One Saturday morning several years ago, during a substantial storm, my friend and I parted the drapes to enter the sanctuary of a warm restaurant. Snow squeaked behind us as the door to the temporary vestibule stopped short of … Read more
How do you write about a shared event that changes the world, but that we each experience personally? And how do you then share that personal experience back to the world in a meaningful way? I’ve been pondering those … Read more
If you’re not a fan of “A River Runs Through It,” it can only be because you haven’t read it yet. Norman Maclean’s 1976 novella of family dynamics plays out on Montana’s Blackfoot River and is an enduring … Read more
When she set out from Russian port of Murmansk on a 60-foot sailboat headed to Novaya Zemlya in August 2019, journalist Andrea Pitzer had few expectations. She hoped to visit historical sites central to the … Read more
On May 23, 2020, (May 24 in print), the New York Times landed a daring and historic front page: A wash of overwhelming gray, which jumped to two more gray pages inside the print paper. To mark the deaths … Read more
Canadian freelancer Eva Holland didn’t just report her debut nonfiction book, “Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear.” She lived it. For the book, she plummets out of an airplane, stands … Read more
It is widely believed that storytellers can turn almost anything into a good story, which gives them a bottomless well of topics. But even the celebrated ones, like Romanian-Moldovan writer Tatiana Tîbuleac, who won the … Read more
Sometimes I push writing students to look for new ways to tell stories. Should you start with the “small” things? Is there a story in the way a character dresses? How about the things they hang on the wall … Read more
The first time I met Tommy Tomlinson, he and his wife, Alix Felsing, took me to their favorite spot for breakfast in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they lived and where Tommy wrote a wildly popular column for the … Read more
Why is it great? Well, first of all, it comes from the great Sarah Lyall, who was the longtime London correspondent for The New York Times. She has such a wonderful voice: charming, funny, intimate. This comes from her book … Read more
