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Writing the book: Ben Montgomery on Grandma Gatewood's Walk

Writing the book: Ben Montgomery on Grandma Gatewood’s Walk

One night in January 2013, deep into the writing of Grandma Gatewood's Walk, I found myself alone at the keyboard, crying. Weeping, really.Thinking back, the storm of depression and anxiety…
March 4, 2014
Watch Kurt Vonnegut demystify story structure with a fairy tale and a piece of chalk

Watch Kurt Vonnegut demystify story structure with a fairy tale and a piece of chalk

A couple of years ago, in a Storyboard piece on John McPhee‘s gorgeously built Encounters with the Archdruid, the acclaimed author Adam Hochschild wrote about narrative structure: A few years ago…
February 28, 2014
The Bread Loaf files: Ted Conover, Cheryl Strayed, Richard Bausch and Robert Frost on craft, dedication, discipline, poetry and what to ban from your bookshelf

The Bread Loaf files: Ted Conover, Cheryl Strayed, Richard Bausch and Robert Frost on craft, dedication, discipline, poetry and what to ban from your bookshelf

This week’s theme: semi-obscure archives that might prove valuable to your narrative storytelling. On Tuesday, we highlighted Mark Berkey-Gerard‘s posts on multimedia narrative, which he warehouses at his classroom-based website, Campfire Journalism. Today,…
February 27, 2014
How to interview, structure, choose your medium, edit for sound, identify the story arc and more

How to interview, structure, choose your medium, edit for sound, identify the story arc and more

The new student of multimedia narrative may want to bookmark an archive on digital storytelling by Mark Berkey-Gerard, who teaches online journalism at Rowan University, in New Jersey. A Columbia…
February 25, 2014
20 writing and editing tips from Tracy Kidder + Richard Todd

20 writing and editing tips from Tracy Kidder + Richard Todd

In the book Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, memorably instructive lines for writers and editors appear on almost every page. The authors, the Pulitzer-winning nonfiction writer Tracy Kidder and his…
February 21, 2014

10 things you can learn from Roger Angell’s “This Old Man”

The story of the week has been Roger Angell’s “This Old Man” (The New Yorker). Angell is widely revered for his body of work on baseball, but in this piece he…
February 19, 2014

“Why’s this so good?” – The badass women edition

From the “Why’s this so good?” archives, a handful of great reads about, or by, brilliant, brave, inspiring women, featuring Joan Didion, Rita Dove, Calvin Trillin, Julia Barton, Edna Buchanan,…
February 18, 2014
Robert Caro, Part 2: On work habits, enthusiasm and minimizing distraction

Robert Caro, Part 2: On work habits, enthusiasm and minimizing distraction

On Thursday, we ran Part 1 of Robert Caro’s conversation with the Washington Post’s Anne Hull, on reporting, sacrifice, sources and finding book projects. Today, in the second and final part,…
February 14, 2014
Robert Caro, Part 1: On finding book projects, reporting, sacrifice and sources

Robert Caro, Part 1: On finding book projects, reporting, sacrifice and sources

Hearing Robert Caro talk about his work is like getting a master class in longform journalism. A Nieman Fellow, Class of 1966, Caro is the bestselling biographer of Robert Moses…
February 12, 2014
Annotation Tuesday! Jeff Sharlet and the iron closet

Annotation Tuesday! Jeff Sharlet and the iron closet

Last week, on the eve of the Sochi Olympics, GQ published "Inside the Iron Closet," a Jeff Sharlet story that revealed disturbing details about what it's like to be gay in…
February 12, 2014