AUDIO

Chosen by radio producer and editor Julia Barton, who writes Storyboard‘s Audio Danger column, and Julie Shapiro, artistic director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

“Poetry, Texas”

Producers: Pejk Malinovski and Falling Tree Productions

Pejk Malinovski is a New York-based, Denmark-born radio producer and poet, and he’s found his ideal subject in Poetry, Texas. His half-hour documentary for the BBC takes a wide-eyed look at a small East Texas community and finds much to wonder at. Malinovski’s narration is sparse but just right, as when he interviews a lonely man outside the town’s only gas station. The man, Malinovski tells us, has been diagnosed with cancer. Soon after we find out the man is clutching a pack of cigarettes. When he says “dime,” it drawls into “dawm.” “I wonder if anyone ever recorded this man’s voice,” Malinovski says. “And I shiver with the thought that this might be the last time that anyone does.” (nominated by Third Coast International Audio Festival artistic director Julie Shapiro)

“Retraction”

Producers: This American Life

This brutal self-takedown on the part of Ira Glass and This American Life also makes for gripping audio. Earlier this year, TAL achieved its most-downloaded episode when it excerpted Mike Daisey’s monologue about working conditions at Chinese plants that manufacture iPhones and iPads. But his story turns out to be conflated or downright false. Glass cedes much of the episode to Marketplace’s China correspondent, Rob Schmitz, as he does the shoe-leather reporting that rapidly takes apart Daisey’s account. It’s brave, truthful, and a model of transparent journalism –  though it begs some larger questions about why we fall for fabulous narratives over messy reality time and again.

“Grumpy Old Terrorists”

Producers: Pat Walters and Radiolab

Like This American Life, Radiolab struggled with its own ethics controversy this year: Hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich were excoriated for treatment of a Hmong interviewee in this episode (though to their credit, they did something rare in public radio and aired an interview gone awry). In general, it’s been fascinating to hear the show expand beyond science and take on the wider world with its trademark embrace of risk and ambiguity. Producer Pat Walters’ podcast short “Grumpy Old Terrorists” raises all kinds of questions about how our government, and all of us, respond to people who seem to be planning horrible things. (And for more on host Jad Abumrad’s insistence that the program grow and change, read his manifesto, punks.)

“Pike County, OH – As Black as We Wish to Be”

Producers: Lu Olkowski and State of the Re:Union

Independent producer Lu Olkowski stumbled upon a remarkable story in southern Ohio: a town where most people identify as “black” – and suffer N-word treatment by surrounding communities – although generations of intermarriage have rendered most residents completely “white” looking. Olkowski and State of the Re:Union host Al Letson take what could be just an absurd, uniquely American curiosity and go deep, letting us hear how the residents of Jacksonville, Ohio, have to make tough choices about identity and family.

“Artists Disturbed And Inspired By Syria’s Violence”

Producers: Kelly McEvers and NPR

It’s hard to highlight only one narrative out of Kelly McEvers’ coverage of the Middle East this year. Whether in Bahrain, Yemen, or Syria, she’s able to make us really feel what people are going through in this traumatized part of the world. One piece of hers I can’t get out of my head is a simple report on a performance in Beirut – a late-night, secretive set of monologues based on letters and stories from Syria’s war zones. And don’t miss the accompanying web feature on an artist who satirizes the Assad regime with finger puppets, at huge risk to himself.

MAGAZINES

Chosen by Paige Williams, writer, Storyboard editor, and Nieman Foundation for Journalism narrative writing instructor.

“Animals,” by Chris Jones, Esquire

At last count, journalists had produced four long narratives of the weird news out of Ohio – that a suicidal zookeeper had freed scores of tigers and bears and other animals before shooting himself – but none more poetically, or with more narrative tension, than Jones.

“The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador,” by Karen Russell, GQ

You may know Russell as the author of the short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swampladia!, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, but in her first long magazine narrative she proves herself an equally compelling teller of true stories. She doesn’t gild her sentences; she wires them.

“The Innocent Man,” by Pam Colloff, Texas Monthly

Colloff has become a one-woman justice league with her stories about wrongful imprisonment. With this two-parter, about a man accused of killing his wife, she continues the work, laying out the whole saga in straightforward prose that you can’t put down.   

“The Throwaways,” by Sarah Stillman, The New Yorker

It’s impossible to talk about the year’s most important work without including Sarah Stillman’s remarkable piece on the law enforcement community’s growing reliance on young confidential informants. Stillman focuses on the death of a 23-year-old drug informant named Rachel Hoffman (“She had never fired a gun or handled a significant stash of hard drugs. Now she was on her way to conduct a major undercover deal for the Tallahassee Police Department, meeting two convicted felons alone in her car to buy two and a half ounces of cocaine, fifteen hundred Ecstasy pills, and a semi-automatic handgun.”) but covers an entire American subculture of pawns.

“The Yankee Comandante,” by David Grann, The New Yorker

It’s a love story, a war story, an expat story, a mystery, a history lesson, music.

NEWSPAPERS

Chosen by the Tampa Bay Times‘ Ben Montgomery and Michael Kruse and Sports Illustrated’s Thomas Lake.

“Never Let Go,” by Kelley Benham French, the Tampa Bay Times

Not because we know her and love her, but because Kelley Benham French lived an amazing story and had the good sense to recognize that, and to go back and report the hell out of it.

“In Rust Belt, a teenager’s climb from poverty,” by Anne Hull, the Washington Post

Because Anne Hull is back on the Post and we missed her deep and empathetic immersion reporting so much.

“Former Black Panther patches together purpose in Africa exile,” by Christopher Goffard, the Los Angeles Times

Because of Goffard’s very last paragraph and all those that led to it.

“At the Corner of Hope and Worry,” by Dan Barry, New York Times

Because Dan Barry is the Homer of Americana.

“A teacher, a student and a 39-year-long lesson in forgiveness,” by Tom Hallman Jr., the Oregonian

Because a good feature story is about something universal, like an apology, and Hallman knew when to pay attention.

“Caballo Blanco’s Last Run: the Micah True Story,” by Barry Bearak, the New York Times

Because Micah True’s was an almost perfect death, if there is such a thing, and Bearak handled it masterfully, and the New York Times gave it the space it deserved.

“Life of a salesman,” by Eli Saslow, the Washington Post

Because this story about the shifting myth of the American dream made every last one of us wish we had thought of it and done it so well.

“The Princess of Matamoros,” by Mark Collette, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times

Because Collette found a love story, full of change and redemption, in a washed-up hell-raiser and told it with skill.

ONLINE

Chosen by Mark Armstrong, founder of Longreads and editorial director for Pocket.

When I started Longreads in 2009, more than 70 percent of the stories shared in the community were pieces that started out in a print magazine or newspaper. That’s changing, slowly. Print publishers are still responsible for the vast majority of the deeply reported pieces that are online, but it’s heartening to see so many online-only publishers, new and old, embrace in-depth storytelling on the web. Here are a few favorites from this year, in no particular order:

“Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, the Biggest Troll on the Web,” Adrian Chen, Gawker

Chen spent much of 2012 tracking down the real humans behind some of the anonymous and/or despicable characters of the web. And Gawker and sister publications Gizmodo and Deadspin already have an impressive track record with these stories.

“How A Career Ends: Nancy Hogshead-Makar, Olympic Swimming Gold Medalist,” Rob Trucks, Deadspin

The first-person account of an Olympic career, a violent attack, and what happened next.

“The Wedding,” Katherine Goldstein, Slate

The story of Will and Erwynn, the first gay couple to marry on a military base.

“Imagining Myself in Palestine,” Randa Jarrar, Guernica

A Palestinian-American writer attempts to fly to Israel to visit her sister.

“The Glorious Plight of the Buffalo Bills,” Ben Austen, Grantland

A forever disappointed fan base, a team that’s threatening to leave town … and Zubaz.

“Lost in Space,” Mike Albo, Narratively 

I have complicated feelings about Kickstarter and journalism – it feels like a sugar high for niche publishers – but I guess it works, because love Narratively, and I loved Mike Albo on navigating the online hookup scene.

“A Mormon Reporter on the Romney Bus,” McKay Coppins, BuzzFeed

This year, the most restrained, thoughtful story about Romney’s religion came from BuzzFeed.

“Grandpa Was a Baller,” Matt Kallman, The Classical

Another Kickstarter-backed publisher, still doing great work after its first year. Kallman digs into his grandfather’s past as a pro basketball player for the Chicago Stags in the 1940s.

Other online publishers I loved this year: The Rumpus, The Hairpin, SB Nation, The Verge, The Awl, The Billfold, The New Inquiry, Splitsider. Looking forward to in 2013: Matter.

Starlee Kine
Tackling Themes in Different Story Forms

Kine (photo by Tudor Vintiloiu, courtesy Decât o Revistă)

No one has talked about this but I find it really hard – all of it. I find writing really hard. I find coming up with stories really hard. I find really hard forcing yourself to make the ideas you come up with into stories. I want to talk about (how) I get through it.

One is: If there’s an idea I really like and I don’t get around to doing it really quick, it tortures me because I feel that the idea starts in your head, it can’t leave your head, it’s stuck in there. I honestly picture them like orphans, the ideas that I don’t get to. They feel like orphans that are just getting older without being adopted and they never go outside and they’re like fighting over who sleeps where and, like, showing each other the chore wheels. Their little faces are pressed against the glass, and they’re never going to go outside.

So I try to get my ideas out. I also think it’s really important to get them out fast because if they’re stuck in there you begin to hate them, and that’s bad too. So acting fast is really important, and I was going to tell you some tools on how to do that, but first I wanted to tell you how I started doing stories.

You guys, all know This American Life, the show? I started working for This American Life really by accident. I was in college and I was hating my writing classes, so I stopped going to them. And I was working in a bookstore across the street from my school and I would just read a lot of books and not do any of the writing stuff for school.

I lived in this apartment in the East Village and there was an old Ukrainian woman who lived right next to me; we shared a wall. She could hear everything and she got into her head that I was a drug kingpin; she decided that I was the head of the drug runners. She thought everyone was working for me; she thought that the whole building was employed by me. I babysat this 5-year-old kid and she thought he was a mule that I would use to sneak drugs in and out. She would put these signs around the building saying my name; and they were on pieces of neon rave flyers that she would stick up with gum and on the back write “Kine is selling drugs in apartment 3.” She’d stick them all over the apartment in these strategic places like on the front door of the building, above my mail box and on my front door. You couldn’t catch her; it was impossible. She would put it on my door and I would open it, take it off and close it. And then open it again, it will be there again. She was really old and really fast.

In order to graduate, I took this video class and I made a documentary about her. At that point I was so bored with my particular program, but because I was really obsessed with her, I was able to do it.  I was consumed with her and I became consumed with making this movie. I would stake out my neighbors across the hall, I would stake out their apartment, and film through the peephole. I would try to catch her on the act. And we got into a big fight on camera – we just started yelling at each other in the hall. I was really proud of this movie.

I used to have barbecues with the people who worked at the bookstore and I would have them come over. It was like an interactive thing where they would eat and then I would show them the movie. Then, I would take them all to the hall and show them her, and she would stand in the doorway with a flashlight shining on them. It was like an amusement park. It was really satisfying. And she deserved it because she was really mean.

This American Life was just starting out and someone told (them) about me and this lady. They called me up and said: “We want to come and talk to you.” There was this man named Paul Tough who appeared at my door one day and he basically came in and started interviewing me and I totally understood what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, immediately.

The way he was talking and the way he was asking me questions, he made me seem really interesting to myself – which I think a good interviewer does. It was just really so clarifying, and I ended up just trying to follow him. He then went to Canada. He was responsible for making the Readings section at Harper’s.

I became an intern at This American Life and then a producer. The reason I like journalism and telling stories so much is that I really do think it makes everything look more interesting. I don’t know what people do during the day, people who aren’t thinking about stories. Because if you’re bored or if you’re traveling and you don’t know what to do, you can just go out and at least you can tell yourself you’re looking for a story and everything automatically takes on this like extra, like kind of color to it.

At This American Life there are different kinds of story. We get a lot of pitches, a lot of people say, “This would make such a good This American Life story” (but) almost every time they are wrong, and I feel like it’s very confusing because I think people are really smart and they listen to it really carefully but usually the story they pitch is not the one that works and then I’ll be out to drinks or something with them and then they’ll tell me another story and that totally makes sense.

I feel sometimes people think too hard. They are trying so hard to compare it to a story they’ve already heard and it’s kind of off the mark.

I get really obsessed with certain writers and I read them over and over again. Usually I’m reading them because I’m enjoying it, but I get so intimidated by so many people. I feel like you have to stick with something until that awe falls off. You have to start off like a groupie and you have to become a critic. You have to know what is wrong about a story, too, and try to break it apart in order to understand how someone goes without doing it. I feel you can totally do that with This American Life stories, you can just listen to them, and make a list of every act and every part and it will start to make more sense.

There are different kinds of stories. We have the-giant-thing-that-happened story. It’s so obvious and you can’t really mess up the interview because there are all these different parts. Someone will pitch it and it will be like, “They started off…” We had this story where this girl was the pen pal to dictator Manuel Noriega. That is such an obvious no brainer kind of story – you just kind of go with it and put it together.

And then there are other ones that are the personality-driven stories. And then there’s the ones that we called the sheer-force-of-will stories. You have a concept and it didn’t exist anywhere and you have to make it exist. It came out of your head and you have to force it into existence. Those are kind of my favorite stories, because it’s so satisfying to create something completely out of scratch, and I’m going to play some tape from one of those stories.

This is about a breakup I had, and this is the beginning of that story.

That story came out because it all happened, it was very true.

I was sitting there and I was so sad but the whole time I was trying to think there has to be a way to make this into a story. I thought nobody would listen to it, I didn’t understand if it will be of any good or anything. It just felt like it’s such a good feeling when you do a story.

I don’t know if I believe that every single thing that happens in your life is worth talking about and writing about endlessly. That was just a breakup, a very ordinary breakup, not much happened in it, and I feel like if you can start at that point with something that is universal and very real to you, and then figure out a way to press it further and add the extra layers to it, that could be a less daunting way to figure out what you want to say sometimes.

And it’s always really good to have a question, too. I did another story, about my parents getting divorced. Again, my parents’ divorce was pretty ordinary but I wanted to find out why my dad stayed with my mom, who had done all these terrible things to him, and I feel I so sincerely needed to know the answer that it presses further than self-indulgence: “I need to talk about my messed-up childhood.” I think you have to be very clear about what you’re going into an interview doing. If it feels kind of small, figure out the ways to make it bigger.

Lawrence Weschler, who’s a great writer, said that whenever he gets stuck on writing something, he has all these blocks and he starts building houses out of these blocks. He did a story on a carpenter and he had the carpenter build him a custom set. I find when I’m stuck it’s always good to try to go to a different medium entirely because it kind of clears your head and then you can come back. So, I have this friend who’s an illustrator/animator and we’ve done a lot of collaborations together.

We did this thing – it was supposed to be narrative, or us telling stories, and he was going to animate them. The first night we got the offer we had 24 hours in order to make the pitch. He had to draw, we had to come up with tape and everything; and I wanted to play for you that weird 24-hours thing that we did because I feel it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. Everything afterwards is really polished, but for me it’s just a pure creative process.

I guess the point is that you should just do lots of stuff because why not? It actually helps and you’ll feel so much better when you have a bunch of weird stuff instead of just sitting there wondering about the perfect story you’re supposed to be working on, or obsessing about if someone is going to call you back.

Even while you’re waiting for stuff you can just be constantly trying to apply all your other storytelling abilities into other strange things. And you can collaborate.

The other last collaboration I wanted to show you is this other weird thing.

This is a strange art project. People are asking about Internet versus print, but there are all different kinds of mediums that you can use if you want to express yourself in narrative form. This is a project called “The Thing” and you subscribe, and four times a year you get a mystery package designed by a writer or an artist. Dave Eggers did a shower curtain, which is hanging in my bathroom. And I did one.

If they choose you, the people who created the magazine will mass-produce any object that you want; they will make it for you. I was very excited because I find writing can be so intangible, and radio is also very intangible, so I was very excited by the idea of having a physical object. They made this cutting board; and it was supposed to be a heartbreak cutting board, because when you go through a breakup your kitchen feels very sad, very lonely and you think about the ghosts of the meals that you made.

You’re supposed to cut onions on it. You have crying instructions with a picture of McNulty from The Wire crying. On the back of the instructions it says you’re supposed to cut the onions to get the tears flowing and the more you use it and cut into the words like the pain is supposed to fade away.

I’m a big believer in the conceptual idea that makes sense. I don’t like random, meaningless stuff. I think there should be logic to these things. And for me, this has logic. Even McNulty has logic.

I’ve tried to think about what interests me, because you start to see themes in so many different writers. I think I like productive dwelling, stuff that makes me feel bad or upset or confused, and I try to turn it into a positive experience. The story doesn’t have to be positive. But I like to turn it into a product. This is why I’m writing a book about self-help, which I hate so much; so I’m trying to work my way through understanding it by this book.

The only other tip I have for you right now: I find that it always helps me, if I actually have an idea, to physically write it down instead of just keeping it up in my head.

I did a similar talk for a bunch of illustrators and they were all drawing and stuff, and I said that if they wanted they could mail me their ideas, so that I can kind of adopt them. It’s very cheesy, but I can keep them safe. So, if you guys want – this could be corny – you can mail me your idea, and I will keep it very safe on a display in my apartment, I will look at it all the time and wonder if you’re actually doing it. So, it’s up to you.

Starlee Kine is a radio producer, writer and pop culture critic at work on a book about self-help.

Mike Sager
Suspending Disbelief

Sager (photo by Alex Tizon)

I wanted to talk today about suspending disbelief. It’s a very important aspect of my work. I’m just gonna read about it a little bit first and then we’ll talk about it some.

This story’s called “A Journey to the Heart of Whiteness.” It was written quite a long time ago, in 1995, when America was in the beginnings of a war on terrorism within its own country. There were all of these groups of white people who were threatening America and wanted to bring it down. I got sent to Idaho, which is in sort of the northwest part of the country. At the time, there were 1.1 million people in the entire state. There were 9,000 Asians and 3,000 black people. And we had this period of time where soon there will be a bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, in 1996, and prior to that was a big standoff in Idaho between government snipers and these people who didn’t believe in government, and they killed this woman holding a baby. Then there was a famous case – I’m sure you’ve heard of it – of O.J. Simpson killing his wife. The main detective, Mark Fuhrman, he was basically debunked as a witness because they found this tape where he was screaming, “Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger,” all the time, and he moved up to this area where I was visiting too. So my editor at GQ said, “Go up to Idaho and see what the white people are doing.”

The dog came charging out of the shadows of a little orchard by the barn, a dun-colored blur churning up leaves and sod, making a bee line for my SUV. He threw himself at the driver’s door, rocking the fancy suspension of the rented four-wheel drive, snarling and barking and fuming foamy spittle, raking the glass with his nails.

Thankfully they’d been considerate enough to mention Hans when I made my appointment. Wheeling into the driveway at the two tall white-washed pines that stood watch over the entrance to the compound, I rolled up my window. Juddering past the grove where a flock of turkeys pecked the grass beneath a hand painted swastika, I double checked the electric locks. ‘Hans don’t cotton much to strangers,’ the reverend’s assistant had said. He also said that the reverend was very, very, very busy and that before I could talk with him I should just come out and pick up a press kit. The kit cost a hundred and fifty dollars, ‘Cash only, please.’ If after doing the reading I still had questions I could request an audience with the reverend Richard Butler himself – the 78-year-old founder of the Church Jesus Christ-Christian and its political arm, The Aryan Nations.

The assistant, a guy named Jerry, had a childlike voice, reminiscent of Lennie’s in Of Mice and Men.  He gave elaborate directions to the compound, two notepad pages full of turns and land-marks and descriptions to get me to a place that ended up being a right turn of a major highway and two more right turns onto a clearly marked road. Jerry concluded his directions with the warning about Hans, a little story about the time they’d tried to build a cage to hold the prize purebred German shepherd imported from the father land to sire a super race of guard dogs. First, they’d tried a cyclone fence with razor wire. Hans simply opened the latch. Then they secured the gate with a thick rope. Hans chewed through it in minutes. The final solution, proposed by one of the kinsmen – as their members are called – was an electrified fence surrounded by a mote. Hans tore the whole deal down, taking the full charge, shorting out the electrical system of the compound. Since then, whenever that kinsman comes to visit, Hans goes into a lather. ‘He remembers that guy. He knows his car and the smell and he don’t like him, he got his number,’ Jerry said.

I lit a cigarette, turned up the radio, tried to ignore all the barking and growling, the fur and gums and yellow teeth sliming the window, the nails scratching and screeching against the glass. It was a beautiful day in Hayden Lake, in Northern Idaho, an area that’s called a panhandle — a thin, majestic strip of fir trees, and mountains, and deep glacial lakes between Montana, Washington and Canada. The sky was a color I remembered from grade school, when we mixed our own paints from powder, a pure, royal blue, with thick cottony storybook clouds and long, transecting jet trails, glowing with the deep glowing light of the afternoon sun. A slice of heaven.

I was married at the time. I had a small kid and I was living in Washington, D.C. There were a bunch of different splinter groups in Northern Idaho; it wasn’t just one group. There were white supremacists, there were libertarians, there were Christian patriots, there were evangelicals. But they all agreed the world belonged to people with white skin. Everybody thought the world should be just white, basically. It was a very interesting sort of area to be in, and in that very moment, while I was gone from my home in the nation’s capital, there was a million-man march going on back there, called by the black civil rights leader Reverend Farrakhan. And so, as I was in the panhandle of Idaho, trying to find white people, there were a million black people coming to my neighborhood. It got me thinking. I’d been in the panhandle for a week and I hadn’t seen one black face. No Hispanics, no blacks, no Asians, there was no one. There was a sign that said, “Idaho is what America used to be:”

Over the past week I noticed that with my olive skin and deep nostrils, my shaved head and earing I was drawing stares. People on the streets had this way of circumnavigating me. Women in line at McDonald’s eyed me and hugged their purses. Kids giggled. I shrugged it off. I wore a hat. It didn’t matter what they thought of me, I was here to find out about them. Had my wife, my ex-wife, been with me, I know she would not have the same attitude. Her dad is a creole born in Louisiana, in a town named for its clan leader. His grandparents were a French woman, a jet black son of a slave, a half black half Cherokee woman and a full Cherokee man. My wife’s mom, who emigrated from England as a young girl, is the daughter of Russian Jews etc., etc. My parents are from the South, from Russia and Lithuania. They also grew up dodging rocks and epithets. My mother still bears the emotional scars of living in a town of blond pug-nosed 4H queens. My son is also olive, a beautiful testimony to genetic mixture with a halo of curly hair, his grandpa’s high forehead, his mom’s almond eyes, his dad’s full bottom lip and talent for craftiness.

So as I waited in the car, the office door finally opened and a big belly, pink-cheeked man came down the three stairs. He was in his 60s with white hair. He wore a blue uniform shirt with a leather sash hooked from the belt to the shoulder. He took Hans by the collar, stashed him into an old VW bus, and made his way to my car. I rolled down the window and waved. He scrutinized me with watery blue eyes through thick glasses.

‘Are you white?’ he asked – by his voice, by his generally befuddled mien. I guess this was Jerry, the reverend’s assistant.

According to Aryan Nations philosophy, white people are the true descendants of the ancient Israelites, in direct line from Adam and Eve. Jews, they believe, descended from Cain, who was born not of Adam and Eve but of Eve and a serpent. Cain’s children fled into the woods, mated with beasts and produced the nonwhite, mud races.

To Jerry then, I was a mud person. A miscegenator, married to a mongrel, father of a mongrel. And I was a hymietown-based liberal member of the “Jews media,” one of the conspiratorial arms of Zionist occupational government that was leading the country to ruin.

I smiled, held out my palms and inspected them and then turned my hands over and inspected them some more. ‘Looks white to me,’ I joked. ‘What do you think?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Jerry said quite seriously. ‘You look like a Jew to me.’

Thankfully, I’d done my research. I knew there were twelve Aryan Nations. Holland, Spain, Iceland, Great Britain, The United States, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Germany, France and Italy.

I smiled at Jerry. ‘I’m Italian,’ I said.

I haven’t read this in a million years, but I wanted a way to talk about this whole thing. Suspending disbelief has become over the years an important quality [in my writing]. My parents grew up being a minority in the South of the United States. They raised us in a sort of a Jewish ghetto in Maryland, a suburban place that you can imagine from any American movie. But what it was, was comfortable. A place where you knew where you belonged. Also because my parents weren’t really from there, I had the sense that I needed to see other things. And from an early age I started taking the bus downtown in Baltimore. Has anyone seen the show The Wire? That’s where I used to go for fun. It gave me this sense that there was something out there. And I think possibly because my wanderings might have coincided with me smoking pot back in 1969. Pot was like a great equalizer, so I could go to the ghetto, go to where all the hippies were. And we all passed a joint together and it was cool. I wasn’t afraid of them, they weren’t afraid of me. Before that, all we knew in my neighborhood about black people was that they came to clean your house. I mean my mother was raised in a small town in Virginia and she had, you know all those old movies where they had a black nanny for the child? She had this black woman who took care of her. But it was regarded as a person of a certain sort, not an equal, even though it was a lot of love there.

There is the First Amendment that causes journalism to be allowed but which has nothing to do with the things that we are trying to accomplish in our sort of journalism, where we want to scrape a person’s insides; we want to know what you’re thinking. I can look into your records, I can find out your finances, your taxes, whatever, your arrest warrants, but I have no right to ask you, “How did it feel when that girl turned you down?” Or any of the millions of questions that really make a story so perfect.

I came up as copy boy at the Washington Post and I kind of worked my own way into the paper by hook or by crook, but I really didn’t belong there. Everybody there had gone to Harvard. There was one woman who was the great-granddaughter of a president; there was another guy whose father was James Dickey, the poet laureate of the United States. There was Bob Woodward, who was my boss. It’s like there’s all these people. You know them all from American media and then here was I, who just lost all my hair the first year. The thing was that I was willing to do the things that these people who were from good families weren’t inclined to do, or maybe they were off that night.

It’s funny, when you go into waiting tables, they have a thing that’s called “shadowing.” You’re not even allowed to wait a table, you have to shadow someone, and they have to wait tables and you go around with them to learn how to wait tables. But journalism, I never knew what to ask, and I still don’t know what to ask. My reaction to that has just been to shut up, be quiet, be small, and if something drops, I pick it up. Just pick it up. I’m here to see what it’s like to be you.

My technique is to spend hours with the people I write about. It is really easy to explain now; it was harder in the old days. Today I just say, “I’m a reality show with no cameras, just me.” Or you can say I act like the anthropologist Margaret Mead. I pull up a log by the fire, sit there. I drop my prejudices and let people be themselves. I observe and try to understand. It doesn’t matter if I agree with them.

If you don’t yell back at the politician that you hate, if you don’t yell back at the TV while he speaks, you’re gonna be in a better position to hear what he or she is saying. If you go ahead and feel okay about letting a person act like a male chauvinist pig even though it hurts your better sensibilities, maybe you’ll be able to understand his motivation. It doesn’t make it right, but the world is full of people who have what I like to call the different constellations of reality. They put shit together, and they fucking believe it a certain way. Like, for instance, they believe they’re going to Heaven and once they get there they’ll be playing the harp. People believe that. People fight over that. They go to war over religion. We all think that we know the truth. But the real truth is that there are many versions of the truth. It is our job to try and understand.

Mike Sager is an Esquire writer at large and former Washington Post staff writer, Rolling Stone contributor and GQ writer at large. His story “The Man Who Never Was” won the National Magazine Award for profile writing. He and Walt Harrington have just published an e-anthology, The Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Literary Journalists.

Tizon (photo by Tudor Vintiloiu, courtesy Decât o Revistă)

Alex Tizon
Telling Your Own Story

I’m here to talk about personal history because I just wrote my first personal history, a memoir, and, of course, that makes me an authority on the subject, right? I’m going to talk about my process. I just finished the manuscript a week before this trip here, so I’m still actually still processing my own process.

I was in newspapers for 20-something years, for the Seattle Times, the L.A. Times, and newspapers tend to train first-person writing right out of you. It’s frowned upon. About five years ago I got this itch to write a book. I just wanted to try something longer than what I’d been doing, so I spent six months putting together a book proposal. I gave it to an agent, and he distributed it to all these publishers. It was a 100-page proposal, a little book in itself. It went nowhere. I tried not to get discouraged, and I rewrote it — the same topic, using a completely different approach and different characters. Now I had two book proposals in my house. Then an author friend of mine read the proposals and he said: “You know, the themes that you’re touching are so personal. Why don’t you just write it as a memoir?”

I wrote a third book proposal: same topic, except I wrote it in a way that it would be kind of a memoir. Agent sent it out, and three major publishing houses responded right away. Knopf, Norton, and Houghton Mifflin all wanted it and, of course I was delighted. I celebrated for three months. And when I got sober, finally, I sat down and I tried to begin, and over a period of three weeks it dawned on me that I really didn’t know how to write a memoir.

The proposal gave an idea of what I wanted to do, but I didn’t really know how to do it. I’m a typical writer and I’m always looking for ways to procrastinate. What’s more terrifying than that blank first page of a major project? So, I spent the next six months reading memoirs. I read every memoir that I had never read, and re-read them, and studied them. I studied them to see how they structured their narratives, how did went about telling their stories. I critiqued them.

My first tip, if you have never written a personal history or memoir, is to get your hands on the memoirs that moved you and to study them for a sense of what’s possible. And then my second tip is to forget them completely. Absorb what you can but then forget them. If you don’t, you might find yourself  trying to emulate the writers you’ve been reading. That could prevent you from telling your story in your own way. One of the secrets of storytelling is finding your own way to tell the story. There’s a certain point when you have to say to yourself, “This is the story I have to tell, this is the way I tell it and come what may, come what may.”

The story that I ended up writing actually was very untraditional in its structure. It was only part memoir. It was also part history, part sociology, and even a little bit of science. It ended up that my own story was just the skeleton of the larger story that I wanted to write, which was about race and manhood.

One reason I chose to do it this way was that race and manhood were just too large, as topics. Race by itself is this incredible universe that you can spend your whole life studying, and then you add manhood on top of that? I don’t have a brain big enough to wrap around such large topics. My approach was to address them through my own experiences. My so-called memoir is really a series of interrelated and chronologically  ordered essays or short stories that all touch on various aspects of race and manhood.

I was about two or three chapters into it before I even realized what the book was actually about. A writer friend kept asking me, “What’s your book about?” and I’d say “Well, it’s about race and manhood and my experiences with it.” That was my easy answer. But she kept asking, “But what is it really about?” Her asking kind of bothered me. She was asking a question that I hadn’t really grappled with. She was asking: “What is the universal theme of your book?”

The theme, I came to realize, was shame. That’s what drove the narrative. The topic was race and manhood, but the theme that gave it momentum, that gave it the narrative engine, was shame.

It was good for me to know that. I guess that would be another tip. If you are thinking about writing a personal history or a memoir, it would serve your process if you knew early on what was the theme you were working with. I try to make things simple in my own head, so I reduce themes to one word. Things like love, loss, betrayal. I love betrayal. Betrayal gets me going. Triumph. They don’t all have to be sad, right? I happen to like sad. I’m one of those people that actually wouldn’t be turned off by someone saying they’re writing a book about shame. Actually, I would think the conversation just got interesting. Talk about shame! Yeah! I want to hear your shame! I want to share my shame with you!

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last three years. I’ve been working on this book, and being this introspective, grumpy creature in front of the typewriter. Have you guys seen The Lord of the Rings? You know the character Gollum? I became like that because I literally had to close myself off for a few years and go into a room, and write about all these things that maybe I have been kind of avoiding for most of my life. That’s why this book that I just finished was one of the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and one of the most gratifying.

It was hard because it went against all my training. All my training as a daily journalist was to move away from thinking about and talking about yourself, and using the I word. It’s a good point, really, because one of the potential pitfalls of writing about yourself is being self-indulgent without purpose. The other pitfall is the temptation to exaggerate or to fabricate, to make the story better. One of my favorites quotes from Mark Twain is: “When I was young I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.” It’s a useful thing to get acquainted with the limits of your own memory. All you can do, as a person writing a personal history, is do what Walt Harrington is going to tell you to do a little bit later on: You do your best; you want to be as honest to your own recollection as possible, acknowledging that there are different points that might disagree with yours. The risk is that you embarrass yourself or hurt yourself and, worse, you can embarrass other people, you can harm them in a way they didn’t deserve. It’s a serious thing to consider when you’re writing a personal history.

One of the potential rewards is that if I tell my story as honestly and vividly as possible, maybe I can give expression to an experience that other people have also experienced but haven’t had the words for.

Let me just end by telling one more little story. I bought a house, my first house, about 10 years ago. It was a cool old house, a cool house with lots of little spaces. It needed a lot of work. From the very first days I heard skittering up in the ceiling, and we knew animals were living there. We hoped they were mice. One day I was in the backyard and I saw this gigantic rat run from the middle of the yard to underneath our deck. My wife said, “Do something! I don’t want to be in the house with that thing running around in the ceiling.”

So, being a man, I went to Home Depot. I went and bought a box of rat poison. These were green cubes that felt like rubber, 20 of them in a box. I’m a journalist, so I didn’t read the instructions. We were about to go on vacation so I took these cubes and I just threw them under the deck, exactly where I saw this rat go in. Then we went away for two weeks.

Oh, man. We came back and we opened the door to our house and this horrible smell hit us like a hammer. I knew exactly what it was. I knew that there was a dead rat somewhere. We didn’t know where. We ended up calling some pest control people and they came and spent a few hours looking at our house and said, “You have underneath your deck an opening where rodents can go in and they can go right into the ceiling.” They said, “We believe that there’s a dead rat inside this thing, and the only way we could get in is for you to take out a part of your ceiling.” My wife said, “Do it! What are you waiting for?”

I used the sledgehammer and broke the ceiling open, and sure enough there was a dead rat, big giant rat, about 2 pounds laying there. And then I stuck my head into the hole, and I looked around, and I saw these silhouettes that looked suspiciously like other dead rats. I took out the rest of the ceiling and we found another 10 dead rats. It turned out the rats were also in our walls. I ended up demolishing our entire basement. We stopped counting after we found 30 dead rats, rotting.

Why am I telling you this story? There’s a metaphor here. Let me see if I can make it work. Shame was like a dead rat in my psyche. I spent most of my life knowing that there was something I had to deal with, but being a typical shallow TV-watching American, I ignored it and hoped it would find its own way out of my psyche. That didn’t happen. It kept bothering me. It made me uncomfortable, restless. I always felt a sense of exile, of being an outcast, and I carried that around with me. Writing this book allowed me – actually it forced me – to go into those never-visited corners in my basement, the basement of my soul. It allowed me to pick something up that I had never identified before and to bring it outside and look at it, for the first time, for what it was – which in my case was shame, a deep shame of who I was, a deep shame of the race of people that I was born into. That’s a hard thing to live with. I’m still not completely free of it. I still live with it. But at least I know what it is now. I know the dimensions of it, and I know what it is, and I can deal with that.

Alex Tizon is a former Seattle Times and Los Angeles Times staff writer and contributor to Newsweek, 60 Minutes and Sierra magazine. He shared a 1997 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He is now on the University of Oregon faculty. His first book, Big Little Man, is scheduled for release this year.

So why do I keep returning?

I like messy, underdog places. They teach me something that seems to matter about the human spirit. More to the point, out of these shambles rises a narrative journalism movement that is as inspiring as it is surprising.

For two years now, a small band of young believers has defied a national sense of lethargy and a severe lack of funding in order to host “The Power of Storytelling” conference. This year’s marquee speakers: Esquire writers Chris Jones and Mike Sager, The Atavist’s Evan Ratliff, Radiolab’s Pat Walters, This American Life’s Starlee Kine, Frontline’s Travis Fox, Intimate Journalism author Walt Harrington and two Pulitzer winners, Alex Tizon and me. The day-and-a-half event drew almost 300 people – twice as many as last year’s inaugural conference. A few were working journalists, but many more came from corporate communications, public relations, education, government, law and even medicine –  all curious about this American thing we call true storytelling.

Lupsa (photo courtesy Decât o Revistă)

The conference was born of an even bigger act of faith: the launch of Decât o Revistă, a quarterly magazine that takes on taboo issues, dares to raise its voice against indifference and dares to have a personality. Cristian Lupsa founded the magazine four years ago, after he returned to his native Romania with a master’s degree from the Missouri School of Journalism and saw nothing like the journalism he aspired to practice. He had no money, no business or management experience; no assurance that anyone in Bucharest would understand his magazine, buy it or advertise in it. But he gathered a few close and like-minded talents who also wanted to believe. Together, they planted the seeds of possibility. Together, they keep that possibility watered.

Like Lupsa’s magazine, ”The Power of Storytelling” is held together by creative desperation. A few dollars from the U.S. embassy. A sponsor’s name on give-away notebooks. A hotel that trades speakers’ rooms for an ad in the magazine and a banner at the conference. Friends and more friends (and a few relatives) who provide rides and meals (oh, the meals!) and computer help and trips to museums and trips to nightclubs and trips to painted churches and enthusiasm that should be archived in museums and painted on the walls of churches, and is toasted over drinks in nightclubs.

I live in a country far more privileged, yet where newsrooms are under siege, conferences fold for lack of paid attendance and the industry news can read like a dirge. Then I go to Romania, the shambles that it is, invited by a group of young journalists with no Constitution to protect them, no history to stand on, no example to learn from and no guarantee of anything. And there I find a family of like-minded believers, a plug-in to inspiration and, oddly, a seat at the table with the masters.

Consider joining us next year, sometime in early October. You might be surprised, and inspired, by what you discover there.

— Jacqui Banaszynski

In Thursday’s post, we gave a taste of the talks. Today begin the full texts, lightly edited for clarity and space: Banaszynski on the future of storytelling; Ratliff on moving from magazine writer to digital entrepreneur; and, next week, Tizon on writing your own story; Harrington on keeping the “non” in “nonfiction;” Jones on why stories matter; Sager on shutting up and listening; Kine on story forms and theme; Walters on the beauty of ambiguous endings. A very special thanks to Lupsa for sharing this material with Storyboard.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Writing on the Rocks, Writing on the Stars 

Banaszynski (photo by Alex Tizon)

This is amazing. Can’t thank you enough for being here, and for giving us the privilege of working with you. We’re struggling in the U.S. with journalism these days, and so whenever I’m in a place where I’m with people who are absolutely passionate about this work it helps me remember why I care about it so much.

We have a tradition in the U.S. in journalism called the obituary. And I’ve asked whether or not that’s a tradition in Romanian media and I found that it is quite different. That you do paid death notices – and we do that in the U.S. too, but for years and years and years, especially in smaller papers, anybody who died in a community got an obituary written by the newspaper. Bigger newspapers only do obituaries of famous people, because they can’t possibly write about everybody. But what’s happened over the years is that those paid death notices have gotten longer and longer because people are desperate to tell the life stories of their loved ones.

Every journalist who studies in a journalism program or starts as an entry-level reporter in the United States cuts their teeth on obituaries. They all hate it. Right? ’Cause why would you want to call up the widow of the guy who just died and say, “Can I talk to you about your dead husband?” So young people get very nervous about it until they realize that people are desperate to tell the stories of people they love. And some of the finest writers in America, I believe, learned how to write the way they write because of writing obituaries.

Unless you control the obituary you write yourself, most news organizations work with funeral homes and they have a formula for how to write an obituary. You have to start with, you know, “They died on certain day and such and such,” and then you do a chronology of their life. Mostly a list of their accomplishments, what they achieved, and then you end with who survived them.

Why do I tell you this?

Well, obituaries to me are the ultimate story. They’re the last things ever said about somebody. And the formula that we’ve built is a formula that I think has had advantages but also is a formula that I learned the power of.

My mother died four years ago this month, and I wrote her obituary. I wish I had done the same thing when my father died six years before her, or when my oldest brother was killed by a 16-year-old driver seven years before that. But my father’s and my brother’s death caught us by surprise. We weren’t in an emotional state – any of us in my family – to sit down and write their story. So we did fill-in-the-blanks obituaries. They were adequate at the time, just one more task to be checked off a very exhausting list of emotional tasks. Those of you who have lost somebody you love, you know how exhausting those days are. How much there is to be done. But looking back at my father’s and my brother’s fill-in-the-blanks obituaries I realize that they told me what they did in their life, but they never told me who they were.

When my mother died it was different. No less painful, certainly, but her death did not come to us as a surprise. We had spent years chasing a long and dizzying descent, watching her lose herself to dementia. We had, my brothers and my sisters-in-law and I, changed her soiled diapers. I lived with her for the last several weeks before (she went to) a care home, and I got to the point where I had to sleep on the floor outside her bedroom door. She took to wandering in the middle of the night. And we knew we were in trouble when I received a phone call from a police officer – I was at a conference somewhere, and a police officer called me at 1 in the morning, and said they had her in psych lockup because they had found her wandering on the freeway. She was 80 years old and she was trying to go home to the family farm, because she wanted to be with her mother and father again.

So I went home to stay with her until we found a place that could care for her. And because she was a wanderer we had to figure out ways to keep her safe. And I started by thinking if I just left the door open I could hear her. But she was really, really clever. So then I started piling up empty soda cans in front of the door. She still got out. She somehow would get up in the middle of the night and sneak to that front door and she was so desperate to go home, to the family farm that didn’t exist anymore, that she would dismantle those soda cans one by one, so I couldn’t hear her, and leave the house. The only thing I could do was sleep on the floor in front of her bedroom, so if she left in the night she at least had to trip over me, and we would negotiate her return to bed.

I also had to take to reminding her that she had been married. That, yes, she had children. She didn’t remember that. And that the photos on the wall in our living room were photos of people she knew. She would take the photos off the wall and bring them to me and say, “Who are this people and why do I have a picture of them?” The photos were of her oldest son and his wife and their three children. All of this played out over about seven years, and the last two or three were pretty critical. So when death finally took my mother we weren’t so shocked that we couldn’t remember her life. If anything, we had a chance to lose her and grieve for her as she lived, and therefore when she finally died we were truly able to celebrate the life before that.

Now interestingly, when I wrote her obit I realized that because she was a woman of her generation – therefore a homemaker – she had done less in a catalog sense than my father or my brother, who both had careers, who were both accomplished in the community. But her obituary, after I wrote it, actually captured a richer sense of her life. And a richer history than I was able to catch for either my father or my brother.

I’m not gonna dwell on that history, I just want to introduce her to you for a second. This is my mother just a few weeks before we put her in a care home, and she’s with her first great-grandchild. He’s now 5. By this point my mother couldn’t remember my name. She never remembered his name when we came to bring him to visit. And one of the interesting things that happened was we watched this young child grow and develop and gain skills just as we watched my mother lose hers. So as my nephew is gaining language, gaining the ability to relate to people, my mother was losing the ability to walk, losing the ability to talk and finally she lost the ability to eat. Her body no longer remembered how to swallow.

One of the things that happened when I spent time with my mother those last several weeks was she’d look at her hands and she’d pull at them, and she’d say to me, “Something’s wrong, something’s wrong.” And I thought she was in pain, and I tried to figure it out, and finally – it’s harder to get stories out of people when they can’t relate to you the way we do as adults – finally I realized that the reason my mother thought something was terribly wrong with her hands was because when she looked down she saw the hands of an 80-year-old, even though she still felt like she was 17.

And indeed, as the weeks went on, I’d get up in the morning, I’d feed her her breakfast – she didn’t know how to pour cereal anymore – and she’d say to me, “Can you take me home today? You’re a really nice lady, but I think it’s time for me to go home and I think my mother and father would be worried. And I wanna go back home, to the farm.”

As I said, the farm was long gone and her parents were long dead. And so every day I got in a habit of taking her to the cemetery where her parents were buried, and we would sit on the cemetery stones and I’d let her tell stories, because she remembered things from when she was 8.

My goal isn’t to have you know my mother but to illustrate my belief that the smallest stories, when told well and honestly and with care, have enormous power in our lives. One story sparks another, which sparks another. The story of one becomes the story of many. The story of them becomes the story of us. Those stories, shared, help us understand ourselves and each other, and help us find our way in the world.

In my mother’s obituary I wrote about the Barbie doll clothes that she used to knit and sew. You guys have Barbie dolls here? My mother was a seamstress. She was a homemaker, but she could sew, she knit, she crocheted, and she made Barbie doll clothes for all of the girls in my village when we were all growing up playing with Barbie dolls. I had little ice-skating outfits and little ball gowns, all that my mother made. After our neighbors read her obituary, they suddenly went up into their attics and down into their basements, and pulled out boxes that had been stored away 50 years earlier, and brought out the Barbie doll clothes, and called their daughters and remembered the times when their daughters where 5 and 6 and 8, playing with those clothes.

One of the women, who was my mother’s age, came to the funeral home the night before the services, and brought me a box of those clothes. And her daughter showed up, and her daughter’s daughter, and we sat and told stories about what it was like to grow up during that time.

In my mother’s obituary I wrote of the afghans, the blankets that she crocheted and knit as wedding gifts. Everybody in my family has a knitted or crocheted blanket from my mother. And a cousin of mine, who was an ordained minister, led the services at my mother’s funeral, and while she was leading the service she held the blanket that my mother had knit for her own wedding, 30 years earlier. Held it in her arms and built her service around the notion of being wrapped in the comfort of God, in the comfort of community and in the comfort of family in times of grief. All because I had mentioned in a story that my mother knit blankets for people’s weddings.

I wrote of the pie and coffee that were always waiting in my mother’s kitchen when my father or his colleagues would come home, tired and dirty from fighting a fire or reconnecting downed electrical lines after a storm. Now, at the funeral, over pie and coffee, the old men who had once worked in those crews stepped forward to tell their own tales of those times. They seemed to remember their own stories as they remembered my mother’s. Again, it’s not my mother’s specific story that matters except to those of us who loved her.

I would encourage you all to think, what is the story you would tell about your mother or someone you love? And then, how do you bring that same care and the same sense of storytelling in everything you do?

It is what the telling and the hearing of stories teach us that we need to pay attention to, as much as the craft of telling those stories.

True stories told with care for the subject and care for the craft touch us in ways little else does. That has been true since man first took ochre to rocks. I trust it will be true when we learn to write on the stars.

I did not set out to become a storyteller. I started in newspapers, 30 years ago, far more interested in reporting than in writing. Reporting gave me license to be curious, and to be constantly learning. Writing was the price I had to pay to let people know all this cool stuff that I had learned. Writing was painful and lonely for me. And frankly, I wasn’t very good at it. I didn’t know it while it was happening, but I was lucky. My first newsrooms were small ones that were more invested in their communities than in winning big awards. We ran hard and somehow slapped out a newspaper every day – each reporter filing multiple reports for multiple editions, a lot like we do today online.

My editors worried more about what I wrote than how I wrote. Did I get to the right sources, did I have my facts straight, was I ahead of TV? But since no one told me what to do – we weren’t really taught at the time, we just learned on the job – no one told me what not to do. So in between county commission meetings and government sessions and crime briefs and stories about budgets, I tried to write the kinds of stories that I loved to read. Stories that I found on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, magazine pieces from Esquire or Vanity Fair or Sports Illustrated, true versions of the fiction I could never put down as a child. I even spent a couple of years devouring everything Stephen King wrote, all of his horror stories, trying to figure out how he kept me turning the pages late at night.

I moved to bigger newsrooms but for a long time our work stayed anchored to fairly traditional news beats: sports, politics, taxes, labor, the environment. I spent time covering business, and I spent times covering sports. I was never in a position to indulge solely in the topics or the kinds of stories I really wanted to write. That too proved lucky. I learned to be interested in things that I never would have been drawn to on my own. I learned to be curious not for my own sake, but for the sake of readers who counted on me to be where they couldn’t. And my writing began to take shape out of a keen desire to communicate. If I spent time struggling at the keyboard – and the keyboard’s always a struggle for me – I wanted that struggle to have a purpose. I wanted to reach an audience. To help them understand something, help them feel compassion or outrage or joy. Transport them for a few minutes.

It also proved lucky because in order to do the kind of work I naturally lean towards, I had to find stories. Not just articles, but stories. And I think there’s a difference. And I had to find those stories in the thicket of all those institutional beats. I could report the dollars that divided workers and management in a big meatpackers’ strike. Or I could find the family in that strike that was divided, because the father worked on the kill floor and the daughter worked for the boss in the corporate office. How do they resolve a strike when it sits in the center of who they are as a family? I could chronicle the takedowns and the final score of an Olympic wrestling match. Or I could sit in the stands with the identical twin brother who sacrificed his own medal dreams so his brother could be out on the mat and win silver. Much more interesting than the score of the match was the score that these brothers kept with each other.

And during the crucible times of the AIDS crisis in America I could and did file report after report after report of transmission numbers, policy debates, questions about discrimination in jobs and housing against gay people. But I also found two young men who were in love with the land and with each other, and I witnessed as that love ultimately resulted in their deaths. “AIDS In The Heartland,” published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.

But long before and long, long after that prize, the death-do-us-part story of Dick Hanson and Bert Henningson rippled into the world and made a difference. Which is the other thing stories do, when they’re done right: They make a difference.

A father called the gay son he had disowned. A conservative nurse led efforts to get her small town hospital to accept AIDS patients. A newspaper, my newspaper, amended its obituary policy to become one of the first in the country to include unmarried partners as survivors. Imagine dying and having your life partner erased from your obituary; 25 years ago that’s was used to happen, until we wrote about the people living in this crisis.

Now, all this is easy for me to talk about. I’ve already done all these things so I can relax in the success of them without having to remember the anxiety and the uncertainty and the terror I felt each time I sat down to write. I used to believe that we have a quota of words and eventually I was gonna run out of them. I still sometimes sit down at my computer and think, “Maybe words are done for me. Maybe I had my shot.”

These days, anxiety and uncertainty seem to be at an all-time high in the world. You all know that. It’s true of our world economy, of our politics, of our cultural differences, our questions about the future. Definitely true in the United States right now, with the election we’re facing in six weeks. This uncertainty and anxiety is especially acute in the world of journalism and publishing and, as a result, storytelling. So these are challenging and confusing times to be a storyteller. Not only for those of us who primarily trade in words for a living and want to make a bit of money at it, but for anybody who’s trying to figure out how to find their place in the white noise of the digital world, where information is as accessible as a pocket phone; where anyone and everyone can join the ranks of those of us who used to claim to be society’s storytellers; where some people actually think that Twitter is one of the greatest things to happen to mankind since the discovery of fire.

I was in Finland three years ago at a conference much like this one, and a young journalist interviewed me for some story about the conference. And I remember I was feeling a little bit anxious because she was challenging how we could promote and talk about the value of deep narrative storytelling and the place of professional storytellers in this crazy new digital age. And at some point she just looked at me, and asked very bluntly, with a microphone in my face: “Is narrative dead?” I remember swallowing hard and then I remember getting angry. And that’s when I looked at her and I said, “We have been telling stories since man has written on the rocks, and why wouldn’t we tell them when we write on the stars?”

I saw the path, that day, from those who wrote on those rocks, to the time where I got to be part of a great storytelling tradition in American journalism. I see the connection between that history in the past and what I do now. The troubadours, the scribes, the people who carried fire from camp to camp in Indian tradition because they carried the stories along with it. I also now see that future, that need to recognize that stories are as eternal and essential as humanity itself. We too often in our anxiety confuse the means of delivery with the essence of what we deliver. Sure, how we tell our stories matters. And we must master as many ways of telling stories as there are stories to tell. But the center that will hold is the story itself. Stories will survive and be needed as long as human beings survive.

But I’m someone who, I think like most of you, is plagued by insecurity and by doubt. I’ve had my share of career crises over the years. I learned, as a survival tool, to do the thing that I do best: Get out of my head and get out in the world and report. Every few years, I reach out to a few people I believe in and trust and who I know and who I think are really great journalists, storytellers of whatever kind, and I send them a quick note: “In 30 seconds, no more, I want you to write me an e-mail and I want you to answer this question: ‘Why do we need stories?’”

Last week, as I was thinking of the getting together with you I reached out to a few people again, and I sent a note and I said, “Hey. Thirty seconds. Why do we need stories?” I’ll share a few of them with you.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist — former journalist. She left the business a little while ago to support her husband who’s running for the U.S. Senate. She sent me a note:

We tell stories to close the distance. We meet someone and immediately we see what we don’t have in common. Then we share our stories and realize we’ve known each other always.

Bryan Denson, reporter I used to work with in Portland, Ore., who’s now finishing up a book that has actually a Romanian history, about one of the most famous traitors in the CIA. He sent me this:

We need stories because they are part of our universal vocabulary. We’ve been telling them around fires since the beginning of human kind. Humans have changed much, but the stories, the components of them, haven’t. We’ve always had heroes, villains, obstacles to overcome and loves to win and lose. In the end, the heroes always learn something valuable, and those become our shared gifts.

And Wendy Call, who was the co-editor of Telling True Stories, sent me this just today, along with this picture. This is a picture indeed of a story told on rocks. It’s in the Pacific Northwest, where Wendy lives and where I live, so it’s not far from Washington, it’s up in a beautiful wilderness area. Wendy’s been spending some time up there and she sent me a picture of a story told on rocks. And she did a little research and she says it’s at least 600 years old, when people migrated to that part of the country. It could be as much as 9,000 years old. And here’s what she sent me:

Storytelling might be the one activity, beyond loving and hating and physically sustaining ourselves, in which all communities engage. We don’t yet know whether whales and dolphins and wolves might be telling stories too, but we can be sure that all of humans are and always have. I look at this image sometimes before I begin writing a story myself, to remind myself that I’m part of a long tradition. To remind myself that I’m not trying to be original, or to entertain, or to educate, or to castigate, so much as I’m simply participating in the longest, greatest, most fundamental human tradition.

One last thing. We talked about rocks and stars and you got a rock star crew with you today, so I’m gonna leave you with a few words of wisdom from one of my favorite rock stars, Bruce Springsteen. The boss. Springsteen came out with a new album this year called Wrecking Ball, and it becomes kind of an anthem for some of the things that we’re going through in the U.S. Springsteen spoke at the South by Southwest conference, which is this big, fabulous, media conference in Austin, Texas, every year, and I just want to read you one paragraph from what he told. He was dealing with the young musicians who were struggling, who were trying to own their craft, who were figuring out how they could be creative, how they could find their own voice, whether they had a place in the world, and whether it was worth doing, this thing that they didn’t know how they’d make money at. And here’s what he said:

So rumble, young musicians, rumble. Open your ears, and open your heart. Don’t take yourself too seriously, and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry, and worry your ass off. Have unclad confidence, but then doubt. It keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town, and that you suck. It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn’t drive you crazy, it will make you strong. And stay hard, stay hungry, and stay alive. And when you walk onstage tonight, to bring the noise, treat it like that’s all we have. And then remember: It’s only rock and roll.

Rock and roll this weekend, my friends!

Jacqui Banszynski has been a reporter and editor for more than 30 years and won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. She now holds the Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism and a visiting faculty member of The Poynter Institute.

Evan Ratliff
Writer to Digital Entrepreneur

Ratliff (photo by Tudor Vintiloiu, courtesy Decât o Revistă)

I’m honored to be here, I’m honored talking to you, and I say that first partly because, I think the idea of someone coming from the U.S. and standing in front of you trying to tell you something about business or entrepreneurial ventures is maybe a little bit ridiculous. I don’t really know anything about business. I started a business without having the first clue of what it would take to create something that would last longer than a magazine issue. So, if you don’t listen to anything else that I’ll say, if there’s one thing you can take away it’s that: It’s okay to not know what the fuck you’re doing.

Even when I was starting as a writer, I had no idea of what I was doing. Even when I go on reporting trips now, I have no idea what I’m doing. No one can tell you, for instance, what you should do when a source says/does this. What should you do when suddenly you have to deal with tax accountants and lawyers? You can only learn those things by doing them. You can read and be inspired by what you read and listen to the amazing people that you already have heard from, but really you just have to do it, and you find out and you fuck up and you kind of figure it out from there.

So, that’s the overall lesson of what I’m going to tell you right now.

The way I’ll tell you that is by telling you a story. The story is in the first person, it’s self-indulgent – it’s slips off into self-indulgence really quickly. Hopefully it’s not boring.

A few years ago I got this idea in my head that I wanted to write about people who disappear, and I got really obsessed with people who fake their own deaths, and do the ultimate reinvention – they decide, for whatever reason, that they don’t want to participate in their lives anymore, maybe they’re in trouble, maybe they’re in a bad marriage, and they go to the absolute extreme, I’m gonna change my life, I’m going to pretend that I killed myself and then I’m going to start over with a new identity. I was talking with my editor at Wired for months and months about how to do this, how to write a story about these people. Because the problem is – if they succeed, you can’t find them and write about them because they’ve completely changed their identity and if they failed they kind of sucked at it, so they’re not that interesting. So eventually I hit upon this idea that I myself would try and disappear. I would live this life for a month and then I would have some kind of an insight into the psychology of what it takes to reinvent yourself.

I sat down with my editor over lunch and I told him this idea: I will disappear, and then we’ll have people trying to find me. We’ll let anyone in the U.S. try to find me. And I believe he said, “That is the fucking dumbest idea I have ever heard.”

We talked about it some more for a couple of weeks and eventually we came up with some parameters and rules and he said, “You know what? I think we can do this.” He kind of got into it and I got into planning for it, and after about three or four months we said, “Okay, we’ll do this.”

We decided we’re going to (use) photos of me in the magazine, and that if anyone in the U.S. could find me, they could (win) $5,000. I would try to get a new identity and live one month on the run. This actually seemed like a good idea as we were planning it out. It was Aug. 8, 2009, when I woke up and I realized I actually had to do this – I had to leave my friends and family behind, and go.

I took $3,000 that I’d withdrawn from the bank. I got my car and I drove across the Bay Bridge, out of San Francisco. I pulled out the battery out of my phone so no one could track it, and I was gone.

I needed to sort of change my appearance because people could identify me on the street potentially, they could say the code word that was in the magazine, and then I would be out. So I took all these extreme measures to do that, and I also took a lot of videos of myself. Everyday I took a video of myself becoming increasingly paranoid about people who were close to finding me and how I was maneuvering.

But eventually I got caught. I got caught, I came back, I wrote a story about it and that story appeared in Wired. Now the story got more attention than I ever gotten from doing anything else, and it was wonderful, but around the same time I started talking with the same editor I’ve been working with. We were talking about how much fun it was to do this story, which was written in two parts. The first part was 4,000 words and the second part was 9,000 words. And we talked about how we don’t get to do that so much. Maybe 5,000 words is about as much as you would get to write, but here we live in a digital age, with actually unlimited space. There’s no reason why online you can’t make something as long as you want, and yet the web forced people into doing things that were much shorter, from blogging to RSS feeds to tweets.

It’s getting shorter and shorter and at the same time you were freed of all the limitations of how much advertising there was in a magazine. So we started talking about that and we started talking about the videos I took, and how we couldn’t use them for anything.

Even on the web they didn’t use the videos. So I thought, what if I constructed the story using those videos that showed how strange I became in this period of a month? Maybe it would have been better, maybe it would have been worse, but it was an idea.

What if you conceived a story from the start to appear on the web, no print at all?

So we started talking and we ended up talking to this third guy, (Jefferson Rabb), who is a programmer, and we started throwing out ideas. What if we had something that people read on their phone? What if we sold stories individually? What if we had video, what if we had audio? And for the better part of a year, this is basically what we did.

We sat in a bar, we had drinks, we would have a couple of drinks and say, “That’s not a good idea,” and then we would have five or six drinks and we would say, “Actually no, this is fantastic, it’s the best idea we ever had.”

And Jefferson started to build prototypes, started building things for the phone. He’s that kind of guy, who can take an idea and code it up and turn it into a basic version. After a year we said, “Now we’ve got something; maybe we should find some stories for it.” We’d built this technology, so we went out trying to convince writers to write. But when you try to convince people to write for something that doesn’t exist at all it’s very difficult because writers like to see their things published and if you say, “We’re going to invent something that your story will go into” most of them will say, “Call me when it’s out.” But we managed to find one writer who would write for it, and then I wrote for it myself. At a certain point we said, “We don’t know what we’re doing, and we don’t know why we’re doing it exactly, except this is fun and interesting,” and then, along the way we went to an investor. He looked over the project and he said, “It’s very interesting what you’re doing, but why are you wasting your time doing these stories? Why don’t you build this technology thing and sell that, and you get rich and then you do as many magazine stories you want?”

We walked away from there thinking that guy was probably right: There’s probably not a business in selling these long stories. But fuck it. Sometimes you just have to take the battery out of your phone, and get in your car, and drive across the bridge and see what happens. And that’s what we did.

So we launched it in January 2011. It’s called The Atavist. It’s kind of like a magazine, it’s kind of like short books. We do these stories that are between 5,000 and 30,000 words. They’re all narrative nonfiction, and they’re sold on Kindles and Nooks as e-books, as well as in apps on iPads, other tablets and things like that. So it’s all designed to exist on these tablets and this presentation is made inside of our app.

Two of the lessons that I’ve learned doing this are: First, if you start to pursue something like this, you say, “This is the thing I love, I love narrative journalism, and I’m going to see if I can find a way to make some.” You can find other people who will join up with you, and whatever they want to do, you should take them on, particularly if you find someone skilled in ways that you aren’t. We wouldn’t exist if it was just me because it really required someone who was willing to have the same love for creating that I had, and spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of unpaid hours putting this sort of thing together.

So we launched it, we started selling stories, we’re doing pretty well but in the middle of 2011 we realized that running a business is not as simple as launching a side project and putting stories out there. Because suddenly you have to either take on more people in order to stop working 100 hours a week, or you have to do less. We were doing a story a month and they were selling pretty well, but it wasn’t enough to pay our salaries, to keep us away from putting everything on a credit card.

So we kind of lucked into another aspect of the business. Jefferson created an actual system in order for us to do all this stuff. It’s like a piece of software that you log into online, and it enables us to create these stories, it enables us to layer in all the sounds, and the videos, as well as all these eBook files that we sell in other places. It turned out that other people wanted to use the system to do similar things. So, just almost by accident we started licensing the system to other people: A university produces case studies; TED produces their own line of books; we’re helping The Paris Review – we launched their app, and put their archives in it.

Then we started making money. Now we have a business, where we’re selling software basically, and we’re selling stories and we hired some people, we have an office. We have what seems a real business. For me, to go from a person who took an assignment and went into the world, and talked to people, or tried to disappear, suddenly I was spending all my time negotiating (software contract) terms, sending them back to people – there’s no way you can call this storytelling.

So, lawyers, accountants, investors. That’s the way I spend most of my time now. It was very difficult for me because here I am, fancying myself a writer, and trying to make it in the world of narrative journalism, and suddenly I’m doing all these things I became a writer not to do.

Bucharest (photo by Lavinia Gliga, courtesy Jacqui Banaszynski)

I think the lesson here is one that I’m still grappling with. I think that sometimes you just have to get over yourself, and sometimes you just have to survive. And this is what we had to do to survive. We had to do things that we were not ready to do and I think that is true for a lot of journalists who want to strike out as freelancers, who want to write things that are different from what your editors want you to write, and you want to go out in the world and find new magazines and find new homes.

Sometimes you have to write some advertising copy on the side and sometimes you have to go write research reports or fact checking, or whatever will pay your bills, while you do the thing that you love doing.

The good news was, we were still in business, but the question was how to make it a business that we actually enjoy doing. We have this American expression, “Go big, or go home.” Basically, it’s either you bring everything to something, or you might as well not do it. And, believe me, many, many times I decided I’m not going to do this anymore. I walked into meetings with my co-founders and said, “I’m done.” But eventually I kind of said, “Well, we’ve created something and rather then let it die, let’s see if we can make it bigger.”

When you’re a writer, especially a freelance writer, you face rejection a lot. What you deal with is pitching stories to people and they say no. And it takes a long time, getting used to that. You can take the “no” but also say, “All right, that doesn’t say anything about me. This (just) means I have to try again.” But in this case it was sort of the opposite problem, which is that sometimes you have to be willing to accept people’s expectations.

At some point you have to say, “You know what? We’re going to take on everyone’s expectations and we’re going to do our best, and if we don’t end up doing it and everyone (says) we failed, it’s better then saying we don’t have the guts to do it.”

So we took on investors and the second thing we did was try to open up this platform that we made so anyone can use it. It’s a way for us to say that we made something anyone can use to make a story, anyone can use to create a book. We’re about to open up it more. We let a group of reporters use it for a long story. They did one in Joplin, Mo., were there was a big tornado. They told some pretty amazing stories. And then they made a book and they’re selling a book. Then we have photographers – a photographer that was in Japan after the tsunami shot all these beautiful portraits of clothing, just empty clothing that was either washed up or lying around, and he’s using it as a way to present his work.

So we got into a place where we feel we can help people tell the types of stories that we want to tell.

I can tell you from experience that when you’re caught up in issues like how you’re going to survive, how you’re going to pay off your credit card bill, or how you’re going to pay your employees and give them health insurance, it is very easy to lose track of why you’re doing what you’re doing. So for us, putting out a story every month is not just a business; it’s the way we stay grounded in the things that we care about.

Evan Ratliff is founder and editor of The Atavist and a contributor to Wired, The New Yorker and National Geographic. His story “Vanish” was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. 

Front row, left to right: Banaszynski, Walters, Kine, Jones. Second row, right to left: Sager, Fox, Tizon (photo courtesy Decât o Revistă)

But forget about the Pulitzers, the National Magazine Awards, the business deals, the titles. The visitors were storytellers – they knew magic. The listeners wanted the secrets, and Cristian Lupsa wanted to give them those secrets, with the conference as his medium. Lupsa, who edits the quarterly magazine Decât o Revistă, started “The Power of Storytelling” a year ago in hopes that his narrative obsession will take hold in the hearts and minds of journalists across Europe. He was kind enough to share with Storyboard this year’s absorbing, inspiring and often irreverent keynotes.

Today, read short excerpts from some of the talks. (For each speaker, you can click through to Decât o Revistă‘s compilations of full bios, quotes and story lists.) Tomorrow and next week, we’ll run full texts: Banaszynski on the future of storytelling, Harrington on keeping the “non” in “nonfiction,” Jones on why stories matter, Kine on theme and story forms, Ratliff on moving from magazine writer to digital entrepreneur, Sager on the wisdom of shutting up, Tizon on telling your own story and Walters on the beauty of ambiguous endings.

Check back tomorrow for the first of these, plus photos and audio and a special introduction by Banszynski.

Until then, some highlights:

In my mother’s obituary I wrote of the afghans, the blankets that she crocheted and knit as wedding gifts. Everybody in my family has a blanket from my mother. And a cousin of mine, who was an ordained minister, led the services at my mother’s funeral, and while she was leading the service she held the blanket that my mother had knit for her own wedding, 30 years earlier. Held it in her arms and built her service around the notion of being wrapped in the comfort of God, in the comfort of community and in the comfort of family in times of grief. All because I had mentioned in a story that my mother knit blankets for people’s weddings. I would encourage you all to think, what is the story you would tell about your mother or someone you love? And then, how do you bring that same care and the same sense of storytelling in everything you do? — Jacqui Banszynski, winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing

Truth may be many things, but it is not nothing at all. When a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, it still makes noise. This kind of real, objective truth exists—despite the philosopher’s ponderings. Words spoken were spoken whether or not we can reconstruct them correctly. Events occurred in a certain sequence whether or not we can discern it. Sisters can remember differently just how big was the old oak tree in their backyard. But there must at least have been a  tree! Otherwise, as Jonathan Yardley said, it’s fiction. — Walt Harrington, author of Intimate Journalism

I think a lot of writers have been taught by traditional journalist or journalism schools that you’ve supposed to be objective. That there’s supposed to be a distance between you and what you’re writing about, so that you cover it like you’re neutral, like you’re a star in the sky, looking down on the world. I’ve always taught that that is a really strange, crazy idea. It’s like asking someone to be a robot. — Chris Jones, Esquire

If there’s an idea I like and I don’t get around to doing it really quick, it tortures me because I feel that the idea can’t leave your head; it’s stuck in there. I honestly picture them like orphans, the ideas that I don’t get to. They feel like orphans that are just getting older without being adopted and they never go outside and they’re, like, fighting over who sleeps where and showing each other the chore wheels. Their little faces are pressed against the glass, and they’re never going to go outside. So I try to get my ideas out. — Starlee Kine, This American Life contributor

Two of the lessons that I’ve learned doing this are: First, if you start to pursue something like this, you say “This is the thing I love: I love narrative journalism, and I’m going to see if I can find a way to make some.” You can find other people who will join up with you, and whatever they want to do, you should take them on, particularly if you find someone skilled in ways that you aren’t. We wouldn’t exist if it was just me because it really required someone who was willing to have the same love for creating that I had, and spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of unpaid hours putting this sort of thing together. — Evan Ratliff, founder, The Atavist

If you don’t yell back at the TV at that politician that you hate, you’re gonna hear what they’re saying. If you let that person act like a male chauvinist pig maybe you’ll understand a little of their motivation. It doesn’t make it right, but the world is full of people that form what I like to call the different constellations of reality. They put shit together, and they fucking believe it. They believe that you’re going to Heaven and that you’re going to play the harp. People believe that. People fight over that. We all think that we know the truth. — Mike Sager, Esquire

I love betrayal. Betrayal gets me going. Triumph. They don’t all have to be sad, right? They don’t all have to be like shame. Your themes don’t all have to be sad. I happen to like sad. I mean I’m one of those people that actually wouldn’t be turned off by someone saying they’re writing a book about shame. Actually I would think that’s when the conversation just got interesting. Talk about shame! Yeah! I want to hear your shame! I want to share my shame with you! — Alex Tizon, winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting

When you’re writing keep in mind the end of your story; look back and think. Stare at the scenes and the dialogue and the images that you’ve collected and push back against the conclusions that you’ve come to. Find the ambiguity. Find a moment that questions what you think your story is about. — Pat Walters, Radiolab

Storyboard: How did you come to do this story?

Feldman: If I were an evangelical I could just say I was “called” to Tulsa. Because for evangelicals, God speaks to you as loud as a loudspeaker. Obviously it’s more complicated than that, but it still felt like I was destined to do this story, somehow. A new magazine out of Oklahoma, This Land, invited me down to do a religion story of my choice. It was like this dream gig: We’ll put you up, we’ll cover your expenses, write about whatever you want. So I had a talk with the editor, Michael Mason. He’d read some of my reporting on evangelicals and right-wing Jews, and it was kind of clear that I was drawn to true believers. He ran a few story ideas by me, but they weren’t good fits. He was like, “Oh, you know there’s a big story with Senator Jim Inhofe refusing to attend Tulsa’s holiday parade last year because the city changed it from a Christmas parade. It was covered on The Daily Show. This year Inhofe is having his own Christmas parade in South Tulsa, the evangelical side of town.” But I was like: No, too easy. So he said, “Well what kinds of stories do you like?” And I said: Well, generally I like feeling like I have to enter a world unto itself and figure out how it works, learn the culture and the language of that place. There has to be something bad going on that I need to figure out. I like feeling like I’m going into the belly of the beast, and then I’m going to come back out and explain it to people. I tend to do stories about the nexus of youth, sex, and power. So Michael said, “Ah! Okay, I think we have a story idea for you.” Two people on staff at the magazine grew up at Grace –

You’re kidding.

Yeah, Josh Kline, one of the contributing editors, grew up at the church and went to school there. He’s a few years older than I am. He played on the school’s basketball team in middle school and hero-worshipped Aaron (Thompson, the convicted abuser). He and his buddies had sleepovers with Aaron and played videogames together. His mom would say, “Isn’t it kind of weird that he’s 19, 20, and he wants to hang out with kids?” And Josh was defensive: “Why would you say such a thing?” He wasn’t molested, none of his friends were; it turns out that most of the victims were quite a bit younger. Then Michael Mason, the founder and editor of This Land, he also has a Grace background but of a different generation. He’s just turning 41. His mom had taught there, he went to middle school there. So between the two of them, they knew that whole world. They felt that the truth hadn’t come out at the time and that Grace had never really been held to account. My sense was that they were angry about it. They also felt they needed someone on the outside to do this story — someone who would be able to approach it fresh.

Yeah.

At one point, the contributing editor was assigned to the story before me. He’d actually met with the other “Josh,” the first victim, and had had an interview on background with him – they were friends of friends –

Your access was pretty amazing.

Josh, the contributing editor, tried to do the Grace story at first, but it hit too close to home for him. He had all this emotional baggage tied up with everything. And my editor, Michael, decided it’d be better to have a more impartial reporter, somebody who’d approach it fresh. Josh put me in touch with that first victim, whose story I ended up weaving throughout the piece. Other than that, Michael and Josh gave me some guidance about how to approach those who’d been in leadership roles at Grace. I worked months and months of asking and re-asking plaintiffs’ lawyers to approach the victims and their families for interviews. A lot of things fell into place in a roundabout way. I talked with a trauma services provider who off-handedly mentioned that he’d heard, from friends who used to go to Grace, that the church circled the wagons after Aaron’s arrest. So I asked him to see if any of his friends were willing to tell me about that period. And the friend who volunteered ended up being a former Grace teacher named Laura Prochaska, who taught on Aaron’s unit and had a kind of a whistleblower role in the story. Laura asked her friend and former colleague, the anonymous Specials Teacher, if she’d talk to me. Once the teacher heard that Laura had already “spilled the beans” (her words), she was in. The two of them felt that the story needed to be told; they felt an urgency because the son of their friend/colleague was one of the victims, and they had seen how the abuse continued to reverberate in that family’s life.

So give us the time frame. When did this start?

So that first phone call with This Land was last June. I was really taken with the story and immediately obsessed with it. Right away, I felt like it was mine and was meant for me. I knew early on that the title would be “Grace in Broken Arrow.” Not long before publication, about a month or two ago, I sent my editor an email to catch him up to speed. I was like, “You should know that I’m really attached to this title, and that that’s what it is.”

(laughter)

I kind of tried to play it cool by acknowledging that I realized it wasn’t my call to make, but still, I was like, “Seriously guys, I challenge you to come up with anything better!”

(laughter)

So that was in late June. It was a transition period for me because I’d just published my first long-term investigative story in The Nation about Birthright Israel. That story was two years in the works, off and on. It was basically my first big real post-college feature story, and I was very happy to see it make a pretty big stink. Then I had that post-articulum depression where you’re not sure how to fill the void. The prospect of immersing myself in evangelicalism was really appealing after swimming in the muck of ethnic nationalism. I do a lot of reporting about young Jews and Israel, and that’s exhausting and upsetting. I also worried about being a one-trick pony.

I was developing an interest in trauma reporting, but I didn’t have any experience at the time. I wanted to look at the long-term effects of sexual violence. There was the challenge of needing to work my way into an insular community. Plus I just have a deep love of public records and that feeling of going on a treasure hunt through stuff nobody else cares about. The Grace story brought everything together: the trauma reporting, the court records, the thousands of pages of testimony and primary documents, the kind of archival nerd-out that I really enjoy. So the magazine was like, “Come to Tulsa when you can.” I said, “I’m busy with other things but we’ll figure it out.” We were in touch on and off in early fall and then they said, “We need to get the story done or we’ll give it to somebody else.” Oh my God. It was like being told that my child was being put up for adoption without my permission. I was like, “NOOO! You don’t understand! This has been a part of my emotional landscape for the entire summer and early fall!” And I’d really studied up on Oklahoma. I read the definitive biography of Oral Roberts; I’d watched every movie that takes place in Oklahoma that I could find. I re-watched Silkwood like it was homework. I talked with a college friend from Tulsa who could catch me up to speed on the culture. But that was a different ball of wax because he did not share my newfound sense of Tulsa being this exotic wonderful place. I was like, “All your bitterness and love-hate hometown feelings are not gonna work for me right now.”

(laughter)

I do this thing where I overcompensate for my lack of experience in very useful ways. I always feel out of my league. So for the trauma reporting part, I read all the how-to literature I possibly could. I couldn’t recommend the DART Center for Journalism & Trauma more – I have such deep gratitude for them. I read all their manuals about how to interview survivors, how to focus less on perpetrators and more on the victims’ stories or survivors’ stories, depending on what terminology the victim/survivor uses. (In Oklahoma, everybody said “victim.”) This was the tension of the whole Grace story while I was working on it – balancing institutional accountability with wanting to put the victims and their families front and center. The long arm of Grace is really, to me, why this story matters. I didn’t want readers to walk away thinking: “What a bunch of assholes.” That’s not a story, to me. So I was wrestling with how to make the story larger than that. In October, I went to this amazing workshop at the DART Center on reporting on intimate partner violence. I’d gotten accepted to that with the intention of having it inform my Grace reporting, and then around September when This Land said they were itching to get the story done and might give it to someone else, I was like, “No, you don’t understand, I’ve been planning my life around this.” So I went to Tulsa for two weeks in November. The original timeline of the story was very, very different. When I ask permission to file long, I mean it.

So it was commissioned at what length and ran at what?

They originally said: Do your reporting in November and file around Christmas and we’ll run it Jan. 15; you probably can’t do the story in less than 4,000 words, so let’s aim for around 4,000. I just kept filing longer and longer – I think my first draft was 8,000 and that still had whole sections just outlined.

What’s the total word count?

Well, it depends on how you’re counting.

(laughter)

I have this whole neuroses surrounding the idea that no one was gonna read this story because it was too long. Even up to last week, when it came out, I had emotionally braced myself to be okay with things if no one read the story except for people in Oklahoma, and my mom. By the way, my mom was my No. 1 reader throughout the whole process. She commented on at least five drafts. As a pediatrician with a child abuse specialty, she was my in-house expert — the main member of my braintrust. She was really instrumental in shaping the story and encouraging me to take out certain details of the victims’ abuse experiences that might play into stereotypes and misguided notions that many readers might bring to the table. Most of all, she was a strong voice who was encouraging me to frame the story in an instructive way, like, “This is why you don’t self-investigate abuse suspicions.”

While I was in the thick of things, people kept saying, “How long have you been working on this?” I’d kind of fudge it to make it sound like it hadn’t been on my plate for so long. They’d ask how long it was, and they’d hear “over 10,000 words,” and they’d give me this look. Like I was wasting my time or being self-indulgent, writing that much. The whole time I was working on this, my deep, soul-crushing fear was that no one would read the story or care about the legacy of abuse, that I should’ve been able to tell the story in a tighter way but failed miserably and everybody would be like “Yeah, it was pretty good but too long – it got tedious.” I don’t know why I have so much shame wrapped up in the word count! So the timeline itself was 1,100 words. So if you count the timeline with the body of the story, it’s 14,000 words.  But the story itself is just shy of 13,000 words so let’s say 13,000 words. No, no, back up – I’m gonna own it! Every word is important, and I’m gonna own it.

But 14,000 words — that’s about right for some long-form narrative territory, which can average anywhere from 5,000 to 30,000 and longer.

True. I kept psyching myself up to write this story by reading others’ work. I was very studious about it – I’d read other pieces about abuse and trauma and copied and paste that text into a Word document and be like, “Damn, they just told that story in 6,000 words? In 8,000 words? How’d they do that? It can be done, but I’m just failing at it.”

Give me some examples of what you were reading that you liked.

Okay, time for some hero-worshipping across the Internet: I read everything I could by Kathy Dobie, in both GQ and in Harper’s. Her story “The Girl from Trails End” is just haunting. I also read her book, The Only Girl in the Car. Her Harper’s story on sexual violence on Indian reservations is rightly up for a million awards this year. I also did the same thing of studiously reading Robert Kolker’s New York magazine stories. “On the Rabbi’s Knee,” his 2006 story on sex abuse in Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, was groundbreaking and devastating (and we should all be pissed that the New York Times is only just now starting to cover Orthodox abuse). I still wonder if I should have structured my Grace story like his ultra-Orthodox story: like a survivor-accountability-survivor  sandwich. He also had that great story that just came out, about Brigitte Harris, an adult survivor of molestation who accidentally ends up killing her father/abuser. Pieces that both do justice to the survivors’ stories and also treat people who’ve been through horrible things with a tremendous amount of dignity. Then, too, there’s JoAnn Wypijewski — who’s amazing all around — writing in Legal Affairs about Father Paul Shanley, one of the big villains of the Catholic sex abuse scandal. She was making a case for nuance and due process. It’s uncomfortable to read, because we usually think of sex abuse as pretty cut and dry. And oh my gosh! Kristen Lombardi, of course. There was her work on the Catholic church sex-abuse scandal. Same deal, very important for me to read her Center for Public Integrity work about campus sexual assault. It’s just terrifying to see the full extent of the extrajudicial make-survivors-go-away machine known as the American college campus judiciary system. She laid out all of the structural problems while telling the stories of rape survivors who were willing and able to speak out. It was heartbreaking and infuriating to read.

I also sought out crime reporting books but should’ve read more. I read Dave Cullen’s Columbine, trying to figure out how to pull together a million documents and interviews into a coherent narrative. I stayed up all night several nights in a row finally reading In Cold Blood. I found it to be a totally gripping and ultimately heartless book. Capote is an aesthete who thinks murder is fabulously ugly and beautiful – something to be studied if not admired on a formal level. The human dimension of murder is absent, as if the slaughtered family were just a prop to tell the story of how the murderers did it. Honestly, my sense is that Capote didn’t give a shit about real people. Which might explain why he invented scenes and dialogue.

So you flew to Tulsa and then what happened?

The first phone calls I started making were in late October. I really felt strongly that I needed to become fluent in the culture of Grace Church. What was it like to grow up in that church, what kind of worldview did it try to impart, what was it like to be there at the time? I started with Josh, my colleague from the magazine, and his sister, and heard about growing up in the church. Then I started working on the lawyers for the boys. I’ve been calling them victims but generally in trauma reporting I say “survivors.” But people in Oklahoma say victims, so if people refer to themselves as victims I use their language. I called as many lawyers as I possibly could and just started working on them, like, “Will you reach out to your client and his parents for me?” Those ultimately didn’t pan out, except for the father of the boy in jail. I had a number of mothers of different boys who had relayed that they really wanted to talk; they felt like they never got their say or they wanted to talk for whatever reason. They didn’t return phone calls, and I didn’t want to press them. I just said: I have to respect their wishes. Another of the mothers came through because she was a friend of the This Land editor’s wife. Oh gosh what did I call that mother? What’s her pseudonym? I think I called her Julie –

Wait, did I miss the part about pseudonyms?

There’s an editor’s note up top. No reputable publications will publish names of sexual assault victims, especially, especially, especially if it happened to minors (unless the victims themselves are totally gung-ho about being identified). The main character “Josh,” not to be confused with the Josh connected to the magazine, he’s just a dream subject because he was an enthusiastic participant. For the whole time I was working on the story he really wanted to be named. He said, “This is my way to have a say − Pastor Bob had his little pulpit since Aaron’s arrest 10 years ago, now I get mine.” (That’s one thing that I guess I could’ve played up more, that this was the 10th anniversary of the perpetrators’ arrest.) So with Josh, I was in a strange position of saying, “Well you might say that now but we really need to talk seriously about this; just remember, this story will be the first thing that shows up 10 years from now when a potential employer Googles you.”

In reporting, you’re often trying to sweet-talk people into telling you things they might regret later. But in trauma reporting, my approach – and having studied other reporters’ approaches – I really want subjects to give informed consent. I don’t want them to feel screwed over – again – by having chosen to participate in a story. I want them to fully understand what participation means. Josh and I got pretty close through the reporting of the story. Some of the stuff he told me came out over Skype and long g-chats of the soul, and in the story I chose to write “says” not “told me in a g-chat.” I stand by that decision even though some publications wouldn’t be down with that. So he’s really close with his parents; having that support system is probably a big factor in his well-being nowadays. His parents really didn’t want him to be named. They felt it would bring yet more community retribution and shaming. And they were scared of being sued. The two parents of the other victims were also just terrified of getting sued. In Tulsa the main industries are oil, manufacturing, aerospace and churches. The latter are rather litigious.

What documents did you have before you landed?

Nothing. Once I got there, I had an intense two weeks. I met with “Josh” and worked on the lawyers to get them to contact their clients and families. I went to church whenever I could, not just at Grace but at other megachurches around Tulsa for comparison. Wednesday night, Saturday night and Sunday mornings are when evangelicals go to church. I commissioned the court reporter to make transcripts of the testimonies from the Grace lawsuit that went to trial. I was also spending long days at the Tulsa County Clerk’s office, digging up public records. First I had to go through the criminal records, then there were all the files from the civil lawsuits. There were three massive boxes from the first lawsuit. From the testimonies to the depositions to all the flotsam documents, I easily had 5,000 pages of material. And it turns out they don’t black out the names in a criminal case.

Nope

South Tulsa supermarket merch (photo: Kiera Feldman)

So I was in the unique position of feeling really bad, like I knew things I shouldn’t know. If I’d been molested as a child, I wouldn’t want my name to be in there. Like, fuck no, I would not want someone 10 years later to find my name and find me on Facebook. Which is exactly what I did. So I had a dilemma: Do I Facebook message or not? Ultimately I decided not to. Now that I’m done with the story, even for the people I never talked to, I feel really attached to the kids and their families after reading their depositions and reading about them in the opening and closing statements of the lawsuit that went to trial. I know where people were in 2004, so I care about them, and I also felt like I shouldn’t violate their privacy. Maybe I was being overly cautious – maybe I didn’t reach out to people who would have really wanted to talk, and I denied them that opportunity to make that decision. But in any event, I decided not to cold-call any of the victims or their families. I wanted people to be approached by people they already trusted so it wouldn’t be an out-of-the-blue phone call that could be upsetting or shocking. Plus it turns out that people in Oklahoma literally can’t understand me on the phone. I talk too fast, I slur my words – I had no idea. That was some serious culture shock. I’ve never before felt like such an outsider. Tulsa’s a really small town when it comes down to it. I’d go down to the Tulsa County courthouse and get a sinker of a barbecue sandwich from the ancient canteen and then start going through these three massive files. And people were suspicious of me. At first I was like, “How dare you be suspicious, these are public records.” But I think it was because they worried I’d publish the victims’ names.

Speaking of that 10-year anniversary, why was it important to tell this story now?

It was long overdue.  This should’ve happened years ago. It was such a big story and has affected so many lives, and at the time it got such a cursory treatment in the local press. I knew from the little news capsules what to look for – I knew there was a “do not fondle” agreement of some sort, I knew there were two anonymous letters. The more documents I found, the more shocked I was that more of this didn’t come out in the press at the time. The Tulsa World reporters presumably had many of the same documents I had. Then again, I’m not sure if any of the Grace teachers would’ve gone on the record till now(ish); it takes time for the dust to settle enough for people to talk. Plus, by now enough time has passed that I could check in with the victims and families and gauge the long-term impact of the abuse.

It was just a coincidence that the Penn State scandal broke while I was there in Tulsa in November. It created a ready-made conversation starter – an opening. There was almost an office betting pool at This Land about how long I’d last in Pastor Bob’s office before I got kicked out, but it turned out that he made the leap from Penn State to Grace’s ordeal on his own – he brought it up, and he was more than happy to talk. It was all water under the bridge for him.

Yours was the first actual narrative on the whole story, the first piece that connected all the dots.

Yep. I didn’t actually realize until I got thick into it just how little Grace staff and members knew even now, save for the people in leadership positions named in my story. I just assumed that people inside the institution, that everyone knew what happened. Basically, most of the stuff that you read in my story – no one really knew any of that. Now that the story’s out, I’m reading the comments on it and getting emails from former Grace members and staffers, and they’re just thanking me. They say my story filled in a lot of gaps for them, because they had a feeling everything didn’t quite happen the way Grace’s leadership had told them it happened. So for me the feeling of urgency grew the longer I worked on the story and the more I realized that even people on the inside at Grace had never learned the truth. At first I thought I was writing a story for people outside the institution; I didn’t realize until really late in the game, and especially since it came out, that Grace insiders are really grateful. And amazingly, some Grace readers have even wondered if I’m an insider. I got one email from a former staffer who said that the story was so detailed, and I’d gotten all of the personalities spot on, that at first she wondered if I was “one of us.” Being an outsider, I’d worried so much about getting everything about Grace slightly off, so I went overboard on cobbling together details and weaving them into the story. Being a progressive Jew from a coastal state, I never, ever, ever thought I’d accidentally pass as a conservative evangelical.

It is a very detailed story. How much did you wrestle with what to include, in terms of the more graphic details, and how much?

A lot. The short answer is, a lot. I had a mountain of great stuff I didn’t use for various reasons: It didn’t advance the narrative, or it felt self-indulgent to include it, or I worried it’d seem like it was there for the sake of titillation. During a deposition, there was one boy who had such a sad answer to the question of how much time his first incident of molestation lasted. Aaron had brought him to the coach’s office and given him a candy prize for something in gym class. The boy answered, “As long as it took me to eat, like, three or four pieces of Airhead candies.” They were red Airheads. It broke my heart, and I didn’t use it. I didn’t trust my own writing abilities enough to use it in a way that wouldn’t also kind of make a reader laugh a little like, “Ha ha, oh yeah, Airheads! I remember them!”

There was a whole section about a teacher’s amazing correspondence with Aaron while he was in jail, and I chose not to include it because I knew it would make readers feel even less sympathetic toward Aaron, the perpetrator. When really, I think Aaron deserves way more sympathy than his counterpart, Pastor Bob. How much to reveal and how much to withhold – I agonized. I’d go for a jog late in the evening to air out my crazy, and these questions would be running through my mind. It seems like it makes for a better story the more information you have – but really, does it?

Right. Right, right.

For the boys I didn’t interview, like the boy in the lede who moved 1,200 miles away, with every draft, I took out more details about the actual physical mechanics of their sexual abuse. First, I wanted to respect their privacy, and I didn’t want to give identifying details unless the people involved gave me explicit permission. I know this stuff is already in the public record, but fuck it, I have to be able to live with myself. Especially for vulnerable sources, I often fall back on the Golden Rule. And I already had plenty of heartbreaking material that’d been freely given to me by sources directly. Part of why it’s so hard to write about child sex abuse is that you have to be really careful not to be lurid, not to be sensationalist. A child sex-abuse story is kind of the article equivalent of driving by a massive car crash: Readers have a morbid fascination. The challenge is to bring readers into that car and make them grieve for the people inside.

I knew that at some level the tension of any story like this is that a reader kind of just wants to know who put what where. So I tried to be really honest with myself and understand that people keep reading longer than they might read for another kind of story, because they have a voyeuristic desire to know the taboo sex bits. The challenge in the writing is to make it as unsexy as possible, because it is not sex – it’s violence against children. So I wanted to focus on the emotional impact over the transitive verbs that sound like things grown-ups can consent to. Less is more was my motto. With each draft, I leached more details of physical parts of the abuse. So “Josh,” the main character – it was really, really, really hard because the story he first told about himself really emphasized his own resilience and downplayed his suffering. It wasn’t until we reviewed his material shortly before publication – I’d given him veto power over everything that made it into print – that he told me he oversimplified things: He hadn’t told me about his two suicide attempts, he hadn’t told me how his guilt and shame had just eaten him alive. It was only in reviewing the material that he told me, basically, “I don’t want a reader to think that I’ve got this forgiveness tattoo and I’m fine now and okay with what happened to me.” Early in our reportorial relationship, he very much conveyed that he’s in a good place now and wanted to own his experiences by baring all.

Wow, that’s a hard question. That backgrounding really engrained in me the idea that a good trauma story focuses on the survivors’ experiences and not the perpetrator or the bad guys. Without having that in mind, I probably would’ve been more gleeful in detailing Grace’s leadership’s actions. I probably would have given more space to developing Aaron’s character and sympathizing with him − which I probably should have done anyway. It just seemed like the story was already too long, and I wasn’t going to take verbiage away from my families to give Aaron more ink. I also fought against an edit that would’ve cut from the sections that told the family impact from the perspective of the mother and the father of two different abused boys; without that background, I might’ve just deferred to the editor’s judgment and not trusted myself. And without that research into the field of trauma reporting, I don’t think I would have known or thought to really intensely review material pre-publication with “Josh.” That’s what led to revamping his sections so that, I think, they contain an emotional truth. Those passages then were particularly resonant with readers. I got an email from a woman after the Grace story came out: She described her sexual assault and her evangelical college’s egregious mishandling of her complaint, and she said she’d be willing to go on the record. She trusted me and felt like her story would be in good hands. I cried when I read that.

I remembered hearing Kristen Lombardi talk at that DART Center conference about how she does three whole interviews with assault survivors, and how she reads back quotes and asks people, “Are you okay with this or that detail?” I’d talked with other reporters who said they sometimes even read whole paragraphs or passages to their survivors. At first Josh – I put something in there – there’s a big thing I can’t talk about that was part of his experience that’s not in the story. When I read it to him, he told me it was painful for him to hear it in the story, and that it made him cringe. I said, “No, no. I don’t want you cringing.” And he said, “Leave it, leave it – it’s the truth, that’s what happened.” So I was in a very interesting place of being like, “Well, I’m not sure if you want that, actually. A reader doesn’t have to know every single thing that happened. And that’s not possible, anyway.” I told him, “You tell me 1,000 things, and I’ll pick a handful of them to shape into a story.” I added, “You’re going to art school, your art is starting to take up themes from your childhood experiences of abuse.” He’d sent me some of his recent work. I said, “You’re going to tell your own story in your own way someday – it might be in a different medium. Right now, you’re entrusting me with your story, but it’s still going to be my version of your story and the institution that wronged you.” And he got that.

Then it became very much a collaborative thing, where we’d have like a five-hour g-chat conversation —  “Do we want to include this, do we want to include that?” It was right before the story closed, which was when I got all those incredible quotes about his suicide attempts. It felt very much like doing a documentary radio piece as opposed to a magazine story, the former being known as a more collaborative process. Even though I was never a documentary audio producer, I’d admired the craft. So the part of his story I didn’t include in the final piece, that’s a big part of why the abuse was such a mindfuck for him. We wrestled with that and ultimately decided against including it, not wanting to give a reader any ammunition to say that he had somehow “seduced” his abuser. It was also just an incredibly complex concept to try to convey to a reader – one that would have required a tremendous amount of nuance – and I just didn’t think I could do it properly in a relatively short space. If the whole Grace story had been a profile of him, if there hadn’t been all the accountability stuff to deal with, then maybe I could’ve pulled it off.

"The Mountain," Feldman called her growing and ever-present pile of documents. She also had thousands of digital "pages."

I also have to say, the end game of going over material with “Josh” and with the father of the boy in jail was incredibly time-consuming and wonderful. I think I disappeared from my life for a week. And I had major freak-outs. Like: Oh my gosh I’m breaking the rules, I’m letting sources see parts of the text in advance – does this mean I’m a hack? I had this whole internal debate with myself but ended up fully accepting what I already knew: Trauma reporting is a whole different animal. Grace was my first experience reporting on vulnerable sources, where you have to throw out the rules and forge a kind of intimacy. That was the most rewarding time of the whole reporting process, because I was engaging with the people I most cared about, making sure that I wasn’t blundering their stories. Those were the conversations that filled me with a tremendous sense of gratitude. What a privilege, what a responsibility to be trusted not to screw up something so big. These are people’s lives. That was a period when I just thought, “Yeah, this is why I do this. This is why I want to write.”

What’s your reporting background? What brought you to this point in your career?

I graduated from Brown four years ago. I came from a public radio background. That was very much a part of my identity. I did student radio in college and hosted an alt.NPR podcast – Brown, alma mater of Ira Glass, has a very strong radio culture. I went to the Third Coast International Audio Festival twice, and I very much thought I was going be a public radio reporter forever and ever. I graduated and moved to Brooklyn because everybody else was doing it. As a post-college extracurricular, I joined this lefty radio collective called Beyond the Pale, a show affiliated with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice that broadcasts on New York’s Pacifica station. The radio collective has several people who work in print. It turned out that my first articles initially came into the world as radio stories that that crew incubated. So there’s Esther Kaplan, who edits the Investigative Fund – she’s the one who goaded me into going on a Birthright Israel trip so I could do a story for the radio show; later, she ended up being my editor on my Birthright story in The Nation. Meanwhile, I worked as a fill-in producer on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show and also had a research gig on a PBS documentary.

But it became clear that the stories I like to do are long, reported essays. And that doesn’t exist on public radio except at This American Life. Most of my heroes do long-form narrative journalism. I like troublemakers. Public radio is not the place to be a troublemaker. The work I do now feels like it’s 1,000 percent un-public radio. But I can still see the radio reporter in me: I have a really good ear for dialogue and quotes, and I love chatting people up and getting them to say things in ways that are very quotable. Reporting comes naturally to me. Writing is a different matter.

I guess how I started making the switch to print was that I did a Beyond the Pale radio story about Jews for Jesus, which led to a print version for n+1. Then I met the Killing the Buddha circuit of religion writers – we’re all half-Jews, it turns out. (I identify as a fullsy but have lots to say about my baptism when I want to pass among Christians.) Then I spent much of 2010 as Jeff Sharlet’s researcher on his book C Street, and that was investigative reporting boot camp.

How do you mean? What did you learn?

When you’re investigating something, speak the language of that community. But it’s not like you’re trying to pass, you just want to convey that you’re proficient. Learn a few key words and phrases, reflect people’s language back to them, speak to people’s best perceptions of themselves, and they’ll project what they want on to you. (With the family, the key words were like “reconciliation” and “principles of Jesus” and “bridges of understanding.” Sample sentence: How do you think the principles of Jesus help build bridges of understanding that might lead toward reconciliation?) It helps people let their guard down, and then they tell you what they really think and feel: the ideologies that enable powerful people to do terrible things. Some people call this “faking friendly” (I later learned). I got so good at it that I scared myself.

Nowadays, I’m learning – rather belatedly – that I’m still growing into my own as a reporter. The Jeff Sharlet method is not the Kiera Feldman method. For a long time, I took his method as gospel. I remember Jeff once introduced me as “one of the most manipulative young reporters I’ve met in years.” I was just thrilled and thought it was the best compliment I’d ever received. But now I’m learning that’s not really who I am as a reporter – or who I want to be. Of course, I delight in the gamesmanship of it all. And I basically buy into the Janet Malcolm hypothesis (reporting as a morally indefensible betrayal of sources). But I’d like to forge some kind of middle ground in which I play it straight, at least some of the time. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I’m drawn to trauma reporting – there’s no artifice when I approach someone who’s gone through something terrible.

Let’s pause here while I ask Jeff Sharlet what he thinks of Feldman. His response:

“I’ve found that the problem with hiring bright young people from fancy schools is that they tend to confuse manners with ethics. They have lovely manners, and they think having these lovely manners makes them ethical. It doesn’t, of course; all it does is prevent them from doing tough investigative work, which isn’t polite. Kiera’s the best of both worlds, a wonderfully pleasant and genuinely kind person with a killer instinct for when somebody is lying or hiding something. And she uses her pleasant, seemingly naive manner to make interview subjects let their guard down. Is that manipulative? Of course. Is it justified when talking to alleged gangsters, cheats, crooks and snake oil salesmen? Absolutely. But that talent would be useless if it weren’t connected to a truly dogged determination to get the facts. She’s the best fact checker I’ve hired − maddening, in fact, which is just what a fact checker should be. And, maybe most important, she has the ability to empathize and really hear sources who are frightened for good reasons. She’s a natural, self-taught.”

Now back to our chat. What kind of resistance did you run into, from Grace?

Not as much as you’d imagine. I honestly think if I’d been a different person there would’ve been a lot more resistance. I thought I was going to get a lot more pushback than I did. The doors that got slammed in my face they weren’t really slammed, it’s just like – people didn’t reply to emails or Facebook messages. Senator Jim Inhofe’s office never returned any of my calls (your tax dollars at work, everybody). Otherwise: People let their guard down around me because I look like I’m still in college, and I get nervous and smiley around strangers and seem like the last person on earth who would be an investigative reporter. I seem nonthreatening and chatty, and I kind of work that. I look like a nice Christian girl if you want to think that. No one knew what I was up to, really. I flew under the radar. I’m sure gender was a factor. When I approached Pastor Bob in the receiving line after church, I was wearing my nice Christian clothes; I just complimented the sermon, said I wrote about religion, and asked if I could pick his brain sometime. He said, “Sure, call my secretary.” Really, all I do is speak to people’s best conceptions of themselves. This is from the Jeff Sharlet school of reporting. The only really hostile time that I had with the Grace story was when I called Mary Ellen Hood, the former principal. She hung up on me twice, actually. I really wanted to make sure I was doing due diligence, so I called her back. Then with Grace’s lawyer, Mike King – I was saving him till the very end and just planning to lay all my cards on the table. But what was interesting, he actually called me and said, “I hear you’ve been asking some questions. How can I help?” I don’t think he understood just how much reporting I’d done, because over the course of the conversation it seemed like he started to realize how much I knew and how much I’d actually done, and then he started shutting down.

You know what surprised me the most? That the D.A., Tim Harris, said that as a criminal prosecutor he “(looks) at the Ten Commandments.”

People (there) don’t bat an eyelash at that. That’s the thing I learned in Oklahoma – that’s not anything. My friends from Oklahoma are like, “Yeah, this is just what our politicians are like.” They have strong ties to the Christian community and that’s why they’re in power.

Tell me if I’m reading this wrong but I detect anger in the writing, even in descriptions such as: “Up close, Pastor Bob’s skin had a purplish putty quality. His bulbous pug nose was a few shades darker than the rest of his face.”

For me, it felt like each successive draft was really trying to tone down the writing and make it less over the top – no frills. It was such a challenge not go overboard with descriptions of Pastor Bob. I’m not used to trying to describe people. This sounds really dumb but people’s faces are hard to describe!

Very hard to describe.

Someone should have told me that!

You did a good job considering no one ever told you that.

It felt like I was really trying to tone it down – as a person in the flesh, Pastor Bob is over the top. I was like: How am I going to write this, because he’s beyond belief. If you watch YouTube videos of him, he just sounds like an angry, nasty man. I actually felt like I had to dig deep to find the nice stuff about him to try to understand why so many people think he’s this great Bible teacher. I couldn’t think of any ways to describe him except for beady eyed, paunchy, exaggerated pores, prone to fire-and-brimstone-sounding crescendos on the pulpit. I had this long list and I was like: Okay, I can only pick one or two of them or otherwise it’ll sound like caricature.

But I know what you’re getting at, with the anger in the writing – I wouldn’t call it anger. I guess the more I found out and the more I realized how much Grace got away with it, I was like: Wow, this is really a story about getting away with it, once I learned from the horse’s mouth how they had justified it to themselves. To top that off, I felt so attached to – I called the victims and families “my families” – even people I hadn’t talked to felt like “my families” – and once I started learning how much pain they’d gone through and how cruel Pastor Bob had been to them and how unrepentant he was – I would say the emotion was more like incredulous and indignant. But then trying to tone it down and be like: I can’t be over the top. I was worried it was already too preachy as a story, that there was too much editorializing. All that stuff like “This is a cautionary tale” and “Here is why you do XYZ” and “Here is the lesson of that.” But then again I really felt like I was obligated to have that stuff: It might not be pretty writing, but it’s a way to make the story bigger than itself. But maybe there was some underlying anger beneath the writing, like I felt angry on behalf of “my families.”

You’ve mentioned to me that you wrote more than a dozen drafts. Talk about that, and about the editing process.

My early drafts were a mess. I left whole sections just sketched out as outlines, because there was so much material to try to pull together. I was totally overwhelmed. And I was continuously doing more reporting, right on up to closing time. Michael Mason, my editor, gave really great structural comments. He didn’t do as much line editing as I was used to in other stories. That was new for me; I’m used to having every sentence I write go through the wringer and come out different on the other side. He very rightly pointed out that the piece needed a richer sense of character. I’d been so focused on just pulling together facts that this whole cast of characters just got jumbled together. He made what proved to be a crucial suggestion, which was to think about Grace Church’s building as a character in the story, to show how it changed over time. Originally, the “gilded carousel” final line came at the end of a kind of long 1,200-word lede, but then I moved it to the end of the piece. And the whole time that I was revising (while doing more reporting), I was working toward that gilded carousel. At the same time, I figured out that I needed to start the piece mid-scene with the “do not fondle” agreement. So that was a fantastic place to be: I knew where it began, and I knew where it needed to end up, and everything else would get figured out.

Michael also encouraged me to make Pastor Bob a looming presence throughout the whole story, to let the reader meet him in the flesh only at the end. As such, I don’t think I wrote that scene until, like, “Grace8” (out of “Grace13,” drafts). Before that, thinking like a radio reporter kinda, I just assembled a bunch of Bob’s quotes I wanted to use and left them there, as a placeholder. With the Pastor Bob scene, Michael encouraged me to really pick and choose – less is more. Which I think was spot-on, although it took some serious restraint to not use all this great Pastor Bob material. The weekend before the story closed, I revised Josh’s sections like five times; it was really intense. He’d just told me about the two suicide attempts. Plus, in reviewing material with the father of the boy in jail, he gave me permission to use the more recent developments with the baby and the girlfriend. So I wrote that stuff at the very end as well.

How and where did you learn how to report?

I never took a journalism class. I took creative nonfiction classes in college and, um, learned how to write some mildly amusing personal essays about my family? Ugh. The David Sedaris turn in culture, in which the young were ruined and made to be less curious about the wide world outside themselves.

I guess I’ve DIY’d it. I apprentice myself to people. There was Jeff Sharlet bootcamp. Of course, there’s Beyond the Pale, my radio collective, which I still love dearly. Alisa Solomon teaches at Columbia J-School and is in my radio collective and has very generously advised me on projects over the years. I have a couple Legitimate Journalist friends I g-chat when I’m in need of quick-hit advice, generally along the lines of “I’m freaking out, I don’t know any of this stuff, please help – is this ethical??” I went to the Investigative Reporters & Editors conference last year, which was a crash course in and of itself. Also and importantly, I have on occasion reached out to people by email who are doing the kind of work I’m doing or want to be doing. Thank you for all the advice, generous strangers on the Internet! They are nice enough not to mention that my emails are all time-stamped, like, 4:55 a.m.

What do you wish you’d done differently in “Grace?”

I really regret not getting to talk with the main second-tier members of Grace’s leadership: former principal DeeAnn McKay, head administrator John Dunlavey, and former youth pastor Mike Goolsbay. I did due diligence in requesting interviews with them, and then some, to no avail. But then I gave up because I was just swamped. I should’ve been beating down their door. I wish I’d given them an opportunity to surprise me with their decency. This week, I heard through the grapevine that Goolsbay is responding really well to the article, like a true Christian. Now I feel like an asshole.

What are you working on now? What’s next?

I really don’t feel done with Grace. I feel like I’ve done the first step, and it was a good first step. I’m delighted and also shocked that people are reading it outside Oklahoma. I emotionally braced myself in case nobody read it or cared. What I really want to do is tell more of the victims’ stories and their families’ stories – it feels like I have the accountability part of it out of the way. Sure, if insiders contact me that would be wonderful – if they say, “Look, I was on the inside and here’s all the places where someone was lying through their teeth in depositions,” I take it and run with it. But really, my heart is with the families and their stories. I’m really interested in the long-term effects of abuse and how it can impact the fabric of someone’s life and have a ripple effect on the whole family. Another thing I want to get into is the idea of the cycle of abuse and why some kids who’ve been abused go on and become perpetrators and others do not.

Why not a book?

I know right? I haven’t used the b-word yet. This is the first time someone’s used the b-word. Yeah, of course I want to write a book about Grace. But, like, I’m 26. I guess 26-year-olds write books. Ok. Yeah. I could write a “long, long, long reads.” That’s actually what I call books now.

Do the book.

Of course. Plus, people in the community are even more likely to talk now that they’ve seen the article and know what I’m about. It’s not like everybody from Grace hates me now. The predominant response seems to be: Thank you; finally, we know; this story needed to be told; you got it right.

The Atlantic’s James Fallows, meanwhile, lamented that Daisey deceived not only a massive, presumably trusting audience but also threatened the credibility of the Western press and the efforts of human rights workers. And, he wrote, none of it had to happen: “If he had even once said that he was presenting a polemic, a metaphor, a dramatization, an ‘inspired by real events’ monologue rather than real ‘facts,’ no one could ever have complained.”

The conversation resurfaced this week with new questions about humorist David Sedaris’ essays, which have appeared on NPR and in the New Yorker. A Washington Post story probed the “gray area” of Sedaris’ work, raising “the question of what’s permissible in the context of a nonfiction program.” Paul Farhi wrote: “The immediate question is whether Sedaris’ stories are, strictly speaking, true − an important consideration for journalistic organizations such as NPR and programs such as This American Life. A secondary consideration is what, if any, kind of disclosure such programs owe their listeners when broadcasting Sedaris’ brand of humor.”

So what’re we talking about here, a story-rating system?

We seem to be pinwheeling toward that moment when publications and programs build windows into process for the sake of preempting attacks on credibility. In the meantime let’s keep talking about it, tedious though the topic may seem. (If the topic doesn’t seem tedious, congratulations − you are a narrative nerd!) How are you framing your storytelling? What decisions have you made about your methods? Are you, say, generally more comfortable putting reconstructed dialogue in italics or behind em dashes than in direct quotes, or in some cases are you so confident in your sourcing that you’ll use the sacred punctuation? Do you prefer to qualify some remembered or reconstructed actions with “perhaps” rather than state them as fact? How much of the reporting and writing process will you address in your About This Story box or your back-of-the-book notes? To what degree will you be transparent with readers? To what extent will you go to be transparent? If your publisher refuses to run the sourcing with the story, or at length in the back of your book, will you create a companion website or another online space and run it yourself? Don’t know how to do that? Here, watch: Tom Lake practically line-by-lines his marvelous Atlanta magazine story “The Last Heavy Footfalls of Doc Hullender.”

Even with a high degree of transparency, there may be questions. Now that trust is fluid, it must be guarded and earned and re-earned, even if you are a god. When Hampton Sides wrote the bestseller Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, the New Yorker’s David Grann wrote, in a review: “Hampton Sides has long been one of the great narrative nonfiction writers of our time, excavating essential pieces of American history − from the daring rescue of POWs during World War II to the settling of the West − and bringing them vividly to life.” (Takeaway: Sides is highly regarded by one of the most acclaimed narrative journalists in the business.)

In a Q-and-A, Sides was asked, “The ‘Notes’ and ‘Bibliography’ sections … total more than 50 pages − how did you begin to tackle the wealth of information? What was your research process like?” Sides answered, in part: “I don’t think I unearthed any massive bombshells that will change the world forever − like, say, proving once and for all that J. Edgar Hoover actually orchestrated the whole affair. Instead, what I unearthed were thousands and thousands of tiny details that make the story come alive on the page and make it possible, for the first time, to understand the tragedy as a complete, multi-stranded narrative. The book’s packed full of novelistic detail − weather, architecture, what people were wearing, what the landscape looked like, the music that was playing on the radio. To get all this stuff, I had to do the usual sort of archival work − from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin to the London newspaper archives − and I went pretty much everywhere James Earl Ray went, following in his fugitive footsteps: Puerto Vallarta, Toronto, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Birmingham, Lisbon, London.” (Takeaway: Sides sourced his material extensively, and to the satisfaction of esteemed peers.)

The New York Times gave Sides’ book a great review but for one line: “Beyond writing that ‘the kitchen was redolent with the tang of yeast,’ Mr. Sides goes mercifully easy on the made-up particulars, preferring to take a cool, clinical view of Galt and his subsequent travels.”

“Made-up particulars” − is this characterization fair? Did the reviewer carelessly damn the book’s (and therefore the writer’s) integrity with that one line? Or did the author undermine himself with his description of baked goods?

Here is the paragraph in question:

The prison bakers sweated in the glare of the ovens, making bread for the hungry men of the honor farm. Since dawn, they’d prepared more than sixty loaves, and now the kitchen was redolent with the tang of yeast as the fresh bread cooled on the racks before slicing. A guard, armed but not very vigilant, patrolled the galley perimeter.

“How could I know this?” Sides later told an audience at the Mayborn literary nonfiction conference in Texas. “Well, the prison bakers at the Missouri state pen interviewed after Ray’s escape said they expressly liked to work in the bakery because it smelled so good in there … and only minutes before Ray’s escape, they had just pulled 65 loaves of bread from the oven.”

A leap? No, the writer decided. In this case, he allowed logic to prevail. Had the bakers used yeast in the bread? Yes. Does baked bread have a fragrance? Yes. Since the bakers just moments earlier had pulled the fresh bread from the ovens and placed it on the racks, was it safe to assume the kitchen smelled of baked bread?

Risking absurdity, let’s push it: What if the bakers burned the bread that morning − not so redolent a kitchen then, was it? What if, by accident, they forgot to add the yeast? Or, referring to the first line of the paragraph, what if these particular bakers lacked sweat glands and therefore did not in fact glisten by the light of the ovens? Possible! But highly unlikely. The question for the narrative writer becomes where to lay bets − on the possible or the not likely? − or whether to gamble at all. Would it have been just as effective to say the bakers had just taken 65 loaves of fresh-baked bread from the oven and let readers fill in the rest with their senses?

Nearly a decade ago, we published a lengthy essay that paved this slippery slope better than anything we’d seen. We re-read it the other day, to see if it holds. It does. “… There should be a firm line, not a fuzzy one, between fiction and nonfiction and all work that purports to be nonfiction should strive to achieve the standards of the most truthful journalism,” wrote Roy Peter Clark. He suggested adhering to two principles:

Do not add. This means that writers of nonfiction should not add to a report things that did not happen. To make news clear and comprehensible, it is often necessary to subtract or condense. Done without care or responsibility, even such subtraction can distort. We cross a more definite line into fiction, however, when we invent or add facts or images or sounds that were not there.

Do not deceive. This means that journalists should never mislead the public in reproducing events. The implied contract of all nonfiction is binding: The way it is represented here is, to the best of our knowledge, the way it happened. Anything that intentionally or unintentionally fools the audience violates that contract and the core purpose of journalism – to get at the truth. Thus, any exception to the implied contract – even a work of humor or satire – should be transparent or disclosed.

So, how to do it? When to do it? Whether to do it? This is about to get interesting.

I have to admit I do the same thing when I open an issue of the New Yorker and find a piece by Katherine Boo. I don’t think she publishes more than a story or two a year. And fewer, lately. But the stories are remarkable. She takes on heavy, complicated themes – social policy and the lives of the poor – and brings a world of vivid characters to life.

Take the “The Marriage Cure,” a New Yorker feature from 2003. A group of academics and policy types had suggested that pervasive singleness in poor neighborhoods, often assumed to be a symptom of poverty, might instead be a root cause. If they were right, a campaign to promote marriage in poor neighborhoods could help improve their lot. One state, Oklahoma, decided to give it a try. Boo went to see how it was working.

Boo could have made the idea the main thing, and profiled a bunch of people. Or she could have picked one person to be the protagonist – a single woman, or a marriage promoter – and zoomed in close. But she did neither of those things. Instead, she wrote about a friendship. The piece begins:

One July morning last year in Oklahoma City, in a public housing project named Sooner Haven, twenty-two-year-old Kim Henderson pulled a pair of low-rider jeans over a high-rising gold lamé thong and declared herself ready for church. Her best friend in the project, Corean Brothers, was already in the parking lot, fanning away her hot flashes behind the wheel of a smoke-belching Dodge Shadow. “Car’s raggedy, but it’ll get us from pillar to post,” Corean said when Kim climbed in…

I love this. Our lives are stories of relationships. We aren’t us without them. But it’s actually pretty rare to see authentic, intimate relationships at the center of a reported magazine piece. It’s tough reporting, for sure. People often guard their meaningful relationships closer then they guard their secrets. They’ll tell you the most private things – painful things, shocking things – and then politely hustle you out when their neighbor shows up, or their kid gets home from school. But Boo writes about Kim and Corean and the people in their lives like she’s known them for ages, and has only now, finally, gotten around to writing about them. And they talk like no one else is listening.

When Corean visits a man in prison who, in both sustaining and vexing ways, has become something more than a friend, Boo observes quietly: “Corean stretched her legs, letting her foot graze the instep of his state-issued sneaker.” Then she returns home, weary, and her son, a high-school senior, removes her sandals and sits with her in their dark apartment, squeezing her swollen feet.

“Corean remembered how, when she was a child, hardship had turned members of her family against each other, and was grateful for her own family’s closeness,” Boo writes. “But she also knew that single mothers could be seduced by it. Husbandless, they treated their [daughters] as confidantes and their [sons] as stand-in partners, and were shattered when those companions left them behind.” At least a half-dozen scenes in the piece are so intimate, they’re startling.

So of course, Boo goes with Kim and Corean to marriage class. And Boo lays out the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand: In theory, it’s easier to make ends meet and easier to raise kids as a couple, but none of the women in the class had had great experiences with men. Most of them had grown up without fathers, or been left, or been beaten; two of the women had been with violent criminals. In the projects where Kim and Corean live, Boo writes, “relationships with men were often what stopped an ambitious woman from escaping.” So, it’s complicated.

The piece never really lands explicitly on one side or the other. That’s a sign of Boo’s ambition, I think. The marriage class happens pretty early in Boo’s narrative, and she barely returns to it. Instead, she follows Kim and Corean out into their world – a world they face with resilience and grace and good judgment and, still, problems seem to find them, and cascade. “One unacknowledged consolation of struggling in the inner city is the lack of time one has to indulge romantic discontent,” Boo writes.

Ultimately, one of the women’s chances at a good, lasting relationship seem better than her friend’s. But I’m not going to give away the ending. One of the pleasures of Boo’s writing is that you come to care about her characters and how things turn out for them. I’ll just say that in the end the piece is about hope, and fear, and work, and health, and money, and companionship, as much as it is about marriage. In other words, it’s a true love story.

Douglas McGray (@dougmcgray) has written features for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and This American Life. He is also the editor in chief of Pop-Up Magazine, the co-editor of My Life Is True, and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation (which hosted Katherine Boo the year she wrote “The Marriage Cure”).

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, check out the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

The evening offered a mash-up of topics, from the iPad as “salvation, almost” to Moby-Dick, McPhee and Milton. Despite the differing needs of radio, television, digital and print entities, several panelists were quick to agree that it is, in fact, possible for long-form to be too long.

Engelberg recalled an argument he had with a reporter over story length, saying, “The Internet may be infinite, but my attention span isn’t.” Aronson-Rath noted that several times, “Frontline” had done a long (approximately 90-minute) and a short (approximately 52-minute) version of the same documentary for broadcast. Of those, she could recall only one in which she thought the long version had been better. Remnick described Lawrence Wright’s recent exploration of Scientology – which clocked in at more than 20,000 words – as an anomaly. “In the world we live in,” he said, “5,000 words is the norm.”

While some outlets have stopped running even 5,000-word pieces, “long-form is absolutely not dead,” noted ProPublica’s Engelberg. “What’s dead is bad long-form.” He sees the market as clearing out the pieces that shouldn’t have been long in the first place, while leaving room for the good.

The people formerly (still?) known as the audience

The panel spent a lot of time addressing the elusive goal of getting and holding audience attention. Talking about the virally successful “Giant Pool of Money” episode from “This American Life,” Glass explained that the piece was framed around a single question related to the economic crisis: “Who should we hate?”

Variety, too, has a role, said Remnick. “It can’t be all brown food; there needs to be different colors and moods and varieties and intellectual aspirations to it.” Otherwise, he suggested, “the reader, meaning me,” gets bored.

Pondering audience size for long-form, Engelberg asked, “Are we reaching a mass audience with all this material? I don’t think as much as we’d like.” Look at the collective audience of the editors and producers onstage, he suggested, and compare it to the broader swatch of America – “call it elite, call it select, call it small,” it would be just a fraction of the potential audience. Tools like the iPad and Kindle, Engelberg noted, offer organizations another chance to reach new groups of people.

In reference to the word “elite,” Remnick had a different take: “‘Moby-Dick’ sold 3,000 copies in Melville’s lifetime. It was an enterprise worth doing. … This word ‘elistim’ is used like a baseball bat. It’s used like a political weapon.”

The shifting storyscape

The group also discussed changes in technology and the news cycle. Glass offered an upbeat note, saying that the 24-hour cycle, with all its shouting, leaves people wanting substance and step-back and quirk. “It’s really been good for us as a business.”

Still, some kinds of storytelling are changing in response. Aronson-Rath said that documentary film used to be more focused on plot and tension. Filmmakers would save their best stuff – or at least some of it – to the end, to give viewers a payoff. Now, she said, “I really expect to know a little more sooner,” suggesting that a film has to be more aggressive from the start because the assumption that the audience is captive no longer holds. Still, Aronson-Rath believes that new possibilities of “things like the iPad and the tablet are a salvation, almost, for documentary film” and that new devices will allow for a 3-D documentary experience.

Remnick described himself as more resistant to the trend toward new graphic and interactive storytelling models. “Language is still the greatest invention we have,” he said. “It’s still the most complex and richest invention we can imagine.”

Money and long-form

Moderator Stewart reminded the audience that New York Times Magazine editor Gerry Marzorati has stated that a good piece of long-form nonfiction can cost $40,000 to produce. Engelberg seconded Marzorati, saying “$40,000 is cheap, cheap, cheap.” He added, “You can’t do the same work with half the number of people – particularly when you’re asking them to do twice as much.”

In terms of long-form funding sources, Glass referenced the recent debate over public broadcasting, saying, “Our situation is great! The United States Congress just loves us.” Aronson-Rath noted that “Frontline” receives 80% of its funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and that due to the subject matter of its documentaries, the show has a hard time getting corporate sponsorship.

So you want to be a rock and roll star?

Remnick talked about learning from John McPhee at Princeton and described how the experience transformed his understanding of nonfiction, likening the analysis of writing to dissecting a frog in order to examine muscle structure. In response, a despairing viewer wrote in to the webcast to ask, “How does one learn the craft of long-form journalism, short of teaming up with John McPhee?”

As luck would have it, the panel answered a similar question from another viewer. Asked whether he would recommend going to journalism school or getting an MFA to become a good writer, Remnick stressed the importance of reading voraciously, saying “I don’t understand people who want to be writers who don’t really read very much.”

Engelberg said that at one point, he got 1300 resumes and read every one of them without concern for whether the applicants had gone to journalism school. Similarly, Aronson-Rath said that film school was not a requirement for working with “Frontline,” that having an eye and being a keen reporter were the most crucial qualities. As for what makes for a good reporter, Remnick used the word hunger and said that “without that stuff-gathering, without that harvesting, without that dumb stubbornness – do something else.”

Glass suggested that when it comes down to it, the best way to begin in journalism is to “start making stuff. That’s the advantage of the media landscape we’re in.” On the disadvantages of that same landscape, Glass noted that the permanent news cycle lacks plot and characters and storytelling, as well as “a sense of discovery or sense of joy.”

Remnick suggested that the problem may lie less in the 24-hour news cycle than in “screaming & yelling at each other like idiots.” The world keeps moving, he said, so the job of a long-form journalist is to step out of the cycle of life – to some extent, to stop time.

For more, watch the video of the event or see comments and tweets made during the discussion. You can also check out our earlier post on a radio conversation with Raney Aronson-Rath and Steve Engelberg.

Thanks to Nieman Lab’s Megan Garber, who made significant reporting contributions to this post.

Tonight at 7.pm., ProPublica and The New School are hosting “Long-form Storytelling in a Short-Attention-Span World.” Alison Stewart, co-anchor of the PBS show “Need To Know” will moderate a great set of speakers: Ira Glass, host of “This American Life”; David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker; Raney Aronson-Rath, series senior producer for “Frontline”; and Steve Engelberg, managing editor of ProPublica. The event is free and open to the public.

In a kind of sneak preview of what tonight’s discussion might be like, Aronson-Rath and Engelberg talked long-form Monday on “The Leonard Lopate Show” at radio’s WNYC. Two key things that emerged from their conversation were their excitement about the changing consumption of long-form and their positive experiences with collaboration (sometimes with each other). Here are a few of their on-air comments, lightly edited for clarity.

Lopate asked if there are specific pieces of a story, or even whole stories, that work better in a particular medium. In response, Aronson-Rath discussed “Frontline’s” partnership with ProPublica:

Sometimes Steve will bring to me – and he knows this – the most amazing reporting. And the two of us will put our heads together and say, “How can we make that into a documentary film?” There are times when the visuals just aren’t going to be able to bring that story more to life than they’re going to be able to do in print, so we have to pass. And that’s a real disappointment.

To a certain degree, there are limitations to the visual form, in the sense of the complexities, and also simply people sometimes don’t want to go on camera. There’s a whole range of issues that we have that Steve doesn’t. And I would argue the vice versa [is also true]: There are sometimes visual stories that are just terrific that aren’t as strong or as powerful in print.

Engelberg agreed, but emphasized the complex stories that ProPublica has been able to deliver through cross-platform collaboration:

Having been in an organization, ProPublica , an investigative newsroom, where we don’t have a printing press or radio station – we’re web-based – we work with more different media than anyone else. We have found an amazing flexibility, particularly with radio, which turns out to be excellent for complicated storytelling – far better than I think I understood when I started. And “Frontline” has done some miracles with us already, in terms of getting complicated things on the air. So I think we’re stretching the boundaries of this now. The boundaries are disappearing, and we’re seeing that there are more possibilities than we might have first thought.

Later, Engelberg said that in some ways, long-form storytelling may be improving despite the difficult straits that journalism finds itself in today:

I think one of the things we could do when newspapers were a monopoly is tell long stories in a very boring way because there was frankly no place else to go. You would take these stories, they would not have narrative, they would not have pacing. They would just be just facts layered one upon the other. To me, it’s become clear that in this competitive news environment, we need to learn what a good documentarian already knows, which is how to tell a story, how to develop a character, how to make people care. So I feel like, in all of our editorial conversations with “Frontline,” with NPR and so on, that we’re learning things, too.

In addition to depicting a “fundamental” shift toward collaboration, Aronson-Rath described the way that technology is changing storytelling options at “Frontline”:

It’s just an incredible time for us. The cameras are now so much cheaper, they’re more accessible. So on the “Law and Disorder” project, for example, our producer was actually filming the entire way through. We were able to post those videos online and actually have visual storytelling that lasted the whole year, instead of what we would normally do, which is to keep our production to a few weeks at the end of the process of reporting.

Those technological changes, of course, are not affecting just the way storytelling journalism is produced. Aronson-Rath talked about how even old-school media are considering the ways viewers will consume their content:

We believe [that] for documentary film, the tablet, the iPad, basically these new platforms are essentially going to be our salvation. … We’re really trying to create the most exciting environment that you can inside a film, around the film. That in part is why we collaborate with folks like Steve, because we really believe that very sophisticated text companion pieces are essential. When somebody’s on an iPad, and they’re watching our film, if they’re going to get distracted, we want to distract them to our material, our content, to what we feel is important.

Engelberg noted that at first, ProPublica entered the journalism arena to fill what was seen as a gap in coverage by newspapers and magazines. “Over time,” he said, “what became clear to us is that reporting and storytelling transcend medium.”

For more, you can listen to the rest of Monday’s Leonard Lopate show. Or tune in tonight, when David Remnick and Ira Glass join Aronson-Rath and Engelberg on stage.

Yesterday, I was talking with an MIT new media researcher who showed me a project that incorporated individual narratives. He felt the need to reassure me that they were not just stories but “stories with teeth.” Dan Conover over at Xark (see item 4 in this post) has for a while now been calling for an end to what he refers to as “narrative-based” news. And Los Angeles Times education reporters caught minor flak in September on Numbers Rule Your World, a statistics blog that has taken to shouting “Story time!” when they think a reporter has jumped the shark, going from data to inventing explanations or causes.

Late last month, John Allen Paulos of Temple University wrote on “Stories vs. statistics” for The New York Times’ philosophy blog, referencing the inevitable C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures lecture and considering how the literature/science divide plays out with regard to what kind of information we prefer. Outlining the tension between stories and hard numbers, Paulos summarized two kinds of errors in statistics: “we’re said to commit a Type I error when we observe something that is not really there and a Type II error when we fail to observe something that is there.” A bit later he writes that which error we worry most about may determine how we want to receive information:

People who love to be entertained and beguiled or who particularly wish to avoid making a Type II error might be more apt to prefer stories to statistics. Those who don’t particularly like being entertained or beguiled or who fear the prospect of making a Type I error might be more apt to prefer statistics to stories. The distinction is not unrelated to that between those (61.389% of us) who view numbers in a story as providing rhetorical decoration and those who view them as providing clarifying information.

Narrative fraud

As early as 2007, Nassim Taleb noted “the narrative fallacy” in reasoning, which he suggested might be better titled narrative fraud. While not knocking narrative nonfiction directly, Taleb indicted our human tendency to link events by creating stories that explain them, the comfort we derive from thinking we understand why something happened if we make a story out of it.

In a TEDx talk from last year, which we covered on Storyboard, economist Tyler Cowen encouraged listeners to distrust stories in proportion to the very degree they find themselves moved by those stories, to understand that when a story begins to convince them of something, a sales job is underway. There are only a few story templates, he noted, and stories tend to leave out conflicting or messy stuff that doesn’t fit the pattern. “The more inspired a story makes me feel,” said Cowen, “very often, the more nervous I get.”

I have no issue with Cowen teaching us to be more critical consumers of story or to ask what information is being left out. And at root, it’s true that stories can be reduced to a few basic themes. If you’ve read one dramatic medical narrative in a newspaper, it’s not hard to find a dozen similar ones on the same topic in other papers that use more or less the same machinery. At times they can be reductive, generic or manipulative. But sometimes something else is happening.

A narrative like Los Angeles Times reporter Thomas Curwen’s “Ana’s Story” might on a surface level have a lot in common with Tom Hallman’s Pulitzer Prize winner “The Boy Behind the Mask.” Both are about coming of age with a facial deformity and undergoing harrowing medical procedures to address the problem. But the two stories’ subtler aspects are more complicated and different than their common template would lead you to believe. Looking at the broad story, it’s easy to miss the specifics that can matter to a given community at a specific point in time. Curwen informed me that when his piece on Ana came out, it was the second most viewed story for the Metro section in the paper’s history.

Not all narratives are the same

People have a tendency to create their own narratives out of stock stories, which includes adding their own meaning to the stories they view and read. It’s worth realizing that those meanings aren’t automatically irrelevant or wrong.

But even if we concede the existence of a buffet of empty-calorie narratives, highly-engineered true stories that engage readers but don’t offer the kind of information that might appear in breaking news reports or policy stories, it doesn’t mean that narrative can’t be useful in conveying news. One celebrated example is This American Life’s “The Giant Pool of Money” episode. Jay Rosen did a good job of explaining why such a narrative was important—the idea that without background on the financial collapse (and, I would argue, recognizable characters to follow through it), many of us were unable to understand individual hard news updates about the economy. Narrative journalism can provide context in ways that not only educate people but that they also value (check out Nieman Lab’s post from this summer about how Slate racks up visits with long-form journalism.)

Narrative as a vehicle

The most important thing, however, may be that narrative appears to be the most efficient vehicle for getting people to understand, remember, or accept new information. Studies done within journalism and outside it have confirmed the power of narrative in conveying information. Previously on Storyboard, we also noted a Kaiser Family Foundation study that looked at the real-world effectiveness that even fictional television characters and narratives can have with regard to conveying public health information.

I recently interviewed Safra Center fellow Michael Jones, who is melding the worlds of statistics and story by analyzing storytelling’s effectiveness in policy arenas. (For his purposes, he identified a story as anything that involves characters, a plot, a setting and a moral to the story or a solution to the problem.) Jones noted that when it comes to policy, not surprisingly, that “even if the narrative is incomplete in a news story, people will fill in the blanks with what they already bring to the table.”

He later added that “[t]he biggest obstacle is believing that you have to communicate narratively to begin with, as opposed to just conveying scientific information to people and letting them fill in the blanks. You have to tell people a story.” As for worries that structuring a story for maximum impact is somehow cheating, Jones noted that most reporters probably want people to read and understand their stories, and suggests that having tools to do that more effectively is not a threat.

If statistics and studies help us better understand how narrative works, and reveal the mechanics by which narrative techniques persuade readers, pretending that we don’t have that information isn’t an option — though that knowledge may add urgency to the journalistic questions of objectivity, transparency and advocacy. And wishing that people didn’t have a tendency to want things tied together in stories won’t make it so.

Story partnered with statistics

It’s worth remembering that researchers and journalists alike are capable of overstating their conclusions or misinterpreting why something happened. And numbers fans dismayed by stories have their own critics: scientist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson has been trying for years to get scientists to understand the value of storytelling in sharing research.

Both researchers’ and journalists’ work involves focusing on a limited topic, investigating it, and then presenting information about it in ways that can be understood by target audiences. This doesn’t mean that narratives have to pander or oversimplify, though different audiences will have different thresholds for how general or specific information can be.

Simple tools like hyperlinks have made it possible to effectively embed data in narratives and allow readers to evaluate source information for themselves. Comments and social media outlets have given readers options for giving critical feedback that more clearly defines the story. And with tools like IBM’s Many Eyes and Gapminder, which now allow data visualization to combine some strengths of stories with hard numbers, the distance between story and statistics may not be such a vast divide. Even Nassim Taleb’s book criticizing our worst narrative impulses is filled with instructive stories that illustrate his points, make his arguments and entertain the reader.

[I wrote this post in part to prepare for an MIT Communications Forum panel on covering slow-moving crises. For more about the session, check out the full-length podcast or read the summary by Megan Garber over at Nieman Lab.]