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How a midcareer print writer mastered the “magic stick” in a 9-week radio...
Nearly two years ago, I was one of dozens of Los Angeles Times reporters who took a buyout and left the paper. I liked my job almost all the time. Sometimes I loved it. But I’d done it for 23 years. I...
View Article“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the...
Why is it great? First off, the rhythm of the sentence makes me swoon. I keep reading it aloud, to hear how it swirls and swirls like dancers on a ballroom floor before coming to a rest, softly, on the...
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5(ish) Questions: Maud Newton and her science-meets-personal-essay “I, Rodent”
A few days ago, I had the disturbing experience of stepping barefoot on the bloody, decapitated body of a mouse. My first reaction was of course a back-wheeling step away from the corpse. My second was...
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The journalistic power of empathy: making connections that elevate the writing
Empathy is one of the greatest gifts a journalist can have. If you come by it naturally, you can actually feel what your subject is feeling, and that can be a painful burden sometimes. But even if you...
View ArticlePat Beall and “Sexually abused as a child: A Post reporter’s journey to...
Pat Beall’s distinguished career at The Palm Beach Post has been marked by exhaustive and meticulous investigations. “I knew I did not want to create a parade of horrors, and in so doing, not only...
View Article“Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is...
Why is it great? Here in E.B. White’s Maine, August is bittersweet, bringing whispers of summer’s end even at the height of its ripeness. Apples, the fruit of fall, begin to color on gnarled trees....
View Article5(ish) Questions: Andy Kopsa and the slow payoff of freelance longform work
With fewer staff writers at newspapers and magazines, freelance journalists have more opportunities to take on longform features – both on and offline. Q: What would you tell other freelancers who are...
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Neo-Nazis, childhood abuse and even a solemn E.B. White — here’s to better weeks
This has been an unsettling week. Who will forget the look on that one Charlottesville marcher’s face, a terrible echo of the hate seen on other faces as Hitler rose to power in Germany and blacks...
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5(ish) Questions: Mandy Len Catron and “How to Fall in Love With Anyone”
Perhaps you’ve read that Modern Love essay in The New York Times, the one that zipped around the country along internet tethers and social media synapses in 2015 like contagious hope, bearing an...
View Article“Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.”
Why is it great? Yesterday was Dorothy Parker’s birthday. (She would have been 124, reminding me of her classic line, “Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.”) The line above is one...
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5(ish) Questions: Podcast producer Lily Percy and humor as a survival tool
She has a Groucho Marx tattoo on her left wrist, and a biblically tinged Sufjan Stevens lyric inked on her right arm. So maybe it makes sense that radio producer Lily Percy has been exploring how...
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Love and laughter and Dorothy Parker: sounds like the name of a cool movie, no?
Sometimes, when the world is too much with us, we just need a love story or a laugh. This week, Storyboard obliged with lots of both. We talked to the writer of a viral Modern Love column in The New...
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Notable Narrative: Joe Kovac Jr. and a tale of murder, a manhunt and a...
The crime was brutal – two guards shot to death with their own .40-caliber Glocks inside a Georgia Department of Corrections bus packed with prisoners. The setting was primal – a lonely stretch of...
View Article“Sometimes at noon down South on the hottest of days, when everyone is...
In addition to the music of Blythe’s lush language, I love how he captures this brash paradox–that a chorus can make us feel so lonely. Furthermore I love how, like a quintessential writer, he stations...
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Monica Hesse and “American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land”
In the winter of 2012, a pair of lovers set dozens of fires over a span of 20 weeks in remote Accomack County, Virginia—once the richest rural county in America, and now one of the poorest. As one or...
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It’s Southern Week on Storyboard: Read on for some great regional storytelling
It was Southern Week here on Storyboard, spotlighting some wonderful regional journalism and writing. It’s been fun tweeting out great lines from famous Southern writers, including this one from...
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The late Alex Tizon and “My Family’s Slave”: his first memory, and his last...
The story of the woman called Lola begins and ends with ashes. Ashes that “filled a plastic box about the size of a toaster.” Ashes sheltered in a canvas tote bag from a suburb north of tech-hip...
View Article“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.”
Why is it great? For “Controversy Week” on Storyboard, I chose a sentence from one of the most controversial books of the 20th century. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was shocking on so many levels when it...
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An alt-weekly editor steps up to the plate to back a freelancer’s...
Like most journalists today, Britni de la Cretaz is accustomed to being on the receiving end of comments from critical readers and opinionated trolls. As a freelance writer who frequently tackles...
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Sometimes journalism and literature are controversial; sometimes that’s a...
I decided to try another “theme” week on Storyboard, after having such fun with the Southern focus last week. For this one, we took a look at controversial stories, books, writers and themes. From D.H....
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