The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara Episode 519: Stephen Wood's 'Ocean's 11' Anti-Government Caper
"I'm always calibrating when I'm interviewing somebody, like, how much of a prompt are they going to need, and what is what is going to get something out of them?" — Stephen Wood, whose Buffalo Raiders piece appears in The Atavist Magazine.
What is the meaning of this Wednesday podcast! Middle of the week! It’s hump day, this holy day! It’s April 1st, is this some kind of joke! NO! Point being, it’s that Atavistian time of the month and I’m trying to get back to making the Atavist pod an extra pod, not just another Friday pod. So, consider your podcast feed warned, you filthy animal.
Stephen Wood is here! Find him on LinkedIn, the professional that he is. He’s a journalist who writes about sports, history, and politics and he’s here to talk about his Atavist story “The Buffalo Raiders: With thousands of U.S. soldiers dying in Vietnam, a group of young Catholics in New York embarked on a secret mission to bring the war machine to its knees.” I’ll give Stephen a more formal introduction — top hat and monocle — just before his segment of the show.
We’re gonna hear from Seyward Darby about her side of the table, which is always fun. Name another show where you get an editor talking about a piece, and then the writer talking about it. Exactly, visit patreon.com/cnfpod to contribute to the cause.
Also, head to magazine.atavist.com to read Stephen’s story and maybe subscribe. I pay $25 a year to subscribe and I don’t get kickbacks or commissions. Yeah, I pay, too.
Stephen Wood can be found at https://sbrycewood2.wixsite.com/ or, per his preference, at LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/hey-its-stephen/ … His work has appeared in The Guardian, Current Affairs, Jacobin, The Athletic, and McSweeney’s. He was a producer with Gilded Audio where he worked on shows including Snafu with Ed Helms and The Reason We’re All Still Here.
In this chat, we talk about:
- Calibrating an interview
- How sometimes podcasts hosts don't even do the interviewing
- What to do when there’s too much meat on the bone #toomuchmeat
- What’s a load-bearing element to the story
- Going in fear of the abstraction
- And a lot more.
Show notes: brendanomeara.com