"The worst thing you can do is pitch a topic, not a story. You start with a topic. I like to talk to a few people before I write a pitch, which can be difficult because people you're asking to talk to don't know where it's going. I just look for topics that interest me first, and I dig down to an expert, and then from the expert, I try and find individual stories within that," says Peter Ward, whose "Master and Commander" appeared in The Atavist Magazine.

It’s that Atavistian time of the month, so there might be some spoilers here. I can’t remember. Good chance of it. Visit magazine.atavist.com to read the story by Peter Ward, a writer whose work has appeared in GQ, The Atlantic, Wired, The Guardian, and others. He’s the author of two books of nonfiction, The Consequential Frontier and The Price of Immortality. This story for The Atavist titled Master and Commander is wild. Here’s the deck: When a scraggly band of folk musicians arrived to tour the UK, residents of a small Welsh town were enamored—until they learned that the band’s leader ruled with an iron fist.

There’s sea shanties, people.

We’re gonna hear from lead editor Jonah Ogles first and dive into the Atavist’s national magazine award nominations, namely Drew Philp’s story “There Will Be No Mercy.” You can hear out chat about it on Episode 449.

Peter is here to talk about how he arrived at this story.

• Pitching a story, not a topic
• Off the record conversations for trust
• His cheat code
• How the story was a house of cards
• Better Call Saul
• Finding voice
• Interview prep
• And the video clip of Matt Stone and Trey Parker that really helps with story development

Promotional support: The 2026 Power of Narrative Conference. Use narrative20 at checkout for 20% off your tuition. Visit combeyond.bu.edu.

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Welcome to Pitch Club

Show notes: brendanomeara.com

"Come to editors with solutions, not with problems. A lot of young freelance writers will be like, 'Hey, hook me up with this editor. Do this and do that.' And I'm like, 'I can connect you, but you better have pitches. If you don't come with the idea you're just a problem,'" says Tony Rehagen, a long-time freelance writer.

Seth Wickersham put me in touch with a colleague of his, someone he went to grad school with by the name of Tony Rehagen. Now, he’s a special kind of freelancer in that he’s a grinder. Much like Pete Croatto and other freelancer types who are balancing all kinds of work: content work, copy writing, alumni magazine work, and pure journalism, Tony has been in the thick of the freelance morass for a long, long time. He was featured in the 2015 anthology “Next Wave” for his piece called The Last Trawlers, a work of journalism that really reads like a short story.

His work has appeared in myriad places like Indianapolis Monthly, Atlanta Magazine, Men's Journal, and Bloomberg.

Tony was a blast … there are too many great nuggets from this conversation to list out, but I’ll list out a few. We talk about:

• His filing system for stories
• How many stories he’s working at a time
• Being on the clock and off the clock all the time
• Treating his writing as a service or a trade like plumbing or carpentry
• Treating editors more like clients
• Taking risks with how much skin he puts into a certain story
• And where his ambitions lie now.
• And that just scratches the surface.

Promotional support: The 2026 Power of Narrative Conference. Use narrative20 at checkout for 20% off your tuition. Visit combeyond.bu.edu.

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Welcome to Pitch Club

Show notes: brendanomeara.com

"I wanted to keep reporting, and I'm like, it's not ready yet. And [a friend] reminded me over and over that this is a sales pitch. It's a proposal. The agents and publishers just want to know you can put a story together and tell a story that's longer than 2,000 words, and that there's some narrative arc to it," says Melanie D.G. Kaplan, author of Lab Dog: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research (Hachette).

Today we have Melanie DG Kaplan, author of Lab Dog. Not gonna lie, if you’re an animal lover and a believer in animal rights, it’s a tough read. I don’t mean it’s a bad book, it’s a very good book, it’s just … tough. Brought no fewer than 88 tears to my eyes at various points. The late Jane Goodall called it “remarkable.” So, there you go.

Melanie is a journalist, an author, and when she’s feeling brave an ukulele player. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, among many, many others. She interviewed Miss Piggy. How many people can say that? Lab Dog is her first book and it chronicles her and her rescue beagle Hammy as they illuminate the world of animal testing and thus the testing that Hammy was subjected to for the first few years of his life. They find out where he was born, where he was subjected to various cruelties and indignities all in the name of science and progress. Her book details the advances in technologies and models that are proving to be just as effective as animal testing without the torture.

In this conversation we also hit on:

• The dialogue between the animal research world and the animal activist world
• Changing her physical environment so she can focus and write
• Overcoming not being a “name” in this business
• Book proposal craft
• And the power of tech shabbat and how she turned me on to the “Light Phone”

Order The Front Runner

Welcome to Pitch Club

Show notes: brendanomeara.com