Gangrey Podcast

Bradford Pearson is the author of “The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America.” The book was published by Atria Books of Simon and Schuster. Pearson’s book tells the story of Japanese internment camps during World War II, and a very special high school football team. That team offered hope to those who were being held in an internment camp on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming. Pearson spent a lot of time in historical archives to tell this story. It’s something he’s always enjoyed doing. He likes looking for a needle in a haystack, for a bit of information that ties everything together. He went to the National Archives, as well as archives in Wyoming and at UCLA. Pearson has been on the podcast before. He was on Episode 40 in November of 2015. At the time, he was an editor at Southwest: The Magazine. We talked about his story, “My Kidnappers,” which was published by Philadelphia Magazine. He has also written for the New York Times, Esquire

This is a rebroadcast of the November 2013 episode in which Matt Tullis talked with Jeanne Marie Laskas. They talked about her profile President-Elect Joe Biden, who was then serving as vice president. She spent a day with him being driven around his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. That story ran in GQ. Since joining the podcast, Laskas has written two books, bringing her total to eight. In 2015, “Concussion” was released. That book expanded her 2009 story “Game Brain,” which is also discussed in this show. The book was turned into a feature film starring Will Smith. In 2018, “To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope” was published. For this book, Laskas interviewed President Obama as well as the people who wrote him letters. She is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a correspondent at GQ, and a two-time National Magazine Award finalist in feature writing.

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 star

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

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 fi

Alex Belth is the curator of The Stacks Reader and the editor of Esquire Classic. He’s also the creator of Bronx Banter, a website that focuses on New York City sports, arts and culture and more. The Stacks Reader is a treasure trove of classic magazine journalism and other writing that otherwise might be lost to history. Belth has built this archive largely by himself, reaching out to writers and their families and obtaining the rights to republish. There are stories in The Stacks Reader that go all the way back to 1932, like Westbrook Pegler’s Chicago Tribune story headlined The Called Shot Heard Round the World. One of the writer’s whose work has been preserved on the site is a man named O’Connell Driscoll. Driscoll’s first magazine piece was a 13,000 word profile of Jerry Lewis. He wrote it for Playboy, while he was still in college. Belth recently received the 2020 Tony Salin Memorial Award from The Baseball Reliquary. He was honored for his work on The Stacks Reader and Esquire Classic, as well as h

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 Ai

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."

Eva Holland is the author of the book “Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear.” Nerve is a hybrid of memoir and reported science. It’s focused on Holland encountering and overcoming the things she was most fearful of, and the science behind it all. The book came about after a few things happened back in 2015. First, Holland’s mom died unexpectedly. That was one of Holland’s greatest fears in life. And then, she was in a series of serious car crashes. “I rolled my car into a ditch in April 2016, and I had been thinking about the idea of a book about fear actually that day while I was driving on the highway,” Holland says. “That night in the hospital, I was like, yeah, okay, you’ve got to do the book about this now because obviously the universe is sending you some kind of sign.” This is Holland’s first book. Most of what she has done as a writer over the last decade are magazine pieces. She is a successful freelance writer, working as a correspondent for Outside magazine. She’s also written for Esquire

How do some of the best narrative journalists find the stories they report and write about? This episode focuses on how four different reporters landed on stories that are still read and talked about today. In the first part, Luke Dittrich talks about how he ultimately decided to head to Joplin, Missouri, to report and write a story that won him a National Magazine Award. In Part II, Eli Saslow talks about how he landed himself in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, for the first piece in his Pulitzer Prize winning series on food stamps. In Part III, Pamela Colloff discusses the genesis of her National Magazine Award winning series The Innocent Man. Finally, Part IV is a snippet of a TedX Tampa talk that Michael Kruse gave, in which he discusses his story about Kathryn Norris, a woman who disappeared and was missing for 16 months, before someone found her body — in her own home. The first three parts all come from Gangrey: The Podcast archives. As usual, you can listen to every episode of the podcast, for free,

Bronwen Dickey is a contributing editor at The Oxford American and the author of Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon. In October 2019, her story “The Remains” was published by Esquire. The story looks at forensic anthropology, and one case in particular. “The story is about a young man named Christian Gonzalez, who came to this country when he was very, very young with his family, and grew up in East Texas and considered himself, as did his friends and family, to be American,” Dickey says. “And then he was deported after kind of a weird conflagration of events, and he was deported to Mexico. He really did not know his home at all and felt very lonely there. He tried to get back into the United States, and he died in the South Texas desert. Dickey opens The Remains with a scene that is very detailed, showing the forensic anthropologists doing their work on the remains of Christian Gonzalez. That work was done many years ago, though, which means Dickey had to recreate the scene through solid reporting

This episode features clips from four of the women included in the new anthology, “New Stories We Tell: True Tales by America’s New Generation of Great Women Journalists.” The book was recently published by The Sager Group. "New Stories We Tell" is the third in a series of anthologies celebrating women in longform journalism, featuring more than 50 great writers from the 1950s to the present. The first was “Newswomen: Twenty-Five Years of Front Page Journalism,” and was published in 2016. That book was followed two years later by “The Stories We Tell: Classic True Tales By America’s Greatest Women Journalists.” Four reporters who have been on the podcast are included in the new book: Pamela Colloff, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Janet Reitman, and Brooke Jarvis. Additionally, the book’s editors, Kaylen Ralph and Joanna Demkiewicz, have been guests on the podcast. They helped with “Newswomen,” and talked about that book in 2016. They are the editors of “New Stories We Tell.” In this episode, you’ll hear from them,

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.

This is a rebroadcast of the original episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, featuring Justin Heckert. It originally aired in January 2013. Heckert talked with host Matt Tullis about his story “The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly,” which ran in The New York Times Magazine in November 2012. The story is about a 13-year-old girl who has a medical condition that makes it so she can’t feel pain. Since joining the podcast, Heckert has reported and written a lot of other amazing stories. His story, “Susan Cox is No Longer Here,” ran in Indianapolis Monthly, and was later republished by River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. It’s a haunting piece that looks at what happens when life, and death, don’t go the way we expect it to. In March 2014, he wrote a piece on Puddles the Clown for Grantland. In July 2018, he wrote about the last Blockbuster video store for The Ringer. And in August, he wrote about a year-long quest to save an injured loggerhead turtle. That story ran in Garden & Gun magazine. Tullis a

This episode is a rebroadcast of the interview Matt Tullis did with Kim Cross in September 2015. Cross’s book “What Stands in the Storm: Three Days in the Worst Superstorm to Hit the South’s Tornado Alley” had been published by Atria Books in March of that year. The book is a reporting and writing masterpiece, as Cross went to great lengths to make sure the reporting was accurate, and the writing was compelling. Since joining the podcast, Cross been included in Best American Sports Writing twice. She was included in the 2016 edition for her story The King of Tides, which ran in Southwest: The Magazine. And this year, Cross will be in BASW 2019 for a story she wrote for Bicycling Magazine. That story is about a prisoner in California who spends his time restoring used bicycles. Cross has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Society of American Travel Writers. Her work has appeared in Outside, Southern Living, Cooking Light, Bike, Bicycling, Runner’s World, the Tampa Bay Tim

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 paperb

On this episode, Rachel Monroe talks with host Matt Tullis. Monroe’s first book, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime and Obsession, was published by Scribner. It went on sale today, August 19. The book tells the stories of four true crimes that had women intimately involved in them, but all in different capacities.  Monroe is a freelance writer based in Marfa, Texas. She also serves as a volunteer firefighter there. She’s written about crime, communes, utopias, drones, small town, firefighters, haunted houses, really just about everything.  She was a finalist for a Livingston Award for Young Journalists in 2016 and was named one of 56 women journalists everyone should read by New York Magazine. She’s been published by The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Outside Magazine, The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, and Esquire, among many others. Her essay about murder, fandom, and adolescence, “Outside the Manson Pinkberry” was originally published in The Believer, and was anthologized in The Be

On this episode, host Matt Tullis talked with Latria Graham, a writer, editor and cultural critic currently living in South Carolina. Graham’s writing revolves around the dynamics of race, gender norms, class, nerd culture, and sports. Back in 2016, she wrote one of the last pieces for SB Nation Longform. That piece was headlined “The Dark Knight Unmasked,” and was about the Carolina Panther’s Josh Norman. Graham has also written some important pieces about race for The Establishment, which is no longer publishing. Fortunately, they’ve kept their stories online. One of those pieces was an essay written by Graham titled “Why, As A Black Woman, I Finally Decided To Take To The Streets.” Graham’s first published piece ran on Ebony’s website. That was in May of 2013, and was about her struggles with bulimia. Graham has written for ESPNW, Outside Magazine, Bicycling Magazine, the Guardian, Our State Magazine, Garden & Gun, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and many other publications.

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.

This episode is a rebroadcast of the interview Matt Tullis did Wil S. Hylton in March of 2014. At the time, the two talked about Hylton’s new book, Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II. The book focuses for the modern-day search for one American bomber that crashed over the Pacific Islands during the war. That bomber carried 11 men, who for decades, were listed as missing in action. When Hylton started the piece, he thought it was going to be a magazine piece. He had no idea it would expand into his first book. “I never really imagined that I would write a book to be honest,” Hylton says. “I venerate the magazine form. I always have. To me, it's the perfect gem-like distillation of a story, and it comes with all of its own special habits and history that are quite different from either doing fiction books or newspaper writing, broadly speaking. I just love it. This is the form that I've always wanted to work in, but what happened was this particular story forced me to try a