By Trevor Pyle In opening paragraphs of her Chicago Reader piece about six deaths in Chicago last year, Katie Prout makes a rare and daring admission: She reveals that she keeps an altar and remakes it … Read more
By Chip Scanlan When Thomas Curwen of the Los Angeles Times decided to write about mental health care in California through the lens of one patient, he faced a daunting challenge: tracking the erratic chronology of … Read more
By Ania Hull Jon Mooallem is a writer-at-large with The New York Times Magazine, and has published articles and feature stories with, among others, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Slate, and Mother Jones. He’s the author of two … Read more
Ads on radio and news sites here in Seattle are promoting “Potted Potter,” a romp of a stage play that retells all seven Harry Potter books — more than 4,000 pages worth — in 70 minutes. 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
A standard — some would say ideal — approach to effective narrative nonfiction is to follow a single, primary character through an intimate journey that illuminates a larger social situation. The key is to find a person to follow … Read more
There has been a small but steady wave of recent stories focused on the plight of women in Afghanistan, who have been stripped of their rights — to jobs, to education, to choosing their wardrobe or having their hair … Read more
A few years ago, Line Vaaben was eating a traditional Christmas dinner at her home in Copenhagen. Vaaben, a 2014 European Press Prize finalist, remembered a story that followed a potato from the field … Read more
As I write these words I am propped up in bed, six days into COVID, chipping through my fugue at a 6,000-word story that was due before I got COVID. It’s 99 degrees outside my window in Boise, Idaho, … Read more
The temperatures topped 100 Fahrenheit week (38+ Centigrade) up at the mountain cabin one day last week. The three-man yardscape crew seemed indifferent. They spent their first afternoon prepping the site; they dumped mounds of dusty gravel, unloaded heavy … Read more
