"I have this desire to write as a novelist might write but write nonfiction," says Sasha Bonet, the author of The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters (Knopf).

Today we have the brilliant writer, the brilliant mind, Sasha Bonet, author of The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters. This book is a masterpiece that chronicles the matriarchal lineage of Sasha’s family, and the pain, and the struggle, and the triumph of will, of the slow, methodical, generational march forward and the residue of generational trauma, what we can outrun and we can never outrun. Damn, man, it’s something of a family epic that brought to mind A Hundred Years of Solitude to me in its scope, in its sweep. I don’t know. Maybe I have no clue what I’m talking about.

Sasha is a writer, critic, and editor living in the socialist hellscape of New York City, woot, woot!

Her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, Aperture, New York Magazine, Vogue, and BOMB, among others. She earned an MFA from Columbia University and teaches nonfiction writing at Columbia’s School of the Arts and Barnard College. You can learn more about Sasha at sashabonet.com and follow her on the gram @sasha.bonet.

This is a rich conversation about:

• Community
• The in-between place
• Not holding back
• Her influences
• Her writing practice
• And how jazz informs her writing

She’s also good friends with G’Ra Asim, who appeared on these podcast airwaves way back on Ep. 256.

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"I kinda hate it when people say writing is fun," says Jack Rodolico, author The Atavist original "The Blue Book Burglar."

Today we feature Jack Rodolico, who is a bit of an audio maven, but he comes to us hot off the Atavist presses to talk about "The Blue Book Burglar: The Social Register was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful— the heirs of robber barons, scions of political dynasties, and descendants of Mayflower passengers. It was also the perfect hit list for the country’s hardest-working art thief."

It’s a fun, rollicking read, not too heavy, not really heavy at all, merely a great caper.

Batting leadoff is lead editor Jonah Ogles, so we talk about his side of the table about what less experienced writers can learn about pitching the Atavist and how Jonah worked with Jack to fix the structure of the piece. As always, really rich stuff from the editing side of things.

A bit more about Jack Rodolico, the dude’s got it going on … His work has appeared in The Boston Globe, NPR, 99% Invisible, and NHPR … He’s earning an MFA in fiction, and that’s really helping him with his nonfiction writing, as you’ll hear in a moment.

You can learn more about Jack at his website journalistjack.com. In this conversation we talk about his Atavist piece, writing fiction, earning trust, why you can’t pay sources for information, how he organizes his research and cites his work, beginnings and endings, and how he didn’t necessarily want to be a journalist, rather he wanted to be a writer.

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“So much misery. It is so much misery. It is so hard. It's not natural, locking yourself in your room for three years to focus on one person is not mentally healthy. Leigh Montville, great, great writer, said to me years ago, he's like, ‘It's an unnatural thing. You spend two years in a hole to come out for two weeks, you know?’” — Jeff Pearlman, author of Only God Can Judge Me.

Today we have Jeff Pearlman returning to the show to talk about his 11th book, his latest book, Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur (Mariner Books). Jeff has made a career out of being a sports writer, so when I heard he had turned his biographical eye toward a hiphop icon from the 1990s, I was especially intrigued by how he would approach it. It’s the kind of book he could pursue after having proved himself ten times before, with a few of his books becoming coveted NYT bestsellers. He interviewed close to 700 people for the book … that’s how you do this. THAT is how it’s done.

The first time he was on, I think I annoyed him a bit with my questions on “craft.” He kind of bristled at the idea that it was a “craft,” which maybe he thought was too cute a word to put on it. To him, it’s fucking work. You make all the calls. Then you make more. You go to the locations. You knock on doors. You report, report, report. It has more to do with tenacity and rigor than art … so I made sure I steered clear of things that felt too crafty this time around.

Jeff is all over the place. By that I mean he’s got a YouTube presence with The Press Box Chronicles, a TikTok presence with more than 300,000 followers. He has a podcast, Two Writers Slinging Yang (still waiting for my invite), a political Substack called The Truth OC, and his writing/journalism Substack The Yang Yang. He’s a writer in his 50s and he’s tremendously nimble. He understands, even with his platform and profile, that nobody is going to champion your book like you can. Honestly, we can all take a page out of his book and how he has embraced the ever-changing playbook for book promotion. 

In this conversation Jeff and I talk about:

• Book promotion
• Finding the little guys
• How he handled another Tupac biography publishing during his research for this book
• The misery of it all
• Conversations he had with Jonathan Eig, the PP winning author of King: A Life
• Jeff’s favorite “version” of Tupac
• And hitting the “fuck-it” stage.

All great stuff, as you might come to expect from speaking to Jeff Pearlman. His audio was a bit muddy. It’s not as great as I would have liked but I think the message carries the day.

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"When I came in [to Longreads], I didn't come in and say, I think we need to grow aggressively. I said, 'Let's figure out who we are. Let's figure out what other people aren't doing, that we do , and that we can do better.' And so the only real thing that changed when I first came in was to try to make the editors known quantities," says Peter Rubin, head of  publishing at Automattic, where he works primarily with Longreads, but also The Atavist Magazine.

Today we have Peter Rubin. He’s on the pod to talk about a lot of things, but he’s also drumming up attention for a membership drive for longreads.com, a hub of curation for the best longreads on the web, first started by Mark Armstrong. Longreads has since gone onto publish original works of criticism, journalism, and personal essays and won a National Magazine Award for best digital illustration in 2020. In conjunction with with Oregon Public Broadcasting, they produced Bundyville, the hit podcast that made Leah Sottile something of a household name (shoutout to her new season of Hush).

He spent many years at Wired Magazine and he’s also the author of Future Presence: How Virtual Reality is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life, which came out in 2018, but with Chat GPT going full porn for verified adult users (what could possibly go wrong?), Peter’s book seems oddly of the moment … also it’s only seven years old, but I guess in tech that’s like the stone age.

You can learn more about Peter from his very stripped down website ptrrbn.com, yeah, he hates vowels, don’t come at him with vowels, or on the gram @provenself. 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Finding diamonds in the rough
• How he cultivated his editor eye
• Being merciless in the edit
• Figuring out the new identity of Longreads when he took over in 2021
• Curation
• And the Longreads membership drive

Visit longreads.com to read more and to pony up … that’s what I’m going to do, for you people who think I get handouts, just know that I’m not that savvy.

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"As a reader, if I were a fan reading this book, I want the good, the bad and the ugly. I want you to rip the band aid off and tell the truth. Because, from my from my experience, I've read a lot of memoirs that are super boring and just fluff," says Jeremy X. Wagner, co-author of Curtis Duffy's Fireproof: Memoir of a Chef (Dead Sky Publishing).

We have Jeremy X. Wagner on the show today. This dude is a stone-cold badass and the co-author/ghost writer of Fireproof: Memoir of a Chef (Dead Sky Publishing). Jeremy, man, he’s a heavy metal musician and founder of the death metal band Broken Hope. 

He’s the author of the novels Rabid Heart, which was nominated for the best horror novel at the 2019 Splatterpunk Awards, and the novel The Armageddon Chord. He has a new novel coming out in January titled Wretch, so stay clued into jeremyxwagner.com for more info on that.

He’s the CEO of the TV/film company Aphotic Media and the indie publishing company Dead Sky Publishing. He has a very varied creative life which I find inspiring and really fucking cool.

In this conversation we talk about:

• How he became an accidental publisher
• Playing guitar
• Being turned on to Ride the Lightning
• Passion and imagination as a driver
• Learning the business inside and out
• Competition
• Trust
• And how he translated Curtis’s voice onto the page

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"This has to be meaningful to you. It has to be a story that won't leave you alone, a story that you're willing to rearrange your calendar for," says Masha Hamilton, whose Atavist Magazine story is titled "I've     Gone to Look for America."

Today we have Masha Hamilton, a journalist, a novelist, a fan of the show, a fan of Pitch Club. You’ll want to visit mashahamilton.com to learn more about her wide-ranging career covering the world. She’s the author of five novels and trying to sell her sixth. She was at one point the director of communications and public diplomacy at the US embassy in Kabul.

Her story for the Atavist is about her driving the entire length of I-95 with her photographer son Cheney, and stopping at just about every rest stop to speak with strangers about how they feel about our country. “Conversations and revelations about an ailing nation along Interstate 95.” Man, those Atavist editors sure can write the hell out of a dek.

Guess who’s back!? Seyward Darby! Do your best Kermit the Frog dance. Very nice to hear her and this piece challenged Seyward in ways I didn’t see coming: Meaning, she didn’t share Masha’s optimism or hope. Seyward, for lack of a better word, disagreed with it, so there was an interesting tension she brought to the edit.

For Masha's part, we talk about:

• Novels as complimentary to her nonfiction
• Covering societies in change
• Healing through story
• How this was piece was a therapy session
• Accelerated intimacy
• Endings
• Middles
• Finding the meaning
• Writing you rearrange your calendar for
• And belonging as practice

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"My editor was like, hold on, you need to put your thumb on the scale of why this matters. Now, there's no first person in this, but you have your thumb on the scale, you need to assert your own point of view. Like, this matters, why? says Brendan O'Meara, author of The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine Mariner Books.

Who the heck does this host think he is being a guest on his own podcast? The nerve of this guy. That’s right, for the third live taping of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast at Gratitude Brewing, I was interviewed by the brilliant Daniel Littlewood, who kinda makes me look and sound like a jabroni’s jabroni.

Daniel is Group Creative Director at The Explainer Studio at Vox Media, Inc. He edited the documentary feature film “Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock & Roll.” Formerly, he was the lead producer for HuffPost’s Live’s multi-million dollar sponsored content division. He has a tremendously easy-going, conversation nature to interviewing with tremendous shot-clock awareness that required next to no editing on my part.

So The Front Runner has, at this point, been out for four months. Daniel and I recorded this on July 27 so the book was only out for two months at that time. This was a painful edit for me because I’m so sick of hearing myself talk and talk and talk. I’m not so sure I took a single breath during this conversation, but Daniel was an incredible partner and if something should happen to me, I want Daniel to take over CNF Pod.

In this episode, I talk about:

• My love of my editor
• Valorization of pain
• Making the case for why I was the person to write this book
• Asserting POV in biography
• World building
• And why it was a good thing I forgot the combination of our gun safe

Ruby McConnell introduces us at Gratitude Brewing.

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"Writing a book is so overwhelming. I need to have a book that's like so many steps in between. So what I do to manage my own anxiety and overwhelm about that is I'm really, really obsessed with breaking everything into little steps so that all I need to do is the next step and then I don't get overwhelmed," says Tracy Slater, author of Together in Manzanar.

It’s another Super Size Me CNFin’ Double Feature, Ep. 491 with Tracy Slater. She is the author of Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp. It’s published by Chicago Review Press. 

As Tracy and I talk about in this podcast, this book is sadly of the moment. It happened 80-some years ago, this vile incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese AMERICANS, 2/3rds of them were American citizens, rounded up and shipped to American concentration camps. Disgusting and disgraceful, but these are the histories we need to look dead in the eye, these are the histories THIS administration aims to erase so it's the work of historians, and journalists, and storytellers like Tracy to keep these stories alive.

She’s an American writer from Boston living for a bit in Toronto. Her essays and articles have been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, among other places. She’s also the author of the memoir The Good Shufu. In this conversation we talk about:

• How she broke up with her first agent
• How sadly of the moment Together in Manzanar is
• Being a white person writing this story and worrying of blind spots
• How she handled the overwhelm of it all
• And how the story chooses her

She also thanked me and the podcast in her acknowledgements, which is really sweet and made me feel good. As you know, CNFers, this podcast often feels pretty uni-directional, so to know it’s “working,” that it’s of use and helpful, that’s validating. You can learn more about tracy at tracyslater.com and follow her on Bluesky at tracyslater.bsky.social or on IG at  at good_shufu. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for this. 

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"When I got back to [writing], it was like an athlete or a martial artist coming back to the practice, and the endorphins start running back. And you remember the joy that you had in it, also the struggles of it, but you're back in it, and then I couldn't be stopped," says Jeff Chang, author of Water,  Mirror, Echo.

Today we have Jeff Chang, and what a great conversation this was. He’s the author of the beefy biography Water, Mirror, Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America. It’s published by Mariner Books, so we share a publisher here. Pretty cool.

He’s also the author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, which was the winner of the American Book Award, Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America, and We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation.

He’s a writer, host, and cultural organizer known for his work in culture, politics, the arts, and music. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times,  and the Believer, among many others. He has a great Substack at zentronix.substack.com and you can follow him on Instagram @zentronix. You can learn more about Jeff at jeffchang.net.

We talk about:

• How hip-hop influenced his work
• Trust and relationships
• Voice
• Compression
• And stealing time to write

Why don't you settle in?

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"For many of us, myself included, it's easy to want to be on the New York Times bestseller list, or the USA Today bestseller list, and to try to get an amazing number of week-one sales, but it's important to remember that those lists are really hard to get on, and there can be this nice long tail in terms of the impact of a book where maybe it doesn't necessarily get a ton of sales in that first week or that first month. But over time, it continues to sell, right? And then you get these bumps, and you realize that, oh, this book has staying power," says Mallary Tenore Tarpley.

Mallary is here today for a double-feature Friday. She’s the author of Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery (Simon & Schuster/Simon Element). It’s pretty heavy shit, man. She developed a disordered relationship to food when her mother passed away when she was just 11 years old. Mallary spent years in treatment and the book blends her personal story with the ballast of science and outward-facing reporting, memoir-plus as it was pitched. We’ll call it Memoir Max.

Mallary has been on the hustle for Slip. She’s everywhere. She’s posting. She’s newslettering. She’s beating the drum. She’s an example of what a modern author must do in this age. I’d say take a look at what she’s doing and maybe cherry pick what works for you. But speaking from experience, really nobody is going to do it for you.

She graduated from Providence College and earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College, where she started Slip. She worked with my dear friend Maggie Messitt on it for a bit.

Mallary is an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas where she teaches journalism classes. She started her career at The Poynter Institute where she would become the managing editor of the website, poynter.org. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Nieman Storyboard and she has a Substack, don’t we all, called Write at the Edge, at mallary.substack.com. You can also learn more about her at mallarytenoretarpley.com and follow her on LinkedIn or Instagram as well.

We talk a lot about 

• Platform and publicity
• How she vetted a freelance publicist
• Staying power
• And some of her best memories working alongside Roy Peter Clark at Poynter

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