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Golden nuggets from the rich river of narrative nonfiction

Golden nuggets from the rich river of narrative nonfiction

Big Ideas from small sessions at the 2019 Power of Narrative Conference
Grounding apocalyptic issues in reality without losing hope

Grounding apocalyptic issues in reality without losing hope

Q&A with Washington Post writer Dan Zak about his daring and emotional query about climate change, and finding some calm in the controversy
"She stares at me, but it feels like she's looking at who I used to be, her little girl with ponytails and a snaggletooth who swore she was a Powerpuff Girl."

“She stares at me, but it feels like she’s looking at who I used to be, her little girl with ponytails and a snaggletooth who swore she was a Powerpuff Girl.”

—From the young adult novel "The Hate U Give," by Angie Thomas
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!'”

—Jack Kerouac from his autobiographical novel "On The Road"
Learning to look up, down, sideways, backwards and beyond while storytelling

Learning to look up, down, sideways, backwards and beyond while storytelling

Storytellers in any medium can learn from those in others. Writers must know how to paint mental images through the hieroglyphics of text, apply (and break) rules of grammar to…
Newsroom Ode #10: A loyalist's last lament

Newsroom Ode #10: A loyalist’s last lament

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the tenth and last in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled…
Wired's executive editor seeks stories that reveal all faces of technology

Wired’s executive editor seeks stories that reveal all faces of technology

Rejections aren't personal: “70 percent of why pitches don't work has nothing to do with the writer”
Newsroom Ode #9: Echoes from an empty desk

Newsroom Ode #9: Echoes from an empty desk

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the ninth and penultimate in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from a different first-person perspective. Together they create the…
Raw first stories from the Appalachian Trail

Raw first stories from the Appalachian Trail

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…
Building a museum with jars of dirt, and building stories from the ground up

Building a museum with jars of dirt, and building stories from the ground up

 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…