Our November Editors’ Roundtable looked at “Hecho en América,” a story by GQ correspondent Jeanne Marie Laskas about migrant blueberry pickers in Maine. Laskas’ work has been featured previously on this site, and has won her a slot in the “Best American Sportswriting” anthologies four times. She has also written five books and been a contributing editor at [...]
Category Archives: words
Brady Dennis on “After the sky fell”
This week’s “Why’s this so good?” post looked at Brady Dennis’ 296-word story about a toll booth operator’s love for the wife he lost to cancer. The piece ran in 2005 as part of the St. Petersburg Times’ occasional series “300 words.” Dennis has since moved on to The Washington Post, where he is an [...]
Michael Paterniti spins a fairy tale of loss and survival
Our latest Notable Narrative, “The Man Who Sailed His House,” tells the story of Hiromitsu Shinkawa, who was found floating alone on the roof of his home in the days following the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March of this year.
GQ’s Michael Paterniti nails down the tiniest details of the story: the structural [...]
Jack Hart on “Storycraft” and narrative nonfiction as an American literary form
A soup-to-nuts look at narrative nonfiction, Jack Hart’s “Storycraft” breaks down different approaches to telling true stories and the components that make or break them. In writing the book, Hart brought to bear a doctorate, years of teaching in college classrooms, and a quarter-century of experience at The Oregonian, where he edited several stories selected as [...]
What we’re reading: surrendering revenge, little girl lost, and a town that disappeared
Required Storyboard reading has been light on humor of late, but there’s some wryness mixed in with the sorrow in Justin Heckert’s look at what nature did to Vaughn, Ga. And a vignette about an “atomic banana” adds range to an tale from 9/11. The rest of today’s choices tackle equally hefty subjects: a survivor forgiving [...]
Gene Weingarten on “the god of journalism,” compulsive editing and “The Peekaboo Paradox”
After some months spent planning to write about Gene Weingarten’s story “The Peekaboo Paradox” for this site, I caught up with the two-time Pulitzer winner in Texas this summer at the Mayborn Conference. And when I say caught, I mean caught. I had never met Weingarten before, but I saw the highly recognizable, highly mustachioed [...]
The future of Baby Donuts: Patti Waldmeir on changing (and unchanging) life in modern China
Our latest Notable Narrative, “Little Girl Found,” is the tale of a baby discovered outside a Dunkin’ Donuts in Shanghai, China. Financial Times correspondent Patti Waldmeir, who was with a friend when he found the baby, just happens to have two adopted Chinese daughters at home – girls who had also been abandoned as infants.
So [...]
What we’re reading: 9/11 ten years on, bat extinction and a 70-year-old mystery
In our latest roundup of narrative and narrative-ish pieces, we’ve pulled together stories reflecting on 9/11, researchers dealing with an unstoppable disease, the end of a family fishing dynasty, and a tale tracking the convoluted path of rare U.S. coins the government has been fighting to get back since the days of FDR.
“Karen Wagner’s [...]
