February 2012
4 posts
the wayward notebook, vol. 1
Do you ever find unidentifiable scraps in your reporter’s notebooks? I do, all the time. Here’s one that I found this morning, in a notebook that otherwise contains bits about Florida tarpon fishing:
X— wants to know what I do with my time. My days. My nights. “At work,” he says, “walk me through it. Who do you talk to? What do you do? What kinds of things do you...
10 lines to love: Kate Boo
At the sentence level alone, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo’s unsettlingly gorgeous epic about life in a Mumbai slum, already distinguishes itself as a teaching resource. And these lines are just from the prologue, people!
“He had deep-set eyes and sunken cheeks, a body work-hunched and wiry—the type that claimed less than its fair share of space when threading through...
Coming soon: Annotation Tuesday!, the Zanesville...
It’s impossible to talk about one Zanesville narrative without examining all three, so stay tuned for the full line-by-line autopsy + Q&As with all three of these fellas:
18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars,
2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque,
and 1 Man Dead in Ohio
By Chris Heath
GQ
March 2012
A little before five o’clock on the evening of October 18, 2011, as the day...
The narrative rat
I never can resist using this one in class as an example of some basics:
S.F. kids spend recess toasting the best rat who ever lived Steve Rubenstein, Chronicle Staff Writer
November 23, 2002
They raised their grape juice cups at Lakeshore Elementary School in memory of Jupiter the rat.
“He was a great rat,” said fourth-grade teacher Rich Mertes. “Possibly the greatest rat...
January 2012
4 posts
If you want a job in magazines* you should...
… wear something other than cargo pants, flip-flops and a see-through T-shirt to the job interview, even if you are a designer. For one thing, dressing nicely shows respect. For another, we don’t need to see the full curve of your fonts to know you’ve got edge.
… never call us “mister.” Research the design director/editor/professor/whatever well enough to avoid calling a she a he....
Fortunes
My friend @JeffGordinier emails a poem a day by a range of poets. These often save me. I open the inbox and there waits a perfect moment of clarity or beauty or humor. Here’s today’s. It appeals on all levels but especially, maybe, to creative types. Enjoy.
Fortunes
You are just beginning to live.
You are original and creative.
You have a yearning for perfection.
Your winsome...
Your memory sucks
The great war reporter Ernie Pyle supposedly rarely took notes. Truman Capote professed to have a memory so flawless he could recall entire conversations whole. (Sorry, TC, not buying it, and neither does Joshua Foer.) Even in intense, fast-moving situations some journalists take zero notes because they believe they can remember everything: the precise sequence of actions, who said what, what...
December 2011
2 posts
how many writers does it take to change a...
If you use this at your next party, and don’t lie, you know you will, you may thank this dude, Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft in Seattle.
Q. How many writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. Ten. One to change it; nine to think they could have done it better.
Q: How many writers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: But why do we have to change it?
Q. How many...
3 tags
Annotation Tuesday! Amy Wallace + Garry Shandling...
Reading Amy Wallace’s profiles is like sitting around your favorite bar with your favorite super-witty friend and talking about people over cocktails: You come for the companionship and vibe, you stay for the juicy details.
It’s hard enough to profile the famous because public figures don’t reeeeeeally want to be known anymore, but Amy, a GQ correspondent and Los Angeles...
November 2011
3 posts
Mississippi Thanksgiving
Two recipes, as told to me by my Aunt Zet
Chicken and Dressing
“Cook your chicken. Everybody says it’s better to do a hen than a chicken. You get it at the grocery store; you don’t have to go out and wring its neck or anything. Put it in a big pot and cover it with water and cut you up at least one onion and boil it till it’s done. If it’s a hen you’ll know...
2 tags
Annotation Tuesday! "The End." by Ben Ehrenreich
OK, so my students always accuse me of being obsessed with death. Death sneaks into their reading materials and assignments, and makes me look maudlin. But seriously what else is there? (My second favorite topic is, alas, absurdity, but we’ll talk about that some other time.) If I designed a nonfiction course on The Literature of Death—and I may yet!—Ben Ehrenreich’s “The...
2 tags
Index: Annotation Tuesday!
#1: “A Brevard Woman Disappeared, but Never Left Home,” by Michael Kruse, St. Pete Times #2: “The Falling Man,” by Tom Junod, GQ #3: “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” by Amy Ellis Nutt, Newark Star-Ledger #4: “Almost Human,” by Mary Roach, National Geographic #5: “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” by Jon Franklin, Baltimore Evening Sun #6:...
October 2011
2 posts
September 2011
3 posts
5 tags
Annotation Tuesday! Jon Franklin & "Mrs. Kelly's...
Jon Franklin’s “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” which in 1979 won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, ran 33 years ago but never loses its power to captivate or instruct. Franklin followed a brain surgeon through a life-or-death operation on a woman named Edna Kelly and wrote a tight, timeless narrative that stands as a model of precision reporting and evocative...
4 tags
"The Curse of Tom Wolfe"
This 2002 Columbia Journalism Review piece on the state of magazine writing—”The Curse of Tom Wolfe: What went wrong for the magazine story,” by Michael Shapiro—has been big conversation in my writing group this week. Magazine writing has become so predictable, so BORING, Shapiro argued.
He described his disappointment after reading National Magazine Award entries as one of the...
3 tags
Mary Roach & "Almost Human" (annotation tuesday!)
Mary Roach’s voice is so distinctive you could take her byline off her stories and NYT best-selling books and still know who wrote them. Roach immerses herself in worlds that other journalists might rather avoid—human dissection labs and funeral homes for Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, for instance, and “haunted” spaces for Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, her...
August 2011
12 posts
5 tags
Annotation Tuesday! Amy Ellis Nutt and "The Wreck...
In “The Wreck of the Lady Mary” the Newark Star-Ledger’s Amy Ellis Nutt told a deeply reported, literary story about a scallop-boat sinking that killed six of the seven fishermen aboard. By its very nature the story calls to mind The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger; from a policy standpoint it was important because it revealed...
Sunday Sermon! Jack Hart on what's in your...
“When writers come to me for coaching, I always spend the first couple of sessions learning how they operate. I quiz them about how the organize their material, find structures, and write drafts. One of the most revealing exercises is a look in their reporting notebooks. If they’re newsies, the chances are that I’ll find page after page of direct quotations.
“The...
4 tags
5 tags
Annotation Tuesday! Tom Junod and "The Falling...
Annotation Tuesday! #2: Of the countless 9/11 stories, “The Falling Man,” by Tom Junod (Esquire, September 2003), stayed with me more than any other. The story centers on an iconic photo …
… of an unidentified World Trade Center employee dropping to his death. The photo ran once and then vanished in this country because it was considered too shocking to be seen. Junod reported...
1 tag
Muses: What Hemingway learned about writing by...
Lillian Ross’ New Yorker profile of Ernest Hemingway—“How Do You Like it Now, Gentleman?” (May 13, 1950)—contains a scene with Hemingway at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was visiting with his wife, Mary, and son, Patrick, whom he called Mouse. “I learned to write by looking at paintings in the Luxembourg Museum in Paris,” Hemingway told Ross. “I never went past high school. When you’ve got a...
WatchTop three takeaways from Gay Talese on writer’s block:
1. “I mean it isn’t blocks so much as you want to rise above the ordinary, the mediocre, the easy to do, the functionary.”
2. “Sometimes writers write too much.”
3. “Look, it is a very satisfying profession to be in something called book writing, very satisfying, but it has its downside and the downside...
8 tags
Annotation Tuesday! Michael Kruse &...
Welcome to the first of semi-regular installments of Annotation Tuesday!, in which a journalist takes us through his/her reporting/writing choices for a particular piece.
Michael Kruse starts us off with a look at his recent St. Petersburg Times piece on the disappearance and death of Kathryn Norris. I used this piece as a teaching tool in a recent Harvard Summer School class because it’s so...
4 tags
1st person yes or no?
Students often want to know whether it’s okay to write in the first person. My answer: It depends on the story, the subject matter, the writer, the publication. First-person reportage doesn’t automatically render a piece of work un-literary, as you can see here, below, from these excerpts. While you’re at it, take a wee quiz: Name the journalist who wrote each....
crowdsourcing a syllabus
This morning’s question: “What’s the ONE nonfiction book/work you’d assign to your graduate students above all? I know my answer*, am interested in yours.” This morning’s question, recast to correct for heinous grammar: “What’s the one book above all that you’d assign to your grad students?” Thanks, Tweeps and Facebook friends, for the...
4 tags
WatchJust stumbled upon this 20-min TED vid of the incredibly endearing Roger Ebert + wife + friends, on voice, identity and human connection. Filmed five months ago.
5 tags
Lines to Love: Ben Hecht
I occasionally teach out of 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, Hecht’s collection of 1921 Chicago Daily News columns, and every time I open that book I find something new to admire. Eight of my favorite sentences/passages:
“His heart was tired of tall buildings and the endless grimace of windows.” ~ “Vagabondia”
“When in the name of 750,000 gods of reason will...