An interesting writing move recently caught my eye in Rosalind Bentley’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution profile of poet laureate Natasha Trethewey. For lack of a better name, I’ll call it the “narrative overview,” and I now see it everywhere. Read more
Detroit Week continues here on Storyboard, with an appearance by radio storyteller Glynn Washington, a Motor City native and host of the hot NPR show Snap Judgment. We recently ran Part 1 of our conversation with him, about … Read more
If you missed a post or two in our weeklong recap of this year’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, here’s the roundup: On Tuesday, the Tampa … Read more
Mayborn Week continues: Skip Hollandsworth, a veteran writer for Texas Monthly, specializes in the kind of true-crime narrative yarns that are always bigger in Texas. In 2010, Hollandsworth won a National Magazine Award for “Still Life,” his spare, lyrical story … Read more
Tampa Bay Times reporter Kelley Benham went into labor four months early and delivered her daughter, Juniper, at 23 weeks: a baby who weighed 20 ounces and was no taller than a Barbie doll. Doctors told Benham and … Read more
In case you missed it, Nieman Reports, one of our sister publications, featured a few pieces recently on poetry and metaphor. The discipline and the device serve narrative’s need for quick-stroke description, evocative imagery and attention … Read more
Brendan Koerner‘s new book, The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking, dropped last week to critical acclaim. It tells the story of a pair of unlikely hijackers (a “troubled … Read more
At the recent City & Regional Magazine Association conference in Atlanta, Esquire’s Tom Junod and Texas Monthly’s Pamela Colloff interviewed each other for an audience of narrative lovers. Atlanta magazine’s Tony Rehagen kindly recorded the session exclusively … Read more
The haunted “third of June” cannot pass without calling out Tommy Tomlinson‘s classic piece on the essence of story, via Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.” Tomlinson, a onetime Pulitzer finalist who now writes for Sports … Read more
In good fiction, the reader absorbing a compelling narrative never notices the writer as intermediary. In nonfiction, that translator’s presence is inevitable. Since the former is the ideal relationship with the reader, the more you can bring that non-point of view to nonfiction narrative, the better. In other words, as a writer, no matter what the hell you’re writing, do your best to kill your ego, even if those are mutually exclusive ideals. (i.e.: He could have told the story of the effect of that atomic bomb on an innocent city by telling us what he found when he went over there, and it would have been a good piece. Instead he gave the story over to the six survivors, and it earned a place in immortality.) Read more