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 central question was “How did humanity get to Auschwitz, and where did it go from there?” After looking at camps on six continents, I tried to answer that question. Yet the black hole of Auschwitz itself still sat at the heart of my book, in many ways as bleak and incomprehensible as ever.

“Auschwitz: A Monograph on the Human,” a 2022 book by Piotr Cywiński, tries to address that abyss. He does so not by working his way along the boundaries around Auschwitz — the dates and architecture of genocide that swallowed more than a million people, the overwhelming majority of them Jewish — but instead dives into the emptiness itself, gathering details from hundreds of memoirs and official testimonies, along with trial minutes and questionnaires. Chronology doesn’t serve as the organizing principle; instead, the book is divided into themes of human emotion and experience, such as “Decency,” “Hierarchy,” and “Fear” that emerged from looking at the survivors’ accounts as a whole.

Cywiński is a historian and has been the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland for more than 16 years. His polyphonic approach of bringing in hundreds of voices to tell one overarching story struck me as an answer to the question of how to write about something as vast as incomprehensible as Auschwitz.

This focus made me think of Pulitzer winner Katherine Boo who, in talking about her book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” balked at the idea of the journalistic impulse to make an individual a symbol of a place or an event. In a 2012 interview Poynter.org, she warned of the   dangers of using one person’s story to represent a bigger concept:

“Nobody is representative. That’s just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they’re still people. Making them representative loses sight of that.”

Cywiński’s Auschwitz monograph illustrates this idea elegantly, gathering related observations with care then ceding nearly all his book to camp prisoners themselves, letting their archival testimonies converse with one another, with minimal interpretation and explanation.

Last December, more than 80 years after Nazis first sent prisoners to the small town of Oświęcim in Poland, Cywiński sat for a public interview with me at the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York. We spoke about why some stories went untold for decades, why understanding life at Auschwitz remains almost impossible and why it’s important to include a multitude of perspectives to even begin to glimpse the real story of Auschwitz.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation, which have been condensed and edited for clarity:

You mention several times in the book the experience of prisoners entering a different world on arrival at Auschwitz.
This is extremely important, and I think that this was maybe the main reason why so many survivors started to speak about Auschwitz so late. And still, 95 percent of survivors didn’t speak, didn’t give testimonials, didn’t write any memoirs. I think that they were afraid that using words from our normal world would never give the sense of the reality of the camp.

When I’m hungry, it doesn’t mean the same as when you are hungry in the camp. It’s completely different, and it’s like this with many other emotions, because they are at an extreme that we can’t imagine in our world. You’re put in a situation when the most important factors, like space and time, are completely different. You don’t know how long you will survive.  When you’re speaking about hope, it means some plans for the future, but in the camp it means to survive for the next five or ten minutes. And at every moment, somebody is dying around you. That means you will also die, perhaps in a few minutes or in one hour. It’s a completely different kind of time than we experience in normal life.

At the beginning, I was thinking that I would speak about death at the end of the book. This was an error. In Auschwitz death did not happen at the end; it was present at all times and everywhere.

One of the essays in the collection is on death. There’s a quote from a survivor: “not only is life and human dignity violated here but human death counts for nothing.”
For us, death is so tragic. It’s a big mystery. We will arrive all of us at one moment to face our death, but it’s something that we consider with a religious or para-religious approach, with a philosophical approach, even if we if we don’t want to organize our lives according to this destination.

In the camp death was everywhere and could arrive at every moment. Maybe the only thing that they were sure of was death. It’s also completely different when it’s an inverse point to our way of thinking about death. If I ask what you’re sure about in the immediate future, you would tell me about how you will go back home and get dinner or do something with your family. But nobody would be thinking about death as something that we can be sure of happening in the present moment.

One quote from another testimony says: “Among the Auschwitz prisoners who wrote their memoirs none of them claims the camp ennobled people.” Yet it’s woven into a lot of fabric of society before and after Auschwitz that suffering brings a kind of nobility, that there is something inherent in suffering that makes us pure or better. I think it’s important that is not what’s reflected in most of these testimonies.
Yes, this perspective is present in very few testimonies. What we consider as a moral system in our society was completely different when it was recreated inside the camp. I think it was also a factor in the incapacity to speak about Auschwitz for many survivors because they begin to justify themselves, and they don’t want to justify themselves. They knew that their choices inside the camp — daily choices, I do not speak about dramatic choices — the daily choices were how to survive, to have one or two or three or days more to stay alive.

The position where you stand at the queue in order to have your soup: If you go at the starting point of the distribution of the soup, you will receive only water; if you go at the end, you’ll be beaten by some very well-positioned prisoners, some kapo or some people from the blocks, because they know that at the end, there will be some potatoes. So you have to find your own position, not too quickly and not too late. But that means you will take this place from some other prisoner. And with every choice you made, that means somebody else did not get this choice.

You also address the Sonderkommando — these people who were drafted into being active participants in the murder of other prisoners at Auschwitz.
It’s perhaps the most tragic history in the camp, the story of the Sonderkommando. They were in general young men taken from different transports and put to work around the gas chambers and the crematoria. They had to burn corpses, to make all this machinery function. A clear majority were Jews, and many of them were coming from Jewish Orthodox families, and cremation of course was something they couldn’t have imagined. For decades after the war, they were considered maybe not as perpetrators but as collaborators of perpetrators, except two or three, like Shlomo Venezia or Filip Müller. Many of them stayed silent for years.

We are all very proud of our culture, our education and our sense of values. We feel really prepared to confront difficulties. Those people also, certainly they were thinking like this. But a few days were enough to change a person arriving from a normal world to a person completely acting according to the camp rules, thinking in a different way, approaching other humans in a different way, considering himself as a completely different person.

Another example of a theme that we in our world might think of quite differently than the voices we hear in the book is this idea of sacrifice. I want to speak specifically about Father Kolbe, because many people have heard about this story, and he was canonized later for switching places with a condemned person. Here’s what one of the survivors said about him: “I must stress that what impressed us was not that he gave up his life for someone else, for life wasn’t worth much in the camp. We were impressed that in front of so many SS men and prisoner functionaries, he had broken discipline and dared to step out of rank.”
It’s quite different than what we might think. I heard many words like this. “If you give your life for another, that does not mean you give your life. You give your last few days or a few weeks, it’s not something exceptional. But breaking the rules, it is something, yes.”

And there were, of course, different levels of sacrifice. You can share, for example, your bread. So you have some bread. Your kid or your friend for some reason has no more bread, and maybe he’s in deeper need. You can give him the half of your bread; it seems nothing. But what was the remark of the prisoners?  “Oh, look at him he’s starting to share his bread. He has no will to survive. He will be finished very quickly.” It’s not like a sacrifice, it’s like suicide. This is why I am speaking about an entire axiology that is completely different in the camp than in our perception.

You note that some of those people wo were most deeply tied into their communities actually were a tremendous disadvantage in the camp.
Those who had the easiest time adapting to the camp were people coming from very low socioeconomic levels from big cities, people who had very hard childhoods with many problems in their lives. They’ve got ideas on how to adapt to those difficulties.

But at the opposite end, you get for example people from the countryside, normal people without any education, unable to understand or to speak German, unable to imagine a different world than their own, living all the time in cyclical time according to the seasons. They found themselves in the camp and were completely unable to adapt. In general they did not leave testimonies after the war, because if you finish two grades in the schools or even not two, you are unable to write your testimony.

But many other prisoners themselves tried to enter in contact with them and describe them, and this was something incredible. Many times you think it’s those people coming from very traditional settings with centuries of culture and systems of ethics who will be the strongest in a difficult time. Not really. Not really.

One of the things the general public forgets today about the enormity of the death camps and the Holocaust was that it took many years to frame even the basic understanding that we have today of what happened. It was not understood in the immediate postwar time, so survivors didn’t have that space to speak, because what they experienced was in some ways quite different than what was first said about what had happened in the camps.
The situation of somebody captured in 1940 in Warsaw because he prepared some anti-Nazi, anti-German action, as a scout or something like this, was completely different than somebody who was taken from their house for nothing. The latter was unable to know why he was in this camp. It was difficult to create a definite narrative after the war if you were taken for no reason from your house or from the street and sent to the camp. If somebody was involved in some unusual actions, it was different. He was able afterward to say, “Yes I suffered a lot. It was inhuman, but I was fighting against something.”

This psychological difference was huge in the postwar narratives.

A question from the audience, from a woman whose father spent years in Auschwitz, asks about the difference between the reception of Christian and Jewish narratives.
In Poland, especially after 1968, the camp narrative was more organized by Christian prisoners. In the Western world it was more organized by Jewish survivors. It was a very clear difference between the two narratives.

I remember in the ’90s when Communism ended, it became possible to travel to Poland to visit Auschwitz. The two communities of remembrance met in the same place and did not recognize each other. It was like they were speaking about some completely different history. There were different symbols, words, approaches. It created tensions, it created emotions.

It took time, even a whole generation — up until 2010 or later — for those different worlds not only to accept each other but to understand that, yes, they’re all attached to the same story, to the same place. It was very, very difficult.

And at the same time, in the late ’90s, some new history arrived. The genocide of the Roma and Sinti — so-called gypsies — was discovered by the larger public. Then Russia started to speak about the Soviet prisoners of war who were put in Auschwitz.

I think we are headed in a good direction. We are learning to understand each other and all these stories.

***

Andrea Pitzer is the author of three books of narrative nonfiction that explore untold histories. She was the editor of Nieman Storyboard from 2009-2012.

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How’s this for a story? At the start of a bloody war that shocked the world, a ship braved Antarctic ice and sailors risked their lives, returning with a tale for the ages. That’s the story of Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance a century ago —  but it’s also what happened when a crew discovered the wreck of the Endurance a month ago (March 5, 2022)  in near-pristine condition almost two miles below the surface of the Weddell Sea in Antarctica.

The original voyage was set to the sound of the wooden Endurance at the mercy of the ice cracking like a pistol shot. Boots filling with icy water again and again on a long march in subzero temperatures. Sailing hundreds of miles in in a 20-foot open boat amid waves that sank massive steamships. No wonder that readers in 2022 still thrilled to the announcement of the underwater discovery — Shackleton’s legendary 1914 expedition has it all.

As the author of “Icebound,” an account of another polar expedition, I’ve found that Shackleton is far and away the explorer that American and British readers most often bring up to me at book-signings or talks. Today, Shackleton, his crew, and the Endurance seem as if their immortality were guaranteed.

In fact, their destiny was surprisingly unlikely.

What makes for a timeless narrative?

Shackleton’s 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition had a setup that lent itself to epic status — a ship at sea with no GPS and not even a radio transmitter, sailing to the ends of the Earth to make a land crossing of the Antarctic continent.

Yet it’s the gap between the ambition of the mission and what actually happened that makes this story so powerful. Like the final expedition of 16^th-century navigator William Barents, who failed to find a passage to China but overwintered in the high Arctic, or Aspley Cherry-Garrard’s devastating Antarctic voyage with Robert Falcon Scott three hundred years later, Shackleton’s legendary expedition is a story of failure.

The achievement for which Shackleton is most famous — sailing hundreds of miles in a tiny boat to a whaling station on the island of South Georgia in an attempt to save his crew — resulted from the loss of his ship. He never had a chance to attempt the land crossing he had planned to do.

Talented people achieving the thing they set out to do, even if it’s difficult, is rarely as good a story as what happens when things go wrong. Epic tales often depend on apocalyptic derailments; we love these stories in part for their surprise. The choices our heroic types — and even sometimes the anti-heroes — make in the face of new and unpredictable challenges often matters more than their original plans.

When unexpected crises arrive, readers can more deeply identify with the characters. Those who are sitting home in cozy armchairs may not know how to steer a dogsled or sail a ship or climb a sheer ice cliff, but they know that feeling of dread as the best-laid plans go wrong. They like to imagine that given a little more in the way of superhuman skills, maybe they, too, could survive such horrifying catastrophes.

And what persistence Shackleton and his men showed in the face of the loss of the ship, and the desperate trek to land. As one by one each became unable to continue each under his own power, they began carrying and dragging each other along. Shackleton gave his mitts to Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer, who had lost his. For his sacrifices, Shackleton would end up with frostbite and his crew’s undying gratitude.

But in order to gain immortality, it’s rarely enough to launch an ambitious expedition, watch it fall apart, and somehow survive the ordeal honorably. There’s a second level to becoming a legend. Someone not only have has to live to tell the tale, but at some point, someone has to tell the story astonishingly well.

Preserving epic events through story

Five years after the Endurance had set out on its final voyage, Ernest Shackleton’s account, “South”, appeared, with the help of reporter Edward Saunders and expedition meteorologist Leonard Hussey. The rights of the book were traded to help clear lingering debts from the voyage.

In the years that followed, Shackleton’s accomplishments were not celebrated as widely as those of peers like Robert Falcon Scott. Without Alfred Lansing, who wrote “Endurance,” the definitive account of the voyage four decades later, Shackleton would not sit so firmly lodged in our collective memories.

As author Nathaniel Philbrick writes in the introduction to a 2014 edition of Lansing’s book, Lansing came to his story with the right background to create something both accurate and riveting. He had served in the Navy and also worked as a journalist in Illinois and New York. To research his book, he met with surviving crew members and reviewed diaries and logbooks from the expedition. In the end, it was Lansing who not only preserved Shackleton’s story for posterity, but who boosted his star higher with an account that made the man and the expedition unforgettable.

“The order to abandon ship was given at 5 pm.”

In that opening line, Lansing reveals immediately that he will not be giving a simple recitation from the captain’s log. Instead he starts his book fourteen months into the expedition, with “the pressure of ten million tons of ice” bowing the hull and driving the crew off the ship.

“She was being crushed. Not all at once, but slowly, a little at a time.”

And from there, the narrative hardly lets up. The story of Shackleton’s expedition that Lansing forged out of endless documents, journals and interviews was unforgettable, and received widespread praise in early reviews. Yet after it was published in 1959, it went out of print quickly and vanished for a quarter-century.

Raising both ship and story from the depths

It’s tempting to say that given the human impulse to tell stories, great stories are inevitable — or that they will live forever. But just as often, they drown — quickly or slowly — into obscurity. And given whose stories get told and who is discouraged from telling them, it’s staggering to think of how much of human history we’ve lost.

But in the case of Shackleton, a publisher took a chance on Lansing’s “Endurance“ and brought out a new edition of the book in 1986. Even then, the story took awhile to catch on. But once it did, it never stopped. In time, it would spawn a documentary starring Liam Neeson, graphic novels, two television miniseries (one starring Kenneth Branagh), books modeling Shackleton’s leadership for the corporate executives, biographies and coffee-table photographic narratives of the voyage.

All this Shackleton fever drove interest in the fate of the ship nearly a century after it was swallowed by the sea. Modern technology’s battery-powered submersibles make it possible to explore the ocean floor the way that sailors on wooden ships used to set sail across its surface. And sometimes fate assists with meaningful synchronicity: The 2022 search team found the Endurance a hundred years to the day after Shackleton’s funeral.

On the level of fantasy, most of us would like to imagine that thrust into a situation that requires greatness, we might meet the challenge. And when thinking of what makes an epic tale, it’s intriguing to remember that for better or worse, nothing is inevitable — not the destiny of the crew aboard the Endurance, the fate of the story that Lansing wrote, which stories get told, and maybe even what we do with our own lives.

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Lori Waselchuk describes herself as a “documentary photographer and arts activist.” We’ve wanted to talk with her for a while about her latest project, “Grace Before Dying,” which focuses on a prison hospice program in Louisiana. In light of the recent discussions around visual documentary and accountability spurred by “Kony 2012,” we also thought she might address the ethical quagmire that documentary activists can fall into when creating stories in communities outside their own.

Waselchuk has worked as a freelance photojournalist for many major U.S. newspapers and magazines. In addition to “Grace Before Dying,” her long-term personal projects include years of gathering images in Africa and tracking the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We talked with her earlier this month by phone about how she approaches her work, and about simplicity vs. complexity in storytelling. What follows are excerpts from our conversation and images from “Grace Before Dying.”

You’ve done freelance photojournalism for Newsweek, Time, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times – and other Times that I’m probably not remembering. And then you have these portfolios of extended projects, like your work documenting a prison hospice program or a hurricane. How do you think of the short-term assignments vs. the long-term projects?

Usually, the short-term assignments are how I get out into the world and I get to learn more about what’s going on. I learn best when I’m face to face with things. And it affects me more deeply than reading about it. So usually my long-term projects come from assignments that I’ve done.

Hurricane Katrina was not just an assignment, it was my experience. So that work is coming from an entirely new place. Even though I did a lot of work for newspapers and magazines while I was working on longer-term projects about New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf, usually the assignments are where I can enrich what I know, and it provides access and introduction. And they also help me earn a living.

I’m particularly interested in “Grace Before Dying.” How did that project get started? Did it come from a photojournalism assignment? How long did you spend on it?

Yes, that started as an assignment. I was commissioned by Louisiana Magazine to do a story, which was unusual. They wanted a photo essay about this hospice program, and so that was my introduction. It took a while to get in, about three months. And then the deadline for the magazine was pushed back as far as they could push it back, but it still came up very shortly after I started working.

I realized after the magazine had published the project that I really wanted to do more work on this, so I asked for permission to come back, not with any publication waiting for work, but on my own to try to see how deeply I could tell this story that was incredibly beautiful and moving to experience and witness.

You did the short-term project, and then when you came back in a more free-form situation. Did you approach the people differently? Did you shift gears?

I didn’t come back as a different person or with a different attitude. I always had the same sort of goal, which was to try to say in photographs how important the work that the hospice volunteers were doing was, and to somehow show the complicated journey that these men were on, and the complicated space in which these men were doing this work.

So photographically, I went from a traditional 35 millimeter digital camera to using the panoramic camera as my main tool. I wanted to see if it could do close-up work. I think this camera is more traditionally thought of as a landscape camera, but I wanted to see how it would describe what I was trying to describe. I thought it worked very well, and so I changed completely how I was approaching the project photographically. I went to black and white film and pursued my personal vision of what the work could be.

Can you talk about exactly who you were photographing at Angola, and what Angola is?

Angola is the nickname given to the Louisiana State Penitentiary. It was given that name when the land that the prison was built on was a plantation, for a century and a half. It was nicknamed after the people who were brought in as slaves. Most of the slaves came from the Angola slave port. And it kept that name, but it’s really the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Louisiana’s maximum security prison.

The program I was photographing was the hospice program, where both the patients and the volunteers are incarcerated. The volunteers are incarcerated serving either life sentences or very long-term sentences, as are the patients. I was really interested in how you get to that place of incredible humanity and love and selflessness in an environment that’s designed to punish and isolate. And also coming from a history that was most likely filled with violence or hurt, they are extraordinary examples of what we are capable of as human beings.

I don’t mean to put them on a pedestal, because they definitely have their problems. They’ve got their difficult days. And they’ve got a terrible history, most of them. In spite of all of that, what mattered at that moment was someone else.

You work the humanitarian side with your projects, and the journalism side of things, too. Do you see yourself as a storyteller, an advocate or something else entirely? What are you trying to do with your work?

This is a very crucial moment for me, because I’m in the middle of what’s possible, and what’s survivable. Right now, I consider myself a storyteller, and I feel like that’s my primary mission, but I’m interested in placing my work in community.

When I’m shooting, I’m in storyteller mode, and that to me is creatively wonderful and challenging. With the “Grace Before Dying” project, I think about how important it is to have the conversation around the work.

So through that I’ve built this traveling exhibit that was designed for prisons, initially, and it continues to tour the country in all kinds of venues. It moves around through grass-roots efforts. So small organizations can bring it to their community, and they move it around their community, and they then take charge of how this body of work inspires the conversation they’re interested in maintaining and putting in front of the public.

It’s been a powerful example to me in how I can really direct thoughtful and engaging conversations based on my own work. It’s also let me research how other photographers are trying to do this kind of work and getting their work out in the world.

I guess I’m both. The storytelling comes in the gathering of images, and the advocate comes in asking, “How do we then put this in community and encourage an intellectual or an emotional conversation, or both?” You want people to be smart, and also to feel.

When you think of a print story that’s a narrative, something in the story usually changes over time. Do you think of your work as having a narrative component? How do you think of visual storytelling?

In the book, the sequence had sort of a narrative structure. It’s not about the same people, but I had different ideas and aspects of the program that I wanted to show. So I brought people through the care part, and I also wanted to describe the prison and then (go)into the final days. It felt very sequential.

I think it was important for it not to be cryptic. It’s such an emotional story, I needed to ease people through it. I approached care, the final days, and then the dignified funeral. In the book, that’s the way it went.

It went almost the same way in the exhibition. The exhibition came first and broke down the different aspects of the program. I built it for other correctional facilities to host, because I really thought people could use the information to trigger conversations on “How can we incorporate some of these things in our end-of-life care program?” or “Can we start an end-of-life care for our prison population?” So I really broke it down into the different programs and how they helped the families of the prisoners, and how they did their own caregiving, the different aspects of it. The exhibition started out as an emotional but informational project.

The film “Kony 2012” has been in the news a lot this month.

I’ve been watching it.

It’s spurred a lot of discussions about voice and who gets to document stories. As someone who has gone many times to Africa, how do you weigh the question of telling someone else’s story in pictures?

It’s been a fundamental question I have continued to ask myself. I was based in Africa for 10 years. I have been asking myself that since the beginning, and it continues to push me. And I think that, more than anything, pushes my personal projects. I feel like my personal work – I don’t make it for anybody but myself. I can control how it moves in the world and how it’s seen.

The “Grace Before Dying” project has been transformative in a way, in that I have been able to do what I do, which is make photographs that focus on human connection and empathy and have an understanding of the way I am inspired by our best – the best in us.  I’ve been able to jump outside of the working world and create something that has its own life, has its own distribution qualities. It continues to resonate with audiences.

I feel like even the traveling exhibits are collaborative. The quilts that travel with the exhibit are made by the hospice volunteers. So their hands, their work, their own visual art are part of the photographic story. That collaboration will influence my future projects. And as I think about future work, collaboration with community is going to be part of how I work in the future. How the work is placed is fundamental to an ongoing conversation that I have with myself about telling other people’s stories.

Who does it benefit? What is the value of the information of the issue versus the empowerment of the actual community being affected by the story? All of these issues continue to be part of how I work.

I think when I’m working on my own projects, when I turn the story about the hospice program into a personal project, with nobody needing this work from me, I’m able to pursue a more honest line of thinking and produce work where I can slow down and have conversations with people, like the guys at the prison.

For people just coming up, who maybe haven’t had as much time to ponder these issues, one clear suggestion that rises out of what you just said is to think about what kind of role your work will have in the community and collaborate with the community. Do you have other tips for how people can approach something like a “Grace Before Dying” project?

Look outside the traditional field of journalism for inspirations on how to get your work out. Right now I’d say the Internet can be considered traditional. To me in journalism, your feet have to be on the ground. You have to be interacting with people. You can’t report without coming face to face with people and feeling as well as hearing as well as seeing. How can you honestly translate that in different ways?

Think of a way to get your project out in different directions. You can publish in a magazine. You can publish online. You can put prints up somewhere. You can have a conversation with your subjects about how they might want to see it.

Certainly “Grace before Dying” has been published around the world by magazines and newspapers, but nothing can compare to the way an exhibit creates conversation out in the community. It gathers people around a topic in different ways and inspires different kinds of conversations. But always the conversations are intense and, I think, enlightening.

Can you talk more about “Kony 2012”?

The great thing about it is that it’s an in-your-face example of so many things. I can list like 10 things off the top of my head.

Do you want to talk about some of those things?

I was alerted to this by my 13-year-old daughter, as it seems like many people out in the field were. She came to me and talked about it. Ten years ago I (had done) a story on the reintegration camps up in northern Uganda, so I told her about my experience.

Then the emails (about “Kony 2012”) started coming in, with all kinds of different conversations: “This is good,” because now everyone knows about him, or “This is bad,” because it doesn’t really represent the situation. It got very interesting. There were people who tried to look at it broadly.

Very few people talk about who’s funding the Invisible Children, besides all the people who want wristbands to demonstrate their concern for another continent’s conflict. The source of funding is always something that needs to be gone to first, but it still hasn’t reached that point. The self-serving documentary where the subject is not the actual issue, but the person who made the documentary is the issue – you can’t get a clearer example of having a documentarian incorporate himself in a story. That was to me truly bizarre.

I struggle with the viral video a lot. I don’t see a lot that’s helpful, except for how it helps this organization. And a lot of people disagree with me, but I think that part of the thing that I like to do with my work is to introduce complexity in a way that people can absorb it and maybe start to think about it and not decry a situation by making it simple, with a good guy and a bad guy.

I hope that’s what “Grace Before Dying” does, because these are the last guys on earth that we would consider to be heroes. They’re serving life sentences in Louisiana’s maximum security prison. So I think that trips people when they see this story – and angers some, but I really believe that we are more than our worst act. We have to be.

Here I’m coming into the advocacy thing – I think our prison system is unwieldy and overarching. We need to find a way to reduce sentences to make them more in line with international standards, reduce our incarceration rate and find a way to reintegrate felons and people who have served prison time, so our prison system gets reduced rather than continuing to grow.

What do you say to those people who argue that to convey a story to a big audience, you have to take off the rough edges of the complexity? That you have to tell the truth but not get lost in the complexity?

I do think you can take off some of the rough edges, but I also really think you can draw people in with a universal. We are connected to each other in really fundamental ways, and in order to tell stories that will connect with others you have to use those tools and look for common ground.

You can start with that, but you have to deepen the conversation, and you have to be honest about who this is serving, and what your goals are. If the goal is to inform people about the ongoing war and terror that the Lord’s Resistance Army is wielding against people in East Africa, you can certainly boil it down to a few facts, but you probably need to be more specific about what’s going on and clearer about those facts. One of the things that upsets me is that I don’t believe that their goal of capturing Joseph Kony is really their goal. I’m suspicious of it. The movie was just too self-serving. I think they themselves were surprised, but I think their goal was to continue to raise funds for their organization.

I’m kind of cynical, but I just can’t imagine creating a documentary without having the research and understanding the depth of the issue. It was built for the Internet, it wasn’t built for broadcast. It was built to be something they could put up without having any sort of scrutiny before it went out in the world. There was nobody it needed to pass by before it was published; they just put it online. It just makes me wonder what their real intentions were.

All images appear courtesy of Lori Waselchuk.

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In this week’s Notable Narrative, we took a semi-quantitative look at how Dahlia Lithwick’s story on a wrongful conviction used one person’s experience as a narrative thread to present a bigger problem. The piece, which followed the exoneration of Bennett Barbour, is right up Lithwick’s alley. As a senior editor at Slate, she writes the “Supreme Court Dispatches” and “Jurisprudence” columns, and she edited “The Best American Legal Writing of 2009.”

We’re glad we caught up with Lithwick by phone this week – in addition to talking with us about her story, she had interesting news about the future of long-form journalism at Slate. In the following excerpts from our conversation, she talks about that news, the value of a good editor, and what rising journalists should do to save the field and get a job like hers.

How did you find out about Bennett Barbour’s wrongful conviction?

Two ways – first from the folks at the Innocence Project here in Charlottesville. I’ve written about some of their work before, so I’m always in touch with Deirdre (Enright) there to know what’s going on in the Innocence Project world. And then also, unrelatedly, Brandon Garrett, the law professor I cite in the story, sent me an email saying, “Wow, you should take a look at what’s going on with the DNA testing in Virginia.” So this actually came in stereo, where both he and Deirdre were responding to the Frank Green piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Did you debate with yourself on whether the story should focus on Bennett Barbour, the exonerated man, or Jonathan Sheldon, the attorney who is on a mission to get the names of the innocent?

Well, I kind of wanted to do both. I spoke to Barbour, and it’s just such a completely heartbreaking thing to talk to him, because he really is very, very sick, and he did lose this new marriage. He had this baby daughter; his life was wrecked by this. As I was writing at the end of the week two weeks ago, he was sent back into the hospital. This guy’s life is so shattered by what’s gone on.

And then at the same time, when I started talking to the Innocence Project folks, they said, “This guy John Sheldon is amazing. What he’s done really is sort of the pivot here.” And then I spoke to him several times and started emailing with him, and I think I realized that the part of the story that is an amazing new twist is that this guy singlehandedly took on DFS and has made it his crusade to get word to these folks.

You spend time on both of them, but you open and close with Barbour. Did you ever sit down and tease out exactly how you planned to structure the story?

I give huge credit to Will Dobson at Slate, who edited this story. By the time I turned it over, it was probably 1,000 words longer than it ended up, and I was very invested. And Will, more than anyone, sat down over the weekend with it, so I really can’t take credit for the final draft. The structure looked a lot different after his last edit. He really helped me bring it back to Barbour at the end.

Can you talk about how what you turned in was different than the final product?

When I turned in the draft – there were a lot of drafts. This is longer, quite a bit longer than the typical Slate form. The ordinary turn of events at Slate is that you file something at noon and it goes up at 4 – and this is not that kind of piece. So this was a big departure for me, in terms of really taking two weeks to write a piece instead of five hours. As the drafts went along, Will was really pushing, “Go back and talk to the Innocence Project people. Go back and ask Sheldon about this.” This was a real lesson for me in how you can take two weeks to write a piece and have it come out really significantly better reported.

I’m not slamming on Slate’s ordinary style. We are trying to be quick and to pivot fast. But for me going back and getting the second and third interviews with people made a huge difference. And at every turn, Will was saying, “Wait, wait, wait. Go back and ask this, too. Wait a minute – he defended the D.C. sniper? Just wait a minute.”

It went up on a Monday, but we had planned to run it the Friday before. We were trying to get a photograph of Barbour, and I got word that he was back in the hospital. You start to have that sinking feeling, understanding that the guy is really, really ill. And I think it was Will who rejiggered it so that the last paragraph went back to Barbour. It was almost completely a function of being reminded that there’s a person in the middle of this who’s very sick.

We get a lot of details about Barbour in passing, but you didn’t expand on his life – what he’s done since he got out, the details of the relationship with his daughter. Was that an attempt to streamline the story, or was it even a deliberate choice?

I give huge credit to Frank Green who wrote these pieces on Barbour for the Times-Dispatch, because he had done a lot of that reporting. So what I was trying do was to take three steps back and look at the legal story. And I think the local NPR affiliate had also done a really good interview with Barbour, where they talked about how he was a chef and he became a good cook in prison.

There was a lot of great color that felt to me like it had already been reported. So I wanted to talk to the crime lab, and I wanted to talk to Sheldon, who hadn’t really been a central part of the story before. There was a feeling that this other material about Barbour, while hugely important, wasn’t as necessary for me. I wanted to tell the legal story. Some of that stuff felt like it would have been making this piece even longer, and what I really wanted to do was to get to how the system got set up and how it’s failing.

America’s courts are your beat. Do you have an overarching goal when writing stories about them?

Yes, I do. Sometimes I think that court reporting is so mystified, it becomes a form of science reporting, where it’s this obscure thing in which we have to spend a lot of time explaining the physics and how things work. My own sense of it is that this can’t be the way we talk about the courts, because the courts impact every single aspect of our lives. Things like eyewitness identifications that go wrong affect every single one of us. We pay millions of dollars into a criminal justice system that I think is fundamentally broken.

A lot of the overarching goal from the beginning has been to try to be an ambassador or a translator between the very lofty, and I think jargon-y, language of the court system and the average American, who is hugely interested but sometimes feels like the meaning has been obfuscated. So I try really, really hard, particularly in some of these criminal justice cases. Think of Thompson v. Connick, a big Supreme Court case also involving someone who was exonerated. People care so desperately about this, but you need to strip away the patina that this is too hard to understand, and really try to formulate it in ways that are interesting and also urgent, so that people can come to realize, “Oh my God, this is what we are doing in this country, and this is why it matters.”

That sounds awfully high self-regarding, but the objective is to do for court reporting what really good political reporters do, which is to say, “This seems like it’s way off in the ether, but it’s actually affecting every part of your day-to-day life.”

You also recently had a long piece in the New Yorker, a book review. Are you planning to do more long pieces?

I’m probably not the best person to talk about it, because I think it’s happening at the editorial level, but I think Slate is really rethinking its view of long-form writing. We have tended to say for many years that people just click off at 1,400 or 1,500 words on the Web. It turns out that that’s not true.

We had in fact thought because it’s so un-Slatey to run a 3,000-word piece on Barbour, we had thought that maybe we would break this story into two pieces over two days. But it was a piece that wanted to be one long piece, so we just put it up.

I think that editorially Slate is going to try to challenge the idea that folks simply can’t read X number of words on the Web, because we’re seeing in a lot of ways that that is no longer true, if it was ever true at all. It may have just been an assumption we all made at the beginning of Internet writing that was wrong.

I do think, certainly at Slate, that we’re going to see more long-form pieces. We all did those Fresca projects. And while the Fresca idea is just flat-out brilliant – to get out of your wheelhouse and do something you’ve never done – it was dominated by the idea we had to do three 1,400-word reported pieces because that’s what people read. I think the new Frescas are going to be a lot longer, and that’s a good thing. I think we had some mistaken assumptions about how readers read Slate.

Hopefully you’ll see more of it from me, but I think you’ll really see more of it from Slate. And as we think through what Web reporting is going to do, the idea that it all has to be quick and bloggy and newsy and that we leave long-form reporting to other sources, I think it’s going to start to go in the other direction, and that’s a great thing. Both the New Yorker piece and the Slate piece really benefited from going back and forth four or five times with an editor. Holy cow, it really is humbling how much better a piece can be when two people are working crazy hard on it.

How do you think of balancing human stories of people whose lives have been changed by judicial decisions with educating your readers about the history and process of the courts? Do you have ways you think about the language?

Those of us who went to law school and then turned to legal writing, we just get so bogged down with the jargon. We really have this notion that if we use all this jargon we used in drafting briefs, that it’s somehow better, and that really long sentences are really good because they seem to be good in the law. I do think you have to do this dual project of draining a lot of the legal, what looks like loftiness but what is in fact kind of wordiness, out of your writing. That is really a hard thing to unlearn after law school – that more words isn’t better.

At the same moment you’re draining it out, there’s a real secret shame in legal writing of passionately caring about something, about making it urgent and important. There’s that dispassionate distance that you learn really works when you’re drafting memos or documents for court, because judges read things differently. But the American public desperately cares if an innocent man is in jail for many years. They desperately care if Garner and Lawrence weren’t having sex. These things matter.

It’s a little bit of unlearning what you thought made legal writing important with a capital “I” and then relearning that fostering these connections and creating a sense that if something is unjust, it’s okay to say it’s unjust.

I come at this largely as a Supreme Court reporter. When people walk into the Court, they’re always surprised that the plaintiff has fallen out of the case. You’re lucky if they’re sitting in the courtroom; more often than not, they’re not there. If they are in the courtroom, nobody references them, nobody pays attention to this person whose whole life for five years has been this case. They evaporate into very highfalutin’ talk about the Dormant Commerce Clause, or whatever we’re talking about.

I think the trick is to loop them back in. I’m lucky – I come out of this tradition. Nina Totenberg is all about that, Adam Liptak, Joan Biskupic. There’s a whole host of court reporters who have very much dedicated their writing to the idea of “Hey, meet the person at the center of the case, who you won’t hear about for the next two hours.”

When you’re paying attention to making it human, do you ever worry about veering into melodrama?

Yeah, that goes back to that shame. Lawyers aren’t supposed to care about personal details, and  they’re not supposed to tell sob stories. Justice Scalia is always the first person to say, “If the opinion starts, ‘Little Mary Jane was walking back from school,’ you know where this is going.” It is a yank at the heart strings, but I think it’s important to realize that the Supreme Court justices deploy that all the time. We like to pretend we’re dispassionate automatons, but even at the Supreme Court level, we constantly dip in and out of the language of real life and real people. What you do depends on which ends you’re trying to serve.

It’s incredibly important to remember to remember that what all courts have to do at some level is disaggregate the human drama from the rule that they’re going to create going forward, and that little Mary Jane walking home from school only goes so far in solving workable problems for the future. But for my purposes, a story is always the best way in, the best way to get a reader to care, to find something familiar.

In a deep way, that’s what the Lawrence case, that book review, was about, the concentric circles that become doctrine. It does no one any good to start a case from the dry, dry legal rule and hope that people will become passionately engaged. I think you have to walk that line, between not manipulating your readers but helping them understand that this could have been them. That Bennett Barbour could have been them. That Lawrence and Garner could have been them. The courts touch every single part of our lives, and yet we think they’re out in the stratosphere doing God’s work.

Is there anything else we should know that we wouldn’t from reading the piece?

One of the heartbreaking trends in the media right now is the demise of the local court reporter, the local crime reporter, folks who used to sit around courthouses and watch every single trial. At the most local, basic level, this beat is disappearing around the country. Thank God for Frank Green, who is doing this in Virginia.

When young reporters call me and ask, “How do I get a legal job?” my advice is to do almost exactly what I’ve done with this Barbour story. Find an amazing story that gets sloughed away as a local story, and tell it.

What we have come to think of as legal reporting is really crime reporting, some fantastic crime story. But that’s sort of cable news driving this beat. I think that this beat needs to be driven by amazing young reporters who are obsessed with the law and who realize that every single day in every courthouse are incredible stories that we need to go back to telling, even if that means sitting in on some trial in Winnetka and figuring out why this has implications around the country. I think this is a form we need to bring back, because it does no good to report only big national crime stories and think that we are monitoring our courts.

*Photo of Dahlia Lithwick by John Looney

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In our latest Notable Narrative, “The Exoneration of Bennett Barbour,” Dahlia Lithwick tells the story of a man wrongfully convicted of rape 34 years ago on the basis of eyewitness testimony. Years after he finished serving his sentence, Barbour recently learned of evidence that exonerates him, evidence uncovered as part of a widespread effort to test archived DNA samples.

Barbour has company. The State of Virginia has uncovered scores of other innocent convicts whose names it is only reluctantly revealing. And in all likelihood, behind those people now known to be innocent stand many others who have also been wrongfully convicted but for whom DNA evidence is nonexistent or no longer in any condition to test. The article calls into question Virginia’s record of convictions and its commitment to justice.

In her story, written for Slate and edited by Will Dobson, Lithwick consistently underplays the drama. She spends just two sentences describing the moment that attorney-advocate Jonathan Sheldon found Barbour and told him of his exoneration – and she does it with a quote.

But providing some emotional connection is key, and Lithwick knows that Barbour – a human being who was robbed of five years of his life, his new marriage and his relationship with his daughter – is the heart of her story. And so she uses his experience as a narrative thread running through what is largely an explanatory piece.

How do you tell a powerful story that addresses systemic flaws when you’re doing an explanatory, rather than a scenic, narrative? Lithwick and Dobson have provided a primer.

The image above (pulled from the scrolling bar of the single-page version of the Slate story) shows how often Barbour’s name comes up in the text, which reflects pretty accurately how often the story returns to his experience. It’s worthwhile to look at the pattern of appearances over time.

“Barbour” crops up repeatedly in the beginning of the story, which lays out his wrongful conviction and recent exoneration. Then Lithwick pulls away for the next four paragraphs, diving into how the review of DNA evidence was triggered and carried out in Virginia. At the end of that section, she circles back to Barbour. A quick blitz of references is followed by a longer digression – 10 paragraphs and a graphic – explaining attorney Sheldon’s role in depth. It mentions Barbour only once, in passing, right in the middle. Another quick blitz of five references to Barbour is followed by a final loop away to delve into the state crime lab director’s strange explanations of current procedures. And then Lithwick brings the piece home, paraphrasing Barbour himself on the cost of the state’s obfuscation and delay. A man long sick with bone cancer (an illness we learned about in the lede), Barbour explains that he nearly died without being able to prove his innocence to his own daughter.

Not every story will be written in scenes. And in this case, the writer deliberately avoided many of the personal details about Barbour and his life that had already been covered by local news organizations. But Lithwick shows how finding the narrative touchstone in an explanatory piece and returning to it in the right rhythm can draw readers through complicated events into a better understanding of not just one person’s tragedy but widespread injustice.

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Yesterday at SXSW, a fascinating interactive animation by Quebec filmmaker Vincent Morriset called “BLA BLA” won first prize in the Interactive Art category. While we’re not sure that the treatment of an animated protagonist and inkblots and the starry night sky fits the Storyboard bill as either narrative or journalism, we can see why it won at SXSW – and why the National Film Board of Canada backed it in the first place.

Luckily for this site, the NFB has been up to other things that fit more cleanly into Storyboard’s mission. They got viral attention this winter when the release of their documentary “Pink Ribbons, Inc.” coincided with the maelstrom around the Susan G. Komen for the Cure/Planned Parenthood funding controversy.

But as “BLA BLA” indicates, some of the NFB’s most innovative work is in experimental storytelling, such as one new interactive documentary (yes, interactive documentary) with first-person narration from the point of view of ... a bear. Set in the Canadian Rockies, you can enter “the uniquely modern territory where the wired world ends and the wild one begins.” Meet “Bear 71.”

Kony 2012

Along with everyone else, we’ve spent the last week watching the drama surrounding “Kony 2012,” a megaphone-ready campaign calling for the capture of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. Storytellers have been talking for some time about how stories get told, by whom, and in what context. And “Kony 2012” has hit a nerve, not only with photojournalists and political writers but also with with Ugandans themselves, several of whom took to open protest before screenings around the country were canceled this week.

For the record, the filmmakers have gained support for their viral approach from some journalists, including The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof; while outlets like Foreign Policy and writers like Dinaw Mengestu argue that it is fundamentally flawed. We’re fairly sure, however, that fodder for discussions of appropriating or benefiting from someone else’s misery has never before been as abundant as it is in this video from Invisible Children, which includes footage of a traumatized child as a lead-in to an extended dance performance by not only the filmmakers but what appears to be an entire high school.

On a less controversial front is a CNN story that offers minimal fanfare and hints at tremendous complexity. Alan Moore kicked his first extra point almost 50 years ago in high school, then headed off to Vietnam. After he was laid off from construction work in the Great Recession, this grandfather of five still dreamed of playing college football. And so he did. This extraordinary profile of a 61-year-old kicker for the Faulkner University Eagles includes inspiring elements without becoming manipulative.

Somewhere between “Kony 2012” and CNN’s profile of Alan Moore sits “The Road We've Traveled,” Davis Guggenheim’s video summing up President Barack Obama’s first term. Davis, known for his policy-focused documentary work, produced the film on assignment for Obama’s re-election campaign. News footage combines with heartwarming photos and narration by Tom Hanks as Guggenheim works to build a very simple narrative from the roller-coaster ride of a presidential term.

Guggenheim’s latest is not, and is not meant to be, journalism. But it’s useful to look at the way that these three videos – each of which was designed to evoke emotion in millions of viewers – approach their narrative arcs, and the degree to which complicating information is adopted or avoided. However necessary a strong grasp of narrative is for effective policymaking and good reporting, the question of “how simple is too simple?” seems destined to dog us for a good while longer.

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America tends to get credit for adding narrative journalism to the literary canon. And there’s no doubt that the combination of timely reporting and timeless writing took on new and exciting forms in the U.S. in the second half of the 20th century. But that movement grew out of more than a thousand years of narrative nonfiction in other parts of the world. And many overseas journalists have been ambitiously reversing the trend in recent years, working to develop or refine their own cultures of narrative reporting.

2009 Nieman Fellow Graciela Mochkofsky and affiliate Gabriel Pasquini returned to Argentina after their fellowship year to co-launch the site el puercoespín (The Porcupine), which looks at excellent storytelling in many forms, with a particular interest in narrative nonfiction. (They’re working really cross-culturally, offering Spanish translations of Jon Lee Anderson's New Yorker articles.) And then there's Periodismo narrativo en Latinoamérica, a blog-which highlights great storytelling journalism from both American continents.

Spanish newspaper El País offers the Ortega y Gasset prize annually, which often includes winners with a storytelling focus. (Submissions are now being accepted for this year’s prize.) The Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism (FNPI), created by writer and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, similarly holds an enormous competition for Spanish and Portuguese journalists, and tends to choose winners with strong narrative elements. FNPI is hosting a narrative journalism workshop in April run by Leila Guerriero, who took the Foundation's prize in 2010.

In Bucharest, Cristian Lupsa is producing Decât o Revista (Just a Magazine) and running a narrative conference that sold out in 2011.Laurens Nijzink, a multimedia storyteller in the Netherlands, put together another narrative conference in Amsterdam last year.

A how-to manual for Francophone journalists

There are a lot of English-language texts on how to produce top-notch narratives (see our own “Telling True Stories,” as well as many other books). But where English is not the dominant language (and where narrative does not have a long history), working journalists and rising reporters have little choice but to learn on the fly and get advice as they can from practitioners with more narrative experience.

Enter Alain Lallemand, a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven and longtime investigative reporter for Le Soir, a Belgian newspaper. Lallemand has written a college textbook in French, “Journalisme narratif en pratique,” which was recently published by De Boeck editions.

“Keep in mind,” Lallemand said via email, “that in the French-speaking culture, narrative journalism has been identified very lately – within the last decade, not before – and in most universities, is not even taught.”

To create a how-to manual for narrative journalism, Lallemand touches all the bases. He outlines the ingredients of a good story, describes how to create scenes, addresses some of the core tools most useful to storytellers, and even takes on the tricky McGuffin (some words just can’t be translated). Sections of the book are dedicated to emerging nonlinear narratives and to consideration of narrative ethics, with mini case studies.

Lallemand’s index references everything from Hemingway and Tolstoy to material published here on Storyboard. He builds out from Tom Wolfe’s “new journalism” and the new new journalism of “Actuel,” a counter-culture idea magazine published in France from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Emphasizing immersion and participatory journalism, Lallemand pays special attention to on-the-ground reporting covering conflict and humanitarian crises.

And what will happen now that French-speaking journalists and J-school instructors have a how-to manual of their own? “For most Paris-based academics, ‘storytelling’ is still perceived as a sub-field of marketing and propaganda,” Lallemand said. “I hope this book will be a game-changer.”

We’re sure there are many other storytellers around the globe trying to develop or expand narrative journalism in their home countries, whether the final creation is written or visual (or both). We’d love to hear from those outside the United States who are building narrative tools, projects and networks, and to learn more about the challenges they encounter and the results of their work.

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The City and Regional Magazine Association and the Missouri School of Journalism recently announced the finalists for the 2012 National City and Regional Magazine Awards. Racking up the most nominations (more than 10 each) were Texas Monthly, Los Angeles Magazine, Philadelphia Magazine, Atlanta Magazine, Chicago Magazine and 5280 Magazine (Denver’s city mag).

Winners will be announced at the CRMA conference to be held May 19-21 in Las Vegas. Categories include everything from food writing to photography and design, but we were most interested in the feature, profile and reporting categories. Several people are finalists for stories we’ve already highlighted on the site, such as Pamela Colloff’s “Church Burners,” Justin Heckert’s “The Town That Blew Away” and Robert Sanchez’s “The Fire Next Door,” but there are also some nice entries from people we hadn’t noticed before.

You can see the full list of finalists for yourself, but there are no links in the press release, so we thought we’d provide a few for you. Here’s a taste of a single story from each finalist in CRMA’s “Writer of the Year” category. Happy reading!

Justin Heckert of Atlanta Magazine. Here’s a passage from “Her Own Flesh and Blood”:

The congregation read the letter, heard what the pastor had to say. Hebron Christian decided to support the Monfortis, even though AIDS was such a frightening word.

Of course, everyone wondered how they got it. Everyone asked. Their friends asked, the doctors asked; her parents were incessant in their asking. For a while they told a fib, just to quiet everyone down, to keep up some kind of normal-family facade; she said that she probably got a needle stick somewhere along the line, being a nurse, but she didn’t believe that. When Jeff was in New York, before they were married, he’d lived another life; he’d slept with men. This was something he’d told her, but he’d also told her he stopped when he found God. But then he’d confided to her, and to the men in the church, that he still had a lot of conflicting feelings, and that while she was pregnant with Jonathan, he’d been unfaithful with another man. It made sense; Jonathan was the only one who tested negative. She loved Jeff and had decided to stay with him when he told her all this.

Mimi Swartz of Texas Monthly. Here’s the opening paragraph from “Law and Disorder”:

Darla Lexington sleeps in a very dark room in a very large bed, alone. Like a particular kind of Houston woman, the fact that she lives on the top floor of a luxury apartment building is a sign of reduced circumstances, though in her case the loss of an impressive River Oaks home resulted from a death instead of a divorce. The bedspread and curtains are black, giving the room the gloom of mourning. Beside the bed, leaning against the wall, is a large portrait of her lover of ten years, John O’Quinn, the infamous trial lawyer who died in a terrible car accident in the fall of 2009. Darla, who at 59 has the courtesan’s hourglass figure, the geisha’s will to please, and a soft, baby girl voice, talks to the portrait often, especially when she is lonely or sad or, as is frequently the case these days, really, really mad.

Robert Sanchez of 5280 Magazine. Here’s a piece of “Rewrite”:

In another room, Sean is unconscious. His family is led to his bedside. Karen Student has seen her boy almost every day of his life, but now she only recognizes him from the bottoms of his size 13 feet and from his short-cropped brown hair. Both of his eyes are blackened.

The family sits and waits. By 5:45 a.m., doctors tell Sean’s family that there’s nothing more they can do. They agonize over the decision they have to make. Eventually, Sean’s parents sign some papers and Sean is taken off life support. Karen sits in a chair next to her son’s bed, holding his hand. It’s cold to the touch. It takes him 35 minutes to die. When she finally lets go, Sean’s hand is warm again.

Tony Rehagen of Indianapolis Magazine. This passage is excerpted from “A Lot To Lose”:

Chris and the boys returned home and went to bed. At 2 a.m., she rolled over to see the other half of the bed undisturbed. Her first thought was that Rich had succumbed to the stress and suffered a heart attack at his desk. She hurriedly got dressed and drove back to Burd Ford. She saw Rich’s Taurus out front. The dealership’s doors were now locked. She didn’t have a key. She banged on the glass. There was no answer.

You can begin to form your own explanation. You probably faced your own hardships. At the height of the financial crisis, the news was filled with stories of desperate people—laid off, broke, foreclosed on. Some of them, including nearly a dozen car dealers, committed suicide. And when you consider how much of Rich was invested in his business, it’s not hard to imagine his despair when he felt his dream begin to crumble around him.

Robert Huber of Philadelphia Magazine. Here’s a sample of  “Power, Sex and Secrets”:

JOE IS NOW 59 years old; his health is fragile—he’s had two heart attacks. He’s a small man, with straight brown hair combed to the side, like a boy’s. For the past few months, Joe’s been in therapy—ever since he came out with his story, at his church’s men’s group in Manayunk, of being abused. Putting words to his thoughts is not easy for him. His voice seems to escape, barely, from the side of his mouth as he tells his story again in a back booth at Michael’s Ridge Diner in Roxborough.

He was small and quiet and dumb—or at least the nuns at Roman Catholic High School said he was dumb. He was in ninth grade in 1968, barely getting by. Father Schmeer was a guidance counselor. He would call boys down to his office for supposedly skipping English class. One day, it was Joe’s turn. He knew what was about to happen, because other boys had been there. Or he didn’t know exactly, but he was about to find out.

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