Jacqui Banaszynski recently retired as the endowed Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism, and is a faculty fellow at the Poynter Institute. She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for “AIDS in the Heartland,” a series about a gay farm couple facing AIDS, and was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer in international reporting for her account of the sub-Saharan famine.
A clear grasp of “voice” in writing has always eluded me. Not that I don’t have one. Everyone does. But I’ve never been able to define mine, and certainly can’t control it. I still remember, with embarrassment, having my … Read more
Power of Storytelling 2018, Bucharest, Romania Below is a post offered on Facebook earlier this month as a thank you to speakers and attendees at … Read more
The last time I posted One Great Sentence, it was with thoughts about how context informs and layers the meaning of a single line. Only when I opened that post two weeks later, did I remember that it came from … Read more
Editor’s note: At Storyboard, we’re always looking for moments of inspiration, epiphany and, yes, struggle that we can all relate to or learn from. We hope to make such discoveries a more regular feature under Short Takes. Send your found … Read more
There is much to consider in that straightforward sentence. A small child, only 2. A girl-child, if that matters, but that conjurs the universal image of a child clutching a doll. A name that hints of national or … Read more
Sentences can seem simple. Even the most tangled and complex are just a few words arranged between punctuation and white space. Ideally they make sense standing alone. But sentences never really stand alone. They live in context, with … Read more
An award-winning author writes a break-out novel, and then another, and then… It has been 10 years since Minnesota novelist Leif Enger‘s last book, “So Brave, Young and Handsome,” was published. That followed soon after his best-selling … Read more
Why it’s good: There are endless memories and memorials marking yesterday, the 17th anniversary of 9/11. I find it impossible to post about something else, but impossible to choose the right thing to post. Mostly I wish that the events … Read more
This passage – not quite a Haiku, but with that feeling – comes as part of Mary Oliver’s poem “Sometimes.” It is introduced in the poem as “Instructions for living a life.” I’m not good at poetry (a gap … Read more
The opening paragraph of Rebecca Solnit’s new LitHub essay, “Why the President Must Be Impeached,” is a single sentence, 88 words long. It is one of the shortest paragraphs in a 20-paragraph soliloquy about her take on the … Read more
