Yes, it’s the time of year to look back on the good things that happened this year (and try to forget the bad, if only for a little while). First off: John McPhee wrote a book that gives lesser beings … Read more
The final half of this week’s One Great Sentence has stayed with me: “Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.” It’s about the winter landscape, but couldn’t it also apply to the craft of storytelling? When we pursue a story, often … Read more
It was Poetry Week on Storyboard, which is pushing the envelope a bit for a site that explores the art and craft of narrative nonfiction. But I would argue that literary journalists can learn a lot from poets, especially their … Read more
This week on Storyboard we spotlighted two pieces of historical nonfiction, with one telling the story of America’s first detectives, back in the time of Charles Dickens, and the other reaching back just 40 years, to the brutal Argentine dictatorship that … Read more
We really looked under the hood of literary journalism this week, with wonderful tips on how to pitch and write your stories. In the second installment of our series “The Pitch,” a Smithsonian Magazine editor talks about her likes and … Read more
Note from Storyboard editor Kari Howard: Reporter Tom French recently spoke at the annual Power of Storytelling conference in Bucharest, Romania. His speech, a remarkable feat of storytelling about storytelling, is so powerful, we’re running the entire transcript verbatim. Trust … Read more
This week we spotlighted talented women on Storyboard — be they writers, performers or proto-feminists of the 18th century. I love this quote from Adrian LaBlanc, one of the women included in “The Stories We Tell” anthology below: “I won’t be … Read more
For Halloween week, we did a few spooky-themed posts, including an interview with the creator of the scary true-stories podcast “Lore.” This week’s One Great Sentence is a haunting one (in both senses of the word) from Mark Twain, who is … Read more
In her memoir about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, Joan Didion writes about the night she lost the man who can only be described as her other half. She recalls how a social worker described her to … Read more
These words from journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones sum up this week’s posts on racism and white supremacism better than I ever could: “The truth is even though this is fundamental and foundational to living in the United States, this is a history … Read more
