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“… how the persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well.”
It’s a common and happy reframe among my retired friends: They are busier than they’ve ever been. They can’t remember how they managed to do all the things they needed to do — make friends, keep a...
View ArticleA veteran newsman teaches writing through music
By Chuck Haga The students file in and suddenly some remember the day’s assignment: Bring in a favorite song lyric, something with magic in the way words work together. Out come the phones and they...
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A whimsical request inspired some essential writing tools
EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is shared with our friends at The Poynter Institute by request of the author. * * * By Roy Peter Clark Early last October I received a small package from England, which looked...
View ArticleHow to free your writing with free writing
By Korrina Duffy Timer set. Pen poised. Go! Free writing is for when you just need to write the damn thing already. If you like many have a bad case of blank page syndrome, free writing helps clear the...
View ArticleWho says political writing has to be boring?
By Jacqui Banaszynski I sat down to watch the State of the Union address this week out of a sense of obligation and, to be honest, a somewhat dark curiosity. How scripted would it be? How predictable?...
View ArticleIntimate stories in abstract numbers
By Jacqui Banaszynski The details are what always hold me. The numbers matter, of course. Horrible numbers that matter horribly. I follow them as they rise. When the news of the shallow earthquake...
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Jon Mooallem’s narrative on the Camp Fire: “The value is in the telling”
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...
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Courage and empathy: Winners of the 2023 American Mosaic Journalism Prize
By Monique Brouillette and Jacqui Banaszynski Congratulations to Cerise Castle and Carvell Wallace, this year’s recipients of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize. The prize was launched in 2018 by the...
View ArticleSquirrels (and newspapers) as threatened species
By Jacqui Banaszynski Let’s, for a moment, consider squirrels. Stick with me. There’s a reason for this, and it has to do with things threatened and endangered. More specifically to that point, the...
View ArticleUkraine coverage: The press rises to cover a grinding war
By Jacqui Banaszynski A large property sprawls on the north side of the state highway that runs from mountain cabin in the Washington Cascades to the town where I buy groceries. At least I assume It’s...
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Auschwitz stories told by those who lived them
By Andrea Pitzer Is it possible to tell the story of Auschwitz, the abyss at the center of the twentieth century? When I wrote “One Long Night,” a history of concentration camps around the world, my...
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Keeping it real in a news reporting class
By Howard Sinker The news reporting class I teach probably isn’t what you’d expect. I don’t teach at a school that offers a journalism degree — and I’m good with that. My hope is that students learn a...
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“…the stories it told … were not someone else’s but one larger story of which...
By Jacqui Banaszynski As I read Celeste Ng’s most recent novel, I couldn’t help but think of George Orwell’s “1984” or Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale.” Nor could I avoid echoes to discordant...
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Reconstructing a fractured life and broken system
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...
View Article“…cutting the viewer to the bone.”
By Trevor Pyle It would be easy for a writer to jumble himself into knots of frustration writing about Tom Sizemore, the incendiary “Saving Private Ryan” and “Strange Days” actor who died last week at...
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‘Good versus good’ stories that unravel complex societal problems
By Carly Stern For Nathan Heller, Lowell High School had always represented the road not taken. Heller had applied to Lowell when he was a teenager growing up in San Francisco, but ended up attending a...
View ArticleWriting without words
Ireturned from a recent three-day watercolor workshop with three marginal values’ studies in gray (trying to see and control the range of light-to-dark without being distracted by color), and a scrap...
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A doc film that gently unspools surprises
By Line Vaaben To tell this story of craft, I must share something which might ruin your first-time viewing of the short documentary film “Victoria,” by Eloisa Diez. So if you haven’t already watched...
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The making of a (born) journalist
By Don Nelson When we first meet Carl Bernstein (as portrayed by Dustin Hoffman) in the opening minutes of “All the President’s Men,” he’s a shambles. Shaggy hair, tieless, frayed shirt collar,...
View ArticlePause before you hit the SEND button
By Jacqui Banaszynski I long ago abandoned the illusion that I could block spam from my inboxes, prevent hacks of my accounts or keep much of my private business private. Unless you live way...
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