The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara

Brian Mockenhaupt, an intrepid and elite reporter of the living, turns his eye to those long gone. And as we near the 150th anniversary of that bloodiest battle at Gettysburg, Mockenhaupt, through his deft skill as an information gatherer, writes a compelling story about friendship, love, and loss in the most famous battle of the Civil War and its putrid wake for those left behind. It culminates with President Lincoln presiding over a newly created memorial to the felled Union soldiers, a speech where he turns the volume down so we may hear the ghosts of Gettysburg.

Sheri Booker’s memoir Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home chronicles her near-decade long experience immersed the culture of death. Everything from picking up bodies to preserving them in the inner sanctum of Wylie Funeral Home. In it Booker learns that death knows no age and that a funeral home is every bit a part of a community as a church. She also addresses the age-old question of whether or not bodies move on the embalming table.

In Episode 4, I welcome Harrison Scott Key, winner of Creative Nonfictin's "Southern Sin" essay contest. The essay, titled "The Wishbone", is a hilarious account of Key's father suiting up his too-old son to win a pee-wee football game. In this conversation, we talk about "The Wishbone", where Key found his comedic sensibility, his forays into improv and stand up, and the mechanics of humor writing.

Well, what didn't we hit on? It was a pop culture kind of podcast. Let's face it, it had to be since author and Barrelhouse nonfiction editor Tom McAllister joined me to talk about "Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse Magazine". McAllister is the author of "Bury Me in My Jersey: A Memoir of My Father, Football, and Philly." He is also a professor of creative writing at Temple University and, most recently, is the editor of "Bring the Noise". As McAllister riffs in his hilarious introduction, BTN is a treatise "on the the stupid things we love". Yes, there's the stupid things we love, but BTN shows how beautiful these stupid things are when in the hands of seventeen artful storytellers whose personal stories elevate popular culture to the adult table. In it you'll find professional wrestling, roller derby, Barry Bonds, stalking Aaron Grenier, and the "never-ending reality of The Hills" and, in true Barrelhouse style, the Patrick Swayze question.

Susan Kushner Resnick is the author of "Goodbye Wifes and Daughters," which won a gold medal for nonfiction from the Independent Publisher’s Book Awards. Her first book, "Sleepless Days: One Woman’s Journey Through Postpartum Depression," was the first PPD memoir by an American author. In her latest book, "You Saved Me Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me About Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish," Susan writes of the chance encounter she had with Aron Lieb, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, and the blossoming love and friendship that came from that meeting.