In the first episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, Matt Tullis talks with freelance writer Justin Heckert, who wrote the story “The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly” for The New York Times Magazine. The story was published in November, and is about Ashlyn Blocker, a teenager who suffers from congenital insensitivity to pain.
Heckert has written several amazing stories, some before his Times piece and some after. His story “Lost in the Waves” was anthologized in “Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.” Heckert also talked about that piece with Tullis for an Annotation on Nieman Storyboard.
His piece “Let Me Live That Fantasy,” published on Grantland, was one of the sites greatest pieces before it shut down in October 2015. His story “Susan Cox is No Longer Here,” published in Indianapolis Monthly in December 2013, was reprinted in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.
Most recently, Heckert wrote the afterword for Walt Harrington’s “Artful Journalism: Essays in the Craft and Magic of True Storytelling.”
Gangrey: The Podcast 