“Wells Fargo, You Never Knew What Hit You” stars Ali, if use of such a deliberately awkward voice counts as starring. Other characters include a California couple (“the Lipkins”) and Wells Fargo Bank, which threatens foreclosure on  the Lipkins’ house.  

Ali’s tale, which has the tone and pacing of an improbable sitcom, relates his first effort as a solo practitioner of California law. He makes us squirm in fear along with him as worries about failing clients whose trust he has inexplicably gained.

Invoking icons from American pop culture in his crusade (Rocky, Bigfoot, a Jedi Knight), Ali portays Wells Fargo as a “feces-covered bear” with whom he has a protracted wrestling match. The story follows Ali’s struggle to find the right person to talk to and the right thing to say to the disembodied telephone voices controlling the Lipkins’ future.

It’s a comic piece, but the tragedy of millions of all-too-real homeowners in foreclosure around the country undergirds the humor with substance. The dozens of unreturned phone calls and Ali’s random discovery of the magic words that get Wells Fargo to respond make it clear just how steeply the system is stacked against the Lipkins in a way that a non-narrative piece never could.

Ali bears watching, as he’s more than a lawyer who has written an interesting first-person story. He blogs and referees submissions at Goatmilk, writes regularly on Muslim communities and issues for The Guardian, and scripted a play about Muslims in post 9/11 America.

Christy wrote us in response to our Friday issue of the Narrative Digest, which featured coverage of a zoo, a history of animal experimentation, and an essay on a vet in Sierra Leone, among other articles. He added another a item to the list of issues raised by animal narratives, expressing his frustration that when it comes to stories about humans’ illegal interaction with wildlife, a “focus on animals (and their suffering) tends to give the criminals a bye.”

A high school-era Bryan Christy with pet Socrates

While most of the stories we featured didn’t involve illegal trafficking, it’s an interesting storytelling issue. In a January Huffington Post essay (“Wildlife Smuggling: Why Does Wildlife Crime Reporting Suck?”) Christy argues that “too often wildlife crime stories are little more than eco-tourism pieces with sad endings” and claims that that sloppy reporting for these kinds of narratives has real costs.

He notes a 2007 report from the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which suggests that widespread “gross exaggeration” from the media (along with other groups) doesn’t help the cause of getting more attention to and support for protecting wild animals. (And in fact, the inflated and inexact numbers Christy points to do show up in some major news outlets via Google search.)

But Christy isn’t arguing against a narrative approach to trafficking stories. In “The Kingpin,” from January’s National Geographic, he presents Anson Wong, one of the world’s major smugglers of endangered animals. While there are plenty of gripping details about victimized creatures in Christy’s story, the tale unfolds more as an expose of one man’s willingness to deliver any animal for money and a global system hard pressed to keep him from doing it.

While the lure of safari-style visuals might be hard to editors to resist, shifting coverage to the bigger picture could make for a more accurate story. Christy suggests that treating the issue with the same kind of rigorous reporting applied to other criminal enterprises might be the answer: “More time should be spent on paper and money trails, less on jungle adventures.”

“I knew Roger was writing about the story,” Jones told us via email, confessing his hands had trembled when he clicked on the link to see what Ebert had written about his piece. “I mean, he’s a critic, right? And I really enjoyed spending time with him, and I hope he enjoyed spending time with me. I didn’t want him to feel regret for having let me in.

“So, when I read what he posted, I felt like 1,000 pounds had been lifted off my shoulders. I could have received a million letters from other people saying they liked the story, but if Roger Ebert had hated it, I would have felt bad about that, literally for the rest of my life.”

Jones’ moving profile of the film critic drew praise from Ebert, and also garnered a mention by Jim Romenesko and a post from the Cronkite School’s Tim McGuire, who portrayed the article as a call to the journalistic ramparts. And it’s true that the Ebert article is beautifully written, and that Jones is a national continental treasure (it turns out that the Canadians get credit for him, along with Sidney Crosby and Celine Dion).

But the thing that struck me about the story is how its online existence has transformed it. If it had come out as a print piece only, the profile of Ebert would have been read and praised, then perhaps used in some classes or maybe eventually, it would have found its way into a collection of Jones work. But what has emerged instead is a larger, living thing—a dialog of stories, if you will, between Ebert and Jones, and Ebert and Esquire.

The online version referenced Ebert’s journal on the Chicago Sun-Times site and described the movie expert expounding there on the “existence of an afterlife, the beauty of a full bookshelf, his liberalism and atheism and alcoholism, the health-care debate, Darwin, memories of departed friends and fights won and lost.”

So we have an Esquire piece that points to nearly two years of entries in Ebert’s online journal, followed by Ebert using his online journal to comment on the Esquire piece. But the story doesn’t stop there. Ebert talks about his work with Esquire decades ago and mentions “the best interview I ever wrote” for the magazine. And that interview, “Saturday at Lee —-ing Marvin’s,” is now posted on Esquire’s site as well, linking back to Ebert’s response and the original profile. Jones explains how the Marvin interview came up:

“In the course of my research for the story, Tim Heffernan at Esquire photocopied a bunch of Roger’s stories for me out of the paper archives. One of those stories was the Lee Marvin story. I brought them to Roger to show him—there was also one on Groucho Marx, and one of Hugh Hefner’s daughter—and he lit up and said that the Lee Marvin story was the best story he ever wrote.

“I mentioned them in the article and told my editor, Peter Griffin—you talked to him about the helicopter piece—what Roger thought of the Lee Marvin story. A little while ago—maybe two weeks ago—Peter asked if I thought Roger would mind if the story was posted. Roger was fine with it, and someone at Esquire typed it into the system. Voila. A piece that’s nearly 40 years old is suddenly given new life and a new audience.”

These posts and stories work particularly well together because of the talent possessed by both writers. But their connection also illustrates how a standalone story can evolve into a larger narrative by picking up prologues and codas as it finds echoes and responses in the world.

But reporter Dan Koeppel does virtual disaster very well. It’s tough to use the second person “you” so relentlessly without driving the reader away, but here, details actually draw the audience in, even as they induce panic: “You’ll be unconscious soon, and you’ll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again. When that happens, remember what you are about to read.”

Koeppel uses four scenes, each of which provides backstory and instructions as he counts down the time and distance to impact. His approach is a good reminder of how a tight structure moving toward a focused climax creates urgency.

His upbeat, Heloise-like tone plays against the gruesome information he provides, such as the fact that children have a greater survival rate for big falls, perhaps because their “reduced surface area decreases the chance of impalement upon landing.” From waking up floating in mid-air to a celebratory cigarette on the ground, Koeppel applies a “you can do it—maybe” tone that makes for funny, informative, and nausea-inducing reading all at once. Now where’s that airbag?

Cohn notes that there is nevertheless no shortage of poetry. And it’s true that people are still writing it in droves—as witnessed by the overburdened submission box of at least one literary journal. Slam poetry competitions similarly flourish nationwide.

In addition to serving as paired metaphors for irrevocable decline and financial struggle, however, poetry and journalism can work together in other ways. Poet/journalist James Fenton actually used earnings from his poetry to fund his reporting, which doesn’t seem like a career path most of us could replicate. But sometimes poetry can be a more direct vehicle for narrative journalism.

This week’s Notable Narrative, “Women of Troy” is an innovative multimedia collaboration between poet Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally and radio producer Lu Olkowski. The project documents working-class women of Troy, N.Y., and narrates moments in the women’s lives, from a Flag Day parade to intimate domesticity. Delivering a more nuanced, and lively, picture of the working poor than we often get from journalists, the unusual combination of media helps us see with fresh eyes.

This project exists in this form because it was funded by Public Radio Maker’s Quest 2.0, an initiative of the Association of Independents in Radio. However, “Women of Troy” and “Congregation” (the second installment of the ”In Verse” collaborations) have company. Olkowski pointed us to an experiment unlikely to figure in future news re-organizations, in which the Israeli newspaper Haaretz had poets and novelists cover the day’s events, including features, stock reports and TV reviews. In November, The New York Times also commissioned commemorative poetry for the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, including work from such luminaries as C.K. Williams.

Somers-Willett, who wrote the poems for “Women of Troy,” talked with us about the ways in which doing documentary poetry felt different to her:

“With this project, I was interviewing these women and writing about them, and I knew they would hear the product. I really needed to try to include everything and be accurate about what happened and in what order. I was working under the narrative constraints—or really, narrative boundaries—of the radio format, too.

I was trying to convey, say, in a poem about DJ Guerrin, that she’s a certain age and has seven kids, but only four of them live with her, while one is with her mom, and the other two live with their respective fathers. It’s very difficult to say all that in a compressed format such as poetry. You can say it in prose, where you have the space. In poetry you have to be really subtle about finding new and inventive ways to relay information.”

In an interview with Nieman Storyboard, Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways mentioned Kwame Dawes’ site livehopelove.com, which chronicles life with HIV in Jamaica, as a powerful example of poetic collaboration for journalistic purposes. Olkowski similarly noted poet C.D. Wright’s work with photographer Deborah Luster on One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana.

These projects, along with the two installments of “In Verse” produced so far, show that it is possible for a tightly focused poem to embrace a very big picture, even a documentary one. Poetry seems unlikely to replace standard print narratives and even less likely to supplant the inverted pyramid, but its future and the future of news may be bound together at the margins. We are just beginning to imagine how both will evolve and the ways in which they might work together in narrative reporting.

You’ve already gotten a lot of coverage for “Finding Dolly Freed.” What hasn’t been said yet?

What may be getting lost here is Dolly Freed herself and what a fascinating person she is. I just want people to get to know Dolly the way I did and appreciate her, and Possum Living’s, relevance today.

What do you see as her relevance?

We’re reliving some of what happened in the ’70s. People panicked about their jobs, their well-being and their livelihood. Her big message is that you don’t have to panic. A lot of people are beyond the place where they could do what she did way back then. They’re so entrenched in the consumer economy that they can’t just drop out, because of credit card debt and the “live beyond your means” lifestyle that so many of us live. But the basic sentiment stands, that it doesn’t have to be that complicated, that you can strip it down and still have a good life.

You were having your own financial issues at the time, weren’t you?

I heard about Dolly two days after losing my job. I met her at a time in my life when everything centered acutely on money and survival, and her ideas on simplicity appealed to me.

I was thinking about the story and working on it while I was packing up my life and every tiny piece of crap I’d been dragging around with me since my divorce: knickknacks and paper files, just so much stuff. All I really need is my books and my dog, and something to sleep on. And my bike. And my coffee pot. And my laptop. Not a lot, really.

What else was going on at the time that you could do this piece?

Nothing. I was just trying to find a job. I knew that I didn’t have the money to go back and forth to Texas, so at one point, I was thinking it would be smarter to go and camp out in Houston get a cheap apartment off Craigslist for a month. But really I thought I would be able to sell the story idea and go back and work on it.

How long did you try to sell the piece?

The piece itself was never written until the very end—it was the idea I was trying to sell, and maybe I was selling it all wrong. The attempts went on for months. I was stunned by the lack of interest. I thought catching up with Dolly Freed was a no-brainer of a story—all over the Internet people were mooning about what had become of her and asking “Where are you, Dolly Freed?” I wanted to tell them the answer. I felt like plenty of readers would be as riveted by her and what had become of her as I was. I mean here was a woman who published a book and went on to become a rocket scientist with basically a seventh-grade education, and whose book is as fascinating for its literary quality as for its usefulness. Maybe I overestimated editors’ appetite for this story; maybe the connection was clearer to me because of my personal situation, but I thought the idea would sell.

It’s been interesting to watch peoples’ responses to my saying that. There are a lot of really great people out there giving helpful feedback, but some have suggested I’m stupid or naïve for pursuing the story without a buyer.

It’s not at all naïve to answer something that speaks deeply to you. If we don’t follow what we love, what the hell are we doing? If I backtracked over the course of my 20-year career as a journalist and played every move safe, I wouldn’t have done half the things I’ve done. I had to find out what the story was about.

For me the outcome has nothing to do with the money. I was prepared to lose that $2,000. I wrapped the money into it, by adding the PayPal option, because I got curious about what would happen. Luckily the response has been thoughtful and thought-provoking. Anytime you put yourself out there, try something new, you run the risk of attracting the opposite, though, too: people who seem more interested in going straight to the negative and gleefully screaming folly, telling you what a mistake you’re making. I don’t mind strong comments, but make them insightful, make them accurate.

I like the extensive use of footnotes—they turn into this organic outgrowth of the mainbar.

I have a footnote fetish. I’ve used them in magazine stories before. I once wrote about the 13th-tallest woman in the world, who happens to live in Atlanta. I was in line behind her one night at Whole Foods and the minute I saw her I knew I had to write about her. I had to think really quickly—she was paying for her Thanksgiving turkey—and I knew it would be predictable to ask her height so instead I went up to her and said, “I just have to ask, How many times a day do people ask you how tall you are?” She said, “You’re about the eighth today.” I gave her my card. And she graciously allowed me to do a story on her.

I used footnotes in that story because they allowed me to give more information without interrupting the narrative. For my money, with footnotes you get a narrative and you get bonus info.

Was the voice you used in the Dolly Freed piece different than it would have been if you were writing for a magazine?

For better or worse, that’s my tone, my voice. I don’t know how to write any other way. But how it could be different when you’re self-publishing—that’s one of the questions that I find most interesting: If you don’t have to conform to a voice, a tone, or an audience, how does the delivery play out? Can you have more fun with structure or voice, within the journalistic parameters we have to follow?

On the Dolly piece I didn’t have time to explore that question. It had to happen so fast. I wrote the story in a few days, and then rewrote and tweaked over a couple weeks. There wasn’t time to think about innovation and structure.

How long was The New York Times piece on Dolly that got killed?

About 1,200 words. It fell through right before it was scheduled to run. I got the email from the editor on December 7; the piece was supposed to run on the 10th. So, the 5,000 words and the web site all came together in about three weeks. I had a team that just went into action. I have to say that I think it worked out this way because it was supposed to work out this way. It sounds so meta, but trying to force the story into some other form was like trying to push a relationship with a guy who doesn’t want to be with you.

What template do you think this can provide for narrative journalism?

The story and who’s telling the story are important—within the journalistic conversation, that’s what’s probably most relevant. The credibility has to be there. That’s not to say that new reporters or writers can’t go do this online themselves, but I suspect they’ll be more successful if they have a foundation of experience and credibility.

I’ve been asked at what point can we consider the Dolly project a success. When I recoup my expenses? When I can pay the photographer beyond expenses? Is the piece a success when Audra makes what she would have made if the job had come through a regular magazine assignment? A photographer like Audra Melton would have cost at least $6,000 for a feature like this. She did the work for expenses only because she’s a friend and believed in the project.

So, I don’t know if this template can work for everyone. That wasn’t the question I set out to answer. I just wanted to see if it would work for this one story.

One built-in hurdle from a reporting standpoint: If you endeavor to do this kind of work, it’s going to be harder when sources ask who you’re reporting for. When I was dealing with NASA, their first question was “Who is this for?” And I said, “It’s for me. I’m a journalist, and it’s for my web site.” Some sources are institution-minded and may be less inclined to cooperate unless they’re dealing with a journalist backed by a known publication. Student journalists run into that all the time, sources taking them less seriously because they’re reporting for campus publications.

Did you have anyone for a role model, someone who’s done this and done it well?

There wasn’t anything like it that I had seen. Plenty of websites run long-form pieces, of course, but I’d never seen anyone do a self-published one-off and have the story run the same gauntlet as it would at a magazine or newspaper. All I had in mind was the way I wanted the story to go, and the format. The site will evolve. It’s not as tricked out or useful as it could be, but until I can pay for changes it’ll have to stay at 1.0 for a while.

We launched a week ago. Since then there’ve been 5,885 unique visitors, 11,829 page views. That to me is really fascinating. I’m up to $878.75 in donations. And in a week, I’ve gained more than 100 new followers on Twitter. In the big scheme that’s not a lot, but the quick-time doubling seems telling. The contributions have ranged from 75 cents to $100. Adam Penenberg sent me $100. Sweet Hank Stuever sent me $100, with a note. He said, “I’m happy to feel strongly enough about what you do – what we do – to put money behind it… I feel it all going away: serendipitous stories, lark, wonder, exploration, heart. Everything in the newsroom now is just reactive, scoop-centered, gossipy, fuss-and-chit-chat.”

You wrote Dolly’s story in just three weeks. Going back and rereading, is there anything you wish you’d done differently?

I never read stories once they’re out, for this very reason. When it’s in print, it’s too late. I can’t change anything. With Dolly, I could change it if I wanted, but I haven’t touched it except to fix two typos. I also think there’s a danger in tinkering with things too much. This original version is the truest form of it—this is how it came out. If you practiced this self-publishing online model and thought about stories as fluid documents, maybe there would be some possibilities for evolution and elaboration in there. It’s an interesting thought. Maybe next time.

Courtesy Audra Melton

Williams, whose “Finding Dolly Freed” debuted last week, installed a donation box on her Web site next to her 6,000-word self-published piece. The story recounts the fleeting teenage stardom of Dolly Freed, who wrote a back-to-basics guide called Possum Living 32 years ago. Williams dives into Freed’s past and checks in on her current life in Texas.

How’s it doing? As of yesterday, Williams had 5,885 unique visitors to her site, and had raised $878.75 in support from readers. The avalanche of publicity for her renegade approach has been even more substantial—Reason, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Mother Jones have all weighed in, along with Real Simple.

While Spot.Us has been fostering crowdfunded journalism for more than a year, and Kickstarter projects include nonfiction writing, Williams’ move was less a desire to leap into cutting-edge journalism than a bid to save a story she loved:

“If we don’t follow what we love, what the hell are we doing? If I backtracked over the course of my 20-year career as a journalist and played every move safe, I wouldn’t have done half the things I’ve done… For me the outcome has nothing to do with the money… I wrapped the money into it… because I got curious about what would happen.”

With less than half of her own expenses paid, never mind the free help she got from top-notch journalist friends, what Williams calls “Radiohead journalism” isn’t likely to provide a living for her in the immediate future  (unless she’s willing to resort to some of the roadkill, creamed catfish, and dandelion wine espoused by her subject). Luckily, she also has her day job as executive editor* of Boston Magazine.

Still, this kind of enterprise may well make a difference for journalism in the long run, suggests Tanja Aitamurto, a Finnish journalism researcher who has studied Spot.Us and other approaches to crowdfunding. Talking about “Finding Dolly Freed,” Aitamurto describes the shift in the interaction between journalists and the public:

“I’m very excited about this project. It shows that people are willing to pay for in-depth journalism, not just blog posts or news stories. Some of these stories take a long time to produce; they’re complicated and involve deep relationships with sources. You see this with ‘Dolly Freed.’ When the reader decides to donate, is there any better reward for a journalist than that—to actually have your readers pay to support you?”

What does “Dolly Freed” mean for storytelling? Right now, it’s hard to tell. While Williams’ piece has extensive footnotes, which might have been ditched by some magazines (“I have a footnote fetish,” she confides), it is otherwise a straight-ahead, well-done narrative piece. The chronological structure was chosen for expediency: with the re-issue of Freed’s Possum Living looming, Williams worried about losing her news hook. She wrote and revised the story across three weeks. The result is a moving, if eccentric, portrait about growing up differently, in ways good and bad, and learning the value (or non-value) of things.

But is it possible that crowdfunded journalism could change how long-form narratives look and work? What about pay-as-you-go installments on sets of connected stories? What about a Kickstarter model of tiered access to different layers of the story? Aitamurto says she’d love to see more people take advantage of the possibilities:

“ [T]he crowdfunding revenue model encourages reporters to experiment with story topics and how to produce a piece, to experiment with sources and information. It’s encouraging journalists to be more innovative. I think that’s a great idea.”

Williams has written narrative pieces for O Magazine, Atlanta magazine, and several other publications, garnering herself a National Magazine Award for feature writing in 2008. Asked if she can imagine a different kind of Radiohead journalism, Williams says:

“If you practiced this… model and thought about stories as fluid documents, maybe there would be some possibilities… It’s an interesting thought. Maybe next time.”

As for crowdfunding saving long-form journalism, Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh is skeptical about the scalability of any financial rewards Williams is able to extract from this story. Aitamurto, however, thinks that long-form reporting will eventually find a home online. She notes that crowdfunded approaches are in their infancy and may become more viable as journalists find ways to pitch stories more effectively to the public. In the long run, she says,

“It’s a kind of power shift to the reader. I’m a journalist, too. Sometimes we have the idea that we know what other people need, but oftentimes people know better than we do.  That’s the whole point of crowdfunding and collective intelligence. As far as ‘Dolly Freed,’ I’d love to see more like this. These kinds of efforts are the only way for us to find out what kind of revenue models are possible.”

We’ll continue to track how “Finding Dolly Freed” pans (or panhandles) out. But regardless of how much money it brings Williams, the piece stands as a tribute to one journalist’s commitment to delivering a story. And it poses some interesting questions about the future of narratives in the digital era. For more on the story, check out our Q&As with Williams and Aitamurto.

*[Correction: the original version of this post incorrectly listed Williams as editor of Boston Magazine.]

How did you approach narrating a decade in 2,200 words?

I had some really good direction from David [Granger] and from Mark [Warren]. So the first thing they gave me was the number. And the more we talked, the more the phrases “nobody could have anticipated” and “nobody could have known” kept popping up. But of course they did anticipate, they did know. It was a really terrible decade.

When did you know what structure you would use for “The First 3,650 Days”? Could you talk a little about how it’s organized?

I had the structure right about when I sat down. Generally I let things percolate in my head, and have an idea where I’m going. Then I sit down and things follow the idea—I don’t make any complicated outline. It’s a question of making the writing conform to the idea. I let this one flow out of my head.

Is there a series of things you want your stories to do? What should a good story do?

“Tell the story” is the glib answer. I want the ideas to flow from one to the other. I want them to be surprising if they can be. I want the reader to go along in the same kind of evolutionary way, to have the themes strike them at the same point in the story that they strike me. But I don’t write with the reader in my head.

Your opening image of the balloon is elegant, but “The First 3,650 Days” is not a comforting vision. There’s something DeLillo-esque about it.

I remembered walking through the newsroom and seeing the balloon on screen after screen.  It was an ongoing event of which we were tremendously unsure. I was struck by the fact that I was seeing it again and again.

You’ve produced other unsettling narratives. More than a decade ago, your Tiger Woods profile generated a lot of outrage. Even your lovely Hubble story seems rueful.

The Hubble story is a little more hopeful, but I do think I do have an underlying theme of dystopian thinking. Still, if you let that overwhelm the story, then you just turn into a cynic and a crank.

Going through more than a half-dozen stories of yours, I found only one that really verged on the hopeful, and it was about a horse.

I do think that hope is a good thing. If you read the piece on Barack Obama, “The Cynic and Senator Obama,” there you’ll see me personally wrestling with the parameters of hope—its parameters and its limitations.

You write for the magazine of The Boston Globe as well as for Esquire. I just read your old Ted Kennedy story that gained new relevance recently when he died. Do you see yourself still as a local writer, a Boston writer?

I think I’m formed by the political and social culture of New England—I grew up in Worcester. But I’ve been a national magazine writer for 17 years now. I consider myself to have a foot in both worlds. Boston is part of the country, certainly, and I still have stories I want to tell that are outside it.

What is the last piece of narrative nonfiction that blew you away?

The last one I read that I really loved was a Chris Jones story where the title is a play on the Tim O’Brien book.

“The Things That Carried Him?”

Yes. That, I thought was really extraordinary work.

Not to plug my employer, but Tom Junod’s story on the financial scandal—that was well done, too. And Matt Taibbi combines good old American invective with good old American writing.

Do you have any thoughts on the future of storytelling given the tumult in newsrooms around the country?

Now you’re really trying to bring out the dystopian in me! There are days I think I’m working in the buggy whip industry—that we’re facing a problem for which there is no solution. What worries me most is that the smart guys who are supposed to be able to figure out solutions seem to be at a loss.

Narrative nonfiction, long-form narrative, is what I love to do. Is there a place for it on the monitor as well as the page? I don’t know. I have a friend, Wright Thompson—he writes for ESPN online. I go to check out his work and there are seven or eight clicks with the mouse, and I print it out. I don’t know. Is Kindle the hope? I have no idea.

The next new thing always seems to founder on the rocks of how anybody’s going to make any money from it. Anyone not concerned isn’t paying attention, and any narrative journalist who’s not concerned is really not paying attention.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about writing stories? Any unaddressed problems with producing this kind of journalism?

I think we’re wandering a little too deeply into the notion of niche marketing. The capacity of being a great generalist—which I hope to be—is being lost a little bit. I think that’s tragic.

And then there’s something else I talk a lot about: I don’t think we train editors enough. You have a great writer, and then you go and turn him into an editor. You lose a strong writer and get a mediocre editor.

I’m a terrible editor. I can’t write or work in someone else’s voice. I think we don’t do a good job of identifying people who would make good editors and training them how to do it.

[You can also read our commentary from yesterday on Pierce's piece in Esquire. In addition to writing traditional print narratives, Pierce just finished blogging school and has been allotted acreage on the digital frontier. He has posted 10 times in less than 48 hours, putting the editors of Nieman Storyboard to considerable shame.]

“Typically, in scholarly writing, we feel the need to stamp our authority from the outset rather than leaving room for movement and change. That’s a major reason why scholars often struggle to adapt their expertise to more journalistic contexts. We let research smother ignorance.”

You don’t have to be a Ph.D. to have too much information. Journalists who spend even a few weeks on a story at some often point wonder how to put their own understanding of the story in reverse and go back to pick up readers. According to Nixon,

“It’s critical to try to tap into the spirit of that initial ignorance to make dramatic narrative possible. Moreover, allowing space for that initial ignorance can draw the reader into a journey of shared discovery rather than feeling that he or she is being lectured at. In public writing, ignorance is too valuable a dramatic resource to throw away cheaply.”

Rob Nixon

Nixon also talked about the history of nonfiction in academia, where “for so long, the novel and poetry were treated as the peaks of imaginative work, while nonfiction was seen as the valley of the shadow of death. Hopefully, those days are over.”

Offering some inspirational examples of writers who have fused scholarship with literary nonfiction, Nixon mentioned Michael Pollan as “someone who reads widely, tapping into the zeitgeist and looking for a way to find narrative energy to bring fields together.”

For his New York Times Magazine piece “Power Steer,” Pollan followed a steer—which he bought—from insemination to the dinner table (his own). Nixon says that as Pollan was doing the story,

“[He] found research was the easier part. The difficult part was finding a character to convey the story to the reader. In his case, it was a cow. Research for many of us is easier than the hunt for a cow.”

So are there times it’s better to know less? Not exactly, but we can all work harder to find the right cow and be willing to create space in our stories for the reader to enter, even if it means we can’t share everything we’ve learned.

When did you first hear about Mithradates?

He was in the back of my mind because I was always interested in marginal figures and events in antiquity. But he really came to the fore when I was researching biological and chemical warfare in the ancient world. He was a master of these techniques, and he systematically tried to make himself immune to poison.

The more I found out the more I was drawn to his story. It astounded me that no one had really done a biography on him in a long time.

What other accounts are there?

The magisterial work on Mithradates was written by Théodore Reinach, a French author, in 1890. There was another one done in 1958 called He Died Old, by Alfred Duggan, a historical novelist. It’s a light treatment, but he doesn’t have any documentation.

And of course, Reinach was living in the late Victorian era, so his story is very dated. He’s comparing Mithradates to decadent Ottoman sultans. There are a lot of racial issues. In fact, there are a surprising number of those in Dugan’s account as well.

What made you decide to write a book?

Six years ago, when I was working on Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs, I started a file on Mithradates. That’s when I realized how much material was gathered by his enemies. The Romans get so fascinated by their dread enemy that they just keep collecting information. They fought him for 40 years. I cited more than 30 ancient authors, some very well known, some less so. The info was out there, but it took a lot of research to find it.

You’re an unconventional academic but have managed to become a visiting professor at Stanford, right? How did you bring yourself out of academia and academic language to write a popular nonfiction account?

I’m not a professor—I’m a visiting scholar in the Classics department and the History of Science program, solely on the basis of my scholarship. I don’t have a Ph.D.—a Ph.D. requires a kind of specialization I never wanted to commit to.

Still, it’s a struggle to avoid writing like an academic, because I love research and footnotes. At the same time, I think that’s why my work is respected. I usually pick topics that no one else has worked on, and I work to document my material to make sure my arguments are supported.

While I was hoping to write a book that was accessible and even cinematic, I do admire specialists. I can’t pursue my work without their work. I don’t read Greek or Latin.

You’re a classics scholar with no Greek or Latin?

I have a friend here who has known me for a long time, and she refers to me as a “stealth scholar.” But sometimes I get referred to as a “guerrilla scholar.”

I was really worried about it with the first book, The First Fossil Hunters. I was bold enough to present it to Princeton University Press. At that point, I was really concerned about trespassing on other people’s specialties.

At the time, I really thought of myself as an investigative reporter. I had to do a lot of research before I could even approach people to talk about my ideas. But then I found researchers were thrilled to share information on esoteric topics. They had run across material but weren’t necessarily going to use it. They were happy to talk with someone who might do something constructive with it.

How did you approach the idea of making The Poison King narrative engrossing?

In a biography, chronological structure is usually best, of course—especially since that’s how the Romans thought of Mithradates. Their fascination with his changes in battle strategy, how he responded to losing so many battles to them, and how he began to follow more nomadic tactics.

One of the problems I faced was how could I talk about his patronage of arts and science, and his work on toxicology. He was involved with these things for a long time, but I didn’t want to just have them appear in bits in pieces, tucked in around the battles. Luckily, I realized there was a period of about 10 years where he was at peace, and I could plug the material in that slot.

I made many, many different outlines thinking about how I was going to organize the book. I had a contract with Princeton, and at first, we were talking about 80,000 words. Then I realized I had a lot more story than that. It ended up working out anyway—apparently people tend to want a large, meaty biography, so they asked for more words.

So you plotted a lot ahead of time. Did you make a lot of revisions once you completed your draft?

A huge number of revisions. I had three or four friends read various chapters and tell me when they got bored, and that was very helpful. I did have to prune—I had a lot more material than would be of interest to everyone, and I wanted it to be a page turner.

My friends were worried about me. Here I was getting a crush on this historical figure who did some pretty awful things. But I think you have to fall in love just a little with your subject if you’re going to do a biography. I hoped other people would find him as interesting.

You’ve created a Facebook feed for him.

I started the Facebook personality, because I used to have websites for all of my books on AOL, and then AOL stopped hosting sites. I actually thought this book wasn’t going to sell, because no one had ever heard of Mithradates. But I thought if I could just publicize it a little, maybe it would help introduce him.

Who has more friends—Mithradates or you?

He’s got four times as many as me—more than 800 friends now, from every part of the political spectrum and around the world. It’s amazing, because he has international friends. The publisher of Forbes magazine asked to be his friend. Bush’s speechwriter. It’s amazing. I’ve really been thinking about what Mithradates might mean to them, especially those who asked to be his friend before the book came out.

You mentioned to me that one whole chapter is mostly speculation. Journalism has pretty strict rules about inventing part of the story. What kind of rules did you set for yourself in writing about these less documented points in Mithradates’ life?

Obviously, I had to be really careful and maintained everything within the bounds of possibility. Nothing could be anachronistic or outside the real geography and topology. I think in my introduction, I refer to Sherlock Holmes. You have to “balance the probabilities and choose the most likely.” I tried to signpost whenever I made “scientific use of the imagination to fill in the spaces.” It helped that all historians agree that Mithradates was atypical.

At the end, I do lots of speculation about his last hours, and what happened to his Amazon lover, and whether his body given to the Romans. Virtual history sort of gives some of the rules. I talked with Ian Morris; he likes to use hypotheticals in his work. We discussed it a god deal.

When people are writing historical fiction or novels, they can make anything happen, even create new characters. I couldn’t.

Mithradates was part Persian. He was not exactly a family man. He dabbled in poisons and was inclined toward brutality. Did you worry about exoticizing him or furthering stereotypes?

Well, I wanted to update his story and tell it from his point of view. It’s always recounted from the Roman point of view. Yet the Romans were incredibly brutal and savage. They referred to Mithradates and his allies as barbarians. But from Mithradates’ point of view, the Romans were the barbarians, driven by lust for gold and slaves. That really captured my attention.

But I didn’t worry that I would be typecasting, because I knew I would be telling it more from his perspective, from outside the Roman view of things.

As you were writing it, what did you hope the book would do?

If I possibly could, I wanted to explain some of the stereotypes that have been accepted in the past. Even though he used dubious tactics, he was the alternative to the new Roman Empire. I wanted to point out that he was not fighting or challenging the Roman Empire that most people know, but the last days of the Roman republic. He saw himself as the defender of Greek and Persian civilization, what he saw as the greatest civilizations in history.

I just wanted to revive the story, really—a marvelous story. I thought of trying to keep people’s attention, and I feel I’ve done that. Being a finalist for the National Book Award was astounding to me—I don’t think there’s ever been a book on ancient history as a finalist.

Now that it’s already surpassed your expectations, is there anything else you hope to see come from it?

Not really—though I’d love to see a graphic novel based on his life. I’d get nothing from it, just pure enjoyment.

[See video of Adrienne Mayor reading from The Poison King at the 2009 National Book Awards Finalist Reading.]