"I'm very comfortable not writing perfectly. I think a lot of writers have difficulty writing because they can be such good editors that there's almost this like, inherent need of sometimes rereading the same chapter over and over again and trying to make it perfect. And so I think, for me, I'm  very comfortable with the idea of, like, let me just get stuff on paper," says Mary Cain, author of This is Not About Running: A Memoir.

It’s Mary Cain! She’s @runmarycain on Instagram and she serves on the board of The Army of Survivors and the founder of the nonprofit Atalanta NYC which employs professional female runners to serve as mentors to girls in underserved part so the city.  For a certain subset of people they’re gonna be like, Who dat? To them, I say, Mary was a running prodigy in the 2010s, the fastest high school girl in America and one of the fastest across all ages before the age of 18 in events like the 800 meters and the 1,500. She was recruited by the now disgraced Alberto Salazar for the Nike Oregon Project where she was physically, emotionally, and psychologically abused by Salazar in a win-at-all-costs culture.

In 2019, she published a video op-ed with the New York Times that brought down the Nike Oregon Project and Alberto Salazar. It lit a fire and this book is also lighting a firestorm as well.

This was a really fun conversation. I was working in specialty running retail when Mary exploded onto the scene, so it was just really cool to chat with her. Part of the appeal for her coming on this show was to talk about the writing, which she’s not really going to experience on this book tour, which will primarily be on the running shows. She was very generous with her time and we talked for almost 90 minutes on topics like:

Her love of Hemingway

• Procrastination
• Writing in the present tense
• The benefits of reading when you’re writing
• Finishing as a skill
• Not writing perfectly
• Sticking to artificial deadlines
• Seasonality in writing
• Support networks
• Starting from pure anger
• The monetization of fake advocacy
• And the one sentence she wrote that I wish I wrote

Mary is a medical student now at STanford University and basically runs for fun. This episode will pair well with my conversations with Maggie Mertens, Christine Yu, Lauren Fleshman and Renee Hess.

I had a real blast talking to her and I think you’l enjoy as well. Parting shot on my marathon experience, but for now, here’s the super cool Mary Cain.

"In the case of being a storyteller, I keep a document that I call my nonfiction compost pile. I keep little snippets of things that I've heard but it didn't really dive deeper into it. When you have other things to fall back on, it's easier to to pivot and say, 'Okay, this one didn't work out.' If you really believe in a story, you're going to find somebody else who believes in it too," says Nick Davidson, whose "Big Game" is this month's featured Atavist story.

We’ve got Nick Davidson (@nickgdavidson on IG) returning to the pod because he has within the span of about two years landed ANOTHER story with our dear friends at the Atavist Magazine. Nose to tail, this is one of the best Atavist pods you’re going to hear. I don’t know what was in the air, but Jonah Ogles, the lead editor, and Nick, were in the zone. I’m very excited for you to sink into this one for reasons I think that’ll be clear once you sit with it. Head to magazine.atavist.com to read the story and consider subscribing, and no, I don’t get kickbacks and I, in fact, pay for my own subscription, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Nick’s story chronicles the undercover operation to take down dozens of poachers in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. The federal agent at the heart of it, George Morrison, goes undercover and what follows is a riveting story that raises all kinds of questions and blurs the lines between right and wrong. It's titled: Big Game: Colorado’s San Luis Valley was a wildlife poacher’s paradise. Then an undercover federal agent arrived.

Nick  can be found at nickgdavidson.com. His work has appeared in Outside, Men’s Journal, Truly Adventurous, Garden & Gun, High Country News, Backpacker, VICE Sports, and Popular Science.

There’s a Buddhist vibe to Nick in that he’s an eternal optimistic and he surrenders to the current, not in a passive way, I know that sounds contradictory, but what I mean is he’s not one to frantically paddle upstream. He practices in the martial arts, which imbues him with a sense of confidence of mind and body; he preaches non-attachment, which is always good materialistically but also when it comes to stories that might not pan out. He’s of abundant mindset and he  very much had me questioning my headspace, which as you know is a cesspool of toxic goo.

So in our conversation, we talk about:

• How he established a freelance career
• Pitching
• Excitement for the story
• Having a positive attitude
• Telling the story that’s right in front of you
• Google alerts
• Writing long
• Developing character
• Beginnings and endings
• And when the magic happens

I think you’re really going to leave this chat feeling energized at possibility. Maybe that’s just me.

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"The Chronology of Water story was an 11-page story written in tiny fragments. And the MFA program I was in, they told me, that's not a story. It's a poem or something. It's a list of fragments. I'm like, 'Fuck you!' My whole enterprise has been to trouble the edges," says Lidia Yuknavitch, bestselling author of several books, most recently a memoir titled Reading the Waves.

Lidia Yuknavitch makes her thrilling return to the podcast, this a live recording of the show at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene in partnership with the revival of the Northwest Review. My understanding is that there’s a significant literary prize, including creative nonfiction essays. You might want to try you filthy animals. The Northwest Review was the first place that ever published Lidia, a short, 11-page story called the Chronology of Water, so, maybe YOU could be the next Lidia Yuknavitch, though we know that’s impossible so don’t even try.

She’s the author of eight books of fiction, nonfiction, and the editor of an essay collection on menopause called The Big M. She’s best known for her memoir, or anti-memoir called The Chronology of Water, the novels Thrust, Verge, and The Small Backs of Children. And her most recent nonlinear, fractured memoir is the brilliant Reading the Waves.

She won the Oregon Book Award in 2016 and also stood on the TED stage and delivered a beautiful talk about misfits. Her work has appeared  in Guernica, Ms., and Another Chicago Magazine. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland, Oregon. She is a very good swimmer.

We talk about:

• Getting rid of the good/bad binary
• Writing in a group setting
• Inventing your own rituals
• The beautiful and the brutal living next to each other
• Taking your turn
• Troubling the edges
• Being good compost
• And how her market days are over and she’s cool with that

You’ll want to pair this episode with 217, Lidia’s first time as well as:

• Episode 447: Brooke Champagne Sits Back from the Suckitude
• Episode 498: Sasha Bonet on Not Holding Back, and 
• Episode 123: Elena Passarello on Listening to the book, Polaroids, and Self-Doubt

Dig it, friend.

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“Not to confuse journalism with newspapers. Newspapers are one set of communication methods. But it's certainly not the only one. If they have the right mindset, and that's what I try to get them to do, there are so many more opportunities. You can go out and do a podcast, or you can do a newsletter. You can't think of it as I need to work at The New York Times. You have to think of it as I need — I need — to tell stories, and I've got this curiosity.”

Anthony DePalma is a journalist and professor at Columbia University. He’s the author of several books, his latest being On This Ground: Hardship and Hope at the Toughest Prep School in America. It’s published by Mariner Books.

He spent 22 years as a reporter for The New York Times, and another 8 as a stringer for them, so, let’s do the math … that’s 30 years. He reported a lot on Mexico and Cuba, as well as Albania, Guyana, and Suriname. You can find him at anthonydepalma.com and on the Facebooks and Substacks, at anthontyrdepalma

Anthony DePalma has been all over the world telling true stories. He’s the author of The Cubans, City of Dust, The Man Who Invented Fidel, and Here: A Biography of the New American Continent.

In this conversation we talk about:

• How not to confuse journalism with newspapers
• The NEED to tell stories
• The stunning lack of curiosity among young journalists
• Not wearing headphones on walks
• Accelerated intimacy
• Challenge of being of satisfied with the writing
• Still being a WIP
• What to do when you can’t be everywhere at once
• Cutting 30-40% of his ms
• Radical pragmatism
• What makes St. Benedict’s tough
• And how grafting apple trees is like writing

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"When I was writing the book, I used a lot of my interest in art criticism and nature writing to get cross pollinate into my sports writing. And I really try not to fall into a rut and just read only adjacent to my own subject or my own field," says Giri Nathan, author of Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis.

Today we have Giri Nathan (@giricube on IG), he is a staff writer/cofounder of Defector and the author of Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last couple years. It’s funny and voicey and if David Foster Wallace’s tennis writing made sweet, sweet love to John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, you get Changeover. How Giri is able to illustrate why Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner are so captivating and capable of inheriting the mantle held by Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, and Novak Djokavic (who’s still going) is a triumph. This book may very well be the future of sports biography in that access to principal figures is almost impossible so you have to approach your subject more with a critical eye, like an art critic, and we talk about that …

Giri Nathan’s work has appeared in New York Magazine, The NYT Book Review, The Believer, and National Geographic. He made the 2025 edition of the Year’s Best Sports Writing and The Best American Food & Travel Writing.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Him taking John McPhee’s CNF class at Princeton
• Art criticism and nature writing as influences for Changeover
• Losing fandom
• The relationship to personality and style
• Writing from contemporaneous excitement
• Writing the fun scenes
• The insider-outsider perspective
• And keeping a running list of adjectives so he doesn’t repeat himself

Really fun stuff here.

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"I think, like all writers, I will feel an itch that I have to scratch. There will be an idea in my head that I've got to get down on paper, whether I follow through with it or not," says R. Renee Hess, author of Blackness is a Gift I Can Give Her: On Race, Community, and Black Women in Hockey.

Who do we have this week? It’s R. Renee Hess, but you can all her Renee, of Black Girl Hockey Club. She wrote the essay collection Blackness is a Gift I can Give Her: On Race, Community, and Black Women in Hockey. It’s published by McClelland & Stewart.

After Renee finished her schooling and got a job and had some money, she sought to find a sport to follow that cut against the grain. Instead of baseball, football, or basketball, she thought, maybe hockey and it didn’t take long to realize that there very few Black people on the ice and in the stands. And even fewer Black women in the stands. In 2018, she launched Black Girl Hockey Club, a nonprofit organization that focuses on equity and including for Black women in ice hockey.

Renee was named one of three finalists for the NHL’s Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award in 2021 for positively impacting the community, culture, or society through the sport of hockey. Her work has appeared in Black Nerd Problems, Spectrum Magazine, and Racebaitr. You can learn more about Renee and her work at blackgirlhockeyclub.org and find her on the socials at @blackgirlhockeyclub

In this conversation we talk about:

• Tackling other genres
• Short Fiction
• Reading as a writer
• Going back to the classics
• What sustains the writing
• Taking representation further
• And focusing inward vs. outward in her BGHC work

Really fun conversation about the important work she’s doing and the work she draws inspiration from.

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"I'm always calibrating when I'm interviewing somebody, like, how much of a prompt are they going to need, and what is what is going to get something out of them?" — Stephen Wood, whose Buffalo Raiders piece appears in The Atavist Magazine.

What is the meaning of this Wednesday podcast! Middle of the week! It’s hump day, this holy day! It’s April 1st, is this some kind of joke! NO! Point being, it’s that Atavistian time of the month and I’m trying to get back to making the Atavist pod an extra pod, not just another Friday pod. So, consider your podcast feed warned, you filthy animal.

Stephen Wood is here! Find him on LinkedIn, the professional that he is. He’s a journalist who writes about sports, history, and politics and he’s here to talk about his Atavist story “The Buffalo Raiders: With thousands of U.S. soldiers dying in Vietnam, a group of young Catholics in New York embarked on a secret mission to bring the war machine to its knees.” I’ll give Stephen a more formal introduction — top hat and monocle — just before his segment of the show.

We’re gonna hear from Seyward Darby about her side of the table, which is always fun. Name another show where you get an editor talking about a piece, and then the writer talking about it. Exactly, visit patreon.com/cnfpod to contribute to the cause.

Also, head to magazine.atavist.com to read Stephen’s story and maybe subscribe. I pay $25 a year to subscribe and I don’t get kickbacks or commissions. Yeah, I pay, too. 

Stephen Wood can be found at https://sbrycewood2.wixsite.com/ or, per his preference, at LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/hey-its-stephen/ … His work has appeared in The Guardian, Current Affairs, Jacobin, The Athletic, and McSweeney’s. He was a producer with Gilded Audio where he worked on shows including Snafu with Ed Helms and The Reason We’re All Still Here.

In this chat, we talk about:

• Calibrating an interview
• How sometimes podcasts hosts don't even do the interviewing
• What to do when there’s too much meat on the bone #toomuchmeat
• What’s a load-bearing element to the story
• Going in fear of the abstraction
• And a lot more.

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"You can't go and find all of our stories. You can't just click a button and and be served up. You really have to appreciate them in person by holding the magazine in your hands, and that, to me, makes it more special," says Laura LeBleu, co-founder of Geezer Magazine.

It’s Laura LeBleu and Paul von Zielbauer, the founders of Geezer Magazine, a new, print-only magazine exploring the Gen-X aging experience. It’s a killer experience. Issue 1 came out several months ago and it’s this 11x15-inch-sized thing and it has pieces by Kim Cross and Tommy Tomlinson. Issue 2 comes out any day now and features an essay from ya boi. You can read my pitch for the essay at welcometopitchclub.substack.com titled Pitchin’ from the Hip.

So Laura  dreamed up Geezer Magazine in the shower, that incubator of great ideas. She's been an Emmy award winning TV producer, a lead singer of an Italian band, voice of a virtual character, stilt-walking circus ringmaster, minor gay icon, and an NYC cabaret performer. She worked in tech for a bit and it was draining her soul and her creativity muscles were atrophying, she needed to do something, so she decided to bootstrap a magazine. I subscribed.

Paul has ridden a bicycle from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, spent 11 years as a journalist with the New York Times, where his work was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, that little thing. As the Great Recession hit, he launched a business that got volunteers to build playgrounds for disadvantaged children overseas — kaboom kaboom kaboom, IYKYK. According to Geezer’s website, he works quietly in the basement until Laura tells him it’s okay to come upstairs.

Fun chat that covers:

• The appeal of print in a digital world
• The cost of paper
• That fine line between being print only but how much should be digital, call it digital fish bait, maybe?
• Influences such as Mountain Gazette
• Zigging while others zag
• The strange creature coming out of the forest
• The oyster that forms the pearl
• The people trying to pick up the fountain
• And metaphors, all the metaphor!

Really fun chat from a great magazine that needs your support. Visit geezermagazine.com to check them out and consider subscribing. It’s not cheap, but you get such a unique experience. It truly is one of a kind. I did and no, I don’t get kick backs or commissions.

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"Those people who shaped the people are often more important than the subject, because they have insight into this young person that they were working with. It's crucial," says Keith O'Brien, bestselling author of Heartland: A Forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird.

Today we have Keith O’Brien, author of five books, including his latest book Heartland: A forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird. It’s published by Atria Books.

It’s a lean, propulsive biography framed as an origin story of Larry Bird before he went to the NBA to later become one of the ten best players in history.

Keith is the New York Times bestselling author of Outside Shot, Fly Girls, Paradise Falls, Charlie Hustle, which won the PEN America award for biography, and now Heartland. You can learn more about Keith at keithob.com and follow him on the ol’ IG @obrienstory. This book has been crushing it. His events have been overflowing. In this episode we talk about:

• The dispiriting change we’re seeing in sports journalism
• Finding the people who shaped the people
• Sitting under the prism of history
• Writing an origin story
• His favorite part of the job
• And how writing a book is like a miracle every time you finish
• Lost of great stuff to chew on …

Promotional support: The 2026 Power of Narrative Conference. Use narrative20 at checkout for 20% off your tuition. Visit combeyond.bu.edu.

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"A book is not a long magazine article, and it took me a long, long time to understand that, to even understand what it means. It's something that you can say, but you have to live it to understand it," says Tom Junod, author of the memoir In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man.

Wow, look who visited the digital CNF Pod HQ: It’s Tom Junod.

Listen, I don’t have all day to sing the praises and list the back-of-the-baseball-card details of Tom’s illustrious career writing for GQ, Esquire, and ESPN. He’s a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award. His piece in Esquire titled The Falling Man is a re-read for many of us around 9/11 and it takes a meditative and reportorial look at the man who had not chosen his fate, but appeared to embrace it. Tom wrote the iconic profile of Fred Rodgers that was turned a movie starring Tom Hanks. In many ways, so much of Tom’s work is writing about father figures, which of course brings us to the ultimate: In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man, a memoir about his father. It’s published by Double Day.

Tom can be found on Instagram @tom_junod and on the Facebooks and stuff. Google his work to read wildly ambitious stories from that particularly crazy era that was pre-internet magazine culture. Dude was in a watch ad.

In this episode:

• We talk about that watch ad
• The Mountain of writing a book
• The difference between writing a magazine story vs. a book
• The no nut-graf philosophy
• Saying yes
• Telling his life story from the work he does about other lives
• The one arrow in his quiver
• How there should be principles in journalism, but no rules
• Writing beginnings that hint at the ending
• Writing before referring to notes
• And combining love and truth telling in his memoir

Really an amazing conversation.

Promotional support: The 2026 Power of Narrative Conference. Use narrative20 at checkout for 20% off your tuition. Visit combeyond.bu.edu.

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