EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is shared with our friends at The Poynter Institute by request of the author. * * * By Roy Peter Clark Early last October I received a small package from England, … Read more
By Chuck Haga The students file in and suddenly some remember the day’s assignment: Bring in a favorite song lyric, something with magic in the way words work together. Out come the phones and they search, trying to remember … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: Six mid-career freelance journalists who specialize in science and environmental stories offered takeaways from a weeklong workshop on nonfiction writing held at a guest ranch in Tucson, Arizona. One thing we journalists tend to … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski As we turned the last pages of 2022, I am pondering the years past and the year ahead and the concept of writing practice. I’ve spent my professional life trading in the written word, but never … Read more
The 2022 National Book Awards were announced this week. I expect I am not alone in adding the winners in fiction and nonfiction to my wish list and handing it, not very discreetly, to my gift-giver-in-residence. Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two essays about the new book “A Place Called Writer L,” a collection of listserv discussions from the 1990s and 2000s. Tomorrow, co-editor Stuart Warner writes of the origins and ending … Read more
First there was Nathalie, an English language learner who whispered that she’d never done well in English, never liked it, but this course was different. And her writing was getting better. Then there was Nseandra, who avoided the news … Read more
A stray remark during a visit with her grandmother sent newspaper reporter Casey Parks, then a college journalism student, on a years-long quest to unearth the story of a trans man in Louisiana. As the project evolved — from … Read more
They are sweet, tart, succulent and tangy. Summer on the tongue. The mighty blackberry: as big as your thumb; a deep, inky sheen with purple highlights; a nuanced flavor with earthy undertones and hints of Pinot Noir that lends … Read more
It was the mid-1990s. I was sitting across a white damask table-clothed table at a midtown Manhattan steak house watching my editor, Bob Loomis, alternately cut into a ribeye and sip a dry Martini. This was … Read more