"I am tyrannical about noise and about quiet. I don't feel that I can control the amount of mess I make. I mean, I know I can, but I kind of can't. And there's just so many things about my character that are really detrimental to having a writing process, which I need, and it's just so opposed to everything that's going on in my disgustoid little spirit," says Rax King, author of Sloppy.

As I tell Rax in this conversation, I hadn’t been reading a lot of what I’d call “fun” books. I wasn’t having much by way of fun reading for a long time and that changed with Sloppy, which isn’t to say the book doesn’t have its heavy moments, but it’s couched in a buoyant and irreverent voice that I found very appealing.

Like Melissa Febos, Rax is something of a quote machine with acerbic wit that made this episode really electric. That’s something I notice from voice-heavy memoirists and essayists. Like, if you’re not throwing heat as an essayist, you gotta work on your game. Maybe there are some who can lyric their way through, but that’s not my taste, personally. I need people pointing out the absurdities and their complicity in the absurdity. I don’t even know what that means, but it sounded good.

Rax King also is the author of Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and the co-host of Low Culture Boil with Courtney Rawlings and Amber Rollo. Rax's work has been nominated for a James Beard Award and has appeared in Food & Wine, MEL Magazine, Glamour and Electric Literature. You can learn more about Rax at her website raxkingisdead.com or follow her on the gram @raxkingisdead.

We talk about revisions, her sobriety, her sloppiness, money issues, steady-income spouses and a lot of other stuff. She really brought the heat.

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"That is the main difference between storytelling for the ear and writing, is that the cost of revisions is so much higher," says Julia Barton.

We have Julia Barton. Julia was the third hire, I think I have that right, with Pushkin Industries, the podcast giant founded by Malcolm Gladwell. She’s the executive editor of Pushkin and helped develop Revisionist History and Against the Rules, the latter by the journalist and uber best seller Michael Lewis. She, quite literary, edits with her ears.

I met Julia briefly at the Power of Narrative Conference in Boston, where she’s also a Nieman Fellow, as her talk followed mine. I did not attend her talk and I feel great shame about that, but my battery was in the negative after my talk and I just needed to disappear, the plight of the introvert. I could have learned a LOT since her talk was about the grammar of audio stories. I atoned by inviting her on the podcast to talk about her auditory journey.

So Julia has a cool newsletter called Continuous Wave, which is a weekly newsletter exploring the forgotten history of broadcast and all electronic media. It’s very specific, which is what you want from a newsletter. She’s the founder of RadioWright, she is @bartona104 on IG.

We talk about:

• Editing audio stories and how it’s different than print
• What’s the ideal length for a podcast be it narrative or interview
• The cost of revisions
• Scratch mixes and dry mixes
• Animal vs. Mineral editing
• Picturing the ideal interview in your head
• And more!

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"You have to finish it out. You have to report it, even if it's financially a terrible idea," says Matthew Wolfe.

OK, it’s that Atavistian time of the month so we’re here to talk about Matthew Wolfe’s “The Talented Mr. Bruseaux: He made his name in Chicago investigating racial violence, solving crimes, and exposing corruption. But American’s first Black private detective was hiding secrets of his own.” Go to magazone.atavist.com to read it.

So we’ll be hearing from Matt in due time. It’s not Matt’s first story with the Atavist and we talk a little about his first story with the Atavist as well.

Matt is a journalist and I believe he wrapped up a PhD in sociology. He’s got a book coming out next year. We’ll be sure to tout that when the time comes.

Batting leadoff here is none other than lead editor Jonah Ogles. Jonah and I talk about the ideal writer to work with and get into how he edited Matt’s piece

Matt's first Atavist story was “The Ghosts of Pickering Trail.” His work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Pop-Up Magazine, the New Republic … hold on ... maybe I should just read the publications he hasn’t written for. Oh, wait, there are none. Shit. You can find more about Matt at matthewwolfe.net.

Matt likes to lean on TV and screenplays as a means to developing stories. He uses the Dan Harmon Story Circle to help with structure, and I’ll link up to that in the show notes. We talk about not being mercenary about stories and leaning into the ones that won’t let go, and one of the more bizarre recommendations you’ll ever hear.

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"Listening to podcasts, it's like, how do I start making them? That's been my approach, essentially try and take that beginner mindset into anything and try to teach myself new skills," says Mark Armstrong.

Who do we have today? It’s Mark Armstrong! He is a producer, a writer, a singer, working at the intersection of storytelling and digital media. Does that make him intersectional? Hell, yes.

Mark is the founder of Longreads, the hashtag phenomenon back when social media was cool. Now he’s the editor of the Nieman Storyboard, which is where all us narrative journalists go to get jealous of one another. He hosts the Nieman Storyboard podcast and he’s also the co-founder of Ursa Story Company that he created with Dawnie Walton and Deesha Philyaw. Intersectional, indeed.

So Mark is a pretty rad guy, great guy. He was one of the five people in the audience for event in Seattle. I tell you, five people in a room made for 100 is … upsetting, but he was so generous to come by. We got our picture taken together. See that in the show notes

In this episode we talk about:

• Beginner’s mindset
• Trying new things just to fuck around
• The importance of a host’s curation
• Why he started the Nieman Storyboard Podcast
• And the myriad ways we as journalists can try to make a buck

It’s some nice dialogue here. A real conversation. You can learn more about Mark at markarms.com and follow him on Instagram @markarms.

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"Yeah, join the club of people who feel inadequate," says Dana Jeri Maier, a cartoonist and author of the graphic book on creativity Skip to the Fun Parts.

This incredible artist is the author of Skip to the Fun Parts: Cartoons and Complaints About the Creative Process. It’s one of the best books on creativity because it deals with doubt, it deals with jealousy, it deals with ideas, it deals with perfectionism. Dana is a hilarious cartoonist and you should pick up a Front Runner and also a copy of Skip to the Fun Parts.

I’ve long wanted to be a cartoonist. I know there’s no perfect job, but I love the idea of creating something funny and whimsical and not having to talk to as many people as being a biographer entails.

Dana, Dana, Dana, is a contributor to the New Yorker Daily Shouts and the creator behind the cartoon series The Worried Well. She has illustrated for The Phillips Collection, the DC Public Library, Politics and Prose, and Museum Hack. She’s into improv and she lives in DC with her two cats and man husband.

We talk about her influences, voice and style, how she doesn’t trust anyone with a neat desk, bad ideas, jealousy, and a lot more. She’s a real treat.

Learn more about her at danajerimaier.com and on IG @danajerimaier.

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"You're an outsider. And as you linger in that space, you start to become an insider ... but you're still an outsider. Don't forget that, even though you know more about it, you're an insider and an outsider," says Jeff Sharlet about when he's reporting on, say, far-right religious groups.

OK, we’ve got Jeff Sharlet, which is pretty stunning when you think about it. I mean, this guy is the author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, The Family, among other books. He often covers the far right and far-right fundamentalism and what’s he’s been able to document is scary and often unsettling. We don’t dig too much into that, because mainly we just talk about doing this kind of work. It was really a fun and illuminating conversation and I’m pretty stoked.

He teaches writing and creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College. That was where I desperately wanted to go to school. I was set to be their starting shortstop, but I couldn’t get my goddam SATs above remedial and thus I attended good ol’ UMass … back in the late 1990s, if you could funnel a beer in five seconds you got a scholarship #yolo

In this episode, Jeff and I riff about:

• His key influences
• Treating your book badly as a way of treating it well
• Using your outsiderness to your advantage
• His love of sportswriting, or interest in sportswriting, despite not following sports
• And real toads in imaginary gardens

You can learn more about Jeff and his work @jeffsharlet on Substack and his newsletter there called Scenes from a Slow Civil War … I admire people like Jeff who are just so damn smart in how they articulate things seemingly on the fly. Meanwhile, ya boi BO sounds about as coherent as a chimpanzee.

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"I'm a guy who needs a lede. I need the lede to work. I need it to be compelling. And it doesn't have to be the best place to begin. It just has to be a place to begin that works and that amuses and sucks you in. I. So once I have a lede, then that will lead to another place," says Nick Paumgarten.

Wow, so today we have Nick Paumgarten and can I tell you something? Nick has long been my favorite New Yorker profile writer. Whether it’s profiling Mikaela Shiffrin or Mr. Money Mustache, or features about elevators, teaching birds to migrate, the Eagles winning the Super Bowl, or a feature about a sketchy restaurateur; he is appointment reading.

I see his name in the table of contents of an issue of The New Yorker and I will stop just about everything I’m doing and spend the next hour or so reading Nick’s work. Over the years, he’s been the model, for me, as the perfect profile writer.

Nick is a long-time New Yorker staff writer. You know, it’s funny, since I’ve never landed a big feature at a big magazine like the New Yorker, I kinda feel like a phony, a fake writer, even though I have two books under my belt. When Nick and I were off mic, he was saying how because he hasn’t published a book yet, he feels like a fake writer. This is Nick Paumgarten (!) saying he feels like a phony. It goes to show, none of us feel good about ourselves.

In this episode, we talk about:

• The reporting suggesting the root system of a piece
• Loosening your grip
• Stories being like a rip tide
• Need a lede to work first
• Befriending chronology
• And the nerdery

I mean, great stuff. I was finally put in touch with Nick by CNF Pod alum Jared Sullivan, the author of the brilliant book Valley So Low, of Ep. 443 fame, and I’m so glad we got to make this happen.

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"It's honestly one of the biggest gambles I've taken in my career," says David Howard, the journalist behind "Conversations with a Hit Man," this for the Atavist Magazine.

David is a journalist and author, and in this conversation we talk about:

• Nonverbal stuff, so the importance of doing this stuff in person
• The grand puzzle of a piece
• Looking for stories to believe in
• Keeping his mind as clear as possible when he starts to write
• Taking gambles
• Learning from losses
• And what the tape recorder frees him up for

We also hear from lead editor Jonah Ogles about his side of the table. If you want to learn more about David, visit davidhowardauthor.com and follow him on Instagram @davehoward99.

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