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Dear Storyboard community,
Right now I'm thinking a lot about ensuring the safety of our subjects and our sources. Unless someone feels safe to tell their story, it might not get told at all.
Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy has just published a primer on how civil servants can communicate safely and securely with journalists, at a moment when both are being targeted by the Trump administration.
Safety is both physical and psychological, and it applies to telling your own story, too.
Our digital era has given everyone the tools to tell their own stories — I believe it's one reason why memoir and personal essays have become such a diverse and popular genre over the past two decades. But again, these stories won't get told if we don't feel safe sharing them.
Minda Honey on finding her voice through memoir
This week I'm thrilled to welcome Minda Honey as a new contributor to Nieman Storyboard, as she digs into the craft of memoir with Edgar Gomez, author of the new book "Alligator Tears."
Honey is the author of the memoir "The Heartbreak Years," and I first discovered her writing when editor Sari Botton published her essays at Longreads. Last year, she talked with my podcast collaborators at Ursa, Deesha Philyaw and Kiese Laymon, about being "shameless" in telling her own story.
I asked her how she came to that specific word in describing her work:
I really have to give credit to the writer Danielle Buckingham for using the "shameless" framing when discussing my book. She was the first do so. I immediately valued the truth Danielle uncovered about my work because I don't think it's possible to live free as a woman, especially as a Black woman in America, without embodying a certain degree of shamelessness. To be shameless is to reject the standards set for you by others and live by your own measure. As Audre Lorde writes in "Sister Outsider": “Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.” Beyoncé is such a great example of this because you can literally succeed at every measure set by a society and they will still seek to humble you. You must find peace through self-definition. You must be shameless.
Many of us in the Storyboard community come from traditional journalism, and I also know that some of us (myself included) have struggled with putting our own stories and voices into writing. I asked Minda what advice she would share with journalists who are starting to experiment with memoir:
Revise where you're hiding. Memoir and journalism are both about truth-telling. However, memoir is more focused on a personal truth. So when a journalist sits down to revise, they should seek out the places where they find themselves over-relying on research, shoehorning facts in, unspooling someone else's narrative — because that's likely the place where they have something hard and honest to say and are hiding behind the security blanket that is their journalistic training.
For more on writing personal essays and memoir, check out Storyboard's full archive of resources.
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Links of Note
- Claire Willett writes about how to navigate what's happening with anti-DEI and anti-trans language being added to NEA grant application requirements. "How soon until we begin to lose even the small ways that arts and culture can be havens for LGBTQ+ people in isolated communities, because negative polarization has a hard dollar value attached to it now?"
- For the Tampa Bay Times, Nieman Storyboard contributor Mallary Tenore Tarpley writes movingly about being in recovery from anorexia and how it is informing her decisions as a parent. (Her forthcoming memoir "Slip," which she's written about for Storyboard, is due out in August.) Tarpley leads with a small moment observing her child staring at herself in a mirror:
My daughter Madelyn was 18 months old when she stood in front of a full-length mirror for the first time. She wore a Snoopy onesie, and her strawberry blonde hair was tied in a miniature ponytail. She leaned forward and kissed the mirror, leaving lip marks. Then she paused to admire the girl staring back at her.
- ProPublica has announced a new call for proposals for partners in its Local Reporting Network. The nonprofit will reimburse news organizations for the salary of a reporter (up to $75,000, plus a benefits stipend) so they can “spend a year working full time on an accountability journalism project of importance to their communities.”
- Vanity Fair's Joe Pompeo has a great newsletter, A Little History, where each month a nonfiction history writer breaks down how they researched and reported their book. This month, Matthew Goodman talks about how he used libraries, archives, and genealogists to research his new book, "Paris Undercover," about two women who helped transport allied service members out of occupied France.
Keep sharing your stories,
Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org
Send me your story, book, podcast, and documentary recommendations: editor@niemanstoryboard.org
