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***
Dear Storyboard community:
The first word in Sasha Bonét's memoir, “The Waterbearers,” is a clear call to action:
“Listen.”
As I was listening to contributor Christina M. Tapper's expansive conversation with Bonét for this week's Nieman Storyboard podcast, Bonét offered many insights that return to this core principle: During our quest to find the story, we must stay open and listen when it finds us.
Bonét was working on an assignment about the artist Emma Amos when she interviewed sculptor and filmmaker Camille Billops — who then began opening up about her decision to give up her 4-year-old daughter for adoption.
“All she wanted to talk about though was this daughter she had given away who had died, and I was like, kind of pushing back on it. … And then at some point I just got quiet and I listened, and it was fascinating, all of the things she was saying. And I thought, okay, this is the story,” said Bonét. The resulting feature, ”The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter,” was published by the digital magazine Topic and named to many year-end “Best Of” lists in 2019.
Bonét says the experience was a reminder about “letting the story carry you where it needs to be.” Billops's story is one "tributary” in Bonét's memoir, which is about her own family, and more broadly about Black womanhood and motherhood in the U.S.
Give the conversation a listen.
“In a practical sense, I needed to include [my grandmother's house] because I had so many characters. … I needed a place where everyone could be in one room. I think in telling any story, whether it's in film or writing, you need a place. ‘Seinfeld’ had a place; ‘Friends’ had a place. There always needs to be a place where all the characters can be in one setting, and then the main characters can kind of exist outside of that.”
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Links of note
- If you’re in the weeds, reread the above pro tip from one of our favorite pros, Pamela Colloff.
- The European Press Prize, which celebrates journalism that “informs, inspires, investigates, and makes an impact,” is now accepting submissions for its 2026 awards. Journalists from across Europe — all 46 Council of Europe countries, plus Belarus and Russia — are invited to submit their best work in five categories. Stories must have been published between Dec. 1, 2024 and Dec. 31, 2025. The deadline is Dec. 14. Full details and the submission form are here.
- One of my favorite things about the early days of Longreads was discovering and spotlighting writers from the great alt-weeklies and city magazines across the U.S. Sadly, many of those publications have gone away. Tributes poured in this week for Charlotte magazine, which announced the publication is shutting down after nearly 60 years. Read more from former Charlotte editor Michael Graff, Jeremy Markovich, and Tommy Tomlinson.
- An in-depth toolkit from The Marshall Project: “How to Report on Deaths in Jails and Prisons.”
- The 2026 Lukas Prize Project, honoring excellence in nonfiction, is now accepting submissions for its awards, with a deadline of Dec. 4. Awards include the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Awards, which give two winners $25,000 each to aid in the completion of “a significant work of nonfiction on a topic of American political or social concern,” as well as the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize.
- Journalist Evan Ratliff has unveiled Season Two of his AI podcast, “Shell Game,” in which he blends explanatory tech journalism with dystopian humor as he attempts to build an entire company with only AI employees. For Wired, he describes how the experiment quickly went sideways, with AI agents lying about their progress and digressing into side projects that weren't assigned to them.
Keep the bots away, and keep sharing your (human) stories,
Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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