When I first discovered that Earl Shaffer — the first man acknowledged to have hiked the entire 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine — lived nearby, I went through his brother John Shaffer with an interview request. It … Read more
One day last October, Cara Solomon sat alone in an empty field in Alabama, the unmarked site of a lynching. She wasn’t carrying a reporter’s notebook or thinking yet about how she might write about this place. She was … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the eighth in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from a different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special and sadly contracting culture. The author, … Read more
A key character in a story I was struggling with was a woman with a broken heart. She’d been cheated on by the man she had married, but continued to love him even after he went to prison for … Read more
When I encountered this sentence, I took it personally. I like being brilliant. I like it so much that I don’t write as much as I should. It’s uncomfortable to start writing, to try to flesh out a thought, … Read more
For several years, I have been captivated by a porpoise. The cetacean in question is the vaquita, a Mexican marine mammal that is shy, adorable, and totally screwed. The reasons for its imminent demise are too complex to explicate … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the seventh in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special and sadly contracting culture. The author, … Read more
I‘m not much on Valentine’s Day. I liked the grade school tradition of exchanging Valentine’s Day cards with classmates. (Is that just a U.S. thing?) Each of us was supposed to have enough cards for everyone so no one … Read more
“I work like a watchmaker or an old-fashioned silversmith: one eye screwed up, the other fitted with a watchmaker’s magnifying glass, with a fine tweezers between my fingers, with bits of paper … in front of me on my desk … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: Storyboard recently revisited the long-standing debate over the ‘nut graf’ — variably called the summary nut, the billboard, the transition, the significance graf, the so-what passage, the foreshadow. Veteran writer and story coach Chip Scanlan weighed … Read more