It’s Memorial Day in these dis-United States. The news won’t take a holiday. There are too many active war zones, notably in Ukraine and Gaza; the armed conflicts that persist in a number of countries the Middle East and Africa; drug and gang wars in Latin America and Haiti; the brutal civil war in Myanmar that gets very little news coverage. That’s not a comprehensive list. I Googled “wars in the world right now;” the lists were long and discouraging.

Not all of these wars are officially claimed as such, of course. The long and costly entanglement of the U.S. in Vietnam never received a formal war declaration by Congress; nor was the U.S. Civil War. But no amount of political tip-toeing can reduce the number of the dead and injured, or the collateral damage to families, friends, communities and economies.

I’m not qualified to write a worthy piece about the human history of war or a thoughtful essay on American Memorial Day. I’ll hunt through news and social media this weekend for that. (Calling on you, Dan Barry, Charlie Pierce, David von Drehle, Connie Schultz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chuck Haga, David Finkel and more.) Instead, I want to spend a few words talking about the challenge and value of such holidays as prompts for meaningful story work.

Predictable holiday fare

Much that comes your way will give barely a glance to the war origins of Memorial Day. You’ll read stories about the vagaries of weather, the trials of travel and the list of local celebrations — at least in those communities that still have news sites to listify and note such things. I found this lede from an AP story:

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — Memorial Day is supposed to be about mourning the nation’s fallen service members, but it’s come to anchor the unofficial start of summer and a long weekend of discounts on anything from mattresses to lawn mowers.

To be fair, the AP story went on to be a smart break-out of the emotions, origins and controversies behind Memorials Day. The opening graf is a deft bit of writing that skewers the usual boilerplate journalism. Not that the boilerplate lacks it’s place: It serves a valid informational purpose. But some reporters resent those assignments (often dismissed as “dog’s breakfast coverage” in my day), so stories that are predictable — and predictably forgettable.

Those reporters miss the opportunity to see holidays as portals (adits, to the word-nerds out there) to mining journalistic gems. The key is to think ahead of and then beyond the calendar event to the origins and meanings of the event, and to then think about in the context of current times. Sometimes those stories ping directly off the news; sometimes they probe a better understanding of history; sometimes they take readers on a walk with those who live with the legacies.

Early this morning, I slogged through my mess of stored files to find a piece from years ago. It was by the late David Lamb, who covered Vietnam and other wars for various news outlets and for 25 years was a traveling foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times. Written in March 2004, it wasn’t technically a Memorial Day story, but coverage of a WWII veteran’s burial at Fort Snelling National Cemetery in St. Paul. Minnesota. It was the first story that anchored, for me, the inevitable loss, veteran by veteran, of a generation. Lamb called it a “roll call.” Here’s his lede:

Bill Bornetun, 81, a former sailor, was buried on a cold winter morning, the hard earth dusted by snow, with full military honors. His place in history was minor. But as the roll call of World War II veterans grows smaller by the day, the farewell he received at Ft. Snelling National Cemetery was that of a hero.

Around his grave stood a dozen other veterans, members of the volunteer Memorial Rifle Squad, which has presided over more than 40,000 military funerals here in the last 25 years. Holding 1903 bolt-action Springfield rifles and the American flag, most of them were vets from the 1940s, average age 77, some with hearing aids and canes — and all firm in the belief that in the brotherhood of the military, veterans look out for veterans until the last shovelful of dirt fills the grave.

Some years earlier, I landed the Memorial Day story assignment for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It was 1985 — 10 years after the end of the (undeclared) war in Vietnam and 40 years after the end of WWII. The piece I wrote for the end-of-May weekend was a space-filler I don’t even remember. But while scouting for story ideas, I stumbled onto a story that I think still think about, almost 40 years later.

Sorry, no link available. 1985 was still the Dark Ages in digital time. I hunted through three boxes of musty old clips in the garage, but couldn’t find this one. So the details are no longer crisp. But the essence of the narrative, and the emotions it sparked, remain. Here’s the short version:

I found a Vietnam veteran who enlisted, fought, came home damaged, continued to battle his way through a divorce and drink until he pulled through. He was running a support center for other veterans when we met. He told me he had enlisted, in part, because his father had fought in WWII, and maybe his grandfather in the first Great War. Yet he did it in defiance of his father, who did not want his son to go to war.

That, in itself, suggested story material. I remember my own father, a WWII vet, having the same fight with my oldest brother, and insisting he stay in college to avoid being drafted. The reasons weren’t articulated — war stories were seldom told in my house — but the line drawn could not have been more clear.

Now I asked the Vietnam vet — his name was Reed, or maybe Reid — if I could talk to his father. He shrugged; the two had been estranged since Reed came back from Vietnam. He wouldn’t stop me, but he wouldn’t be part of a dual interview.

I called the father and he told me his story. And that’s where the haunt settled in.

Both men were named Reed. They were separated in age by a short generation, but one that created a chasm in culture. Neither was able to share their experiences with the other — despite eerily similar experiences in war. Both had fought in the jungles of the Pacific. Both were part of units that did reconnaissance behind enemy lines — some of the most dangerous work in jungle warfare. Both had seen many of their comrades killed. And get this: Both carried letters, the father from a wife and the son from a sweetheart, in the chest pocket of their fatigues. At the end of the day, each pulled the letter out, unfolded it carefully, read it, refolded it and tucked it back away to be read again after patrols, night after night. Both told me those letters kept them grounded.

Their mirrored stories separated there. The son came back from Vietnam to a far colder welcome than the one his father faced upon his return from the Pacific theater. The father was embraced as part of a hero generation, with Legion halls and parades to celebrate him. There was no ticker-tape honoring the son or other Vietnam vets who, for years, were treated as social pariahs.

I told each of the men what I planned to write, but they still didn’t want to talk together. I wrote my story, weaving parallel grafs back and forth between the parallel experiences. I think it was published on Veteran’s Day that year, but again, I’d have to find that clip.

The true rewards of story work

The story never won any awards. But I received one that mattered far more to me, and is part of why that story, of the thousands I reported and wrote, is one I still think about.

After the father and son had each read the story — separately, of course — they made a tentative plan to have dinner and talk. They shared blood and, for many years, a roof. But that had never shared their own stories.

I don’t know how or if their relationship progressed from there. Journalists are notoriously bad at follow-ups, especially those who work in the constancy of daily news.

But I never again dismissed a holiday story assignment, either as a reporter or an editor. Our response to them becomes rote over time — another day on the calendar of another year that we ignore until the last minute. Yet holidays and anniversaries began with events that had deep meaning. If not, they wouldn’t remain markers in our collective lives. It is the meaning of those markers we need to look for, report, then write with the honor they deserve.

It’s also a sure way for an ambitious enterprise reporter to land some original work. Editors are desperate to fill space in print and on site for anniversaries. That is space that a reporter can easily claim. Sure, you may need to provide the calendar list of celebrations or do the standard reach-out to the people most involved or most affected. But if you ponder the origins of those calendar dates, connect them to the issues that echo today, ask fresh questions and stay open to the detours that yield even better stories, that time will be well spent. And the reading public will be well-served.

The post Remembering Memorial Day ~ and the sparks of fresh stories appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The students file in and suddenly some remember the day’s assignment: Bring in a favorite song lyric, something with magic in the way words work together.

Out come the phones and they search, trying to remember that song that took them by surprise the other night, the one that really spoke to them.

I start the class, news writing for new and traditional media, by putting Pete Seeger up on the screens scattered around my University of North Dakota classroom.

Old Devil Time, I’m gonna fight you now

Old Devil Time, you tried to bring me down

When I’m feelin’ low, my lovers gather round

To help me rise and fight you one more time.

The students clearly have no idea who this old man is, or was. It’s possible — even likely — that they’ve heard some of his iconic and oft-covered anthems, like “We Shall Overcome” and “Turn, Turn, Turn!” But the origins of that music is as remote to them as Seeger’s history of social activism, which led to an indictment for Contempt of Congress in 1961 when he refused to answer questions about his political affiliations. A lengthy prison sentence was dropped on a technicality and Seeger went on to a long career of writing and singing progressive folks songs.

He wrote “Old Devil Time” in 1971. The gobots must have been listening in on class, because the day after Facebook dished up a memory on my news feed of Seeger singing “Forever Young” with a chorus of children at a concert for Amnesty International. He died soon after at age 94.

Old devil fear, you with your icy hands

Old devil fear, you tried to freeze me out.

But when I’m afraid, my lovers gather ‘round

To help me rise and fight you one more time.

Writing that transcends time and platform

For several years now, I’ve devoted time in this class at the University of North Dakota to this exploration of song lyrics, plus favorite lines of poetry and faith verses — anything that might help the students see the potential in metaphor, personification, the use of telling detail or other literary touches that could add a little punch or sparkle to their writing.

I admit to them at the outset that my music playlist bears no resemblance to theirs. If they’re unaware of Gershwin and Porter, indifferent to James Taylor and Judy Collins, I doubt I could identify a single artist in the current Top 10.

This semester’s group responded especially well to the exercise. They kept me busy for a night looking up artists and songs I’d never heard of before.

Abigail offered a line from “Could Have Been Me” by the Struts:

Don’t want to live as an untold story.

She explained: “I believe this lyric means two different things for different ages. For the old, not wanting people to forget them and fear that their life wasn’t a story worth telling. For the young, not wanting to live like a story that isn’t worth telling, to live a forgettable life. It resonates with me, because I myself fear not living a life worth telling, or living a life that is forgettable by those I will come to care for or care for already.”

From Caroline came a few lines from “Happiness is a Butterfly,” by Lana Del Rey:

Happiness is a butterfly

Try to catch it like every night

It escapes from my hands into moonlight.

Malachi gave me a Drake rap titled “Last name ever, First name Greatest.”

Like a sprained ankle, boy, I ain’t nothin’ to play with.

I’m not big on rap music or a lot of the music my students brought in. But I would not say it’s bad. Fifty years ago, my history graduate school advisor, preparing to teach a course on the 1960s, asked me to provide him with some of my music from that time. I gave him Dylan and some others. A few days later, he gave it all back. “Chuck,” he said, “this is crap.”

He was a great teacher, but not too tolerant when it came to pop culture that had passed him by.

The meaning in the message

Alivia, another of my students, suggested I listen to “Burn Burn Burn” by Zach Bryan and “Stacks” by Bon Iver, which includes the line,

Everything that happens is from now on

And this:

The fountain in the front yard is rusted out

All my love was down

In a frozen ground

What does the lyric mean to her? The song “is about living in the present and taking things as they come,” she said. “This is important to me as I am a deep over thinker.”

I’m thinking that’s a problem for me, too.

This example of detail and perspective is from “Things That Matter” by Jameson Rodgers, recited by student Grace:

Things I wanted that I don’t have 

I’ve learned to let ‘em all go  

‘Cause of things that mean the most 

Is waking up with the woman I love 

Talking to the man above  

Sipping coffee from my favorite cup  

Slowing down in the country  

Going hunting with my old man 

Hugging mama while I still can.

Gabrielle offered this image from “Who Am I?” by Bazzi:

I’m so tired of feelin’ paper-thin

Like I could tear at anytime

Trapped inside of the brain I’m in

Please get me out of my mind.

From Max, a few lines from Zach Bryan’s “Birmingham”:

I’ve been working here like a slavin’ mule,

Sucking the Earth of dry crude

Looking for a way out of it all.

Angela quoted Noah Kahan, who in his “Everywhere, Everything,” may have borrowed a line from Ben Franklin:

I wanna love you ‘til we’re food for the worms to eat

‘til our fingers decompose

keep my hand in yours.

And Maria, bless her, cited lines from the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” – but from a striking (and new to me) Grammy-nominated arrangement by Cody Fry:

Eleanor Rigby, picks up the rice

In the church where a wedding has been

Lives in a dream

Waits at the window, wearing the face

That she keeps in a jar by the door

Who is it for?

All the lonely people

Where do they all come from?

All the lonely people

Where do they all belong?

Where, indeed? The lines haunted me back when it was first released in 1966, and even more now today.

Universal stories

But let’s end the lesson where it began, with Pete:

No storm, no fire can ever beat us down

No wind that blows but carries us further on

And you who fear, O lovers gather round

And we will rise and sing it one more time.

* * *

Chuck Haga was a reporter at the Grand Forks Herald and Minneapolis Star Tribune. He now teaches part-time at the University of North Dakota and writes a column for the Herald.

The post A veteran newsman teaches writing through music appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]T[/dc]he longer I dwell in the world, the more I believe our greatest values, as human beings and as journalists, come through empathy and listening. Also, alas, our greatest failures. Because the longer I dwell in the world, the more I'm aware of the many times and ways I default to it's-all-about-me-ism. My biggest lapses on the listening front are in my personal relationships, especially my primary ones. Whole songs have been written about around the theme of hurting the ones we love.

I like to think I've been better at it as a journalist, although far, far, far from perfect. But I do believe, and try to honor, these tenets:

• Good journalism of any kind requires good writing.
• Good writing requires thinking.
• Good thinking requires good reporting.
• Good reporting requires good listening.
• Good listening requires all the senses.
• Using all the senses requires being fully present in the moment for the other — the other person, the other perspective, the other place.

You could launch a near-identical list with any number of words besides journalism: teaching, friendship, partnership, leadership, parenting. A few other word tweaks would follow, but I'm they would all circle back to good listening.

Lessons all around us

Reminders are everywhere these days, especially as we become more aware of the power of what is now called "mindfulness." I don't mean formal therapy or meditation (I've never mastered the art of sitting still with myself), but rather, at core, a conscious and complete awareness in the moment of the situation and, especially, of the other person. Much of  what I read about mindfulness is about paying attention with sincere curiosity rather than judgment, with kindness rather than criticism. (Asterisk: Necessary exceptions granted, at times, to investigative or political reporters who confront lies, abuses and corruption on the public's behalf.)

Two recent reminders came from writers I have long admired. Both were writing not through journalistic frames, but deeply personal ones. Both are dealing with significant health concerns, and learning a lot about what it means to listen, and be listened to.

Bedside manners

[caption id="attachment_168520" align="alignleft" width="205"] Chuck Haga[/caption]

Chuck Haga is retired from a long career as a newspaper reporter in Minneapolis and Grand Forks, North Dakota. He now teaches classes at the University of North Dakota and writes a column for the Grand Forks Herald. His gentle essays have found their way to Storyboard at times, such as this piece about the connections he made while camping alone in the wilderness.

Lately, Haga has been writing about his new adventure: cancer. His tone is always honest but never whiny. As I follow along, I feel I'm watching someone peel away the layers we wear into the world, and get closer to the real stuff that lies at the heart. His most recent piece is straightforward: "You can hear a lot by listening."

In it, Haga describes the people who stop by to visit him — how grateful he is for those who show up, fully present to him, and how painful it is to be with someone who is there physically, but not really there beyond that. From one such encounter:

Once recently, trying to explain something important, something that mattered to me, I saw words forming in this man’s eyes even before I had made a point. This was maybe the fourth straight sentence of mine he had halved or quartered or simply brushed aside. I wanted to reach across and slap him and say, “Don’t talk now.

Please. Listen. Hear me.

Please.”

He confesses his own lapses in attention as a journalist, teacher, husband. And he inserts some wisdom we all should cross-stitched and hung in every room of our lives, and certainly in our newsrooms:

Don’t interrupt. Don’t feel you have to finish sentences for people. It’s not live TV, and it can be tough for people to find the right words, especially if they’re not used to people listening to them.

You need to be curious.

You might think you know everything about a person or a situation, but listen to what’s being said. Listen for what isn’t being said. Listen for what you didn’t know or expect.

Seeing what we look past

[caption id="attachment_168518" align="alignleft" width="241"] Frank Bruni[/caption]

I have followed Frank Bruni's work in The New York Times for years. Now that he is a chair professor at Duke University (lucky students!), I subscribe to his newsletter. He still writes an occasional guest column for The Times, including one earlier this week that is adapted from his forthcoming book, "The Beauty of Dusk." It's about a rare type of stroke that attacked his vision, and may someday lead to blindness. For now, as he wrote:

A thin but permanent fog hangs over the right edge of my field of vision, awaiting a sun that never comes.

Much fear followed, of course. Until, over time, Bruni realized he was seeing in a new way:

Bit by bit, the people around me came into sharper focus, by which I mean that their fears, struggles and triumphs did.

What comes into focus for Bruni are deeper and truer stories about people he meets or even thought he knew. He captures those stories in quick, pointed summaries that he calls sandwich boards. You could also think of them as tweets or headlines or those six-word story forms often attributed to Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway, according to the legend, started with a piece about never-worn baby shoes. Some of the things on Bruni's sandwich boards:

“Single parent, child with special needs, nowhere near enough help.”
“Plane crash, prosthetic leg, dead 8-year-old son.”

And on his own board:

“Eyesight compromised, could go blind.”

Like Haga, Bruni connects the dots to journalism. He confesses to his insecurity every time he has to interview someone, and how he waits one minute, two, three, before he dials the phone:

I’ll tell you a secret about my journalism career, one that hints at the self-doubt and timidity that has also colored the rest of my life: Before I pick up the phone to call someone I’m about to interview, I have to steady myself. I have to take a few breaths. I’m afraid that I’ll ask the wrong questions or at least won’t ask the right ones. Or that I’ll ask them in a fumbling, embarrassing fashion.

That may not be something most of us would assume about someone of Bruni's status in the profession. But there it is, letting us see him more fully — and perhaps understand how much we flawed humans are alike.

No spoiler here about how he ends his column. But I've tucked both his and Haga's wisdoms in my teaching file. Take a read — and a listen.

The post What personal pain reminded two writers about the gift listening appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]E[/dc]very year, or as often as I can, I go into the northern Minnesota woods, usually alone now, seeking tranquility and time to brood and reflect.

And I write while I’m there, among the pines, at a campfire or by the lake. If it rains or the wind howls, I retreat to a graceful lodge built of giant logs and furnished with a great stone fireplace, with history on the walls and, if I’m lucky, a place for me at an old oak roll top desk.

I have always hesitated to call myself a writer. I was for most of my adult life a newspaperman. I might call myself a reporter, maybe a staff writer when I wore a tie and talked with governors and such, and for a couple stretches a columnist. Now, at 72, I teach news writing part-time to university students, and I write a weekly newspaper column.

“Who is your audience?” I ask the students, telling them they should know that before they begin typing. “Who are you writing for? What do you want to say, and how should you say it?” As practice, I give them each a thank-you note, an envelope and a postage stamp, an exercise I found in a Nieman Storyboard years ago. (Each semester, I have to tell a couple students how to address their letter and where to put the stamp. It’s their first time.)

[caption id="attachment_166146" align="alignright" width="315"] Chuck Haga at his campsite in Itasca State Park, northern Minnesota[/caption]

Turning the notebook inward

When I write in the woods, it’s different than my journalism — usually personal, reflective, a post or series of posts on Facebook. My audience is friends — longtime, beloved and often distant friends, and hundreds of digital “friends” whose paths crossed mine along the way. I fret about those musings coming off as overly self-indulgent, but my friends, including “friends,” tend to respond nicely.

When I turned 70 two years ago, I wrote monthly from camp in Minnesota’s Itasca State Park from May into November, calling the series of posts “Camping at 70” and saying I wanted to see if, at that age, I still could sleep on the ground and get up in the morning. (I confess it’s getting harder.) I wrote about 5 a.m. breakfasts with blue jays overhead and chipmunks at my feet, the contents of my book bag, sightings of bears and moonlight serenades by owls, struggles with lanterns and air mattresses — and the constant, conflicting pull of peaceful isolation against a sometimes overwhelming sense of aloneness.

“A campfire is best enjoyed with company,” I wrote one night that summer, pecking the words out on my smart phone as I sat, alone, by my fire, “so you and someone you like and trust can stare into it, feed it, talk or sit quietly and remember. Alone, I tend to miss certain people too much.”

In late September that year, I borrowed from E.B. White’s "Essays" to convey why I kept coming back to this campground with its lodge and lakes, its ferns and centuries-old pines — more than 50 years now — and asked readers far and near to indulge me. From White:

"The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays."

Or personal columns, perhaps. Or long Facebook posts from the woods.

Three months earlier, I had written this:

“Aloneness is different from lonesomeness. I thrive on aloneness, taking time to see and listen, remember and think. Up to a point. Aloneness can slide easily into the other, which can lead to boredom or depression.”

Also in my book bag that summer was Sylvain Tesson’s “The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Siberian Taiga.” Now there’s a fellow who appreciated solitude. At one point in his yearlong aloneness, Tesson describes snowshoeing through the forest in April, setting up his tent on a rocky overlook, laying down a mattress of dwarf pine branches and building a fire. The fire sends sparks “shooting into the sky,” glittering “with a last brilliance before melting into the stars.” Tesson:

“Nothing is as good as solitude. The only thing I need to make me perfectly happy is someone to whom I could explain this.“

Itasca’s campgrounds in high summer are more suburban neighborhood than Siberian taiga, of course, with kids running and dogs chasing and RVs nearly as long as a city block providing music and energy for campground block parties. I may retire to an infrequently visited trail. But sometimes the other campers give me something to think — and write — about.

Lily and "Santa"

Earlier this August, I wrote about meeting Lily, 4, who was camping with her family. Twice as I passed by, the little girl smiled and waved at me, said her name and asked me mine. She appeared to be alone — Mom must have been inside the camper — so I just smiled, told her she should check with Mommy or Daddy before talking to me, and walked on.

I love it when little kids smile at me, I wrote later, but it can be an ugly world. I hate it that sweet kids must be taught to be careful, but I accept that they do.

The third time I passed, Lily again smiled and waved to me, but this time she called to her mother, told her “the big man” was back, which made me a bit nervous. But Mom came out, looked me over and smiled.

“She wanted to know your name,” she said.

I explained why I had been standoffish, and Mom nodded. She understood.

Again, Lily asked me for my name.

I had a hunch, I wrote later — it has happened before — so I asked her if she could guess my name.

"Santa?"

"That's right!" I said, patting my belly and fluffing my white beard.

I finished the little story later and shared it on Facebook.

“With Mom watching and listening, we talked about reindeer and snow, I asked Lily if she's been good and she said she has, and I told her to have Mommy help her write a letter to me at the North Pole in a couple months. I believe she will.

“We said goodbye. I went down to the lake and listened to loons and wished for a long, safe and happy life for Lily, for all the Lilys.”

The post A retired newspaper man finds a new writing voice in the solitude of wilderness appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

One the best things about writing, or any storytelling, as a career is also one of the worst: You're never as good as you can get. Sourcing, research, interviewing, story structure, pacing — all that and more are things to be learned over and over, and in greater and greater depth. That might explain why some of the best among us just keep getting better: They haven’t stopped, but keep returning to the basics, like the basketball player who practices free throws or the pianist who plays scales. They keep strengthening the foundation of their craft, then experimenting with ways to elevate the ceiling.

They keep learning.

That also likely explains why the most popular posts on Nieman Storyboard get down to the nitty-gritty of how-tos. A story we feature can inspire by demonstrating that our craft can reach the level of art. But it’s best when it includes some sense of how that happens.

Almost all Storyboard posts, going back 11 years, are replete with lessons. When journalists help us annotate their stories, or weigh in on Story Craft, or simply answer our questions about their work, they are letting us into their process. They are showing, at some level, how the work is done. Those are lessons that never get old, no matter how often they are repeated.

Below we offer a non-scientific list of some of the best posts from 2020 that offer essential tools you can use tomorrow and throughout your career. It’s a subjective list: No metrics were involved. And there is no ranking: Posts are mentioned in chronological order. We hope it gives you an end-of-the year gift of craft brush-ups, and perhaps prompts you to scour back through the site for more help.

Storyboard as a lifetime learning guide

Start with some general site searches. Post categories are listed on the home page, on a left-hand menu below the most recent posts. Story Annotations take you deep into the text of stories. Why’s This So Good offers professional analyses on what makes a story work. Story Craft posts often include direct tips about some aspect of reporting and writing.

We also recommend searching “The Pitch.” It pulls up a range of posts about the common problems in story pitches, and interviews with editors about what works in pitches to their publications. Knowing what works in a pitch is a doorway to knowing what works in a story.

Other posts to read that offer immediate help and also demonstrate the range of skills involved in good storytelling:

• Free writing: Releasing your inner artist Published: January 25, 2020 | Shop Class: Moving your fingers to get out of your head and into your story.
  By Jacqui Banaszynski
• In good writing, clarity is job one
  January 30, 2020 | A retired newspaperman teaches to learn, and introduces the next generation the parallel pillars of effective writing: Keep it simple and clear.
  By Chuck Haga
• Using narrative digression to weave backstory, context and suspense into stories
  February 5, 2020 | A narrative writer binges on "The West Wing" and contemplates the value of taking the reader on short detours from the primary plot.
  By Chip Scanlan
• The shift of “branches” in a sentence creates shifts in mood and meaning
  February 21, 2020 | Writing guru Roy Peter Clark shows how a single, long sentence reveals the power of an overlooked writing tool: the placement of the main clause.
  By Roy Peter Clark
• Six core questions to spark fresh ideas
  April 1, 2020 | Shop class: What we can learn about finding and focusing original enterprise stories from watching the early days of coronavirus coverage.
  By Jacqui Banaszynski
• How to wed personal experience and journalistic discipline
  Published: April 3, 2020 | Narrative master Dan Barry of The New York Times draws on five universal techniques to write about his family's decision in the time of coronavirus.
  By Jacqui Banaszynski
• Teaching narrative in the time of coronavirus
  Published: April 16, 2020 | A former Washington Post editor retrofits a journalism class at Stanford — and finds many of the best reporting tools still fit.
  By R.B. Brenner
• Reverse engineering your story or project
  Published: May 26, 2020 | Sometimes the best way to go forward is to think backwards.
  By Jacqui Banaszynski
• How a viral tweet led to a sensitive story on family, race and America
  Published: Sept. 30, 2020 | A Los Angeles Times reporter used new and old tools (listening!) to gain access and trust.
  By Trevor Pyle

The post A go-to list of how-to story craft posts from 2020 appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Editor's note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers.

[dc]S[/dc]teve Ronald, one of the top editors at the Star Tribune most of the time I was there, smiled at me one day when I apologized for turning in a story at 100 inches.

"Oh, don't worry, Chuck," he said.  "A hundred inches by you reads like 98 by anybody else."

I remember his gentle dig every time I see I'm passing 20 inches.

Chuck Haga ~ columnist, The Grand Forks Herald; journalism teacher

The post Gratitude Notes (#8) appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[caption id="attachment_150520" align="alignright" width="250"] Chuck Haga with his reading partner and story muse, granddaughter Emma. Haga says they have both aged since this picture was taken, but that Emma wears it better.[/caption]

EDITOR'S NOTE: Metrics aside, the true test of a good story is that it evokes other stories. That's what happened when I asked veteran storyteller Chuck Haga to write a "Why's This So Good" essay about a story by James Eli Shiffer, an editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Shiffer's piece, based on a trove of old photos, wove threads of research and emotion to create a tapestry of the too-short life of a lovely, and much-loved, little girl. Haga said Shiffer's story reminded him of a piece he had done five years earlier, for the Grand Forks Herald, based on a three-paragraph obituary and a similar trove of photographs that came his way.

Haga has long been someone I follow to study how to blend honest reporting with honest emotion. He had a storied career at the Grand Forks Herald and Star Tribune, and now teaches and mentors lucky students at the University of North Dakota.

In honor of our belief that stories beget stories, we are reprinting Haga's story below, with permission. Pair his piece side-by-side with Shiffer's provides a great lesson in the power of curiosity, the quest for answers and the truth that compelling stories are wherever you look.

REMEMBERING LLOYD

Salvaged photographs and other pieces of family history fill out the story of a child of the Red River Valley: Farm boy, veteran, construction worker, son, brother.

By Chuck Haga
Grand Forks Herald
November 11, 2012

[dc]B[/dc]UXTON, N.D. - Lloyd Domier died 17 years ago. A brief obituary notice in the newspaper said he was born near Buxton in 1928, served in the Army and worked in construction.

And that was that: a life in three paragraphs.

He was part of a large family, with six brothers and four sisters. But Lloyd never married, the family has largely died off or scattered, and only a few older residents of this Traill County town recall the Domiers. Like members of previous generations, Lloyd was quietly fading into the unremembered past.

Then the pictures came.

A man in Florida, taking out his trash one day this fall, spotted a bundle of photographs in his apartment complex Dumpster. Curious, he fished them out. In faded images and scrawled notes, they hinted at a multigenerational story, the story of a family.

Many of the pictures had notations that made reference to the little town of Buxton in northeast North Dakota. The man who found the photos had been born in North Dakota, and his father had grown up in Prosper, a small town near Fargo. So, he shipped the photos, more than a hundred of them, to his father in Louisville, Ky.

"I have had them for a while but really do not have any personal interest in them," Loren Waa wrote recently to the newspaper in Grand Forks, knowing the city was not far from Buxton. "It seemed to me that they would be better off in your hands than mine."

In Buxton, Duane Bjerke, 84, visiting with friends over coffee at the Cenex station, looked at the photos, one by one. He paused as he studied the smiling face of a boy, a boy from another time.

"That's me," he said.

"I was raised on a farm 4½ miles west of here," Bjerke said. "The Domiers were on a farm 3½ miles west. Lloyd ran with the same crowd I did, but he kept mostly to himself. He worked for a construction outfit for many years. They built elevators. Pretty much the whole family worked for that company."

Bjerke smiled as he remembered one of Lloyd's brothers.

"I was a police officer here for 10 years," he said. "Lloyd's brother, Douglas, was a little wild, and I had to talk to him a few times.

"He became a minister. He was back here once and he thanked me. He credited me with steering him in the right direction."

Another man in for coffee called for Doug Thompson, the Cenex manager. "Don't you have an address for Douglas Domier out in California?"

The family still had a financial interest in the cooperative, and Thompson quickly found an address.

"I have a phone number, too," he said, "but I don't know how current that is."

[dc small]R[/dc]emembering

"Of the brothers, he (Lloyd) was the closest to me," the Rev. Douglas Domier said last week from San Juan Capistrano, Calif., where he lives.

"He was an older brother who really encouraged me to continue with my schooling," Douglas said. "He invested in me, personally and financially and every other way, to encourage me to finish school and go to college."

The photos, he said, may have been tossed by an ailing elderly relative in Florida, or by someone caring for her.

"Yes, I would very much like to have them," he said.

The photos include old-time images of a chubby-cheeked boy and a baby girl: Douglas and Lloyd's father and mother. Their maternal grandparents are dressed in their Sunday best for a formal portrait, and their paternal grandfather poses as a young man with five brothers.

A reprint of a studio portrait taken about 1900 shows a proud elderly couple, also dressed for the moment: Lloyd's paternal great-grandparents, Henrik and Kari Domier. With the photo is a copy of the passenger list from the Norway-Heritage Line's Fauma, the three-masted sailing ship that brought them to America in 1867.

Newer images show a young Lloyd at work on a farm, posing with two brothers, and sitting on the fender of a 1940s-era car with a toddler, a nephew perhaps, in his lap. Snapshots barely an inch square, taken in the early 1950s, show a young man in uniform, sitting with a girl on a park bench, and standing jauntily outside a café in Frankfurt, Germany. "A German café that most of the guys go to from this outfit," he wrote on the back.

In another, he is bending over a stream, about to splash water on his face. "Cleaning up a little," he wrote. Another shows him in uniform and reclining on a bed, maybe in a barracks. "This is my room," he wrote, and probably sent the little photo home to his mother.

There are letters, too, though spelling clearly was not Lloyd's strength.

"Dear Ma Just a line to tell you not to right to me here I will leave here party soon. Lloyd."

On Jan. 29, 1952, he wrote a little more.

"Dear Mom and Pop I got your letter yesterday but I sat down last night and tried to write a letter but I could not think of anything to write about so I gave it up."

He wrote that it was good to hear they were well "and that the roads are still open" back in North Dakota. He was a farmer's son.

He told about the weather there in Germany, too, how there was snow on the ground but it was melting and would probably be gone by the end of the day.

"Well, that is about all I have to write about now. Tell all the kids hello from me and grandma too, and tell Douglas I will write him a letter real soon."

[dc small]S[/dc]o close

"I was in the first grade when my brother was called into the service during the Korean War," Douglas said. "I remember sitting on a swing that morning outside the school, crying, thinking I had lost my brother. I was already so close to him, and I thought I would never see him again."

People thought Lloyd resembled the actor Humphrey Bogart, both in appearance and in the way he moved, a confident but not arrogant stride.

"I loved to watch him," Douglas said.

Though he never married, Lloyd appears to have been a popular uncle and big brother. In several of the old photographs, he is holding a youngster. Maybe because of the age difference, about 15 years, and maybe because of his own disappointments, he felt a special responsibility for Douglas.

"He was a guy who was pushing ahead, working hard, always looking to the day that his ship would come in," Douglas said. "But he also was looking back and wishing he had made some better decisions to get ahead in life.

"The first time he hired me — I was about 15 then — he talked to me: 'I have never backed up to anyone in my life to pick up a paycheck. I've always taken my paycheck and looked in their eyes.' And he wanted me to do the same."

Lloyd was a construction foreman with a crew, building grain elevators. "We worked like animals, 14 to 16 hours a day, and he always tried to finish a job before other crews," Douglas said. "We were paid by the hour, but it was a thing of honor to him.

"We were a very poor family, kind of the lower class out there by Buxton. That bothered Lloyd a lot."

Douglas said he didn't always hold to the straight and narrow as a teenager. "I had started alcohol, chasing around," he said. But Lloyd persuaded him to study hard at school, work hard at his job and plan for college.

"In 1960, I was a few weeks into my first year at Mayville State. Lloyd came home from work with a 1958 Ford Fairlane. ‘I want you to have a good car to drive to and from school,' he said. He also took me down to the bank and started an account so I'd have money for gas and things.

"And he said, 'But I tell you, you little S-O-B, if you spend my money on booze and women, I'll …' Well, it worked."

Douglas graduated from Mayville (N.D.) State University and went on to earn advanced degrees. He entered a seminary, was ordained and spent 20 years as a missionary in Guatemala, Ecuador and Costa Rica. At 70, he continues to work with Spanish-speaking ministries in the southwest United States.

"If he had not encouraged me to continue my studies, pushed me to hold onto my values and try for a better life, I probably would have continued on in the beer-drinking construction industry.

"I became his hero. But I did it basically for him. I am greatly indebted to my brother."

[dc small]A[/dc]nother photo

In his mid-40s, Lloyd was working at a construction site one day when he fell 25 feet to a concrete surface, Douglas said. The fall damaged his spinal column, and he was in pain most of the rest of his life.

In the packet of photographs that help to explain who he was, where he came from and who he became, there is a picture of Lloyd lying in a hospital bed, probably just after the accident.

He died on May 8, 1995, in Union Hospital in Mayville, at the age of 66.

He was buried in Immanuel Cemetery, rural Buxton.

He is remembered.

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Why it's good: There are endless memories and memorials marking yesterday, the 17th anniversary of 9/11. I find it impossible to post about something else, but impossible to choose the right thing to post. Mostly I wish that the events of that day had never happened, which is folly, or for a long moment of silence to fathom why, and what they mean. That, too, so far, has proven folly. As a journalist seldom at a loss for the meaning of a story, I remain at a loss.

In that gap, I was grateful for this morning's Facebook post by Chuck Haga, reprising a column he wrote in the first dark days after 9/11. He reprised it not out of ego but because, now retired from a career at his hometown paper of the Grand Forks Herald with a stint in between at the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune, he is teaching as an adjunct at the University of North Dakota. He notes that his students were babies when the Towers when down and so, like Watergate and Vietnam and World War II and pretty much everything that happens before it happens to us, it is a distant history to them. An odd artifact of someone else's life.

Which raises two questions: How do we remember what we have no memory of? How do we remember what we can't forget?

I grieve that the sentiments expressed in Haga's opening lines – images both unfathomable and unforgettable – are not just about this time, but about awful times again and again in human history and continuing today, around this small Earth we share.

I also cling to the belief that journalism – as flawed as it can be in the moment – is an archive of human memory that moves us forward despite our lurching ways.

That archive, of course, is not always easy to access. I searched for Haga's column on Google, and it doesn't do the modern thing and pop right up. (If you can find it, please send a link.) So I take the liberty of posting it here, as Haga did on Facebook. Many other things were written about that day, and the days since. This one helped me today:

Chuck Haga, Sept. 16, 2001, The Star Tribune

No matter how long we study them, the images are unfathomable.
No matter how quickly we look away, they are unforgettable.
Men and women in suits flee with their briefcases down smoky, debris-strewn caverns in the heart of a great city, their eyes wide, mouths agape, and we understand that power and privilege are precarious. Soot-smooth faces crease and cake with tears, and we see that innocence is no protection against zealotry.
Jets crashing into towers. Jets seemingly suspended in air, aimed like daggers, about to crash into towers.
Proud towers burning, crumbling, disappearing.
A noble skyline savagely altered, falsified as if by a cheap, dishonest trick of photography.
People - hundreds, thousands - lost in an instant, unseen except in the memories of those who knew and loved them, or in the precious, honest photographs they hold in desperate hope.
Fine soot, like a gentle winter dusting of new snow, accumulates on office sills, apartment stoops, the wrought-iron fences of parks and churchyards, the weary faces of firefighters and surgeons.
The rubble recalls the contested cities of Europe in the worst days of World War II: iron twisted by heat and stress, concrete blackened by fire, all of it heaped high by lunacy. It dwarfs the men and women who step gingerly from slab to jagged slab, searching, scrambling after life.
Not all the memorable images are of horrific, feckless crimes.
Disheveled, mud-caked firefighters, like so many Marines on a distant Pacific island, raise an American flag with purpose and reverence on a pole that juts from the debris that was the World Trade Center in New York.
The battered Pentagon stands, and beyond it, the Capitol, in Washington, D.C.
Though they be dwarfed by the twisted, blackened heaps, the searchers at Ground Zero press on.
And in other places, other searchers sift through records, rental cars, hotel rooms and a scorched field in western Pennsylvania, looking for clues and evidence, determined that no one who could do such wrong will sleep long in safety.

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