Newsroom Ode #8: Podium pontifications
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the eighth in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from a different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Building a museum with jars of dirt, and building stories from the ground up
One day last October, Cara Solomon sat alone in an empty field in Alabama, the unmarked site of a lynching. She wasn’t carrying a reporter’s notebook or thinking yet about how she might write about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Raw first stories from the Appalachian Trail
When I first discovered that Earl Shaffer — the first man acknowledged to have hiked the entire 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine — lived nearby, I went through his brother John...
View ArticleNewsroom Ode #9: Echoes from an empty desk
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the ninth and penultimate in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from a different first-person perspective. Together they create the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
THE PITCH: Wired’s exec editor seeks stories that reveal all faces of technology
Maria Streshinsky, executive editor of Wired, wouldn’t say the magazine has grown skeptical about the promise of technology. But compared to the optimism of past editorial regimes, she and...
View ArticleNewsroom Ode #10: A loyalist’s last lament
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the tenth and last in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Shop Class: Learning to look up, down, sideways, backwards and beyond
Storytellers in any medium can learn from those in others. Writers must know how to paint mental images through the hieroglyphics of text, apply (and break) rules of grammar to ensure clarity, and...
View Article“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad...
Why I like it: I imagine my high school grammar teacher, Ms. Weiner, trying to diagram this sentence. We all seek characters to drive our stories. Here, Kerouac lists requirements for the characters...
View Article“She stares at me, but it feels like she’s looking at who I used to be, her...
This sentence contains everything that good narrative writing should. There’s the specific detail of the narrator, and there’s universality — the wonder we humans experience when faced with a child...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Grounding apocalyptic issues in reality without losing hope
Look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now. History is happening. We are changing the world. So sings Eliza Schuyler in “Hamilton,” a magical musical set in the late 1700s...
View Article
