Gangrey Podcast: Recent Episodes
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Kathryn Miles is the author of “Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders.” The book, published by Algonquin, officially goes on sale on May 3.
“Trailed” is about the 1996 murders of Lolly Winans and Julie Williams. The two young women had entered Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park to go on a week-long backcountry camping trip. When they didn’t return, park rangers began searching and found a scene of horror at the women’s campsite.
The murders were never solved. Then, in 2016, on the 20th anniversary of the case, the FBI announced they wanted to reinvestigate. That’s when Miles thought she had a magazine story on her hands.
“As soon as I started working with the FBI on this case, as soon as I was able to access some of the case files from the court case, it was very obvious to me that this case was much more complicated,” Miles said. “That’s when I realized that we weren’t talking about a 5,000-word piece here. We were talking about a 100,000-word piece.”
This is the second time Miles has been on the podcast. She was a guest on Episode 46 in September 2016, discussing her Boston Globe story about a woman got lost and died while hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Miles is the author of five books, including “Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake” and “Super Storm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy.”
Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Outside, the Boston Globe, Politico, and more. She’s been anthologized by “Best American Essays” and “Best American Sports Writing.”
Mark S. Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who covers health and science for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He is also the author of “Though the Earth Gives Way: A Novel.” That book was published in January by Bancroft Press.
The book is an end-of-days look at a small group of people as climate change has wrecked the planet.
Host Matt Tullis wanted to talk with Johnson about the book, as well as how his journalism career has helped or hindered his ability to write fiction.
Johnson was part of the Pulitzer Prize winning team in 2011 for a series on the groundbreaking use of genetic technology to save a 4-year-old boy. That series was later turned into the book, “One in a Billion: The Story of Nic Volker and the Dawn of Genomic Medicine.” He wrote that book with Kathleen Gallagher.
Johnson, a Pulitzer finalist three times, continues to write about health and science in Milwaukee.
Mike Sielski is the author of “The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality.” Sielski, a sports columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, wanted to tell the basketball superstar’s origin story after Bryant died in a helicopter crash on January 26, 2020. That’s a story that takes place mostly in Philadelphia.
Sielski interviewed more than 100 people for the book. He was also assisted by long-time friend Jeremy Treatman, who had been an assistant coach and confidant of Bryant’s back in Kobe’s high school days. At one point, Treatman and Bryant were working on a memoir focused on Kobe’s rookie season in the NBA. As a result, Treatman recorded interviews with Bryant on microcassettes during his senior year.
The book never happened, and then Treatman lost the cassettes. He found them just before Christmas in 2020, just three months before Sielski’s book was due to his publisher. Hearing Kobe’s voice as a teenager helped Sielski get more depth and details that he wouldn’t have had otherwise, strengthening the narrative of the book.
“The Rise” is Sielski’s third book. In 2005, he co-wrote “How to Be Like Jackie Robinson” with Pat Williams. His second book, “Fading Echoes: A True Story of Rivalry and Brotherhood From the Football Field to Fields of Honor” was published in 2009.
Sielski was voted Best Sports Columnist by the Associated Press Sports Editors in 2015. In 2010, his story “Dream Derailed” was included in “Best American Sports Writing.”
Chris Jones is the author “The Eye Test: A Case for Human Creativity in the Age of Analytics.” Jones describes the book as the distillation of everything he has learned from creative people over his journalism career. He says he’s trying to make the case that analytics are useful, but they have their limitations.
“The Eye Test” digs into seven different areas where there are a lot of analytical inputs, but stories of those analytics coming up short. Those chapters include Entertainment, Sports, Weather, Politics, Crime, Money, and Medicine.
This is Jones’s third book. His most recent book was “Too Far from Home,” which was retitled “Out of Orbit” in paperback. It first came out in 2007.
Jones has been on the podcast twice before. He was featured on Episode 17 in January of 2014. At the time, we talked about his Kenneth Feinberg profile that ran in Esquire, as well as his 50th anniversary story on the JFK assassination.
In April of 2020, when the pandemic was just getting started, Episode 82 included an interview with Jones focused on the different types of writing he had been doing since leaving Esquire, including screenwriting.
Jones was a longtime reporter for Esquire, where he won a National Magazine Award twice, including in 2009 for “The Things That Carried Him.” He was a writer and producer on the Netflix series “Away.” He has written for The New York Times, ESPN: The Magazine, and many other publications.
Chip Scanlan is an award-winning former journalist who has authored or edited a dozen books. His newest book is Writers on Writing: Inside the Lives of 55 Distinguished Writers and Editors.
Each writer or editor included in the book was asked the same four questions. The answers to those questions are enlightening to read.
Included in the book are Susan Orlean, Dan Barry, Jan Winburn, David Finkel, Roy Peter Clark, and so many more. The book also includes ten writers who have been on this podcast.
It’s not just journalists featured in the book though. Scanlan included poets and fiction writers. He’s covered the entire realm of writing. The end result? Narrative journalists aren’t so different from poets after all. Ultimately, we’re all just writers.
Scanlan has written two journalism textbooks. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and many other places. Two of his essays have been listed as “Notables” in Best American Essays.
He publishes the newsletter and blog “Chip’s Writing Lessons” and is a regular contributor to Nieman Storyboard. He formerly directed the writing program and the National Writer’s Workshops at The Poynter Institute.
Jim Sheeler won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2006 for his story “Final Salute,” which ran in the Rocky Mountain News. The piece focused on Marine Major Steve Beck, who notified families when their loved ones were killed in Iraq and helped them through the mourning process. The story ended up being more than just about Beck, though, as it brought memories of the lives of the dead service members and their families to millions of people.
The story was expanded into a book with the same title. That book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2008. Sheeler made a name for himself as a reporter by writing feature obituaries about ordinary, everyday people. A collection of those stories can be found in Sheeler’s book “Obit.”
Sheeler never appeared on Gangrey: The Podcast, although many reporters talked about how they learned lessons from him and his work. He died unexpectedly on September 17. He was 53 years old.
This episode remembers Sheeler through stories from a variety of people who knew him.
In the introduction, Josh Roiland, an English and journalism professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington talks about how Sheeler helped him out a couple years ago when he was struggling.
Included in this episode:
Part 1: In October 2019, host Matt Tullis interviewed Sheeler for a writing project he was working on. Tullis recorded that interview and found the audio file after Sheeler died. It’s presented here.
Part 2: In the days after Sheeler died, Ben Montgomery tweeted a story he’s heard Sheeler tell about his middle name - Expedite. Montgomery tells that story.
Part 3: Steve Knopper, a freelance writer of 25 years, worked with Sheeler in Boulter in the early 1990s. He also tweeted a remembrance, and tells the story of how he and Sheeler stumbled out of a bar one night at 1 a.m. and found adults riding Big Wheels.
Part 4: Anne Nickoloff and Mike McKenna were students of Sheeler’s at Case Western Reserve University from 2012-16, and stayed in touch with him afterward. Nickoloff is now a reporter at Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer. McKenna is a fourth-year graduate student in clinical psychology at Ohio State. They tell us what it was like to have Sheeler as a professor.
Part 5: Jim Tankersley is a White House correspondent for the New York Times focusing on economics. Back in the early 2000s, he worked with Sheeler at the Rocky Mountain News. They became friends and stayed in touch. Then, in August, Tankersley was named the pool reporter who had to follow President Biden to the Dover Air Force Base to receive the bodies of 13 service members, the last to die in Afghanistan. He reached out to Sheeler for help with that article.
Allison Glock is the type of writer who succeeds in a variety of genres. She writes young adult fiction. She’s an executive producer for the NBC series “The Blacklist.” She’s written for the New Yorker and Garden & Gun magazine. She’s written poetry, and produces short documentary films.
In this episode, we start off by talking about an essay she wrote for espnW at the end of 2020. The essay, “Walk, run, or wheelbarrow: We moved our bodies forward during the pandemic,” is about how we dealt with COVID in the days when we were locked down.
That essay leads off the new sports anthology series “The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2021.” That’s a new series started by Glenn Stout. The series, published by Triumph Books, continues the tradition carried on by “Best American Sports Writing,” which ended its run in 2020. Stout talks about the new series at the end of this episode.
Glock got her start doing longform narrative for magazines, but has transitioned to film and TV out of economic necessity. She’s doing amazing work there, including her work on The Blacklist, and videos made by her production company, Holler Beach Productions. One of the videos produced was about southern women.
Marissa R. Moss is a freelancer who writes about musicians for Rolling Stone, Billboard, American Songwriter, and more. In August, she profiled country music superstar Sturgill Simpson for Rolling Stone.
Moss has been writing about music for years. She writes a lot about country musicians, partially because she lives in Nashville. But also because she loves the storytelling aspect of it.
Moss has written about Kacey Musgraves, Jason Isbell, Tanya Tucker, Eric Church, Miranda Lambert, and more. She was given the Best Music Reporter award by Nashville Scene in 2019.
Now she is putting the finishing touches on her first book. “Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed To Be” will be published by Henry Holt and Company. It goes on sale in May 2022.
Kent Babb is a sports feature writer for the Washington Post. He writes about the NFL, college sports, the NBA, and the intersections of sports with social, cultural, and political issues.
We talked about his new book, Across the River: Life, Death, and Football in an American City. It was published by HarperOne in August.
Across the River is a riveting look at a high school football team in a part of New Orleans few of us ever hear about. It’s a team made up of players and coaches who have to deal with shootings and murder on a regular basis.
Babb is also one of the writers included in The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2021. That’s the new anthology created by Glenn Stout. The book goes on sale October 5.
Babb’s story ran in the Washington Post, and is about Anthony Guiliani, Rudy’s son, and his questionable job at the White House.
Jason Fagone is a narrative writer for the San Francisco Chronicle who focuses on in-depth stories and investigations. His most recent piece is headlined “The Jessica Simulation.” It’s about a man who used a website that created chatbots to bring his dead girlfriend, or memories of her, back to life.
“Joshua was able to use this website project assembler to create a custom chat bot simulation of his dead girlfriend Jessica, and he began to talk, have these very long, intense emotional conversations with this simulation of Jessica and then things go Very weird,” he said.
Fagone joined the Chronicle in the fall of 2017 after a solid career of freelancing and book writing. He has been on the podcast before. Fagone was the guest on Episode 9 back in September 2013. At the time, we talked about some of his work in Philadelphia magazine, including a story about a cancer researcher who had a breakthrough discovery. We also talked about his book “Ingenious.”
Since that episode, Fagone has written two more books, giving him three in all. That includes “The Woman Who Smashed Codes,” which was released in 2017. Fagone has written for Esquire, Wired, GQ, Huffington Post, and Mother Jones, among many other publications.
John Branch is a sports reporter at the New York Times, and the author of “Sidecountry: Tales of Death and Life from the Back Roads of Sports. The book was published on June 1 by W. W. Norton.
“Sidecountry” is a collection of stories Branch has written for the New York Times about sports and athletic activities that take place outside of the mainstream sports world. Included in the book is “Snow Fall,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2013.
There are other stories, like the one about a bowler who rolled his first perfect game and died just minutes later. Branch also includes his piece on a Rubik’s Cube competition (this story was anthologized in Best American Sports Writing 2019), and his series on the Lady Jaguars, a girls basketball team that never won a game.
“I just love the idea of trying to illuminate a story that otherwise wouldn't get illuminated,” Branch says.
In 2010, Branch profiled the greatest horseshoe pitcher of all time, Alan Francis. Host Matt Tullis also profiled Francis in 2007 for the Columbus Dispatch, and later wrote about Francis’s main rival, Brian Simmons in 2012 for SB Nation.
Branch has been at the New York Times since 2005. He won the Pulitzer in 2013, and was a finalist in 2012 for his series of stories on a professional hockey player who overdosed on painkillers.
Sidecountry is Branch’s third book. “The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family in the New West” was published in 2018.
Travis M. Andrews is a features reporter at the Washington Post and the author of “Because He’s Jeff Goldblum: The Movies, Memes, and Meaning of Hollywood’s Most Enigmatic Actor.” The book was published by Plume on May 4.
The book is what Andrews calls a semi-biography, semi-celebration of Jeff Goldblum. It also looks into the shifting nature of fame and celebrity. The book came about after Andrews wrote a piece on Goldblum for the Post.
While he didn’t talk with Goldblum for this book - the actor, or his publicist, passed, Andrews did talk to upwards of 80 people who have worked with Goldblum before. He also read every single interview that Goldblum’s given, and watched every single movie Goldblum has appeared in.
Andrews writes for the Washington Post’s Style section, where he covers the Internet, pop culture, and the ways we live now. Recently, he wrote about Adam Sandler, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Yang. He often writes about TikTok, including a piece on the No. 1 TikTok poster in the world.
Before joining the Post, Andrews was an associate travel and culture editor for Southern Living. He’s also written for Time, Esquire, GQ, and the Atlantic, among others.
Sean Flynn is the author “Why Peacocks? An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World’s Most Magnificent Bird.” The book was published by Simon & Schuster, and went on sale on May 11.
Flynn’s book is certainly about peacocks, but also so much more. It’s a reported memoir that examines his life as a reporter and how it has impacted his family, and how the animals he takes care of fits into that. He gives credit for this book idea to his editor, Sean Manning.
Flynn has spent his life writing about traumatic events that involved other people. He won a National Magazine Award for his story “The Perfect Fire.” The story is about six firefighters who died in a warehouse fire in Massachusetts, and ran in the July 2000 issue of Esquire.
He’s written about Tamir Rice, the 12 year old Cleveland boy who police killed in a city park. He’s written about mass killings in New Zealand and Norway.
Flynn has written three books. He’s a correspondent for GQ. Aside from books and magazine work, Flynn has also written for television, film, and audio.
Hannah Smith is a reporter, writer, producer, and host of the first season of a new podcast called The Opportunist. That first season was focused on a woman named Sherry Shriner, the leader of an online cult that believed most humans were alien reptiles out to kill them.
The Opportunist is produced by Kast Media. As a podcast, it will focus on true stories of regular people who turn sinister simply by being opportunistic. The second season is set to start in June.
Smith got started in the world of podcasting at Maximum Fun, working on comedy and interview podcasts. She worked on a parenting show called Bad Mother, as well as the award-winning courtroom comedy Judge John Hodgman.
She’s worked in almost every kind of genre of podcasting, including news, comedy, audio drama, and narrative nonfiction.
Smith is part of the Los Angeles live storytelling community, where she performs true stories from her own life. She is an Angelino who was raised in Middle America. This contrast of rural and urban, of culture and religion, informs her approach to storytelling.
Kevin Maurer has written eight books, all of them focused on the military in some way. His most recent book is “Rock Force: The American Paratroopers Who Took Back Corregidor and Exacted MacArthur’s Revenge on Japan.” The book was published by Dutton Caliber.
In “Rock Force,” Maurer dives into one relatively small battle during World War II and shows us the men who were there.
Maurer has frequently embedded with American soldiers. In 2003, he followed the 82nd Airborne Division during the initial invasion of Iraq and wrote articles for the Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina.
He returned to cover the soldiers more than a dozen times, most recently in 2010, where he spent ten weeks with a Special Forces team in Afghanistan.
In 2012, Maurer co-wrote, with a former Navy Seal, “No Easy Day: The First Hand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden.” That book was a New York Times best-seller.
Abbott Kahler is the author of four books of historical narrative nonfiction. More recently, though, she wrote the story “How Sara Gruen Lost Her Life.” It was published simultaneously by New York magazine and the Marshall Project.
The piece is about how Gruen, the famed author of “Water for Elephants,” was left broke and seriously ill after fighting for six years to free an incarcerated man who she thought was innocent.
Kahler and Gruen are close friends. Kahler says it was cathartic for Gruen to talk about what she had been through. The story got a lot of traction when it was published on March 24, giving more attention to the case of Charles Murdoch, the man Gruen is trying to free.
This was definitely a different type of writing and reporting for Kahler. She’s made a name for herself as a New York Times best-selling author of historical narrative nonfiction. She’s done so under the name of Karen Abbott, although she legally changed her name in 2020, and will now write as Abbott Kahler.
Her first book, “Sin in the Second City,” is about two sisters who ran a famous brothel in Chicago in the early 1900s. Her book “Liar Temptress Soldier Spy” is about four women who worked undercover during the Civil War. Her most recent book, “The Ghosts of Eden Park,” is about a bootleg king in Cincinnati and a shocking murder in 1927. It was an Edgar Award finalist for best fact crime book.
Kahler has written for the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and other publications. She also maintains the Wicked History Blog, which presents old photos and short reported pieces that describe the photos.
Elon Green is the author of “Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York.” The book was published by Celadon Books earlier this month.
The book is about men who were picked up in piano bars in New York City in the early 1990s, and then killed, dismembered and left outside the city. The book is about the lives those men led.
Green did a massive amount of reporting in order to write this book. He gathered trial transcripts, massive amounts of police files, and documents handed over by friends and family members. He also interviewed about 160 people, some of them many times.
Green has written for the New York Times Magazine, The Awl, and New York. He’s been anthologized in Unspeakable Acts, which was edited by Sarah Weinman. Green has also been an editor at Longform since 2011.
In 2013 and 2014, he did Annotation interviews with some of the best literary journalists of all time, including reporters like Tom Wolfe, Mike Sager, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Gay Talese. He did those for Nieman Storyboard.
In this episode, Matt Tullis talks with Glenn Stout about his new book, “Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid: America’s Original Gangster Couple.” The book is about a husband and wife who robbed jewelers and bankers blind over the course of one year in the 1920s. It’s published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and is available on March 30.
Stout has had an amazingly productive 2021. His book “Young Woman and the Sea” will be turned into a movie for Disney+. Production should be starting soon. The book is about Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English channel. Ederle is going to be played by Daisy Ridley. She played Rey in the newest Star Wars movies.
As if that’s not enough, Stout has also found a way to make sure the best sports writing in the country will continue to be anthologized. “Best American Sports Writing” had its 30th and final year of production in 2020. Stout had been the series editor for the entire time.
He’s managed to create a new series called “The Year’s Best Sports Writing. It will be published by Triumph Books. Stout will edit the first edition, and he’s created an advisory board that will carry the book forward.
That book will be available in October.
This episode features Mirin Fader, a new staff writer for The Ringer. Prior to joining The Ringer, Fader spent four years writing for Bleacher Report’s BR Mag.
On January 14, The Ringer published her story “Davate Adams is Peaking in Every Way Possible.” The profile of the all-pro wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers was her first piece for The Ringer.
The story goes deep behind the scenes of Adam’s life. That’s something that doesn’t happen often in profiles of star athletes. Fader spent a great deal of time talking with Adams, his wife, and his mother, and came away with a story that shows exactly how the wide receiver has been impacted by becoming a father.
In Fader’s last year at Bleacher Report, she wrote two pieces about the heart-breaking deaths of two athletes. One of those stories was focused on Gigi Bryant, Kobe’s daughter, who died in the helicopter crash one year ago. The other story was about California Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, who died of an accidental drug overdose in 2019. Fader said learned so much about empathy in reporting those pieces.
Fader has been noted in Best American Sports Writing twice. She was also a finalist for the Dan Jenkins Medal in 2020.
She is currently writing a book about Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo. That book will be released in August 2021 by Hachette Books.
Andrea Pitzer is the author of Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World. The book was published by Scribner, and went on sale on January 12.
Icebound is a gripping piece of narrative journalism focused on European arctic explorers in the 16th century. At the center is William Barents, one of the greatest navigators of the time who's obsessive quest to sail through the most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both tragedy and glory.
Pitzer did an amazing amount of research in order to tell this centuries-old tale. For Icebound, Pitzer made three trips to the Arctic herself. She spent a great deal of time in archives and libraries. She even walked through a replica of the yachts that sailed in the 16th century.
Icebound is Pitzer’s third book. Her first book was The Secret History of Vladimir Nabobkov. After that, she wrote One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.
In 2009, Pitzer founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction website for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. She stayed on as the editor until 2012, but the site is still going strong.
Pitzer has written for The Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, Outside Magazine, GQ, Longreads and others.
Bradford Pearson is the author of “The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America.” The book was published by Atria Books of Simon and Schuster.
Pearson’s book tells the story of Japanese internment camps during World War II, and a very special high school football team. That team offered hope to those who were being held in an internment camp on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming.
Pearson spent a lot of time in historical archives to tell this story. It’s something he’s always enjoyed doing. He likes looking for a needle in a haystack, for a bit of information that ties everything together. He went to the National Archives, as well as archives in Wyoming and at UCLA.
Pearson has been on the podcast before. He was on Episode 40 in November of 2015. At the time, he was an editor at Southwest: The Magazine. We talked about his story, “My Kidnappers,” which was published by Philadelphia Magazine.
He has also written for the New York Times, Esquire, Time, and Salon, among other publications.
This is a rebroadcast of the November 2013 episode in which Matt Tullis talked with Jeanne Marie Laskas. They talked about her profile President-Elect Joe Biden, who was then serving as vice president. She spent a day with him being driven around his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. That story ran in GQ.
Since joining the podcast, Laskas has written two books, bringing her total to eight. In 2015, “Concussion” was released. That book expanded her 2009 story “Game Brain,” which is also discussed in this show. The book was turned into a feature film starring Will Smith.
In 2018, “To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope” was published. For this book, Laskas interviewed President Obama as well as the people who wrote him letters.
She is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a correspondent at GQ, and a two-time National Magazine Award finalist in feature writing.
This is a rebroadcast of the talk that Matt Tullis had with Mike Wilson in May 2015. Wilson was just named a deputy editor for enterprise in Sports at the New York Times. When we did this interview, Wilson had just been named editor of the Dallas Morning News.
Wilson has a long track record of supporting journalists who write narratives. When he was at the Tampa Bay Times, he worked with a number of reporters who have been on this show: Ben Montgomery, Lane DeGregory, Michael Kruse, Kelley Benham French, Leonora LaPeter Anton, John Woodrow Cox, and more. They’re all excellent storytellers. That, in Wilson’s mind, is important, especially in news organizations.
“Stories are how we understand the world, or how we share our experiences,” he said in the show. “They're how we communicate with loved ones. So it's very elemental stuff for human beings. So it's only natural that telling stories as journalists would also be really important.”
When Wilson was a top editor at the Tampa Bay Times, the newspaper started publishing Encounters. The front page series consisted of short, interesting stories that one would not define traditionally as news.
“It was supposed to be a really enjoyable five to six minute read for readers,” he said. “The Michael Kruse story about the guy teaching his daughter to ride a bike, there was absolutely nothing special about that story and then everything was special about it. It described this moment that probably just about every parent has been through of setting up your child on two wheels for the first time and letting go and watching them take those first few kind of halting pedaling steps forward and it was just this absolutely beautiful capturing of a universal moment."
Wright Thompson is a senior writer at ESPN, and the author of Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things that Last. That book just came out earlier this week. It’s published by Penguin Press.
Pappyland had a strange route to publication. It was initially supposed to be a book Thompson ghost-wrote for Julian Van Winkle. Van Winkle is a bourbon genius who found a way to rebuild a business that was built by his grandfather and lost by his father.
In the process, he’s created a bourbon that people pay more than $3,000 a bottle for.
But ultimately, Thompson saw the book become something more, a book about a man who makes bourbon, and one who drinks it.
The book is also about fatherhood. It’s about both Thompson’s father, who passed away several years ago, and Thompson, who in the book, is in the process of becoming a father.
It’s almost magical that just five days before Pappyland was released, Thompson’s second daughter was born.
Pappyland is actually Thompson’s second book. His first, The Cost of These Dreams, is an anthology of his best work from ESPN. He’s still writing longform narrative pieces for ESPN. He’s also producing the TV series True South, which focuses on southern food and culture. The show airs on the SEC Network.
Thompson was a guest in the early days of the podcast. He was featured on Episode 11 in October 2013. At the time, we talked about his profiles of Michael Jordan and legendary wrestling coach Dan Gable.
John Woodrow Cox is an enterprise reporter for the Washington Post. He’s currently writing stories focused on how the COVID pandemic is impacting children.
On October 7, the Post published his latest story, about the Marquez-Greene family in Connecticut. They lost their daughter Ana at Sandy Hook, and recently had to make a hard decision as to whether they would send their 16-year-old son Isaiah back to school in the middle of the pandemic.
Cox was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 2018 for his series of stories that look at gun violence and how it was impacting children. His book — Children Under Fire: An American Crisis — expands upon that coverage. That book will be available on March 30, 2021.
Cox was on Gangrey: The Podcast way back on Episode 12 in October 2013. At the time, he was a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times. In that episode, we talked about his series of stories for the Floridian titled “Dispatches from next door.” They included one about a woman who was only able to find peace on the ocean.
We also talked about his coverage of cops, and one story in particular, about a 9-month-old who drowned in a family swimming pool. Cox said that story has had a lasting impact on him as a reporter.
Since he was on the show, he’s won Scripps Howard’s Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Storytelling; the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma; and Columbia Journalism School’s Meyer “Mike” Berger Award for human-interest reporting.
Alex Belth is the curator of The Stacks Reader and the editor of Esquire Classic. He’s also the creator of Bronx Banter, a website that focuses on New York City sports, arts and culture and more.
The Stacks Reader is a treasure trove of classic magazine journalism and other writing that otherwise might be lost to history. Belth has built this archive largely by himself, reaching out to writers and their families and obtaining the rights to republish.
There are stories in The Stacks Reader that go all the way back to 1932, like Westbrook Pegler’s Chicago Tribune story headlined The Called Shot Heard Round the World.
One of the writer’s whose work has been preserved on the site is a man named O’Connell Driscoll. Driscoll’s first magazine piece was a 13,000 word profile of Jerry Lewis. He wrote it for Playboy, while he was still in college.
Belth recently received the 2020 Tony Salin Memorial Award from The Baseball Reliquary. He was honored for his work on The Stacks Reader and Esquire Classic, as well as his own baseball writing.
He wrote Stepping Up, a biography of St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Curt Flood. In 2012, he wrote the essay The Two Rogers for SB Nation Longform. That piece was about the death of Belth’s father, but also the writings of Roger Kahn and Roger Angell.
Belth was included in Best American Sports Writing 2012 for his Deadspin story on sportswriter George Kimball. He often writes for Esquire.com.
Back in November, podcast host Matt Tullis talked with Chris Jones. Tullis wanted to talk with him about writing for a book he’s working on, a book focused on how to report and write narrative journalism.
Tullis talked with Jones about writing for about 30 minutes. They talked about how Jones wrote “The Things That Carried Him,” which Jones won a National Magazine Award for in 2009. They talked about his Zanesville zoo story and his Roger Ebert profile and his Kenneth Feinberg profile.
They also talked about Jones making the move to screenwriting.
Jones made quite a career for himself at Esquire. He was regularly included in Best American Sports Writing for work he did for ESPN The Magazine. Now he’s a writer for the Netflix show Away. The show is loosely based on Jone’s Esquire story with the same title. That show will likely be released later this year.
Jones was on the podcast back in January 2014. At the time, he talked about his Feinberg piece, as well as a story he wrote about what happened on Air Force One immediately after President John F. Kennedy was killed.
Kim Cross is a freelancer who writes for a number of publications. Most recently, Bicycling Magazine published her story “Noel and Leon: What Happens When Two Strangers Trust the Rides of Their Lives to the Magic of the Universe.”
The story is about two bicyclists who were riding in opposite directions on thousand-mile journeys. They just so happened to cross paths in the middle of a desert. Cross first heard about these two men five years ago, and fought long and hard to find a home for the story.
This is the second time Cross has been on the podcast. She was on in September 2015, when we talked about her book What Stands in the Storm: A True Story of Love and Resilience in the Worst Superstorm in History.
Cross has written for a number of publications, including ESPN, Outside, Bicycling Magazine, Garden and Gun, and more. She has been included in Best American Sports Writing twice, including in 2019, for her story "The Redemption of Artis Monroe."
Eva Holland is the author of the book “Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear.”
Nerve is a hybrid of memoir and reported science. It’s focused on Holland encountering and overcoming the things she was most fearful of, and the science behind it all.
The book came about after a few things happened back in 2015. First, Holland’s mom died unexpectedly. That was one of Holland’s greatest fears in life. And then, she was in a series of serious car crashes.
“I rolled my car into a ditch in April 2016, and I had been thinking about the idea of a book about fear actually that day while I was driving on the highway,” Holland says. “That night in the hospital, I was like, yeah, okay, you’ve got to do the book about this now because obviously the universe is sending you some kind of sign.”
This is Holland’s first book. Most of what she has done as a writer over the last decade are magazine pieces. She is a successful freelance writer, working as a correspondent for Outside magazine. She’s also written for Esquire, Wired, Bloomberg, Pacific Standard, AFAR, Smithsonian, and National Geographic News.
This is Holland’s second visit to Gangrey: The Podcast. She was on the show back in March 2014.
Nerve goes on sale on April 14.
How do some of the best narrative journalists find the stories they report and write about? This episode focuses on how four different reporters landed on stories that are still read and talked about today.
In the first part, Luke Dittrich talks about how he ultimately decided to head to Joplin, Missouri, to report and write a story that won him a National Magazine Award.
In Part II, Eli Saslow talks about how he landed himself in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, for the first piece in his Pulitzer Prize winning series on food stamps.
In Part III, Pamela Colloff discusses the genesis of her National Magazine Award winning series The Innocent Man.
Finally, Part IV is a snippet of a TedX Tampa talk that Michael Kruse gave, in which he discusses his story about Kathryn Norris, a woman who disappeared and was missing for 16 months, before someone found her body — in her own home.
The first three parts all come from Gangrey: The Podcast archives. As usual, you can listen to every episode of the podcast, for free, on the website.
Bronwen Dickey is a contributing editor at The Oxford American and the author of Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon.
In October 2019, her story “The Remains” was published by Esquire. The story looks at forensic anthropology, and one case in particular.
“The story is about a young man named Christian Gonzalez, who came to this country when he was very, very young with his family, and grew up in East Texas and considered himself, as did his friends and family, to be American,” Dickey says. “And then he was deported after kind of a weird conflagration of events, and he was deported to Mexico. He really did not know his home at all and felt very lonely there. He tried to get back into the United States, and he died in the South Texas desert.
Dickey opens The Remains with a scene that is very detailed, showing the forensic anthropologists doing their work on the remains of Christian Gonzalez. That work was done many years ago, though, which means Dickey had to recreate the scene through solid reporting.
“Recreation is one of the parts of writing that I enjoy the most,” Dickey says, “Because it’s kind of like going on a historical scavenger hunt a little bit, trying to find the details that’ll fit into the puzzle of the picture you’re trying to build.”
Dickey has written for Esquire, Outside, Men’s Journal, Pacific Standard, the New York Times, and so many more publications. She’s received the Hearst Editorial Excellence Award in reporting, and a Lowell Thomas Award in travel journalism.
Her story “Climb Aboard, Ye Who Seek the Truth,” was published by Popular Mechanics, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Magazine Award in feature writing.
This episode features clips from four of the women included in the new anthology, “New Stories We Tell: True Tales by America’s New Generation of Great Women Journalists.” The book was recently published by The Sager Group.
"New Stories We Tell" is the third in a series of anthologies celebrating women in longform journalism, featuring more than 50 great writers from the 1950s to the present. The first was “Newswomen: Twenty-Five Years of Front Page Journalism,” and was published in 2016. That book was followed two years later by “The Stories We Tell: Classic True Tales By America’s Greatest Women Journalists.”
Four reporters who have been on the podcast are included in the new book: Pamela Colloff, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Janet Reitman, and Brooke Jarvis. Additionally, the book’s editors, Kaylen Ralph and Joanna Demkiewicz, have been guests on the podcast. They helped with “Newswomen,” and talked about that book in 2016. They are the editors of “New Stories We Tell.”
In this episode, you’ll hear from them, as well as clips from Colloff, Grigoriadis, Reitman, and Jarvis. You’ll also hear from Mike Sager, the founder and publisher of The Sager Group.
This episode is a rebroadcast of the interview Matt Tullis did with Kelley Benham French in February 2013. They talked about her three-part series “Never Let Go,” which focused on the birth of her and Tom French’s daughter. Juniper was born at 23 weeks and 6 days, weighing just one pound-four ounces.
The series was a hit. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. And it was expanded into a book, which French wrote with Tom. That book is titled “Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon.”
Kelley Benham French is currently a professor of practice at the University of Indiana. She recently reported and co-wrote a piece for the USA Today titled “The Long Road Home.” It was about a woman who believed she was a descendant of some of the first slaves in America, and who was trying to figure out who they were.
This is a rebroadcast of the original episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, featuring Justin Heckert. It originally aired in January 2013. Heckert talked with host Matt Tullis about his story “The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly,” which ran in The New York Times Magazine in November 2012. The story is about a 13-year-old girl who has a medical condition that makes it so she can’t feel pain.
Since joining the podcast, Heckert has reported and written a lot of other amazing stories. His story, “Susan Cox is No Longer Here,” ran in Indianapolis Monthly, and was later republished by River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. It’s a haunting piece that looks at what happens when life, and death, don’t go the way we expect it to.
In March 2014, he wrote a piece on Puddles the Clown for Grantland. In July 2018, he wrote about the last Blockbuster video store for The Ringer. And in August, he wrote about a year-long quest to save an injured loggerhead turtle. That story ran in Garden & Gun magazine.
Tullis also interviewed Heckert a second time in 2015 when he did an annotation of his Men’s Journal story “Lost in the Waves” for Nieman Storyboard.
Heckert has written for dozens of magazines, including Esquire, GQ, ESPN The Magazine, Men’s Journal, and Sports Illustrated. He has twice been named the City and Regional Magazine Association’s writer of the year.
This episode is a rebroadcast of the interview Matt Tullis did with Kim Cross in September 2015. Cross’s book “What Stands in the Storm: Three Days in the Worst Superstorm to Hit the South’s Tornado Alley” had been published by Atria Books in March of that year. The book is a reporting and writing masterpiece, as Cross went to great lengths to make sure the reporting was accurate, and the writing was compelling.
Since joining the podcast, Cross been included in Best American Sports Writing twice. She was included in the 2016 edition for her story The King of Tides, which ran in Southwest: The Magazine. And this year, Cross will be in BASW 2019 for a story she wrote for Bicycling Magazine. That story is about a prisoner in California who spends his time restoring used bicycles.
Cross has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Society of American Travel Writers. Her work has appeared in Outside, Southern Living, Cooking Light, Bike, Bicycling, Runner’s World, the Tampa Bay Times, ESPN.com, and many more publications.
This episode is a rebroadcast of the interview Matt Tullis did with Eli Saslow back in September 2014. Saslow, a reporter for the Washington Post, had just won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his six-part series on food stamps in a post-recession America. Tullis and Saslow talked about that series and much more.
Since joining the podcast, Saslow has continued to write compelling stories that show the big issues facing our country in minute detail. He’s written about the opioid epidemic, how the made-up stories get passed around the Internet as news, immigration, and more. In June 2018, he wrote a story about the school resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who didn’t go into the school to engage the shooter.
Saslow’s story about a white supremacist turning his back on the movement was ultimately expanded into a book. Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist was published by Penguin Random House in September 2018. The paperback version of that book will be on sale on September 3 of this year.
Saslow has won more awards than I can list. He won the Pulitzer in 2014, and was a finalist for that award in 2013, 2016, and 2017.
On this episode, Rachel Monroe talks with host Matt Tullis. Monroe’s first book, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime and Obsession, was published by Scribner. It went on sale today, August 19.
The book tells the stories of four true crimes that had women intimately involved in them, but all in different capacities.
Monroe is a freelance writer based in Marfa, Texas. She also serves as a volunteer firefighter there. She’s written about crime, communes, utopias, drones, small town, firefighters, haunted houses, really just about everything.
She was a finalist for a Livingston Award for Young Journalists in 2016 and was named one of 56 women journalists everyone should read by New York Magazine.
She’s been published by The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Outside Magazine, The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, and Esquire, among many others. Her essay about murder, fandom, and adolescence, “Outside the Manson Pinkberry” was originally published in The Believer, and was anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing 2018.
On this episode, host Matt Tullis talked with Latria Graham, a writer, editor and cultural critic currently living in South Carolina.
Graham’s writing revolves around the dynamics of race, gender norms, class, nerd culture, and sports. Back in 2016, she wrote one of the last pieces for SB Nation Longform. That piece was headlined “The Dark Knight Unmasked,” and was about the Carolina Panther’s Josh Norman.
Graham has also written some important pieces about race for The Establishment, which is no longer publishing. Fortunately, they’ve kept their stories online. One of those pieces was an essay written by Graham titled “Why, As A Black Woman, I Finally Decided To Take To The Streets.”
Graham’s first published piece ran on Ebony’s website. That was in May of 2013, and was about her struggles with bulimia.
Graham has written for ESPNW, Outside Magazine, Bicycling Magazine, the Guardian, Our State Magazine, Garden & Gun, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and many other publications.
On this episode, I talk with Amos Barshad, the author of the book, “No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World.” It was published by Abrams Press in April.
The book looks at the people in the shadows of the powerful who silently pull strings and wield their own power. It’s incredibly interesting and entertaining, covering Rasputins in everything from pop culture to crime, from professional sports to politics. It also covers the namesake Rasputin – Grigori Raputin, an almost mythical Russian mystic who had the ear and the trust of Prince Yusupof, until Rasputin was murdered.
Barshad was raised in Israel, the Netherlands and Massachusetts. He’s a former staff writer at The FADER and Grantland, and has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, and Arkansas Times.
This episode is a rebroadcast of the interview Matt Tullis did Wil S. Hylton in March of 2014. At the time, the two talked about Hylton’s new book, Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II.
The book focuses for the modern-day search for one American bomber that crashed over the Pacific Islands during the war. That bomber carried 11 men, who for decades, were listed as missing in action.
When Hylton started the piece, he thought it was going to be a magazine piece. He had no idea it would expand into his first book.
“I never really imagined that I would write a book to be honest,” Hylton says. “I venerate the magazine form. I always have. To me, it's the perfect gem-like distillation of a story, and it comes with all of its own special habits and history that are quite different from either doing fiction books or newspaper writing, broadly speaking. I just love it. This is the form that I've always wanted to work in, but what happened was this particular story forced me to try a new medium.”
On May 8, Hylton had a new magazine piece published by The New York Times Magazine. It was headlined “My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.” It’s a brutal yet important piece that looks at toxic masculinity and how it impacts all of us, and how it nearly ended Hylton’s life.
Hylton opens up entirely about his own life in this piece, and it’s not always pretty. That’s what makes the essay so effective, and, hopefully, imactful.
Hylton’s work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Rolling Stone, New York, and many other magazines. He has been selected for numerous anthologies, including The Best Music Writing, Best American Political Writing, Best Business Stories, and Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.
On this episode, host Matt Tullis talks with Philip Gerard.
Gerard, who is a professor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, is the author of a new book about the Civil War. The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina was published in March by the University of North Carolina Press. The book is an extension of a series of nonfiction narratives that Gerard was writing for Our State magazine. Gerard was one of Tullis’s professors when he was in the MFA program at UNCW.
Gerard is also the author of Cape Fear Rising, a novel that is set in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, a time when wealthy white residents massacred the growing and successful black culture in the city. That novel was originally published in 1994. Blair, the publisher, has reissued the book in a 25th anniversary edition, in part because so much of what is happening in the United States today mirrors Wilmington in 1898.
Gerard has written five novels and eight books of nonfiction. He’s written books like Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life and Writing a Book That Makes a Difference. He’s written nonfiction narrative books like Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II’s Heroic Army of Deception and The Patron Saint of Dreams. And he’s written fiction. In addition to Cape Fear Rising, Gerard has also written the novels Hatteras Light and Desert Kill, among others.
This episode focuses on Eli Saslow's story "Into the Lonely Quiet," which was about one Newtown family whose son was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
But instead of focusing on the reporting aspect of the story, as Gangrey episodes typically do, this episode is focused on the story's subjects and what it was like to open their lives up during a traumatic and horrific time in their lives.
This is also the first episode of Gangrey: The Podcast that is told in story form, and not through straight interview. It's a complimentary audio piece tied to a written story that host Matt Tullis wrote for Nieman Storyboard.
In this episode, Tullis talks with Mark Barden, the father of Sandy Hook victim Daniel Barden, Nicole Hockley, the mother of Sandy Hook victim Dylan Hockley, and Eli Saslow.
On this episode, I’m going to replay an interview I did Wright Thompson back in October of 2013.
Thompson’s first book was just released by Penguin Books this week. It’s titled "The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business." It consists of 14 of Thompson’s previously published stories for ESPN. That includes the two stories that I talked with Wright about on this episode of the show – "Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building," and "The Losses of Dan Gable."
Thompson’s profile on legendary wrestling coach Dan Gable is a perfect example of how and why reserved people open up to him.
The Dan Gable story came up right on the heels of Thompson’s profile of NBA legend Michael Jordan. That’s the story that leads of the book. With the Jordan story, Wright said he kept thinking of the classic Esquire profile on Ted Williams, which was written by Richard Ben Cramer. That story was titled “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now.”
“That story is very much a North Star, and the thing I’ve always wanted to do, always, is write that story,” Thompson says. “I knew going in that they’re only a couple of athletes famous enough to make that even possible.”
The book is fantastic, of course. And it’s no surprise to me that after one week of sales, it’s already showing up at No. 4 on the New York Times Best Seller list for paperback nonfiction.
On this episode, host Matt Tullis talks with Carson Vaughan, the author of the “Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream,” which focuses on a small-town zoo in Royal, Nebraska, and its eventual downfall.
Vaughan started reporting and writing this book as an undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He then took the project to graduate school, where it was his master’s thesis in the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s MFA creative writing program. That’s the same program that Tullis graduated from in 2005.
“Zoo Nebraska” was published by Little A, an imprint of Amazon Publishing that focuses on literary fiction and nonfiction.
Vaughan is a freelance journalist who writes frequently about the Great Plains. He wrote “My Cousin, the Cowboy Poet” for the New Yorker. He’s also written for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review Daily, Outside, The Atlantic, Roads & Kingdoms, and Runner’s World, among others.
On this episode, host Matt Tullis talks with Michael Graff. Graff was the guest on Episode 35, back in June of 2015. At the time, he was the editor of Charlotte Magazine. He was also writing for places like SB Nation Longform.
Now Graff is a freelance writer and editor. He recently published his first piece with ESPN.com, a story that focused on the life of former NBA legend Muggsy Bogues. That story, How Muggsy Bogues saved his brother’s life, and found the meaning of his own, explores the lives of two brothers, Muggsy, the superstar, and Chuckie, the older brother who spent many years battling drug addiction, but got clean once he started living with Muggsy.
While Graff is still doing a lot of reporting, he’s also started writing, and publishing, some incredibly moving and beautiful essays, including ones about a high school friend whose daughter battled childhood cancer and another about what happened when he tried to cut negative people out of his life.
Graff has written for ESPN, The Guardian, Garden & Gun, The Oxford American, Politico, SUCCESS, Washingtonian, Our State, and Southwest: The Magazine. He writes the monthly column for the back page of Charlotte magazine, where he was the editor from April 2013 to August 2017.
On this episode, we’re rebroadcasting an interview Matt Tullis did with Ben Montgomery, Thomas Lake, Michael Kruse, Wright Thompson, and Tony Rehagen, about the late, great Michael Brick.
Brick died on February 8, 2016 after battling colon cancer. We’re approaching the third anniversary of Brick’s death, but his name and his amazing work lives on because a book of his stories — “Everyone Leaves Behind a Name” — was put together by the guests on this show and others, and then published by The Sager Group.
The stories included in “Everyone Leaves Behind a Name” were originally published in The New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, Harper’s Magazine, and others. Brick also wrote the book “Saving the School,” which was published by Penguin Press in 2012.
Everyone Leaves Behind a Name is still available on The Sager Group’s website. It’s also available on Amazon.com. All proceeds from book sales go to Brick’s family.
On this episode, Matt Tullis talked with Sarah Weinman, the author of “The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World,” which was published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers in September.
The book is a gripping true-crime investigation into the 1948 abduction of Sally Horner and how it inspired Vladimir Nabokov’s classic novel, “Lolita.”
Weinman regularly writes pieces of true crime longform, having been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Guardian, and Buzzfeed, among others. She also covers book publishing for Publishers Marketplace.
Weinman is the editor of the books “Troubled Daughters, Twisted Lives,” and of “Women Crime Writers: Eight suspense Novels of the 1940s and 50s.”
On this episode, Matt Tullis talks with Brendan O’Meara. O’Meara is the host of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. On that show, he talks to writers, filmmakers, producers, and podcasters who he admires. They talk about the art and craft of telling true stories, unpacking their origin stories as well as tips and habits so that listeners can apply those tools in their own work.
Tullis was a guest on the Creative Nonfiction Podcast back in September of 2017, when O’Meara talked with him about his memoir, Running With Ghosts. Recently, O’Meara hosted Glenn Stout, who talked about his new book, The Pats: An Illustrated History of the New England Patriots, which was just released.
O’Meara is also a reporter and a writer. In 2016, he published the story “The Day That Never Comes” in the online magazine Proximity. That story, which we talk about in this episode, ultimately won Proximity’s Narrative Journalism prize for the year it was published. He is also the author of Six Weeks in Saratoga: How Three-Year-Old Filly Rachel Alexandra Beat the Boys and Became Horse of the Year.
Ben Montgomery is the author of “The Man Who Walked Backward: An American Dreamer’s Search For Meaning in the Great Depression.” The book was published by Little, Brown Spark in September, and tells the story of a man named Plennie Wingo, who in 1931, attempted to walk around the world, backward.
This is the third time Montgomery has been on the podcast. He was the guest on Episode 21, when he talked about his first book, “Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail.” That book went on to become a New York Times Bestseller.
He was also one of five guests on Episode 45, which was focused on the work of the late Michael Brick, which was contained in the book, “Everyone Leaves Behind a Name.” The other guests on that show were Wright Thompson, Michael Kruse, Tony Rehagen, and Thomas Lake.
Montgomery created the website gangrey.com, which was the namesake for this podcast. For years, he was one of the top enterprise reporters at the Tampa Bay Times, where he wrote about everything from the last spectacle lynching in Florida to why cops shoot at suspects.
He left the Tampa Bay Times in October 2017 to focus on writing “The Man Who Walked Backward.” Now, he finds himself teaching student journalists at the University of Montana as the T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Visiting Professor.
Montgomery’s latest book is his third. His second book was titled The Leper Spy: The Story of an Unlikely Hero of World War II.
He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting in 2010 for his series of stories on the decades of abuse at a Florida reform school for boys. He won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for the same series.
On this episode, we’re rebroadcasting an interview that Matt Tullis did with Janet Reitman in October 2013. During this episode, Tullis and Reitman talked about her story, “Jahar’s World,” which ran in the Rolling Stone. The story was about Jahar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers.
Rolling Stone was criticized at the time because they put a glossy photo of Tsarnaev on the cover. But journalistically, the story that Reitman wrote was lauded as an excellent piece of reporting and writing.
Reitman is being lauded again because of a piece she reported and wrote for the New York Times Magazine. The story, “U.S. Law Enforcement Failed to See the Threat of White Nationalism. Now They Don’t Know How to Stop It.” was published in early November.
A few days after the story was published, Terry Gross interviewed Reitman for Fresh Air on National Public Radio.
Reitman is a contributing writer for the New York Times, and a contributing editor for Rolling Stone. She is also the author of the book, “Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion.”
On this episode, host Matt Tullis talks with Brin-Jonathan Butler. Butler wrote the book, The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlsen and the Match that Made Chess Great Again, which will be released on November 6. The book takes a look at the 2016 World Chess Championship, which was held in New York City just before the 2016 election. It also dives deep into the type of personality needed to be a chess champion.
Butler’s first book, The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing With Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in the Last Days of Castro’s Cuba, was shortlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award for literary sports writing, and was a Boston Globe Best Book of 2015.
His story, “Ghost of Capablanca,” published by Southwest: The Magazine, was included in the 2018 Best American Travel Writing. He’s also been a notable selection in that book, as well as Best American Sports Writing, multiple times.
Butler has written for Esquire, Bloomberg, ESPN The Magazine, Playboy, Harper’s, the Paris Review, and Roads and Kingdoms.
Episode 3 features Pamela Colloff of Texas Monthly. Late last year, her two-part series, “The Innocent Man” was published. The story focuses on Michael Morton, who in 1987, was wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. In the podcast, Colloff talks about how she found out about the story, how she reported it and what it was like to shine light on a case like this.
Colloff has written a lot of stories for Texas Monthly since joining the podcast. Most recently, and movingly, though, was a piece titled “The Reckoning,” which was about one of the victims of what is regarded as the first mass school shooting in the country’s history.
In June 2012, D Magazine published Michael Mooney’s “The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever.” The story is about a recreational bowler named Bill Fong, who on one night two years earlier, made an improbable run at perfection. The story has been included on just about every list of the best nonfiction of 2012 and ultimately was selected for Best American Sports Writing.
In this podcast, we talk with Mooney about how he found the story, what the reporting process was like and how he decided to structure it.
Since joining the podcast, Mooney has written dozens of amazing stories, including an up-close look at Glenn Beck. He just published the piece “Weekend at Johnny’s,” which had him traveling across America and visiting all of the bars that Johnny Manziel has partied in.
On this episode, host Matt Tullis talks with Jeff Pearlman. Pearlman is the author of “Football For A Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL.” The book takes a deep dive into the United States Football League, which existed from 1983 to 1985. The league existed when Pearlman was a kid, and he was in love with it. It’s a book that Pearlman has called a labor of love.
Pearlman interviewed 430 people for this book. Only two people with ties to the USFL that he reached out to refused to talk to him. One of those people was Donald Trump. Trump was the owner of the New Jersey Generals in 1984 and 85. Pearlman was doing the reporting for this book during the 2016 election season. One thing he started realizing was the Trump was making the same types of promises as a presidential candidate, as he did as a USFL owner. That includes the time he signed quarterback Doug Flutie to a huge contract, and then sent a letter to the other owners of the league, telling them all that they had to actually pay for Flutie themselves.
“Football For A Buck” is Pearlman’s eighth book. He’s written books about the 1986 New York Mets, about Brett Favre, and about the Los Angeles Lakers Showtime years. He currently writes a weekly column for The Athletic, and is a former senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He’s also written for ESPN.com, Bleacher Report, Newsday, the (Nashville) Tennessean, and many others.
Pearlman is also the guest editor for this year’s edition of The Best American Sports Writing. The series editor of that annual anthology is Glenn Stout, who has twice been a guest on the podcast.
On this episode, we’re rebroadcasting an interview Matt Tullis did with Earl Swift in November 2014. At the time, Swift’s book “Auto Biography: A Classic Car, An Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream” had just been published.
Swift has a new book out now. “Chesapeake Requiem: A Year With the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island” was published by Harper Collins, and is getting rave reviews.
Auto Biography is also a fantastic book. It tells the life story of a 1957 Chevy that, at the beginning of the book, is falling apart. He also delves deep into the life of the current owner, Tommy Arney. Arney had a brutal childhood. He dropped out of school in the fifth-grade, and lived a life of crime. But had also become a somewhat successful and controversial businessman.
The story of this car started as a five-part series for the Virginian-Pilot, where Swift had been a reporter for many years. In this interview, he talked about the differences between reporting for newspaper work and reporting for a book project.
Swift is a former Fulbright fellow in New Zealand, and is currently a residential fellow of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
This episode is a rebroadcast of the interview Matt Tullis did with Luke Dittrich in September 2013. At the time, Esquire had just published his story “The Prophet,” a story about a neurosurgeon who claimed to have visited heaven in a best-selling book. Dittrich’s piece pretty much debunked those claims.
Dittrich also talks about his story about the Joplin, Missouri, tornado. The story — “Heavenly Father! I Love You! I Love Everyone,” was about 23 people who rode out the storm in a convenience store cooler. The store was destroyed, but the people within all survived. Dittrich ultimately won a National Magazine Award for the piece.
Since joining the podcast, Dittrich turned another piece that was discussed in this interview — “The Brain That Changed Everything” — into a book. “Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets” digs deep into that Esquire story and unveils the life of his grandfather, the doctor who treated Patient HM and performed lobotomies on untold numbers of people. The book is one of the best science-related books that I’ve read in a long time, and easily holds rank with “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” by Rebecca Skloot.
On this episode, the podcast replays the interview Matt Tullis did with John Woodrow Cox from October 2013. Cox was the 12th guest on the podcast, and, at the time, was a general assignment reporter in Pinellas County for the Tampa Bay Times. On this episode, he talked about the short, narrative stories he was writing for the Floridian Magazine. The series was called “Dispatches from next door.” They were short pieces – just 500 words – but painstakingly reported. He talked about two such pieces – one about a woman who is only able to find peace out on the ocean, and another about a senior citizen who is always on the look for a younger woman who will save him from loneliness.
Cox left the Times in 2014 and went to the Washington Post. He’s an enterprise reporter with a focus on narrative journalism there. This year, his series about the impact of gun violence on children in America was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. He is currently working on a book that will expand on that coverage.
He’s also written about a flawed sexual assault investigation in the Marines and about a 10-year-old who has HIV. Since joining the podcast, Cox has won several prestigious awards. He has won the Scripps Howard’s Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest in Storytelling, the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, Columbia Journalism School’s Meyer “Mike” Berger Award for human-interest reporting, and the Education Writers Association’s Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting. He’s also been named a finalist for the Michael Kelly Award and for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. His stories have been recognized by Mayborn’s Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing contest and the Society for Features Journalism, among others.
This episode features an interview Matt Tullis did with Brooke Jarvis in May 2015. In the interview, Jarvis talks about her story “The Deepest Dig,” which was included in the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015 anthology. That story ran in the California Sunday Magazine. She also talked about her piece “Homeward,” which also ran in the California Sunday Magazine. That story is about a young man from the jungles of Ecuador, whose village sent him to the United States so he could be educated and come back to save the village from the oil industry and colonization.
Since joining the podcast, Jarvis won the Livingston Award in National Reporting — she won that in 2017 for her story “Unclaimed.” In 2016, she was the recipient of the Reporting Award from NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award in Journalism and the Livingston Award in International Reporting.
In November of 2017, her story “How One Woman’s Digital Life Was Weaponized Against Her” went viral after being the cover story on Wired Magazine. And in December, she had a piece in the New York Times Magazine about the children of undocumented immigrants whose parents had been deported, and yet they were left stateside.
In June, Jarvis’s story, “The Obsessive Search for the Tasmanian Tiger,” ran in The New Yorker. The Tasmanian Tiger has long been thought extinct, but now there is hope that it is still alive.
On this episode, host Matt Tullis talks with Stephen Rodrick, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and a writer-at-large for Esquire. In the third week of June, both of those magazines published profiles of two very different celebrities that Rodrick wrote.
Esquire published Rodrick’s piece on Taylor Sheridan, a writer and actor who is reinventing American Western storytelling through movies like “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water,” on June 19.
Two days later, Rolling Stone published his fascinating profile of Johnny Depp. That piece got all of the attention because Rodrick spent a sometimes sad, sometimes fun, sometimes weird 72 hours with the man who has played everyone from Willy Wonka to Jack Sparrow. It also chronicled the troubles that Depp has been face, troubles that are primarily financial despite the amount of money he has made in his illustrious career.
Rodrick was the guest of the podcast on Episode 6, back in February of 2013, when he talked about his story “The Misfits,” which was about the filming of the movie “The Canyons,” and what happened when Lindsay Lohan was cast in it. He’s written for a number of big-time magazines, like Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, Men’s Journal, The New York Times Magazine and New York.
Pamela Colloff is a senior reporter at ProPublica and a writer-at-large at The New York Times Magazine. She was the third guest on the podcast back in January 2013, when she talked about her Texas Monthly series The Innocent Man. That episode has unfortunately been lost. Colloff ultimately won the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing for that story.
On this show, Colloff talks about her two-part series, “Blood Will Tell,” her first project for ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine. In this extraordinary project, Colloff tells the story of Joe Bryan, a former principal in Texas and a man many believe was wrongfully-convicted of murdering his wife.
Prior to joining ProPublica and the Times in 2017, Colloff was an executive editor and staff writer at Texas Monthly. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker and has been anthologized in “Best American Magazine Writing,” “Best American Crime Reporting,” “Best American Non-Required Reading,” and “Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.”
She is a six-time National Magazine Award finalist. Her 2010 story, “Innocence Lost” — about a wrongly convicted death row inmate named Anthony Graves — was credited with helping Graves win his freedom after 18 years behind bars. One month after its publication, all charges against Graves were dropped and he was released from jail, where he had been awaiting retrial.
In 2014, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University awarded her the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism. Her oral history “96 Minutes,” about the 1966 University of Texas shootings, served as the basis for the 2016 documentary, “TOWER,” which was short-listed for an Academy Award in Best Documentary Film.
On this episode, we are replaying an interview Matt Tullis did with David Giffels in January 2015. Giffels is a former reporter and columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio who has gone on to become a creative writing professor in the Northeast Ohio MFA program. He’s also the author of three books.
When he was on the show in 2015, his book, “The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt,” had just been published by Scribner. The book ruminates on Akron — Giffels’ hometown — specifically the city’s despair and destruction as the rubber industry moved out. It also embraces Akron’s resurgence.
In January of this year, Giffels’ third book was published. “Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin and a Measure of Life” is about what ended up being the last woodworking project Giffels ever did with his 81-year-old father; designing and building his own coffin. The book was release on January 2. Three days later, his father died. He wrote about that in an essay that was published on the Atlantic’s website on Father’s Day.
This episode features an interview with Baxter Holmes from 2014. At the time, Holmes had just joined ESPN, having previously written for the Boston Globe, where he covered the Boston Celtics.
When we talked with him four years ago, he had been hired to cover the Lakers. Since then, he’s had some incredible success, and has been promoted to a job that has him writing about the entire NBA.
One of the stories that came about in that new beat was a story on how professional basketball players are obsessed with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The story – The NBA’s Secret Addiction - went viral, and ultimately ended up winning Baxter a James Beard Foundation media award for feature reporting, a top award in the culinary industry. He received his award at the end of April.
At any rate, on this episode, Baxter talks about his story about the time Bill Russell, KC Jones and other players from the University of San Francisco – which had just won the NCAA national championship – visited inmates at Alcatraz. It was his last story for the Boston Globe before he joined ESPN.
Leah Sottile is a freelance writer who, most recently, authored and hosted Bundyville, a four-part story series and seven-episode podcast, which was presented by Longreads and Oregon Public Broadcasting.
The project is the deepest dive yet into the Bundy family -- that’s the family that fought back against federal law enforcement officers out west not once, but twice, a few years ago -- and how they have become a symbol for those who feel the government is keeping them from living their true lives.
Sottile's features, profiles and investigative work has been featured frequently by the Washington Post, Playboy, California Sunday, Outside Magazine and many more publications.
Before freelancing, she was a staff writer at The Inlander, in Spokane, Washington, where she wrote about music, and was the host of two very late-night heavy metal radio programs.
Brantley Hargrove is the author of “The Man Who Caught The Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras,” which was published by Simon and Schuster in April. The book is about a legendary storm chaser who, despite never going to college, was a hugely successful engineer who also managed to record the first meteorological data from inside a massive tornado.
The book has gotten rave reviews. Hampton Sides, the author of “In the Kingdom of Ice,” said that “The Man Who Caught the Storm” is “a thrilling tale of Promethean defiance.” The Washington Post said that Hargrove is “one of today’s best science writers” who “takes the reader not only on a journey through the remarkable life of engineer-explorer Samaras, but also through the beautifully desolate roads of the Plains while on the chase.”
Hargrove has written for Wired, Popular Mechanics, and Texas Monthly, among other publications. He’s gone inside the effort to reverse-engineer super tornadoes using super computers. He’s chased violent storms from the Great Plains to the Texas Coast. But he’s also done more than just write about devastating storms. He has also explored the world of South American jewel thieves who terrorize diamond dealers in South Florida.
Terrence McCoy covers poverty, inequality and social justice in urban and rural America for the Washington Post.
In February, he wrote the story “I don’t know how you got this way.” That piece is about how a young neo-Nazi has revealed himself to his family, and how his mother and grandmother are left wondering if they will ever get him back.
He served in the United States Peace Corps in Cambodia, an experience that ultimately led to The Playground, a Kindle single available on Amazon. That book was named by the Washington Post as one of the best nonfiction books of 2013.
His story “Today, Her Whole Life Is a Free Skate” was included in Best American Sports Writing 2017.
This is a special, mini-episode of the podcast, and one that host Matt Tullis admits is greatly self-promotional.
He has made a trailer for his book, "Running With Ghosts." Some authors have been making or have had made book trailers for several years now, and he thought it would be fun to try and do one himself.
The video — which has been embedded on gangreythepodcast.com — consists of a reading of the prologue from the book, as well as photos that are tied to the days when Tullis had leukemia. There are also photos of the cancer patients he writes about who didn’t survive.
Don Van Natta is a senior writer for ESPN Digital and Print media. He was recently named a finalist — along with his reporting and writing partner Seth Wickersham — for a National Magazine Award in reporting for three stories: “Sin City or Bust,” “Standing Down,” and “Roger Goodell has a Jerry Jones problem.”
Van Natta has had quite the illustrious career. He’s been on three Pulitzer Prize winning reporting teams — two at the New York Times and one at the Miami Herald.
He joined ESPN in 2012, and has since produced many features and investigative pieces centered around the NFL. His profile of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones in August 2014 is particularly amazing because of the access he got from a subject who initially did not want to participate.
In 2014, Van Natta started the Sunday Long Read newsletter with Jacob Feldman, a reporter for Sports Illustrated. The two launched the Sunday Long Read podcast in August of last year, and so far has produced more than a dozen episodes featuring some amazing reporters and writers.
Van Natta is currently working on a book with Wickersham. The book, tentatively titled Powerball,” will be published by Crown Archetype in 2020.
Leonora LaPeter Anton is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter on the Tampa Bay Times’ enterprise team. In January, the Times published her story, “Gang raped at 17. Therapy at 65.”
The story follows the attempt of Evelyn Robinson to cope with a horrific rape, 48 years after it happened.
LaPeter Anton has been at the Tampa Bay Times since 2000. Her stories veer toward the unusual – a surrogate mother who can’t get pregnant; a broke couple who rent rooms in their mansion. She won a Pulitzer for her work in an investigation into the failing mental hospitals in the state of Florida.
She also contributes to the newspaper’s occasional series, Encounters, which are short narratives about people living ordinary lives in south Florida. Her most recent Encounter focused on a woman applying for a job at Subway.
LaPeter Anton grew up in Connecticut and Greece, and studied journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
On this episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, host and producer Matt Tullis talks with Christopher Goffard about “Dirty John,” a combination print series and podcast. Goffard is an author and staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. “Dirty John” focuses on the relationship between Deborah Newell and John Meehan. It was a relationship Deborah’s children hated, and one that ended in the death of one person.
Goffard shared in the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for the LA Times’ investigation into the city of Bell, California. He has twice been a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing, in 2007 and 2014. His book, “You Will See Fire: A Search for Justice in Kenya” was based on his LA Times’ series and was published in 2011.
He’s also a successful fiction writer. His novel “Snitch Jacket” was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel in 2008.
Michael Kruse has been a senior staff writer at Politico for nearly four years. In that time, he has gone from writing deep profiles of presidential candidates to criss-crossing the country in an effort to understand the current state of politics in America.
One of Kruse’s most recent stories focused on Johnstown, Penn., a city and region that voted heavily for President Donald Trump. This story follows up on several people Kruse interviewed when he was in Johnstown just after the election.
Kruse also recently profiled Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey in a piece headlined “Cory Booker Loves Donald Trump.”
Kruse has won the Paul Hansell Award for Distinguished Achievement in Florida Journalism and the American Society of News Editors’ distinguished non-deadline writing award. This is his third time on the podcast. He was the featured guest on Episode 16, when he talked about his three-part series “The Last Voyage of the Bounty,” which in the Tampa Bay Times. He was also on Episode 45 with Ben Montgomery, Thomas Lake Wright Thompson and Tony Rehagen, as they reminisced about the late Michael Brick.
This week’s guest is Vanessa Grigoriadis, whose first book, “Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power and Consent on Campus,” was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in early September. The book reveals a new sexual revolution taking place across the country, one in which college students are on the front lines.
Her reporting shows women who are using savvy methods to fight entrenched sexism and sexual assault even as they celebrate their own sexuality. She also shows male students who are more sensitive to women’s concerns, and other men who perpetrate the most cruel misogyny.
Grigoriadis was on the podcast three years ago. In Episode 30, we talked primarily about her celebrity profiles. Toward the end of that episode, though, we talked briefly about a story she had done for New York Magazine that focused on Emma Sulkowicz, the young woman at Columbia University who had been carrying a mattress around everywhere she went to bring light to the fact she had been sexually assaulted, and the university had done little or nothing about it.
Sulkowicz ends up kicking off Blurred Lines. The first chapter is titled Mattress Girl
Grigoriadis is a contributing editor at the New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair, specializing in pop culture, youth movements, and crime reporting. She has won a National Magazine Award, and been anthologized regularly, including in Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.
On this episode, guest host Steven Kurutz fills in for Matt Tullis, but with good reason. This time around, Tullis is the guest being interviewed.
Earlier this month, Tullis’s book, “Running With Ghosts: A Memoir of Surviving Childhood Cancer” was published by The Sager Group.
In “Running With Ghosts” Tullis, who’s now 41, recounts the months he spent at Akron’s Children’s Hospital fighting for his life, and the years that followed, when he struggled to understand why he’d survived cancer when many of his fellow patients—and even some of his care providers—didn’t.
The book, according to Kurutz, is emotionally honest and moving and, although it’s a personal story based on memory, incredibly well reported.
Tullis is, of course, the host and producer of Gangrey: The Podcast. He’s also the director of the Digital Journalism program at Fairfield University. He is an associate editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, and has been noted in Best American Sports Writing three times and Best American Essays once. He was a daily newspaper reporter for about 10 years, culminating at the Columbus Dispatch, and has written for SB Nation Longform, Sports on Earth, Nieman Storyboard and Yahoo!’s The Post Game, among many other publications.
Thomas Lake is a senior writer at CNN Digital. He just published a three-story series titled "The Trigger and the Choice," which examines multiple aspects of police shootings.
Prior to joining CNN, Lake was the youngest ever senior writer at Sports Illustrated. Some of his most amazing stories include “2 on 5,” which won the Henry Luce Award for most outstanding story for 2008 across all Time Inc. publications; “The Boy They Couldn’t Kill,” which was named one of the 60 best features in the history of Sports Illustrated; and “The Boy Who Died of Football,” which was anthologized in "Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists." Lake has also been anthologized in "Best American Sports Writing" four times.
One of his first big projects at CNN was authoring the book, "Unprecedented: The Election that Changed Everything." That book was published just one month after the November 2016 presidential election.
Lake also participated in the virtual roundtable discussion, “Getting The Story,” which was published in Creative Nonfiction. That discussion, which Matt Tullis moderated and Lake, Chris Jones, and Ben Montgomery participated in, became the inspiration for Gangrey: The Podcast.
David Grann is a New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. His latest is book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. The book was published in April by Doubleday, and explores one of the most sinister crimes and racial injustices in American history.
Grann’s first book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, was adapted into a major motion picture and is in theaters now.
He’s also the author of The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, which contains many of his New Yorker stories. That book was named by Men’s Journal as one of the best true crime books ever written.
Grann’s stories have appeared in The Best American Crime Writing; The Best American Sports Writing; and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He has previously written for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic.
Glenn Stout is the series editor of Best American Sports Writing and the author of the book The Selling of the Babe: The Deal that Changed Baseball and Created a Legend.
Over the last year, Stout has been working with nonfiction writers when it comes to developing book proposals. From July 14-16, he’ll be doing a workshop on that subject at the Archer City Story Center in Archer City, Texas. Stout will also be on the faculty of the story center's week-long literary nonfiction workshop, which takes place July 23-30.
Archer City is the hometown of Larry McMurtry, and is the inspiration for the setting of his novel The Last Picture Show. The story center is just about a year old, and is starting to offer more workshops that aim to help all sorts of storytellers.
Host Matt Tullis will also be doing a workshop there this summer, one focused on developing a podcast. That workshop will take place the the weekend of August 11-13.
Michael J. Mooney is a contributing editor at D Magazine in Dallas. He’s also written for GQ, ESPN The Magazine, Grantland, and Outside Magazine, among many others.
This is his second time visiting the podcast. He was the guest on Episode 2, when we talked about his story “The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever.” That story was ultimately included in Best American Sports Writing.
On this episode, Mooney talks about his story, “My Brother, the Murderer,” which ran in D Magazine in January 2016. He also talks about his piece “Weekend At Johnny’s,” which he wrote after visiting and drinking in many of the bars that Johnny Manziel has frequented. That piece ran in B/R Mag, an extension of Bleacher Report.
He is also the co-director of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction conference, which is held every July in Grapevine, Texas. We talk about that conference, and what is in store this year.
Mooney is the co-director of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, held each year in Grapevine, Texas. In this episode, he talks about some of the plans for the upcoming conference, which is always incredibly popular among literary journalists.
Tom Junod is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com. He joined ESPN after spending nearly 20 years at Esquire Magazine, which he left after former editor-in-chief David Granger was fired earlier this year. Junod is one of the most decorated magazine writers of his generation. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award 11 times, and has won twice. His story, “The Death of Patient Zero,” won the June L. Biedler Prize for cancer writing earlier this year. He’s been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Sports Writing, Best American Political Writing, Best American Crime Writing and even Best American Food Writing. For Esquire’s 75th anniversary issue, editors at the magazine selected his 9-11 story “The Falling Man” as one of the top seven stories in the magazine’s history. In this episode, Junod talks about the first story he reported for ESPN (his second story overall), a piece titled “Eugene Monroe Has A Football Problem.” The story is about the retired NFL lineman who spoke out earlier this year about the NFL needing to change its policy toward marijuana. He also talks about a piece that just went live on ESPN.com, titled “In Defense of Participation Trophies.”
Steven Kurutz, a features reporter for the New York Times, where he writes about style, culture and design. Kurutz wrote the piece “Fruitland” for Creative Nonfiction magazine’s new series, True Story. The story expands upon a piece he wrote for the New York Times in 2012 headlined “A Time Capsule Set to Song.” That story was about two brothers who put out a record in the 1970s, but didn’t receive fanfare for three decades.
Prior to joining the New York Times, Kurutz was a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal and Details. He is the author of “Like a Rolling Stone: The Strange Life of a Tribute Band,” which was published by Random House, and which the New York Times called “heartfelt and often hilarious.”
Also joining the podcast on this episode is Hattie Fletcher. Fletcher is the managing editor of Creative Nonfiction, and is editing each installment of True Story. The new series publishes one big work of creative nonfiction every month in a mini-magazine. It started in October with Kurutz’s Fruitland.
Fletcher edited a virtual round-table discussion that I conducted with Chris Jones, Ben Montgomery and Thomas Lake in 2012 on journalism as creative writing. That discussion ran in the Winter 2013 issue of Creative Nonfiction, and ultimately inspired this podcast.
In this short outtake from Episode 26, Eli Saslow and Matt Tullis talk about "Into The Lonely Quiet," Saslow's story about one family whose first-grade son was murdered in the Sandy Hook killings. They also talk about why reporters are often drawn to hard and depressing stories.
Sonya Huber is an associate professor of English at Fairfield University. She is the author of five books, including “The Evolution of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” which she wrote for the British publisher Squint Books.
Huber is a reporter, memoirist and essayist who also frequently writes about social issues. Her memoir “Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir” delves into the many issues she has experienced in life with health care and insurance.
Her book “Opa Nobody” is a family memoir, as she seeks to understand her grandfather, who was a coal miner, union organizer and social activist in Nazi Germany.
Her new book “Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System” will be published by the University of Nebraska in 2017. Huber has also been published in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Washington Post Magazine.
She also teaches in the low-res MFA program at Fairfield University.
Kathryn Miles is the author of three books, including “Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy.” Her essays and articles have appeared in publications including Audubon, Best American Essays, Boston Globe, Ecotone, The New York Times, Outside, Pacific Standard, Popular Mechanics, and Time.
Her forthcoming book, “Quake Land,” examines the changing face of earthquake hazards in America, and will be published by Dutton in July 2017.
Miles currently serves as writer-in-residence at Green Mountain College, where she also teaches in the college’s low-residence graduate programs. She lives with her family in Portland, Maine.
She recently wrote a piece that appeared in the Boston Globe about the death and ultimate recovery of a woman who got lost hiking the Appalachian Trail. We’ll talk with her about that story, as well as some of her other work.
This week, I talk with Stephen Rodrick, a writer for The New York Times Magazine. He wrote the cover story for the Jan. 10 issue of the Times magazine, titled "The Misfits." Online, thanks to search engine optimization, the story was called "Here is what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie." Rodrick was embedded with the cast and crew of the movie, The Canyons, which was directed by Paul Schrader, and starred Lindsay Lohan.
Rodrick has also written the memoir "The Magical Stranger: A Son's Journey into his Father's Life."
Check out Rodrick's Longform page to read more of his work, including stories he's written since joining the podcast.
Jesse Lichtenstein wrote the story, "Do we really want to live without the post office" for the February issue of Esquire. The piece examines the controversy surrounding the future of the postal service, and what life without it would be like. Lichtenstein also makes the argument that the postal service binds the country together in a way little else can.
This is Lichtenstein's first piece in Esquire, but he has written for numerous other publications, including Slate and The New York Times Magazine. He also worked as a fact checker for The New Yorker.
Brian Mockenhaupt wrote the Byliner.com original "The Living and the Dead." The story chronicles the traumatic experience of a group of Marines in Afghanistan, as well as their difficulty adjusting to life once stateside. He won the 2013 Michael Kelly Award for the story, and was also a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.
Mockenhaupt is a contributing editor to Readers Digest and Esquire, and is the nonfiction editor of the Journal of Military Experience. He writes regularly for The Atlantic and Outside, and his work has also appeared in Pacific Standard, Backpacker, The New York Times Magazine and Chicago.
After serving two tours in Iraq as an infantryman with the 10th Mountain Division, Mockenhaupt has written exclusively on military and veteran affairs.
He was the first in-studio guest for the podcast, as he was visiting Ashland University for the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference.
Luke Dittrich has been writing for Esquire for about six years. In that time, he's written about a man who lived most of his life with no memory (a man who was also treated by Dittrich's grandfather), the Penn State scandal and the Joplin, Missouri, tornado that killed 160 people. That last story won Dittrich a National Magazine Award in 2012.
Most recently, he wrote the story "The Prophet." The story is about neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander, who claims to have visited heaven in a best-selling book. Dittrich’s piece pretty much debunks those claims.
In this podcast, we talk about many of his stories, as well as how he got started reporting and who gave him the idea for the Joplin tornado story.
Since joining the podcast, Dittrich turned his story about Patient HM, the man with no memory, into a book by that same name.
Jason Fagone, a Philadelphia-based journalist who writes about science, sports and culture for Wired magazine and Philadelphia magazine. Fagone’s work has also appeared in GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate and Deadspin.
Fagone’s most recent story — "Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?" — is about a cancer researcher who has found a way to treat leukemia using genetically modified T-cells. Since joining the podcast, he has written the book "Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring and the Race to Revive America," which follows the lives of several people as they attempt to engineer a radically new kind of car.
Janet Reitman is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and is the author of Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion.
In July 2013, she wrote the story “Jahar’s World” for Rolling Stone. The story dug deep into the life of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving brother accused of the Boston Marathon bombing. That issue created a huge controversy when the magazine decided to put Tsarnaev on the cover.
Reitman's most recent story for Rolling Stone was a Q&A with Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who was elected to the senate just one month before the Sandy Hook shooting.
Reitman has written about a wide range of topics, including the church of Scientology. She was nominated for a National Magazine Award for that story. She’s also covered the war in Iraq and written about Anonymous hactivists, among many other things.
In addition to Rolling Stone, her work has appeared in GQ, Men’s Journal, The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, ESPN The Magazine and Salon. For links to many of Reitman's stories, check out her Byliner page.
Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. Thompson is widely regarded as one of the top literary sports journalists in the country. His work has been featured in seven editions of "Best American Sports Writing." This year, his story "Urban Meyer will be home for dinner," was included in the anthology.
2013 was an epic year for Thompson, who reported and wrote several memorable stories, including a profile of Michael Jordan as he turned 50 years old, a story about Italy’s racist soccer thugs, a story about a paralyzed fly rod maker in Montana and a profile of legendary wrestling coach Dan Gable in the wake of the International Olympic Committee cutting that sport.
Since joining the podcast in October 2013, Thompson has written an incredibly in-depth piece on Tiger Woods as well as a piece on New Orleans on the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. That piece took up the entire feature well in one issue of ESPN: The Magazine.
In this podcast, we talk about the Gable story, which Thompson says he wouldn't change a thing about, and the Jordan story. Both are intimate profiles of people you wouldn't think would ever open up to anyone, let alone a reporter.
When John Woodrow Cox talked with Matt Tullis on the podcast, he was working at the Tampa Bay Times and writing short narratives. Since then, Cox joined the Washington Post, where he is an enterprise reporter who has written about a flawed sexual assault investigation in the Marines and about a 10-year-old who has HIV.
At the Times, Cox was a general assignment reporter in Pinellas County. He covered breaking news and led long-term investigations into frivolous government spending, military contract fraud and Florida’s prescription pill epidemic. He also wrote feature stories, including the “Dispatches from Next Door” series for the Floridian magazine. These stories are very short — just 500 words long — but painstakingly reported. They tell a full story in a very short amount of space.
We talked with him about two such stories, one about a woman who is only able to find peace on the ocean. The other is about a senior citizen always on the look for that special young woman who will save him from loneliness. We also talked about writing cops and crime stories and how it can help form a narrative sense.
Jeanne Marie Laskas is a correspondent for GQ and the director of The Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of seven books, including “Hidden America,” as well as the award-winning trilogy of memoirs: “Fifty Acres and Poodle,” “The Exact Same Moon,” and “Growing Girls.”
Since joining the podcast, Laskas turned her story about concussions in the NFL, "Game Brain," into the book "Concussion," which has since been turned into a feature film starring Will Smith.
On this episode of the podcast, we talk with Laskas about her profile of Vice President Joe Biden, "Game Brain," and her most recent GQ story, "Oops, You Just Hired The Wrong Hitman."
Formerly a contributing editor at Esquire, and a weekly columnist (“Significant Others”) at The Washington Post Magazine, she has been writing for national magazines for twenty years, with work appearing in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Allure, Ladies Home Journal, and many others.
Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Best American Magazine Writing and Best American Sports Writing.
Susan Dominus is a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine. She’s written about everything from higher education to organizational psychology. She also writes celebrity profiles. The most recent focused on Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter Fame. The other was about Stephen King and family of writers.
The Radcliffe piece — "Daniel Radcliffe's Next Trick is to Make Harry Potter Disappear" — followed the Harry Potter star as he promoted the independent film "Kill Your Darlings." The story shows just how much life as Harry Potter has affected the young actor.
"Stephen King's Family Business" centered around a family get-together in Maine, where the King family of writers got together to discussion the early days of Stephen's career and the new generation of writers he raised.
When Jeremy Markovich visited the podcast, he was a writer and columnist for Charlotte magazine. He also contributed to SB Nation Longform and Our State magazine, and an Emmy-award winning producer at WCNC-TV. His first story about a blind man who hiked the Appalachian Trail won several awards, including the National City and Regional Magazine Award for Personality Profile.
Markovich is now a senior editor/writer at Our State. Click here to see many of his newer stories for that magazine.
On this episode, we talk with him about two stories he wrote for SB Nation Longform. The first — "Elegy of a Race Car Driver" — is about famed NASCAR racer Dick Trickle, who committed suicide earlier this May. That story was recently named a Best of 2013: Sports by Longform. The second — "Over the Edge" — is about BASE jumping, particularly those who gather at the New River Gorge bridge in West Virginia on the third Saturday in October every year to jump.
When Michael Kruse visited the podcast, he was a staff writer on the enterprise team at the Tampa Bay Times. In October and November 2013, Kruse published a three-part series titled "The Last Voyage of the Bounty.” It chronicled a tall wooden ship bound for St. Petersburg, Fla., as she sailed straight into Hurricane Sandy. Sixteen sailors were aboard that ship, and not everyone survived.
Since then, Kruse joined Politico, where he has been writing feature stories on those who ran and are still running for president. He wrote at least two pieces on Jeb Bush, including "Jeb 'Put Me Through Hell'" and "The Year That Changed Jeb Bush Forever." He's written about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Kruse has been recognized for his writing and reporting a number of times. Most recently, he won the Paul Hansell Award for Distinguished Achievement in Florida Journalism. He also won the American Society of News Editors distinguished nondeadline writing award. His story, “A Brevard woman disappeared, but never left home,” was included in the anthology “Next Wave: America’s Next Generation of Great Literary Journalists.” He’s given a TedX talk on the importance of story, and has written the book “Taking the Shot: The Davidson Basketball Moment.”
On top of writing for the Tampa Bay Times, Kruse has also been published by Grantland, Yahoo sports, Our State and Men’s Health magazines and Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard, among others.
At the time of his visit on the podcast, Chris Jones was a writer at large for Esquire, as well as a back-page columnist for ESPN The Magazine. Jones has twice won National Magazine Awards. In 2009, his story “The Things that Carried Him” won for feature writing.
Jones is an expert profile writer. His 2010 piece on the late Roger Ebert is, in our opinion, one of the best celebrity profiles ever written. It’s touching and poignant, showing a side of the film critic that hadn’t been seen since Ebert’s battle with cancer.
Most recently, Jones turned his eye on a man most have never heard of, but a man who has been involved in nearly every major tragic event in recent US history. His Esquire story, “Kenneth Feinberg: the nation’s leading expert in picking up the pieces,” looks at the man who decides how much money the surviving victims of horrific shootings and bombings get once there is a monetary fund set up for those victims.
In October 2012 he wrote a historical piece on what happened on Air Force 1 immediately after the President John F. Kennedy assassination.
In 2011, Jones participated in a virtual roundtable discussion moderated by podcast host Matt Tullis. That discussion focused on journalism as a sub-genre of creative nonfiction, and was published in Creative Nonfiction in the Winter 2012 issue of the magazine. The discussion was ultimately the inspiration for the podcast.
Since joining the podcast, Jones wrote a piece about astronaut Scott Kelly as he prepared to spend a full year in outer space.
Flinder Boyd is a former professional basketball player who now writes longform journalism. For 10 years, he played as a point guard in the lower and upper levels of many professional European basketball leagues.
Now he’s writing, often about basketball. His story “20 Minutes at Rucker Park” profiles a young man’s cross-country journey on a Greyhound bus to New York City’s streetball Mecca.
That story was published on SB Nation Longform. It was subsequently a Longform selection and named by Longreads a Top 5 Longread of the Week. It was also a Nieman Storyboard recommended reading selection and earned Boyd Longread’s Favorite New Writer Discovery in 2013. Finally, Sports on Earth called the story a Top 20 sports story in 2013. To top things off, the story was anthologized in Best American Sports Writing 2014.
He’s written two other stories for SB Nation Longform; a profile of NBA player Chris Copeland and a first-hand account of the corruption and chaos of playing professional basketball in Slovakia.
Since joining the podcast, Boyd has started writing for many other outlets, including Rolling Stone, Newsweek and Fox Sports, where he wrote about Rafael Palmeiro in April 2016.
Boyd has also written for The Classical, Sports On Earth and BBC online among others. You can follow him on Twitter @FlinderBoyd.
Wil S. Hylton wrote the book “Vanished,” which focuses on the modern-day search for one American bomber that crashed over the Pacific Islands during World War II. That bomber carried 11 men, who for decades, were listed as missing in action. Finding that lost bomber gave closure to the families of those men, but it also took an amazing feat of detective work and amazing modern technology.
“Vanished” came out in November 2013 and has garnered praise from newspapers and magazines around the country. Time Magazine said the book contains “passages so expressive that we’re constantly reminded we’re in the hands of a phenomenal writer.”
Hylton is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His work has also been featured in Harpers, GQ, Esquire and Rolling Stone, among many others magazines. He’s profiled US Attorney general Eric Holder among many others and written about the doomed Air France Flight 447. He’s also written about mothers who make the agonizing decision to abandon their children at safe havens.
Since talking with Matt Tullis on the podcast, he has continued writing for The New York Times, including the piece "The Mysterious Metamorphosis of Chuck Close," which was published in July 2016.
You can also find out more about Hylton by visiting wilshylton.com.
Ben Montgomery is an enterprise reporter at the Tampa Bay Times and the author of “Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail.”
Montgomery’s book focuses on Emma Gatewood, who at the age of 67, through-hiked the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. She was the first woman to ever do so, and later became the first person, male or female, to hike the trail two and then three times. Montgomery’s book doesn’t just chronicle Gatewood’s hikes, but seeks to understand why she took to walking at such an advanced age.
Since joining the podcast, "Grandma Gatewood's Walk" went on to become a New York Times bestseller, and Montgomery has written another book. "The Leper Spy: The Story of an Unlikely Hero of World War II" is being published by Chicago Review Press, and will be available on Oct. 1, 2016.
As a reporter, Montgomery was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for a series of stories called “For Their Own Good.” Those stories examined abuse at Florida’s oldest reform school, at times called the Florida School for Boys and the Dozier School for Boys.
He is also the founder of Gangrey.com, a blog devoted to sharing and talking about the best narrative journalism being done in magazines and newspapers around the country. The podcast is a spin-off of that blog.
Jackie Valley is a reporter at the Las Vegas Sun. In 2013, she published a seven-part series called “Grace Through Grief.” The series followed Arturo Martinez and his two young sons as they dealt with the brutal murder of their wife and daughter, their mother and sister. The murders happened in April 2012, and Valley covered it as breaking news on her cops beat. She got to know Martinez through her reporting, and he eventually allowed her remarkable access as he recovered from the murders, both physically and emotionally.
This was Valley’s first foray into a large project. She studied journalism at Kent State University, and completed a Dow Jones copy editing internship at the Virginian Pilot in 2009. She joined the Las Vegas Sun one year later.
Mac McClelland is an award-winning journalist who has written for publications like Time Magazine, The New York Times and Mother Jones. She’s reported from every region in the United States, gone undercover in industry and the sex trade and reported internationally from places like Thailand, Haiti, Australia, Burma, Uganda, Turkey and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
McClelland has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Hillman Foundation, the Online News Association, the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Association for Women in Communications. Her book “For Us Surrender is Out of the Question” was a finalist for the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Price. She’s been nominated for two National Magazine Awards for Feature Writing. And her work has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best Business Writing.
She has written about a lot of human rights issues, including reporting from Haiti after the deadly earthquake in 2010. She often immerses herself in her stories, like when she worked in a massive warehouse for an online retailer for several weeks. Most recently, she’s written about Syrian refugee camps in Turkey for The New York Times. You can read a lot of McClelland's stories by visiting her own personal website.
Since joining the podcast, McClelland's book “Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story,” has been published. The book is a beautiful yet painful look at how PTSD can affect reporters who have covered traumatic events.
Walt Harrington is a former staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine. He’s now a journalism professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Harrington has written a number of award-winning books, including "The Everlasting Stream," which was turned into an Emmy-winning PBS documentary.
His book "Intimate Journalism," has been a staple of journalism writing classes for more than 15 years. Last year, he co-edited an anthology called "Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists." He produced that book with Esquire writer Mike Sager, a former podcast guest. The book features 19 stories written by journalists who are all under the age of 40.
In May 2014, Harrington's book "Acts of Creation: America’s Finest Hand Craftsmen at Work," was published by The Sager Group. That book consists of 14 portraits of people who work with their hands, including a fireplace maker in Maine, a cabinet maker in Maryland and a locksmith in Ohio.
Since talking with Matt Tullis on the podcast, Harrington write another book: "Artful Journalism: Essays in the Craft and Magic of True Storytelling."
Eli Saslow is a reporter at the Washington Post. Earlier this year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his series of stories on food stamps in a post-recession America.
Over the course of 2013, Saslow reported and wrote six extraordinary stories that focused on everything from a town in Rhode Island where one-third of the residents receive food stamps to a program that uses school buses to take lunches to kids in rural Tennessee during the summer.
When Matt Tullis talked with him, he was writing a series of stories on another hot-button issue – immigration.
Now he is writing about drug addiction in America. In July 2016, he wrote "How's Amanda: A story of truth, lies and American addiction."
Saslow was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing in 2013 for his story “Life of a Salesman.” That story looked at the suffering American economy through the eyes of a man who sells swimming pools. Last year, he wrote a heart-breaking story that focused on a family whose first-grade son was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting.
In 2008, Saslow covered the presidential campaign, and he’s also chronicled the president’s life inside the White House. As if his work at the Washington Post doesn’t keep him busy enough, Saslow also occasionally writes for ESPN: The Magazine, and has been included in Best American Sports Writing twice.
Earl Swift is the author of "Auto Biography: A Classic Car, An Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream." The book tells the life story of a 1957 Chevy that, at the beginning of the book, is falling apart.
Swift profiles the car’s thirteenth owner, Tommy Arney, who has led an extraordinary life, one that started with a brutal childhood, proceeded into a life of crime and ended up as a somewhat successful and controversial businessman. Arney sets out on a quest to restore the car to its former glory, and Swift is there for all of it. Through that narrative, Swift manages to also tell the stories of every single person who had ever owned the car. In the process, he captures America’s strange and abiding relationship with the automobile.
This is Swift’s fifth book. Since 2012, he’s been a residential fellow of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities at the University of Virginia. Before that, he was a newspaper reporter for the Virginian-Pilot, where he was nominated five times for a Pulitzer Prize.
Seth Wickersham is a senior writer with ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com. He joined ESPN right after graduating from the University of Missouri. While he primarily covers the NFL, he has also covered the Athens Olympics, the World Series, the NCAA tournament and the NHL and NBA playoffs.
Since joining the podcast in 2014, Wickersham has gone on to write several noteworthy stories, including two stories he co-wrote with Don Van Natta Jr., "Spygate to Deflategate" and "The Wow Factor." He has a profile on John Elway in the September 7, 2016 issue of ESPN: The Magazine that is getting great reviews.
When Matt Tullis talked with Wickersham, he had just started writing some wonderful longform literary journalism for ESPN. He wrote about a runner from Kenya who went to college in Alaska, but suffered his own private torment, something that changed his life forever. He wrote about legendary NFL coach Bill Walsh’s attempt to write a book that would teach everyone how to coach in the NFL. And he wrote about vets who have to put racehorses down after catastrophic injuries, a story that was anthologized in the book "Next Wave: America's New Generation of Great Literary Journalists."
In this episode, we talk with Wickersham about two stories in particular. In “Awakening the Giant,” Wickersham wrote about legendary quarterback Y.A. Tittle, who suffers from dementia. He also wrote the story “Out Route,” which chronicled Atlanta Falcon’s tight end Tony Gonzalez in the final season of his hall of fame career.
Baxter Holmes recently joined ESPN as its new Los Angeles Lakers reporter for ESPN.com. Holmes previously wrote for The Boston Globe, where he covered the Boston Celtics. Before that, he was a sports reporter for the Los Angeles Times. It was his first job after graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 2009.
Holmes has won a slew of awards in just a short time as a professional sports writer. He has received Associated Press Sports Editors honors for explanatory reporting, projects reporting, beat reporting and breaking news. Additionally, he received first-place honors in the Game Story and Features categories of the Professional Basketball Writers Association 2013 Best Writing Contest.
A year ago, he profiled Celtics head coach Brad Stevens in a three-part series. In September, he profiled Celtics guard Marcus Smart. His last piece for the Boston Globe was a story about the time Bill Russell, KC Jones and other players from NCAA basketball champion University of San Francisco visited the inmates at Alcatraz.
Vanessa Grigoriadis writes for New York, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone magazines, among other publications. Grigoriadis calls herself a generalist longform writer. She writes about hot topics in the world and does a lot of celebrity profiles, really good celebrity profiles that dig far beyond what a celebrity’s publicist often wants.
She won a National Magazine Award in profile writing for her profile on Karl Lagerfeld. Her New York Magazine story Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in feature writing.
She recently wrote a piece called Justin Bieber: A Case Study in Growing Up Cosseted and Feral. The story in many ways serves as a follow-up to the profile of Bieber that she wrote for Rolling Stone in 2011.
David Giffels is a former newspaper reporter who wrote the book “The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt.” Giffels, who grew up and has lived his entire life in Akron, Ohio, writes about the city’s despair and destruction as the rubber industry moved out, as well as Akron’s resurgence. He writes about bowling, rock n roll, thrift stores and sports in a smart and funny way. Giffels was once a reporter and columnist at the Akron Beacon Journal. While at the Beacon Journal, he worked alongside Chuck Klosterman and Michael Weinreb. Now Giffels is an assistant professor of English at the University of Akron. He’s also the author of “All the Way Home,” which won the Ohioana Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Beacon Journal, Grantland, and many other publications.
This entire episode is devoted to the life, stories and music of Michael Brick. Brick wrote for the New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, Harper’s Magazine. He also wrote the book “Saving the School.”
Brick passed away in February from colon cancer. He leaves behind a wife a wife and children.
In Brick’s final days, his friends and fellow reporters scrambled to put together a book that contains so many of his amazing stories. That book, “Everyone Leaves Behind a Name,” was published by The Sager Group and is now available. All book proceeds go to Brick’s family.
In this episode, I’m going to talk with some of men who put that book together. On the show we’ve got Ben Montgomery, a senior writer at the Tampa Bay Times, Michael Kruse, a senior staff writer for Politico, Wright Thompson, a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine, Thomas Lake, who covers politics for CNN Ditital, and Tony Rehagen, a freelance writer living in Atlanta.
Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter who has been called the beat poet of American journalism. He currently works as a writer at large for Esquire Magazine, and is also the editor and publisher of The Sager Group, a consortium of multimedia artists and writers.
Sager recently co-edited the book, "Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists." He’s also released a collection of his own magazine stories called "The Someone You’re Not," as well as a novel titled "High Tolerance."
Sager began his journalism career in the Washington Post newsroom, working for Bob Woodward. He went on to write for dozens of high profile magazines, including GQ, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Vibe, Spy and Interview, among many others. In 2010, he won a National Magazine Award for profile writing for his story on former NFL quarterback Todd Marinovich.
Kaylen Ralph and Joanna Demkiewicz are the founders of The Riveter Magazine, which just put out its fourth issue. They are both graduates of the University of Missouri journalism school. The Riveter publishes longform work by female reporters only. The idea for the magazine stemmed from the fact that, in 2012, while Ralph and Demkiewicz were students, the National Magazine Awards put out its list of nominees, and there wasn't a single female nominated in the reporting, feature writing, profile writing, essays and criticism or columns and commentary categories.
Ralph and Demkiewicz recently collaborated on the book, “Newswomen: Twenty-Five Years of Front-Page Journalism,” which was edited by Joyce Hoffman and published by The Sager Group. Ralph and Demkiewicz interviewed all of the women included in the book and write “as told to” pieces on how those women got their start in journalism. A similar book is in the works for female magazine writers, as Ralph and Demkiewicz continue to work with Mike Sager to showcase the top female writers and reporters in the country.
Kelley Benham French of the Tampa Bay Times wrote the three-part series “Never let go.” The story focuses on the birth of Juniper French, the daughter of Kelley and husband Tom French (as in Pulitzer Prize-winning Tom French). Juniper was born at 23 weeks, six days and weighed just one pound, four ounces at birth.
While written in the first-person, this story is not your typical piece of memoir. Benham reported the hell out of this story, starting with more than 7,000 pages of medical records and continuing on with extensive interviews with ever doctor, nurse and social worker involved in her daughter’s life.
French is now a professor of practice at the Indiana University Media School. She recently worked as the editor on Lane DeGregory's piece, "The Long Fall of Phoebe Jonchuck."
Lane DeGregory is a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer at the Tampa Bay Times. In early January, the Times published a long story by DeGregory, told in three chapters, about a five-year-old girl whose father killed her by dropping her off a bridge into the ocean. “The Long Fall of Phoebe Jonchuck” is a brutal yet powerful piece that shows how a sweet little girl was the victim of a child protective services system that let far too many children fall through the cracks. The editor on this story was Kelley Benham French, now a professor of practice at the Indiana University Media School. We featured French on the podcast after she wrote the three-part series, “Never Let Go.” DeGregory won a Pulitzer in 2009 for feature writing for her story, “The Girl in the Window.” Her work has appeared in Best Newspaper Writing in four times. She has taught journalism at the University of South Florida – St. Petersburg, been a speaker at the Nieman Narrative Conference at Harvard University, and won dozens of national awards. She’s also known for finding wonderful stories among everyday lives, including a piece on a flag-toting rodeo rider, and a boy buying a Valentine card for his first girlfriend.
Ed Caesar is the author of “Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon.” The book chronicles the attempts of the world’s greatest marathon runners to inch closer and closer to the magical two-hour mark, and follows one runner in particular, Geoffrey Mutai. Caesar has contributed to The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Outside, The Smithsonian Magazine, the Sunday Times Magazine and British GQ. He’s reported from a wide range of countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo, and Iran. He’s written about secretive Russian oligarchs, African civil wars, marathon tennis matches, British murder trials, and more. He’s also written celebrity profiles, as well as a profile on the greatest darts player to ever live. In 2014, Caesar was named Journalist of the Year by the Foreign Press Association of London.
Brandon Sneed wrote the book “Behind the Drive: A Story of Passion, Dreams, Demons, and Highway 55, the World’s Next Favorite Burger Joint.” The book is a collaborative effort with Kenney Moore, the man who started the popular restaurant.
Despite Sneed’s youth, this is already his second book. His first was titled “Edge of Legend: An Incredible Story of Faith and Basketball.” That book was about a dominant Division 2 basketball player.
Sneed writes often about sports, and has also written for publications like GQ, ESPN The Magazine, Pacific Standard, Outside and SB Nation Longform. His story “The Prospect” was noted in “Best American Sports Writing 2014.”
Eva Holland is a freelance writer and editor based in Canada’s Yukon Territory. She writes for several publications, including Vela Magazine and SB Nation Longform. She is the co-editor of World Hum, a website devoted to the best travel stories on the Internet.
In 2013, Holland had pieces from Vela Magazine listed as notable in both Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing. She’s written two stories for SB Nation Longform that were aggregated by Longform.org. One focused on the handlers who help sled dog racers in the one-thousand mile Yukon Quest. The other story is about called “Wilderness Women” and is about women who go to Alaska to compete in one of the wildest and strangest competitions ever.
Her story “Chasing Alexander Supertramp” looks at the increasing number of people who make the pilgrimage to the bus where Christopher McCandless of “Into the Wild” fame died. The hike to that bus includes a dangerous crossing of the Teklanika River in Alaska, and continues to strand hikers on a regular basis, and sometimes claim lives.
Chuck Klosterman is the author of six books of nonfiction and two novels. His most recent book, "I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)" was a New York Times bestseller.
In the two most recent issues of GQ, Klosterman has interviewed Taylor Swift and Tom Brady. In fact, he's done several celebrity interviews this year, including Kobe Bryant and Eddie Van Halen.
He’s written for Grantland, Esquire, GQ, Spin, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Believer, and the A.V. Club. He currently serves as The Ethicist for the New York Times Magazine.
This episode of the podcast features the work of Robert Sanchez of 5280 magazine in Denver and Bradford Pearson.
Sanchez is a senior staff writer for 5280. In 2014, he was named the City and Regional Magazine Association’s Writer of the Year. He also won that organization’s award for best profile in 2014, for his story “The Rise and Fall of Terrance Roberts.” Sanchez has been a finalist for the City and Regional Magazine Association Writer of the Year three times, and is also a three-time finalist for the prestigious Livingston Awards for Young Journalists. His work has been anthologized twice in “Best American Sports Writing,” and has also been included in “Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists” and in the “Missouri Anthology of Narrative Journalism.”
Sanchez also contributes features to ESPN The Magazine and has been published in Esquire and Men’s Health. He’s also worked for the Associated Press, the Denver Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Rocky Mountain News.
Bradford Pearson is a managing editor at Southwest: The Magazine. In September, he published his story “My Kidnappers” in Philadelphia magazine. The story is about a time when Bradford was in college, and he was robbed and kidnapped at gunpoint. In the piece, he actually tracks down the men who did this to him. Bradford has also been an editor at D Magazine in Dallas.
In our Required Reading segment, Zack Lemon offers his thoughts on Tom Junod’s classic piece “The Rapist Says He’s Sorry.” Lemon is a senior at Ashland University who has served as the managing editor of the award-winning student newspaper The Collegian. He is now the senior reporter at the paper, where he has won first place in the Ohio Newspaper Association’s College Newspaper Competition for in-depth reporting for a watchdog piece on the university administration. He recently finished an internship at the Columbus Dispatch.
In the first episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, Matt Tullis talks with freelance writer Justin Heckert, who wrote the story “The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly” for The New York Times Magazine. The story was published in November, and is about Ashlyn Blocker, a teenager who suffers from congenital insensitivity to pain.
Brooke Jarvis is a longform narrative and environmental journalist who lives in Seattle. One of Jarvis’s more recent stories, “The Deepest Dig,” will be included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015. She is a 2015 Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow, reporting on the advent of deep-sea mining. That is what her story, which ran in the The California Sunday Magazine in November 2014, is about.
More recently, Jarvis wrote the story “Homeward.” That story was also published by The California Sunday Magazine, and is about a young man from the jungles of Ecuador, whose village sent him stateside so he could be educated and come back to save the village from the oil industry and colonization.
Jarvis has written for a whole host of national publications, including The California Sunday Magazine, Bloomberg Business Week, Al Jazeera America, Audubon Magazine, Rollingstone.com, The Washington Post and Orion Magazine, among many others.
Mike Wilson is finishing up his first few months as the new editor of the Dallas Morning News. Wilson came to Dallas from ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight website, where he was managing editor.
Before that, he was the editor of the St. Petersburg/Tampa Bay Times. While in St. Petersburg, Wilson oversaw a staff of incredibly talented writers and reporters, many of whom have been featured on this podcast, reporters like Ben Montgomery, Michael Kruse and Kelley Benham French. During the podcast, we talk about a series of stories that ran in the St. Petersburg Times called Encounters. One by Kruse was about a dad teaching his young daughter how to ride a bike.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the writers Wilson cultivated in Florida. He was the primary editor on Lane DeGregory’s story, “The Girl in the Window,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2009.
During our discussion, we also talk about a story Wilson said he recently read, titled “The Root of All Things,” by Nathan Thornburgh. The piece ran on the website roadsandkingdoms.com, an independent journal of food, politics, travel and culture. It’s a story well worth checking out.
This episode of Gangrey: The Podcast is focused solely on the “The Best American Sports Writing 2015,” which is now on sale at bookstores across the country. This year marks the 25th edition of the book, and it was guest edited by Wright Thompson.
The podcast opens with a conversation with Glenn Stout, the series editor. Stout also serves as the longform editor of SB Nation, and has edited all four pieces that host Matt Tullis has written for the Website. That includes “The Ghosts I Run With,” which you can hear on Episode 37.
In the second segment, Jeremy Collins talks about his story “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Greg Maddux,” which is included in this year’s Best American Sports Writing. He also talks about his latest SB Nation piece, “The Reckoning.”
Finally, in the Required Reading segment, host Matt Tullis breaks down this year’s Best American Sports Writing, and why it is a must-read for everyone, even non-sports fans.
Michael Graff is the editor of Charlotte Magazine and is a freelance writer for SB Nation Longform, Washingtonian Magazine and Politico. Before taking over Charlotte Magazine, Graff was an editor and writer for Our State Magazine in North Carolina for four years.
On June 4, SB Nation Longform published Graff’s piece, “Two Lanes to Accokeek.” The story is an at times graphic story about a street race that turned tragic in the most unimaginable way.
In this podcast, we talk about that story as well as some of Graff’s work with Charlotte Magazine, including a story about the world’s greatest female skydiver and her quest to become the first woman with 20,000 dives.
This week, Gangrey: The Podcast gets a makeover.
This week’s episode has three segments, starting with Nathan Thornburgh, a chief editor and publisher of the website roadsandkingdoms.com. Thornburgh spent much of the last decade as a foreign correspondent and editor for TIME Magazine. He’s reported on everything from cyber war in Russia to information wars in Georgia – not the state Georgia, by the way — to drug wars in Juarez. He also co-founded the parenting blog DadWagon.
We’re going to talk about his story, “The Root of All Things.” Mike Wilson mentioned the story in Episode 34 and said he had been told about the piece by one of his reporters at the Dallas Morning News.
The story is also going to be republished in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative this fall. Last spring, River Teeth republished Justin Heckert’s “Susan Cox is No Longer Here,” which originally ran in Indianapolis Monthly Magazine.
In the second segment, I talk with David Caswell. Caswell has created a new news database called Structured Stories. He hopes the database will empower everyone to collect, use and improve a permanent record of news events.
Finally, the third segment will be something new called “Required Reading.” This week, I’ll tell you about two stories I’ve recently read that I think everyone should also read. The stories are “Ballad of the Sad Climatologists,” by John H. Richardson, which ran in Esquire. The other story is “The Really Big One,” by Katherine Schultz, which ran in The New Yorker.
In the future, though, we hope podcast listeners will contribute to this segment. We’ll have more posted on the website about how to get involved.
Our first guest this week is Kim Cross. Cross is the author of “What Stands In a Storm: Three Days in the Worst Superstorm To Hit the South’s Tornado Alley.” Cross, who lives in Alabama, experienced those storms, although not to the extent of the people she writes about.
Cross has written for The Anniston Star and the Birmingham News. She was a spot news reporter for the New Orleans Times Picayune and the Tampa Bay Times. She has also been an editor at Southern Living and Cooking Light magazines.
In our second segment, we talk with fiction writer Karen Bender. Bender is the author of a relatively new collection of short stories titled “Refund.” That book was recently long-listed for the National Book Awards in Fiction. Bender has also written the novels, “A Town of Empty Rooms” and “Like Normal People.”
Bender is a distinguished visiting writer at Hollins University, and has also taught creative writing in Taiwan and at the MFA programs at Antioch Los Angeles, Chatham University, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and at the Iowa Summer Writer’s Festival.
Finally, in our third segment, Required Reading, Dave Stark offers his thoughts on J.R. Moehringer’s “The Tender Bar.”
This week’s episode once again features three segments. The first is a talk with Tyler Cabot, an articles editor for Esquire Magazine. Cabot also directs the magazine’s research and development. He spearheaded the revamping of Esquire Classic, which now includes access to every issue Esquire has ever published. Cabot has said that today, he is focused with finding new ways to tell and sell stories, and that is evident in Esquire Classic. On that new site, you can read Gay Talese’s landmark celebrity profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” and you can read it as it appeared in the April 1966 issue of the magazine. You can also read a short, behind-the-scenes piece on the difficulties of reporting that story. And you can read the letters-to-the-editor that the piece spawned. From Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Chris Jones and Tom Junod, it’s all there on this new site. In the second segment, we offer our first, full-length audio version of a piece of nonfiction. We’ve got “The Ghosts I Run With,” by host Matt Tullis. The piece of memoir ran on SB Nation Longform in April, and is about the many people Tullis thinks about when he runs, people he came to know when he had leukemia as a teenager, people who didn’t survive their own illnesses. Finally, in Required Reading, freelance writer D. Rossi tells us why we should all read Brian Ives’ piece “How Bruce Springsteen Got His Groove Back,” which ran on Radio.com. Rossi maintains the blog Life among the Humans.