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Tag Archives: Paige Williams

April Editors’ Roundtable: GQ dives into the personal consequences of war

Stop shopping for your Easter bonnet, and put down those 1040s – it’s time for a new Editors’ Roundtable! This session, our editors are looking at Michael Paterniti’s “The Boy from Gitmo,” which ran in the February issue of GQ. Paterniti’s piece explores the relationship between Mohammed Jawad, a boy who was sent to Guantánamo Bay [...]

March Editors’ Roundtable: Mother Jones looks at rape in Haiti

The narrative for discussion in the second installment of our Editors’  Roundtable is “Welcome to Haiti’s Reconstruction Hell” by Mac McClelland. Appearing in Mother Jones earlier this year, the story was written after a visit in 2010 to survey the island’s post-quake recovery efforts. Clara Jeffery, one of two editors-in-chief at Mother Jones, edited the piece. The narrative [...]

February Editors’ Roundtable: Time magazine takes on the Tucson shootings

The narrative selected for discussion by our first-ever Editors’  Roundtable is “The Real Lesson of the Tucson Tragedy” by David Von Drehle. Appearing in Time magazine five days after the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and so many others, the piece draws on reporting from six reporters who fed Von Drehle material from Tucson, New York and [...]

The Justice League of narrative? Even better: it’s the roster of our new Editors’ Roundtable

Earlier this week, we announced a new offering on Storyboard – an Editors’ Roundtable, in which a stellar group of editors will collectively analyze a piece of narrative journalism. We invited Storyboard readers to submit links to the best true story they had read recently. Submissions are open indefinitely, so please continue to forward material at [...]

Michael Paterniti on storytelling (part 2): William Burroughs’ final months, Mitterrand’s last meal, and magical cheese

Today we bring you Part 2 of a discussion on narrative nonfiction with long-form storyteller Michael Paterniti. (If you just tuned in to the conversation, you might want to check out Part 1.) A six-time finalist for the National Magazine Award, Paterniti won the prize for feature writing for “Driving Mr. Albert,” which became a book [...]

Michael Paterniti on narrative voice, the power of rewrite, Bill Clinton, old cheese, and flying Spaniards (part 1)

Veteran magazine writer Michael Paterniti visited the Nieman Foundation a couple of weeks ago for a discussion about literary journalism with Narrative Writing instructor Paige Williams’ class and other fellows. Winner of the National Magazine Award for feature writing (and a six-time finalist), Paterniti has written powerfully about everything from the crash of SwissAir 111 [...]

Paige Williams on “Finding Dolly Freed”

Yesterday on the Storyboard, we looked at a new approach to narrative by focusing on Paige Williams’ self-published project “Finding Dolly Freed.” That post considered the possiblities for crowdfunded narrative journalism, but we were intrigued enough with the rest of what Williams had to say to offer more of it here. Below are excerpts from this [...]

Hello, Dolly! Radiohead journalism and the future of narrative

When a journalist in love with a story gets turned down by magazine after magazine then sells a piece only to see it killed, what’s the next step? If you’re Paige Williams, you take a page from the guerrilla journalism handbook and publish it yourself. Williams, whose “Finding Dolly Freed” debuted last week, installed a [...]