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Tag Archives: Harper’s

“Why’s this so good?” No. 78: Eli Saslow and “Into the Lonely Quiet”

Sunday’s Washington Post carried the kind of story that can leave you limp for days. Rare anymore is the narrative that has such a visceral effect, but Eli Saslow’s piece about Jackie and Mark Barden, whose 7-year-old son Daniel died in the Newtown shootings, is the kind you wake up thinking about, and cannot shake. [...]

“The Power of Storytelling,” Part 3: Starlee Kine on story forms, Mike Sager on suspending disbelief and Alex Tizon on writing your own story

In Part 2 of our recap of Romania’s “Power of Storytelling” conference on narrative journalism, Pulitzer winner Jacqui Banaszynski wrote a short essay about why she and eight other North American storytellers traveled to Bucharest to talk stories before a sold-out audience of journalists. She talked about the future of storytelling. And Evan Ratliff, founder of The [...]

“What’s on your syllabus?”

Every narrative journalist can point to a story or a book, or two, that changed their lives, and that made them want to tell true stories. What story does it for you? Where was your love born? When we asked about influential writing via Twitter, answers came in a flurry. Wright Thompson said North Toward Home, [...]

Kiera Feldman on investigative narrative, trauma reporting, true believers and tricky description

In “Grace in Broken Arrow,” our newest Notable Narrative, Brooklyn-based freelancer Kiera Feldman unfurls an investigative story about child sex abuse and institutional accountability at a private evangelical Christian school outside of Tulsa, Okla. The piece ran last week in This Land, a two-year-old web/print magazine in Tulsa that’s drawing acclaim for its long-form stories and [...]

Gay Talese has a Coke*: reflections of a narrative legend, in conversation with Esquire’s Chris Jones

Continuing a Nieman Foundation narrative writing speaker series set up by Paige Williams, journalism legend Gay Talese appeared on campus two weeks ago in conversation with Esquire’s Chris Jones. The Harvard Writers at Work lecture series co-sponsored the standing-room-only event, where Talese and Jones were introduced by current Nieman fellow Adam Tanner of Reuters. What follows is [...]

“Why’s this so good?” No. 20: Mr. Weschler’s magic cabinet

Magic and writing tricks differ in at least one happy way: A writing trick’s delights only increase once you see through the sleight of hand. In “Inhaling the Spore,” writing about a visit to a very peculiar museum, Lawrence Weschler hides his prestidigitation in plain sight, like every good magician. His 1994 Harper’s showpiece makes the [...]

“Why’s this so good?” No. 16: David Foster Wallace on the vagaries of cruising

For seven days and seven nights in mid-March of 1995, David Foster Wallace took a cruise. He did not have a very good time. The results of the voyage are recorded in “Shipping Out,” an extended essay, framed playfully as an ad for a cruise ship, that ran in Harper’s in early 1996. (It was [...]

Cynthia Gorney on embracing complexity “while maintaining a sense of justified outrage”

Our latest Editors’ Roundtable looks at Cynthia Gorney’s story “Too Young To Wed,” from the June issue of National Geographic. In addition to her work for National Geographic, Gorney is a professor at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, she worked [...]

Eliza Griswold on religion, violence and reporting

We spoke last week with Eliza Griswold, winner of the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.” In addition to winning the Lukas Prize, which is co-administered by Columbia University and the Nieman Foundation, Griswold has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The [...]