Why’s This So Good?

Let’s start with the headline. Sometimes, when I am trying to headline a piece and my heds are getting more and more punny and convoluted, I gather myself and remember…

My love affair with narrative nonfiction was in its early stages when I first read Robert Kurson’s “Into the Light,” in the June 2005 edition of Esquire. I was mostly…

Boxing stories leave me cold. Like many sports stories, they seem to assume an audience of fans who will be thrilled − rather than sickened − by a narrative built on grueling workouts, bloodied…

Years ago, the wonderful Walt Harrington came to our newsroom and fired us up. We were at the start of a storytelling revival, trying to find our way back to craft, and…

It was the altitude, officially. If the flight attendant was concerned about my tears, or if the little girl in the pink hoodie across the aisle was curious: Reading at…

Over the years Roy Blount Jr. has written a number of superb magazine articles, one of my favorites being “Knock ’im Out, Jay-ree!” a profile of the great Southern raconteur…

Just shoot me now.That might be a normal journalist’s reaction to news that the subject of a mega-profile for a magazine cover story has declined to be interviewed for the…

Writing about the writing process isn’t easy, for good reason. Turning words into sentences and sentences into scenes is at heart a craft, yet there’s still a certain amount of…

I love teaching “The Pig” because students, especially narrative nonfiction students, always freak out. “Wait, we can do this?” they want to know.Yes, you can do this and I’d like to…

I wish I had come to this assignment when Alice Steinbach was still alive. I could have thanked her one last time for writing “A Boy of Unusual Vision,” a…