Author Archives: matttullis

Kaylen Ralph and Joanna Demkiewicz are the founders of The Riveter Magazine, which just put out its fourth issue. They are both graduates of the University of Missouri journalism school. The Riveter publishes longform work by female reporters only. The idea for the magazine stemmed from the fact that, in 2012, while Ralph and Demkiewicz were students, the National Magazine Awards put out its list of nominees, and there wasn’t a single female nominated in the reporting, feature writing, profile writing, essays and criticism or columns and commentary categories.

Ralph and Demkiewicz recently collaborated on the book, “Newswomen: Twenty-Five Years of Front-Page Journalism,” which was edited by Joyce Hoffman and published by The Sager Group. Ralph and Demkiewicz interviewed all of the women included in the book and write “as told to” pieces on how those women got their start in journalism. A similar book is in the works for female magazine writers, as Ralph and Demkiewicz continue to work with Mike Sager to showcase the top female writers and reporters in the country.

Lane DeGregory is a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer at the Tampa Bay Times. In early January, the Times published a long story by DeGregory, told in three chapters, about a five-year-old girl whose father killed her by dropping her off a bridge into the ocean.

“The Long Fall of Phoebe Jonchuck” is a brutal yet powerful piece that shows how a sweet little girl was the victim of a child protective services system that let far too many children fall through the cracks. The editor on this story was Kelley Benham French, now a professor of practice at the Indiana University Media School. We featured French on the podcast after she wrote the three-part series, “Never Let Go.”

DeGregory won a Pulitzer in 2009 for feature writing for her story, “The Girl in the Window.” Her work has appeared in Best Newspaper Writing in four times. She has taught journalism at the University of South Florida – St. Petersburg, been a speaker at the Nieman Narrative Conference at Harvard University, and won dozens of national awards.

She’s also known for finding wonderful stories among everyday lives, including a piece on a flag-toting rodeo rider, and a boy buying a Valentine card for his first girlfriend.

Ed Caesar is the author of “Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon.” The book chronicles the attempts of the world’s greatest marathon runners to inch closer and closer to the magical two-hour mark, and follows one runner in particular, Geoffrey Mutai.

Caesar has contributed to The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Outside, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine and British GQ. He’s reported from a wide range of countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo, and Iran. He’s written about secretive Russian oligarchs, African civil wars, marathon tennis matches, British murder trials, and more.

He’s also written celebrity profiles, as well as a profile on the greatest darts player to ever live.

In 2014, Caesar was named Journalist of the Year by the Foreign Press Association of London.

This episode of Gangrey: The Podcast is focused solely on the “The Best American Sports Writing 2015,” which is now on sale at bookstores across the country. This year marks the 25^th edition of the book, and it was guest edited by Wright Thompson.

The podcast opens with a conversation with Glenn Stout, the series editor. Stout also serves as the longform editor of SB Nation, and has edited all four pieces that host Matt Tullis has written for the Website. That includes “The Ghosts I Run With,” which you can hear on Episode 37.

SB Nation Longform ran Stout’s Forward to this years BASW, which is a personal look at how the series came about, as well as what made Stout into the writer and editor that he is.

In the second segment, Jeremy Collins talks about his story “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Greg Maddux,” which is included in this year’s Best American Sports Writing. He also talks about his latest SB Nation piece, “The Reckoning.”

Finally, in the Required Reading segment, host Matt Tullis breaks down this year’s “Best American Sports Writing,” and why it is a must-read for everyone, even non-sports fans.

Our first guest this week is Kim Cross. Cross is the author of “What Stands In a Storm: Three Days in the Worst Superstorm To Hit the South’s Tornado Alley.” Cross, who lives in Alabama, experienced those storms, although not to the extent of the people she writes about.

Cross has written for The Anniston Star and the Birmingham News. She was a spot news reporter for the New Orleans Times Picayune and the Tampa Bay Times. She has also been an editor at Southern Living and Cooking Light magazines.

In our second segment, we talk with fiction writer Karen Bender. Bender is the author of a relatively new collection of short stories titled “Refund.” That book was recently long-listed for the National Book Awards in Fiction. Bender has also written the novels, “A Town of Empty Rooms” and “Like Normal People.”

Bender is a distinguished professor of creative writing at Hollins University, and has also taught creative writing in Taiwan and at the MFA programs at Antioch Los Angeles, Chatham University, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and at the Iowa Summer Writer’s Festival.

Finally, in our third segment, Required Reading, Dave Stark offers his thoughts on J.R. Moehringer’s “The Tender Bar.”

This week’s episode once again features three segments.

The first is a talk with Tyler Cabot, an articles editor for Esquire Magazine. Cabot also directs the magazine’s research and development. He spearheaded the revamping of Esquire Classic, which now includes access to every issue Esquire has ever published.

Cabot has said that today, he is focused with finding new ways to tell and sell stories, and that is evident in Esquire Classic. On that new site, you can read Gay Talese’s landmark celebrity profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” and you can read it as it appeared in the April 1966 issue of the magazine. You can also read a short, behind-the-scenes piece on the difficulties of reporting that story. And you can read the letters-to-the-editor that the piece spawned.

From Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Chris Jones and Tom Junod, it’s all there on this new site.

In the second segment, we offer our first, full-length audio version of a piece of nonfiction. We’ve got “The Ghosts I Run With,” by host Matt Tullis. The piece of memoir ran on SB Nation Longform in April, and is about the many people Tullis thinks about when he runs, people he came to know when he had leukemia as a teenager, people who didn’t survive their own illnesses.

Finally, in Required Reading, freelance writer D. Rossi tells us why we should all read Brian Ives’ piece “How Bruce Springsteen Got His Groove Back,” which ran on Radio.com. Rossi maintains the blog Life among the Humans.

This week, Gangrey: The Podcast gets a makeover.

This week’s episode has three segments, starting with Nathan Thornburgh, a chief editor and publisher of the website roadsandkingdoms.com. Thornburgh spent much of the last decade as a foreign correspondent and editor for TIME Magazine. He’s reported on everything from cyber war in Russia to information wars in Georgia – not the state Georgia, by the way — to drug wars in Juarez. He also co-founded the parenting blog DadWagon.

We’re going to talk about his story, “The Root of All Things.” Mike Wilson mentioned the story in Episode 34 and said he had been told about the piece by one of his reporters at the Dallas Morning News.

The story is also going to be republished in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative this fall. Last spring, River Teeth republished Justin Heckert’s “Susan Cox is No Longer Here,” which originally ran in Indianapolis Monthly Magazine.

In the second segment, I talk with David Caswell. Caswell has created a new news database called Structured Stories. He hopes the database will empower everyone to collect, use and improve a permanent record of news events.

Finally, the third segment will be something new called “Required Reading.” This week, I’ll tell you about two stories I’ve recently read that I think everyone should also read. The stories are “Ballad of the Sad Climatologists,” by John H. Richardson, which ran in Esquire. The other story is “The Really Big One,” by Katherine Schultz, which ran in The New Yorker.

In the future, though, we hope podcast listeners will contribute to this segment. We’ll have more posted on the website about how to get involved.