“Any minute now, Cell Block J is going to blow. My gang has occupied the long cement gallery outside our cells and we’re itching for a fight.”
A scene from the opening of a prime-time cable series? Nope—it’s the lead from a story in last month’s Mother Jones. Dave Gilson’s piece narrates a mock riot in [...]
Tag Archives: print narratives
Mother Jones’ Dave Gilson: There’s a riot goin’ on
December 14, 2009 – 4:09 pm
High Country News’ Michelle Nijhuis on living with an uneasy ghost
December 9, 2009 – 3:47 pm
I was recently taken with a piece that ran ealier this year in High Country News. Written by Michelle Nijhuis, “Township 13 South, Range 92 West, Section 35” explores the idea of family roots and also offers a brief meditation on Western self-sufficiency. But as much as anything else, it serves as a requiem for a girl who died a [...]
Jared Diamond, The New Yorker and the awkwardness of anecdotes
December 3, 2009 – 3:59 pm
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk, in which she described how stereotypes develop when one community has only a single narrative about another. The post also referenced National Geographic writer Tom O’Neill, who sometimes resists centering a narrative on a single subject when he is reporting from abroad.
Last week in Anthropology [...]
Killian Mansfield: a holiday lament
November 25, 2009 – 10:47 am
Before the Thanksgiving holiday, we step away from the future of story and transmedia discussions to offer a classic print narrative. David Amsden’s “Never Mind the Pity” traces the elegant arc of the last year of a boy’s life and the musical collaborations that transformed his final days.
The story, from the October issue of New York magazine, resists many of [...]
Bursting into song and leaping out the window
November 4, 2009 – 2:04 pm
We often highlight stories from reporters who are well-known in the world of narrative journalism, but a lot of unsung writers slip narratives into print and online daily. Here are some moving stories with sharp scenes or imagery from three people we bet you’ve never heard of.
“Sacia’s Promise,” from Kaitlin Manry of The (Everett) Herald:
“She remembers waking up in the middle of the night, just 2 or 3 years old. Her nightgown is wet. So is her bed. She walks into the living room, calling for her mom. She’s not there. Sacia instead finds a stranger, a man, dividing piles of little white rocks spread across the coffee table. The pearly white stones are like baby teeth and crumble when he touches them. She runs back to her bed and stays up all night, kneeling on wet sheets, waiting for a mother who never comes.”
Narrative journalism’s future: fighting words in some places
November 2, 2009 – 3:18 pm
Blog posts and articles on narrative journalism pinged around the Halloween weekend like eyeballs at a zombie food fight—and according to Washingtonian.com, an actual fight broke out at The Washington Post. While the Post’s Henry Allen (a Pulitzer winner for criticism) was reportedly knocking down and punching a younger feature writer over a disagreement related [...]
Joel Achenbach and the storytellers’ union
October 30, 2009 – 3:42 pm
Lots of the usual suspects are blogging and Tweeting about Joel Achenbach’s piece on the future of narrative journalism that ran in yesterday’s Washington Post. Some people have excerpted interesting bits, such as the great line that “story is the original killer app,” while others have attempted to respond.
Today on the Storyboard, we wanted to [...]
The Moth’s Lea Thau on storytelling
October 30, 2009 – 3:40 pm
In some places, the spoken story is thriving. Last night in Boston, that 800-pound gorilla of live storytelling, the Moth, put on an event at the Tsai Performance Center. We decided to ask the Moth’s executive and creative director, Lea Thau, for her thoughts on storytelling. While some of her answers show the unique aspects of [...]
Tom Shroder, former Washington Post Magazine editor, on dinner plates and well-done narrative
October 28, 2009 – 2:03 pm
This week, I had a chance to talk by phone with Tom Shroder, who took a buyout from The Washington Post earlier this year. Shroder specializes in long-form narrative stories and recently launched his own editing site, and so I was curious what he would have to say about the current state of narrative journalism.
In our conversation, he dishes on a common mistake made by narrative freelancers, talks about the genesis of one of the best newspaper narratives ever written, and a offers up a considered defense of poop jokes. Here’s a taste:
Where a lot of narrative journalism went wrong was that it became all about the writing, and not about the details for the story and the facts behind it. People felt they could throw some words at people and dazzle. But even good writers need to start with an exceptional set of facts.
