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Learning to see: A landscape of ice, a blind boy’s eyes, a grizzly bear and a...
Editor’s note: This is our second edition of Shop Class, a new Story Craft feature. The goal is to break down the work that goes into creating stories, and offer prompts or small suggestions to help...
View Article“But the sea, too, took its toll.”
Why it’s great: Deadline reporting of natural disasters is a tightrope walk. Too little drama and events are reduced to factoids that don’t take hold in the readers’ mind or heart. Too much and a story...
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Learning to read: The daily news as information and inspiration
Editor’s note: Our third Shop Class – part of our Story Craft posts – grew out of breaking news stories and blogs that offer rich lessons on how to do the work we do. Even in narrative, we need to know...
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Q&A: Greg Bishop on a quarterback, a suicide and a search for answers
The risks of tackle football run through the center of a tortured conversation that escalates with each new tale of the shattered life of a famous pro. More and more NFL families are stepping up with...
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“What is beyond grief?”
Why is this great? Writers wade into the world to witness it in all its dimensions, then remake it in the hieroglyphics we know as words – marks we use not just to describe, but to create meaning....
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“I think of myself as a humble student trying to get better and just lucky to...
Why it’s so great: This isn’t a particularly elegant sentence. It may even come across as disingenuous – a popular, successful Hollywood actor who, at 65, still claims to be a “humble student” of his...
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Letter from Sing Sing: Writing from inside
Editor’s note: Reporter and teacher Shaheen Pasha (2018 Nieman Fellow) met John J. Lennon when she interviewed him for a larger package she did on writing programs and newspapers inside America’s...
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Immigration reporting from the inside-out: through the mouths and eyes of babes
America’s debate over immigration has played out to the recorded cries of children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, to broadcast images of tears and hugs as some are reunited...
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“During six Sundays, he never varied his routine, faithful as a migratory...
Sometimes a sentence stops me for reasons I can’t entirely explain, or even defend. Often it includes a moment of description or metaphor that teases out a personal memory, or plants the seeds of...
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Q&A: How a letter, honesty and patience won the trust of a shamed school cop
This week marks a return to school for students around the country, including at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, where six months ago a gunman shot and killed 17 students and staff...
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The Pitch: Erika Hayasaki on how to leave the newsroom and kill it as a...
EDITOR’S NOTE: Erika Hayasaki’s conversation with Storyboard contributor Katia Savchuk explores what it took to earn a regular byline in magazines. She also shared the two separate pitches she wrote to...
View Article“Words. Words upon the wind. What will endure, perhaps is what I have...
Geraldine Brooks laid that line down in “Secret Chord,” her deeply researched and richly reimagined novel about the life of biblical King David, the psalm-writing, harp-playing, woman-lusting warrior....
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Parachute reporting in a foreign land: Getting it fast and getting it right
On May 3, 2018, volcanic fissures opened in a residential neighborhood on the island of Hawai‘i, forcing more than 2,000 people to evacuate their homes. While the Kīlauea volcano has been erupting for...
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The Pitch (Take Two): Erika Hayasaki on the reality of landing a big...
Erika Hayasaki was an award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times when she left the relative security of the newsroom for the feast-or-famine world of freelancing. She has since made her way into...
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“Do not despair of our present difficulties. We believe always in the promise...
This photo released by Hanoi's Vietnam News Agency shows Lt. Commander John S. McCain III as a prisoner of war in 1967. AP Photo Coming at the end of his elegant posthumous valedictory to the country,...
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Rebecca Solnit’s long and winding road through the tangled tale of politics
The opening paragraph of Rebecca Solnit’s new LitHub essay, “Why the President Must Be Impeached,” is a single sentence, 88 words long. It is one of the shortest paragraphs in a 20-paragraph soliloquy...
View Article“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
This passage – not quite a Haiku, but with that feeling – comes as part of Mary Oliver’s poem “Sometimes.” It is introduced in the poem as “Instructions for living a life.” I’m not good at poetry (a...
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Christopher Solomon on how he captured the controversial wolf man of Washington
Before Christopher Solomon took on the case of the wolf researcher who ignited a political firestorm, the situation had sparked plenty of regional coverage. In particular, The Seattle Times, where...
View Article“No matter how long we study them, the images are unfathomable. No matter how...
There are endless memories and memorials marking yesterday, the 17th anniversary of 9/11. I find it impossible to post about something else, but impossible to choose the right thing to post. Mostly I...
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An alligator attack sparks a Facebook attack – and an invitation to...
I sat on a bench with Wade Livingston the other day. We talked about an alligator attack, a woman who drowned, and the people who saw fit to condemn her for the audacity to up and die while walking...
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