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Podcast Interview with Glen Stout & Jeremy Collins

This episode of Gangrey: The Podcast features Glen Stout, long form editor of SB Nation and Jeremy Collins who was featured in this year's Best American Sports Writing.
An Inner Exuberance

With this review, River Teeth begins an occasional series of essays on nonfiction books we believe deserve to be read, whether again or for the first time. We are calling it "Neglected Nonfiction Classics." One of the most poignant, absorbing autobiographical memoirs Iâve ever read is this gem from 1943, The Little Locksmith.
Podcast Interview with Kim Cross and Karen Bender

On this episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, Matt Tullis talks with Kim Cross, author of What Stands In a Storm: Three Days in the Worst Superstorm To Hit the South's Tornado Alley; and with fiction writer Karen Bender, author of the short story collection Refund, which is long-listed for a National Book Award. In "Required Reading," Dave Stark offers his thoughts on J.R. Moehringerâs The Tender Bar.
Podcast Interview with Tyler Cabot

This week's episode features Tyler Cabot, an articles editor for Esquire Classic, which now includes access to every issue Esquire has ever published. Cabot talks about finding new ways to tell and sell stories. Plus, host Matt Tullis shares his nonfiction narrative "The Ghosts I Run With." And in Required Reading, freelance writer D. Rossi tells us why we should all read Brian Ivesâ piece âHow Bruce Springsteen Got His Groove Back."
Here's One for the Bookstores

Each writer in Days Like This responded to the prompt, âMy _________ From Hell.â Each essay or story, in turn, depicts the epiphany that comes in the midst of a day from hell. Or a job from hell. Or a girlfriend, an amputation, an acne problem from hell so severe that it drives you to snort heroin in your fatherâs basement. This, fill in the blank, was the absolute worst. And this is where the writer ended up, afterwards.
Podcast Interview with Nathan Thornburgh and David Caswell

This week's episode has three segments, starting with Nathan Thornburgh, a chief editor and publisher of the website roadsandkingdoms.com. Thornburgh talks about his story "The Root of All Things," which will appear in the fall issue of River Teeth. Matt also chats with David Caswell about his Structured Stories news database, and recommends some "Required Reading."
What's Left from the End Times

To begin her new book, Joni Tevis, the author of the equally unusual, The Wet Collection, quotes the Midwestern novelist, Sherwood Anderson, in an epigraph: âJust say in big letters, âThe World is on Fire.â That will make âem look up.â So she does and so do we.
Climbing the High Ridges and Stumbling

I should be clear: I think writing well is terribly hard work, and I admire anyone who endures it. Me, Iâve yet to publish a book of any kind, and I donât teach writing or literature at any college or university, so maybe youâd just as soon stop reading right here. After all, Iâm hardly a professional book reviewer. But because Iâm a professional educator, an environmental educator, I do know this: it all comes down to creating an authentic experience.
Podcast Interview with Michael Graff

Female skydivers, street races, and more in this edition of Gangrey the Podcast. Matt Tullis talks with Michael Graff, the editor of Charlotte Magazine and freelance writer for SB Nation Longform, Washingtonian Magazine, and Politico.
Turning the Tables: How One Woman Put Food in Its Place

Andie Mitchell is a âfoodie.â She is a serious, hard-core âfoodie,â a fact that comes through in delicious, descriptive detail on virtually every page of her 232-page memoir, It Was Me All Along.
Podcast Interview with Mike Wilson

Mike Wilson is finishing up his first few months as the new editor of the Dallas Morning News. He's also worked as an editor for ESPN and the St. Petersburg/Tampa Bay Times, fostering talented writers and reporters like Ben Montgomery, Michale Kruse, Kelley Benham French, and Pulitzer Prize winner Lane GeGregory.
Why We're Here: River Teeth Nonfiction Conference 2015

One week out from the River Teeth conference, conference director Sarah M. Wells reflects on why we gather for writers' conferences.
Podcast Interview with Brooke Jarvis

Matt Tullis interviews Brooke Jarvis, longform narrative and environmental journalist. Jarvis discusses recent stories about the oil industry in Ecuador and deep sea mining.
It's About Time

On the first page of Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso tells us that she started keeping a diary because she didnât want to lose anything. So she wroteâ800,000 words over twenty-five years. But you wonât see a word from those diaries in Ongoingness, The End of a Diary...
Where Have All the Overmedicated Mermaids Gone?

Elissa Washutaâs memoir is a twisting, chameleon-like work of reportage, highly poetic at times, showing how cultural forces and tragic events have left their tracks on her body and mind. The search âfor an identity to sink intoâ in a savage, selfish world is at the heart of this book.
Podcast Interview with Brandon Sneed

Brandon Sneed wrote the book "Behind the Drive: A Story of Passion, Dreams, Demons, and Highway 55, the World's Next Favorite Burger Joint."
A Son Coming Home

Steven Harvey, in his marvelous memoir, The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, is on a journey to discover and understand his mother who committed suicide in April, 1961, when Harvey was eleven years old. Reflecting on her act, Harvey observes that it âhad exploded in my life like the flash of a camera at close range, darkening everything around me and casting me into blindness, and when the light returned she was gone. . . . "
Editor's Notes, Volume 16, Number 2
The title character of Heckertâs pieceâflinty, cantankerous, desperately illâsimply refuses to do what we expect of her, either as a literary character or as a real person. And, as River Teeth readers know, it is the knifeâs edge between those worlds that endlessly worries and fascinates us.
Keywords: 16-2, editors notes
Which Way Next?

In his brief essay, âDead Weight,â Eric Freeze describes a walk he takes with his dog, Zeke, a walk that ends horribly. He sees a police cruiser descending a hill, his Dalmatian blundering into its path, and thereâs nothing he can do but shout and witness the inevitable. This scene reveals a tension that runs through many of the fifteen essays in his first collection of essays, Hemingway on a Bike: the threat of lurking disaster in the most peaceful of moments versus the potential in such moments for sudden and wonderful insight.
Podcast Interview with David Giffels

In this episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, Matt Tullis talks with David Giffels, former newspaper reporter and author of the book, The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt.
A Beautiful Savage Game

After forty years of watching the game, playing fantasy football, and mourning yet another Oakland Raidersâ loss, Almond no longer indulges his love of watching football and his latest book, Against Football: One Fanâs Reluctant Manifesto, explains why.
The Infinitely Unending Art of Judith Kitchen

Judith Kitchen, writer, editor, critic, and teacher, died at the age of 73 on November 6, 2014, after living with metastasized breast cancer, the subject of The Circus Train. I choose the word âlivingâ deliberately because Kitchenâs presenceâher aliveness on the pageâis a swirling force behind many memorable passages in the book...
Podcast Interview with Vanessa Grigoriadis
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In this episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, Matt Tullis talks with Vanessa Grigoriadis, an award winning contributor for national magazines. She talks about pop culture, journalistic research and some of her recent articles.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Women Authors

Since its inception, Shebooksâ digital collection of downloadable fiction, memoir, and journalism has grown to over 70 books, each of which the publishers say can be read âin an hour or two.â Their library is composed of works by both new and established writers. We review three selections in this month's book review.
Podcast Interview with Earl Swift

In this episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, Matt Tullis talks with Earl Swift, the author of Auto Biography: A Classic Car, An Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream. The book tells the life story of a 1957 Chevy that, at the beginning of the book, is falling apart.
To the Body Born

âI started my martial arts training on the day the Gulf War began,â Peggy Shinner recalls. It was a discipline she would go on to master and teach. Moving across the page in her essay collection, You Feel So Mortal, with the same agility she took to the polished wood of the dojo floor, Shinner explores the flesh and blood experienceâhers and oursâof having a body.
Podcast Interview with Eli Saslow

Eli Saslow is a reporter at the Washington Post. Earlier this year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his series of stories on food stamps in a post-recession America.
The Nothing That Is Not There and the Nothing That Is

In Praise of Nothing is both an interesting and a frustrating book. Itâs interesting in its attempt to write a postmodern memoir. Itâs frustrating, however, because it does not fulfill the readerâs conventional expectations of coherence and meaning. Postmodern thinkers, such as Roland Barthes, are highly skeptical of the idea of human agency and would also doubt the coherence of the self. They believe the idea that a human being who is a psychologically whole and stable person is largely fictionalized. Therefore, LeMay has written an unstable memoir.
Editor's Notes, Volume 16, Number 1

We at River Teeth talk a lot about what the journal has meant to us during our first fifteen years. What weâve discovered doesnât surprise us now, but it would have fifteen years ago. Itâs the people: the people weâve met, the people weâve published, the people who came of age as creative nonfiction writers reading River Teeth. Itâs all pretty damn humbling, to be sure.
Essaying a Spinning World

Much of what Skloot deems "off-kilter" seems the kind of emotional imbalance with which we can all identify.
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