Gangrey Podcast

Michael Graff is the editor of Charlotte Magazine and is a freelance writer for SB Nation Longform, Washingtonian Magazine and Politico. Before taking over Charlotte Magazine, Graff was an editor and writer for Our State Magazine in North Carolina for four years. On June 4, SB Nation Longform published Graff’s piece, “Two Lanes to Accokeek.” The story is an at times graphic story about a street race that turned tragic in the most unimaginable way. In this podcast, we talk about that story as well as some of Graff’s work with Charlotte Magazine, including a story about the world’s greatest female skydiver and her quest to become the first woman with 20,000 dives.

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.

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 visiting writer 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.