"The worst thing you can do is pitch a topic, not a story. You start with a topic. I like to talk to a few people before I write a pitch, which can be difficult because people you're asking to talk to don't know where it's going. I just look for topics that interest me first, and I dig down to an expert, and then from the expert, I try and find individual stories within that," says Peter Ward, whose "Master and Commander" appeared in The Atavist Magazine.

It’s that Atavistian time of the month, so there might be some spoilers here. I can’t remember. Good chance of it. Visit magazine.atavist.com to read the story by Peter Ward, a writer whose work has appeared in GQ, The Atlantic, Wired, The Guardian, and others. He’s the author of two books of nonfiction, The Consequential Frontier and The Price of Immortality. This story for The Atavist titled Master and Commander is wild. Here’s the deck: When a scraggly band of folk musicians arrived to tour the UK, residents of a small Welsh town were enamored—until they learned that the band’s leader ruled with an iron fist.

There’s sea shanties, people.

We’re gonna hear from lead editor Jonah Ogles first and dive into the Atavist’s national magazine award nominations, namely Drew Philp’s story “There Will Be No Mercy.” You can hear out chat about it on Episode 449.

Peter is here to talk about how he arrived at this story.

• Pitching a story, not a topic
• Off the record conversations for trust
• His cheat code
• How the story was a house of cards
• Better Call Saul
• Finding voice
• Interview prep
• And the video clip of Matt Stone and Trey Parker that really helps with story development

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

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"Come to editors with solutions, not with problems. A lot of young freelance writers will be like, 'Hey, hook me up with this editor. Do this and do that.' And I'm like, 'I can connect you, but you better have pitches. If you don't come with the idea you're just a problem,'" says Tony Rehagen, a long-time freelance writer.

Seth Wickersham put me in touch with a colleague of his, someone he went to grad school with by the name of Tony Rehagen. Now, he’s a special kind of freelancer in that he’s a grinder. Much like Pete Croatto and other freelancer types who are balancing all kinds of work: content work, copy writing, alumni magazine work, and pure journalism, Tony has been in the thick of the freelance morass for a long, long time. He was featured in the 2015 anthology “Next Wave” for his piece called The Last Trawlers, a work of journalism that really reads like a short story.

His work has appeared in myriad places like Indianapolis Monthly, Atlanta Magazine, Men's Journal, and Bloomberg.

Tony was a blast … there are too many great nuggets from this conversation to list out, but I’ll list out a few. We talk about:

• His filing system for stories
• How many stories he’s working at a time
• Being on the clock and off the clock all the time
• Treating his writing as a service or a trade like plumbing or carpentry
• Treating editors more like clients
• Taking risks with how much skin he puts into a certain story
• And where his ambitions lie now.
• And that just scratches the surface.

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"I wanted to keep reporting, and I'm like, it's not ready yet. And [a friend] reminded me over and over that this is a sales pitch. It's a proposal. The agents and publishers just want to know you can put a story together and tell a story that's longer than 2,000 words, and that there's some narrative arc to it," says Melanie D.G. Kaplan, author of Lab Dog: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research (Hachette).

Today we have Melanie DG Kaplan, author of Lab Dog. Not gonna lie, if you’re an animal lover and a believer in animal rights, it’s a tough read. I don’t mean it’s a bad book, it’s a very good book, it’s just … tough. Brought no fewer than 88 tears to my eyes at various points. The late Jane Goodall called it “remarkable.” So, there you go.

Melanie is a journalist, an author, and when she’s feeling brave an ukulele player. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, among many, many others. She interviewed Miss Piggy. How many people can say that? Lab Dog is her first book and it chronicles her and her rescue beagle Hammy as they illuminate the world of animal testing and thus the testing that Hammy was subjected to for the first few years of his life. They find out where he was born, where he was subjected to various cruelties and indignities all in the name of science and progress. Her book details the advances in technologies and models that are proving to be just as effective as animal testing without the torture.

In this conversation we also hit on:

• The dialogue between the animal research world and the animal activist world
• Changing her physical environment so she can focus and write
• Overcoming not being a “name” in this business
• Book proposal craft
• And the power of tech shabbat and how she turned me on to the “Light Phone”

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"A certain sort of dogged obsessiveness seems to help. I remember hearing Tobias Wolfe speak once that talent is wonderful  and widely distributed on Earth, but sitting down and putting in the hours is where it's at," says Mary Margaret Alvarado, who wrote "That's Somebody's Son" for The Atavist.

It’s a little later than planned, but here we feature Mary Margaret Alvarado’s piece for The Atavist Magazine titled “That’s Somebody’s Son: Three Mothers, One Struggle: saving their children with schizophrenia.” It’s a piece that that Mia, as Mary Margaret goes by, pitched more than a year ago and it was rejected. But Mia went back to the drawing board, basically wrote the entire thing, came back, and boom here we are.

We’re going to hear from Seyward Darby about her side of the table and why this piece was at first rejected and that special feeling when a great pitch comes across the transom.

Mary Margaret Alvarado is a multi-faceted writer with her poetry and nonfiction appearing in The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, VQR, Outside, and The Georgia Review, among other publications. She is the author of the poetry collection Hey Folly and the nonfiction book American Weather. She lives in Colorado.

In our chat we talk about:

• Dogged obsessiveness
• Cold drafts
• Ambition
• Trust
• Reimagining the MFA
• And stocking produce

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"To be a good writer, you have to really get into the visceral parts of the experience, right? You have to bring someone into that experience with you, which requires you to go back and understand every detail, every memory, all the visceral aspects of the experience, the sounds, the smells, everything that was happening," says Jane Marie Chen, author of Like a Wave We Break.

Today we have Jane Marie Chen, author of Like a Wave We Break: A memoir of Falling Apart and Finding Myself. It’s published by Harmony. It’s a book whose ancestor is very clearly Eat, Pray, Love. A story of the cost of achievement and ambition, how childhood trauma permeates deep into adulthood, and the long nonlinear road to  healing. 

Jane, being the entrepreneur she is, has quite the ecosystem around her memoir. At her website, there’s a self-worth quiz. I don’t feel like failing, so I’m not gonna take it. If I can’t copy off the smart kid, then why take the test, am I right? She does speaking and leadership coaching, workshops on building resilience, and she recently delivered a TED talk about resilience.

Jane is the former CEO and co-founder of Embrace Global, which developed infant incubators that helped more than 1,000,000 babies, many of which would have died without this technology. She was recognized as Forbes Impact 30 and receive the Economist Innovation Award, Fast Company Innovation Award, and the World Economic Forum Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award. She has an MBA from Stanford and a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard. Didn’t I just have some clown on the show who studied at Yale and Harvard. What the fuck am I doing? If I don’t feel inadequate, I don’t feel alive, man.

You can learn more about Jane at janemariechen.com and follow her, let’s just say on the gram, at janemarie.chen.

In this podcast, we talk about:

• How she wrote the book to help people
• The importance of surfing in her life
• What’s enough?
• Burnout
• Writing the visceral
• Zooming in and Zooming out
• Playing with timelines
• Working with a collaborative writer
• Writing to leave the past in the past
• And not wanting to write a prescriptive memoir

Some pretty rich shit, man, parting shot on, shit if I know, so let’s queue up the montage. Here’s Jane Marie Chen, huh!

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"My teenage daughter looked at me. She said, 'Oh, Dad, you should put that in a folder called nobody cares.' Okay, not everything I learn will be in this book. And then the question became, 'What is Lin-Manuel learning from this story?' And if he's not learning anything from it, even if it's fun, it's got to go in the deleted scenes," says Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, author of Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster).

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, the Notorius DPP, is charismatic as he is brilliant. Maybe some of that seasoning rubbed off on me. One can dream. He teaches English and theater at Portland State University. He received the Graves Award from the American Council of Learned Societies for outstanding teaching in the humanities. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic and the New York Times.

Wanna know how sickening Daniel is? He has a BA in history from Yale and a PhD in English from Harvard. Gross. Ew, right? Ew. You can learn more about Daniel’s disgusting intelligence and equally freaky contributions to the culture at danielpollackpelzner.com and follow him on IG at danielpollackpelzner.

This conversation was so lively and great and we talk about:

• How he pitched Lin-Manuel Miranda on being his biographer
• Being driven by curiosity
• Having to earn scenes
• The “fun of it” framing
• Balancing salt, acid, fat, and heat
• Maintaining a sense of play with the work
• What Daniel learned from Lin-Manuel
• And taking the harsh feedback from trusted readers

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"Characters make books. Why are these guys in opposition? And were they actually really? How can you be in opposition with someone you never met? How can you be in opposition with somebody who's essentially sharing the same plight you're sharing in the country? And that brings in the other character. It's Branch Rickey. Branch Rickey is the puppet master of this entire book. Branch Rickey is the puppet master of that entire period," says Howard Bryant, author of Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America.

We’ve got Howard Bryant (@howardbryantbooks) back on the show for Ep. 509.  Howard is the best-selling author of several books and his latest is Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America. It’s published by Mariner Books.

Howard’s book takes a new framing on two iconic Black American icons of the 20th century. Very few people know much about Paul Robeson, who was a brilliant football player, but perhaps more famous as a baritone singer and stage actor. Jackie Robinson was the first Black American to play major league baseball, breaking the color barrier in baseball.

The two were separated by some twenty years, never met in person, but were pitted against each other during the second Red Scare, kings turned into pawns. The authoritarian, McCarythian overreach of the era very much echoes our current moment. Robeson’s career, his life, was ruined. It’s a complicated story brilliantly orchestrated by one of the best writers this country has on offer.

Howard is the author of The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron, Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball, Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original, The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism, and Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field, and he also was the guest editor of The Best American Sports Writing Series. You’re in for a treat. You can learn more about Howard at howardbryant.net and follow him on IG @howardbryantbooks.

In this episode we talk about:

• When you know it’s a book
• Who are your stars?
• How he reshaped the book by fixing the introduction
• How he bridged the gap between Robinson and Robeson’s timelines
• How Branch Rickey, this vaunted angle of integration, wasn’t exactly so holy
• And Howard’s favorite thing about writing

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"I spent several months  trying to narrow down the cast. I had access to so many people with interesting stories. But what [my agent] said to me over and over again was, 'narrative arc, narrative arc,' all the time. What he needed to know in order to sell the book was like, 'Where does this book start? And if you can't tell me where it ends, at least tell me what are the ups and downs? What's gonna happen along the way?" says Alison Lyn Miller, author of Rough House: A Father, a Son, and the Pursuit of Pro Wrestling Glory (Norton).

Who is our guest this week? It would appear to be Alison Lyn Miller (@alisonlynmiller on IG), author of Rough House: A Father, a Son and the Pursuit of Pro Wrestling Glory. It’s published by Norton.

This is a great book and it’s an immersive story in an oddball subculture of amateur professional wrestling. It follows Hunter James, a young man who eschewed the traditional path, the path his father wanted for him, to pursue this dream of becoming the next superstar of the WWE. You’re gonna think I’m crazy, but this book has so many parallels to being a writer. The luck you need, the timing you need, the skill you need, the perseverance you need, the envy they feel, the subjectivity, voice, style, individuality. But we writers rarely need the abs. But don’t we all want the abs.

So Alison is a freelance journalist based out of Georgia, which put her in direct overlap with this subculture of “backyarders,” these aspirational wrestlers and hobby wrestlers. It’s easy to poke fun at wrestling as fake. Well, it isn’t fake, so much as it’s scripted brutality. It’s danger adjacent, though there’s always physical risk when jumping, flipping, and kicking. Alison witnessed it all and delivers a heartfelt tale of ambition and striving, of a blind belief in the self.

In this conversation, we talk about:

• Not being able to throw everything in the book
• Being motivated by slights
• Finding the narrative arc
• The year it took Alison to write her proposal
• How wrestling mirrors humanity
• Making the writing approachable
• And maybe we should all be play fighting in our underwear

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"Practically speaking, mostly what I'm doing is I'm  writing in a hotel room and then writing in the taxi, and then if the TSA queue is long, I might whip my laptop out and balance it on the stanchion and do some more writing, and then get on the other side and write in the lounge and then write on the plane, and whether that means that the laptop's nearly vertical because I'm on a discount airline with with terrible seat pitch, just writing. And so that's it, right? What my real practice is ... I just goddamn write," says Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

This is exciting. We’ve got Cory Doctorow on the podcast today for Ep. 507. Cory is the author of more than 30 books of nonfiction and fiction, his latest being Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About it. It’s published by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Ever wonder why Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and Apple suck ass? This book will explain why they do and how they got there and maybe, just maybe, how we can get out of this mess. Did you know that Apple factories in China installed suicide nets so workers couldn’t kill themselves? Think about that the next time you upgrade your phone. I’m ready for a new computer and it will likely be a Mac, even though they’ve gotten shitty over the years. Point is we all have blood on our hands.

Cory is prolific, his blog posts epic, his books prescient and important. You can learn more about him at craphound.com or read his blog at pluralistic.net. He is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. In 2020 he was inducted into the Candadian Science Fiction Hall of Fame and he is a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foudnation (eff.org), a nonprofit group that defnds freedom in tech law, policy, standards and treaties. You could spend a year or two reading nothing but Cory Doctorow books and, I might add, you’d be better for it.

He’s one of the good guys, man, and he’s out to help us understand the internet. So in this episode we talk about:

• Internet literacy
• His ongoing relationship with his audience
• Getting a book done in six weeks
• Platform decay
• What exactly enshittification is and how Substack is slouching toward it
• And the influence of the writer Judith Merril

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"I feel like many of us can relate to that, like, that's the trough of despair, right? Like, that moment where you're energetic optimism, diving in, and then, like, that's the wall of regret, where you're like, 'What was I thinking? This is not a story,'" says Alexandra Marvar, whose piece on Lummie Jenkins was revived by The Atavist.

Today we Alex Marvar, this month’s featured Atavist writer, but this is something of a twist. Seyward Darby, who we will hear from in a sec, has launched an initiative called “Revived.” The idea being to resurrect long lost stories that are no longer available online. These stories that for one reason or another … disappeared. Seyward calls it a crisis of impermanence. You can learn and read more at magazine.atavist.com.

Alex is a freelance writer and photographer. Her work has been appeared in the Believer, The Guardian, The New York Times, Vanity Fair and many others. She’s kind of a boss. She even won the prestigious East Knox Middle School’s 1995 DARE Student Essay Contest. She interviewed Iggy Pop for a documentary and got her picture taken with the punk legend, so, yeah, Alex is kinda sorta wicked cool.

In our part of the conversation we talk about:

• Money
• Revisiting her younger self
• The trough of despair and the wall of regret
• Borrowing trust
• Saggy middles

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"We always were having conversations about, if we can't solve it, what then? What is this about? Why isn't it solved? And what is our job? Is the job of a journalist to solve crimes? No, it's to document. So what are we documenting? We're documenting what had to happen for there to be no answer in a situation where there should be an answer," says Leah Sottile, reporter, writer, Hush.

"Sometimes making yourself uncomfortable is the way to find new creativity, or to challenge yourself to find a smart idea within that," says Ryan Haas, reporter, producer.

Today we’ve got a fun one with CNF Pod regular Leah Sottile, investigative journalist, podcaster, author of Blazing Eye Sees All and When the Moon Turns to Blood.

And we also have her long-time collaborative partner Ryan Haas. They are primarily here to talk about season 2 of Hush, an incredible series put out by Oregon Public Broadcasting that chronicles how a small town has, to date, failed to bring closure on the death of 18-year-old Sarah Zuber in 2019. The red herring of it all is that it starts like a classic true crime show, but it quickly becomes an interrogation of the true crime genre. One of Leah’s great lines is that this isn’t true crime so much as it is bureaucratic horror in the rural town of Rainier, Oregon.

I love getting a chance to chat with Leah, and this was special to hear from Ryan Haas, too, who up until recently spent more than a dozen years at OPB. She and Leah worked on the epic Bundyville Podcast together and two seasons of Hush. I’m gonna miss Hush because I would run five miles listening to primarily Leah, though Ryan pops in every now and again, narrate this incredible story about what happens when journalism folds up shop in a small town, when the greek choir of Facebook is the primary news source, when power-hungry people leverage a tragedy for personal gain, when law enforcement becomes lax.

In this episode, they talk about:

• The Grid of Doom
• The evolution of their partnership
• How they push each other
• Interrogating the true crime genre
• White board conversations
• Being open to where the reporting goes
• Being open to complication
• Finding the cliff hangers
• And breaking news! The future of Leah and Ryan’s work

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