EDITOR’S NOTE: With apologies for how very American — actually, how the American of these dis-United States — this is, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, however you celebrate it, and have some leftover pie. Here’s a lovely essay … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: From the archives, an essay by an Indigenous journalist, inspired by a story by another, about the myths of Thanksgiving and its white-bread centerpiece: turkey. By Jason Begay It happens enough in my life that I have … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski A long-time aspiration of mine has been to read more of the classics. My formal dip into that kind of literature was in high school, reading and discussing the usual suspects. I got to skate past … Read more
By Lauren Kessler I have chronicled the road to prison traveled by a 16-year-old Black kid involved in a double murder. I have shadowed a 22-year-old dancer struggling to find her place in a professional ballet company. I have … 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
By Trevor Pyle To guide readers through a thicket of bureaucracy and a shocking policy that had been born there, Caitlin Dickerson first had to slash through it herself. Once she had, the reporter for The Atlantic had unwound … Read more
Physical descriptions are challenging to write. More accurately, they are challenging to write well. And yet they are standard fare in much of our journalism, especially if we’re writing profiles or intimate stories that take readers deeply into other … Read more
By Philip Kiefer In the last several weeks, Katherine J. Wu, a science writer at the Atlantic, has written a lot about cats. Her run started in late August with a profile of … Read more
By Katharine Gammon Small-moment stories. That’s what the writers were laboring over the day I stepped onto the rainbow rug in my son’s third-grade classroom. I was there to share some of my work as a writer and to … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: “A Place Called WriterL” is a new collection of some of the listserv discussions about narrative journalism held in the late 1990s through the early 2010s. In a previous post, nonfiction author John Clayton writes about the … Read more
