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.

Episode 93: Hannah Smith

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.

Episode 96: John Branch

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.

Episode 97: Jason Fagone

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.

Episode 98: Kent Babb

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.

Episode 99: Marissa R. Moss

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.

Episode 100: Allison Glock

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.

Episode 101: Jim Sheeler

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.

Episode 102: Chip Scanlan

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.

Episode 103: Chris Jones

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.”

Episode 104: Mike Sielski

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.

Episode 105: Mark Johnson

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.”

Episode 106: Kathryn Miles

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.

Episode 39: Glenn Stout & Jeremy Collins

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.

Episode 33: Brooke Jarvis

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.


Episode 41: Chuck Klosterman

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.

Episode 48: Steven Kurutz & True Story

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.

Episode 59: Don Van Natta Jr.

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.

Episode: 63 Pamela Colloff

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.

Episode 64: Stephen Rodrick

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.

Episode 3: Pamela Colloff

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.

Episode 67: Ben Montgomery

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.

Wright Thompson (2013)

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.

Episode 72: The Other Side

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.

Episode 73: Philip Gerard

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.

Episode 74: Amos Barshad

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.

Eli Saslow (2014)

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.

Kelley Benham French (2013)

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."

Episode 81: Kim Cross

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.

Episode 82: Chris Jones

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.

Episode 84: John Woodrow Cox

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.

Episode 85: Wright Thompson

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."

Mike Wilson (2015)

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.

Episode 87: Andrea Pitzer

Gangrey: The Podcast focuses on narrative journalism and the reporters who write it.

Popular tracks by gangreypodcast