January Events

• Sunday, January 25, 1 p.m., CNF Pod Live at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene with Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, author of Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist. … Then we sprint over to:

• Sunday, January 25, 4 p.m., Front Runner book signing at Barnes & Noble in Eugene for Steve Prefontaine’s 75th birthday.

Purchase Signed, Personalized Books

Purchase signed, stamped, personalized copies of The Front Runner directly from me (while supplies last!). The cost is $30 per book. That includes Media Rate shipping (what a deal!). If interested, reply to this email, and I’ll invoice you through PayPal and ask you how you want your book personalized. I can only grant this to people living in the United States. The cost of shipping outside the country is bonkers.

Issue 8 of Pitch Club with … me!

Coincidental, but No. 8 was my number in baseball, and I, the owner of the club, featured myself and my essay pitch to Geezer Magazine, Pitchin’ from the Hip. The essay could still be killed, but it probably won’t, right? Right? RIGHT?

The Riff

Happy New Year?

Sure, yes, of course!

Below you’ll find an essay I was going to pitch to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (They will be mine. Oh, yes, they will be mine. White Whale pub for me.). But I procrastinated and missed the window where this essay would have been relevant. Since then you’ve probably seen a bunch of “Spotify Wrapped” gags. I was on the cutting edge, man, I swear! I swiped the language from the wrapped animation as best I could.

I had fun writing it. I hope you have fun reading it.

You published a book this year! You had high hopes! How silly! We’re ready for you! Let’s see what your senseless promotion of your life’s work accomplished.

3 …

2 …

1 …

You did many podcasts. We counted. Nobody listened!

You could not have been more gracious when you were asked the same question no fewer than 612 times. Nice.

Clearly nobody cared. Let’s hear more!

Your top venues were bookstores, reading groups, and thematically germane retail stores … nobody came!

Attendance is just a number … your events that tallied fewer than three people was perhaps the only exceptional thing you did. Take this personally.

Once upon a time there was a book lover … it was not for your book.

There was that one person who did buy your book, read it, and liked it! Celebrate this … Except they confessed how they are passing it around their friend group like a bong so nobody else will have to buy it.

And now, a word from your publisher:

“Hey, yeah, wow, you were such a tremendous disappointment. I hope we never work together again. In fact, I can assure you we will never work together again.”

All of your author-subsidized travels made you part of something bigger: An increasingly jaded group of people writing books for an ever dwindling readership with microscopic attention spans.

Time for your victory lap! Hahaha, jkjkjk. You have nothing to be proud of.

We pulled some of your files, just in case you needed more evidence:

You have only one liver, but you didn’t let that stop you from drinking enough IPA to fill an Olympic-sized pool. 

And, wow, you sure masturbate a lot.

Yep, you very clearly should find another line of work, area of expertise, and we’d add even a new personality. The good news is that when you hit rock bottom, we’ll be there with a backhoe to make that hole just a bit deeper.

Wrapped party! … now challenge your writer friends to a real-time cry.

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With a nod to the slain Rob Reiner (and his wife, Michele), this newsletter starts here, and goes up to 11!

The Books

1. Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America by Howard Bryant. Robinson and Robeson have been written about a lot, but I always love how a biographer re-frames stories, bridges connections, and reappraises these central figures from a certain rubric.

2. Like A Wave We Break: A Memoir of Falling Apart and Finding Myself by Jane Marie Chen. Woman goes to therapy, writes about it. I was not the intended audience for this book, but I suspect for some it will be very enlightening.

3. Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner. This will be the first live podcast of 2026. Sunday, Jan. 25, 1 p.m. at Gratitude Brewing, if you can make it. This biography takes such a cool approach in that DPP frames LMM through his mentors and teachers. Amazing.

4. Uncommon: Simple Principles for an Extraordinary Life by Mark Divine. Listen, self-help books, by and large, recycle the same old tripe. This one’s OK. It will make for a good addition to the Little Free CNFin’ Library under the big Doug fir, but sometimes the banalities of wellness are nice to hear.

The Other Stuff

5. My favorite minimalist on the 16 things he quit.

6. Leah Sottile wrote a journalism manifesto. “Change is tantamount to survival.” Among the many, many other gems.

7. It’s just running.

8. At times, like now, I go through a trove of old bookmarks I’ve saved to find cool links, like this one that celebrates the fading art of diagramming sentences.

9. It’s that habit time of year. Check this little ditty out about Alex Honnold, the most famous rock climber there is.

10. Margaret Atwood had a bunch of thoughts on stuff and … a hangover cure tested on … George Saunders???

11. The Atavist Magazine is trying to solve the “crisis of impermanence” online.

ICYMI: December on CNF Pod

Christa Hillstrom Takes Pride in Her Rejections

An Atmospheric River of Rejection with Jason Brown

Seth Wickersham and the Macbethian Tragedy of the American Quarterback

Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas Talk ‘Hush,’ Investigative Reporting, and Breaking New Trail in Their Careers

#Flash52 in 2026

Can you write one flash essay a week for an entire year? Even if you aimed for the stars of 52, could you land on the “moon” of 26? 15? Isn’t that maybe more than you wrote a year ago? Join me in 2026 in trying to write 52 flash essays and maybe we land a couple. It’ll be for any tier of paid membership at Patreon. It’ll be an open Zoom room for 30 minutes, and we just hang out and bang away at the keys. No dicking around. Little if any small talk. First one is Sunday morning, Jan. 4, 7 a.m. PST.

Coda

I hope you dug this issue of RATA. To support what it is I do, you can buy copies of The Front Runner, subscribe to Pitch Club, and/or leave kind reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcast and/or leave kind reviews for The Front Runner on Amazon and Goodreads. My understanding is the book is well received, and well reviewed, though I still refuse to look. Can always use more. As my pal Kim H. Cross says, buying a book or leaving a review is a vote for the next book; it makes us just a tad more attractive to publishers.

If you have a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you may check out Patreon.com/cnfpod.

Otherwise, rage on ragin’ on,

b.r.o.

PS: A Look at Cassidy Randall’s CNFy