"You're constantly asking lean, open, neutral questions that start broad and then narrow, and you're asking more lean, open, neutral questions based on their answers. When you do that, it tells the subjects that you're actually listening to them very intensely, and you're asking questions based on the things that they say. And that accelerates trust and intimacy, I think, in a better way than kind of betting on your personality," says Seth Wickersham, the bestselling author of American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback and an ESPN.com senior writer.

Seth Wickersham is back. He is an ESPN.com senior writer, investigative reporter, the NYT best-selling author of It’s Better to Be Feared and, most recently, his best selling American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback, it’s published by Hyperion.

We had a tight window to get this interview done. It was 30 minutes and after the edit it was closer to 25. He was gassed. I think he did this as a favor since I’d been on his ass since July about this book. Well, mainly on his publicists’ asses, then I had to go over their heads. Sidebar: sometimes I think tight interviews are GREAT. Tony the Tiger level great. You can’t cover quite as much ground and get into the granularity of certain things, but there’s still so many great takeaways from this episode even though it’s half as long as the usual. Seth talks about:

• Getting to the heart of the matter
• Interviewing vs. conversations, and how he bristles at the “conversation” angle
• Establishing trust
• Writing out questions, but being OK with deviating
• How doing all this book promotion is just pennies in the bank
• His relationship to quarterbacking
• How he vetted the main quarterbacks he featured in American Kings
• And how the quarterback is a vector for American ambition

Seth is one of the good guys. You can’t say that about everyone. He’s a heavy hitter, he’s steady in the pocket, and his eyes are always downfield.

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Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm

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Show notes: brendanomeara.com

"I will always go back to the well, and I will write until I die," says Jason Brown, author of Character Witness.

Jason Brown is here. He is a brilliant short story writer and the author of the memoir Character Witness (University of Nebraska Press). It’s an incredible book and we recorded this conversation at the end of October as the fourth and final LIVE podcast of the year at Gratitude Brewing here in Eugene.

Jason, as luck would have it, teaches at the University of Oregon in its writing department, forging the young minds who will publish in the most obscure lit journals, the future bitter podcasters of America, sorry, speaking from experience. I’m projecting, OK?

But thanks to Jason and his clout with the University, we had our biggest gathering of the year, live and in person. There’s something pretty rad about the in-person jam.

Jason can be found at writerjasonbrown.com. He writes fiction and nonfiction and was a Stegner Fellow and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University where he taught as a Jones Lecturer. He has received fellowships from Yaddo and Macdowell colonies. He taught for the MFA program at the University of Arizona and directs the MFA program at the U of O here in Eugene. He’s the author of the collection Driving the Heart and Other Stories, Why the Devil Chose New England For His work and his work as also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, The L.A. Times, and The Guardian, among many others. This is getting obnoxious.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Persistence
• Hiking out from the moment
• The atmospheric river of rejection
• Escape velocity
• Woodworking
• Rule breakers
• Maturing around himself
• And working with Tobias Wolff

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Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm

Welcome to Pitch Club

Show notes: brendanomeara.com

"Take pride in your rejections. It's a tough industry for putting yourself out there. You're like, doing a ton of work up front, not knowing if anyone will be interested in it. It's very easy to feel deflated about it. Your rejections are reaching for things that maybe aren't easy reaches," says Christa Hillstrom, writer of 14,445 and Counting for The Atavist.

It’s that Atavistian time of the month. Not much by way of spoilers, but you know you’re in for a double dose of CNFin’ insights as we will hear from editor-in-chief Seyward Darby and, of course, the writer of this month’s feature, Christa Hillstrom. Her story is titled 14,445 and Counting: Inside a Texas nurse’s quest to document the life and death of every woman killed by a man in America. You can read the story at magazine.atavist.com. A sub is only $25 a year. No, I don’t get kickbacks; yes, I pay to subscribe as well. I’m the hipster doofus of the people.

The Atavist doesn’t usually do profiles, per se, but this profile is of Dawn Wilcox and her “sacred work” of logging every femicide in the country, which is to say violent deaths directly against women by men. It’s a tough one, not gonna lie. Not because it’s not well done, but because, well, read the title.

OK, so this piece is pretty heavy, but it’s a story of obsession and what the central figure calls her “sacred work” to bring attention to this epidemic of sorts.

The credits for this piece are: Ed Johnson was the art director, Sean Cooper copy edited it, Emily Injeian fact checked it, Naheebah Al-Ghadban illustrated it and Jonah Ogles and Seyward Darby edited this suckah.

Christa Hillstrom is a freelance journalist based in the Pac Northwest, but hailed from Minnesota originally and even attended Northwestern’s grad program in journalism. Doesn’t get better than that.

She’s an award-winning reporter, editor, and multimedia producer in human rights, global health, gender-based violence, and trauma/resilience.

We talk about:

• The little treasures in research
• The cost of doing this kind of reporting
• Outlining
• Task initiation
• How she wrote herself into this story
• Justing doing the writing
• And taking pride in your rejections

Check out her story at magazine.atavist.com and check out this conversation … right now.

Order The Front Runner

Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm

Welcome to Pitch Club

Show notes: brendanomeara.com