April Events!

Saturday, April 18, 1-3 p.m. at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene, OR: Live podcast recording with the one and only Lidia Yuknavitch. Yeah. Here’s a link to secure a FREE ticket. It’ll help us get a headcount for Gratitude Brewing. RSVP here.

RSVP here.

Saturday, April 25, 5:30 p.m. I’ll be delivering a small keynote at the Eugene Public Library to raise some dollar bills for the joint. Come on out.

Sunday, April 26, Eugene Marathon, 7 a.m.: Kill me now.

The Riff

So the podcast turned 13 on March 20, 2026. The first episode with Susan Kushner Resnick aired on March 20, 2013. Let’s see, I would have been living in Upstate New York. I would have been 32 years old. Six Weeks in Saratoga had come out less than two years before that. I was writing shitty-ass slide shows for Bleacher Report and covering some local sports for $30 a story. Another gig I had, the publisher’s checks were bouncing and I had to file complaints with the labor bureau to get my money. I had no network to speak of. I was supremely frustrated and bitter, having spent the better part of 2010-2012 working in specialty running retail while my peers in journalism were making something of themselves.

Here I was, this guy with an MFA, a published book, and wondering how the fuck anyone ever “makes it” as a writer of nonfiction, a magazine writer, like my heroes and it seemed many of the people my age were appearing in the pages of Outside Magazine and getting anthologized in the Best American Sports Writing and somehow appearing on these fucking bullshit 30-under-30 lists. What a time to be alive! I was wasting a LOT of energy on that shit and it’s no wonder that I always scurried off to find the next menial day job to give me a steady paycheck even if it meant setting my career back ten years. Those were the conditions that spawned CNF Pod.

My original podcast rig was running Audacity out of my laptop to record, a landline on speaker phone that I propped up on the computer. I would call the guest and have the computer record them through the phone. I would lean into the phone and the computer. I didn’t get an actual microphone for a while.

The closet studio in 2015.

2015: Believe it or not, this was a bit of an upgrade. That Blue Snowball mic still sucked.

I wasn’t a radio guy. I was just a guy listening to cool conversations about writing and art and knew that nobody was ever going to invite me on their shows. I wasn’t famous. I had no real body of work to speak of, not REALLY. And I knew there were legions of writers like me: not famous but with ability (pump the brakes, BO) and ambition, who had insightful things to say, but no platform to say it because we were all being ignored. Plus, there weren’t that many podcasts at the time. Not like today.

The Longform Podcast guys started a few months before me. I didn’t know who they were when I started, I swear, but they had a team and an infrastructure in place that allowed them to do the show weekly. When I started I did it whenever I felt like it for the first three years of the show’s run and wondered why there was no real audience, no traction.

In honor of this birthday, I originally thought I’d do something silly like 13 lessons from 13 years of the podcast, and maybe I’ll do a blog post about it or a newsletter, but one of the many lessons it has taught me is to let time do its thing. I might might might have 5,000 subscribers after all these years. That’s not nothing, man, but it’s not exactly going to blow your agent’s hair back. 5,000 might even be a bit high. But it grows in a sustainable way. The people who find it tend to stick around. They realize this show is a little … unbalanced, a little … unhinged.

It takes a LONG time to grow anything. Don’t be fooled by the viral outliers who went from 0-100,000 in a month. Most people who start a podcast and have a big following right away are already famous, have a media company with legions of people behind them to promote it, and are probably not doing any of the actual labor of putting a show together. Amy Poehler, who I love, girl ain’t in the edit.

CNF Pod is unlike any interview show out there and that’s only because, well, I’m unlike anyone out there … for better or worse. Better, right? Right? RIGHT? And I guess that’s another lesson: double down on what makes you weird. Its closest cousin is WTF with Marc Maron. I remember when I was well into the run of CNF Pod and I started listening to Marc more, it was like I found a kindred spirit. He was expressing the same level of resentment and crankiness around his craft as I was. Him being a pioneer of the form and 10,000,000 times more famous/popular means people might think I’ve been ripping him off, but it’s more like we just have similar personalities and worries and anxieties, so naturally sometimes what we say about our work rhymes. I’ve had a few people compare me to him and it always makes me smile. 

Think about the last time you checked out a new podcast from an unknown. There’s so much inertia, like, “fuck, do I really want to spend an hour listening to what is most likely an unpolished, unskilled person trying to get their footing? Do I want to give them a year to get better? Two years? What are they really offering me for spending an hour of my time with them?”

This is the math we’re all doing. And the astute podcast host is always doing this math because you have to balance being entertaining and informative and inspiring and unique. At least in this genre or sub-sub-sub genre of interview shows.

How many podcasts go unlistened to in your feed because you just don’t have the time? Or the energy? I thought when Longform sunsetted that I’d basically get all their audience since I’m the only nonfiction interview show going now, or if not the only, certainly the longest running one. I was like, “Get ready BO, this is your one shining moment!” But I didn't get a bump at all. In fact, I’m sure all those Longform listeners were relieved that they didn’t have to listen to another podcast or feel guilty for ignoring them week after week. 

The podcast was and is never about making money, though I’m always asked how I make money with it. It makes $150 a month from Patreon before skimming off a chunk for taxes. It’s always been about community and maybe making you feel a little less shitty and alone. The show has opened doors for me and will continue to do so, I think. It’s a tall tree in a forest of podcasts, still growing, evergreen as fuck.

Pitch Club is taking the month of April off, but there’s a lot of great stuff to check out, like Issue 10 with Pete Croatto.

It’s closed for renovations. Gotta clean the carpets and replace a few lightbulbs. The club will re-open in May!

The Books

1. Reading the Waves: A Memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch. Boning up for the live event. I’d throw in, as a bonus, The Big M: 13 Writers Take Back the Story of Menopause.

2. Unstuck: A Writer’s Guide: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page by Ramona Ausubel. Lots of great pointers in this craft book.

3. Zine Making & Book Binding: A Beginner’s Guide in 25 Projects by Lauren Simkin Berke. You know I love me a zine.

4. Starstruck: A Journalist’s Pursuit of a Fugitive Pop Star, Her Diabolical Maestro, and Their Teenage Sex Cult by Christopher McDougall.

The Other Stuff

5. Amaris Castillo of Poynter wrote a little feature about Pitch Club. [Sidebar: In a meta twist, I pitched Poynter to do a feature on Pitch Club.]

6. It’s a good time of year to declutter.

7. I had this Gay Talese complex early in my career where I would wear suits to work. I tended to feel more confident. It definitely made people take me more seriously, which I believe led to the kind of access I got for my first book. I got away from wearing suits, donated all of them a long time ago, but I’m thinking I might need to suit up again. Jabronis need to suit up, Pat Riley believes in the suit.

8. So Jess Bowen is a drummer for the band The Summer Set. Never heard of them or her. That’s not the point. This video of her trying to figure out the drum beat to Rammstein’s “Du Hast” is fascinating. What struck me was how she was saying at one point she was too much in her head and not her body. THAT'S the takeaway I’d love you to think about. You can’t think through everything. At some point, it’s something you gotta feel your way through.

9. A hilarious and devastating animated short called Retirement Plan.

10. So, um, yeah, on YouTube, Metallica now has a TV station that shows music videos and live concert videos. It’s like MTV … whoa … oh, BTW … snagged my tix to the Sphere, going in Feb. 2027! I was going to spring for a Snake Pit ticket, but I got to thinking … you actually want to be farther back to take in what the Sphere offers, like, visually. So we’re up Section 407, dead center. I’ll hit up the Snake Pit next time they’re in North America. Gotta. They’re in their 60s. More time behind than ahead and all that.

11. Seth Godin’s keys to being remarkable.

My Favorite Exchange from the Podcast: Keith O’Brien

Brendan: The piece that you wrote for The Atlantic around the time that Charlie Hustle came out about sports journalism … we'll miss it when it's gone, and we're seeing the erosion of of that to this day. How do you evaluate the sports journalism landscape, especially in this age of the sanitized docu-series?

Keith: I mean, you're so right. And the sanitized docuseries where the subject has full editorial control over the product is making work like I do, like you do, like others who come on this podcast do, a lot harder to do, because everybody wants to have full control, and nobody is willing to sit under the prism of history anymore.

I'm very worried about where we're headed in the sports journalism ecosystem. We're living in a time where sports gambling has proliferated to levels that no one anticipated, even after they legalized gambling eight years ago. We live in a time of scandal after scandal, and we live in a time when people like me and you and others out there have less and less access to the athletes themselves. And it was flawed before. In the 70s, at that time, the reporters had too much access. They were buddy buddy with the athletes. They were going out and drinking with them, carousing with them. They were too close, and we didn't know our heroes because they didn't tell us what we didn't want to know.

But now we've swung in a completely other direction, where there are just walls and fortresses around the locker rooms. I understand it. Sports has become a multi, multi billion dollar industry, one of our largest industries. People are drawn to sports because of the story, because of the story. It's not about the box score, it's not about the final score, it is about the story. If we get to a place where the best storytellers don't have the ability to tell the great stories because they don't have the access to do so, or simply don't have the resources to do so, or the people in the locker room to do so, then it's, it's bad for us all.

Brendan: On the one hand, I can almost understand why, especially high profile athletes, wouldn't want to subject themselves to the scrutiny of a journalist, to root around in their lives and then tell the that story through that writer's point of view when now they have so many tools at their disposal to to control that narrative in their brand. I can empathize with it, but hopefully a wise viewer or a wise reader realizes they're not getting the whole story. And the a story in the hands of someone like yourself and Ian O'Connor, Mirin Fader, Jeff Pearlman, getting to things that might be a little uglier really illustrate the human condition and make them all the more relatable. And in the end, I feel more likable.

Keith: Yeah, I agree, and I agree with you 100% I think the discerning reader knows what they're getting. The discerning reader knows if what they're getting is a package story with the corners rounded off, or the real story, good, bad and ugly. On my book on Pete Rose, Charlie Hustle, Pete sat with me for 27 hours of recorded interviews.

Brendan: Wow.

Keith: And I got to him, not through his agent. I got to him through back channels, through his friends. I was doing reporting. I was in Cincinnati, getting to know people, my hometown, building connections. I got the introduction, and I was in, and it was only after his agent learned that I was in that I lost that access. I don't know why I lost that access, but it was only after the agent learned and it is just a shame, because listen, the Pete Rose story is as ugly as a story gets from for a modern athlete, let's just say. He's got it all: the good and the bad and the ugly, the lies, the scandal, everything. But you know, I wanted to write that story straight down the middle and you know? I'm gonna write about all that. I'm gonna write about the highs and the lows, the glory moments on the field, the tragedies off of it, and let people come to their own conclusion. And I think the consensus, clearly, based on the feedback I've gotten the last two years, is it achieved its purpose. Pete is better off for having that book, having been done and for having participated with it, even if he wouldn't have liked everything that was in it. Because I get emails from people who say, all these years I supported Pete Rose and I loved him, and I thought he should be in the Hall of Fame, and I read your book, and I’m not so sure I think so anymore. But I also got emails from people who said, All these years, I've hated Pete Rose, and I didn't even want to read your book, and I thought he shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame, but I read your book anyway, and now I sort of think he should be in the Hall of Fame. I think all of it is is is better for the subject himself."

Coda

I hope you dug this werewolf issue of RATA. To support what it is I do, you can:

• Buy copies of The Front Runner

• Subscribe to Pitch Club,

• And/or leave kind reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcast and/or leave kind reviews for The Front Runner on Amazon and Goodreads.

My understanding is the book is well received, and well reviewed, though I still refuse to look. Can always use more. As my pal Kim says, buying a book or leaving a review is a vote for the next book; it makes us just a tad more attractive to publishers.

If you have a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you may check out Patreon.com/cnfpod.

Otherwise, stay wild, nose to the wind,

b.r.o.

Had a crummy day. Made a cool collage. Was gonna get shitfaced. Made a collage instead. Might get shitfaced later.

Want a promotional discount code to attend the Power of Narrative Conference in Boston? I don’t think I can go, but if I do, I’ll be using this coupon¹. Enroll at combeyond.edu and enter the promo code narrative20 to receive 20% off your enrollment!

The Riff

OK-but-listen, friend,

After putting together the March issue of Pitch Club with Pete Croatto I wasn’t feeling putting together the rager for its usual first-of-the-month pub date.

But I’ve long been intrigued by the idea of turning the rager into a … werewolf.

Um, what?

Dude, gimme a sec!

I’ve thought it’d be a quirky-fun-weird thing to publish the newsletter every full moon. That often aligns with the first of the month, but not always. So this issue dropped at 3:38 a.m. PST, a Worm Moon, and also a total lunar eclipse (no bigs). Nothing about the content will change (or will it?). Maybe it’ll have more teeth, maybe a silver bullet will kill it, maybe it’ll be a shape shifter … queue Metallica’s “Of Wolf and Man”:

Shape shift, nose to the wind
Shape shift, feeding I’ve been
Move swift, all senses clean
Earth’s gift
(Back to the meaning) Back to the meaning of … life

Let out a big, ol’ howl! It’s the 62nd day of the year. You’ve got 303 remaining.

So seek the wolf in thyself!

I read a recent newsletter from my pal Kim H. Cross about her experience with performance anxiety, specifically “choking” in sport. She then cited Alysa Liu’s gold-medal performance at the Olympics and the joy she brought to the rink for her figure skating performances. It’s really magical seeing some of the images of her, that unbridled sense of wonder.

Maybe the greatest performance-enhancing drug is … joy.

I bring this up in part because I was a decent baseball player but felt very little joy despite how good I was. The better I got the less fun it was because it was always about trying to get to … the next level.

There’s another reason why I wanted to be good at sports and it was to be accepted by my peers, to be revered and lauded and thought of as cool. It was a perilous search for validation and acceptance. It was about externalities, being able to wear the varsity jersey in school when few others did, it was about status, about affiliation. It was never about joy. Thus, I burned out.

Does this little anecdote of yours have a point, B.O.?

Well, in a way kinda sorta if you’ll bear with me …

When I see other writers I admire online and how they banter with each other, how they can throw around terms like “David Granger’s Esquire” and know what they’re talking about, how they shared their glossy by-lines and/or teach them in feature writing classes, or their interview classes, I have this palpable sense — an almost lizard-brain need — to feel part of that conversation, to eat lunch with the cool kids. Make no fucking mistake … in this world I am very much Eddie Munson from Stranger Things (I’ve long embraced my punk-rock rogue-ishness, but validation is a strong drug).

I’d like to think I’ve matured out of such things, but you can’t unbake a cake, am I right? I have matured to the point where I at least recognize the impulse.

So … am I writing and doing journalism and podcasting for the wrong reasons? Do I only want stories to appear at various outlets so I can flex in the same ways I did as an athlete? On some level, yeah, my insecurities are such that I want to show all those cool kids that I belong, that maybe they’re no better than me after all. But, as anyone who survived middle school and high school knows, the harder you try to be cool the more you look like a loser, a poser trying too hard. And as a 90s kid, being a poser or selling out is kinda sorta the worst thing you can ever do.

It’s why social media is so insidious: It’s pits our basest insecurities against the successes of others. But social media also allows us to lurk … and you can see the parties you weren’t invited to when you thought you were a deserving invitee.

But, it’s all good, man. The cool kids are boring AF.

Issue 10 of Pitch Club with Pete Croatto

Hope you’ll give this a subscribe, because what’s cool is that I added rough transcripts in the footnotes to each audio clip. So if you’re hard of hearing, or merely can’t listen to the audio, you can hover over the footnote and read the text. It’s gives you options.

Great issue with Pete with tremendous freelancey insights.

The Books

1. This is Not About Running: A Memoir by Mary Cain. The book opens with a riff on Steve Prefontaine, and a critical one at that as it relates to Nike. This book is, as the kids say, fire. “Nike loves Steve Prefontaine because he’s dead.” I wish I wrote that sentence.

2. Hotwired: How the Hidden Power of Heat Makes Us Stronger by Bill Gifford.

3. The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home by Wil Haygood. Pair this book with Howard Bryant’s Kings and Pawns. Pod TK.

4. On This Ground: Hardship and Hope at the Toughest Prep School in America by Anthony DePalma.

The Other Stuff

5. It’s kinda the same thing dressed in a new clothes, but I love Gabriela Nguyen calling quitting social media “appstinance.”

6. A sobering look at the time we have and how we might be spending it.

7. John Steinbeck went through how many pencils in a writing session?

8. Self-promotion advice from … Anne Sexton?

9. Andre Dubus III gets “primitive.”

10. As the founder of Pitch Club, this piece caught my eye from Transom.org on pitching as a portal.

11. A big reason I’m running the Eugene Marathon (news flash) at the end of April is to push myself in ways I haven’t in a long time. So here’s an interview with Kilian Jornet on “what we can learn from pushing our bodies to extremes.”

My Favorite Exchange from the Podcast: Tony Rehagen

Brendan: That afterward of the in Next Wave, the thing I love that you brought up is that like ideas are what separate successful writers from merely talented ones. So I'd love for you to expand on that in the freelance world, just having ideas, generating ideas and executing on them.

Tony: Man, I want to say it was Jason Fagone, formerly of Philadelphia Magazine, author, great writer. He once told me a piece of advice that I think is right: Come to editors with solutions, not with problems. I have a lot of young freelance writers 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.” And I think the way Fagone worded it is like, “You're just you're just another name in the inbox.” They're flooded with email all day about people who need things. And if you're like, “Hey, I'm this writer, here are some clips. Hope you have any ideas for me.” That's a problem. That's not a solution. Do your research. Look at what the publication does, find what they might need. Come to editors as a solution, not a problem is always the thing that I lean on there.

Coda

I hope you dug this werewolf issue of RATA. To support what it is I do, you can:

• Buy copies of The Front Runner

• Subscribe to Pitch Club,

• And/or leave kind reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcast and/or leave kind reviews for The Front Runner on Amazon and Goodreads.

My understanding is the book is well received, and well reviewed, though I still refuse to look. Can always use more. As my pal Kim says, buying a book or leaving a review is a vote for the next book; it makes us just a tad more attractive to publishers.

If you have a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you may check out Patreon.com/cnfpod.

Otherwise, stay wild, nose to the wind,

b.r.o.

January Events

• Sunday, January 25, 1 p.m., CNF Pod Live at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene with Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, author of Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist. … Then we sprint over to:

• Sunday, January 25, 4 p.m., Front Runner book signing at Barnes & Noble in Eugene for Steve Prefontaine’s 75th birthday.

Purchase Signed, Personalized Books

Purchase signed, stamped, personalized copies of The Front Runner directly from me (while supplies last!). The cost is $30 per book. That includes Media Rate shipping (what a deal!). If interested, reply to this email, and I’ll invoice you through PayPal and ask you how you want your book personalized. I can only grant this to people living in the United States. The cost of shipping outside the country is bonkers.

Issue 8 of Pitch Club with … me!

Coincidental, but No. 8 was my number in baseball, and I, the owner of the club, featured myself and my essay pitch to Geezer Magazine, Pitchin’ from the Hip. The essay could still be killed, but it probably won’t, right? Right? RIGHT?

The Riff

Happy New Year?

Sure, yes, of course!

Below you’ll find an essay I was going to pitch to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (They will be mine. Oh, yes, they will be mine. White Whale pub for me.). But I procrastinated and missed the window where this essay would have been relevant. Since then you’ve probably seen a bunch of “Spotify Wrapped” gags. I was on the cutting edge, man, I swear! I swiped the language from the wrapped animation as best I could.

I had fun writing it. I hope you have fun reading it.

You published a book this year! You had high hopes! How silly! We’re ready for you! Let’s see what your senseless promotion of your life’s work accomplished.

3 …

2 …

1 …

You did many podcasts. We counted. Nobody listened!

You could not have been more gracious when you were asked the same question no fewer than 612 times. Nice.

Clearly nobody cared. Let’s hear more!

Your top venues were bookstores, reading groups, and thematically germane retail stores … nobody came!

Attendance is just a number … your events that tallied fewer than three people was perhaps the only exceptional thing you did. Take this personally.

Once upon a time there was a book lover … it was not for your book.

There was that one person who did buy your book, read it, and liked it! Celebrate this … Except they confessed how they are passing it around their friend group like a bong so nobody else will have to buy it.

And now, a word from your publisher:

“Hey, yeah, wow, you were such a tremendous disappointment. I hope we never work together again. In fact, I can assure you we will never work together again.”

All of your author-subsidized travels made you part of something bigger: An increasingly jaded group of people writing books for an ever dwindling readership with microscopic attention spans.

Time for your victory lap! Hahaha, jkjkjk. You have nothing to be proud of.

We pulled some of your files, just in case you needed more evidence:

You have only one liver, but you didn’t let that stop you from drinking enough IPA to fill an Olympic-sized pool. 

And, wow, you sure masturbate a lot.

Yep, you very clearly should find another line of work, area of expertise, and we’d add even a new personality. The good news is that when you hit rock bottom, we’ll be there with a backhoe to make that hole just a bit deeper.

Wrapped party! … now challenge your writer friends to a real-time cry.

Upgrade to Premium.

With a nod to the slain Rob Reiner (and his wife, Michele), this newsletter starts here, and goes up to 11!

The Books

1. Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America by Howard Bryant. Robinson and Robeson have been written about a lot, but I always love how a biographer re-frames stories, bridges connections, and reappraises these central figures from a certain rubric.

2. Like A Wave We Break: A Memoir of Falling Apart and Finding Myself by Jane Marie Chen. Woman goes to therapy, writes about it. I was not the intended audience for this book, but I suspect for some it will be very enlightening.

3. Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner. This will be the first live podcast of 2026. Sunday, Jan. 25, 1 p.m. at Gratitude Brewing, if you can make it. This biography takes such a cool approach in that DPP frames LMM through his mentors and teachers. Amazing.

4. Uncommon: Simple Principles for an Extraordinary Life by Mark Divine. Listen, self-help books, by and large, recycle the same old tripe. This one’s OK. It will make for a good addition to the Little Free CNFin’ Library under the big Doug fir, but sometimes the banalities of wellness are nice to hear.

The Other Stuff

5. My favorite minimalist on the 16 things he quit.

6. Leah Sottile wrote a journalism manifesto. “Change is tantamount to survival.” Among the many, many other gems.

7. It’s just running.

8. At times, like now, I go through a trove of old bookmarks I’ve saved to find cool links, like this one that celebrates the fading art of diagramming sentences.

9. It’s that habit time of year. Check this little ditty out about Alex Honnold, the most famous rock climber there is.

10. Margaret Atwood had a bunch of thoughts on stuff and … a hangover cure tested on … George Saunders???

11. The Atavist Magazine is trying to solve the “crisis of impermanence” online.

ICYMI: December on CNF Pod

Christa Hillstrom Takes Pride in Her Rejections

An Atmospheric River of Rejection with Jason Brown

Seth Wickersham and the Macbethian Tragedy of the American Quarterback

Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas Talk ‘Hush,’ Investigative Reporting, and Breaking New Trail in Their Careers

#Flash52 in 2026

Can you write one flash essay a week for an entire year? Even if you aimed for the stars of 52, could you land on the “moon” of 26? 15? Isn’t that maybe more than you wrote a year ago? Join me in 2026 in trying to write 52 flash essays and maybe we land a couple. It’ll be for any tier of paid membership at Patreon. It’ll be an open Zoom room for 30 minutes, and we just hang out and bang away at the keys. No dicking around. Little if any small talk. First one is Sunday morning, Jan. 4, 7 a.m. PST.

Coda

I hope you dug this issue of RATA. To support what it is I do, you can buy copies of The Front Runner, subscribe to Pitch Club, and/or leave kind reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcast and/or leave kind reviews for The Front Runner on Amazon and Goodreads. My understanding is the book is well received, and well reviewed, though I still refuse to look. Can always use more. As my pal Kim H. Cross says, buying a book or leaving a review is a vote for the next book; it makes us just a tad more attractive to publishers.

If you have a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you may check out Patreon.com/cnfpod.

Otherwise, rage on ragin’ on,

b.r.o.

PS: A Look at Cassidy Randall’s CNFy

It’s the end of the year.

December Events

• Monday, Dec. 1, Zoom event with a New York City running club, 4 p.m. PST

• Thursday, Dec. 4, Hodgepodge Books in Eugene for a lecture on biography, tips and tactics, Q&A, 7 p.m. PST

• Sunday, Dec. 7, Holiday Cheer at the Oregon Historical Society, I’ll be tabling The Front Runner from 12 to 4 p.m.

Purchase Signed, Personalized Books

It’s crunch time, but you can purchase signed, stamped, personalized copies of The Front Runner directly from me (while supplies last!). The cost is $30 per book. That includes Media Rate shipping (what a deal!). If interested, reply to this email, and I’ll invoice you through PayPal and ask you how you want your book personalized. I can only grant this to people living in the United States. The cost of shipping outside the country is bonkers.

Issue 7 of Pitch Club with Shawna Kenney

‘Don’t Be Afraid to Follow Up’

Ever want to know how to pitch a podcast series? Check out the latest Pitch Club.

The Riff

It’s the end of a long, arduous, and, on balance, pretty depressing year. Times are tough. These are upsetting and scary times. It seems like each year since the COVID-19 pandemic took root (2020), we’ve been saying, “Wow, it can’t possibly be worse than 2020 … 2021 … 2025.”

Big Tech is intent on numbing us into AI-induced stupors. Civil liberties are under attack and will continue to erode. Are protests working? Can groceries get anymore expensive? Things are bleak.

But we have some power.

Short of extricating ourselves from the capitalism machine, we can buy from ethical companies who treat their employees fairly, not predatory modern-day Robber Barons.

I’ve compiled the first annual CNFin’ Holiday Gift Guide. It should be “view only,” but who knows anymore? All the links to books are to Bookshop.org. I don’t use affiliate links at all, so you know my recommendations aren’t getting me a commission.

I’ve broken them down as best I could into categories.

I’ve also listed all the recommendations from podcast guests this year.

I hope this gives you some ideas for the people closest to you.

However you celebrate the holiday season and the end of the year, may it bring you at least one or two smiles. Three is asking too much.

This will take you to (I hope) the Google Doc: The First Annual CNFin’ Holiday Gift Guide.

I also want to mention and celebrate the first ever winner of best book for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence: Cassidy Randall for Thirty Below. I read this back in February and March and thought, “Damn, this book is the best thing I’ve read in a long time, so keep it front-of-mind all year so recency bias doesn’t skew you away from it.” No book, IMO, topped it this year. Well done, Cassidy! Your bamboo plaque commemorating this honor (suck it, Pulitzers!) is being made as we speak from plaquemaker.com.

The Books (Didn’t You Get Enough from the CNFin’ Holiday Gift Guide You Insatiable Monster?! These Are Not in Gift Guide.)

1. Like a Wave We Break: A Memoir of Falling Apart and Finding Myself by Jane Marie Chen

2. Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America by Howard Bryant.

3. A Killing in Cannabis: A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed by Scott Eden

4. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I read Normal People recently, and Rooney has a real knack for dialogue. I’m on something of a novel kick lately, and as soon as I hit send on this Rager I’m going to the library to pick up Intermezzo.

The Other Stuff

5. Jack Conte, founder of Patreon, is raging against the algorithm by advocating for building an algorithm that doesn’t rot your brain. I’ve been on Patreon for several years (you might wanna consider it to support the work I do … as I say, the podcast and lots of other stuff I do is free, but it sure as hell ain’t cheap), so I really like Conte’s vision. And he seems like a force for good; and he seems anti-algorithm … but isn’t that what they all say? He posted a longer version of his Benevolent Algorithm “state of the union kinda thing” on Patreon for Patreon people … I hope it works. I’m in the “beta” for “quips” (think tweets) and other such stuff. Maybe it’ll lead to bigger and better things?

6. Vince Gilligan talks about potential plot holes in Breaking Bad. He’s heading up a new show for Apple TV+ starring Rhea Seehorn, she of Better Call Saul fame. When Vince talks, it’s best to listen.

7. Having no followers is cool now?

8. I caught myself wishing away the miles and thought this was bad practice.

9. It’s been fun digging into the archive of my blog for random posts that nobody read. Like this one about how to deal with dejection.

10. Scrolling is the new smoking … The Minimalists went a year without social media. Watch their TEDx Talk. Nothing really revelatory about this talk, and it’s a little clunky through the first half, but gains more elevation in the second half.

11. Why workshop? Glenn Stout used to wonder as well. A workshop skeptic, he writes, “Laboring over my laptop alone, I felt lucky. Then, about ten years ago, after I’d added editing to my resume and found some success, I was asked to help run a workshop. And I said ‘yes.’ Gulp.”

What a Sentence!

A new feature of the rager. If I come across a really cool sentence (or 2 or 3), I’m gonna drop it in here. This from Jonathan Goldstein’s Heavyweight, but featured on This American Life, titled “A Few Hundred of My Favorite Things.”

“Dmitri’s never been afraid of a scheme that runs a little pink on the inside.”

The full passage starts with a cliche, about ideas being half-baked, then Goldstein gives us “a little pink on the inside.” Brilliant.

#Flash52 in 2026

Can you write one flash essay a week for an entire year? Even if you aimed for the stars of 52, could you land on the “moon” of 26? 15? And isn’t that maybe more than you wrote a year ago? Join me in 2026 in trying to write 52 flash essays and maybe we land a couple. Might maybe do this as a Zoom group where we simply write in community for thirty minutes and peace out. Likely through the Patreon portal.

ICYMI: November on CNF Pod

Sasha Bonét on Not Holding Back

The Bost-Book Malaise is Real with Maggie Mertens

Episode 500: Structure, Spec, and Panic with John McPhee

Julian Brave NoiseCat Aimed for a Woven Text

Coda

I hope you dug this issue of RATA. To support what it is I do, you can buy copies of The Front Runner, subscribe to Pitch Club, and/or leave kind reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcast and/or leave kind reviews for The Front Runner on Amazon and Goodreads. My understanding is the book is well received, and well reviewed, though I still refuse to look. Can always use more.

If you have a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you may check out Patreon.com/cnfpod.

Otherwise, rage on ragin’ on,

b.r.o.

Woof.

November/December Events

• Monday, November 10, Whirled Pies, Eugene, OR, 6:30 p.m. Whereby I deliver my world-famous talk on unauthorized biography and my annotated reading. Q&A and book signing to follow.

• Monday, December 1, New York Running Club, 7 p.m. over Zoom (I’ll have the link by the next Rager)

• If you want to purchase copies of The Front Runner directly from me, reply to this newsletter and I will invoice you through PayPal or something and I’ll sign and personalize the book and mail it to you. It’s the holiday season. United States only.

Issue 6 of Pitch Club with Tracy Slater

So you broke up with your agent? Now what?

My good pal Leah Sottile said of Pitch Club, “Honestly, Brendan O’Meara is providing a full master class on being a successful freelancer for free, and we should all be paying him for it. Pitch Club is brilliant.”

The Riff

So the author-subsidized book tour took me through Idaho from about Oct. 2 through the 8. It cost, all told, about $1,000 out of pocket. That’s food, that’s lodging, that’s fossil fuels, cocaine … jk, jk, jk … 

Due to weather, I slept in the back of my Crosstrek on Night 1, which was … suboptimal. I had a shitty air mattress and I can’t say that was one of my best moves. [At AWP Boston in 2013 (?) I slept in my car in a parking garage, which was … suboptimal.] I should have opened up the iKamper X-Cover 3.0 atop my car and dealt with the moisture management later the next day. 

Nice view out the back, Caldwell, ID. I-84 humming along in the distance.

#dontrecommend

My next nights in Ketchum were in an RV park and it didn’t rain, but it was cold AF. One night, it dropped to 27 degrees, but with all the windows closed in my tent and my winter sleeping bag, it was comfortable. My neighbors in the RV site beside me saw me the next day and wondered if I had lost consciousness. Nope, that was the beer’s work.

Out the front my RV site.

Much better sleeping arrangement than the previous night.

Author of “Going Nowhere Fast: Running Away from Life as a Teacher” and ultramarathoner Keith Catalano Wilson and I signing books at the bib pickup for the Legends Never Die 55k and half-marathon. If you’re into salmon, he has a salmon business: https://wilsonswildsalmon.com/

And holy shit, dig this: So I had about 60 books in the back seat of my 2020 Subaru Crosstrek. I told my neighbor at the RV park that I was in Idaho doing book events. He asked me what I wrote, I told him. Turns out this guy had run in Prefontaine Classics and played Emiel Puttemans in Without Limits, the Prefontaine movie starring Billy Crudup. Puttemans was the Belgian runner who I believe finished fifth in the 1972 5k where Pre finished fourth.

Wild.

The guy was like I’ll be sure to buy your book and you know what I did? Go ahead … guess … I’ll wait …

…

…

…

I went into my car and grabbed …. My fucking business card and said check out this website to buy a copy.

I HAD 60 FUCKING BOOKS IN THE BACKSEAT! I COULD HAVE SIGNED, STAMPED, AND SOLD HIM ONE OR THREE! RIGHT THERE. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME? Coffee is for closers …

I pulled out of my RV spot and realized that it would be weird to circle back and say, “Oh, hey, BTW, I have a bookstore in this car … stupid fuck … me … not Emiel Puttemans …

And thankfully I had a best bud in Kim H. Cross, who let me crash in her guest room for three nights in Boise. It was the first time Kim and I met in person, which is kinda bonkers, but that’s the kinda intimacy and bond The Creative Nonfiction Podcast has afforded me where I feel a deep kinship with a good chunk of the people who have come on the show.

I owe so much to Kim. The Front Runner doesn’t happen without her. Literally, she made the introduction to my current agent which led to The Front Runner … She orchestrated this entire Idaho book swing, four events total, two in Ketchum and two in Boise.

Kim teeing me up at Oldspeak.

And her community came out in droves for the kicker at the Oldspeak book bar, which was an electric event in one of the coolest new bookstores in the country. I believe they sold all copies of The Front Runner. Ain’t nobody wanna get stuck with stock.

Nice crowd.

Nice beer.

But what I miss most about my time in Boise was having a co-working pal in Kim. I was there for nearly three full days, which is a lot, and after she unilaterally kicked my ass on the mountain bike trails, we spent our mornings and afternoons working on our work. I was doing some proofreading work, podcast work, etc, and she was up in her office working on travel arrangements, and writing and reporting, and she’d come down for a snack, and we’d shoot the shit, then she’d go back upstairs to work and I’d keep doing my thing. 

I don’t know what to say except that as freelancers we’re so often holed up and alone. We’re such weird, feral cats that we’re unhirable (I’m 0-for-this decade in job applications), so it was like having an office mate and we’d chat on a coffee break, or a protein shake break, then maybe we’d go for a bike ride, and it was really cool because we’re in the same lane of narrative nonfiction. 

When I got home I was kind of in a funk because it’s not unlike when you come back from a conference and you’re buzzing from being around “your people,” but then you soon settle into your well-work grooves of home (the chores, my God, the chores), the buzz wears off, and you mourn being around people who fundamentally “get you.”

Plus, Kim did so much for me and wants the best for me even when I feel I don’t deserve it, so all I can say was that it was a special time and I’m deeply grateful and lucky to have people like Kim, like Ruby McConnell, like my sugar mama, all who see something in me that I unilaterally am blind to. Why? That’s for therapy … but there’s also the creeping specter of the clock. I’m 45 and these self-limiting beliefs have perhaps wasted a good 10 years of potential growth … likely more. Definitely more.

And that growth isn’t just for me. Leveling myself up, the podcast up, it has the effect of an undertow, a rip tide, where I can drag more people out into deeper waters, out of safe harbor and into the places that scare us, that challenge us to fully realize our potential. 

I’ve said this before, but I live in fear of future regrets and I have visions of me on my deathbed lamenting why I wasted so much time and energy on bullshit. Like, I won’t be upset if I die having written five books and not twelve, so long as I gave it my all. But I will have regrets if I drag my feet and decide not to go all in for fear of failure, or for want of comfort: Netflix and chilling without the chilling, drinking myself into a nail biting stupors every fifth day, not going to that conference, living vicariously through avatars of accomplishment on TV and social media. 

I already mourn for having wasted my 30s. And, yeah, maybe you can say that set the table for what’s happening now, or what’s going to happen, but I think I hid in plain sight. Instead of working on what mattered, I took menial jobs for minimum wage that robbed me of my purported vision and visions. Even my early 40s, being sucked into the vortex of a pandemic felt somewhat wasted and maybe I need to throw some grace at that situation.

I’m sure there are many of us who can feel the weight of future regrets, not to mention the ones that we’re saddled with from our pasts. Go on, text that crush, start a podcast, start a YouTube channel, fail spectacularly, try something new, try to have fun, give yourself credit, forgive a past version of yourself, take a nap, run that race, swim the Channel.

As you know, this rager starts here and goes up to 11.

The Books

1. Lab Dog: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research by Melanie D. G. Kaplan. The late Dr. Jane Goodall said it was, “Remarkable,” so, you know, skip this book if you’re a bozo.

2. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. I don’t read many novels, but a pal bought this for me and I’m so glad I took the time to put this by my bedside.

3. Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean. The book is something of a victory lap of sorts. I want to talk to someone about this. I have thoughts, but I need to talk it out.

4. Range of Motion by Brian Trapp. A comic novel, and if you liked Jonathan Evison’s The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving you will likely love this.

Help? ==> https://bookshop.org/p/books/driftless-run-the-true-story-of-two-cross-country-teams-and-the-lessons-that-interscholastic-sports-should-be-teaching-us-jeff-rich/75abfa81e2aeddb0?ean=9780063348967&next=t

The Other Stuff

5. Marc Maron is officially done with WTF. I never outright copied Maron (though some people likely think I do), but as I began to hear so many of my grievances of a career in writing echoed through his arc in comedy, I felt a greater connection to him. So much so that I have had to curb a lot of what I say and think so it doesn’t sound like I’m copying him … even though I’m not. That’s the thing: Even if you’ve been doing something for a long time and then somebody way more famous does the same thing, people assume you’re just copying the famous guy. Here’s his final podcast newsletter. I hope he continues sending out a weekly missive. [So far he hasn’t.]

6. A cool mobile writing setup.

7. The genius of “Enter Sandman,” for drum nerds, for Metallica nerds.

8. Leah Sottile has another season of Hush. Go dig it.

9. Have you heard of Raddle? It’s a fun word game. (h/t to Field Notes’s newsletter)

10. Screw finding your passion.

11. The struggle to be organized is real.

https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/

ICYMI: October on CNF Pod

Masha Hamilton Asks Is the Writing Worth Rearranging Your Calendar For?

Co-Writing a Memoir, Becoming a Publisher, and Finding the Passion with Jeremy X. Wagner

On Being Merciless with Peter Rubin of Longreads

Jeff Pearlman Finds the Little Guys

The Seduction of Art Thievery with Jack Rodolico

Coda

I hope you dug this issue of RATA. To support what it is I do, you can buy copies of The Front Runner, subscribe to Pitch Club, and/or leave kind reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcast and/or leave kind reviews for The Front Runner on Amazon and Goodreads. My understanding is the book is well received, and well reviewed, though I still refuse to look. Can always use more.

If you have a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you may check out Patreon.com/cnfpod.

Otherwise, rage on ragin’ on,

b.r.o.

Hemingway Memorial in Ketchum.

Saw some big-ass redwoods. Are things looking up?

October Events and Such

• Friday, October 3, Sturtevants, Ketchum, Idaho, 5 p.m.

• Saturday, October 4, Legends Never Die ultramarathon, Ketchum, Idaho

• Monday, October 6, Fleet Feet Meridian, Boise, ID, 6 p.m.

• Tuesday, October 7, Oldspeak, Boise, ID, 7 p.m.

• Sunday, October 19, Dudley’s, Bend, OR, Time TBD

• Sunday, October 26, CNF Pod Live at Gratitude Brewing, featuring Jason Brown, author of Character Witness, 1 p.m.

The Riff

Remember when things were inconvenient? Remember the days when you bookmarked a website and checked it every day for updates?

Then it all went to shit.

No need to walk down that trail anymore.

What I have found tremendously fun is hanging out on my own website and tending to it like a garden. Going into my anti-social media feed and posting a thing. Posting fresh pics, not on Instagram, but in a blog post. Physically writing out a blog post. Then I might click on one of the links in my newsstand widget along the right rail and see what certain folks are up to.

It feels like 2006.

Then we got lazy.

So what I’d love to see is people guest blogging on each other’s websites again, but what I really want to see more of is IRL. As Seth Werkheiser says (and I’m paraphrasing), feed your website first, then social media, if you must. Social media, even newsletters, are, as Seth says, “the delivery truck.”

Listen: Social media is getting taken over by AI bots and we can’t even trust what’s real any longer. What we can trust is gathering in community, doing the inconvenient thing of leaving our homes, to pluck at the strings of our social anxiety, and attend events (unless we hate the venue operator) and buy the books (unless we hate the author), etc.

Maybe you’ll join me for CNF Pod Live #4 on Sunday, October 26, 1 p.m. at Gratitude Brewing.

This newsletter starts here and goes up to 11!

Issue 5 of Pitch Club with Justin Heckert

Wow. What a banger! Great Pitch Club that took some guts on Justin’s part, sharing a pitch that didn’t land.

My good pal Leah Sottile said of Pitch Club, “Honestly, Brendan O’Meara is providing a full master class on being a successful freelancer for free, and we should all be paying him for it. Pitch Club is brilliant.”

The Books

1. Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow. All social media slouches toward the same ends. There’s no greater voice in figuring out how to rage against the algorithm than Doctorow.

2. We Survived the Night by Julian Brave Noisecat

3. The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters by Sasha Bonet. this book is kinda blowing my fucking mind.

4. Character Witness: A Memoir by Jason Brown

Book sales are depressingly low. Help? ==> https://bookshop.org/p/books/driftless-run-the-true-story-of-two-cross-country-teams-and-the-lessons-that-interscholastic-sports-should-be-teaching-us-jeff-rich/75abfa81e2aeddb0?ean=9780063348967&next=t

The Other Stuff

5. Did the Back of the Book podcast.

6. Did my own podcast.

7. Imagine a world.

8. How to read better, and also libraries as serendipity vendors. I love that. (h/t to Austin Kleon’s newsletter for this rec.)

9. A pretty cool interview with Jeff Tweedy about songwriting, work ethic, creativity. I guess he has a new, triple album out? Dang.

10. Well, shoot, Zadie Smith had something to say about essays.

11. Went through some old bookmarks and found a cool story to Charles Bukowski’s rules for writing.

https://welcometopitchclub.substack.com/

Coda

I hope you dug this issue of RAtA. Kept it tight this month. To support what it is I do, you can buy copies of The Front Runner, subscribe to Pitch Club, and/or leave kind reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcast and/or leave kind reviews for The Front Runner on Amazon and Goodreads. My understanding is the book is well received, and well reviewed, though I still refuse to look. Can always use more.

If you have a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you may check out Patreon.com/cnfpod.

Otherwise, rage on ragin’ on,

b.r.o.

September and Early October Front Runner Events

• September 20, Author Discussion and Presentation at the Coos Bay Public Library, 2 p.m.

• September 21, Author Talk at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, 2 p.m.

• September 27, Florence Festival of Books, Author Conversation, all day, but conversation is from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m.

• October 4, Legends Never Die 55k race and and expo, Ketchum, Idaho, time TBD

• October 6, Book Talk and Signing, Fleet Feet Boise, 6 to 7 p.m.

• October 7, Oldspeak, Boise, time TBD

The Riff

Hello, hi, how are ya?

September … crazy … I usually have something to say, and I’m kinda sorta comin’ up empty, the newsletter gas light flickered on, but we might have something in the reserves to reach a rest area for a fill up.

So I was on this panel for Hippocamp, great little online conference. Used to be in person, but it’s online these days. Shoutout to Donna. I was, as the featured reader. I was under the impression that I was part of the panel discussion that involved four debut authors. There was some miscommunication with the moderator. They emailed asking to provide some talking points to contribute to the conversation, but I was never asked anything of worth. I was asked about photos and how the title of my book came to be as time was running out. Only after did I realize I was, apparently, only there to read. Again, a communication error. No bigs.

I bring this up because someone on the panel said their job wasn’t to sell their book, it was to write it. I may put my Zoom hand up but nobody called on me …

This is all well and good and maybe in a perfect world your only job is to write and let other people sell. But make NO fucking mistake. Your No. 1 job is to the write the book, but jobs 2-99 are to sell the fucking thing.

It is your job to take this thing you planted, nurtured, fertilized, pruned, and harvested and bring it to market, to celebrate it. Because if you don’t, I’m here to tell you that nobody will. If you think your publisher is coming to save the day, they are not. Oh, you have a Big-5 deal so you’re all set? 100% false. You will get a press release on publisher stationery but if you expect them to bend over backwards and sell for you, nothing will happen. And who can blame them? They are working with dozens of other authors.

Now, if you’re satisfied just writing books that get no attention and that’s your jam, then fine, definitely don’t sell. But let’s not kid ourselves, every single person who writes books cares about selling the most possible copies to the most people. If you say otherwise, you are lying.

So when I hear someone — a debut author speaking largely to aspiring authors — saying it’s not their job to sell, that is malpractice.

There is a LOT of unpaid work around the work we have to do.

Take a look at those events I booked for myself, with the help of my pal Kim H. Cross for the Idaho events: There was no publicist involved. That was all us. And, with the exception of the Florence Festival of Books, I’m getting no stipend. I’ll be beating the shit out of my own car, my own time, and, in some cases, selling books by hand (big ups to Square and my phone) because, yes, it is the author’s job to sell their book. These events will cost me several hundred dollars and will likely dip into a thousand, and I don’t make any scratch. Maybe future readers and the chance to write another book.

It’s what comes with the turf: If you’re an author, you’re QB1.

Quarterbacks are obligated to meet with the media. They are essentially middle management (though one of the highest paid people in the entire org chart), and it’s part of the job. I’m sure they’d just like to quarterback and let other people do the talking, but that’s not how that works. They are the face of the organization. The author is the face of the book, while also representing the publisher as well.

I’m not saying you have to live on social media — I'm telling you right now please do not live on social media! That’s a way of seeming like you’re working. But the real work is writing columns and essays and newsletters and appearing on podcast after podcast, of celebrating other people’s work, of leaving 5-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads for your peers whether you loved their book or not. 90% of this game is unpaid work, unpaid effort that hopefully gets you paid. But if you sit back and think your only job is to create, you’re setting yourself up for steaming pile of resentment.

It’s also a way of passing the blame if the book doesn’t do as well as you’d hoped. You can point to your PR team, or your publisher, or you favorite bookstore and say they didn’t do their job. It’s a way of not taking accountability for the success or failure of your book. If The Front Runner doesn't sell — and it isn't, not really — that's 100% my fault (Please Rate and Review!).

In a perfect world, we get to publish our books and let someone else broadcast it. But that hasn’t been the case for ages.

If someone tries to tell you that as the writer it’s not your job to sell your book, smile and nod at some of the worst advice you just heard.

As you know, this newsletter starts here and goes up to 11.

Issue 4 of Pitch Club with Cassidy Randall

Issue 4 of Pitch Club is coming … a day late! I know … Scheduling got wonky, so the next Pitch Club should arrive Sept. 2. In the meantime, please subscribe at welcometopitchclub.substack.com. Leah Sottile, my good pal, said of it, “Honestly, Brendan O’Meara is providing a full master class on being a successful freelancer for free, and we should all be playing him for it. Pitch Club is brilliant.”

The Books

1. Street Journalist: Understand & Report the News in Your Community by Lisa Loving. Community news is more important than ever, and with the rise of newsletters and the erosion of local newspapers, it’s on us to be citizen reporters. Pod TK

2. Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur by Jeff Pearlman. Jeff is a longtime sportswriter, so turning his eye to Tupac was a challenge, to say the least, on a number of levels. Pod TK

3. American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback by Seth Wickersham. Working on getting Seth to Eugene for a live podcast for this book. This brilliant book reads like a tragedy to me. I wouldn’t wish quarterbacking on anyone.

4. Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization by Tim Queeney. Eager to dig into this one. And Tim wrote a nice review of The Front Runner on his blog. Very kind of him. Pod TK.

The Other Stuff

5. The Terry Gross, the host of NPR’s Fresh Air, shares how she reads and marks up the books she features on her radio program. I do something similar. I like to be in dialogue with a text, so I write all over the pages.

6. Sometimes I write things. This for Short-Reads.org. Can we get this into Rachael Ray’s hands?

7. Thanks to CNFin’ Patreon member Peter Bryant for sharing this column on ambition by David Brooks. It gets you thinking about that tension between wanting to achieve more vs. the cost of achievement for all the wrong reasons.

8. No wasted writing.

9. If you drive around with your dogs, this seat cover is the best we’ve ever used. It’s got a hard bottom, great pockets, and you still strap them in.

10. Been going through old bookmarks in my browser and found a doozie with Henry Rollins.

11. Interviewing, listening, and note-taking, a nice little reminder from Roy Peter Clark.

That’s it, fellow, CNFer. If you want to support me or the podcast, you can leave ratings and reviews for The Front Runner on Amazon and Goodreads (still haven’t looked!). Or you can leave a rating and review for the podcast on Apple. There’s also Patreon, which can earn you face time with me to talk some things out. On Thursday, Sept. 4 at 4 p.m. PST, I’m doing the first AMA for all paid tiers. That’s patreon.com/cnfpod.

Have a great September, and say hi to your mothah for me,

b.r.o.

Photo courtesy of the Eugene Emeralds Instagram stories. I did not make the sign for the .05K race on the field.

The Riff

Dude,

What can be said? Things have been kinda bonkers, but then kinda not bonkers, we’ll call it medium bonkers, and the book panics are back as a I gear up for the next one, and speaking of back (as in lumbar) … my body is in outright decay, almost like it’s making a sport of how fast it can break down.

Which is to say the book “tour” is limping along.

I spent $400 to drive up to Seattle for a book event that was attended by five (3 amazing, 2 weirdos) people, which is objectively a bummer but more so when you put in a lot of effort to promote it, to invite people. But, man, seeing five people in a room made for 100 is embarrassing, but you give the five people the same energy and experience as you would for 200 people.

And that’s what we did!

Was in conversation with this wonderful writer:

That’s Maggie Mertens!

Met this guy:

That’s Mark Armstrong! His pod just dropped, Ep. 481 of CNF Pod!

Also met, in person, Sam Jefferies, as well, author of Legacy on Ice. Honestly, I think I was the only one who felt weird about the attendance.

It’s funny-sad: The more famous you are, the more juice institutions put behind the famous people. They’re the ones who actually don’t need it. But, I suspect, when a marketing director has to answer to the president about where their dollars and cents went, they can point to the money spent on a famous person and show definitive results. You promote a jabroni (looks around, raises hand) and it lands flat, that might call into question your competency and your subsequent employment.

No matter!

I drove to Olympia after the event, licking my wounds, and camped out. No hotels for jabronis. This campsite cost me $30 and put me an hour closer to home.

iKamper X-Cover 3.0 FTW!

It was magical.

Honestly, I’m taking it all in stride.

It’s all good.

Practicing this whole notion of non-attachment. Going with the flow of the fucking universe, lol.

I remember my editor saying that things were going to be crazy for me around book launch. It definitely wasn’t. Just kinda floating along.

We’re all just molecules.

Moved my molecules to Gratitude Brewing for a live recording of my podcast with ME as the guest. Above you see Ruby McConnell introducing me and Daniel Littlewood. Ruby said it was a great event because, “You got two teenagers to put down their phones.” I do it for the kids.

Then through a bit of last-minute scrambling, the details of which I won’t burden you with, I got to throw out one of four ceremonial first pitches at a Eugene Emeralds minor league baseball game. They had organized a pre-game .05K race as a gag. I was down on the field and the Ems’ emcee, Andrew, asked if I’d like to throw out a first pitch. I said, well, shit, yes, please and thank you. I hadn’t thrown a ball in years, so I couldn’t be surprised that I short-hopped the catcher and threw the ball into the right-handed batters box.

I mean … I GOT TO THROW A PITCH AT A PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL GAME! HOW COOL IS THAT?!

My book on the big screen.

I raffled off a copy of The Front Runner. I do it for the people.

Some people are all about the hustle. I’m not exactly sitting idly by, but I’m also not saturating the market with appearances, or posting to social media every fifteen minutes. I’m putting my trust in the work, that it’ll spread. If I can help it, I will, but I’m not going to be a helicopter parent for The Front Runner. The book has sold 2,800 copies. That number makes me want to take the T to Bummerville. I think everyone’s raising an eyebrow as to how low that figure is. That can’t be meeting expectations. Maybe it is?

If you wanna sell a lot of books, be a Peloton instructor.

As you know, this newsletter starts here and goes up to 11!

Pitch Club with Kim H. Cross

Issue 3 of Pitch Club is live with Kim H. Cross … I’m telling you … Pitch Club is gonna be a thing. If you teach journalism, you need to have your students subscribe. It will forever be free. Subscribing is a kind of currency, platform currency that I can leverage to book contracts. And that’s how I get paid.

It’s free!

The Books

1. Fireproof: Memoir of a Chef by Curtis Duffy with Jeremy Wagner. I’m part way through this and it’s pretty solid. Duffy’s life was pretty messed up, and I like a good restaurant book.

2. Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton. Pitch-perfect profanity, pretty damn funny book. I needed a good, entertaining read. Well, I listened to the audiobook, which was great.

3. Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben. Because I’m not sad enough …

4. Water, Mirror, Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America by Jeff Chang, because a big, fat, juicy bio on Bruce Lee sounds amazing.

The Other Stuff

5. There are few writers who are drop-everything-and-read-now. Hanif Abdurraqib is one of those writers. Here’s an essay from Lit Hub.

6. Things are getting bleak when the scholars of authoritarianism are fleeing.

7. How to spot fake AI photos, a great TED Talk, and super ragey.

8. How the best golfer in the world teaches us about fulfillment. Lots of parallels to publishing a book, this “thing” we think will complete us. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. It never will. That’s arrival fallacy, which Yi Shun Lai talked to me about, but also appears in the piece I shared.

9. Let us now praise paper calendars.

10. What’s this? The audio magazine is back? Bringing back the theme “codes.”

11. Activation is not a secret.

That should wrap it up. If you want other ways to support me or the podcast you can consider leaving ratings and reviews for The Front Runner and/or the podcast. There’s also Patreon, which can earn you face time with me to talk some things out. That’s at patreon.com/cnfpod.

As always, keep writing, keep reporting, keep researching, keep raging, and stay wild, friend.

b.r.o

Ruby McConnell and me at Powell’s at Cedar Hills in Beaverton.

The Riff

Hey, CNFer,

The Front Runner is out there, plodding along the streets and trails.

It’s been nice … so far ... I’m proud I haven’t checked Amazon or Goodreads for reviews. If I have the strength I will never look. (You should still totally rate and review it, though.)

The Wall Street Journal was our biggest, and really only, review of note. It was a good one. Of course I remember the negative parts. Check it out. If you dare. (And if it appears in print, or appeared in print, and anyone subscribes to the WSJ, can someone send me a physical clip? Email me if you can. It might be online only. I don’t know.).

I was met with a nightmare the day after publication ahead of my “launch” event with Run Hub and ColdFire Brewing. Read and/or listen to the parting shot about it. I about threw up. For realz.

Since then, things have settled. I’ve gotten nice notes from listeners and readers and some randos. One guy emailed me, who hadn’t read the book yet, but only read the review from the WSJ, and was already wondering why there wasn’t mention of this, that, and the other. I wanted to say … read the book, maybe? It’s like when people judge a story by the headline and don’t read the story.

I haven’t been flooded with media, or media appearances [for an aggregation of all Front-Runner-related media, go to this blog post]. I thought the local media would pick me up and feature me, but none of the publications in Eugene have, which seems oddly personal.

As luck would have it, a producer (the super cool Gemma) from OPB googled Steve Prefontaine’s death and stumbled on me and, on short notice, invited me to be on the radio, Think Out Loud with Dave Miller. I happened to be in the Portland area for a Powell’s event in Beaverton. What a world!

Dave’s a runner, can’t you tell? I am … not.

When you’re world-famous author, you get a coffee mug.

I also did a TV spot to open up Afternoon Live with Hannah Olsen (missed selfie op) on KATU TV in Portland. Portland wanted something to do with me!

I was told maybe it’s not a good idea to wear a Metallica t-shirt on TV.

The Powell’s event went well. Maybe 20 people showed up? Which I think is pretty low, all things considered. Maybe that’s normal now, especially for a normie like me. Now, I’m not complaining. I’ve been to book events with three people before and it’s … awkward, but also charming. I just thought with the Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton coupled with the book’s subject, we’d get a big pull from that community. I thought the few friends I have in Portland would show up at the event, and they didn’t … or couldn’t. Getting people out of the house is a big ask.

I’m naturally exhausted from the past couple of days. My battery was low by the end. I’m happy there will be a bit of a lull before I do anything else.

It all goes by so fast. I’ve spent three years on The Front Runner, from book proposal to now. And, by and large, it’s over. You get your week or so in the sun, you hope it finds the right people, you hope you get a chance to do it again. And really, that’s the reward: to be able to keep playing the game.

I’m hard at work drumming up sourcing for the next biography, which has some legs, some buzz, some speed down the runway, and I don’t have to draw up another major book proposal. The gift of The Front Runner is that it’s proof of delivery, that I stuck the landing, that I’m a proven biographer. So maybe by the end of 2025, I’ll have good news to share.

As you know, this newsletter starts here and goes up to 11!

The Books

1. Queen of All Mayhem: The Blood-Soaked Life and Mysterious Death of Belle Starr, the Most Dangerous Woman in the West by Dane Huckelbridge, a CNF Pod alum.

2. Flagrant Fouls by Richard O’Connor and Glenn Stout, a fun novel about a former NBA player turned private detective.

3. The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing’s Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living by the Nearings.

4. Skip to the Fun Parts: Cartoons and Complaints about the Creative Process by Dana Jeri Maier. What a fun, enlightening riff on creativity. Pod in the can.

The Other Stuff

5. Welcome to Pitch Club. This is the thing I wish I had in 2011.

6. In case you wanted to hear my Power of Narrative talk on unauthorized biography, the intrepid people from the Boston University Communications Department put together most of the entire speaker roster. Here’s mine, friend.

7. A Sunday blog about pub week.

8. I got this Cotopaxi travel bag for Christmas in 2024 and it’s amazing.

9. Always cool to hear how John McPhee impacts people. Here’s another, more recent one.

10. People really seem to dig the “Stop Pre” (IYKYK) stamp I use for signing books. You can customize your own stamps with Simply Stamps.

11. I love Derek Sarno’s YouTube channel. He’s a vegan chef, but aside from the meals he makes, and the way he talks about food and life, I love how meticulous he is about keeping a clean station, of cleaning as he goes, his organization of mis en place. I find it inspiring and kinda soothing.

That should just about wrap it up. Keep it tight, as they say. If you want other ways to support me or the podcast you can consider leaving ratings and reviews for The Front Runner and/or the podcast, or you can browse the Patreon page to throw in a few bucks. Mo’ money means mo’ face time with me to talk some things through. That’s at patreon.com/cnfpod.

As always, keep writing, keep reporting, keep researching, and stay wild, friend,

b.r.o.

One of my slides from my Power of Narrative talk.

The Riff: PoN Redux

Fresh off the Power of Narrative Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, the state of my birth and first 21 years. It was a whirlwind weekend, as many of these things are.

Delivered my talk. Here’s the description:

Unauthorized: Tools, Tactics, and the Ethics of Biography: Biography is a rich genre but rife with challenges both practical and ethical. Brendan O’Meara discusses why unauthorized biography is superior to authorized, offers organizational tips for the task, while also delving into what feels inherently exploitative about biography and how best to proceed in the face of it.

There was room for 100 people in the Terrace Room, and I’d say about 20 people showed up for it. It felt pretty thin in there, but you deliver your talk the same be it for three people or 91. It felt rough, despite having rehearsed it a billion times. I’m a bit raw when it comes to presentations. The feedback I got through unsolicited emails and DMs has been surprisingly positive. So I guess it wasn’t as bad as it felt in my head.

As someone who is pathologically brilliant at kicking the shit out of himself, the talk was not as polished as I had hoped. Not unpolished for lack of effort. It was a bit nerves, and I found myself turning too much to the screen, which pulled my head away from the microphone. I think I said, “of course” a lot.

I started by thanking everyone for coming to the conference, for one. These things are not cheap and you have to pay for travel, hotels, and food. During my post-lunch time slot of 2:15-3:15 p.m. EST, there were four talks to choose from and the people who showed up to see this sewer rat talk had their choice of anything, and they came to mine. Or they could have taken a nap.

Starting with appreciation. Never a bad move.

I’d say the most popular part of my talk was the organizational component. I shared my “brain” template (which I tweaked based on a similar one Kim H. Cross shared with me) with anyone who wanted it, as well as my book proposal, and that seemed to make people feel like they left the party with a goodie bag and that their time was worth it.

I did record myself and I’m leaving a couple options open for that. Either I will put it on the podcast feed and edit out the parts that don’t make sense without the slides. Or, I’ll put it in the podstack newsletter with the slides that correspond to a clip of audio. [Subscribe to the podly Substack (Yes, I somehow made “pod” into an adverb, which is admittedly brilliant.)] Many of my slides were hand drawn and a few of them got some big laughs, so that was nice.

The conference proved something to me that I’ve been harking on for years: This idea of getting in front of people and being with people, among people. It’s good to be in real life — IRL, as the kids say — and not digitally interfaced.

Several people approached me and offered kind words about the podcast (some were nervous in the same way I was nervous to approach Dan Zak [I didn’t. What. A. Stud. What a stone-cold hottie.]). Many listeners used the CNF15 coupon code at checkout for PoN, or they found out about the conference because of the podcast and enrolled. All of which is validating on a number of levels.

As I often say, it’s lonely on this side of the microphone and it rarely feels like anyone is out there listening (I know this to be false.). It can feel, at times, futile. Like, why put all this effort in? It’s like the Bruce Springsteen song “Radio Nowhere.”

This is Radio Nowhere,
Is there anybody alive out there?

Experiencing events in person, conferences, shaking hands, workshops like the ones at Archer City, making the eye contact, handing out the business cards. Yeah, they’re alive; they’re out there.

As you know, this newsletter starts here, and goes up to 11!

The Books

1. Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women by Maggie Mertens. Maggie might be interviewing me in Seattle for The Front Runner at Elliot Bay Book Company, so I wanted to make sure I read this and celebrated it on the pod.

2. Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America by Will Bardenwerper. Definitely makes me not like Major League Baseball and commodification of players. Let’s face it, they always were, but now it’s even more clinical and soulless.

3. The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition by Jane Friedman. Jane’s a boss.

4. Love Letter to a Garden by Debbie Millman. Real excited for you to hear this podcast. It’s Debbie’s third trip, but this was a real crackin’ conversation. There was an extra bit of zip to this one.

The Other Stuff

5. Jaron Lanier is one of those tech dudes you WANT to listen to. He wrote an essay for The New Yorker weekend essay about A.I. lovers. He also wrote the must-read Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. After The Front Runner comes out, IG might be a goner for me. It’s reaching the end game. Then again, it might stay there as a placeholder? I have thoughts. Another day…

6. This Yale Review story by Bryan Burrough making nearly $500,000 for three stories a year for Vanity Fair made people feel things.

7. Perhaps a helpful article on story structure.

8. Do you even lift, bro? Cecilia Brown made a great short doc for The New Yorker.

9. Courtesy of Steve Knezovich’s “Read This” newsletter (on hiatus), 100 ways to share you work that isn’t social media.

10. Party like it’s 2008.

11. I’ve spent more than $2,000 out of pocket for audio gear, so come to Gratitude Brewing on Sunday, April 13, at 1 p.m. to hear me in conversation with Leah Sottile talk about her new book Blazing Eye Sees All.

ICYMI: March on CNF Pod

Episode 455: Will McGrath’s Season on the Sidelines for The Believer
Episode 456: Neko Case Wrote Her Memoir in Bed
Episode 457: Poynter’s Neil Brown Says Editing Isn’t Discussed Enough
Episode 458: Jaydra Johnson Had to Get Weird
Episode 459: Cassidy Randall Talks Forgotten Histories, Sticky Notes, and the Power of Listening

Maybe Patreon?

If you want to help support the podcast and possibly get some face-to-face time with me to talk through some shit, consider becoming a patron. You can join for free if you want to lurk, but to get perks, you gotta thrown down that Mastercard. I’m thinking of moving the CNFin’ Happy Hour to Patreon and see if it sticks, or do Live Q&As. I have an A or two, definitely one. https://www.patreon.com/cnfpod

That’s it for this month’s rager as we get closer and closer to the pub date for The Front Runner. I’m not freaking out. You are! Speaking of that, maybe consider pre-ordering.

Stay strong,

b.r.o.

The Riff

Of the thorny issues to talk about among writers, money is a big one. Few things lead to greater jealousy and resentment than talking about who got paid what. I imagine there’s a swath of the nonfiction literati who said, “B.O. got that? Da fuq?”

I’ve been transparent that I earned received (by luck more than anything) that coveted six-figure advance people fantasize about. Six-figures is a pretty big category. You need little more than a sixth-grade education to know that 100,000 up to 999,999 constitutes six figures.

My aim here is to offer up the reality of this $150,000 advance. I had thought about doing it as a podcast, but I think it’s better in writing so the math is easier to digest.

I was lucky in that my advance had a far more compressed timeline than most. Many writers who get an advance of this nature might have it spread over three or four years. Mine is more like 2.5 years … with an entire year of nothing. More on that below.

But first …

A Note on Privilege

Long time listeners of the show know I like to say that my partner lady wife is the breadwinner and we live off her salary alone (she’s also a fed gov employee, so this might change matters and we’ll have to sell our house and move … somewhere … not excluding our vehicle. No lie.)

• She brings in the health insurance.

• We have no children (We know our limitations … to a fault … We do have three dogs and their care is not cheap.)

• We have very little overhead, never go out to eat (largely because we’re vegan and there’s only so much Chipotle you can eat and our dogs are so traumatized from previous lives that we rarely leave home anyway).

• We don’t subscribe to any streaming services, not even Amazon.

• We do have Spotify, but that might be on its last legs, certainly if the DOGE comes knocking … and we hear the footsteps.

• We own one car.

• Our only outstanding debt is our mortgage.

• Any money I bring in is usually gravy. I’m more of the home-maker as I do the cooking, the shopping, the cleaning (though I’m not great and my attention to detail isn’t professional grade), the errands, the yard work.

Ok … I think that lays the groundwork.

And Let’s Be Clear …

None of what follows is a complaint. I’m deeply grateful I got to do what I did under the circumstances. If the above groundwork wasn’t in place, things might have been far more panicky. All that follows is to shed light on what the economics of this experience was like. The next one could be different.

2023: $60,000

First gross payment was $60,000 in early April 2023.

Subtract $9,000 for agent commission, so the net delivered to my bank account was $51,000.

Had to skim off $13,000 for taxes right away so when it was tax time we were good to go. Down to $38,000 available.

Right at the start, my wife was worried I wouldn’t meet my deadline and that we’d have to pay it all back, so I was very reluctant to dip into this reservoir unless I desperately needed to. I needed subscriptions to archives. I needed the usual business expenses of website fees, LLC fee, gear upgrades, paying for editing, paying for a genealogist, paying for photo licensing, etc.

At the start of 2024, I optimistically told our accountant that I planned on getting a gross payment of $45,000 ($38,000 after commission) upon delivery of my manuscript, so he drew up federal and state vouchers for estimated payments for the entire year: $1,300 fed and $600 state. Paid four times equals $7,600.

Now, I was under the impression that my second advance payment would come on delivery of my manuscript to my editor on my deadline of April 15, 2024.

This was wrong, wrong, wrong.

2024: $0 … oh, fuck

The second payment only arrives when they fully accept your rewritten draft, after legal gave it a go. So, for the entirety of 2024, there was no release of the second payment … but I paid those estimated taxes on money that never arrived, nearly $8,000 on no income. I’d go 22 months between payments.

Thankfully due to our paranoia that I wouldn’t finish the job and the fact that we can live off my wife’s salary, that $38,000 was never in danger of depleting.

BUT, had I not been awash in privilege, would $38,000 have lasted nearly two years? $19,000 per year take-home pay as a 44-year-old, college-educated dude with a beer tooth? I don’t think so. I would’ve needed another part-time job. Or freelance more. And I’m the worst freelancer in the world. I’m so bad.

So, though on paper the $150,000 looks amazing, you can see how quickly the money could very well have not lasted long under average circumstances and a longer timeline.

2025: $90,000 … oh … FUCK

Just last month, Feb. 2025, I received my second gross payment of $45,000 (22 months after the initial payment), net payment of $38,000. Since I paid so much in taxes on no income in 2024, I’ll be rolling that over to this year because my third payment — $45,000 gross, $38,000 net — is due on publication, so this year will be cush, and we might buy that van we’ve always wanted. Or we sock it away because of the DOGE. [I’ll keep this money socked away until the end of the year when things might settle?]

If my book earns out its advance (highly unlikely), I’ll have a $25,000 gross bonus.

Also, the hope is I can sell my next book this year, maybe even before my third payment (unlikely), thus overlapping the last payment of one book advance with the first one of the next.

This is the dream.

And so …

Given how murky information is around book advances, and money, and taxes, and how the six-figure advance is paraded around as a status symbol, I wanted to give you a peek as to how mine looked for this book as my life is right now. Things could drastically change. I’m notoriously frugal because I grew up with a fear around money and a family that was really weird about it.

I haven’t invested any of the book advance in Vanguard or whatever, but I do have it in a Capital One high-yield savings account that gives me several hundred dollars in interest per month, this interest pays for much of my overhead with the podcast and other things that keeps the machine running here at CNF Pod HQ.

I’m not “good” with money; I simply don’t spend a lot.

There you have it. Maybe I’ll get lucky again for the next biography, if I can give it wings in the next month for a quick pitch.

As you know, this newsletter starts here and goes up to 11!

The Books

1. Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women’s Ascent of Denali by Cassidy Randall, did you realize how sexist male mountaineers used to (lol) be?You’re gonna get a good fix of Cassidy. She has an Atavist story coming out soon as well.

2. Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age by Leah Sottile, looking forward to recording our second live podcast at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene, Sunday, April 13 at 1 p.m. Come meet Leah! Buy a signed book!

3. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, a modern-day classic written ten years ago that feels very of the moment.

4. Everything is an Emergency: An OCD Story in Words & Pictures by Jason Adam Katzenstein. I love a good graphic memoir.

The Other Stuff

5. I’m way too proud of this book cover I made.

6. Also, I have an “anti-social media feed.” It’s so stupid.

7. Hank Azaria opining about AI anxiety and why his voice work is a full-body, full-soul experience that AI can never replicate.

8. Rebecca Makkai talks about the burden of the blurber. I hated asking people for a blurb. I hated even more having to remind three of them that the deadline was five days away; it bummed me out that one ghosted me after happily agreeing to blurb. I batted 5-for-6. I’ll riff on asking for blurbs another day.

9. Jon Krakauer is on a mission to discredit a fucking YouTube clown trying to debunk Krakauer’s account of the events that became his opus Into Thin Air. Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8

10. OK, so, The New Yorker celebrated 100 years (in case you hadn’t heard, lol) with a meaty, two-week issue and I read it cover to cover! First time ever! And Lawrence Wright’s feature on a group of Catholic nuns who counsel the women on death row in Texas stole the show. It blew me way. Also a great excuse to watch or re-watch Wright’s talk on reporting as craft.

11. On March 22, Matt Caputo is interviewing John H. Richardson in Bethel, CT about Richardson’s Sager Group collection of stories Sing Sing Follies. Matt asked me what I charge for an “email blast” and I’m like, I’ve never heard of such a thing. Since I hate the idea of money and selling off slices of newsletters and spam and a lot of things, I figured I’d just shout it out. Plus, I coincidentally proofread Sing Sing Follies for The Sager Group. What a world!

ICYMI: February on CNF Pod

Episode 450: Ahead of Super Bowl LIX, John Eisenberg Chronicles the Long Journey of the Black Quarterback
Episode 451: When Beach Read Meets a System with Lindsay Jill Roth
Episode 452: lamb of god’s Randy Blythe’s Search for Perspective in ‘Just Beyond the Light’
Episode 453: Chandlor Henderson, Live at Gratitude Brewing, Says ‘Focus on the Skill’
Episode 454: Allegra Rosenberg’s Tale of Love on Ice for The Atavist

Maybe Patreon?

If you want to help financially support the podcast and possibly get some face-to-face time with me to talk through some shit, consider becoming a patron. You can join for free if you want to lurk, but to get perks, you gotta thrown down that plastic. I’m thinking of moving the CNFin’ Happy Hour to Patreon and see if it sticks, or do Live Q&As. I have an A or two. https://www.patreon.com/cnfpod

That’s it for this month’s rager as we get closer and closer to the pub date for The Front Runner. Speaking of that, maybe consider pre-ordering.

Stay strong,

b.r.o.

The name of this newsletter — Rage Against the Algorithm — is by design. If it wasn’t already apparent how insidious and slimy Big Social is, you need only look at the inauguration.

It further underscored what New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote:

“… Zuckerberg and like-minded tech moguls have direct material interests in cultivating Trump’s good favor by performing his brand of manhood. Meta, for instance, wants to undermine its competitors, suppress regulation and free itself from the threat of antitrust enforcement. Other tech billionaires want to leverage state power to secure their investments in artificial intelligence, ahead of a potential collapse in the value of A.I. stocks. If the bubble pops, they want Uncle Sam — and thus the American taxpayer — to be the one holding the bag. Their pose and presentation, then, are all obviously strategic.”

This newsletter is not a political newsletter. But since Bouie’s column was a riff on Big Tech and Zuck’s masculine (LOL!) posturing, what struck me was how if/when the bubble pops, we’ll be holding the bag.

Let’s remind ourselves of this: We do not need social media.

• It is not electricity.

• It is not shelter.

• It is not clean water.

• It is not affordable (lol) groceries.

• It is not an automobile needed to commute to work.

It is an information extraction machine, a privacy eradicator, masquerading as a community hub. Every social media platform eventually molts its skin of community and reveals itself for what it really is. Follow me on Bluesky!

My dream would be the mass exodus of everyone, to delete our profiles all together, in a coordinated walk out. We have all the power, but they have hijacked our sense of reason. I get it. I’m on Instagram (though I just deleted my Threads account. I know. Where do I find the courage?). I have a book coming out and if I followed my instincts and deleted all my socials (which I might in a few months) my publisher might consider that a breach of contract. If I had 50,000 newsletter subs, I could get away with it. That’s the goal. But I have a little more than 49,000 to go to reach that, sooooooo… foward to a friend!

I’ll repeat: We have the power. Nothing is holding us in place. Social media is not a utility company. It is not a necessary evil: It is, by and large, just evil.

If we the people deleted at once and freed ourselves from them, they would crumble to nothing. No, we don’t need them; they need us, which is why they invite us in for free, lock the doors, and throw away the keys. We are the host; they are the parasite. And we freely give it to them. Without us, the entire “Metaverse” would be a hollowed-out shopping mall. It still can be. Despite loving my Silver City Galleria in Taunton, MA, I would so love to see the castles crumble.

Yes, it takes more effort and creativity and rigor to build a platform without these platforms. Yes, it’s inconvenient. Trust me. I know how hard it is. How frustrating it is to get any sense of traction. Social media creates the illusion of traction.

It is Oz.

We always had/have the power to click our heels and leave.

How great would it be to see them wilt and dissolve, snapped into oblivion like Thanos.

I can dream.

As you know, this newsletter starts here and goes up to 11.

The Books

1. After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart by Megan Marshall. I enjoyed this collection of six essays and had a nice chat about it.

2. Romances & Practicalities: A Love Story (Maybe Yours!) in 250 Questions Lindsay Jill Roth. NGL, throwing a bone to a publicist here, but I’m keeping an open mind.

3. Cocomania: How Coco Gauff Won the US Open and Became America’s Next Great Tennis Superstar by Dan Wolken. This doesn’t quite strike the depth I crave from biography, but if you dig tennis you’ll probably dig it, too.

4. The Incomplete Book of Running by Peter Sagal. This has been on my shelf for seven years. Glad I finally picked it up.

The Other Stuff

5. In the spirit of simply blogging about stuff and shit I’m interested in in my little internet garden that is MY website, not the sharecrop of Big Tech, I’ve begun riffing on running a bit (short essays on long running). Here’s my running companion.

6. We pulled off our first live podcast event. Here’s my riff on it.

7. The movie Her is coming to fruition. I kind of see the appeal. In my loneliest days as a sports reporter, I took great joy in the “company” of the commentary on my collection of Simpsons DVDs.

8. This mini-doc on throwing the football is about throwing the football … or is it? Or is it really about voice, individuality, drawing inspiration from the ideal but settling into the comfort of your own skin and style? … Or it could just be about throwing a fucking football.

9. I wrote a thing for Writer’s Digest about whether or not you should have a dress code that reflects the content of your book. But, turns out, my publisher has no plans to send me anywhere, so I’ll be wearing my requisite Champion sweatpants.

10. I appeared on the Pivotal Running YouTube channel for a little interview about Steve Prefontaine. It was good practice. I need to improve my messaging.

11. Download the Bookshop.org app so you can read e-books that support local bookstores!

CNFin’ Happy Hour: How to Finish

It’s natural to jump from project to project but at some point we have to finish things. Let’s talk about it. Grab a tea or a libation. I think Google Meet allows for an hour for free.

Friday, February 21, 5:00 – 6:00pm PST

https://meet.google.com/mad-dpvr-ttd

Maybe Patreon?

Seen a nice little uptick in Patreon enrollment. If you want to help financially support the podcast and possibly get some face-to-face time with me to talk through some shit, consider becoming a patron. You can join for free if you want to lurk, but to get perks, you gotta thrown down that plastic. https://www.patreon.com/cnfpod

ICYMI: January on CNF Pod

Episode 445: For Andrew Dubbins, It’s About the Love of the Story
Episode 446: Harrison Scott Key and the Plight of Memoir
Episode 447: Brooke Champagne Sits Back from the Suckitude
Episode 448: Evan Ratliff Returns … Or Did He?
Episode 449: Drew Philp Wants to Make Spanakopita Out of Spinach News

On Saturday, Jan. 25, 2025, (Steve Prefontaine’s 74th birthday), I went to TrackTown Pizza to meet some of the Pre Classic folks. No vegan ‘za bruh, so I was a hungry boy, tortured by the smell of meat and cheese. Poor me.

I met Tom Jordan, the author of the first Prefontaine biography. He was nice, but I could tell I was interrupting him and that he didn’t really want to talk to me. In my defense, someone introduced me to him so it wasn’t as if I barnstormed the guy. I thanked him for the work he did because biographers stand on the shoulders of those who came before. I also commended him on the job he did at the time he did it: 1978. There was no White Pages, Fast People Search, newspapers.com or, you know, the internet.

You can always tell when someone is like, move along now, move along. So after two minutes I was like, well, I can tell I best GTF outta here. It felt like a loooooong two minutes. Maybe it was three. Either way … I’m good at sensing a vibe and that vibe was, be gone, son.

I also met in person one of my key sources for the book, and her two children. It was nice, but also stressful. The children didn’t ever return my phone calls. I understand not everyone wants to talk with a journalist. They grilled me quite a bit as they’re understandably protective of Steve. I left really liking them, but also uneasy, because they might take issue with some things. Anyway, it was a stressful afternoon for an introverted “enemy of the people.”

Stay cool till March,

Brendan

PS:

Lachlan got a bath this week, so here he is in his bathrobe … since there was no bathrobe photo of Lachlan last month.

I did a promotional partnership with the Power of Narrative Conference (I don’t get any kickbacks or commissions). If you want a discount for the weekend tuition, use the promo code CNF15 at checkout to save 15%. The conference takes place March 28 and 29 at Boston University. Visit https://combeyond.bu.edu/offering/the-power-of-narrative-conference/ to learn more and to register for an unforgettable time. Susan Orlean, a three-time guest of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, is the keynote speaker!

The Riff

Happy (?) New Year, CNFers,

Pre-orders …

Go on …

admit it …

you’re sick of them, too.

It’s okay. Every goddam author under the sun bombards you to pre-order their book. BEGS you. Every author, big and small (sorry, popular and not), must go around and blast to the world over and over and over again asking you to spend an obscene amount of money (often north of $30) to buy something they won’t get for six to nine months. In an age of next-day shipping, book pre-ordering does not jive.

We all know this is part of the game, yet it still feels icky when you already ask people for their attention — be it to listen to your podcast, or read your newsletter — or even plunk down a couple clams on Patreon. Then on top of that you’re asking for a significant investment from your generous audience in the form of a pre-order (or 2 or 3 or 4).

I’ve been sitting on my pre-order link for The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine because I haven’t been able to bring myself to be yet another writer begging you to pay $32.99 on top of your attention. I put the link up on my website. I read a little “house ad” for it on the podcast. I haven’t told a lot of people and perhaps that’s my propensity for self-sabotage. I’ve long thought the idea of success is for other people, a lovely, debilitating trait I got from my dementia-addled mother.

And so it comes to this … I first shared the book cover and pre-order link with the Patreon gang. Now I’ll share it with you before I start getting obnoxious on social media about it.

If $32.99 (or more if you’re being generous) is too much (gosh, that’s a lot money, it really is; it’s like a half-tank of gas or 60 Busch Lights), ask your library to order it, maybe? Is that a thing? Fuck if I know.

If you order five or more for you and your reading group, share the receipt with me and I’ll be sure to schedule some kind of private group sesh. Just like the Metallica Industrial Complex promotes around concerts, “Enhanced Experiences.”

Below, you’ll see the beautiful cover and a link in the caption that will take you to HarperCollins’s site. There you can visit the bookseller of your choice. If you have a favorite bookstore, ring them up.

This has been a wild ride, man. If nothing else, just bask in that book cover. It’s a beaut, Clark!

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338

As you know, this newsletter starts here and goes up to 11!

The Books

1. Newspaper (Bloomsbury Academic) by Maggie Messitt. An odd, little book that braids a selected history of the newspaper in the United States and South Africa, two countries near and dear to Maggie’s heart.

2. Just Beyond the Light: Making Peace with the Wars Inside Our Head (Grand Central Publishing) by D. Randall Blythe. He’s the lead singer of the death metal band Lamb of God. They make Metallica sound like Led Zeppelin.

3. Words & Music: An Album of a Life in Story and Song (Beach Glass Books) by the late Philip Gerard. Before Philip’s untimely passing a few years ago, he was one of the most cherished teachers and writers in this CNFin’ community.

4. The Armor Building Formula: Bodybuilding for Real People by Dan John. He’s one of my favorite strength coaches out there, sensible, not an Instagram trainer.

The Other Stuff

5. The effing algorithm, man … somehow this came across my YouTube feed and … I love it. It’s Aki, a Japanese minimalist and his channel just makes me happy.

6. A recent podcast excerpt in Longreads, this featuring Louisa Thomas.

7. In case you still need convincing, you don’t need Twitter (I left when what’s-his-face [who apparently is going full-on White Supremacist] bought it, but people still seem to need convincing). Shoutout to the Read This email by Stephen Knezovich. Happy One Year Anniversary to my favorite daily email!

8. I got a tip protector for Christmas.

9. Comedian Isabel Hagen struggles with the social media element of being a standup. I came across this via Jason Zinoman’s NYT article.

10. How to stop doomscrolling.

11. Some, but not all, the lessons learned from finishing writing a book in 2024 (parting shot, in writing, from Ep. 444).

ICYMI: December on CNF Pod

Episode 441: Seth Wickersham Gets Them Out of the Building
Episode 442: Steven Hyden Revisits Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’
Episode 443: Jared Sullivan and the Subtle Art of the Cold Call
Episode 444: Stephanie Gorton Embraces the Messiness

CNFin’ Happy Hour: So You’ve Quit Your Resolutions and You Feel Like a Big Fat Loser

Friday, January 17, 2025
5 p.m. PST to 5:45 PST
Link: https://us05web.zoom.us/j/81970506176?pwd=AUDdT0DRlnSbuD7M4YHagu7JYZRtz8.1
Meeting ID: 819 7050 6176
Passcode: 0IGkjK

Maybe Patreon?

Seen a nice little uptick in Patreon enrollment. If you want to help financially support the podcast and possibly get some face-to-face time with me to talk through some shit, consider becoming a patron. You can join for free if you want to lurk, but to get perks, you gotta thrown down that plastic. https://www.patreon.com/cnfpod

Bonus: The Dogs Got Bathrobes

We keep our house pretty chill (literally) in the winter. It makes for shivering dogs when they get their monthly baths. So they got bathrobes for Christmas. Our. Dogs. Own. Bathrobes.

Kevin is in LOVE with hers (this surprised us). Hank loves a good blanket, so it’s no surprise he loves his. I assure you he doesn’t look like a seal.

Lachlan loves his robe, too, but I don’t have a photo with him in it. So here he is not respecting my space. Very on brand for him.

Until February, stay wild,

b.o.

The Riff

It’s the last rager of the year. Thanks for being here. Seriously.

The end of the year is an opportunity for reflection. Like, what the hell happened to the podcast audience this year?

Audience erosion in one year. What happened? What changed?

To quote Buddy the Elf, “That’s shocking.”

My wife saw the graph and immediately googled my name to see if I had done or said something stupid that would lead me to be some micro-pariah. Nothing, which is great! But also … WT actual F?!

I understand it was an election year, which drained all of our batteries. I understand that people might be listening to fewer podcasts. I understand that people’s attention might be more frayed and to hang for an hour is a tall task. (It always was, and I never took that for granted, but it’s like how inflation means your dollar doesn’t go as far. There’s been this inflation of attention where it takes twice the effort to listen to the same hour. Does that make sense?)

This also was a year that Longform sunsetted and a year where I’ve gotten more book pitches than ever. It goes in waves because of publishing schedules, but the book pitches number in the several hundreds. I publish 52 interviews a year. There are unhappy people.

Perhaps people outgrew the show. I know that has happened with my listening habits. Or I didn’t have enough “famous” people on the show. Perhaps people just got sick of me. I’m sick of me. Listen to any of my parting shots and you know how much I hate myself. [SIDEBAR: The parting shots are at the end of the show for a reason. I could understand people getting sick of me if I forced them to listen to my incessant, insufferable blather at the top of the show. If you listen at the end, then, well, you’re really electing to. Plus, the listener analytics show that very few people make it through 50% of an interview, which is really fucking depressing. SIDE-SIDEBAR: Don’t look at analytics.]

But it’s a real kick in the beanbag because this audience was a reason why I was attractive to a big publisher. It was the reason my Prefontaine biography sold. And now, I mean, the trend doesn’t lie. I’m not an analytics guy, but you can’t ignore that disturbing trend. With a book coming out in 2025, losing several thousand listeners in one year is … troubling.

All this is to say that I’m not quitting the show or fundamentally changing the substance of the show. I know the pod has value to many of you. I get the occasional email saying how much a listener appreciates the show, so I know it’s in service of something bigger than myself.

In times like these, be it a blog, a podcast, a YouTube series, you have to remember your WHY. Also, just as important, your WHO. You’re my WHO, friend.

As you know, this newsletter starts here and goes up to 11!

The Books

I. The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster by John O’Connor. John came on the podcast a few years ago, and he’ll be back on to talk about this cool book.

II. The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: A Memoir by Neko Case. Just started this. Pod TK.

III. Blackness is a Gift I Can Give Her: On Race, Community, and Black Women in Hockey by R. Renee Hess. Just started this. Pod TK.

IV. Low: Notes on Art & Trash by Jaydra Johnson. This book kinda fuckin’ blew me away. Pod TK.

Not usually a mocha guy, but this was tasty.

The Other Stuff

V. Cool mini-doc on the great New Yorker cartoonist Barry Blitt.

VI. Hopefully this will feel irrelevant this December 1, but Charles Bethea’s piece, “The Home Front,” is brilliant and chilling.

VII. Is creativity dead? … he says while sharing a link to the most basic forms of newslettering.

VIII. Newsletters are not blogs.

IX. A test between yourself and yourself? Paint me paralyzed! The two-day rule for habit formation, friend.

X. Kim H. Cross wrote about the final issue of Creative Nonfiction. [A couple years ago, the staff of the magazine dissolved over internal conflicts. The result was the end of the magazine. This story doesn’t really riff on that backstory, but if Kim writes something you should probably read it.]

XI. Six writers on procrastination. Also, if this procrastination plagues you, listen to this episode of Ologies.

Three Sisters near Bend, OR.

A Few of My Favorite Books from 2024

For the book lover in your life, here’s a list of a few of the best books I read this year and links to buy them (I don’t use affiliate links, so you know my recommendation is true). For next year, I plan on actually writing down all the guests’ recommendations for a fun, holiday shopping list.

Memoir and Essay
Low: Notes on Art & Trash by Jaydra Johnson
Farm Girl: A Memoir by Megan Baxter
Nola Face by Brooke Champagne
First Love by Lilly Dancyger

Biography and Journalism
The Icon & the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton
Valley So Low by Jared Sullivan
The Message by Ta-nehisi Coates
Dream by Mirin Fader
Indigenous People’s History of the United States, a graphic interpretation by Paul Peart-Smith
The Long Road by Steven Hyden
The Last Shot by Darcy Frey

ICYMI: November on CNF Pod

Episode 436: Mira Ptacin and the Story of How One Town Drove Out a Nazi
Episode 437: Much Ado About Fact-Checking with Wudan Yan
Episode 438: How It’s All Connected with Taiyon J. Coleman
Episode 439: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Paul Peart-Smith Bring a Graphic Interpretation of ‘An Indigenous People’s History of the United States’ to Life
Episode 440: How to be a Truffle Pig with Kate McQueen

CNFin’ Happy Hour Returns!

Figure since it’s the end of the year, maybe we’ll talk about goals for 2025.

Thursday December 12, 5 p.m. to 5:40 p.m. PST
Meeting Link: https://us05web.zoom.us/j/85002008446?pwd=HfIorJUrxpfcberIP0t4cOOIh2rVL3.1
Meeting ID: 850 0200 8446
Passcode: 7ZaZP0

Steve Prefontaine with his dog Lobo.

Beware The Front Runner

I’m guessing that sometime in January there will be a pre-order link available for The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine by ya boy B.O. We need to hammer the pre-orders, CNFers. HAMMER them.

I know I bag on myself at every turn, but this book, thanks to the tireless work of my editor, is pretty special.

Thanks, CNFers, see you next year!

b.o.

The Riff

I don’t use affiliate links so you know my recommendations are true. I get zero bucks from any purchase you make. But if you want to throw dough my way — and get some cool perks — visit patreon.com/cnfpod. In some cases, space is limited!

The Books

I. No Friday Night Lights: Reservation Football on the Edge of America by John M. Glionna (Pod TK)

II. The Ancient Eight: College Football’s Ivy League and the Game They Play Today by John Feinstein. Over-under: How many books has John written? I’ll set it the line at 49.5. If you took the over … you’d be correct! This is his fiftieth book. Da fuq?! (Pod TK)

III. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey. I know I bag on people (my former and, at times, current self, for caring about routines … “routine porn,” there you go, coined a new term, boom, nailed it.). Buuuuuuuut … I like this book. I like reading one or two profiles at the start of the day.

IV. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous People’s History of the United States: A Graphic Interpretation, adapted by Paul Peart-Smith (Pod TK with Roxanne and Paul). If you haven’t read Roxanne’s master source text — An Indigenous People’s History of the United States — let this beautiful, poignant graphic presentation be your gateway in.

The Other Stuff

V. I’m scrubbing many old blog posts from my website because, One, so many are dumb and banal, the musings of a pathetic, desperate thirty-two-year-old person; Two, in the event that there’s anything insensitive, best to delete that. But I came across an interview I did with Jonathan Evison, one of my favorite novelists. It’s worth keeping.

VI. Should you just give up?

VII. Ann Patchett regrets email. And she has a point.

VIII. Sure, it’s content marketing, but it’s a fine little interview with the novelist Robert Brighton. Plus, I’m addicted to Blackwing pencils.

IX. Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas teamed up for another incredible podcast. This called “Hush.”

X. Eva Holland, a past guest of the pod, has a new, indie-published collection of her best journalism, No Sleep ‘til Fairbanks. You can help it out by visiting her Indiegogo link. If you can afford to, you should. She’s one of the good ones.

XI. Lee Child talks about some pretty great writing insights from more than twenty Jack Reacher series.

ICYMI: October on CNF Pod

Episode 432: Betsy Golden Kellem, Scholar of the Unusual, Close Historian, Atavist Writer

Episode 433: The Perils of Playing it Safe with Chase Jarvis

Episode 434: Mirin Fader on Notebooks, Finding the Breakthrough, Biography, and “Dream”

Episode 435: Seth Godin Travels at the Speed of Trust with ‘This is Strategy’ (a bonus link good for authors: https://seths.blog/2024/10/five-lessons-from-week-one-of-this-is-strategy/)

Things are not going well.

The Riff

The Books*

I. This is Strategy: Make Better Plans by Seth Godin. A sister book to This is Marketing, This is Strategy helps you see what you can’t see but then once you see it you can no longer un-see it.

II. The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry that Brought Birth Control to America by Stephanie Gorton.

III. Farm Girl: A Memoir by Megan Baxter

IV. Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe by Jared Sullivan. I’m just getting into this, and if you liked A Civil Action, you’ll dig this.

The Other Stuff

V. I was on a podcast saying the word “just” every other word. Very kind of Ariel and Liz to have me on their show.

VI. Legendary axe-wielder Zakk Wylde on why guitarists should embrace their own sound … a lesson for any writer.

VII. Embedded in just about everything I do these days focuses on the analog, on slowness. I, for one, favor (and this is my coinage, hooray for me) “slow journalism.” Cal Newport has a new book callled … Slow Productivity. And this wonderful profile of Rivendell’s Grant Petersen by Anna Wiener is all about “the art of taking it slow.” I’m sensing a trend.

VIII. Katie Ward reflects on Hilary Mantel’s and seven things she taught Katie about writing.

IX. An oldie, but a goodie, this from Roy Peter Clark reviewing John McPhee’s Draft No. 4 for Poynter.

X. Lilly Dancyger’s first piece for The New York Times talks about the struggle to maintain connection with friends without alcohol. I go for long bouts of not drinking; I journal about it constantly, and I DREAD telling a friend (rare as they are) that I’m not drinking at the moment. I have to gird myself for getting made fun of. I already deal with a mountain of shit for not eating animals or their animal-based products. Point being, it shouldn’t be so hard to not drink in this fucking country. (I had two beers this past weekend.)

XI. Robert Caro finally allowed his tome The Power Broker to be formatted as an ebook. “With everything in the world today, speed is supposed to be a desirable thing,” he said. “I happen to think there’s something good about going slow.”

*: I don’t use affiliate links, so you know I don’t make a penny off any recommendations. You may think me a fool, and you wouldn’t be the first.

The Riff!

Many of us have platform angst, even envy. The notion of platform sits on our chest like an elephant. We can’t breathe. We panic. We fear we’ll never find readers, or the real challenge: convincing an agent or editor to take us on as a marketable, bankable piece of stock.

The IPO of us (shoulda been the title of this rager) rests largely on this idea of platform. And, for many, social media is what people think of w/r/t platform. It’s merely a branch of the family tree of platform, but it isn’t the entire game. I’d argue it’s one of the smallest , but it has the capacity to hijack the entire enterprise.

Instead of a family tree, a better depiction of platform is a pie chart. The fraction of which varies, but it’ll look something like this:

• Your social media following

• Your email list

• Your podcast listeners

• Your YouTube following

• (And here’s what people forget) The other people you have access to, or relationships with.

So long as you’re not being a total vampire, if you have a relationship with someone in your network who has 300,000 followers on Instagram, that’s an extension of your platform even if they’re not “yours.” You shouldn’t be a lamprey glomming onto big sharks and hitching a free ride. You still need to do the work of planting and cultivating your own garden, one that you can share with others as your influence steadily and organically grows. It’s unfair and sleazy to ask someone else who has cultivated a platfor — ideally through years — and then you say, “Mind if I bum a smoke?”

This idea of widening the scope of what it means to have platform came from the new book Hungry Authors: The Indispensable Guide to Planning, Writing, and Publishing a Nonfiction Book by Liz Morrow and Ariel Curry (pod forthcoming where we talk about this quite a bit). What happens when we worry about social media being the endgame of all things platform is we run the risk of losing our time and energy for a service that doesn’t have our best interests at heart. Also, if you’re trying to “decode” an algorithm, trying to hack its rules, you’re wasting your time. You own none of that. As Morrow and Curry write, “The only truth about platform is that no one quite agrees on how valuable or necessary it is to your publishing success.”

All this is to say, it’s very possible to get your work attention without (increasingly meaningless) social media adherence. Those systems are meant to tug on our most primitive psychologies, to lock us into their platforms, to get us to buy stuff, to exploit us.

By all means have social media handles, but platform is far more holistic than we’ve been led to believe the past fifteen years or so.

Being good at social media won’t get you where you want to go.

It is so, so difficult.

But while others waste their time falling into the Valley of Algorithmia, you’re building a root system based on permission, one immune to technological erosion.

Rage.

The Books!

I. Dream: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon by Mirin Fader. Mirin gave us Giannis, now she takes a similar look at Hakeem the Dream.

II. Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy by Brooke Champagne. An arresting voice right from the first page. #douchechills (It’s in the book. I feel like I need to make that clear.)

III. Traveling Without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America by Taiyon J. Coleman. There’s a moment in these essays that ripped my guts out, man.

IV. Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home by Chris La Tray. Chris also has a great newsletter, “An Irritable Metis,” and is the Montana Poet Laureate.

The Other Stuff!

V. Can you afford to write like John McPhee? (h/t Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity for drawing attention to this 2017 essay).

VI. I usually steer clear of videos of this nature, but, I was like, get your head out of your ass, B.O. This from Bookfox, about the nine steps to writing a short story, which might just as well apply to personal essay. This riffed on an essay from Tin House’s The Writer’s Notebook II.

VII. Derek Sivers says make a “now” page. So I did. Here’s mine.

VIII. Louisa Thomas, a sports columnist for The New Yorker, is appointment reading for me. I seek out her byline. When I find it, I pounce. Here she writes about Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes and the game of chicken power pitchers play with their elbow health, namely the ulnar collateral ligament. New pod with her coming shortly.

IX. Evan Ratliff, author of The Mastermind and a former co-host of recently sunsetted Longform Podcast, produced an incredible podcast called “Shell Game.” The first season chronicles what happens when he cloned his own voice, and thus begin’s a six-episode arc of what this sector of AI might mean for us. Evan independently produced the show, which I find pretty cool. Pod TK.

X. Time won’t slow down, but we can.

XI. I have a groovy little partnership again with the folks at Longreads where I share a little excerpt from the podcast. This month’s was a snippet from my amazing chat with Darcy Frey about not using tape recorders.

I don’t use affiliate links, so my recommendations have no bias.

ICYMI: August on The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Episode 423: Rhana Natour and Eman Mohammed Take You Up Close for The Atavist

Episode 424: Tommy Tomlinson on Aiming for One-Word Summations, the Blurt, and 'Dogland’

Episode 425: The Most Brazen of Genres with Madeleine Blais

Episode 426: Aksing for Blurbs, Unauthorized Biographies, and the Myster of Aaron Rodgers with Ian O’Connor

Episode 427: Kelsey Rexroat on Dealing with the Monstrosity

Coda

Also, for face-to-face time and to support the podcast, you can window shop at patreon.com/cnfpod. I put out a call for questions for journalist and producer Evan Ratliff when I talk to him about “Shell Game.”

And if you leave a review on Apple Podcasts, take a screenshot, send it to creativenonfictionpodcast@gmail.com and I’ll coach up a piece of your writing of up to 2,000 words.

Thank you for reading, CNFers.

Rage,

b.r.o.