Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter, delivered every Friday in your inbox.

***

Dear Storyboard community: 

It's journalism awards season — last week were the Peabodys, this week it's the Poynter Institute and the National Headliner Awards, and on Monday we'll have the Pulitzer Prizes (announced via livestream at 3 p.m. ET).

One thing to remember amid all the accolades is that every award-winning story starts with a germ of an idea. How can we know where a story might take us unless we look for ourselves? 

This thought struck me as I read Storyboard contributor Emilia Wisniewski's latest roundup of highlights from Boston University's Power of Narrative conference. From Ken Burns to Boston Globe journalist Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, journalists are constantly pulling on threads and following their curiosity, seeing if one phone call or a day in the archives might lead to a new discovery. 

But then, once armed with an idea, comes other matters: What form will this reporting and storytelling take? How can we get these stories in front of an audience? And who will help fund it? 

These are the critical questions writers and journalists are asking right now, as I learned during a Zoom conversation this week with journalists from the San Francisco Writers Grotto (thanks to Storyboard contributor Carly Stern for the invite). We pondered the state of nonfiction publishing, the pros and cons of building a social media following to promote your work, and whether the written longform feature is still a viable pathway to a book proposal. 

My mission with Storyboard has always been to focus on the elements that we can control — the craft, the reporting. But I'd like to hear from you: How are you thinking about your work in this current moment? Whose work is inspiring you? And what advice would you share with fellow journalists on how to keep moving forward? 

Email me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. I'd like to feature your answers in a future newsletter. 

Look beyond the headlines — and five other lessons for journalists from Power of Narrative 2026

Storytelling advice from Ken Burns, the Boston Globe, The New Yorker's Sarah Stillman, The Atavist, Jabari Asim, and Keith O’Brien

[ Read the story ]

Links of note 

• Storyboard contributor Erika Hayasaki has compiled an outstanding guide to crafting reported and braided essays, as well as “hybrid memoirs,” from her recent panel discussion for the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Hayasaki defines the reported essay as “a first-person nonfiction story grounded in reflection and reporting. These pieces weave facts, scenes, interviews, and research with personal observations and narrative storytelling.” A braided essay can also include traditional reporting, but not always. As Hayasaki quotes fellow Storyboard contributor Kim Cross: “Think of each strand of the braid as its own journey, with its own beginning, middle, and end.”   
• At New York magazine's Dinner Party newsletter, Emily Gould is collecting submissions of readers' favorite “load-bearing” blog posts from the internet's glory days — that is, pieces of writing or reporting that still stand the test of time. Gould's personal list brings back some memories for me (featuring The Awl, Jia Tolentino at Jezebel, and one of the earliest pieces we published at Longreads). Two pieces that immediately came to my mind are this 2011 essay that introduced me to Maria Bustillos's writing, and Allie Brosh's illustrated memoir, “Depression Part 2” from 2013.
• Naomi Kanakia's newsletter, Woman of Letters, shares a history of short fiction in The New Yorker, which gives us insight into the changing nature of storytelling. In the 1920s the magazine began publishing “casuals” — “short humorous pieces that were meant to convey an attitude of urbane sophistication” — with the formula, length, and style evolving from there. Kanakia herself uses her newsletter to experiment with different forms of storytelling, raising the question: what type of story works best on Substack? How might that change in the years to come?

Keep experimenting, and keep sharing your stories, 

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast 
On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org

Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app ]

The post Tell us your best advice for journalists in the current moment appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Author and essayist Grace Talusan is part of a cohort of professors who teach one of Brown University’s most popular humanities classes: “Introduction to Creative Nonfiction.” She encourages her students to find joy in essay writing, assigning exercises that spark creativity.

But before the holiday break, tragedy gripped the Brown campus in Rhode Island, as a gunman opened fire on students who were prepping for exams, killing two and wounding nine others. I interviewed Grace about her teaching and writing before the shooting, checking in with her again in the hours and weeks after. Still reeling, she is now focusing on helping students use writing to process and try to heal.

In the spring, Grace plans to bring back a course called “Writing Wonder, Joy, and Awe,” which she created a few years ago as a direct response to the constant barrage of news that her students lived with — wars, pandemics, climate disasters like fires and floods. She designed the class for students to have a place to “rest their eyes and turn their attention, even for just minutes a day, to the beauty all around us.” 

“I’m still in shock about the mass shooting, just a block from where I teach, and processing the terrible loss and violence,” Grace told me. “When I teach this class in the spring, I hope it can be a respite for our students.”        

Grace created “Writing Wonder, Joy, and Awe” around nonfiction from Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ross Gay, and Brian Doyle, writers who pay attention to wonder and delight in some of their writing. The class begins with the exercise in Gay’s “Book of Delights” that became the book itself: “Write in your notebook for 30 minutes a day about a delight.”

Grace has written about her own experiences of delight, like making yogurt, as well as traumatic events in her life. She is the author of “The Body Papers,” which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction. She serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle (this year as chair of the Autobiography committee), which recently announced its longlists.

In 2024, Grace published “How to Drown in America,” about an incident with her then-boyfriend Alonso (now her husband), when they found themselves in a near-death experience while on a canoe excursion in Maine. As the only non-white people on the trip — surrounded by dozens of people bearing Confederate flags — the couple almost died together that day in the Saco River.

For years, Grace tried to write the story of their drowning. First, she tried it as fiction. Then, she shared it as a part of an oral performance on stage. But over time, her perspective about the experience deepened into an idea for a more multilayered essay.

The piece is not just a survival story. It examines her own privilege as an Asian American woman who is married to a Black American man. Time gave her essay perspective and depth. Grace uses this insightful perspective in her nonfiction. 

My writing groups refer to this writing technique as “the older wiser narrator.” In a personal essay, the older wiser narrator reflects back on memories and moments with insight, perception, and hindsight on events that the younger “in-the-moment” self experienced. An essay can effectively draw from both voices. 

Here is an example from Grace’s piece, with her as the older wiser narrator:

No one uses the term, “melting pot,” anymore, but people said this word aloud around me all the time and I believed that if I continued being a good immigrant kid, America would reward me. I was not ready to discard this delusion in my early 20s. I still wanted to believe that race didn’t matter.

And then there is Grace as the in-the-moment (younger) narrator, inside the scene:

We were a half-hour into our river adventure, our canoe floating on the Saco River, when the first Confederate flag — attached by a metal pole to a canoe shared by two white men with crewcuts and sunburned noses — glided beside us. They were so close I could have touched their freckled arms. I saw Alonso brace himself, but no one said a word; the twangy music from the other canoe radio was the only sound. Alonso paused his paddling and the canoe with the flag sped ahead on the current. 

In our conversation below, which has been edited for length and clarity, Grace offers more ideas to write creatively, and find joy and healing in the practice. 

In your essays, you go to scary places. You go to uncomfortable places. Maybe you could talk a little bit about getting to those places with honesty, and also how you teach that to your students.

Everything I do is with the idea that practice is going to get us there. This is what I say to my students: “If you are going to try something hard, do it in the smallest way possible first. Take the smallest bite of the sandwich.”

We start in three minutes of time. Then six minutes. There is so much work to do to untangle from how they have been taught to write, which is important and gets their academic writing done. I am not discounting high school teaching at all. We build on what they have learned. But what I tell them in the classroom is: “You have all of those skills already, but now I want you to untangle from all of it and be free. Do not think: Does this make sense? Is this any good? We do not care right now. We are just trying to make stuff.”

So, for the first two months, I really want them just to be making stuff. I trust that we can figure out grammar, and structure, and whatever else.

It takes them a little while to trust me, but what I want them also to feel is that energy of: “Oh, this is what I want to write about.” You cannot think your way there. You have to actually write. You have to jump to the page. You can tell me an awesome idea, but do it. You have to try it. I do not know if it is going to work or not. You have to see.

There are writers who have extensive outlines down to the scenes and every point, before they ever write. Other writers — and I am more in this camp — may have a map. I follow the map, but I have to sit down and start writing to listen to what I am actually trying to say. So you are right, it cannot be perfect at first. You just have to get it out, then go back and revise. It sounds like you are kind of like the “listen to yourself” camp.

I mean, even with reporting, you start with a list of people to talk to. But the best part is the unexpected. What happened along the way. That to me is the whole joy of reporting, you know, you should have a plan and places to go and people who will talk to you, but then things happen you never expected.

So that is what I want my students to feel and experience at least once throughout the semester. That feeling of discovery, because that is when you get the original thought, or an original way of putting things together. I keep telling them: “I want you to write like you.” That is actually very hard. What is your voice? But I think it can be found, because you can feel it when you are tapping into that part of you.

Can you talk about your class at Brown? It is so popular. We are constantly reading these articles saying every college student is using AI and they don’t want to write. But it does actually seem to me that so many do still want to write. They still want to create and share.

The beauty of my Brown students is they just genuinely want to learn. They have a genuine curiosity and interest. It’s not gone, and maybe it’s stronger now. Some of my colleagues do the class differently, but I just do a lottery. I don’t screen their samples. Just put your name in the hat and I’ll pick names to be in the class at random.

I’m reading “Joyride” by Susan Orlean right now. There are really good things about finding stories and thinking about stories. And students might be like, “I don't have three years to report a story.” But look, she’s an amazing writer, like, let’s learn from what she has to say, about how she puts a magazine story together.

How do you start to think about writing exercises to bring into your classrooms and to get students inspired, or just creating, even if they do not know where it is going?

I took a workshop with Lynda Barry many years ago, and it taught me that no matter what the instructions for the exercise are or the theme or the content, the exercise itself is a way of calming a person down and transitioning them into the room and the space. It really is transformative. No matter what is on the page. It does not matter.

I tell them, we are not going to talk for the first 15 minutes. I want us to be in this place where we are working and writing. I want them in this place where stories are. And that is what I got from Lynda Barry.

So we will do Lynda Barry’s daily diary exercise. It is an observation exercise. We should be observant. We should be paying attention to what is out in the world, specifically, how you describe things, and very concretely. It is called a Daily Diary, from her book “Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor.” We will start there. That is our warmup.

And then we will do the other exercise, which is often something I make up from the reading. We are reading Alexander Chee’s “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.” From whatever we are reading for that day, I will take something from the essay, and that is what we will do our more substantive exercise on.

So, the students just read “100 Things About Writing a Novel.” I had the students go around the room and I said:  “Okay, everyone has to pitch a line, your own headline. What would you write if you wrote an essay called ‘100 Things About…’?” They said things like “100 Things About Being an Immigrant Daughter,” “100 Things About Chickens.” They are just so fun. It is delightful to have them come up with all these ideas.

And then I said: “Okay, write yours for the next five minutes, as many items under that heading as you can. Now you have to do the person next to you. So if they had ‘100 Things About Chickens,’ you all have to do that one for five minutes.” It is always about loosening up and finding what you want to write, but not trying so hard about it, just finding it.

We did one about games. We had an alum come in. She had published an article for Orion about Wingspan, the board game. So we read it, and then she came to talk. Then I did an exercise where everyone had to write down the games that they played as a kid: car games, board games, playground games. Their faces changed. Then everyone had to talk and say what their game was. We wrote about a moment related to the game. It is a way for them to share with each other, and get vulnerable.

I tell them this too: “I can see you all as sixth graders, the excitement on your face for explaining this weird tag game that you only play on your playground.” And I want people to have positive experiences with each other and with writing and creativity. I want them to have good feelings about it, because I think a lot of their feelings have probably been bad. Oh, I am a terrible writer, oh, look at this page full of corrections. I want them to feel the joy.

It is like that first step. You just start to think about the games that you played. Then it is happening in the world. And I get them to start to describe it. And then, about five minutes or so later, I will give them other prompts. I will say: “Now I want you to reveal something that seems hard. Maybe it is an insight, or an observation, or a question, or a challenge. It is hard for you, but do it. Try to get to that edge where it feels a little bit scary, or risky, or hard to say. Just try it. You do not have to share it.”

Do you do those exercises yourself too?

I do. I write about the body, and I will end up writing about writing and exercising. I am getting to be athletic again. I used to be on sports teams all my life growing up, and then I kind of got out of the rhythm of it. But now I am learning exercises again from a trainer, and it is frustrating because I am having to re-learn. But I also know that once I learn these things, I am not going to have to think about them. It is kind of like writing. It is not going to feel like a good writing session unless I have done it. Unless I have done that thing that feels hard. 

For more of Hayasaki's conversation with Grace on coming up with ideas and writing books, check out her newsletter interview.

***

Erika Hayasaki is an author and independent journalist who teaches in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine. She publishes a newsletter on nonfiction craft and freelancing, The Reported Essay.

The post Author Grace Talusan on going to uncomfortable places in your writing appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter, delivered every Friday in your inbox.

***

Dear Storyboard community: 

Happy New Year! I hope you’ve had a restful holiday season. Many of you shared your favorite stories of the past year with our inaugural Storyboard Best of 2025, where I also asked you to share pieces that you were especially proud of creating, and what you learned from them. 

Your responses are inspiring and motivating, and they might be especially helpful as you begin to think about where to dedicate your own effort in 2026.

Keep sharing your stories, 

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast 
On Bluesky:@niemanstoryboard.org  

***

Robert Sanchez on “The Coloradans Exercising Their Right To Die—and a Doctor Who Helps Them Find Peace” (5280 Magazine, October 2025)

I spent a summer watching very sick people consider how to die with dignity. This story on medical aid in dying reinforced the idea that I need to capture the humanity of every character who shows up in my work. In this case, that’s because few of them would be alive when this story ran. I interviewed more than a dozen MAID patients for this piece, over about three months, and I was physically with three MAID patients (in their homes) when they died. It was an honor to be with these people, and their loved ones, during this time. Maybe most of all, this story taught me about the power of simply asking a question and then taking time to really listen to the answer. The reporting on this story was an ego-stripping experience that changed my life.

Andrea Pitzer on “The ‘Exciting Business Opportunity’ That Ruined Our Lives” (The Atlantic, January 2025)

I had such a strange childhood, one both fairy tale and feral. I hoped to convey at least a little of our life as outsiders while also delivering up some surprise ties to political events rocking the country in recent years. It was a challenge to marry those things, and it took some minor acrobatics to pull off in a mid-length feature, but with a lot of revision, I think the story worked in the end. My editor Honor Jones did a wonderful job whittling and reshaping without damaging the rough magic I was aiming for.

Daniel Drepper on “The Forever Pollution Project: Journalists tracking PFAS across Europe”

With a group of about 50 journalists from all over Europe, we investigated the spread of PFAS or “forever chemicals” as well as the manipulating lobbying tactics of the PFAS industry to avoid restriction on these dangerous chemicals. Over three years, we published two big investigations that broke news all over the continent.

Eva Holland on “Why Did National Geographic Disappear Its Own Documentary About A Queer Climate Scientist?” (Defector, July 2025)

I hadn’t done this sort of properly investigative work before — mostly, I talk to people who want to tell me their stories, rather than spending months trying to extract information from more reluctant, frightened, or even hostile sources. But this one felt important, and personal to me, and I'm glad I put in the time to put it together. It was a demoralizing story to work on in some ways, but I finished with some new tools in my toolkit, and the satisfaction of knowing that I had put something into the public eye that wouldn't likely have been there otherwise.

Mary Schmich on her podcast “Division Street Revisited” 

After 40 or so years as a newspaper writer, it was a thrill to report and write in a new (for me) genre, the podcast. I learned to listen differently, to think of the audience as listeners and not readers, and to collaborate in a way that column-writing doesn’t involve. I’ve always loved stretching the boundaries of what I know and do, and it was especially satisfying to take that stretch in this phase of life.

Theo Balcomb on the podcast episode “Congruence is Effortless”(Voices in the River, March 2025)

Anna Sale of “Death Sex & Money” fame came on the show I make with a witch named Rebecca. At the beginning of 2024, Rebecca read a “year ahead spread" for Anna. It's a tarot reading where you get a card for each month, giving you a sense of what the year may feel like for you. Then in 2025, we talked to Anna about her year that was, playing her excerpts from her “year ahead spread,” and reflecting on how her year transpired. I've never made anything like it...and I'm really proud of it. 

Neel Dhanesha on “How tribal radio stations are preparing for a future without the Corporation for Public Broadcasting” (Nieman Lab, August 2025) 

I'm proud of this story because it drew attention to something incredibly important — the impact of federal funding cuts on tribal radio stations — and also, to an extent, served to show the unique place those stations had in their communities. I learned a lot about the role of tribal stations in native communities around the country, and the hard, unglamorous work that goes into keeping them going.  

Chris Bannon on the podcast series “Tough Cookie: The Wally ‘Famous’ Amos Story” (Vanity Fair, October 2025) 

Revealed the remarkable, hidden story of one of America's most famous Black entrepreneurs through a complex family lens. The lesson: it’s hard to make a new narrative show with an all new team on a tight budget!

Franklin Leonard on starting a newsletter

I'm forcing myself to do more longform writing, something I find incredibly uncomfortable, but it’s happening, and it’s far less terrible than I expected it to be.

Carly Stern on “Looking For Closure At Carlos Watson’s Sentencing Hearing” (Defector, March 2025)

This first-person essay was a difficult piece for me to write and departed from the journalistic work I usually do, where I’m centering other people’s voices rather than my own. Turning the lens inward to my own perspective was an uncomfortable but helpful way to re-process the chaos of my earliest journalism job — and a reminder that reporters can also give ourselves permission to mine our own lives and experiences.

Kevin Nguyen on “American War” (The Verge, April 2025)

An attempt to center Vietnamese people, rather than Americans, for the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon; it was a great exercise in diversity of approaches and voice, and in trying to squeeze this into the purview of The Verge, historically a tech website, I realized that the thing we really do more than talk about gadgets is explain systems.

Drew Harwell on “Inside the life of a 24/7 streamer: ‘What more do you want?’” (The Washington Post, May 2025)

I really enjoyed getting to tell the story of Emilycc, the streamer in Texas who's been broadcasting herself live on Twitch for three years and counting. My hope was to take what could’ve been this strange sideshow of the new internet and use it to explore — with respect, and without judgment — why so many of us now feel we have to perform so much of our lives online: the loneliness, the anxiety, the yearning to belong. On a lighter note, I learned that interviewing a marathon streamer requires becoming a streamer yourself.

Deesha Philyaw on the podcast episode “Destiny O. Birdsong on Navigating Censorship in Storytelling” (Ursa Short Fiction, January 2025)

My Ursa podcast co-host Dawnie Walton and I had the privilege of speaking with poet and prose writer Destiny O. Birdsong about navigating censorship and what happens when writers and editors don’t see eye-to-eye. Destiny also discussed the intersections of religion and queerness, the representation of queer sex and sex work in literature, and more.

[Editor's note: I'm also a co-founder at Ursa.] 

Julie Shapiro on the Audio Flux podcast 

Two years into the Audio Flux adventure, we’ve finally launched our podcast! We're excited to share the dozens of incredible audio gems, produced by independent producers from all over, even further and wider through the podcast. What have we learned? To stick to our values as the podcast industry swirls around us, and to trust in the collaborative spirit at the heart of Audio Flux. 

Minda Honey on “I was a teenage weight loss counselor” (Writing for Fakers, September 2025)

Inspired by the discourse around Ozempic, I wrote about my experience as a teenage weight loss counselor.

Andrew Deck on “Inside a network of AI-generated newsletters targeting ‘small town America’” (Nieman Lab, January 2025)

My story from January uncovered a network of more than 350 AI-generated local newsletters across the U.S. My reporting confirmed they were all operated by one engineer in NYC who was posing as a local resident in each town. The story inspired follow-up coverage by local and regional outlets in almost a dozen states and kicked off fascinating debates in the news industry about where the line is in journalism between automated aggregation and AI-based theft.

Benjamin Hochman on “After suicide attempt, Cardinals fan now helps others — through baseball cards” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 2025)

I was just so moved by the story of this man. He tried to kill himself. Now, he's living his life to help others in his small town.

Raul Gallego Abellan on “Point of No Return” (YouTube)

“Point of No Return” is an independently produced documentary series funded by TV3–3Cat, a regional public broadcaster. Despite its modest scale, the English version on YouTube has reached high viewership and earned major international recognition — including an International Emmy Award, a Webby Award, and two Pictures of the Year awards, among others. It proves that powerful storytelling and exclusive access can break through borders, and that even from small media ecosystems it is possible to reach global audiences and achieve worldwide acclaim.

Laura Coffey on the return of the Society for Features Journalism national conference 

I was so excited and gratified to help bring back the first in-person Society for Features Journalism national conference since the pandemic. We met at ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix from Nov. 6-8, 2025, and it was epic. The focus was on craft, camaraderie, education and inspiration with speakers like Pulitzer Prize winners Eli Saslow, Lane DeGregory, Mark Warren and many more. We're already planning our next SFJ conference at the same location in October 2026. Please join us if you can.

***

Photo: New Year's Eve in Feilitzsch, Germany. Photo by PantheraLeo1359531 via Wikimedia Commons

Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

The post Stories and lessons to inspire you in 2026 appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter, delivered every Friday in your inbox.

***

Dear Storyboard community:

The first word in Sasha Bonét's memoir, “The Waterbearers,” is a clear call to action: 

“Listen.” 

As I was listening to contributor Christina M. Tapper's expansive conversation with Bonét for this week's Nieman Storyboard podcast, Bonét offered many insights that return to this core principle: During our quest to find the story, we must stay open and listen when it finds us. 

Bonét was working on an assignment about the artist Emma Amos when she interviewed sculptor and filmmaker Camille Billops — who then began opening up about her decision to give up her 4-year-old daughter for adoption. 

 “All she wanted to talk about though was this daughter she had given away who had died, and I was like, kind of pushing back on it. … And then at some point I just got quiet and I listened, and it was fascinating, all of the things she was saying. And I thought, okay, this is the story,” said Bonét. The resulting feature, ”The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter,” was published by the digital magazine Topic and named to many year-end “Best Of” lists in 2019. 

Bonét says the experience was a reminder about “letting the story carry you where it needs to be.” Billops's story is one "tributary” in Bonét's memoir, which is about her own family, and more broadly about Black womanhood and motherhood in the U.S. 

Give the conversation a listen. 

Sasha Bonét on ‘leaving room for the story to shape itself’ and how a family home can become a character

“In a practical sense, I needed to include [my grandmother's house] because I had so many characters. … I needed a place where everyone could be in one room. I think in telling any story, whether it's in film or writing, you need a place. ‘Seinfeld’ had a place; ‘Friends’ had a place. There always needs to be a place where all the characters can be in one setting, and then the main characters can kind of exist outside of that.”

[ Read the story ] 

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

Links of note 

• If you’re in the weeds, reread the above pro tip from one of our favorite pros, Pamela Colloff. 
• The European Press Prize, which celebrates journalism that “informs, inspires, investigates, and makes an impact,” is now accepting submissions for its 2026 awards. Journalists from across Europe — all 46 Council of Europe countries, plus Belarus and Russia — are invited to submit their best work in five categories. Stories must have been published between Dec. 1, 2024 and Dec. 31, 2025. The deadline is Dec. 14. Full details and the submission form are here. 
• One of my favorite things about the early days of Longreads was discovering and spotlighting writers from the great alt-weeklies and city magazines across the U.S. Sadly, many of those publications have gone away. Tributes poured in this week for Charlotte magazine, which announced the publication is shutting down after nearly 60 years. Read more from former Charlotte editor Michael Graff, Jeremy Markovich, and Tommy Tomlinson. 
• An in-depth toolkit from The Marshall Project: “How to Report on Deaths in Jails and Prisons.”
• The 2026 Lukas Prize Project, honoring excellence in nonfiction, is now accepting submissions for its awards, with a deadline of Dec. 4. Awards include the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Awards, which give two winners $25,000 each to aid in the completion of “a significant work of nonfiction on a topic of American political or social concern,” as well as the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize. 
• Journalist Evan Ratliff has unveiled Season Two of his AI podcast, “Shell Game,” in which he blends explanatory tech journalism with dystopian humor as he attempts to build an entire company with only AI employees. For Wired, he describes how the experiment quickly went sideways, with AI agents lying about their progress and digressing into side projects that weren't assigned to them. 

Keep the bots away, and keep sharing your (human) stories,

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast 
On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org

The post The art of listening appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Writer, critic, and editor Sasha Bonét joins Storyboard contributor Christina M. Tapper on this week’s episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, in a wide-ranging conversation about Bonét’s writing process for “The Waterbearers,” a memoir about mothers and daughters. Bonét and Tapper discuss surrendering to how a story unfolds, rather than forcing it, and how to turn a physical place into a key character.

Bonét, a professor of creative writing for Columbia University and Barnard College, has written for The Paris Review, Aperture, New York magazine, and Vogue. “The Waterbearers” is her book debut. At the heart of it, the book “is an American family story,” Bonét says. “In the Black American family oftentimes it is a matriarchal family, and that kind of queers the traditional American setup that we understand, which is that the man is at the head of the household. [The book goes] through my family lineage, but it's also connecting to different policies and histories that impact the way the Black family is structured. 

“I wanted to look at American history through the lens of the women that helped to really birth this nation from the beginning of the empire to understand an alternative viewpoint from the people who are often disregarded.”

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

Water is a major theme in the book, and it provides Bonét a through line in telling not just her family’s matrilineal story, but also the history of Black womanhood and motherhood in the U.S. The theme didn’t reveal itself until Bonét conducted interviews with her grandmother Betty Jean, her mother, Connie, and her six aunts. 

“ The water kept coming to me.  I actually wasn't trying to chase it. It was something that, when the women in my family were sharing their stories with me, there was always water. It was a metaphor or it was present, or they were talking about their baptisms. Everything was kind of situated around their proximity to water,” Bonét says. “The water helped as a kind of grounding principle for structure, but also for how I was thinking about writing.”

Bonét says she loves to “leave a lot of room for the story to shape itself. For example, if I'm writing criticism, if I'm interviewing or doing research, I don't want to go into it with my own idea or concept. I like for it to be shaped by what I discover. I allow a lot of space for the interviews and the research to help me build an idea of what I will write about. So that was the case for the book. ... I allow myself to be carried in the direction that the research takes me.”

To help thread the stories of her family with her own experiences as a mother, daughter, and granddaughter, Bonét made her grandmother’s house in Houston, known as 5010, a central character.

“I didn't even really identify the significance of the house until I was writing about it,” Bonét says. “Physical space is really important for this family. But, also I think specifically for people who lack a kind of origin, to have a place that they can ground themselves in.  A place to gather and a place where you can always go. What a gift. I had a lot of fun with that.”

During the conversation, Bonét also shares how collage and creating a writing altar helped her bring “The Waterbearers” to life. The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the importance of interviewing her aunts in birth order before talking to her mother:

My grandmother had 11 children. I spoke with all the daughters. I didn't interview her sons. I really wanted to get the story through the gaze of the women and the daughters. And the order in which I interviewed them was really important. Birth order, to me, plays such a significant role in how we engage with the world because we're kind of given a position that we didn't ask for. The way we are able to situate ourselves within our family of course carries over into the way we engage with everyone else outside the house.

And so I looked at the birth order and I thought, “Okay, I spoke with Granny. Who's next?” I started with the eldest. And you know, the first child is always having to be a bit of a guinea pig. [My grandmother] was very young when she had her. [My aunt] also allowed for a kind of permission because she's quite stoic and doesn't speak very much. 

And then I went around my mother because I knew she would be the hardest one to speak with. So then I interviewed all her sisters, and then I came back to her because I knew that she would want to correct. And so I said, “Well, you know, you don't have to speak with me, but I'm telling the story and I've spoken with all your sisters.” And she's like, “What? What did they say?” And then she's like, “Oh, they got it all wrong. I have to tell you what really happened.”

It was really important to think about how to organize the interviews and how to move through the family structure in a way that would allow me more openness.

On making her grandmother’s house a key character:

In a practical sense, I needed to include it because I had so many characters. … I needed a place where everyone could be in one room. I think in telling any story, whether it's in film or writing, you need a place. “Seinfeld” had a place; “Friends” had a place. There always needs to be a place where all the characters can be in one setting, and then the main characters can kind of exist outside of that. So I thought I would place them there. But then as I started situating them, I really got into writing about the house. ... You know, when you spend time at a place, you just kind of don't see it. It's like an extension of your own skin. When I sat to think about it, what is 5010? What does it represent? What does it feel like? What does it look like? I was like, oh, wow, this is so rich … and the more I thought about it, it is a character.

On managing pushback from her editor about the opening of the book:

I wanted to define “waterbearer” from the beginning. When I wrote [the prelude], I was kind of writing it for myself. Like, what even is this waterbearer? I had already finished the first draft of the book before I wrote that. …I wrote this in one sitting. I sent it to a friend and she was like, “Yes.” My editor, John Freeman, was like, “No.” [He said,] “This voice is too different. The reader who picks up your book at a bookstore is gonna read this and they're gonna think that this is what the book is like, and it's not.”

[But] I just felt so strongly about [including it]. Me and my editor have such a wonderful relationship and he usually doesn't push back on me so much when I feel adamant. … [The prelude] just flowed. And when things come to me in that way, I feel really strongly about them. … I thought, I have to honor whatever this was that came through. And you know, sometimes you have these things come through and they get past you. They kind of slip through your fingers. And then sometimes you can grab ‘em. And this was one of those moments where something came through and I was able to grab it. I felt that it was necessary. And so [John] said, “Okay.” And then there were some other people at Knopf that were like, “Yeah, we love this.” 

On creating an ancestral altar in her ‘writer’s womb’:

I just needed a place of my own — very Virginia Woolf. And because it was post-pandemic, so many office buildings were empty. So I was able to find something really inexpensive in Manhattan. It wasn't until I moved in that I realized this is the first place I've had of my own in the past 15 years since I had my daughter.

It was small. I painted it pink. I called it the “writer's womb.” It was this little place that held me. I set up an altar with all of all these women. I was writing about ancestors, but also all of these women and writers, like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou. W.E.B. Du Bois. All of these people before me who’ve kind of paved the way, and I just put them all on this altar. I would start my day at the altar and say, “Okay, I'm here. Please guide me. Give me the courage to go where you asked me to go. Give me the courage to say the truth.” ... I started with the same kind of chant, meditation, every morning to ground myself and to remind myself that I'm a part of a lineage of people who have been practicing this craft.

On ending the book with a collage:

I'd written this piece for The Paris Review about Lorna Simpson and Breonna Taylor. And I had started collaging with my daughter during the pandemic. So that was on my mind. Leslie Jamison from Columbia University read that piece and contacted me and asked me to do an online guided workshop about collaging and its relationship to writing.

This is during the pandemic. Everything's on Zoom. So I'm creating this collage for this workshop that I'm guiding. And I ended up just loving it and I just held onto it. I framed it, I named it. I actually wanted to name the book, “Water Is a Body Too.” That was the original title that I had on my proposal … I just thought it was symbolic… So I wanted it to be included in the end, as a testament to the entire process.

Reading, Listening, and Visual Art List:

• “The Waterbearers” (Sasha Bonét, 2025)
• “The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter” (originally published in Topic, May 18, 2019, and included in “The Waterbearers”)
• “Waterbearer” by Lorna Simpson
• Femi Adeyemi
• Rakia Clark
• “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval” (Saidiya Hartman, 2019)
• “White Girls” (Hilton Als, 2019)
• Katy Morlas Shannon
• “‘His Name Was Bélizaire’: Rare Portrait of Enslaved Child Arrives at the Met” (The New York Times, August 24, 2023)
• “Water has perfect memory ...” (Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”)
• “what the mirror said” by Lucille Clifton
• “Reimagining Black Futures” (The Paris Review, June 24, 2020)
• Leslie Jamison

Show credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Episode producer and interview by Christina M. Tapper
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

***

The post Sasha Bonét on ‘leaving room for the story to shape itself’ and how a family home can become a character appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter, delivered every Friday in your inbox.

***

Dear Storyboard community, 

This week, Storyboard contributor (and amazing collage artist) Christina M. Tapper returns to our podcast for a conversation with journalist Danyel Smith, author of the pop music memoir “Shine Bright” and whose work has been published in The New York Times, ESPN, and NPR, among many other publications. 

Smith speaks to her evolution as a writer, historian, and journalist, and confronts the complex feelings that many of us struggle with when it comes to sharing stories from our own lives and experiences. 

As journalists, part of our training includes de-centering ourselves in our work. Smith has interviewed many of the biggest stars in pop music and sports, but when the time came to write her own memoir, she says she had to “be my own second voice” — the person sitting on her shoulder telling her that her story is important. 

Part of that conscious effort means treating your writing with the respect it deserves. Smith is mindful about saving (rather than deleting) unused material from her stories, and tries to keep all of her past writing:   

I have journals from when I was 11, so I'm not a big thrower away of things. And those times when I don't have something that I wish that I could put my hand on, either digitally or in an old dusty box, I’m mad at myself. Everything goes back to self-worth with me. I feel like I probably threw that away, or got rid of it in a moment of feeling like it wasn't worth keeping. I'm not saying we have to be pack rats. But to just throw away words that you've written — or for me, sometimes it's even concert stuff, or photos from old phones — I mean, I'm worth keeping.

This week's conversation also includes a heartfelt reading from Smith's deeply personal story for NPR, “Sade Saves,” published in 2020. Thank you to Smith and Tapper for sharing it with the Storyboard community. 

Danyel Smith on developing taste as a writer and building confidence to tell your own story

“You have to remind yourself, or let me use the pronoun that is always difficult for me to use: ‘I’ need to remind myself, always, that my story is worth telling.”

[ Read the story ]

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

Links of note 

• “As my longtime mentor Roy Peter Clark taught me: It’s better to write a lot about a little topic than a little about a big topic.” Mallary Tenore Tarpley breaks down the elements of a successful story pitch. 
• The latest Texas Monthly spotlights the life and work of true crime reporting legend Skip Hollandsworth. He tells Editor-in-Chief Ross McCammon: “I’ve been dealing with Parkinson’s disease, which has slowed me down. But I still feel that same urge to find the next big story. My fire for the job has not in any way diminished. I have this great love for writing long stories, stories unique to Texas Monthly — and especially these long-form narratives we do on crime.” Hollandsworth also shares lessons from his reporting: “Early in my career, I would read over the transcripts of my interviews, and in the margins I’d write ‘SU,’ as in, ‘shut up’  … I’d talk over people just as they were about to say something brilliant.”
• The Finalists for the 2025 National Book Awards have been announced. Nonfiction nominees are Omar El Akkad, Julia Ioffe, Yiyun Li, Claudia Rowe, and Jordan Thomas, and winners for all categories will be announced Nov. 19.
• This week, journalists Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas debuted the second season of their podcast series “Hush” for Oregon Public Broadcasting, investigating the 2019 death of 18-year-old Sarah Zuber. Sottile writes about the trust she and Haas have to earn from their subjects in order to embark on such a big reporting project. For “Hush,” it started with Sottile writing a letter to Zuber's family. 

Keep building trust — in your subjects, your readers, and yourself. And keep sharing your stories,

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast 
On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org

The post ‘Your story is worth telling’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, award-winning journalist, author, and producer Danyel Smith joins Storyboard contributor Christina M. Tapper to discuss building the confidence to tell her own story and being a model for others to do the same. 

Smith, the first woman and first Black person to serve as editor-in-chief of Vibe and who later served as editor of Billboard, is the author of “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.” The book is part memoir, part cultural criticism, while giving Black female music artists their due. Smith is also the host of the podcast “Black Girl Songbook” and a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame selection committee member. 

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

Smith prides herself as a writer who covers music icons, newsmakers, and world champion athletes, but in the last several years, Smith has turned more of her attention to memoir writing and bringing her own life experiences into the stories she’s assigned. As a journalist of more than three decades, she’s more than earned the right. But owning her space in the writing is still a process.

“ I don't know if I own it completely, yet,” Smith admits. “A huge down payment has been put down on owning that space, and I'm good on my payments. But, it's a discipline to look at things that were either so beautiful and wonderful or so terrible and so painful, and to just sit in that. It's an exercise, each time, in self-worth.”

That discipline extends to Smith’s editorship. The Oakland, Calif., native encourages the writers she works with to consider their experiences and observations as worthy of consideration in the work. 

“ Once you’re an editor, aren't you essentially some type of coach or teacher? Reminding [writers] that everything that they've done and lived is important enough to be inserted into this piece, whether with the pronoun ‘I’ or just because your knowledge and creativity is going to infuse it. Even if [the story] is about something else [and] isn't about you, it's still your story and your take on things.”

Smith’s approach to writing is complemented by her journaling practice, her recent embrace of CrossFit, and her strong opinions on semicolons. The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On being your own second voice:

There's a clip of Diana Ross where she talks about self-worth… I'm paraphrasing her, but she says, when she was a teenager, she always used to say, “Well, I'm gonna do this. I'm going to work at this department store, or I'm going to learn how to do this dance, or I'm going to be a singer.” And there would be that negative voice also in her head that said, “No, you're not. Why would you think that you could do that?” And she said she really started growing up and coming into herself when she started being her own second voice and co-signing herself. Because she was worth it and because she could do it. And so you have to remind yourself, or let me use the pronoun that is always difficult for me to use: “I” need to remind myself, always, that my story is worth telling. 

On creating your personal archive: 

I have journals from when I was 11, so I'm not a big thrower away of things. And those times when I don't have something that I wish that I could put my hand on, either digitally or in an old dusty box, I’m mad at myself. Everything goes back to self-worth with me. I feel like I probably threw that away, or got rid of it in a moment of feeling like it wasn't worth keeping. I'm not saying we have to be pack rats. But to just throw away words that you've written — or for me, sometimes it's even concert stuff, or photos from old phones — I mean, I'm worth keeping.

On sharing a deeply personal story for her NPR feature on Sade: 

Sometimes I had to ask myself why I never pitched [a Sade story], because I never have. NPR pitched this to me. It was on the 20th anniversary of a particular album, and the person that came to me with the idea had been following my work for a while and was like, “You never really have written about Sade.” It seems like just a real obvious person that I would've written about Sade … one of the reasons is because she's tied up in so much pain for me.

But I trust people at NPR, the ones that I know and adore and respect. I said, “Well, if I do it … I'm going to have to say something about myself,” because my life was so tied up in her music. They were just like, “Why would you even feel like you had to announce that?”

And then I just decided if I was going to do it, then I should go on ahead and do it. It. And if I was going to do it, I should put it in the lede, because any other way would just be half-stepping.

On finding a new life for your unused material: 

For ESPN, I wrote about Whitney Houston's [Super Bowl] National Anthem. That piece was so long when I filed it. Good gracious. It was, I don't know, 12,000 words. It was a mess because I did so much reporting, and I'm the rabbit hole queen. So one of the rabbit holes that I went down was about the singer José Feliciano …He sang the national anthem in a World Series game in 1968. And he changed the cadence of the song. Also, Whitney Houston did. Whitney Houston and her team slowed it down. José Feliciano gave it so much Latin soul… 

My editor at ESPN was like, “Why is José Feliciano all up in Whitney Houston's business?” I had a whole speech about the comparison of the tempos, and she was like, ‘I don't care.’ But a year later, another ESPN editor called me… and said, ‘why did somebody tell me that you wrote something about José Feliciano that didn't get published? Because we're doing a whole piece on anthems that are sung in stadiums. And is there something that you wanna show me?’ Look at that. Look at the art gods working on my behalf!

On semicolons:

I’m not going to use a semicolon. It’s an indecisive piece of punctuation. My thing is, there's a period, and there's a comma. Pick one, or use an em dash. Very simple.

Reading, Listening, and Watching List:

• “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop” (Danyel Smith, 2022) 
• Danyel Smith’s Shine Bright HQ newsletter
• Danyel Smith on Instagram
• “Black Girl Songbook” podcast
• “More Like Wrestling” (novel by Danyel Smith, 2007)
• “Bliss” (novel by Danyel Smith, 2010)
• Christina M. Tapper at Nieman Storyboard
• Christina M. Tapper's collage art
• “The Unstoppable Genius and Glory of Black Women in Music” (ZORA, June 15, 2020)
• “SZA's Ruination Brought Her Everything” (The New York Times, February 8, 2023)
• “The story of Whitney Houston's epic national anthem performance at 1991 Super Bowl” (ESPN, Feb 11, 2022)
• José Feliciano performing the National Anthem (1968 World Series, YouTube)
• “Sade Saves” (NPR, November 11, 2020)
• “Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary” (HBO Max, 2024) 
• David Dennis Jr.
• Danielle Cadet
• Justin Tinsley
• Kelley L. Carter
• Aaron Dodson

Show credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Episode producer and interview by Christina M. Tapper
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

***

The post Danyel Smith on developing taste as a writer and building confidence to tell your own story appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter, delivered every Friday in your inbox.

***

Dear Storyboard community, 

I am away this week, so it seems like a perfect moment to hand the reins over to one of our Storyboard contributors. Here's a special guest post from acclaimed author, journalist, and recent Nieman Storyboard podcast guest Erika Hayasaki. —Mark

***

As is the case for many journalists, Sara Kehaulani Goo’s decades-long career led her to far-flung places and new cities. She’s worked as a senior news executive who has helped lead media organizations such as Axios, NPR, and The Washington Post, where she was recently named President of the Creator Network. But for years, even while working with reporters covering the world’s biggest news stories, Goo felt pulled to return to tell a story of her family’s homeland on Maui. She long believed the dominant narrative about Hawaii needed to be corrected. But how would she begin to tell that story?

In 2019, the narrative thread found her. Goo learned that her family was at risk of losing its ancestral land, given to them by King Kamehameha III in 1848. “As a journalist, I was trained to keep myself out of the story,” Goo told me. “It took time and, honestly, life circumstances, to realize my family’s story was worth telling in my own voice, and that it could resonate beyond just me.”

There is a special kind of literary power and authority when a writer weaves their personal insights into a deeply reported story about a place they’re from or know intimately. Goo’s new book, “Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai'i,” invites readers to understand Hawaii’s broader, overlooked history through her family’s journey. 

Goo’s braided book is one of several new narrative nonfiction releases I’ve enjoyed reading recently, written by journalists investigating larger historical stories in their own childhood backyards, including “Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama,” by Alexis Okeowo, and “Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity,” by Joseph Lee, about Martha’s Vineyard.

Here are some key questions and tips that Goo shared with Nieman Storyboard for journalists to consider if they are thinking about writing a book that revisits a place from their past:

• Who’s your audience? Whom are you writing this book for? The answer to this question matters because it will help you focus on what kind of publisher you are trying to target and how to focus your book. For example, you might have a target audience of a certain population in mind — think geographic location or identity or people who will relate to a certain stage in life.
• What’s your story? A good story has a strong beginning, middle, and end. Sounds easy, right? Well, in a book, you may realize you don’t quite have all those pieces yet. In my case, I thought I had it figured out but it turned out I actually had more of my life to live and sort out before I had actually figured out the “end.” So my book wasn’t really ready. Maybe that’s where you are. Keep writing — it’s still material you can use for your book.
• Who are your characters? Think about them and develop them more than you would in a typical feature story. Pick a few main characters and decide who are smaller characters. You have to do some serious editing (and be ruthless) about who makes a good character. When it comes to your own life, this could be easy or it could be hard.
• Be patient with yourself. Expect that this process likely will take years, not months. The publishing business is slow. But you also only have one shot to do it right. So don’t rush it. You’re collecting string for your longest yarn ever. There will be times when you work hard at it for months and there will be months when you don’t work on it at all.

For more of my conversation with Sara, check out my newsletter interview with her. 

Links of note

• How do you handle it when people you write about get mad about what you’ve written? Raksha Vasudevan walks us through a story in which the subjects, to her surprise, didn’t like it. Vasudevan notes: “To shine on others a purely beauteous or monstrous light does nothing, serves no one.”
• Naomi Kanakia shares an excellent interview with literary agent Alia Hanna Habib, who represents Clint Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and other nonfiction writers. Habib recently published a book on building a nonfiction writing career and offers this great piece of advice: “I don't think anyone should write a book because it feels like the next logical step. … Don’t approach it as part of a checklist of a brilliant career.”
• Chloé Cooper Jones recently posted a Q&A with Kevin Nguyen, author and features editor at The Verge (who walked me through the story editing process at his publication a few months ago). Nguyen explains how he pitched and wrote his piece for The New York Times Magazine’s “Letter of Recommendation” on “How Interviewing Your Own Family Can Change Your Life.” 
• Tom Huang has worked hard over the past decade to make the Power of Diverse Voices: Writing Workshop for Journalists of Color one of the best writing workshops in the country. Free for participants, it trains journalists of color to harness the power of their voices through four intensive days at Poynter. The application deadline is Sept. 12 for the next session, which runs Nov. 11-14.

Signing off with words of advice for future book authors, first from novelist Isle McElroy, one of 11 writers who talked about “The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Published.” McElroy said: “My advice is to see the book as a moment in time, an expression of a self in amber, rather than a reflection of the person putting it into the world.”

And finally, from Sara Kehaulani Goo (who is also a mother of three) on finishing a book project: “My goal was to write one chapter a month. I gave myself a year to write the book, working every other morning from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m….I also gave myself incentives, like a reward at the six-month mark.”

Keep writing.

Erika Hayasaki
Professor of Literary Journalism at the University of California, Irvine
Follow The Reported Essay

Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

The post Revisiting the historical narrative in a reported memoir appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong sits down with Storyboard contributor and author-journalist Mallary Tenore Tarpley to discuss her new book, “Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery.”

“Slip” is a reported memoir, with Tarpley recounting her own diagnosis and treatment for anorexia following the death of her mother from breast cancer when Tarpley was 11 years old. She talks about the process of writing and researching the book, revisiting spaces from her childhood, and confirming memories through interviews, medical records, and journals that had been stored for years in her father’s attic. 

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

“ I've traveled so far in my recovery, and I still have a ways to go, but looking at those records reminded me of how far I have come,” Tarpley said. “There were some lines that just haunted me and stood out to me that I knew had to be in the book. There was a nurse who had said that ‘Mallary simply stopped growing physically and emotionally after her mother died.’ Because it was my mother's death that really spurred on the eating disorder. But lines like that really helped me to see other people's impressions of me at the time, and all these entries … really helped corroborate memory and just make more of the details of my past come alive.”

Tarpley also talks about how she involved her family — including her father, who plays a crucial role — in the book, and how it can be difficult to accurately and sensitively tell stories about illness when recovery doesn't always offer simple beginnings and endings. (“The middle” is a recurring theme in the book.) Her reporting also reveals how treatment for eating disorders has evolved.

In addition to her contributions to Storyboard, Tarpley is a journalism and writing professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and McCombs School of Business, and she writes a weekly newsletter, Write at the Edge.

For resources including screenings, treatments, and free-to-low-cost support for eating disorders, please visit the National Eating Disorder Association to get help.

Excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On ‘slipping’ and revisiting her own past:

 Sometimes places can inhabit our past, but that doesn't mean they need to invade our present. That is an important motto that I carried through with me during this process. I'll just say that there were times when I would be writing about something and I would find myself slipping.

So I talk a lot in the book about just normalizing slips in the recovery process. And sometimes I had these moments where I could see myself slipping. There was this very real moment of slippage when I was writing about my experiences binge-eating in college, and I found that as I was writing about that experience, I ended up binge-eating. I thought, I need to be really careful that I don't fall into this trap of reengaging in behaviors just for the sake of feeling like I can access those behaviors more and write about them in a clearer way.

I needed to really try to recognize that about myself, that the eating disorder remains a vulnerability and that I could get into really risky territory if I let myself think that I needed to recreate these behaviors in order to write about them accurately. So that was something I had to be very cognizant about and also kind of give myself grace in those moments where I did have slips.

On the importance of ‘the messy middle’:

 When I was in my late 20s, I was director of this very small nonprofit called Images and Voices of Hope. At the time, I was tasked with essentially helping journalists to tell what we called restorative narratives.

These were stories that showed how people in communities were making meaningful pathways forward in the aftermath of illness or trauma or tragedy. And so often in media we hear about the trauma or tragedy, and then a lot of times we move on to the next story. Maybe we get a couple little follow-up stories sprinkled in, or maybe a journalist goes back and looks at the one-year anniversary of a particular trauma or tragedy, but so often those messy middles are overlooked.

Those sort of times [are] when people are trying to figure out: “What does progress look like, and how do I navigate the day-to-day in the aftermath of something that just feels like it tore my whole world apart?” Somewhere along the way… I recognized that this could be a really helpful framework for my own story, because for so long I had told people that I was fully recovered from my eating disorder. But in my late teens and throughout my 20s, I actually had been struggling quite a lot with the effects of a relapse, and yet I was too afraid to admit that narrative, and I didn't really think that I could share that publicly, partly because so many of the narratives and books that we hear and see and read on eating disorders are written from the perspective of people who are fully recovered, such that it can make people who aren't feel as though their narratives are either not worthy of being shared or not really safe to share, because it can feel very stigmatizing if you're in this middle place.

So I decided that I wanted to think about this restorative narrative framework and apply it to my own narrative, which is then when I came up with this term, the “middle place.” I am interviewing lots of people for the book, [and I] realized that there are so many people in this middle place. For so long, I thought I was the only person because I didn't see others writing about it.

But of the 700-plus people I surveyed who have lived experience with an eating disorder, 85% said they could relate to it. So there was something there. But there was a disconnect between the sort of populous nature of this place and the actual media coverage and literature that we see about eating disorders.

In some ways [it] felt like an act of courage, too, because our society tends to prefer narratives with protagonists who prevail and who triumph over their disorders. But I really don't like the tidy narrative. I'm much more drawn to these messy narratives because I think ultimately they're more relatable. They help people feel seen and heard. And ultimately I think they can encourage other people to be more open and honest about where they're actually at with their recovery.

On the language and definition of ‘full recovery’:

 The definitions are all over the map, which, from a research perspective, makes it really hard to compare data across studies. It's also why it can be really difficult to say definitively that X percentage of people actually fully recover, because everyone's definition of full recovery looks a little bit different. So that can certainly make it confusing, not just for researchers, but for people with lived experience who are trying to figure out: “What does full recovery actually mean, especially when you live in a society like ours, which is really steeped in fatphobia and diet culture?” There's even this term called “normative discontent,” which was coined by some researchers who found that the vast majority of people in our society have some level of discontent with [their] bodies.

So when we know that that sort of is more the norm than the exception, what does that even mean then to fully recover? For me it was an indication that, one, we need a lot more language around recovery. We can't have it be so black-and-white, which it very much has been in the eating disorder field where you're either sick or you're fully recovered. And two, we need to be able to give a voice to people in this place so that they don't feel so ashamed and stigmatized. 

On including her father in the process of creating the book:

The memoirist in me wanted to seek answers and to be able to empathize with him more. So I ended up talking with him and asking him questions about that experience. [I] asked tough questions like, “Why didn't you recognize that I needed more care and love and attention during that time in our lives?” And in hearing his side of the story, I could understand him a lot better. So I chose in that particular part of the book to actually frame it as a dialogue, so that the reader could hear my questions and my father's responses. That felt like a way of being really fair and also helping my father to have a voice in the book. 

Because I involved him so much in the process, when it came time for him to read the book, I think he felt like there weren't any surprises, and he really liked the book. And that was important to me, to be able to share that initial draft with him.

Tarpley's advice to other journalists:

 We just societally aren't really accustomed to talking about the process of how we got to where we are. It's much easier to simplify narratives over time and to just say, “Well, I had this in the past, here's what it looked like, but I'm better now.” And we sometimes skirt over that middle part of the narrative.

As journalists, we don't necessarily always ask about that middle. We are more interested in the extremes, but it's in that middle that we find meaning, and it's in that middle that we can really get clarity around who someone is. Around what strength looks like for them. Around what hardship looks like for them. What resilience looks like.

So I always encourage journalists to think about these questions of how did you get from point A to point B? Or what was that like? Or how do you describe your recovery? Or what were some of the small moments for you that illustrated recovery? 

Very often we tend to think in more grandiose terms where we say, “What was the turning point that led to your recovery?” And for many of us with eating disorders and other mental health struggles, there was not necessarily one big turning point. Oftentimes it is just this slow accumulation of baby steps, but there are moments maybe that were pivotal in some way, shape, or form, and so being able to get a little bit more granular with our questioning and asking, “Tell me about a time when you recognized that you made a choice in service of recovery. What did that look like? Share the details of that with me. Walk me through that moment.” And really trying to tighten our questioning and going deep so that we can understand more about the messiness.

Reading List: Authors, Books, and Stories Mentioned 

• “Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery” (Mallary Tenore Tarpley)
• Mallary Tenore Tarpley Nieman Storyboard archive
• Goucher College low-residency MFA 
• “The Night of the Gun” (David Carr)
• Write at the Edge (Mallary Tenore Tarpley's newsletter)
• “Write for Your Life” (Anna Quindlen)
• Other writing from Mallary Tenore Tarpley

Show Credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Associate producer: Marina Leigh
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

***

The post Mallary Tenore Tarpley on writing about eating disorders and navigating ‘the middle’ in recovery appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

As a child in Kentucky, my father always told me my granddaddy and my great-grandmother Neenaw were part Blackfoot Indian. “That’s why they got all that land out there.” 

Then I went to college and learned about the “Cherokee Princess trope,” in which people frequently claimed to have Native ancestry. I soon discovered that the Blackfoot Nation was primarily located in the Great Plains, nowhere near Kentucky. And since my granny had told me my great-grandparents had come up to Kentucky from Alabama, that bit of family lore began to make less sense.

Long before U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren offered up an apology to the Cherokee Nation in 2019 for her dubious claim of Native ancestry, I’d accepted that I needed to stop whipping this tidbit out like a party trick. When you’re Black and Filipino, American colonialism and chattel slavery robs you of history on both sides of your lineage. It can feel good to feel like you know something about your people, but not at the expense of A People.

Whether or not there actually was some distant Native relation in my family tree is beside the point, as Irvin Weathersby Jr. learns while attending a Lakota reading in the Black Hills in South Dakota in his book, “In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space.” Weathersby's book, which takes him across America, is a potent example of a travelogue that weaves in personal storytelling with history. He serves as the reader’s guide to the history of his hometown of New Orleans, to museums and historical sites around the world, and to his experiences with racism as a Black man. His approach is curious, humble, and open to correction, as demonstrated when he attends the Indigenous Writers’ Festival in South Dakota: 

After the reading, possessed by a spirit of kinship and lubricated by glasses of red wine, I told the site’s director that I had a Cherokee ancestor, and he paused before telling me how the suggestion offends. He said it frankly, without injurious intent, and I made space for the lesson. Most Americans have Native blood, he said, which was to say that kinship is beside the point. 

Weathersby shared with me what he took away from that moment:

OK, kinship is beside the point, which means that I'm actually more connected to you, because the idea of our blood lineage is not significant. How can I show up for you? How can I show up for people? That's the most important thing. … We can show up for each other, for other cultures. We don't necessarily have to be members of them to show up for each other in real ways. 

Weathersby’s book opens with a scene in which he confronts a crew of white supremacists guarding a New Orleans monument scheduled for removal. He writes: 

I didn’t know what to expect and fixed my gaze on the statue as I walked slowly around the perimeter, afraid to meet their eyes. Shaking, my adrenaline pumping, I settled on the lawn off to the side so that I could still see them in my periphery.

I had never met white supremacists face-to-face, at least none who were so shameless, and I knew my stunt, the exercise of my right to occupy any public space, had the potential to further enshrine the memorial with my blood. I should tell you that this happened two months before Charlottesville, when [anti-racism protester] Heather Heyer was run over by a car in August 2017. I should also tell you that her murder wouldn’t have turned me around, at least not then. I couldn’t just retreat after everything I had already seen, after every one of us they had killed, so I took a deep breath and collected myself.

Weathersby says that when people ask why he felt it necessary to confront these white supremacists, he tells them his ancestors had been preparing him for this moment — and many other moments in the book — for his entire life. 

One of a writer’s primary responsibilities, I believe, is to tell the truth. So I spoke with Weathersby about how he defines truth-telling. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your relationship to truth in your writing.

The goal of art is to seek out something pure and true and to convey it. I think about Langston Hughes and “Theme for English B.” His professor says, “Go home and write a page and whatever you write, that page, it will be true.”

The idea, when you come to the page, is to strip away all the artifice, strip away all the noise, and get to the true essence of some sort of feeling, some sort of idea to convey to readers.

What is your truth-telling process? Does your work become more honest the longer you sit with it or does this happen through different levels of revision? How are you drilling down to the truest thing in your writing?

I read different histories, whether it's firsthand accounts or other kinds of historical texts — memoirs, other people's reflections — to see, “Am I getting this right?” That feeling that I had, how is that in communication with the actual truth of what happened here at this place or what happened in the timeline of history? As I go through revisions, what I think of then is, "What is the best way to convey this truth?"

A good writer friend of mine told me something that was really helpful. When I'm thinking about writing about people or subjects or content that has been written about so much, how do I approach this freshly or how do I offer something new? It's really about reframing those ideas, or those things that we already know, and offering a slightly different slant. So for example, thinking about Philando Castile and his life and how I remember breaking down and mourning the loss of his life as my own. That's so singular in my own experience. I think many of us can point to a Trayvon [Martin] or a Tamir Rice, somebody that does that for us as well. Breonna Taylor.

We don't know why but we are just so overwhelmed by that person's circumstances and how they collide with ours. 

So many people have written about Philando, people have done paintings. But one thing that really moved me is, I wanted to slow down the time, and think about how many times he was shot within a certain window. I hadn't read that, I hadn't seen “This experience had lasted X amount of seconds or X amount of minutes.” Really drilling down on particulars made it fresher for me and offered a new slant, a new perspective. Even thinking about Breonna Taylor, many people have written about her portrait, but being there in her city [of Louisville, Kentucky,] offers something slightly different. Going to her home offers something slightly different. Just even recognizing how my reactions are slightly different.

I lead with the feeling, the emotion, go to the actual objective text, and then figure out what's the best way for me to say this, how am I going to say this? I hate reading history that is flat and it's just a recitation of figures and people and doesn't necessarily engage with the ideas and doesn't necessarily engage with language. I'm always interested in language. And so that's what I think about when I get into revisions.

I think it's interesting that you say that you start with the feeling, because in this first scene, your fear of the white supremacists is never far from the page. It would have been really easy for you to write that retelling like, “I told them what was what!” But you say your voice was shaking. There's so many times throughout that chapter, where you bring it back to how you were feeling in your body while engaging with them. To me that was very honest. And I think that when we’re honest in our work we carve out this space for the reader to be honest with themselves, too.

Exactly. That first scene is me mirroring what you can do in your own life, wherever you are. How do you face that fear? How do you do what needs to be done? Even later on in the prologue, I was like, “Look, we can't all do everything. But we can all do something. And it's up to you to figure out what that something that you can do is.”

And going back to South Dakota, I think that [was] what those folks were trying to tell me: you can't be us but you can be with us.

In your writing, you’re transparent about your failures. In your book, I believe the opening scene with the white supremacists and the scene at the multipurpose center for Native American communities echo each other.

In that first scene I'm coming to it with apprehension, but also a general openness to who these people are. Afterwards, my family was kind of castigating me, “Are you stupid? Why would you do that? How could you risk your life like that?” I felt compelled. I had to. I couldn't just look away. I couldn't just be a coward. 

And in many ways that courage is what propelled me throughout the whole book. Even in that scene in South Dakota, I walk into this room with all of these Native women, and I could have easily been like, “All right, I'm out. This is not for me.”  But that discomfort, that tension is really where you can learn and grow. If you can sit with it for a second and move beyond it, then there's opportunity for growth. 

Both of those moments offer that. If I could take a step back and take a deep breath and try to let the fear wash away … what could be gained? And from both of those experiences I gained a whole hell of a lot.

Those white supremacists welcomed me into conversation and seemed to even be listening to me. These Native women and artists … also welcomed me in ways that I hadn't expected.

I was trying to be very mindful of being an outsider but also trying to assess my own kind of place and situate myself. That's what the book’s about in general. How can I situate myself within these current moments but also within the timeline of history? To engage in general conversations and being very mindful of the things that I don't know and being OK with asking questions and being OK with my own ignorance.

***
Minda Honey is the author of the dating memoir "The Heartbreak Years" and writes a weekly newsletter, MID., about the adventures of midlife at mindahoney.substack.com.

Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

The post The Craft of Memoir: Irvin Weathersby Jr. on truth-telling in a travelogue appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.