No bullet-point tips list could compare with Skip Hollandworth’s Sunday sermonizing, which closed the 2013 Mayborn Conference. What follows is the Mayborn‘s video of Hollandsworth (followed by our selected excerpts) talking ultimately about “ … Read more
Mayborn Week continues: Skip Hollandsworth, a veteran writer for Texas Monthly, specializes in the kind of true-crime narrative yarns that are always bigger in Texas. In 2010, Hollandsworth won a National Magazine Award for “Still Life,” his spare, lyrical story … Read more
It was the altitude, officially. If the flight attendant was concerned about my tears, or if the little girl in the pink hoodie across the aisle was curious: Reading at 13,000 feet makes one susceptible to mood swings. It’s a … Read more
Journalism that explores “true crime” is booming, in everything from investigative stories to books to gripping TV documentaries. But it can easily risk being exploitative. That cautionary note comes from Pamela Colloff, whose justice … Read more
Longform specialist Jeff Maysh has a penchant for telling genre-breaking stories about people with secret lives. There’s the mom who assumed her daughter’s identity to return to high school; the Michigan farmer who made millions smuggling rare Pez dispensers into … Read more
The 2014 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference opens Friday at the University of North Texas. The Saturday and Sunday workshops are full but you can still register for the keynote events. This year’s speakers are authors David Quammen, Lawrence … Read more
Joe Rhodes pulls off the nearly impossible in “How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze,” an edgy New York Times magazine piece. He takes a horrific event—the murder of a family member, an … Read more
A story without sound lies too dead on the page. Imagine “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” by Jon Franklin, without the pop … pop … pop of the operating-room sensors. Or Tom Wolfe‘s “The Girl of … Read more
Because why not a list of lists? Ten* worth the storyteller’s time: 1) “130 years of must-read stories for digital journalists: five lessons from 1851-1981,” by Abraham Hyatt, editor of the data-driven investigative project Oakland Police Beat. His top … Read more
If you missed a post or two in our weeklong recap of this year’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, here’s the roundup: On Tuesday, the Tampa … Read more