto, who wanted to come on and talk about ghost writing and stuff of that nature. She is very clearly someone who doesn’t need the attention. She’s doing, let’s say, quite well for herself. She has a $250,000+ substack and is the author of the book Write for Money & Power: The Anti-Starving Artists’ Guide to Becoming a SEVEN-figure Writer. I’ll take five figures. Maybe I should read that book.

Amy is a story factory. She’s a ghost writer to many high end folks. She runs online courses through her Substack like Make Substack Your Job, the 6 Week Substack Sprint Workshop, her Substack is her ecosystem and she has mastered it. A little bit more on Amy in a little bit.

Amy Suto is based in San Francisco. She used to be a TV writer but eventually wanted more agency in her writing life. She serializes fiction from her Substack and offers tutorials and classes and a hub for sharing writing opportunities. I’m always a bit weary when you put all your eggs in the basket of a social media platform like Substack but I’m not the guy you want to take money advice from. Look at what I do, then do the opposite. Better yet, look at what Amy does. You can learn more about her at amysuto.com, sutoscience.com, and follow her on Instagram @sutoscience.

In this episode we talk about:

• TV writing
• Ghost writing as fly on the wall
• Inhabiting the client’s voice
• Memoir touch points
• Needing to like the client
• Battling voices
• Charging what you're worth so you don’t get burned out
• Branding
• Conflicting memories
• Creative boundaries
• Building a substack to $260,000 revenue
• Asking the best questions
• Volume over everything
• And the great talk by Mark Duplass about the calvary not coming

This episode will pair well with Jan Friedman’s appearance, any of Jen A. Miller’s appearances, as well Jennifer Goforth Gregory.

“What I tend to do is, if I write this really difficult explanatory section that is going through a lot of technical information and trying to boil it down, once I'm finished with that, then I get to write this other scene that I really want to write. I think of it as dessert. If I finish my broccoli, I get my ice cream sundae,” says Mark Johnson, author of The Family Plan for The Atavist Magazine.

Hey there CNFers, it’s the creative nonfiction podcast … it’s that Atavistian time of the month and we have a wonderful story written and reported by Mark Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, for his story "The Family Plan: When a little girl in Iowa was diagnosed with a rare incurable disease, her parents and their community came together to help her. They wound up making medical history.”

I tell you, this podcast nearly didn’t happen. There was an audio glitch that didn’t recorded more than half of the audio portion, but since I record video now to chop and put on social media, I was able to drag the video file into iMovie, decouple the audio from the video, and export the audio. Saved the day. Scary stuff.

First we’re going to hear from EIC Seyward Darby about why some Atavist pitches are thin and what to do about them and what it was about Mark’s story that made it so easy to just slip in and edit the damn thing from the jump.

Mark Johnson, who, as far as I can tell, has little to no internet presence. He might be on LinkedIn. Mark won this little award you might have heard of called the Pulitzer Prize. You hear of this thing? New to me, is it a big deal?

He spent 22 years at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and most recently he was at The Washington Post, but was unfortunately part of its recent mass layoffs. His first novel, Though the Earth Gives Way, came out in 2022.

In this conversation, we talk about:

• Interview stage fright
• Interview prep
• Is it ever OK for a reporter to want to be liked?
• Things that didn’t work
• Obsession
• The stories we wake up with in our heads
• Writing early in the process
• “Reward” scenes and what they are
• The great advice he received from the journalist Rick Bragg
• Hidden beauties
• And why these kinds of stories still matter to him

As always, you can support the show by visiting patreon.com/cnfpod and subscribe to Pitch Club on Substack.

It was a few years ago at this point when I came up with the idea of a themed issue of the audio magazine called CODES. I was watching The Mandalorian and these bounty hunters never remove their helmets. They often punctuate an encounter with each other saying, “This is the way.” Staying in the Star Wars world, you could extend the code to Jedis, whose objective is a monk-like devotion to order and justice and a devotion to the Force.

Batman has a code that he never kills. That in the Dark Knight, the Joker teases him about it. Batman, out of necessity, breaks the code in killing Harvey Dent to save Jim Gordon’s son.

I admire people with singular devotion because I am someone who is so lacking in singular devotion. I say I want something and yet my habits rarely align with that thing I purport to want. That’s why the people I tend to write about are obsessive and they give things up because the real sacrifice is not seeing their goals through, NOT giving up a night on the town, NOT giving drinking the weekend away, NOT eating multiple pizzas. I could go on.

So it was with that in mind that I wanted to get a sense of the codes people live by.

We have six essays in this issue. It features Sam Sharp, Lindsay Street, Jennifer Lang, Marilyn Wimp Paolino, Judith Evans, and Eren Simpson.

Follow along with the show @creativenonfictionpodcast and consider becoming a patron over at patreon.com/cnfpod. Those contributions helped pay these writers for their work.

"In terms of the research, I can get lost in detective mode. Sometimes it's good if I know, okay, I only have an hour. I'm going to see what what can I learn about this one person in an hour. Then take it in those little pieces, and when I have time, I can get some writing done," says Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, author of The Pain Brokers.

Today we have Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law and the debut author of The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America’s Lawsuit Factory. It’s published by Atria/One Signal Publishers.

It’s a story of greed, fear, and exploitation of a scam that targeted women who had potentially faulty pelvic mesh surgery, only to have a shady network of cons terrify these women, over the phone, with vast amounts of personal information, scaring them to have this mesh removed that effectively has ruined the lives of countless women. The Pain Brokers chronicles their plight, as well as the lawyers who sought justice and the predatory people at the spearhead of this scheme.

So Elizabeth’s focus of her teaching is in mass torts, class actions, and civil procedure. She’s been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and won the American Law Institute's Early Career Scholars Meal in 2015, among a few other saucy awards. Her academic work and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and the Miami Herald, just to name a few. You can find her online at elizabethchambleeburch.com or on the socials, like @elizabethcburch on IG.

The Pain Brokers was named was of the best books so far of 2026 by The New Yorker and in this episode we talk about:

• Making law interesting
• Goat chokers
• Locking in character to an idea
• Structure Part 1 seven different times
• How intimidating it all was
• Getting IRL
• The value we had as journalists
• Getting lost in detective mode
• What the hell are mass torts?
• Mass tort du jours
• The granular details and how to get them
• Knowing where the landmines are
• And what keeps her coming back

Pair this episode with Ep. 443 with Jared Sullivan

"I had a really interesting conversation with a publisher for my first book, and the publisher asked me, 'How are you going to get out of the story?' And I think that's the thing that people often go into it having a  great idea of two thirds of a really good story, how it goes up through the climactic action of your narrative. But then there can be this like long trail off where people can't bring themselves to wrap the story up, or not put as much thought into exactly how the story ends," says Catherine Grace Katz, author of Shadow Before the Flame.

It’s Catherine Grace Katz (@catherinegracekatz on IG)! Who first appeared on the show back on Ep. 222 for her acclaimed book Daughters of Yalta and she’s back in the saddle again for Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War. It’s published by Viking.

Two things are ubiquitous about the Hindenburg: It blew up and the journalist painting the audio picture of the disaster said, “Oh, the humanity.” Beyond that, what else is there? Turns out, um, quite a f------ lot, man. I didn’t know there were survivors. I didn’t know it was a passenger vessel. Shadow will sit right beside the great historical yarns spun by the likes of Laura Hillenbrand, Erik Larson, and Hampton Sides. I’m always amazed how writers make work of this nature suspenseful when you know the outcome. Like, you know the Hindenburg blows up. You know Trudy Ederle swims the English Channel. And yet, when it happens, you’re rewarded more than you could have imagined.

What a fun time we had. Can’t believe it’s been six years since she was on the show. Oct. 2, 2020. Wild. Who’d have thought that she’s such a fiery New York Yankees fan? Hmmm … In this episode we talk about:

• The origin story of this book
• The post-book funk
• Step 1 of writing this book proposal
• Getting out of the story
• World building
• Capturing the little nuggets
• How she’s more rooted in feel
• The murder wall
• Cutting yourself off from the research
• The tech of zeppelins
• Why they couldn’t use helium
• The echoes of history
• Not writing the present into the book
• The one thing she’s totally inflexible about
• The biggest change between book one and book two
• And her hottest of hot takes

Pair this episode with Ep. 132 with Laura Hillenbrand, Ep. 473 with Hampton Sides, and Ep. 368 with Tyler Hooper.

"Writing is such a lonely job, and I feel bad for people who don't have a crew. I think you really have to have a crew. I had a college crew my first couple years at ESPN. There was a bunch of us who were young writers and very ambitious. That was a crew. And then we have our group now of people who are on various text threads, you need a band to always know where your head is at any given time, so they can help you tap into those things when you're doing your work," says Seth Wickersham, author of three books, including his anthology of his best ESPN work Be On That Hill.

Today we welcome back Seth Wickersham, his third trip to the podcast. He has achieved anthology status. His best work over 26 years at ESPN is in 480 tidy pages titled Be On That Hill: Stories from the Summits of Sport, with a forward by his buddy and colleague and master in his own right, Wright Thompson. It’s published by Hyperion Avenue.

I should add right off the top that I should have in the coming week or two a Nieman Storyboard annotation of Seth’s mammoth profile on Sean Payton. It’s a 15,000-word feature that is a stunning piece of work. In any case, pay attention to this space for news on that.

But, yes, Seth is the author It’s Better to Be Feared and American Kings and let me be the one to tell you that he is one of the good ones, just a great person on top of being a tremendous writer and reporter. I think that comes across in how he speaks, his generosity of spirit and willingness to share his vast experience with you. I mean, take these blurbs for instance: from Jonthan Eig: "Wickersham stands with Plimpton and Halberstam among the finest sports chroniclers." And Peter King: "Wickersham’s terrific prose and storytelling are buttressed by his tireless and insightful reporting.”

Damn.

What a treat, what a ride you’re in for. Seth’s work can be found at espn.com and you can visit his website sethwickersham.com and follow him on IG @seth.wickersham. In this episode, we talk about:

• Getting beyond access porn for his Payton profile
• Having an idea of where you want to end a story
• The messy creative process
• Each time you’re starting over
• Shades of grayness
• Not being dissuaded by lack of access
• Lucky that people were invested in his success
• Breaking through creative plateaus
• The benefit of being a young writer
• Everything in a story is a reflection of you
• Needing a crew
• How your writing voice can adapt
• And the notes he has taped to his computer

You might want to pair this episode with Pamela Colloff, Tony Rehagen and Justin Heckert.

"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 chase stories or force them to fit or force them to be a story when they don't actually work as a story," says Matthew Wolfe, author of the book Fires in the Night and the Atavist story "The Bleeding Hearts."

Today we welcome back Matthew Wolfe for the third time in about a year. Why, you ask? Well, his first appearance was Ep. 482 for his Atavist story “The Talented Mr. Bruseaux,” then, just a few weeks ago he was on for Ep. 536 to talk about his first book Fires in the Night. And now he’s got another Atavist story.

Wild, right? This is the way.

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. 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 soon and I didn’t bring this up with him, and I will down the road, but listen to the deck again. If you want to sell a pitch to the Atavist, can you sum it up in one sentence like that? I will talk to them about that in the next one and how that distillation might help your pitches out either for the Atavist or any other publication.

Matthew has written for the Atavist on 3 separate occasions, and he’s also the author of Fires in the Night about the Earth Liberation Front. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and National Geographic

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
• Periods of spring cleaning
• Missing the sprawl of book writing
• And when a reporter can add commentary to a story

"Sometimes you swing and a miss on a story, or you get scooped by someone, and I think there's a constant feeling of like you're only as good as your last story, as the last thing you published, and it's hard to shake that," says Joshua Robinson, co-author of The Playbook: The Hidden Forces Shaping Winners and Losers in the Modern NFL (Mariner Books).

Joshua Robinson is here. Now, it was SUPPOSED to be a two-headed monster with Jonathan Clegg but SOMEBODY got pulled into an urgent news situation at the Wall Street Journal and had to conveniently skip thus putting ALL the pressure on Joshua Robinson to shoulder the burden that is a conversation with me. JR and JC are the co-authors of four books in nine years.

Four books in nine years.

Their latest is The Playbook: The Hidden Forces Shaping Winners and Losers in the Modern NFL. It’s published by Mariner Books and edited by Matt Harper, who made The Front Runner as good as it is.

Joshua heroically stepped in and did the work of two people. He’s the sports editor for the Wall Street Journal and has covered Formula 1, European football, the World Cup, the Tour de France, etc. He and Jonathan are the authors of The Club, The Formula, and Messi vs. Ronaldo. The Club and The Formula are rated 4.6 on the place that shall not be named out of more than 1,800 ratings. That’s amazing.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Translating super niche sports for a reader
• The co-author shared Google Doc
• Amusing themselves
• The Big Pages Stage
• How they only write two big drafts, what?
• Marrying the big idea to characters
• Drive the bus
• Understanding time value of money in the NFL
• And how you’re only as good as last story

This episode will pair well with Episode 199 with Keith Law, and Ep. 540 with Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr.

Instagram: @creativenonfictionpodcast

Substack: welcometopitchclub.substack.com

"I think it's a great point with writing. You know early on you realize like putting pen to paper or starting to type early on was a massive achievement. There were huge gains, and now you're still grinding to figure out like 'I don't know how to end this chapter. How do I not know how to end a chapter? I've been writing for 20 years. What's wrong with me?' And you realize like this is the gig. This is part of the fun, though. It's also part of the grind, which is why if you asked a runner their their most fun runs, they're usually their hardest runs, and it's the same thing with any other passion," says Coach Chris Bennett, author of This is About Running. This is Not About Running.

It’s Coach Chris Bennett! He is the Nike Running Global Head Coach and now he’s the author of This is About Running. This is Not About Running.: Lessons for Between and Beyond the Start and Finish Line. It’s published by Dey St.

If you’re looking for workouts and training plans and pace charts and Zone 2 up the wazoo, this is NOT the book for you. But if you’re looking for a 220-page metaphor for being a better writer, a better person, and yes, maybe even a better runner, then you’re going to love this book. I read it twice. The chapters are, by and large, lean and range from confidence to doubt to hope and play and regrets. Maybe this podcast is about writing and not about writing.

A little more about Coach Bennett, who is something of a real-life Ted Lasso. Prior to working with Nike, he was a high school history teacher who helped coach one of the most successful running programs in the U.S. He attended the Univ. of North Carolina where he captained the XC and Track teams. After college, he spent five years on the Olympic Development Nike Farm Team out of Palo Alto, CA. He used to live in Oregon, but moved back to his native New Jersey.

In this episode, we cover a lot of ground including:

• Why longform content is not dead
• How he went from working in finance to Nike
• How he cultivated his coaching philosophy
• Confidence vs. Arrogance
• Vulnerability
• Reckoning with and the fear of success
• The power of just focusing on yourself
• Self-sabotage
• And how running helped his writing

I’d pair this episode Ep. 419 with Maggie Gigandet and her Atavist story about an ultrarunning couple and Ep. 525 with Mary Cain and her memoir of abuse at Nike called This is Not About Running.