One Great Moment “Words are living things. They have personality, point of view, agenda.” When looking for advice, writers shouldn’t be picky; sometimes even a fictional cannibal will serve.When NBC aired a series about Hannibal Lecter, the psychiatrist who moonlights as a serial killer… June 16, 2020 Trevor Pyle “They were tired, so tired and still they returned.” It’s not possible for the everyday reader to know who wrote that sentence. The lead writer who was pulling feeds from several reporters in the field? One of the field… June 11, 2020 Jacqui Banaszynski “… the only true medicine I could provide.” They are no longer novel, these personal stories the front lines of the coronavirus. Reporters are barred from the kind of immersion that allows eye-witness accounts from that expanding front.… May 29, 2020 Jacqui Banaszynski “When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely.” My wife, Karen, and I happen to have for more than a decade a good Catholic pastor, Msgr. Robert Gibbons. Among his many gifts, he is a news junkie and… May 20, 2020 Roy Peter Clark “Execution is as important as vision.” When I came across this line, it was in a recent interview between Esquire politics blogger Charles P. Pierce and U.S. Senator Angus King, an Independent from Maine who caucuses… May 13, 2020 Jacqui Banaszynski “How was it I had let all wonder, all curiosity, seep from me?” Esi EdugyanA little more than half-way through Esi Edugyan’s fine novel, we are with her protagonist at a rude boarding house in Nova Scotia. It is 1834, and Washington Black… May 1, 2020 Jacqui Banaszynski “… America was postoned.” The story begins with a short sentence: “Routine left us suddenly” — a succinct summarization of what Floridians were feeling after those first two weeks of March. It ran on… March 27, 2020 Lane DeGregory “Iowa is a fairy tale.” Editor’s note: The sentence in our headline is not the One Great Sentence flagged by Storyboard contributor Jill U. Adams. It’s the opening sentence of a profile of Iowa that… February 14, 2020 Jill U. Adams “If you think of all these words just staggering around, grammar is their social order, their government.” Who can say what causes a reader to pause, in one moment, a line or passage she might zoom through at other times? Some sudden notice of the melody of… January 31, 2020 Jacqui Banaszynski “Failure is the best. After you fail, you’re free.” Lizzy Goodman’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom” is such a raucous oral history of New York’s indie rock scene that readers’ ears are in danger of ringing while reading. It’s… December 12, 2019 Trevor Pyle Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 16 Next
