Tom Whipple’s recent story in the Times of London about the reappearance of beavers in Devon, England, could have been a deeply serious science piece, laden with facts, numbers and jargon, except for the fact that it was Whipple who wrote it. The science editor at The Times, Whipple is known to readers for his lively and engaging writing. And so his story about the beavers was, yes, a deeply serious science piece, but one written in an inviting, entertaining way.

How did he do that?

TONE. Whipple respects the reader. He doesn’t over-explain. He lets readers in on the joke, when there is one. He writes as though he is writing to a friend. He surprises the readers with word choice and sentence structure.

STRUCTURE. In this piece, he moves from narrative to background/context to narrative seamlessly. The story is lively, the tone is warm and witty. “It’s beaver o’clock,” he writes, as a group of people wait for the beavers to emerge from their den. He uses the word “beavery,” which might not be a real word but which is perfect in this context. He brings in mythology:

Like the nearby Beast of Bodmin Moor, the beavers were spotted in Devon in fleeting glances, glimpsed in implausible sightings — and dismissed as otters.

VOICE. Whipple’s voice doesn’t change between narrative and background; it remains approachable and slightly humorous. He dares to make reference to beaver testicles, and to beavers’ cute button noses:

Conservation researchers don’t name their animals. That kind of sentimentality is discouraged, in what is a serious science. So Holden only occasionally calls him Gordon the Beaver, before hurriedly correcting himself.

HE CARES. As you will see in our conversation below and when you read the piece.

HE’S FUNNY. See jam / bread / sandwich metaphor below.

We reached out to Whipple about the decisions he made as he worked on this story. Our conversation has been slightly edited for length and clarity.

Why did you write this story?
I like beavers!

In all seriousness, one of the great joys of my job is I get to go and see things. It would be entirely possible to do my work sitting in an office, but I would have a lot less fun — and I think readers would probably have a slightly less fun read. As a reporter on The Times it is a privilege that I can see something that is interesting, and then invite myself along to see it, and just have people rearrange their days to accommodate me. (Early on, I was given a very good bit of advice by a grizzled editor: “Always remember, it’s The Times they are talking to, not you.”)

The ostensible point of the piece was that we are now about 10 years on from the start of a formal reintroduction program of the beaver, and also that the conservation charities want to extend the program. Really, though, I wanted to see some beavers, to get out in my raincoat and wellington boots, and hopefully write a nice piece that people wanted to read. Beavers are charismatic animals, and people like to read about them.

How long did it take you from conception to publication?
I think it was a couple of months. It was difficult to coordinate times so there was some back and forth on email, but the reasons for the delay were logistical rather than editorial.

Did it change much during the editing process?
Not really. I wrote it and then it ran while I was on holiday. I think it was the last thing I sent before putting on my out-of-office message on email.

I read it on the beach on my app like everyone else and remember being annoyed about one change (probably unreasonably so). In the piece I had talked about how this beaver presence actually originated with a rogue release of beavers. They were already settled in the river — and this essentially forced the government’s hand. It changed the status quo so that the question wasn’t “do we introduce beavers” but “do we evict them?”

This felt a little analogous to the geopolitical situation, where armies or peoples create “facts on the ground.” So I described how “once there were beavery facts on the ground….” etc. But someone changed it to “beavery signs on the ground,” which made less sense and didn’t frame beavers as geopolitical actors. I probably became unduly fixated on this.

Why was it important for you to be there in person? What did you gain by being there that you might not have gleaned from reportage done by phone or email?
There were no facts in the piece that I couldn’t have got remotely. Probably, with some effort — perhaps watching clips on YouTube — I could have also got some color.

But I believe and hope that something more is gained by being there in person. There are things that people will tell you in the dusk, walking along a river, as the flies dance above the water and after a day spent together, that they won’t in 10 minutes on the phone. I have to think that seeing the dams and meeting the people makes a difference — because if it doesn’t, then I just spend my days in an office in London. And that’s not why I became a journalist.

How did you decide when to move from narrative to background and then back again?
It’s not something I consciously think about, but I suppose all pieces are a little like a meal. To work, you need the filling: worthy, fibrous stuff — the facts. But to actually ingest them, you need someone to have thought about how to make it palatable. So, to slightly mix my metaphors, it’s a sandwich. You have layers of facts, lightened by the jam of color. And, in this genuinely terrible metaphor that I’m nevertheless going to run with, you start with the jam, to draw people in. Then you give them a slice of bread that explains why they should spend their time reading it. Then some more jam so they don’t find it too chewy.

You need both. Everyone likes jam, but without the bread you’d just smear it all over your face. I start with how many facts I need to convey, then separate them with enough color to hopefully keep people reading.

Who do you see as your audience, and how do you tailor your reporting and writing to them? Or do you?
I always assume that my reader is someone who is intelligent but knows nothing. This is admittedly a more useful rubric when writing about quantum mechanics than beavers — which are relatively easy to understand — but it applies here, too. You assume that they will get your jokes, but you don’t assume they have a degree in conservation biology.

I like to think of them as an interested and curious friend. The worst thing you can do is assume your reader is like the people who put cross comments under articles. Then you write defensively and pompously, and you please no one.

Your story opens with this line: “The beavers keep us waiting.” You are putting us right there, in the action, with no prelude. Why did you choose this beginning?
I don’t completely know. I suppose that I’m conscious when starting articles in which I’ve been to see something that there’s a very cliché way of opening, where you try to describe the situation in overly purple prose. “Scoop” (a novel by Evelyn Waugh) parodied it very well with another watery mammal:

Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.

So the key is to sit back and think, “what actually happened” and “what did I actually think.” Also, thinking about it more, I suspect that that sentence construction instantly gives the beavers agency and anthropomorphises them — which is something scientists very much disapprove of, of course, but which journalists love!

Throughout the piece are graceful, sometimes amusing phrases and asides:

…it’s “beaver o’clock” …

Like the nearby Beast of Bodmin Moor, the beavers were spotted in Devon in fleeting glances, glimpsed in implausible sightings — and dismissed as otters.

Why did you choose to include humor in what is a serious, reported, science story?
I get suspicious of articles without humor, and of people who don’t joke. Even when writing about COVID-19, which I did a lot of, you can sneak in some humor. You shouldn’t force it. I don’t want to be like the boss in “The Office” (If I was like him, I suppose I’d be the last to realize it), but there’s almost always a place to think, “what’s funny here.” If there is something funny, you should put it in. Some of the best scientists in history were funny. Feynman, Crick, Einstein. Newton wasn’t funny, though; he was an arsehole.

There is no first person in this piece, although the opening line comes close. Yet you the narrator are very much a presence. Was this deliberate? And how did you do this?
Right when I started in journalism, writing on my student newspaper, I put myself into pieces a lot. Then I remember going to a talk by a proper journalist, who said if an article started with “I” he stopped reading. It made me feel like an idiot and I never forgot it.

Of course, he was wrong. There is absolutely a place for “I.” Sometimes things happen to you, and it becomes disingenuous to avoid the pronoun. There are few things sillier in journalism than when articles refer to “your reporter saw” or “told The Times” when they mean “I saw” and “told me” (having said that, I used that construction in an article this morning, where it just seemed more appropriate).

If a beaver had come and nibbled at me, I’d have put it in the piece in that form, and not said “a beaver nibbled The Times.” And, as you point out, I came close at the start — using “us.” In that case, it was pertinent to the story because the fact that a group of people, of which I happened to be one, had come to watch the beavers each night was proof of their popularity.

But I do think it’s a good idea to use yourself sparingly. I’m not what is interesting in this piece; the beaver is. This was appearing on the news pages of The Times. Frankly, I was pushing my luck already to get something this soft in there. If I’d also inserted myself into the story the editor might have raised an eyebrow, and stopped me having so much fun in future.

* * *

Laurie Hertzel is the former book editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She now reviews books for several newspapers and teaches in the MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program at the University of Georgia.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Christian Lupsa attended a Taylor Swift concert Aug. 3, 2024, in Warsaw Poland. He wrote about the experience as part of his weekly “Draft Four” Substack essay. It is republished, lightly edited, with permission.

We’re entering late-summer melancholy, so I offer something sparky: 9 things Taylor Swift taught me about storytelling in a pop-listicle format.

Yes, the singer-superstar Taylor Swift. Call me a Swiftie, but know my case is a mild one. I saw her live in Warsaw, on her third consecutive night of playing in front of about 70.000 people. She performed for more than three hours, in a show I don’t think I can accurately describe because it was all about the feels. Let’s just say I cried about three or four times and I could barely move at the end. My Fitbit clocked almost 45.000 steps that day.

For me that was just one night, and Taylor has been on this tour since last year. That is dedication. Let’s get to those take-aways:

1. Structure. 

Often the hardest job of storytelling is organizing the narrative in a coherent way. For “The Eras Tour,” Taylor drew on her 18 years of music as a frame and took us on a chronological journey: from teen-love days, to pick-your-adult-self-up moments, to modern midnights of existential questions. It works because good structure does this: It’s sufficiently predictable so you know where it’s going, and simultaneously mysterious enough to make you feel smart if you see something coming.

2. Setting. 

What distinguishes memorable longform nonfiction from the rest of journalism is a story that takes place in a certain place, at a certain time. The characters work through their dilemmas and problems on a stage the author has to set right, because it influences the narrative. Taylor knows setting, especially on stage. Each “era” of her musical tour has its own colors, costumes, dances, props and visuals. You are not just listening to the songs live; you are moving through space and time.

3. Style. 

If you are among the lucky ones, you’ll find your unique voice as a writer. I’m in the camp that believes Taylor is a pretty awesome lyricist; her bridges are the stuff of legend. She got where she is by doing this, over and over again. Find that thing that brings you pleasure when writing and do it – even overdo it – until you gain mastery over it.

4. Service.

A good story, in my kind of non-fiction at least, is in service of the reader. You are hired to lead a journey, sometimes with the destination unknown. On stage, Taylor is in service to her fans, who trade bracelets and dress up in era-specific outfits, and works extra hard to make it a special night for them. Much has been written about how strangely intimate she can make a show attended by tens of thousands of people. And she does. She is there for you, and you don’t doubt it for one minute. There were even therapy dogs on site to quell anxiety. Be there for your readers, too.

5. Surprise. 

A good structure should leave room for surprise. One of Roy Peter Clark’s pieces of wisdom I go back to is about letting your readers stumble upon gold coins, meaning unexpected information or moments in your piece. Taylor does this in many ways: Her dive into a hole in the stage was neat. But a simpler and more effective surprise involves her performing an acoustic version of two different songs at each concert, one on guitar, one on piano. Someone who saw Swift in another venue told me he wished he caught a concert where she sang “Exile.“ She did that in Warsaw, on piano.

6. Symbolism. 

In a story, there are always some elements that can stand in for the larger idea you want to put across. On stage, colors and props do that nicely. So does a visual of a snake to convey the idea of a slippery and dangerous character – that’s from Taylor’s “Reputation” era. They also set an internal rhythm and allow a narrative shift from action to reflection.

7. Simplicity. 

A young journalist once said that her desire was to write simply about complicated things. But simple is not simplistic and, in my experience, those that meander and have a muddied prose didn’t do enough reporting and don’t have clarity of purpose. It’s usually not the overload of knowledge that prevents them from being simple; it’s the lack of it. Pop is also simple, but mastering the 3-4 minute song requires time, patience and a lot of exercise.

8. Sparkle. 

When the confetti dropped at the end of the show, and everyone’s bracelets started flashing, and the performers were taking their bows, everything seemed possible for a moment, and the world was all right. I left the concert grateful for the experience — and wishing we thought of journalism more often as making people feel like they’ve been through an unforgettable experience. The daily problems will be there when you wake up; can I make you forget about them for a little while?

9.  Share.

Taylor shared the stage with Paramore, a band I’ve loved for 20 years. She recently announced different extra opening acts for every show in London. There’s a spirit of generosity that carries through, and people reciprocate. You don’t make your own dress for any artist, after all. She has made life in prison easier for some. My friend Laura Trujillo, who works for USA Today, shared this beautiful, intimate story of going to Milan to see Taylor with her 18-year-old daughter, Lucy. Taylor Swift isn’t just the world’s biggest pop star: she is also something mothers and daughters share. In Vienna, after Taylor’s shows this week were cancelled because of a terrorist warning, people gathered in the streets, played her songs, and swapped bracelets. “I’m officially a Swiftie,” a friend who was there texted me. “It’s the most wholesome thing in the world.”

Can our journalism aim to be more like this?

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It’s a standard story for American newspapers: the story-behind-the-story of someone who has died suddenly and tragically. But when Keith Duggan wrote about the life and death of Sarah McNally for his newspaper, the Irish Times, it became a different kind of story entirely.

“A very Irish life cut violently short” was published April 6, 2o24, just one week after Sarah’s murder at the Irish bar she worked at in New York. But the story only mentions her death in a glancing sort of way, and it barely mentions the accused murderer (a former boyfriend). It is more a meditation on on the typical Irish immigrant experience in New York.

Sarah is the touchstone throughout Duggan’s story, but he resists the predictable dive into  personal aspects of her life and relationships. Instead, he delivers a narrative, with flashes of first person. The story begins with the rain in New York, and the writer’s journey from Manhattan to the Maspeth neighborhood of Queens; it is about the changing neighborhood where Sarah worked, the Irish bars where Irish immigrants like Sarah have long found work, the people who knew her or knew other Irish immigrants like her.

Duggan’s observations are intimate and empathetic:

No matter how many times you make the brief crossing from the teeming city to the Irish enclaves, the difference between those two worlds is always breathtaking.

Sarah’s death happened “at teatime.” The bar where she worked was a place where “people thought the world of her.” It was, as Irish bars in New York often are to Irish immigrants, a place of “sanctuary.”

One theme of the piece is silence. Instead of using the brusque phrase “refused to comment,” Duggan makes it clear that it’s simply too early for people who knew Sarah to talk about her. The mood in the bar was “warm if exhausted.”

Later in the piece, Duggan interviews Eileen Reilly, who runs a community center in the neighborhood. It’s late in the day, but he lets the reader know that she makes time for him:

As we sit chatting in her office, several staff call ‘good night, Miss Reilly,’ from down the hallway as they leave for the evening.

The whole story is infused with intimacy and empathy. It ends with a piercing conclusion:

In the bar life, you meet many people. In an era of remote working, of hours and years staring into a computer screen, the bar trade has remained true to the idea of the workplace as a society. Over a decade in New York, Sarah McNally must have shared a pleasant word with an inestimable number of people and formed valuable friendships with many of those who are today in a state of heartbreak and disbelief. They will remember her for a long time in the various corners of New York. It is probable that there will be a moment of silent reflection before the big GAA match in Gaelic Park this weekend. And silence is appropriate: it is little wonder that Sarah McNally’s nearest and dearest have been unable to speak about her, at least for the time being.

It’s Saturday again and there are no words.

The hows and whys of the writing can best be explained by Duggan himself, with whom I had a discussion via email. The following is edited for length and clarity.

What was the original assignment, and how did you approach it?
The death of Sarah McNally took place on the Saturday of what was a bank holiday weekend in Ireland. I work and live in Washington D.C. as Washington Correspondent for The Irish Times. I got a message at 7 a.m. on the following Tuesday and was on a train an hour later. The assignment was to write a piece for the Weekend section of our Saturday edition, which generally contains reviews and longer pieces. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure how to approach it until I was travelling up to Manhattan and began to think about what had happened.

How much do you consider audience when you write? This felt to me like a story for folks back home in Ireland, though it was also fascinating to me, an American.
I don’t normally think about audience except in the general sense of trying to make a story as appealing or interesting or informative as possible. But this was unusual. To begin with, I didn’t really think of it as a story — more as a terrible event which we were compelled to cover and which I dreaded doing. I’m not a crime reporter per se. I was conscious of how Sarah’s murder was covered in the New York tabloids and began to think about how bewildering and terrible this must have been for her family and friends, including those who were regulars in the bar.

Why did you include small scenes of first person?
The details of the death were documented in all media in Ireland and in the NYC tabloids. Police reports and comments strongly suggested that this was an instance of domestic violence that took place in the most public of settings — an Irish bar, on a Saturday evening. I decided I didn’t want to rehash the grim events of what happened. But I was aware that people back in Ireland were, understandably, shocked. One of the reasons for this, I felt, was that Sarah McNally could have been them or someone they knew. Everyone in Ireland could relate to her story: leaving Ireland for New York, working in the hospitality industry.

Can you also talk about your use of second person, which makes the story feel very intimate? That’s an unusual structure that American journalists would be warned against using.
In some ways I think the American journalistic tradition is a lot more formal than it is in Ireland the UK. In a piece like this, The Irish Times is comfortable in allowing that second-person perspective that you mention. But I really just wrote about what I encountered that day. As it happened, all of New York was engulfed in a dismal rainstorm that afternoon. It changed the entire city. I took the E train out to Queens and knew that this was a journey Sarah McNally must have made many times. All I was really trying to do was to give readers an idea of what Maspeth was like. And the bar, The Ceili House — here was an everyday Irish bar that was suddenly at the centre of a big media storm. And yet when I called in on Tuesday afternoon, it was virtually deserted, just two customers and the bar lady and the little vigil. I had a brief conversation with the bar lady but she asked me not to quote her. I wanted to make it clear that even though she didn’t wish to speak publicly, she was in no way unfriendly.

Most stories in American newspapers that deal with violent death give as many details of the death as possible. You not only didn’t do that, but you made it clear to the reader that you were not going to do it. Why?
It’s always disconcerting for Irish readers to read the way American media covers violent death. In Ireland, those details are never reported until the trial.

I felt that anyone reading the piece either already knew of the details or could easily obtain them. And of course, the attacker was known to Sarah McNally. It was allegedly carried out by someone who had meant something to her. I think because of the circumstances of her death, her personal life had kind of become public property. That’s understandable: Violent deaths are reported. But it did feel like a violation. If there was a way to cover this story without repeating that graphic detail, it seemed the most sensible and respectful way of doing it.

Let’s talk about your opening, which is cinematic — a feeling of movement from Manhattan to Queens, the recollection of a scrum of reporters outside the bar, and then the quiet of the interior of the bar a few days later. Can you talk about how and why you crafted the opening in this way?
That wasn’t down to any great deliberation on my part. I think I wrote that piece on Wednesday because it had to be filed Thursday morning. So I just described what I encountered over the day. I started out getting off the train at Penn Station, where it was absolutely lashing rain, and 90 minutes later was in the bar.

Your story addresses a changing neighborhood — once very Irish and safe for Irish immigrants, now only partly Irish. This gives a richness to the story, avoids clichés. How did you approach the reporting of this?
I took the train over to Jackson Boulevard and then a taxi down to Maspeth. The taxi driver took us by that community hall that I visited. I looked it up and saw that it was run by a lady with an Irish name, Eileen Reilly. And I knew the area must have been an Irish neighbourhood at some stage but it didn’t feel that way now. I called up unannounced and Eileen was wonderful and spoke about the transition of Maspeth from predominately Irish to a multi-cultural part of Queens. It would seem that all of those traditionally Irish strongholds are beginning to fade and change.

Please talk about your last line  — It’s Saturday again and there are no words. — which really stayed with me.
It just came to me as I was writing that end paragraph and thinking of what it would be like for the staff and regulars in the bar the following Saturday.

* * *

Laurie Hertzel recently retired as senior editor for books and special projects at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She the author of “News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist.”

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I have known the writer Ann Finkbeiner for around 30 years now. She writes mostly about science, especially astronomy and cosmology, and possesses a deep and warm intelligence as well as formidable dexterity with the English language and a love of story. “Warm intelligence:” Ann can be as rigorous and dispassionately analytical as the coldest data scientist — she wasn’t married for many years to the late physicist Cal Walker for nothing — but her work is suffused with wonder and love for the universe and for knowledge and our ability to turn our small lives to the understanding of it all.

She’s also the originator of what has come to be called, among science writers, the Finkbeiner Test when writing about women in science:

I’m going to write the profile of an impressive astronomer and not once mention that she’s a woman. I’m not going to mention her husband’s job or her child care arrangements or how she nurtures her students or how she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field. I’m not going to interview her women students and elicit raves about her as a role model. I’m going to be blindly, aggressively, egregiously ignorant of her gender.

An emphatic yes to all of that.

Ann and I were faculty colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and I know her to be cranky about writing and publishing and academia in a way I find endearing, in part because it aligns with my own crankiness about those subjects. We are the sort of friends who don’t see each other for three years, then get together for coffee and conversation and never once think, Why don’t we do this more often than every three years? She’s written several estimable books (I recommend “The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite”) and is a co-founder and curator of the blog “The Last Word on Nothing,” which I also commend.

Back in August, she published on TLWON an essay of her own that is so good I wish to share it. Pause a moment and read it here; it clocks in at only 830 words or so. Then please read a few paragraphs of my appreciation for its lovely lines.

The Boundary Conditions Being What They Are

Ann Finkbeiner

I’ve written books and didn’t find the experience pleasant: I’d go underground for 2 or 3 or 4 years, maybe 5, and when I’d stick my head up into the light of the world again, the world was changed. Like, during one of my underground sessions, the internet took hold and when I surfaced, the print magazines for which I’d written were saying their last goodbyes. Or during another session, my job whisked out from under me and ok, I was sick of academia anyway and worse yet, now that I was free to only write, I found I was also sick of my writing. All of this is to say, coming out of the pandemic is a lot like coming out of a book: new world, what the hell?

And of course even when it’s over, it’s not over. Just like page proofs have to be corrected and publicity has to be arranged and endured, the pandemic has its upticks and new variants and friends suddenly cancelling afternoon teas.

Meaning, I don’t know how to live in what remains of the past and simultaneously figure out how the present is different. I think this is a liminal state, neither land nor water but some kind of uncertain swamp in between. I do hate uncertainty which, too bad because at this point in time, the swamp is the rule, it’s non-negotiable, it’s the boundary condition.

“Boundary condition” means different things to different scientists but in general it’s the immovable thing that can’t be changed, only worked within. A river running along a granite wall has to run parallel to the wall: the wall sets the boundary condition.

One thing for sure: given current boundary conditions, I need therapy. Every week, I meet with a psychotherapist and a physical therapist; and every day I practice both. Shoulders back and down. Speak kindly to myself. Run my fingers up to door frame to the top. Separate the anxiety from the situation that’s provoking it. Hold a stretchy band in both hands with elbows at the side and pull my hands apart. Figure out what’s so frightening about wanting comfort. Lie down and slowly punch my arms into the air. Think of life’s little epiphanies. The tiny black hummingbird is at the feeder and the sun hits it just so and it turns iridescent green, and it drinks and drinks and then its head pops up and it winks out of space and time, gone.

Once I was in the woods, writing, in a cabin with a grand piano in it and a piano player needed to practice so I said sure, while you play I can write. I couldn’t. She worked her way through two volumes of Beethoven sonatas, and while Beethoven seems to write in sentences, his sentences were more complicated than mine and much more interesting so I got distracted and meanwhile she filled up the cabin with the Waldstein, up to the peaked roof, every atom of air in that cabin moved by Beethoven. I was breathing Beethoven.

How many years ago was that? Twenty? Thirty? I’m at the age where you don’t suddenly lose days or months or years, you lose decades. Getting old: another liminal state. I’m sticking my head out of the ground from the pandemic just in time to face old-age planning. Also someday, not as far away as it used to be, is death, another boundary condition. I have no particular reason to think about death but I am aware of the time. How can all this life just go away? I will miss it all so much. I look at the hummingbird, the little kids in my tree, the lottery card the neighbor leaves on my porch, other neighbors having a kids-in-bed girl-party on their porch, the extraordinary mix of people at the farmers’ market united in their focus on peaches and sweet corn, and I get blinded by loss; I don’t want to ever leave this. My therapist gets a little snippy: then don’t, she says, it’s all out there, you don’t need to miss it now.

Sticking a head up in the middle of a patch of dense, tall, intense green, ferny amsonias is a pale magenta phlox. I had deleted all the phlox years ago because it wasn’t flowering much and got terrible fungus, and I dug it all out. And yet years later, there it is. New world: what the hell? The phlox had been white and this pale magenta guy had to go back into its ancestry for its color and its will to live. “I’m here,” it says, “I am what I am and I’m here. Make of that what you will. And also just do the best you know how.”

My reader mind glides through Ann’s piece and thinks, Wise and lovely. My writer mind lights on each word, rolls back two paragraphs and reads them again, listens to a sentence three times, spots the reappearance of certain phrases, the artful use of repetition. Writer mind builds a schematic diagram of the piece’s structure, smiles, smiles again, and thinks, This is so good. And because we’re friends, Well done, Annie.

If an essay is thinking through prose, or the prose record of thought, or both, Ann’s first three paragraphs are her mind working its way to the core question:

Meaning, I don’t know how to live in what remains of the past and simultaneously figure out how the present is different.

She also introduces a pair of ideas that animate and orient her mind on this day: the liminal state and the boundary condition. Those ideas, which she deftly defines, are simultaneously binders that hold the essay together and lenses through which she refines and sharpens her thinking.

She’s established that she’s someone who hates uncertainty while living in an uncertain period in her life and in the culture, and she copes with therapy, physical and psychological. Braiding the precise and mundane details of what this means day-to-day calls forth a striking example of something that brings joy amidst the inchoate and the frightening:

The tiny black hummingbird is at the feeder and the sun hits it just so and it turns iridescent green, and it drinks and drinks and then its head pops up and it winks out of space and time, gone.

Here my writer mind ruefully nods to a sentence so good I wished I’d written it first. (And notes, in that same paragraph, how an adroit writer and thinker beautifully characterizes the effect of the Waldstein sonata — “every atom of air in that cabin moved by Beethoven” — then lets that sentence lead her to the lovely, “I was breathing Beethoven.” A two-line demonstration of the essay process.)

Followed by a seeming stray thought: a memory of a cabin and a grand piano, winking into existence as if filling the space vacated by the hummingbird, limned in several more striking sentences that nevertheless prompt my writer mind to say, Mrmff? What’s this doing here? Answered in the next graph by the author pondering how long ago she breathed Beethoven and where the hell do the days and years ago and awareness of the ultimate boundary condition, her own expiration date. Which leads to all that she’ll miss when she’s gone and her therapist’s snippy but apt suggestion that it’s silly to miss in advance what’s still all before you.

Taking the therapist’s advice, Ann makes a gift of one more thing sticking its head up — a trope, by the way, that appears three times and serves as one more thing to hold all of this together — this time a stubborn phlox that refuses to exit the stage of her garden and in its atavistic persistence points her mind to a destination, a state of awareness she can live with:

“I’m here,” it says, “I am what I am and I’m here. Make of that what you will. And also just do the best you know how.”

I cannot improve on that. So here I shut up and simply give thanks.

* * *

Dale Keiger, retired editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine, is author of the anthology “The Man Who Signed the City: Portraits of Remarkable People” and writes a newsletter of essays in “The Joggled Mind.”

The post A “wise and lovely” essay enchants the reader in a fellow writer appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts analyzing the stand-out profile of tennis greats Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova by Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins. You can also read our Q&A with Jenkins about her special relationship and interviews with the athletes.

Vladimir Nabokov never wrote “Good Readers and Good Writers.” The esteemed, oft-quoted “essay” of that title, published in 1980 as the first part of “Lectures on Literature,” actually was pieced together by an editor from notes Nabokov made for a lecture on Jane Austen. All the same, the cobbled result is essential reading for aspiring scribblers and it includes this:

In order to bask in that magic, a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading.

On rare occasions I read a piece of journalism that gives me that telltale spinal zap. The most recent was a few weeks ago when I read Sally Jenkins’s superb “Bitter Rivals. Beloved Friends. Survivors.” published by The Washington Post as one of its “Deep Reads.” It’s a long piece for a newspaper, around 8,500 words; the audio version runs more than 50 minutes.

Jenkins, a long-time Post sports columnist, delves and ponders the remarkable 50-year friendship between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, who in their day were the best women’s tennis players in the world. On the court they were ferocious competitors who waged one epic battle after another in the finals of the biggest tournaments. They were coldly lethal toward each other when carrying racquets but somehow became best friends for life. As Jenkins reveals, “best friends” doesn’t begin to encompass their bond.

The greatness of this story did not gradually unfold to me. It was there from the start. By the end of the four-sentence lead (one of them a fragment), Jenkins had my full attention:

There is an audible rhythm to a Grand Slam tennis tournament, a thwock-tock, tock-thwock of strokes, like beats per minute, that steadily grows fainter as the field diminishes. At first the locker room is a hive of 128 competitors, milling and chattering, but each day their numbers ebb, until just two people are left in that confrontational hush known as the final. For so many years, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova were almost invariably the last two, left alone in a room so empty yet intimate that they could practically hear what was inside the other’s chest. Thwock-tock.

There it was: the serve-and-volley cadence of the opening sentence, the sound effects, the spot-on observations and Jenkins’s command of language. A tournament starts with 128 players and goes “until just two people are left in that confrontational hush known as the final.” Those two people return to a locker room “so empty and yet intimate that they could practically hear what was inside the other’s chest.”

Zap.

I could expend 500 words on Jenkins’s first two paragraphs, but I’ll stop at 10: I knew I was in the hands of a master.

Bending time without losing the reader

I read on past Jenkins’s crafty bit of stage-setting and soon my editor’s brain slipped under the sentences to take stock of the architecture of the piece. I’ve been reading, writing, editing and teaching for so long, I now read with a bifurcated brain. Half loses itself in the storytelling while the other half steps back and, with some Nabokovian detachment, says, Okay, how’d she do that? What’s going on here? That seems like an odd decision, huh… Why can’t I put this down even though I have no interest in tennis and should have started dinner 20 minutes ago?

The editor’s part of my frontal cortex noted that six paragraphs in, the piece becomes unstuck in time. It begins in the reader’s present with those half-dozen first graphs that crook a finger: Got a minute? Got 50 minutes? You really should read this story about these famous tennis players. Jenkins then reels back to 1973, before skipping ahead to 1981 and then pulling out of the narrative altogether for 533 words in which she describes and differentiates Evert and Navratilova as they become famous and the public responds to them. After that, she drops us back into 1975, then ’81 again, before landing on their lives in retirement running up to 2022, when each receives a dreaded cancer diagnosis.

Then, with no real transition, we’re in the story’s present, at lunch with them and Jenkins in a Miami hotel. Though not for long. After a dollop of conversation, we reel back to 1973 and each woman’s slightly different memory of the day they met as teenagers. Finally, we settle into a long, engrossing account of the years when they became the two best female players in the world and squared off in one Grand Slam final after another. With a touch as perfect as a winning backhand, Jenkins zooms in to highlight crucial moments of crucial matches, then pulls back to situate everything in her protagonists’ complicated lives, then takes us back courtside.

Making superstars relatable

These vignettes of epic matches are as good as sports writing gets: vivid, perceptive, propulsive. Jenkins brings her knowledge and experience to bear; she knows tennis and knows what to watch for in the games grown-ups play. She aces one piercing phrase after another: “the compressed lethality of this two-fisted young woman,” a backhand winner “through an opening as narrow as one of [Everts’] old hair ribbons.” Navratilova and Evert “went at each other like flashing sabers,” “the delicate sweetheart vs. the bulging lesbian,” which out of context may sound needlessly callous but is essential to the story.

(Jenkins is just as good writing about off-the-court. I defy you to find a better paragraph about friendship than this:

Friendship is arguably the most wholly voluntary relationship. It reflects a mutual decision to keep pasting something back together, no matter how far it gets pulled apart, even when there is no obligatory reason, no justice-of-the-peace vow or chromosomal tie.)

These match reports charge the story’s batteries and the momentum carries us through sections where Jenkins nimbly turns the two women this way and that to reveal more about their characters and personalities and flaws. It’s usually hard for the rest of us to feel anything in common with athletes so good they seem scarcely human. Jenkins gets past this by characterizing all the ways these two were just like us: their fears, their insecurities, their moments of meanness, their bad decisions. And she shines more light on them by braiding various perspectives: how Evert and Navratilova seemed to each other, how they were portrayed by the media, what other players thought of them, how the public responded as their rivalry intensified.

Graph after graph, through their encounters on the court and then the ordeal of their cancer treatments, Jenkins pops in and out of her sequential narrative to elicit comments from each woman as she takes them back year by year by year. The effect is like a voiceover that enriches our understanding of why Jenkins has focused on these particular scenes, these incidents, these details that limn the Evert-Navratilova bond. At the story’s conclusion, the author loops back to lunch in Miami and a bit of what the players’ lives are like now.

Journalism as an exploration

As I teased apart the story’s components — mostly on rereading because the first time I told my inner editor to shut up and let me enjoy this — I pondered why it worked so very well. Why didn’t the story collapse under its own contrivance? All those time shifts. Jenkins could have simply pulled the reader in with a clever lead, applied her storytelling chops to a straightforward chronology, then turned the Miami lunch into a nice kicker and been done with it. Were all those woven story arcs necessary? Was she showing off? Why did I never feel adrift? (Answers to the first two: yes, and no. Answer to the third: Read on. Or better, read the story if you haven’t.)

I’ve no window into the mind of Sally Jenkins, but I don’t picture her, fingertips poised over the keyboard, mentally engineering the story. Here I need a tight focus. Now a little commentary from Chrissy — wait, no, from a lesser opponent. Yeah, that works. A description of the 1981 US Open final goes here and Navratilova’s coming out gay goes there. To achieve the right effect I’ll place some stuff about Evert’s private life here…and there you go.

Maybe that’s how she works, but I don’t think so.

Jenkins is a wonderful journalist. But I think she approached this story not as a reporter but as an essayist. Journalism is declarative. Essays are interrogative. The journalist says, This is what I know. She has made up her mind and imposed some order on messy reality to communicate something important. She deals in points, straight lines, right angles. The essayist deals in fractals. She says, I’m not sure what to make of this, but come with me as I try to figure it out. Journalism is essential, but essays are a richer literary experience because, when done right, they resonate with emotion that might be inappropriate in reporting, and they make room for doubt and mystery that might hamstring journalism’s credibility. Essays are capacious in this way; they encompass not only what’s documented but what’s in the corner of the eye, the back of the mind and the inarticulate gut.

Jenkins-as-essayist puts on the page the intellectual and emotional work of trying to grasp a profound friendship. For example, early in the piece she quotes Evert recalling that one of the first people she called after learning she had cancer was Navratilova. And Jenkins writes:

Wait a second. Is Evert saying that the rival who dealt her the deepest professional cuts of her life, whose mere body language on the court once made her seethe, was among the very first people she wanted to talk to when she got cancer?

Then, when Navratilova remembers making the same call on getting her own diagnosis, Jenkins writes:

Hang on, you say.

Go back.

This is a smart, gifted writer reaching for the ineffable. Trying to figure out how, after (and through) one of the fiercest rivalries in all of sports, two women could come to reside in each other’s heart. As readers, we don’t have to keep a complex time structure straight or acquire an interest in tennis because what we’re really following is Jenkins’ train of thought. All the forked paths seem natural because that’s how our minds work, too. We’re happy beside Jenkins because who doesn’t yearn for the kind of friendship she lays before us?

A final point, if I may. One of the most striking features of Jenkins’s masterpiece is how open and candid Evert and Navratilova were with the writer. They seem to have withheld nothing. At times there’s a level of intimacy that’s dumbfounding. Jenkins earned that kind of trust, from two women who were all too familiar with bad press, because she brought to their encounter decades of honesty, integrity, sensitivity and professionalism.

I don’t know how Evert and Navratilova feel about the outcome, but I think their trust was amply rewarded.

***

Dale Keiger, retired editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine, is author of the anthology “The Man Who Signed the City: Portraits of Remarkable People” and writes a newsletter of essays in “The Joggled Mind.”

The post A profile of rival athletic greats becomes an exploration of a great friendship appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When the folks at Webster-Merriam embraced the use of "they/them" as singular pronouns, the reaction from those in the writing world ranged from relief to indignation to celebration.

• Relief: No more need to torture sentences to follow grammatically correct rules with clumsy "he or she" references to an unknown individual. Example: The new editor will be announced next week. He or she will determine any further changes to newsroom staffing. Or: When a writer choses a lede, he or she is making a promise to readers. Also no nit-picky need to remember that a team, business, institution or organization is singular while its players, employees or members are plural. And this recognizes the way we talk or, as Merriam-Webster pointed out, the way people have talked — and written — since the 1300s. This is how it led a "Words We're Watching" post in 2019.
• Indignation: What about standards? This a slippery slope to "anything goes." Pretty soon we'll be putting social media acronyms in our news reports: OMG! We're doomed!!
• Celebration: As the LGBTQ+ community claims its voice in society and the press, "they/them" recognizes the right of non-binary people to self-definitions that reject rigid gendered labels.

I share all three positions — which makes me either open-minded or wishy-washy. I am mostly in favor of writing that reflects conversational conventions, and I'd love to gain back the hours of rewriting and editing that I've invested in torquing sentences that seem more about rules than common sense. As a spelling bee competitor who was taught to diagram sentences and monitor my subject-verb tense agreement, it can be disconcerting to work with students and young writers who use a shorthand that seems lazy. And I was part of the 1970s feminist movement that fought against default references to women by marital status; we brought "Ms." into accepted lexicon, and in 1980s saw the needed shift away from "homosexual" to "gay" — and then only when even that latter was relevant to a story. Bring on the language that is current, inclusive and makes sense.

As long as it's clear. Nothing excuses journalistic writing that confuses readers. And few things create greater confusion that non-specific pronouns.

So I have found myself struggling with the clarity of "they/them" in conversations and, even more, in text. And that's why I found myself impressed with a recent news story in The New York Times that managed to have it all ways. It was both inclusive and clear, and even included the preferred "they/them" as a relevant bit of information.

The story in question was about the sentencing of Anderson Lee Aldrich, who pleaded guilty to multiple murder charges in the shooting last year Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In exchange for the guilty plea, Aldrich was spared a death sentence.

This is, as noted in the paragraph above, a news story — the kind where the usual rules of journalistic writing apply. Yet the reporters, Jack Healy and Kelley Manley, sprinkled it with moments of context, description and emotion that added depth and humanity. Note especially this paragraph with the briefest of character sketches of the five people who were killed that night:

... survivors and relatives walked one by one to a microphone to share tearful memories of the people who had been killed: Daniel Aston’s “burning blue eyes.” Derrick Rump’s smile. Raymond Green Vance’s gentle spirit. How Kelly Loving wanted others to be “unapologetically ourselves,” and how Ashley Paugh’s young children begged for someone to bring their mother back.

But it's how the story deals with they/them pronouns that stands out. Here's the fourth paragraph, which follows a summary of Aldrich's plea and sentence:

The defendant, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, stood on Monday in a courtroom packed with victims of the attack and relatives of the dead, and tersely answered a series of questions from Judge Michael McHenry about whether the defendant understood the terms of the plea.

Then the story goes on to challenge Aldrich's claim that this was not a hate crime targeting the gay club:

Many of the survivors and relatives referred to the defendant using male pronouns, dismissing the nonbinary identification as a sham and what one survivor’s mother called a “repugnant attempt” to win leniency. At a news conference afterward, District Attorney Michael J. Allen said there was “zero evidence” before the shooting that the shooter identified as nonbinary, and called the shooting a “terror attack based on hate.”

From there, the reporters had to deal with names and pronouns on second reference. They followed The New York Times style of using a courtesy title, in this case the new designation "Mx." Then they used "they" as a singular, which works because it immediately follows the direct and clear reference to the defendant by name:

But Mx. Aldrich offered no details about why they carried out the shooting, and little explanation beyond a bare-bones admission using legal language. They did not directly admit to committing hate crimes in targeting Club Q, and instead said they were pleading “no contest” to those charges because it was likely that they would be convicted at trial.

In one more paragraph where this could get tricky, the reporters did the smart thing and repeated Aldrich's name in the same sentence rather than rely on what could be a confusing pronoun:

In a notice of intent to file suit, the victims say that under Colorado’s red-flag laws, Mx. Aldrich’s guns should have been seized after Mx. Aldrich made a bomb threat against some relatives in 2021 and expressed an intention to become “the next mass killer.”

Language will continue to change, as it should. So, too, should our use of it in journalism. But this is a good model that demonstrates how to adapt to evolving usage without undermining clarity.

The post What to do when pronouns can confuse appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

By Trevor Pyle

[dc]I[/dc]n opening paragraphs of her Chicago Reader piece about six deaths in Chicago last year, Katie Prout makes a rare and daring admission: She reveals that she keeps an altar and remakes it whenever a person she knows dies. She includes coins as one of its ingredients, writing:

… because metal, like us, comes from the earth, and because these hustlers loved money and deserve to go into the afterlife with full pockets.

It’s a jolt of an opening — elegiac, electric, mournful and angry — and Prout maintains the tone throughout. She’s mourning six people who, at times, were shoved to the margins of society. By the time she’s done, readers will mourn, too.

"She was somebody to us," published in January 2023, was driven as much by Lloyd DeGrane’s photographs as by Prout’s reporting and writing. It isn’t afraid to draw a line between specific policy failures and the deaths of people struggling with homelessness, addiction and mental illness, and to point out the public's complicity. As Prout writes:

Each one of these deaths was preventable, including the two accidental drug overdoses. (One cause of death remains undetermined.) Culturally, most of us shrug off overdose deaths as inevitable tragedies—the result of ravenous addiction, if we’re being bighearted, or the result of moral failing, if we’re not. What I need you to understand is that these deaths are policy choices; they are preventable, and we all are accountable for them.

It doesn’t shy away from being bound up with Prout’s own mournfulness:

I’m no expert, I’ve never been addicted or unhoused, and my grief and rage are not the biggest in this city, but still, six people I know died last year. I think you should know them too.

And it embraces being a challenge as well as a remembrance, as Prout writes:

... these deaths are related to us—the people who are housed and not addicted, who have access to health care and alderpeople, who take pictures of the visibly mentally ill or impoverished asleep on the Red Line and post them in online discussions about “crime” on the CTA—and the policy choices we support.

[caption id="attachment_175026" align="alignleft" width="450"] Katie Prout[/caption]

Prout agreed to an interview with Storyboard about her own unconventional background, her outreach efforts on the streets of downtown Chicago with DeGrane, and her efforts to draw individual profiles of Brittany Burke (1990-2022), Ron Jeschke (1985-2022), Sheila Hope Hecks (1971-2022), Valerie “Val” Clark (1986-2022), Rafael “Ralph” Fernandez Jr. (1980-2022) and Demarco “Polo” Hawes (1993-2022).

Fellow journalists may find lessons both practical and philosophical in her answers. A few that jumped out initially:

Emotion can give a story an engine.

Prout gives credit for the piece’s opening to editor and Chicago Reader colleague Taryn Allen, who encouraged Prout to use her own emotions as a runway to launch readers into the story.

“The beginning of the piece is what it is because of her,” Prout told me. “The first version was more news-speak/reporting, not at all personal. During a meeting, she asked me 'How are you feeling?’ and then, ‘What if you told us some of that?’ I had been holding my feelings at a distance, partly because I didn’t want to make the story about me, and partly because I was really struggling and wanted to power through. With Taryn, I found a way to avoid doing either. Tapping into my emotions and my perspective, making the intro a little more personal, was great advice. It brought the readers in quicker, I think, and propelled them forward into the story.”

Conversations, not interviews.

Speaking to loved ones of someone who’s died can be a journalist’s most grueling task, but Prout didn’t try to avoid or even minimize it. She made sure she had robust discussions with the people she interviewed so they knew the purpose of her story. And that openness didn’t end when she flipped her notebook shut.

"The biggest challenge was just explaining to friends and family of the dead why I wanted to do this, why I thought it was important to write about their loved ones with honesty and sensitivity. There were conversations before, during and after interviews: if I was going to ask questions of other people, it was only fair I make myself available for them to ask questions of me,” she said.

Depart from conventional format when you need to.

It can be difficult to write one profile; Prout was faced with six, and had varying amounts of detail and background for each. She initially wanted each profile to be in a similar style, but scrapped that notion and instead was guided by the material she had. Her explanation offers journalists reasons to veer from a plan when it’ll make a story suit its subject better: “I thought about trying to keep a consistent style for each person, but decided to be flexible on that. Some folks I knew well, others I only met once, and everyone was their own self. Being open to changing the length, number of sources and style of each allowed for Lloyd (DeGrane, the photojournalist) to write about Val, for example, or for Dan to take the lead on Ralph’s story, or for me to write in a more creative-nonfiction register for Hope.”

The Q&A with Prout was edited for length and clarity.

[dc small]T[/dc]he Chicago Reader is an established and well-regarded nonprofit alt-publication in Chicago. Tell me a little about your background in journalism, and how you landed at the Reader.
I went to undergrad for English, and my focus was actually poetry and creative nonfiction. I graduated in 2009 at the height of the recession, and worked whatever jobs I could get — a coordinator at a shelter, an after-school program educator, years in Chicago as a nanny and a stint answering phones in call centers. Throughout those years, I wrote erratically, then consistently, and slowly started publishing poetry, nonfiction essays and then freelance journalism. In 2015, I went to grad school and graduated with my MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. But after I moved back to Chicago in 2019, it was another two years of freelancing, nannying and working odd jobs before I landed at the Chicago Reader, where I am a full-time staff writer focusing on addiction, housing and culture.

That’s a long answer, but I share it all to (hopefully) demystify some of the journo job world. Not all of us go to J school or are phenoms by 25: I’m lucky, and in many ways I have an abundance of privilege. But it took me years of scraping by and hundreds of job apps before I got my dream position.

[caption id="attachment_175028" align="alignleft" width="350"] Lloyd DeGrane[/caption]

You mention early-on your weekly walks with photographer Lloyd DeGrane — more on him later — with backpacks of life-saving materials. Tell me a little more about these walks and how they came about.
In 2019 I was underemployed and had an abundance of time on my hands — and a family member with a substance use disorder had just relapsed. I wanted to learn more about this thing called Narcan I’d been hearing about, and so attended a free training on how to administer it put on by the Chicago Recovery Alliance, one of the oldest harm reduction orgs in the country. I started volunteering there weekly, packing kits of clean needles and safer smoking supplies.

When Covid hit, I wondered and worried about all the people I’d come to know through the CRA who relied on clinics for the medication they used to treat their opioid use disorders. Like everything else, those clinics were shutting down and folks were facing withdrawal or relapse. This is where luck comes in, and the generosity of others in the field: I told my friend Logan Jaffe, a journalist at ProPublica, that I wanted to write a story about this but wanted to work with someone on it. She, in turn, introduced me to Lakiedra Chavis, (now with The Marshall Project) who’d been reporting on the opioid crisis in Chicago for years. Lakiedra spent an hour with me on the phone, sharing resources and encouraging me to pursue this story before she suggested I call this guy named Lloyd DeGrane, a photo-documentarian who went on long walks in the Loop, sharing harm reduction supplies and building relationships with unhoused folks.

The resulting story we did came out in Belt Magazine, and shortly after that, I was walking downtown with Lloyd — masked and in my comfy shoes — almost every week. The phone call with Lakeidra really changed the trajectory of my life, and I’m grateful to her and Logan for taking the time.

How did you conceive this story, and what was the reporting, writing and editing process?
Last spring, when Ralph, Polo and Val died, two other people I knew from Lower Wacker Drive (Editor’s note: A multi-level street on the edge of the downtown Chicago) were really sick from preventable disease, and ended up losing the apartment they’d just gotten into after years of surviving on the street. I was sad. But more than that, I was really angry, because these deaths were part of a lattice of failure. I started drafting what I thought would be a short personal commentary/op-ed, but then got wrapped up in other stories. After Ron died in the fall, I returned to it, and realized there was a story here.

Reporting process: Identifying and reaching out to next of kin, to explain why I was writing about their loved one and my hope for their participation. While doing so, I reached out to the medical examiner's office for causes of death and began interviews with unhoused friends and loved ones of the dead.

Writing: I made a brief outline — in my head, this would be six micro profiles-memorials, with an intro and an ending (I ended up dropping the ending). I started writing Ron’s memorial first. As I went, I noted any common themes, scenes or ideas at the top of the doc, to explore later when I wrote the intro. I thought about trying to keep a consistent style for each person, but decided to be flexible on that. Some folks I knew well, others I only met once, and everyone was their own self. Being open to changing the length, number of sources, and style of each allowed for Lloyd to write about Val, for example, or for Dan to take the lead on Ralph’s story, or for me to write in a more creative-nonfiction register for Hope.

I started outlining and jotting at the end of November, and finished the last profile — Brittany’s — four days before the story came out. Not ideal, but it had to happen. It was hard to write about that much death and I needed to take some breaks, especially when, the week before publishing, someone in my extended family overdosed and died. My editor, Taryn Allen, was incredibly understanding. When I told her I needed to take a couple days between that death and listening to my interview with Brittany’s mom Terrie, which I knew would be emotional, she was supportive, even if it meant I would be finishing the draft on a very tight turnaround.

Editing: Speaking of Taryn, the beginning of the piece is what it is because of her. The first version was more news-speak/reporting, not at all personal. During a meeting, she asked me “How are you feeling?” and then “What if you told us some of that?” I had been holding my feelings at a distance, partially because I didn’t want to make the story about me, and partially because I was really struggling and wanted to power through. WIth Taryn, I found a way to avoid doing either. Tapping into my emotions and my perspective, making the intro a little more personal, was great advice. It brought the readers in quicker, I think, and propelled them forward into the story.

How did you approach specific challenges specific to the reporting and writing?
Most, though not all, of the people I interviewed downtown, I interviewed in person, which just meant a lot of legwork. Much of what I’d heard about folks’ lives and deaths was anecdotal and difficult to verify. Some people I knew by nicknames rather than birth names. And the biggest challenge was just explaining to friends and family of the dead why I wanted to do this, why I thought it was important to write about their loved ones with honesty and sensitivity. There were conversations before, during, and after interviews; if I was going to ask questions of other people, it was only fair I make myself available for them to ask questions of me.

Words can bring people to life for readers, but so can photographs; it seems that Lloyd DeGrane's photographs are an essential part of this package, and Lloyd himself is an important part of the story as he's both mentioned and quoted at length. How important were Lloyd's contributions to the story's final shape?
Lloyd is my colleague, my comrade, my mentor and my friend. We learn from and with each other. We’re different people, with different perspectives and politics, who are deeply invested in both harm reduction and documentarian work. Often Lloyd has longer and stronger relationships with folks downtown than I do; I’m still relatively new here, and he’s been doing this for more than half a decade. He can provide insight and history to the communities we move in that I just don’t have. Just like I believe an overdose death is not one individual's fault, journalism like this isn’t the result of one lone journalist’s work. The story is better with him in it.

Some publications might shy away from drawing a direct line from drug-related deaths to policy, but you name organizations trying to help prevent deaths and politicians who could likely prevent them but don't. Would you like to see more journalists and publications take this step?
Definitely. I think it’s disingenuous not to. We’re storytellers as well as reporters, and pretending to be uncomfortable with that fact doesn’t make it any less true. What we choose to include and exclude is a narrative choice we — writers, editors and interview subjects — make all the time. And journalists don’t just identify the who-what-when-where: we also report on the how and why, the context from which readers can make sense of the other information provided.

I was struck by this sentence: "If you ask people what kind of housing they need, they'll tell you." It seems like people who are unhoused or struggle with addiction are often boxed out of policy and political stories that affect them directly. How crucial is it that their voices are included in writing about Chicago, or any community?
I don’t think any reporting is complete without including perspectives from the people who have the most at stake.

There are vivid details in every profile, but one paragraph particularly moved me: Hope's litany of questions to you about yourself; it shows a piece of her inquisitive personality.

As many questions as I had for her, Hope had for me. “How much you spend on cat food? Do your cat eat a lot? What color is he? Is he very friendly? You got cable? You never watch My Cat From Hell? Y’all don’t watch too much TV. How do you like your husband? Ooo, he’s not your husband yet? Well, when will he be? Y’all thinking about getting a big house pretty soon? You have a good job? Can you afford your rent? Is there a lot of crime over there? Mixed neighborhood? Lotta Black folks over there? Puerto Ricans? Lotta good restaurants? Walmarts? Walgreens? You know how to get out of a lockhold? It’s good to know self-defense. Are you safe down here?”

Can you tell me anything but how you came to write it, and how you had made notes of or remembered all those questions?
Thanks for asking me about that paragraph — it was really important to me. I’m so glad I was able to include it. Those questions are from an interview I did with Hope in summer 2021. It’s a good reminder to me ask folks if I can record them, even if we’re just casually talking, because I don’t know if/when I’ll see them again, and because having a rich store of recordings to revisit helps make stories more complex and real. She asked me all those questions, pretty much as they’re written; I just tightened up the language and removed my responses so that the effect was a cascade of curiosity. Hope had a keen interest in people and how we live, and loved to gossip. Being able to show a little of who she was, in her own words, was good for the story, and it meant something to me personally, too.

On a similar note, you end with two wrenching lines in which you recall telling Hope you'd visit her apartment soon. How did you land on this as the best place to end the piece?
I thought about ending a wrap-up paragraph, but decided I didn’t want the ending to this story to feel resolved for the reader, because that isn’t the truth. It also felt important to subtly implicate myself, too, though I don’t know if it read that way — I told Hope I’d come visit soon, and then just didn’t. I’d like to tell myself I would have if I’d had more time, but unhoused people are promised all kinds of things by those of us who are housed and, for all kinds of reasons, we don’t make good.

Who were you most hoping to reach with this piece? Related: What kind of response did you hope to get?
I wanted to reach people who think addiction and homelessness don’t have anything to do with them and people who are community orientated but to whom harm reduction is unfamiliar or even scary. Basically, I wanted to challenge general readers to think about addiction and housing in a new way, and to consider the people and systems in power who could do better. If an alderperson or mayoral candidate read this story, great. But it was more important to me that the people who can hold them accountable do.

* * *

Trevor Pyle was a newspaper reporter in the Pacific Northwest for several years, and now works as a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.

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After reading a remarkable work of nonfiction, have you ever wished you could learn exactly how the writer created what you just read? I don’t think I’m alone in being intrigued by how the stories that move me came about. We all juggle required assignments with passion projects. We all decide to ask our sources certain questions and not to ask others. We all need to arrange the information we find into a particular experience for our readers. But some articles rise above the ordinary to create memorable experiences for readers.

How does that happen?

Lane DeGregory, the Pulitzer-Prize winning enterprise reporter for The Tampa Bay Times, has created more than her share of these extraordinary experiences for readers. In her new book published this month, “'The Girl in the Window 'and Other True Tales,” DeGregory shows that not only does she have the knack for writing emotionally detailed narrative articles, she also has an incredible memory for how those articles came to be and an admirable generosity in sharing her techniques.

Here, I must confess to being a Lane DeGregory fan. I’ve listened to every episode of WriteLane, a podcast of story craft conversations between DeGregory and her former editor, Maria Carillo. In a two-minute video interview, she discusses her passion for storytelling. And I got to speak with DeGregory two years ago for a Storyboard piece about the reporting and writing decisions that went into her 2002 profile of a transgender woman.

DeGregory’s new book collects 24 of the stories that have appeared under her byline over the years. The anthology inevitably includes some old favorites, along wiht bits of advice that DeGregory has mentioned in her podcast or at conferences and workshops. Still, encountering them in a new form is a helpful reminder of her creative and compassionate approach to profiles, including:

• to ignore the “important” people for the more interesting people in the shadows
• to suggest that a story subject bring a friend or relative to an interview help them feel safer
• to find the “bruise on the apple” by including a profile subject’s flaws so that they come across as fully rounded and credible humans
• to always get documents, official and personal, not just to fact-check what your subject is telling you but because they often include specifics helpful for creating a narrative

The book also offers insights into DeGregory's work that I hadn't heard before, including the various ways she has written about subjects being dishonest with her or with others, while still portraying these people empathetically. For example, in a story about panhandlers, DeGregory mentions a man who “swears he fought in ’Nam,” wears a hat that says “U.S. Air Force” and carries a sign with the Marine motto, “Semper fi.” In an annotation about it in her book, Gregory writes:

Some of the best characters are flawed and unreliable. I needed the panhandlers to trust me…. But I wanted readers to know that I didn’t believe everything they were saying…. You don’t have to aggressively challenge their claims. But alluding to conflicting military allegiances, you can hint that the truth is elusive.

I know that when writing narrative, especially the intimate narratives DeGregory specializes in, there will always be people who won’t talk with you and mysteries that will remain unsolved no matter how long you dig. For example, a story about a child's murder includes a section where many people in the child's life express their guilt and regret over small actions that may or may not have saved the child. She writes about asking the same question of people closest to the child but who declined to talk to her. Rhetorical questions about their roles, along with the simple sentence, “None of them would say what happened,” tells the story these sources would not.

Lessons for beginners and pros

The book is published by the University of Chicago Press, so easy to see as a textbook for journalism classes — and to envy the students in those classes; anyone who aspires to narrative journalism would be fortunate to be exposed early on to DeGregory’s empathetic stories and the exacting details of her approach. But journalists of all levels and experience should find valuable tips.

For each story in the anthology, DeGregory lists how long it took to report and how long to write. She describes how and why it was assigned, and sometimes her reaction to getting that assignment. She doesn’t always welcome each assignment — which in itself is a good lesson for beginning journalists, and a good reminder for experienced pros. But it’s what she does with those less welcomed assignments that’s worth the price of the book.

DeGregory may have resisted writing an anniversary story of a heinous crime, rejected following the journalistic pack to Orlando to report on the Pulse nightclub shooting and snubbed a public relations person’s plea to write about foster children. But how she made each of those stories her own offers the rest of us possibilities for our own unwelcome assignments.

For the crime anniversary, DeGregory dug a little deeper than the many who had already covered the story, revealing the humanity of both a murderer and his victim. For the nightclub shooting, she avoided the journalistic pack and found a unique perspective on a heavily reported event. And by focusing on a single foster child — one with an extraordinarily painful story finally turning toward hope ­— DeGregory wrote the series that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

The table of contents is organized by the core journalistic strategy demonstrated in the featured story, allowing readers to dip into wisdom they find most useful or intriguing. Running in the margins of every story are insights into DeGregory’s reporting and writing process. She reveals the question she asked to get that great quote. She points out wordplay and her thought process while writing those words. Even better, she admits when hunches or pure luck resulted in journalism gold. The result is a little like a Storyboard annotation and a little like having DeGregory herself reading over your shoulder and explaining the techniques behind the magic.

“The Girl in the Window and Other True Tales” satisfied my curiosity about how these richly textured stories were created and offered advice and inspiration to dive into my next narrative journalism project.

* * *

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist based in Vermont.

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Washington Post reporter John Woodrow Cox has spent six years covering stories of gun violence and children, fashioning a beat out of one of America’s most heartbreaking realities.

Yet when he first heard about the shooting last May at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, he was stunned. It had been just 10 years since 20 children and six teachers were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Despite that, and Cox’s deep immersion into a subject, he couldn’t fathom that so many children — 19, along with two teachers — had lost their lives.

The Post asked if he wanted to fly to Uvalde to cover the immediate aftermath of the shooting. He declined.

“I could not be one of the 10,000 reporters on the ground banging on doors, desperately trying to get a quote from one kid,” said Cox, who was in tears upon hearing the final death toll. Instead, he wrote about how survivors of other school shootings were responding to the news, and he began thinking about how his eventual Uvalde coverage would unfold.

One month after the shooting, Cox did fly to Uvalde and ended up spending the summer with survivor Caitlyne Gonzales and her parents. The Posts’s former managing editor, Steven Ginsberg, had encouraged him to travel Uvalde and pour all of his experience covering gun violence into a single story. What resulted was an 8,500-word piece that confronts the stereotype of the plucky survivor while uncovering the ups and downs of trauma and the challenges of recovery.

The story, “An American Girl,” published in The Washington Post on Oct. 24, 2022, is a powerful example of a restorative narrative – stories that show how people and communities are rebuilding in the aftermath of trauma. Rather than sugarcoating hard truths, these narratives address them head on and explore the messy middle between a tragedy and one’s recovery from it.

Showing a fuller picture of trauma survivors

 If you’ve followed the Uvalde coverage closely, you may have seen photos of Caitlyne speaking at school board meetings or delivering a talk to Congress about the need for a ban on assault weapons. She has become, as Cox wrote, Robb Elementary School’s most public survivor: “a voice for her friends who were dead and for those who were alive but too daunted to say anything … a 4-foot-8, 75-pound embodiment of the maroon ‘Uvalde Strong’ flags flying all over Texas.”

Cox used patience and insight to report past these outward displays of resilience and show the inner pain, fear, and struggles that Caitlyne has faced in the tragedy’s aftermath. He portrays Caitlyne not as a fully recovered survivor but as a human being who grapples with strength and sorrow, love and loss. He achieves this through a poignant mix of details, juxtapositions, interviews, and reconstructed scenes he witnessed first-hand.

The juxtapositions he sprinkles throughout are striking. In one part, Cox describes Caitlyne as

 a child who didn’t know how to ride a bike without training wheels but did know about ballistic windows and bulletproof backpacks and the movement to ban assault weapons. Who spent as much time following the Instagram pages of her favorite gun safety champions as she did Bad Bunny’s TikTok account. Who was 10, but seldom acted her age, speaking in public about fear and death with the eloquence of an adult, while in private, enduring flashbacks so vivid that she needed bedtime lullabies meant for toddlers to soothe her.

Later in the piece, Cox shows Caitlyne’s fear of going to sleep by herself. The night of the shooting, she had asked her mother to stay at the foot of her bed. As time passed, she asked her mom to sleep beside her, then face-to-face, breath-to-breath. “Caitlyne needed to know her mother was alive,” Cox told me.

After more than two months of building trust with Caitlyne and her family, Cox gained their permission to install a GoPro and baby monitor in Caitlyne’s room for one night. He wanted to see how she wrestled with trauma behind closed doors, when the world wasn’t watching. Cox recalls sitting in the Gonzales’ kitchen that night as Caitlyne’s parents tried having a few moments to themselves in the living room before going to bed. On the baby monitor, he watched Caitlyne unravel as she waited for her mom to come into her room. Audibly crying, she curled up in the fetal position on her bedroom floor in front of her Barbie Dreamhouse.

In an interview, Cox reflected on how difficult it was to watch this scene unfold. “Here’s this kid who has no ceiling, right? Her potential is just like, unlimited. But this is what she has been reduced to,” Cox told me. “She's the kid who cannot sleep alone, who cannot even be in a dark room alone without her mother for 15 minutes without coming completely undone because of something that she has no control over. She cannot control the way her body is responding to that fear.”

Unveiling the complexities of trauma

Cox’s story is a testament to the complexities of trauma and the unpredictability of its effects.

“A piece like this is important because it shows the broader, longer-term, insidious impacts of trauma,” says trauma psychologist Kevin Becker, who has helped journalists think through restorative narratives. “It helps people understand that the impacts of trauma ripple through many, many aspects of your life, even if you're a child.”

Trauma recovery, he said, is a developmental process – one that unfolds over time with ebbs and flows. Stories that pull back the curtain on this process can generate greater understanding and empathy compared to surface-level stories that show children recovering quickly from tragedy.

“The more accurate a picture people have of what trauma does and what the impacts of trauma are, the more caring we can be, the more understanding we can be and the more trauma-informed we can be as a culture,” said Becker, who founded ORI Consulting, an organization focused on trauma response and recovery. “If all we know is something that looks nice and neat and clean, and we don't hear about all the struggles and the messy middle, then we're really not educated about the impacts of trauma. And for journalists, if you're not able to tell these kinds of stories, then you're probably not telling a completely accurate story.”

There’s a tendency to think that children are more resilient than adults and that they bounce back faster from tragedy. “That’s one of those myths that's out there and it’s really not true,” Becker said. This isn’t to say that children’t aren’t resilient, but when we only focus on their resilience, we miss the opportunity to explore other aspects of their lived experience.

Cox was cognizant of this when reporting and writing about Caitlyne. “I've come to hate the term ‘children are resilient’ because it’s dismissive. It allows adults to not take on the responsibilities that they should,” said Cox, who authored the book “Children Under Fire: An American Crisis.” “We see children being happy and running around and joking around. And people think, Well, they're fine, right? We so desperately want kids to be okay that we will cling to evidence that they are alright. We will seek out that evidence and ignore the rest.”

Making the most of limited time

Though Cox was able to spend the summer with Caitlyne and her family, he normally doesn’t have this much time or access. When on tighter deadlines, he tries to spread his interviews out over at least a two-day period. Showing up on the second day shows children that you’re committed.

“There's a layer of trust that they afford you,” Cox said. “The leap that you'll make from that first conversation to the second is really significant.”

Before interviewing children, he asks their parents or guardians a couple of key questions: Is there anything I shouldn’t say? and Is there anything I need to avoid? He also asks them to describe the types of questions the children are asking.

“The questions they’re asking give you insight into their anxiety and what’s on their mind. Suddenly you’re getting past that initial barrier of ‘I’m fine,’” said Cox, referring to the common response children give when asked how they’re doing. “They aren't going to say, ‘This makes me sad,’ or ‘I feel bad about this.’ But if they're worried about the shooter coming after them, they might be asking about the shooter. If they're worried about the security of the school, they might say, ‘Well, is there going to be a fence? Are there going to be cops there?’”

Cox tells the children he’s interviewing that he’s not an authority figure — and that they can choose whether or not to answer his questions. He also tries to sit on the floor during interviews with children so that he’s not towering over them.

Cox asks questions related to details, scenes and memories, knowing that memories can be windows into a person’s innermost feelings and thoughts. When children start opening up, Cox likes to ask “What happened next?” as a way of showing interest and advancing the storytelling process.

Drawing upon his expertise as a trauma psychologist, Becker suggested some other questions that journalists can consider asking children (or anyone for that matter) in the wake of traumatic events:

• What’s been the hardest part about this? And what has been most surprising? These questions invite people to reflect on how a tragedy has affected them in ways they may not have expected.
• Is there anything positive that has come out of this? Not everybody gets to a point where something positive comes out of a tragedy, Becker said, but it can and does happen for some. Capturing this in the person’s own words is an important part of the reporting and storytelling process.
• How has the tragedy impacted your relationships with those closest to you? Whether we're dealing with trauma as a 10-year-old or 40-year-old, we lean on the people who are closest to us, Becker said. Trauma can shift and shape our relationships in unexpected ways.
• How has the tragedy affected your view of the world? This may seem like a lofty question, but it can reveal a lot about the ways in which trauma changes people.
• What’s been the worst part of this experience? When Becker asks his patients this question, he’s often surprised by the answer. It’s the type of question, he said, that can show how trauma rippled through a person’s life in ways that aren’t apparent to outside observers. And it can help a person open up on their own terms. Giving an interview to a journalist isn’t the same as therapy, Becker said, but it can be therapeutic for people who are struggling.

Transparency as an act of respect

 While reporting “An American Girl,” Cox structured the story in his head, plotting the beginning and ends of sections. He talked at length about the structure with his editor, Lynda Robinson, and together they arrived at a shared vision for the story.

”I write with so much more confidence and authority,” Cox said, “when I feel like somebody who I trust completely has the same vision.”

After he finished writing the story, Cox took Caitlyne’s parents through the story in detail as part of the fact-checking process. He asked them to let him know if anything was wrong or if they feared that any of the details could put Caitlyne in jeopardy or harm her emotionally. He later shared parts with Caitlyne as well.

Cox wanted to make the reporting and storytelling process as transparent as possible, knowing that many people have never been interviewed by the media and don’t know what to expect. Transparency is an important part of cultural competency – and of the understanding that different communities have varying levels of experience with, and trust in, the media. “I think the more people understand what we do,” Cox said, “the easier it is for them to trust us.”

By sharing parts of the story ahead of time, Cox could ensure that Caitlyne and her parents wouldn’t get caught off-guard when reading the published piece. In many ways, it was an act of reciprocal respect.

“(Caitlyne’s parents) were entirely open, entirely exposed, entirely vulnerable,” Cox said. “They gave me this extraordinary access into the most vulnerable moments of their child's life. They trusted me with that, and the least I could do was show them how the process works.”

Cox has kept in touch with Caitlyne and her parents in the months since the story was published and said he plans to continue reporting on her journey.

* * *

Mallary Tenore Tarpley is a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and the associate director of UT’s Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. She’s the author of the forthcoming book, "Slip: Recovery, Sickness & the Space in Between," an examination of the under-discussed complexities of eating disorders and recovery.

The post Challenging the stereotype of Uvalde’s plucky child survivor appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

There has been a small but steady wave of recent stories focused on the plight of women in Afghanistan, who have been stripped of their rights — to jobs, to education, to choosing their wardrobe or having their hair uncovered in public, to having a voice in their lives in public and, often, at home — since U.S. troops left the country and the Taliban reclaimed power last year. The point was made without equivocation in the third paragraph of a story by Bushra Seddique, an Afghan refugee who is an editorial assistant at The Atlantic:

Afghanistan is, once again, the worst place in the world to be a woman.

Seddique was born in 1999; she was a toddler when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. For all the cost and controversy of America’s 20-year war, Seddique said the overthrow of the Taliban in was “the beginning of a luckier time” for girls like her. That contrasted with the lives of their mothers and grandmothers, who spent most of their lives in the “unblessed years.”

Seddique’s next sentence:

Now that the time of unblessing has returned, it has become clear that as we grew up, my generation was witnessing not the beginning of a new future, but an anomalous moment in our country’s sad history.

When I clicked on the Atlantic story, I expected to do a quick scan and move on. But as the story went on, my reading slowed and paid closer attention. Then I went back for a reread. It’s not long — just 29 paragraphs, some fat, some a single line. The approach is direct and transparent, starting with the headline: WHAT AFGHANS WANT THE REST OF THE WORLD TO KNOW. The story spine is built on interviews Seddique did with relatives, friends, former teachers and colleagues back home. The structure is unadorned — two-graf anecdote, the one-sentence story theme, a few grafs of personal introduction, then brief scenes from the interviews — was graced with lines or short clauses that made my breath catch:

A 14-year-old girl who loved school now watches through the window as her younger brother boards the school bus each morning. “Are the Taliban at war with women?” she asks Seddique through tears. A 22-year-old woman teaches a secret school in her basement to as many as 80 teenage girls and wishes she had room for more; the 14-year-old dreams of finding a secret school even it if means getting caught and beaten by the Taliban. Illiterate women joined university professors at a recent protest in Kabul in which women demanded BREAD, WORK, FREEDOM. Seddique’s sister loved colorful clothes, lipstick and eyeliner; all those now languish in her bedroom because women who venture outside the home must wear head-to-toe black “like the whole nation is in mourning.” The return to “zero” for Afghan women, who are “so very tired.”

While Seddique uses the first person for credibility and transparency, she turns this story over to others. Her sadness is apparent but never self-absorbed. It is instructive to read her piece about how she and her youngest sister escaped in the chaos of the U.S. troop pullout a year ago. That story is a pure first-person narrative — the family vote about who would stay and who would go, days of tension on a bus with other escapees, wading through a sewage-infected pond, ambivalence about the U.S., ambivalence about the best ways to fight for her family and country, the growing realization that she had no real choice:

I was a journalist and a woman stuck in a country now ruled by terrorists who hated journalists and women.

In that story, Seddique makes five quick mentions of the dangerous decisions she made to keep her laptop even as the Taliban, and then the Americans, required escaping refugees to jettison everything else. After months in holding camps, she and her sister move in with relatives already in the U.S. and she gets a fellowship with The Atlantic, doing work “the Taliban would never let women and girls do.” She ends her personal journey tale a line that should haunt and inspire all journalists:

I smuggled my laptop past the Taliban and carried it across continents to a free country so I could write this story, so I could tell you this.

That story was published just a month ago. Now Seddique returns by remote to Afghanistan to face what she left behind. She takes us on the ground in women’s lives and dares us to see what she feels. At the close, Seddique gives two grafs over to possible policy solutions involving economic and politics sanctions and human-rights efforts. It is a careful consideration, as clear and unpretentious as the rest of the piece. She makes no mention of a return to war but suggests more funding for secret schools, with a plea that is more a sign than a scream:

In secret, behind closed doors, Afghanistan is still breathing.

I would have suggested stopping the story there. Seddique adds one more paragraph, two short, parallel sentences contrasting the despair of a woman still in Afghanistan with her own dim glimmer of hope. But I might be wrong. And as an editor, I believe the tie goes to the writer.

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