The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara

"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. Order The Front Runner [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338] Welcome to Pitch Club [https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/] Show notes: brendanomeara.com [http://brendanomeara.com/]

"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. Order The Front Runner [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338] Welcome to Pitch Club [https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/] Show notes: brendanomeara.com [http://brendanomeara.com/]

"The worst thing you can do is pitch a topic, not a story. You start with a topic. I like to talk to a few people before I write a pitch, which can be difficult because people you're asking to talk to don't know where it's going. I just look for topics that interest me first, and I dig down to an expert, and then from the expert, I try and find individual stories within that," says Peter Ward, whose "Master and Commander" appeared in The Atavist Magazine. It's that Atavistian time of the month, so there might be some spoilers here. I can't remember. Good chance of it. Visit magazine.atavist.com [http://magazine.atavist.com/] to read the story by Peter Ward, a writer whose work has appeared in GQ, The Atlantic, Wired, The Guardian, and others. He's the author of two books of nonfiction, The Consequential Frontier and The Price of Immortality. This story for The Atavist titled Master and Commander is wild. Here's the deck: When a scraggly band of folk musicians arrived to tour the UK, residents of a small Welsh town were enamored—until they learned that the band's leader ruled with an iron fist. There's sea shanties, people. We're gonna hear from lead editor Jonah Ogles first and dive into the Atavist's national magazine award nominations, namely Drew Philp's story "There Will Be No Mercy." You can hear out chat about it on Episode 449. Peter is here to talk about how he arrived at this story. * Pitching a story, not a topic * Off the record conversations for trust * His cheat code * How the story was a house of cards * Better Call Saul * Finding voice * Interview prep * And the video clip of Matt Stone and Trey Parker that really helps with story development Promotional support: The 2026 Power of Narrative Conference. Use narrative20 at checkout for 20% off your tuition. Visit combeyond.bu.edu. Order The Front Runner [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338] Welcome to Pitch Club [https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/] Show notes: brendanomeara.com [http://brendanomeara.com/]

"Come to editors with solutions, not with problems. A lot of young freelance writers will be like, 'Hey, hook me up with this editor. Do this and do that.' And I'm like, 'I can connect you, but you better have pitches. If you don't come with the idea you're just a problem,'" says Tony Rehagen, a long-time freelance writer. Seth Wickersham put me in touch with a colleague of his, someone he went to grad school with by the name of Tony Rehagen. Now, he's a special kind of freelancer in that he's a grinder. Much like Pete Croatto and other freelancer types who are balancing all kinds of work: content work, copy writing, alumni magazine work, and pure journalism, Tony has been in the thick of the freelance morass for a long, long time. He was featured in the 2015 anthology "Next Wave" for his piece called The Last Trawlers, a work of journalism that really reads like a short story. His work has appeared in myriad places like Indianapolis Monthly, Atlanta Magazine, Men's Journal, and Bloomberg. Tony was a blast … there are too many great nuggets from this conversation to list out, but I'll list out a few. We talk about: * His filing system for stories * How many stories he's working at a time * Being on the clock and off the clock all the time * Treating his writing as a service or a trade like plumbing or carpentry * Treating editors more like clients * Taking risks with how much skin he puts into a certain story * And where his ambitions lie now. * And that just scratches the surface. Promotional support: The 2026 Power of Narrative Conference. Use narrative20 at checkout for 20% off your tuition. Visit combeyond.bu.edu. Order The Front Runner [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338] Welcome to Pitch Club [https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/] Show notes: brendanomeara.com [http://brendanomeara.com/]

"I wanted to keep reporting, and I'm like, it's not ready yet. And [a friend] reminded me over and over that this is a sales pitch. It's a proposal. The agents and publishers just want to know you can put a story together and tell a story that's longer than 2,000 words, and that there's some narrative arc to it," says Melanie D.G. Kaplan, author of Lab Dog: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research (Hachette). Today we have Melanie DG Kaplan, author of Lab Dog. Not gonna lie, if you're an animal lover and a believer in animal rights, it's a tough read. I don't mean it's a bad book, it's a very good book, it's just … tough. Brought no fewer than 88 tears to my eyes at various points. The late Jane Goodall called it "remarkable." So, there you go. Melanie is a journalist, an author, and when she's feeling brave an ukulele player. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, among many, many others. She interviewed Miss Piggy. How many people can say that? Lab Dog is her first book and it chronicles her and her rescue beagle Hammy as they illuminate the world of animal testing and thus the testing that Hammy was subjected to for the first few years of his life. They find out where he was born, where he was subjected to various cruelties and indignities all in the name of science and progress. Her book details the advances in technologies and models that are proving to be just as effective as animal testing without the torture. In this conversation we also hit on: * The dialogue between the animal research world and the animal activist world * Changing her physical environment so she can focus and write * Overcoming not being a "name" in this business * Book proposal craft * And the power of tech shabbat and how she turned me on to the "Light Phone" Order The Front Runner [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338] Welcome to Pitch Club [https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/] Show notes: brendanomeara.com [http://brendanomeara.com/]