Adrienne Mayor was a 2009 National Book Award finalist for her nonfiction book The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy. Mayor, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, has made a career of writing about monsters, … Read more
Dave Gilson A scene from the opening of a prime-time cable series? Nope—it’s the lead from a story in last month’s Mother Jones. Dave Gilson’s piece narrates a mock riot … Read more
I was recently taken with a piece that ran earlier this year in High Country News. Written by Michelle Nijhuis, “Township 13 South, Range 92 West, Section 35” explores the idea of family roots and also offers a brief meditation on Western … Read more
This weekend, The Wichita Eagle started an interesting storytelling experiment. Well, actually the experiment started a few weeks ago, when they posted a trailer for an upcoming narrative project on Kansas.com. Book trailers (like this one, … Read more
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk, in which she described how stereotypes develop when one community has only a single narrative about another. The post also referenced National Geographic writer Tom O’Neill, who sometimes … Read more
Before the Thanksgiving holiday, we step away from the future of story and transmedia discussions to offer a classic print narrative. David Amsden’s “Never Mind the Pity” traces the elegant arc of the last year of a boy’s life and the … Read more
We often highlight stories from reporters who are well-known in the world of narrative journalism, but a lot of unsung writers slip narratives into print and online daily. Here are some moving stories with sharp scenes or imagery from three people we bet you’ve never heard of.
“Sacia's Promise,” from Kaitlin Manry of The (Everett) Herald:
"She remembers waking up in the middle of the night, just 2 or 3 years old. Her nightgown is wet. So is her bed. She walks into the living room, calling for her mom. She's not there. Sacia instead finds a stranger, a man, dividing piles of little white rocks spread across the coffee table. The pearly white stones are like baby teeth and crumble when he touches them. She runs back to her bed and stays up all night, kneeling on wet sheets, waiting for a mother who never comes."
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Blog posts and articles on narrative journalism pinged around the Halloween weekend like eyeballs at a zombie food fight—and according to Washingtonian.com, an actual fight broke out at The Washington Post. While the Post’s Henry Allen (a Pulitzer … Read more
Lots of the usual suspects are blogging and Tweeting about Joel Achenbach’s piece on the future of narrative journalism that ran in yesterday’s Washington Post. Some people have excerpted interesting bits, such as the great line that “story is … Read more
In some places, the spoken story is thriving. Last night in Boston, that 800-pound gorilla of live storytelling, the Moth, put on an event at the Tsai Performance Center. We decided to ask the Moth’s executive and creative director, Lea … Read more
