Gangrey Podcast

Kathryn Miles is the author of three books, including “Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy.” Her essays and articles have appeared in publications including Audubon, Best American Essays, Boston Globe, Ecotone, The New York Times, Outside, Pacific Standard, Popular Mechanics, and Time.  Her forthcoming book, “Quake Land,” examines the changing face of earthquake hazards in America, and will be published by Dutton in July 2017.  Miles currently serves as writer-in-residence at Green Mountain College, where she also teaches in the college’s low-residence graduate programs.  She lives with her family in Portland, Maine. She recently wrote a piece that appeared in the Boston Globe about the death and ultimate recovery of a woman who got lost hiking the Appalachian Trail. We’ll talk with her about that story, as well as some of her other work.

This week, I talk with Stephen Rodrick, a writer for The New York Times Magazine. He wrote the cover story for the Jan. 10 issue of the Times magazine, titled "The Misfits." Online, thanks to search engine optimization, the story was called "Here is what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie." Rodrick was embedded with the cast and crew of the movie, The Canyons, which was directed by Paul Schrader, and starred Lindsay Lohan. Rodrick has also written the memoir "The Magical Stranger: A Son's Journey into his Father's Life." Check out Rodrick's Longform page to read more of his work, including stories he's written since joining the podcast.

Jesse Lichtenstein wrote the story, "Do we really want to live without the post office" for the February issue of Esquire. The piece examines the controversy surrounding the future of the postal service, and what life without it would be like. Lichtenstein also makes the argument that the postal service binds the country together in a way little else can. This is Lichtenstein's first piece in Esquire, but he has written for numerous other publications, including Slate and The New York Times Magazine. He also worked as a fact checker for The New Yorker.

Brian Mockenhaupt wrote the Byliner.com original "The Living and the Dead." The story chronicles the traumatic experience of a group of Marines in Afghanistan, as well as their difficulty adjusting to life once stateside. He won the 2013 Michael Kelly Award for the story, and was also a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. Mockenhaupt is a contributing editor to Readers Digest and Esquire, and is the nonfiction editor of the Journal of Military Experience. He writes regularly for The Atlantic and Outside, and his work has also appeared in Pacific Standard, Backpacker, The New York Times Magazine and Chicago. After serving two tours in Iraq as an infantryman with the 10th Mountain Division, Mockenhaupt has written exclusively on military and veteran affairs. He was the first in-studio guest for the podcast, as he was visiting Ashland University for the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference.

Luke Dittrich has been writing for Esquire for about six years. In that time, he's written about a man who lived most of his life with no memory (a man who was also treated by Dittrich's grandfather), the Penn State scandal and the Joplin, Missouri, tornado that killed 160 people. That last story won Dittrich a National Magazine Award in 2012. Most recently, he wrote the story "The Prophet." The story is about neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander, who claims to have visited heaven in a best-selling book. Dittrich’s piece pretty much debunks those claims. In this podcast, we talk about many of his stories, as well as how he got started reporting and who gave him the idea for the Joplin tornado story. Since joining the podcast, Dittrich turned his story about Patient HM, the man with no memory, into a book by that same name.

Jason Fagone, a Philadelphia-based journalist who writes about science, sports and culture for Wired magazine and Philadelphia magazine. Fagone’s work has also appeared in GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate and Deadspin. Fagone’s most recent story — "Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?" — is about a cancer researcher who has found a way to treat leukemia using genetically modified T-cells. Since joining the podcast, he has written the book "Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring and the Race to Revive America," which follows the lives of several people as they attempt to engineer a radically new kind of car.

Janet Reitman is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and is the author of Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. In July 2013, she wrote the story “Jahar’s World” for Rolling Stone. The story dug deep into the life of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving brother accused of the Boston Marathon bombing. That issue created a huge controversy when the magazine decided to put Tsarnaev on the cover. Reitman's most recent story for Rolling Stone was a Q&A with Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who was elected to the senate just one month before the Sandy Hook shooting. Reitman has written about a wide range of topics, including the church of Scientology. She was nominated for a National Magazine Award for that story. She’s also covered the war in Iraq and written about Anonymous hactivists, among many other things. In addition to Rolling Stone, her work has appeared in GQ, Men’s Journal, The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, ESPN The Magazine and Salon.

Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. Thompson is widely regarded as one of the top literary sports journalists in the country. His work has been featured in seven editions of "Best American Sports Writing." This year, his story "Urban Meyer will be home for dinner," was included in the anthology. 2013 was an epic year for Thompson, who reported and wrote several memorable stories, including a profile of Michael Jordan as he turned 50 years old, a story about Italy’s racist soccer thugs, a story about a paralyzed fly rod maker in Montana and a profile of legendary wrestling coach Dan Gable in the wake of the International Olympic Committee cutting that sport. Since joining the podcast in October 2013, Thompson has written an incredibly in-depth piece on Tiger Woods as well as a piece on New Orleans on the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. That piece took up the entire feature well in one issue of ESPN: The Magazine. In this podcast, we talk about the Gable story, wh

When John Woodrow Cox talked with Matt Tullis on the podcast, he was working at the Tampa Bay Times and writing short narratives. Since then, Cox joined the Washington Post, where he is an enterprise reporter who has written about a flawed sexual assault investigation in the Marines and about a 10-year-old who has HIV. At the Times, Cox was a general assignment reporter in Pinellas County. He covered breaking news and led long-term investigations into frivolous government spending, military contract fraud and Florida’s prescription pill epidemic. He also wrote feature stories, including the “Dispatches from Next Door” series for the Floridian magazine. These stories are very short — just 500 words long — but painstakingly reported. They tell a full story in a very short amount of space. We talked with him about two such stories, one about a woman who is only able to find peace on the ocean. The other is about a senior citizen always on the look for that special young woman who will save him from loneliness.

Jeanne Marie Laskas is a correspondent for GQ and the director of The Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of seven books, including “Hidden America,” as well as the award-winning trilogy of memoirs: “Fifty Acres and Poodle,” “The Exact Same Moon,” and “Growing Girls.” Since joining the podcast, Laskas turned her story about concussions in the NFL, "Game Brain," into the book "Concussion," which has since been turned into a feature film starring Will Smith. On this episode of the podcast, we talk with Laskas about her profile of Vice President Joe Biden, "Game Brain," and her most recent GQ story, "Oops, You Just Hired The Wrong Hitman." Formerly a contributing editor at Esquire, and a weekly columnist (“Significant Others”) at The Washington Post Magazine, she has been writing for national magazines for twenty years, with work appearing in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Allure, Ladies Home Journal, and many others. Her work has appe

Susan Dominus is a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine. She’s written about everything from higher education to organizational psychology. She also writes celebrity profiles. The most recent focused on Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter Fame. The other was about Stephen King and family of writers. The Radcliffe piece — "Daniel Radcliffe's Next Trick is to Make Harry Potter Disappear" — followed the Harry Potter star as he promoted the independent film "Kill Your Darlings." The story shows just how much life as Harry Potter has affected the young actor. "Stephen King's Family Business" centered around a family get-together in Maine, where the King family of writers got together to discussion the early days of Stephen's career and the new generation of writers he raised.

When Jeremy Markovich visited the podcast, he was a writer and columnist for Charlotte magazine. He also contributed to SB Nation Longform and Our State magazine, and an Emmy-award winning producer at WCNC-TV. His first story about a blind man who hiked the Appalachian Trail won several awards, including the National City and Regional Magazine Award for Personality Profile. Markovich is now a senior editor/writer at Our State. Click here to see many of his newer stories for that magazine. On this episode, we talk with him about two stories he wrote for SB Nation Longform. The first — "Elegy of a Race Car Driver" — is about famed NASCAR racer Dick Trickle, who committed suicide earlier this May. That story was recently named a Best of 2013: Sports by Longform. The second — "Over the Edge" — is about BASE jumping, particularly those who gather at the New River Gorge bridge in West Virginia on the third Saturday in October every year to jump.

When Michael Kruse visited the podcast, he was a staff writer on the enterprise team at the Tampa Bay Times. In October and November 2013, Kruse published a three-part series titled "The Last Voyage of the Bounty.” It chronicled a tall wooden ship bound for St. Petersburg, Fla., as she sailed straight into Hurricane Sandy. Sixteen sailors were aboard that ship, and not everyone survived. Since then, Kruse joined Politico, where he has been writing feature stories on those who ran and are still running for president. He wrote at least two pieces on Jeb Bush, including "Jeb 'Put Me Through Hell'" and "The Year That Changed Jeb Bush Forever." He's written about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Kruse has been recognized for his writing and reporting a number of times. Most recently, he won the Paul Hansell Award for Distinguished Achievement in Florida Journalism. He also won the American Society of News Editors distinguished nondeadline writing award. His story, “A Brevard woman disappeared, but never left

At the time of his visit on the podcast, Chris Jones was a writer at large for Esquire, as well as a back-page columnist for ESPN The Magazine. Jones has twice won National Magazine Awards. In 2009, his story “The Things that Carried Him” won for feature writing. Jones is an expert profile writer. His 2010 piece on the late Roger Ebert is, in our opinion, one of the best celebrity profiles ever written. It’s touching and poignant, showing a side of the film critic that hadn’t been seen since Ebert’s battle with cancer. Most recently, Jones turned his eye on a man most have never heard of, but a man who has been involved in nearly every major tragic event in recent US history. His Esquire story, “Kenneth Feinberg: the nation’s leading expert in picking up the pieces,” looks at the man who decides how much money the surviving victims of horrific shootings and bombings get once there is a monetary fund set up for those victims. In October 2012 he wrote a historical piece on what happened on Air Force 1 immed

Flinder Boyd is a former professional basketball player who now writes longform journalism. For 10 years, he played as a point guard in the lower and upper levels of many professional European basketball leagues. Now he’s writing, often about basketball. His story “20 Minutes at Rucker Park” profiles a young man’s cross-country journey on a Greyhound bus to New York City’s streetball Mecca. That story was published on SB Nation Longform. It was subsequently a Longform selection and named by Longreads a Top 5 Longread of the Week. It was also a Nieman Storyboard recommended reading selection and earned Boyd Longread’s Favorite New Writer Discovery in 2013. Finally, Sports on Earth called the story a Top 20 sports story in 2013. To top things off, the story was anthologized in Best American Sports Writing 2014. He’s written two other stories for SB Nation Longform; a profile of NBA player Chris Copeland and a first-hand account of the corruption and chaos of playing professional basketball in Slovakia. Sinc

Wil S. Hylton wrote the book “Vanished,” which focuses on the modern-day search for one American bomber that crashed over the Pacific Islands during World War II. That bomber carried 11 men, who for decades, were listed as missing in action. Finding that lost bomber gave closure to the families of those men, but it also took an amazing feat of detective work and amazing modern technology. “Vanished” came out in November 2013 and has garnered praise from newspapers and magazines around the country. Time Magazine said the book contains “passages so expressive that we’re constantly reminded we’re in the hands of a phenomenal writer.” Hylton is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His work has also been featured in Harpers, GQ, Esquire and Rolling Stone, among many others magazines. He’s profiled US Attorney general Eric Holder among many others and written about the doomed Air France Flight 447. He’s also written about mothers who make the agonizing decision to abandon their children at safe

Ben Montgomery is an enterprise reporter at the Tampa Bay Times and the author of “Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail.” Montgomery’s book focuses on Emma Gatewood, who at the age of 67, through-hiked the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. She was the first woman to ever do so, and later became the first person, male or female, to hike the trail two and then three times. Montgomery’s book doesn’t just chronicle Gatewood’s hikes, but seeks to understand why she took to walking at such an advanced age. Since joining the podcast, "Grandma Gatewood's Walk" went on to become a New York Times bestseller, and Montgomery has written another book. "The Leper Spy: The Story of an Unlikely Hero of World War II" is being published by Chicago Review Press, and will be available on Oct. 1, 2016. As a reporter, Montgomery was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for a series of stories called “For Their Own Good.” Those stories examined

Jackie Valley is a reporter at the Las Vegas Sun. In 2013, she published a seven-part series called “Grace Through Grief.” The series followed Arturo Martinez and his two young sons as they dealt with the brutal murder of their wife and daughter, their mother and sister. The murders happened in April 2012, and Valley covered it as breaking news on her cops beat. She got to know Martinez through her reporting, and he eventually allowed her remarkable access as he recovered from the murders, both physically and emotionally. This was Valley’s first foray into a large project. She studied journalism at Kent State University, and completed a Dow Jones copy editing internship at the Virginian Pilot in 2009. She joined the Las Vegas Sun one year later.

Mac McClelland is an award-winning journalist who has written for publications like Time Magazine, The New York Times and Mother Jones. She’s reported from every region in the United States, gone undercover in industry and the sex trade and reported internationally from places like Thailand, Haiti, Australia, Burma, Uganda, Turkey and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. McClelland has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Hillman Foundation, the Online News Association, the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Association for Women in Communications. Her book “For Us Surrender is Out of the Question” was a finalist for the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Price. She’s been nominated for two National Magazine Awards for Feature Writing. And her work has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best Business Writing. She has written about a lot of human rights issues, including reporting from Haiti after the deadly earthquake in 201

Walt Harrington is a former staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine. He’s now a journalism professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Harrington has written a number of award-winning books, including "The Everlasting Stream," which was turned into an Emmy-winning PBS documentary. His book "Intimate Journalism," has been a staple of journalism writing classes for more than 15 years. Last year, he co-edited an anthology called "Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists." He produced that book with Esquire writer Mike Sager, a former podcast guest. The book features 19 stories written by journalists who are all under the age of 40. In May 2014, Harrington's book "Acts of Creation: America’s Finest Hand Craftsmen at Work," was published by The Sager Group. That book consists of 14 portraits of people who work with their hands, including a fireplace maker in Maine, a cabinet maker in Maryland and a locksmith in Ohio. Since talking with Matt Tullis on the podcast,