“I could paint this 100 different ways.”

Artist Sarah Yeoman blithely delivered this claim at a watercolor workshop I attended. She was demonstrating small painting studies focused on value and color. Students were crowded around her easel on the back deck of a gift shop and art emporium in the Adirondack town of Indian Lake, New York.

I have been painting with earnest intent for a few years now, but I still manage to get stuck, often, during the process of rendering a scene. I suddenly lose my way, paralyzed with indecision. As I apply paint and water to my paper, the questions knocking around in my brain are many: What should I do next? What does the painting need? What am I trying to accomplish here?

The writer in me recognizes these kinds of questions because I bump up against them in any article, column or essay that I write.

As a professional writer, I could also relate to Sarah’s bold assertion. I have bragged to my partner (who is not a writer) that I could express an idea — a single sentence — in dozens of ways. Indeed, I have contemplated an exercise for students in my writing workshops to take a sentence they have written and rewrite it five different ways.

One aspect of this parallel between writing and painting seems obvious. Of course more experience leads to more ways to tackle something, more tools in the toolbox. By extension, having lots of tools enables you to customize a sentence — or an image — to make a particular impact.

I take workshops from experts to learn new-to-me approaches that I can add to my toolbox. With her 100-ways comment, Sarah was telling me that any of a vast number of next steps could be made to work. That’s interesting, isn’t it? That kind of expansive thinking can be freeing in a way that appeals to me.

Artists Magazine ran a piece on how aspiring artists can get the most out of a workshop. Watercolor painter Mark McDermott gave this advice: “Note that everything you learn is one way to paint, not the way to paint. Seek to understand why the choices are made.”

I love that. When I’m the expert leading a writing workshop, I want students to set aside their worries about spelling, grammar and formulaic structures (paint-by-numbers, anyone?) that they learned in school. More than anything else, I want them to think about what they’re trying to accomplish with their writing.

As for my sentence exercise, I worry it will backfire. Maybe my students, who are seeking PhDs in the sciences, don’t have the experience or flexibility of thinking to write a sentence five different ways. Rather than expanding their toolkit, the activity may end up deflating their confidence. They may want to avoid looking stupid and choose safety over growth. I can relate.

Keep the bigger story goal in mind

It’s a funny thing, this loosening of constraints. It seems like it should be freeing, and yet all those choices and possibilities can also cause less-experienced creators to tighten up. (It may well cause less-experienced writers to turn to AI tools such as ChatGPT.)

I think it’s more about not letting tiny details and trivial rules undermine overarching goals. What are you trying to say with your painting or magazine story or essay? How can you get your viewer or your reader to see something from a new point of view? Of all the ways you might paint this thing or write that thing, what works and what doesn’t?

Those overarching goals can seem awfully vague when you’re starting out. You need tools and techniques, sure, but also lots of practical experience. Both writing and painting are exercises in problem-solving. My learning curve in art, with as many downward dips as upward climbs, reminds me of how tenuous my hold is on this thing I say I want to get better at.

I don’t know how far I’ll get, but I love knowing that others are there. Sarah has been painting for 40 years, and she can paint that scene 100 different ways. I am inspired.

* * *

Jill U. Adams (jilluadams.com) is a freelance science journalist who writes about health, biomedical research, and nature. She’s been spending more time painting in recent years and posts her work on Instagram (@juadams1).

The post 100 ways to paint (or write) the same thing appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

In spring 2020, while some FaceTimed or baked bread or pursued other pandemic hobbies, I bought an electronic drum kit. I watched YouTube to learn some basic rock beats. Before long, I was jamming to “Billie Jean,” “Don’t Stop Believing,” “Africa” and other classics from my youth, drawing encouragement from friends who humored my Facebook videos.

Soon, though, this playful adventure became a guilty distraction. The longform science journalism I do as a freelancer requires a ton of focus. Even before drumming videos filled my feeds, it was easy for hours to vanish as I sifted my inbox, typed to-do lists, scrolled social media and indulged in all manner of pseudo-work before realizing in a 4 o’clock panic that I hadn’t made a dent in the feature that was due in a few days. It was becoming a familiar narrative: In desperation I’d request an extension, work feverishly on scant sleep, then bask in a moment of publication-day pride while scolding myself for my lack of discipline.

I felt trapped in these cycles of shame and relief for years, but managed to stay on the treadmill, propelled by the guise of productivity. At some point a series of writing deadlines kept me away from the drum kit for almost a year. It felt sad to neglect my new, fast friend.

Musical rhythms and the writer’s voice

When I hear music, what speaks most powerfully is not words or melodies but rhythm. Making summer mix tapes as a teen in the pre-CD 1980s, I hardly knew lyrics or artist names but recognized a song within seconds by its vibe — a mysterious quality akin to the tone and emotional texture of a story created by the writer’s voice. Even as an Asian-American kid who dutifully trained on classical piano and violin before dabbling with guitar, I always felt a pull toward percussion.

The same was true of physical exercise. The forms that roused my sedentary body to any serious degree were rowing and running — also rhythmic in nature, and comfortably monotonous. Activities requiring grace and coordination, such as dance or aerobics, were a no-go. So it was a stretch to envision all four of my limbs moving skillfully at the drum set at the same time.

Then a silly thing helped nudge my drumming dream toward reality: I learned that my friend’s middle schooler was earning physical education credit by playing drums at home during the COVID shutdown. Boy, would I rather burn calories hitting drums than dragging myself out for a morning run!

In spring 2023, I emailed a local drummer and started weekly lessons. By then, newbie giddiness had given way to greater awareness of the challenge. In the early days I’d just pick up the drum sticks and start banging, delighted by whatever I could play, but now I focused more on what I couldn’t do. When my limbs felt slow or jerky, I doubled down on technique, lured to YouTube hacks such as “3 ways to instantly improve your groove” or “Fix your weak drumming hand in 22 days.” If I had a story draft due, I abstained from the drum set but would still tap rudiments on my rubber practice pad for hours at a time. Once the house reeked of smoke after I snuck out of the kitchen and got carried away trying a new technique, neglecting a pot of oatmeal on the stove.

I eventually ventured into jazz — in part to connect with my teen son and husband, who play trombone and trumpet, but also because my drum teacher, who coaches the jazz bands at our local schools, could help demystify this elusive music genre.

The first time I remember hearing live jazz was around the year 2000, when my husband and I watched tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter perform at Berklee College of Music in Boston. We also heard Joe Henderson, another tenor great, at Symphony Hall. I was jazz-illiterate then, and they were unknowns to me. At their shows, I wondered how each could belt out a solo on the fly while staying in tune with everybody else, knowing how long to play and who would go next and when the whole song was supposed to end. For someone accustomed to reading music note-for-note from printed pages, jazz was a foreign language.

Over time, I’ve come to think of classical music as a script and jazz as a dialogue. In jazz combos (small ensembles), musicians take turns soloing, while the drummer accompanies each improvisational segment to support and shape the unfolding story.

Shaking off performance jitters

Earlier this spring, journalism deadlines pushed me to the edge of burnout. I made a difficult decision to step off the treadmill for a while and let myself do more jazz drumming. Now I’m realizing that playing jazz might actually help my writing process.

I’ve struggled with drafting features, I think, because a form of performance anxiety creeps in. I obsessively review my notes, get a snack, re-listen to interviews, go for a walk, email sources with follow-up questions and intersperse some of the pseudo-work leading to that 4 p.m. panic.

Many writers do a “shitty first draft,” a barebones sketch that they rework and expand over time. This approach has never worked for me.

Maybe it’s because I haven’t been willing to try.

Playing jazz has made me dare to try.

It’s a little terrifying. A huge challenge with learning a musical instrument as an adult is that, unlike kids — who get to play in school bands while still learning — adults in music ensembles are supposed to know what they’re doing. At least that’s been my fear and assumption.

Several recent experiences helped relax those drumming nerves. One took place in mid-July at a weeklong jazz camp, where I’d assured myself I would not have to play any solos. Drum solos are less common than for other instruments; I assumed those that did happen were reserved for more experienced musicians (or at least braver ones). My assumption was wrong. Each member of our combo played a solo in most songs. Rather than something reserved for rare moments of inspiration, improv was a discipline — as though a mic got passed and you had to find something to say.

After several days, it actually became fun to throw down a solo on the spot and be surprised by what came out.

The second experience came when my son volunteered me as a last-minute sub to play live jazz at his workplace happy hour. There was no set list. Songs were chosen on the fly, and most were unfamiliar to me. But the wine-sipping attendees looked happy, the band had fun, and I learned I can do a “shitty first draft” — which, for a novice drummer, means laying down a groove and keeping it steady. Purely functional, nothing fancy.

Dependable timekeeping is the drummer’s first responsibility, artistry second. Same for writing: clarity first, then flair and finesse.

On a morning walk the next day, I told a friend about the impromptu jazz gig. I also said I was having a hard time writing a 20-minute talk for an upcoming conference. She saw, in my fretting and procrastination, the same sort of performance anxiety that plagues my writing. As we parted, she issued an order: “Write a five-minute version of that talk. Don’t comb through notes or email anyone for more info; just go with your gut and show me the draft by noon.” That gave me 90 minutes — not enough time to hem and haw. Like the drum solos at camp, I could not obsess about what I didn’t yet know. I just had had to trust my instincts about what I did know.

I sent a “jazz draft” to my friend a minute before deadline, based on improved key points for my talk.

Jazz lessons for writers

In similar fashion, I made myself draft and send this essay in just a few days, so that I would not talk myself out of doing it. A little clean-up, aka editing and self-editing, came later.

Writing will always be challenging for me, but I’m hoping that “jazz drafts” will continue to instill the process with more confidence, and even some riffs of joy.

Here are some tips, inspired by my jazz journey, for making a first story draft (or other large, complicated task) less daunting:

• Incremental. Set a small, specific goal.
• Immediate. Give yourself an imminent deadline so you don’t have time to wonder or second-guess or calculate whether you can pull it off.
• Accountable. Enlist a friend or coworker to hold you accountable.
• Conversation. Real-time dialogue is a form of improv! When you don’t have someone on hand to bounce your ideas off, read your draft aloud and listen to yourself. It’s amazing how quickly rough spots jump out when spoken rather than scrolled.
• Habitual. Schedule such conversations on a regular basis, for built-in accountability without requiring “initiation” energy.

* * *

Esther Wei-Yun Landhuis (@elandhuis) is a California-based science journalist who covers biomedicine at all stages — lab discoveries, clinical trials, biotech, healthcare and its intersections with law and business.

The post Bang that keyboard and jazz up your writing appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

In a few days I am going to start hauling books from the front hallway out into the front yard for a giant give-away. Neighbors will come, and friends, and folks I don’t know, and I hope everyone finds something they like and all the books find new homes.

How many books? I don’t know. Hundreds. What kinds? All kinds. Over the past few weeks I packed ten cartons to give, and then I ran out of boxes and started piling books on top of the radiator. It now holds six stacks, each about two feet high, and there are more piles on the floor.

This is the third time I’ve done a serious cull of my books. The first time was in 2014. I’d been a book review editor for the Minneapolis StarTribune for five years by then, and books were coming into the house at a furious clip. The shelves were jammed. The dining room table was covered. So, too, the bedside table, the bedroom floor, the bedroom radiator, my desk, my other desk and the dining room floor.

Still, getting rid of any books seemed impossible. I couldn’t find any that needed to go. When I picked up a book I hadn’t read, I wanted to read it; if it was a book I’d read, I wanted to keep it. Books are the diary of my life; when I scan a shelf, I see pieces of my past in the spines.

I did try. But when I opened dusty books, I found long-forgotten ephemera — photographs, letters, bookmarks from bookstores long since closed. Some books had been gifts, signed by the giver. Some books had been my father’s, signed by him.

In the end, I got rid of the paperbacks. That felt easy. The print was small, the pages were brittle, the spines had lost their glue. This bought me time; paperbacks took up three shelves, which I immediately filled with books from the table and the floor.

The second cull, during COVID, was easier. This time I took every book off the shelf, one at a time, and studied it. Had I read it? If not, why not? If so, would I read it again? I thought in terms of moving, even though we had no plans to go anywhere: Would I want to haul this book to a different house?

That year I filled more than a dozen cartons and held my first big Front Yard Give-Away. It was a delight. Friends I hadn’t seen since before lockdown showed up, and even though the books were free, some people left gifts on my front step: flowers, candy, homemade jam.

Most of the books disappeared. Those that didn’t I donated to libraries (both Little Free and public).

Now it is four years later, and the books have somehow reproduced. This time, culling is harder. During the first two clean-outs I cut to the bone. This time I am looking critically at the bone itself. I make a plan:

1. Get rid of duplicates. This is not easy, because the books I have in duplicate are books I love, such as Mary McCarthy’s “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,” a wonderful memoir that is also an exercise in how flawed memory can be. I teach memoir writing, so it’s a good book to have on hand. But do I really need three copies?
2. Do not keep every book an author has written. Calvin Trillin takes up more than a shelf. So do John McPhee and Anne Tyler. Maybe I should just keep their best work and let the others go. (Maybe.)
3. Say goodbye to pleasant novels — books that I enjoyed but will not read again.
4. Don’t be afraid to cull books I haven’t yet read. If I haven’t read it by now, perhaps I never will.
5. Reconsider those thick biographies. Yes, I am interested in Ulysses S. Grant and Barbara Pym, but maybe not interested enough. But be careful. I thought the same of Richard Holbrooke and gave away George Packer’s delightful “Our Man” in the Purge of 2020 — then had to buy it again when I needed it for a talk.
6. Coffee table books! Beautiful to look at, gorgeous to possess, but will I ever actually read them? Swallow hard, and be ruthless. The folks who attend the give-away will be thrilled to find these.

Of course I am violating this plan freely. I am keeping multiple copies of B.J. Chute’s 1956 novel “Greenwillow;” it’s a soothing, peaceful book that I send to friends who are going through a hard time. I need to have a good supply. I am keeping both editions of Dermot Healy’s “Long Time No See” because I love that book; the U.S. edition and the U.K. edition are different, and both are beautiful. And I am keeping all of the Anne Tylers; I re-read them during lockdown, and who knows when there might be another pandemic?

Now I see that the forecast for this weekend calls for rain, so the book giveaway might have to wait. I look at the stacks in the hallway, and I find myself wanting them to be gone. They are no longer books, but baggage. That’s a good thing.

I spy gaps on the shelves. I can’t remember what used to be there, and that, too, is a good thing. Now I can think not of what is gone, but of what is yet to come.

* * *

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.

The post All those books? The painful joy of letting go appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

One day in the very late 1960s, my father brought home a copy of Esquire magazine. Out popped a card offering an annual subscription for, I believe, $1.99. He filled it out and mailed it in, and subsequently the magazine, which was just a little past its New Journalism heyday, arrived every month in the mailbox of our home in New Rochelle, New York.

When the year was over, my father decided not to renew. But the magazine kept coming, possibly because its bean-counters judged that keeping the rate base up, even to the point of giving the product away for free, was worth it in terms of advertising revenues. Teenage me read the magazine not word for word, but scattershot: Malcolm Muggeridge on books, Dwight Macdonald on movies, Robert Alan Aurthur’s column “Hanging Out,” Rex Reed’s movie star profiles, occasional voices from the magazine’s past like Helen Lawrenson or George Frazier, and certainly the annual Dubious Achievement Awards and the Gorge Lois covers, including Andy Warhol drowning in a giant can of Campbell’s tomato soup and a smiling William Calley hugging a quartet of cute Vietnamese children.

Esquire stopped arriving after two years or three years. But that was long enough for me to absorb its ethos, similar to (though somewhat hipper than) what I was getting from a mix of newspapers and magazines that came into the house and were, without my realizing it, giving me a sense of what it was possible to do on a page. At the top of that list was The New York Times, which arrived every morning and where I would turn first (on his appointed days) to Russell Baker’s column, which offered a take on politics and other matters that was both funny and serious (but never solemn, to use Baker’s classic distinction). I’d read Robert Lipsyte on the sports page, John Leonard on books, Vincent Canby on movies, Craig Claiborne on food, and features by Charlotte Curtis and Judy Klemesrud (loved that byline). Second was The New Yorker, my mother’s Bible, where naturally I started with the cartoons and the newsbreaks like “Constabulary Notes from All Over” but grew to appreciate writers like Calvin Trillin, John McPhee, Pauline Kael, John Updike and Whitney Balliett. Then throw in in the New York Post, which my father occasionally brought home and where I read wise-guy “chipmunk” sports writers like Phil Pepe, Maury Allen and Larry Merchant; the even-wiser-guy Village Voice, which I picked up on my own forays into the city; Sports Illustrated and Sport magazines, which I intermittently subscribed to; and, needless to say, Mad magazine.

This is a story I’ve always told myself, that as writer I was formed by osmosis, not especially consciously. But recently, perhaps because I’ve reached the stage of life where taking stock seems called for, I’ve had an inclination to flesh out that story. And, thanks to Google’s hoovering up of most of most of what has ever been published, plus the existence of proprietary archives from Esquire, the Times, the New Yorker and other publications, I’ve been able to add specifics to the narrative: to track down particular articles, passages  or even sentences that had an impact.

Archived treasure

Just the other day, someone mentioned something about Richard Brautigan on Facebook, and I flashed back to a line in a Brautigan parody I had read in The New Yorker at least five decades ago. I had thought it was written by Donald Barthelme, probably because his 1973 spoof of Cosmopolitan ads had made such an impression on me.  But some time with Google and New Yorker digital archives revealed that the piece was by pre-“Prairie Home Companion” Garrison Keillor. It appeared in the issue of March 18, 1972, and here’s how it started:

The bit I remembered was, “Some of his stories are no longer than this.” Now, at the time I hadn’t read Brautigan, and I still haven’t. But something about the Keillor line instructed me as to effects it’s possible for a writer to achieve.

A couple of months ago, I saw Calvin Trillin speak on his book tour for “The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press.” I pondered when it was that I became a Trillin fanboy for life, and after rooting around a while found what I think of the Rosetta Stone. It’s the opening of a New Yorker article from July 3, 1971. (Trillin is not only a connoisseur but a perpetrator of great ledes.)

Larry Goldberg, the pizza baron, is slim, but I still think of him as Fats Goldberg. So does he. Although he has ‘been down,’ as he puts it, for twelve years, after twenty-five years of exceptional fatness, he sees himself not as a man who weighs one hundred and sixty pounds but as a man who is constantly in danger of weighing three hundred twenty. “Inside, I’m still a fat man,” he sometimes says. When Fats and I were boys in Kansas City, he was already renowned for his corpulence—though I can’t say I was ever approached about posing for Refugee Relief ads in those days myself. During college, when Fats weighed three hundred pounds and was known to some as Three Cases Goldberg, I occasionally saw him at the University of Missouri, where he was one of a number of storied eaters. According to one tale, when a restaurant near the campus instituted a policy of giving customers all they wanted to eat on Sunday nights for a dollar thirty-five, a fraternity brother of Fats’ called Hog Silverman, who weighed less than two and a half cases, went over one Sunday night and put it out of business.

A little later there’s this quintessentially Trillinesque sentence, about the first time he saw Goldberg after college:

It was a Sunday morning, and I was at Ratner’s, on Second Avenue. I was having eggs scrambled with lox and onions, and I was glancing around constantly, as I tend to do in Ratner’s, to see if some other table was being given a roll basket with more of my favorite kind of onion rolls than our roll basket had.

Given the well-known vicissitudes of memory, it’s not surprising that sometimes I get these passages wrong. I was sure I had read a bit by Dan Jenkins in Sports Illustrated where he was making fun of sports-writing cliches and had a list to the effect of, “Jack Nicklaus, the Golden Bear; Lee Trevino, the Merry Mex; and Arnold Palmer, comma” — the idea being that Palmer was so mighty, no epithet would suffice. For years I tried to find it with no success. Then I Googled “Jack Nicklaus comma” and was directed to SI of September 13, 1976, where Jenkins had this lede:

Jack Nicklaus, comma. Having a bad year by his own standards, comma. Bored when there isn’t a major championship on the line, comma. Disinterested in money earnings, comma. Well, there’s only one thing wrong with all of that. How do you explain the fact that every time they think up a golf tournament of special significance, Nicklaus goes out and hammers everyone so deeply into the bunkers that they think they must be living in a tent in the Sahara?

And speaking of Sports Illustrated, one of my favorite quotes of all time appeared in the issue of April 21, 1969. Curry Kirkpatrick was profiling a young golfer named Bruce Fleisher and reported his answer when someone asked him why he went to Miami-Dade Junior College: “Because I’m dumb and the weather is hot.” (I actually streamlined that one in my memory as “Because it’s hot and I’m dumb.”)

Revisiting early influences

Sometimes my efforts lead to naught. Probably in the late ‘60s, the New Yorker’s television writer, Michael Arlen, had a set piece about a Saturday afternoon so dreary that the most interesting thing on TV was a professional hockey game. It was probably the starkest evocation of ennui I’ve ever read, but the search capabilities of the magazine’s archives are so quirky that I haven’t been able to find it.

Here are some of the other influential lines, passages, or whole pieces I’ve recently tracked down:

Writing about Count Basie’s minimalistic piano playing in the New Yorker of April 7, 1975, Balliett made an analogy that opened my eyes to a thing that criticism could do:

What Hemingway had done for American prose Basie was doing for American music.

On the other hand, Balliett taught me that I did not want to be haughtily dismissive, the way he was in 1971 when he wrote:

There is no need to worry about (Dave) Brubeck anymore. He is what he is — a jovial amateur pianist who happened along at the right time with the right music and make a million.

It kind of blew my mind that the Voice could print a profile of a typeface, to wit, Helvetica, in 1976. And Molly Haskell, writing about the 1964 Howard Hawks film “Man’s Favorite Sport” in 1971, was my introduction to the auteur theory idea that even in an ostensibly witless Rock Hudson sex farce, there was more going on than met the eye:

Hudson is a virgin, who has written a ‘How to’ book on sex while harboring a deep, fastidious horror of it. His masculinity is a lie.

Meanwhile, costar Paula Prentiss:

…must take the initiative in Hudson’s sexual initiation, for which the fishing exploit is metaphor. Fish are phallic symbols, of course, and there is even a scene in which a loose fish thrashes around inside Hudson’s pants, causing him to jump and jerk uncontrollably.

John McPhee’s two-part article about a tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, “Levels of the Game,” appeared in The New Yorker in June 1969. McPhee’s description of Ashe’s backhand showed me something about precision and observation (and provided an aspirational template for my own one-handed backhand, a lifetime work in progress).

Ashe loves the movement of the backhand, because the follow-through does not cramp the arm into the body but does just the opposite-opens both arms wide and high, so that the stroke ends in the stance of the Winged Victory.

Later he quotes Ashe about the stroke:

…you fling your arms away from your body and you wind up in a position that looks as if you’re calling for help, both arms in the air.

And, the kicker (spoiler alert), when Ashe hits a backhand to win the match, is a callback:

When the stroke is finished, he is standing on his toes, his arms flung open, wide, and high.

In August, 1972, right after the Republican National Convention, my favorite columnist, Russell Baker, brilliantly appropriated my favorite novel. What could be better? Here’s how Baker’s Times piece started:

My name’s Huckleberry Dick. You ain’t heard of me less’n you watched a TV show called the Republican National Love-In. That show was made by Mr. Walter Cronkite and Mr. John Chancellor and Mr. Howard Smith and lots of other smart TV people, and mostly they told the truth, ‘cepn for leavin’ out a lot of the more disgustin’ scenes of crowds of love‐crazed Republicans a‐flingin’ themselves on me and a‐lickin’ my hands on account of my havin’ done so much to make the country a fit place to love in again.

In June 1969, Rust Hills published a piece in Esquire that was accurately titled “How to Do Four Dumb Tricks with a Package of Camels” and that started this way:

Another reason for smoking Camels, besides because they satisfy, never change, are available most everywhere, are romantically-dangerously unfiltered, and taste best, is that there are four dumb tricks you can do with the package that amuse children and other simpleminded, amiable people.

So much of that screams David Letterman — the air-quotey phrase “they satisfy,” the idea of doing dumb tricks, even the word “dumb” — that I am convinced he read it in Indiana and it made even more of an impression on him than it did on me.

The funniest and cleverest thing I’ve ever read remains “Albert Brooks’ Famous Schools for Comedians,” published in Esquire in February 1971. It changed my life.

Hearing your own voice

Later in 1971, I showed up in college, with the vague idea I wanted to be a writer. I took a couple of fiction-writing classes and didn’t produce anything very good. I went out for the school newspaper and wrote a few articles, including an interview with Robert Strauss, the head of the Democratic Party, and an account of a speech by the governor of Puerto Rico. I realized that hard news wasn’t for me either.

Then some people started a monthly magazine associated with the newspaper. My roommate was one of the people and one day I tagged along with him to a meeting. I left the meeting having been appointed Road Trips Editor of the magazine. In that role I assigned travel stories and wrote some of my own. The first one appeared on May 1, 1975. I know that because, sure enough, my complete college output is online, including the Robert Strauss interview.

This first Road Trips story was about going to the New York Yankees’ home opener.  I start out writing a bit about my history as a Yankee fan, then talked about arriving at the game:

Our seats today, are, again, in the mezzanine. My father, a champion of the middle way, always brought me to this sheltered cove, and it is like home.

“Sheltered cove” is a bit much. But that line about “champion of the middle way” and etymologically linking it to the mezzanine. Yup, that’s me. I didn’t realize at the time — I didn’t realize much at the time — but all that reading had borne fruit. I had a voice.

* * *

Ben Yagoda is the author or editor of fourteen books, including “About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made: and “Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English,: which will be published in September 2024. His podcast is “The Lives They’re Living.” 

The post Early influencers in a writing life appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is a share from our friends at The Poynter Institute, with gratitude.

All good writers play with words, even when they write about grave matters. The device that makes such word play the most visible is the pun.

My first sentence contains an allusion to a famous poem by Dylan Thomas. In “Do not go gentle into that good night,” he begs his dying father to rebel against his mortality. Along the way, the poet refers to “Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight.”

Given the gravity of the poem, “grave” is not a double-entendre that makes me laugh, or even smile, but it touches me in a hopeful way.

Whoever first said that the pun was the lowest form of humor had never watched the farting scene around the campfire in the Mel Brooks movie “Blazing Saddles.”

I am old enough to remember watching Abbott and Costello on television, the boys reprising comic sketches that could be traced back to burlesque and vaudeville. How sweet the outrage of Lou when Bud tries to explain a sure winner at the racetrack. The horse was a “mudder” who always eats his “fodder.” Lou, of course, hears “mother” and “father,” and sees the whole business as equine cannibalism.

As I type that scene out, I am laughing again.

Low-brow humor or clever creativity?

But let’s climb the cultural ladder to what I feel is the greatest word play of all time. The writer? Shakespeare, of course. (I am happy to serve as his hype man, as if he needed one.)

The word play comes from the lips of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. It is not clear whether the multiple meanings are intended in the context of the action of the play, but they are clearly available to an audience of readers.

Early in the play, Hamlet is visited by the ghost of his father, who shares with his son the unthinkable: That he was murdered by his brother, who now sits on the throne and beds Hamlet’s mother.  Murder, fratricide, regicide, incest; Freud could have a field day with this story – and did.

The key moment occurs in Act I, Scene V. After the ghost’s recitation of the horrible crimes of his brother, his final words to Hamlet are “Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.”

To which Hamlet responds: “Remember thee! / Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat/ In this distracted globe.”

I get chills re-reading that line, a stimulant for the brain as strong as the most sophisticated puzzle. Four words collide with multiple meanings: memory, seat, distracted, globe.

1. The actor may point to his head, the round globe, and the seat of all memories – including his memorized lines. Hamlet is distracted by the experience of so many crimes and his confusion about what he must do next.
2. The Globe is the name of the theater. The groundlings near the stage may be standing, but there are plenty of seats where the audience can be entertained to distraction from the real world.
3. The globe is the entire world.  “All the world’s a stage,” is the first line of a famous soliloquy in “As You Like It,” an invitation to consider the many roles we play as human beings in our lifetime. But, in the medieval tradition of theater, the stage was often constructed to represent all the world and beyond. The higher stage could represent the heavens, the lower stage an entrance to hell, often full of comic devils. In between, where most of the action occurred, was Middle Earth.

A career launched by word play

If I have just described the greatest pun of all time, I am about to reveal the second.  It was written by me and — no kidding — it launched my career.

It was 50 years ago this August when I received my Ph.D. in English from Stony Brook University on Long Island.  I typed out 100 job letters, got four interviews and one offer. It came from a school I had never heard of, AUM, a branch campus of Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama.

It was a bit of a culture shock driving our old Mustang from New York to Alabama, but it allowed me to achieve escape velocity from the parochialism of the city so great they had to name it twice: New York, New York.

As a New York Yankee fan, I was used to hearing the mellifluous voices of those famous game announcers, Mel Allen and Red Barber. Their Southern lyricism made the games more relaxed and more exciting at the same time.

But when I turned on the local television news in Alabama, I was surprised that all the news anchors and reporters sounded as if they were from Middle America. It was OK for the weather men and women and for the sports guys to speak in a Southern dialect, but not the “serious” voices.

I came to look at this trend as a form of language prejudice, a self-loathing that affects folks of all classes and races in the region. It was as if they were saying to the audience: don’t worry, friends, we ain’t gonna make you listen to no rednecks or hillbillies.

I began to study dialect and, with the help of a local newspaper editor, Ray Jenkins, wrote a column. I remember writing it as if it were yesterday. I can see myself sitting on a blue metal chair at a makeshift desk in our little rented apartment. I was almost done but with a strong feeling that I was missing the most important element. In what I now think of as a “conceptual scoop,” I had to give this tendency, this malaise, this syndrome a name.

“It’s like a disease,” I thought. Immediately my mind traveled back to my college days where a particular teacher bore the unfortunate nickname “The Disease.” That’s because his real last name was Jurgalitis.

Now I am staring up into space, my brain clicking a verbal inventory:

Jurgalitis, Appendicitis, Tonsilitis, Bronchitis….It appeared as if written by an unseen hand on the wall above my desk: Cronkitis. The illness of wanting to sound like the great Walter Cronkite.

Before long, the story appeared on the op-ed page of The New York Times, with the title “Infectious Cronkitis.” It was reprinted around the country. It got me an interview on the Today show, after which the great Barbara Walters huffed her disagreement with this kid who wore a leisure suit and flowered shirt more appropriate for a disco.

Layered language

During my three years in Montgomery, I published several newspaper articles, including two more op-ed pieces in the Times.

On a visit back to New York, I stopped at The Times and was greeted by the two opinion editors who had accepted my stuff. Charlotte Curtis was quite interested in my journey, physical and cultural, from North to South, especially at a time when Jimmy Carter was about to be elected president.

Howard Goldberg, an elegant man who would become an influential writer about wine, was focused on my first offering. “It was a good column,” he said, “but a great title. Cronkitis. A pun in two languages!”

A pun in two languages. I was speechless. Fortunately, he turned to Charlotte and explained that the word ‘krankheit’ was the German and Yiddish word for disease. He knew that back in days of vaudeville, the comic doctor would always be a quack introduced as “Dr. Krankheit.”

Doctor Disease.

I learned a lot from that moment. I learned that creativity is its own reward, and that the Muses can deliver more than you asked for. But you still have to ask.

If you are a writer — or any human being — feel free to take credit for things that you did not intend, because — you already know this — you will be blamed countless times for things you did not intend.

That pun got me invited to spend a year at the St. Petersburg Times working as a writing coach, a year that has turned into 47 years, during which I have written or edited 20 books, in which you can find the occasional pun.

But I swear, as long as memory holds a seat in this distracted globe, I will continue to take credit for the second greatest pun in the history of the English language.

Three tips for punsters

1. Avoid the obvious, what I call “first level-creativity.” You know, the headline that says: “This movie is for the birds.” You are better off writing it straight.
2. Keep a file where you save interesting phrases and aphorisms. You don’t need to steal them because you can quote them, as when Oscar Wilde opined that “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”
3. Avoid most cliches (you are allowed one now and then), but you can often get something fresh by tweaking a familiar phrase. Dorothy Parker was especially good at this: “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone”; or “One more drink and I’ll be under the host” (not the table! My mom often quotes her here: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” to which I respond, with respect: “Girls seldom take passes from men who pass gasses.”
   
   * * *Roy Peter Clark teaches writing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and is the author of best-selling books on writing. His latest, now in paperback, is “Tell It Like It Is: A Guide to Clear and Honest Writing,” published by Little, Brown.

The post The power of the pun, from Shakespeare to Walter Cronkite to Roy Peter Clark appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Much of my shaping as a journalist traces back 25 years, when I covered a deadly fire in Sweden. But it wasn’t until I returned to the scene a quarter-century later that I realized how the original story lingers in my mind — and in my body.

* * *

The rocky hulk of Ramberget rises 282 feet (87 meters) from the island of Hisingen in Sweden, providing a stunning view of the town of Gothenburg below. On a September day in 2023 I was seated on a bench atop Ramberget, doing an interview. It was a chilly, windy day; the drizzle smeared my notes. But I hardly noticed. Nor did the man sitting next to me.

Rozbeh Aslanian was 44 when we talked last fall. But in the story he told, he was 19. That’s when he survived a devastating fire at a teenage disco in Gothenburg, only a mile from where we were sitting. Four hundred young people were at the party, and 63 of them died in the fire. One of them was Aslanian’s best friend.

All these years later, Aslanian remained tormented by survivor’s guilt. Only minutes before the dance floor exploded in flames, his friend had said he wanted to leave — but Rozbeh convinced him to stay. “It was my secret,” he told me. “But it became a poison eating me up from within.”

After years of trying to drown his guilt in alcohol, women and work, Rozbeh Asalanian decided to end his life. First, he had to do one last thing: Tell his best friends’ parents the truth about that night.

Now he described how he was standing in the parents’ kitchen, telling them that he was responsible for their son’s death. He braced for shouts and screams in response. Instead, the mother embraced him and whispered in his ear: You didn’t start the fire. Remember that. You didn’t start the fire. It wasn’t you who killed him. You didn’t start the fire.

As Aslanian remembered that moment, he broke down. So did I. For a while I just held his hand. We sat, crying, in silence. Then he gathered himself and told the rest of his story.

‘… not about you.’

I have been a reporter for decades, and this is the first time I cried during an interview. Crying is something I always tell younger reporters not to do, reminding them: It is about the story, not about you. You can cry when you get home. Or after the interview when you transcribe your notes. It’s not that I don’t get moved by the stories I hear and the people I meet. But I pride myself on acting professionally, which always had meant keeping my own emotions in check.

Not this time. The tears ran down my cheeks and kept coming. I felt ashamed and apologized. But Aslanian just said, “I understand. You were there, too.”

He was right. Because 25 years ago I was there — not inside the gutted disco, but right outside.

It was the fall of 1998, I was an intern at the Danish national newspaper Berlingske. Late one night I was jolted awake by a phone call from a senior editor: “Get on a plane to Göteborg in Sweden, immediately.” I was told to report directly from the site. A few hours later I stood in front of the still-smoking building. The lights of firetrucks and police cars flashed around me. Dead bodies were piling up and distraught teens were gathering at the edge of the parking lot, trying to find out if their friends were dead or alive. I watched the ambulances leaving, some with survivors and some with dead bodies. The scent of the fire lingered in my hair for days.

The investigation determined that the fire was set by four teenage boys who hadn’t been admitted to the party. The young offenders were sentenced to three, six and eight years in prison. Four months later, I returned to Gothenberg and spoke with families, friends and first responders, interviews I captured in a longform narrative that families, a community and a country still smoldering with grief.

Exposure to trauma

In many ways the event set the path to my work as a journalist. I learned how important it is to report not only on tragic events, but also on the aftermath — on the human anguish and sometimes clarity that arise as people work through unthinkable levels of pain. Returning to the epicenter of tragedy gives one the opportunity to tell stories crucial both to victims and readers.

Fast forward to last summer, when I was lucky to be appointed as an Ochberg Fellow at The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University. Each summer The Dart Center brings together a group of journalists for an intensive fellowship about how to report on traumatic events.

Many of us may think that only journalists in the field to cover war or major natural disasters are exposed to trauma. But research by Elena Newman, Ph.D. and professor of Psychology at University of Tulsa and Research Director of The Dart Center, suggest, that between 80 and 100% of journalists have been exposed to trauma through their work.

In my own career, I have immersed myself in stories about death and dying; I have witnessed a homicide autopsy, written a book about femicide and talked to people about suicide, rape and terminal diseases. Yet I never thought of myself as journalist who covered trauma, and certainly not as one who was affected by it.

At The Dart Center, I came to a much broader understanding of the field and learned a long list of new tools about approaching and interviewing sources who experienced trauma. I also came away with important knowledge about taking care of myself, before, during and after such reporting. I learned that self-care is a necessary part of your daily routine if you want to do this work without burning out.

Listening to and caring for yourself

After my fellowship, I returned to Sweden where I reconnected with some of the people I had met 25 years earlier: a mother who lost her daughter, a priest who opened his church to the grieving public, a fireman who tried to rescue youngsters from the fire — and the survivor, Rozbeh Aslanian. This time, I applied the lessons I had learned at Dart. The resulting story was published in Politiken on October 29, 2023 – exactly 25 years after the fire broke out. It is an immersion into how those involved dealt with the trauma back then, and how it has shaped their lives since. (Editor’s note: The link is to an English translation.)

It also taught me to pay attention to my own emotions. Bearing witness to catastrophe, fear, pain and loss lingers in your body. And after my experience with Rozbeh Asalanian, breaking down in tears at the top of that mountain above Gothenburg, I remembered the words of one of the professionals teaching at the fellowship. Dr. Kate Porterfield is a consulting psychologist at the Bellevue Program for Survivors of Torture. She told us how our body is wired to respond physically, psychologically and socially when we are under threat. And she also told us to stop and listen to it: “Your body will communicate with you. It will tell you what you need or needed to survive.”

So I listened to my body. And I realized that my reaction when interviewing Aslanian was not unprofessional or humiliating. I cried because I felt empathy with him for having carried a quarter-century of guilt. And for finally letting it go. But because, for once, I was part of the story. I was there that night, and the experience was lodged in my body.

I wish the same self-care for you. Here are some take-aways from my time at The Dart Center:

• Trauma journalism is not limited to wars and natural disaster. Being a journalist involves being exposed to numerous traumatic events, even on a daily beat covering local news: interviewing people who have lost relatives, covering a shooting or a car crash and talking to victims of violent assault. Journalists are craftsmen and trauma is part of the raw material we work with.
• Stop and listen. If you react during or after covering something traumatic or listening to account of trauma, pay attention and attend to it. Your body keeps a score, as the psychologist and author Dr. Bessel van der Kolk puts it. Reactions to reporting a difficult story can be physical, psychological and social. Notice whether you feel unusually tired, forgetful, irritable, are avoiding working on your story or avoiding the company of others.
• Don’t try to toughen up. The hardliner reporter who possesses a special psychological immunity is a cliché. We are human; exposure to trauma has an impact. Research shows that we undergo many of the same working conditions as other first responders: Doctors, emergency workers, police and firefighters. We should treat ourselves accordingly and learn from them.
• Practice self-care. After covering a stressful event you might feel like winding down with Netflix, comfort food and a glass of wine. But you may also consider other types of self-care on a daily basis that will help you keep you fit for the next event. List of suggestions: Yoga, mindfulness, climbing, running, biking or any other kind of physical activity; keeping an appreciation diary; spending time in nature, spending time with friends and family, or simply just taking time off after difficult assignments.
• There is no fixed guideline. Alhough there is research to lead the way, no fixed map shows you exactly how to report and react when covering trauma. We are all human and all different; our experiences and boundaries differ, too.

* * *

Line Vaaben is a writer and editor for Politiken, the largest newspaper in Denmark. Her work has been published in several Danish textbooks, and she teaches narrative and longform journalism to students and professionals.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Thomas Gibbons-Neff served with the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan; he now writes for The New York Times, covering the war in Ukraine. Karl Marlantes served with the U.S. Marines in Vietnam; he is the author of three novels, including the acclaimed Vietnam novel “Matterhorn” and a nonfiction book about the moral implications of war. When Gibbons-Neff wrote a day-in-the-life profile of a Ukrainian sniper on the front lines of the battle against Russian invaders, we asked Marlantes to comment on what made it a standout piece of journalism. His short, pointed essay, published as Ukraine enters a third year of war against Russia, is not a typical Storyboard analysis of story craft — but a thoughtful reaction to waging and covering war. WARNING: Some readers may be offended by slang terms used to describe enemy combatants.

I was asked by Storyboard for my literary reaction to Thomas Gibbons-Neff’s article in the New York Times (Ukraine, a Sniper Mission and the Myth of the ‘Good Kill,’ October 21, 2023). I was a young Marine infantry officer in Vietnam in 1968-69. I was not a sniper. I did, however, on occasion accompany a sniper to act as a spotter or security, so I have some experience with them. I never wanted their job.

I also am a writer of novels and essays. But I am not writing an essay about the writing craft in Gibbons-Neff’s piece. What follows instead are observations from my time in the field and thoughts brought to mind as I read the sniper profile.

Movies and television show the hidden sniper silently waiting to kill his enemy, keenly observing the landscape, then carefully putting a bullet in an enemy soldier’s head. The reality is that observing anything for hours and hours on short sleep is almost impossible. It involves tedious waiting in a state of anxiety about being discovered and getting killed. As for the much-admired headshot, not likely. A good sniper will shoot for the center of mass. If the shot doesn’t kill, taking care of the wounded soldier will at least temporarily remove two more soldiers from combat.

Snipers are almost always drawn from infantry soldiers, but they must have additional attributes. A sniper must be better at keeping fear and excitement in control. An irregular heartbeat or a hand that even hints at shaking can move the end of a long rifle barrel an almost imperceptible amount. Such a tiny movement, further magnified by the extreme distances to the targets, would almost always result in a miss. Worse than a miss, the shot could reveal the hiding place, giving the sniper only seconds to move before being hit with violent return fire. An infantryman engaging an enemy is most likely to fire on full-automatic in the general direction of the threat — and emotions can have full range.

Snipers therefore are members of a club inside a club and experience war differently than an infantryman. Gibbons-Neff is someone in that club within a club, which is why he was allowed to accompany the Ukrainian sniper, Raptor. His article telling us what that experience was like is rare. Club members usually don’t like talking to outsiders. As he writes:

They trusted that I had done the thing, and that even with a language barrier, I understood what was happening around me: orders of work, setting up a hide, the quiet monotony and flurry of activity that comes with watching the same spot for hours or days with a rifle purpose-built to kill at long range.

Gibbons-Neff describes how he felt about killing when he was a sniper in Afghanistan compared to how Raptor felt about it as a sniper in Ukraine. First, when Gibbons-Neff did his killing, he was likely much younger than Raptor. He tells us Raptor “shot competitively before the war.”

Now it was different: He was shooting people. At such long distances, it took several seconds for the bullet to find its way through air to cloth, then flesh. Long enough for the rifle’s recoil to dissipate and for his watchful eye to readjust in the scope, framing the show of his own violence.

“I’m not proud of this,” Raptor began in deliberate English.

Also, Marines are the youngest military service. The frontal cortex doesn’t mature in humans until their 20s. That’s why so many of our best warriors are teenagers: They don’t think — they react, and they carry out orders without questioning. Based on Gibbons-Neff’s profile, it seems Raptor was a mature adult with a fully functioning cerebral cortex.

I wanted to applaud when I read Gibbons-Neff’s lines about “how accepting the world has become of wholesale death and destruction.” Then he emphasizes his point:

Casualty numbers — inflated, closely guarded and impossible to verify — are traded like sports scores between Kyiv and Moscow. Snuff videos of combatants being killed by drones, gunfire and artillery circulate like some digital token of battlefield action.

I remember watching TV coverage of the early days of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Huge headlines, images of bombs exploding in the night, tanks roaring down highways, stirring martial music, and banners over and below the images like “The War in Iraq – Day Three.” You’d think they were describing the Olympics. Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.

Most television news people and Internet bloggers are not in the club that Gibbons-Neff or anyone fighting in a combat zone belong to. Journalists should report the news and leave the cheering to high school football games.

But a major difference between the three of us — Gibbons-Neff, Raptor and me — is that Raptor is fighting to defend his people from rape, torture and death. Gibbons-Neff and I were not. Neither the Viet Cong nor the Taliban were storming the beaches at Santa Monica. We were “carrying out American foreign policy,” cooked up by more people who aren’t in the club. Too often these people have no idea what they’re asking of young soldiers and Marines. If you don’t know the costs, you don’t weigh them against the benefits.

Coming to terms

What all three of us do have in common is needing to come to terms with the killing we did. The “enemy” is usually coerced into killing by their culture or conscription, just as our side is. When you face that enemy, however, and don’t shoot true and fast, you will die. You will revert to your most primal animal self and you will not be thinking about how either of you got into this terrible mess. I suspect it’s a bit different for a sniper, because usually his enemy doesn’t know he’s in a fight. The sniper has a better chance of thinking, which is the function of the cerebral cortex, as opposed to reacting purely from the amygdala, which is the most likely mental state of the young infantryman engaged in combat.

It would take years for me to realize how indoctrinated we all were. Raptor already understood — at least enough to articulate his findings to a stranger in a stairwell amid the thud of distant artillery strikes — that he was killing a human being, and trying to explain why.

“I don’t want to kill, but I have to — I’ve seen what they’ve done,” Raptor went on, his own moral and martial purpose linked to the atrocities Russian forces had committed throughout the war. For Raptor, the reason for pulling the trigger was clear. For me and my comrades, all these years later, the reason we chose to kill can continue to elude us.

I would add some nuance to Gibbons-Neff’s description of “how indoctrinated we all were.” I don’t believe the military is smart enough to turn anyone into a killer. I believe what the military does is remove that thin, spider web of civilization that keeps our primitive killer instincts in check. We are not the top animal on the food chain because we’re nice. Boot camp is a finishing school.

A normal human finds it extremely difficult to kill another human. However, we have no problem killing an animal that is attacking us. It’s very likely in our genes. So to overcome the normal inhibitions of killing another human, we unconsciously employ a sort of psychological trick that is encouraged by the military — not indoctrinated by it.

Many people who are not in the club decry this is “dehumanizing.” You’re damned straight it is. It is the only way that anyone who is not a psychopath or sociopath can accomplish a mission that involves killing. We kill a false animal instead of a fellow human. To aid this we use names like hadji, sand rat, towel head, gook, nip, Kraut, commie, capitalist pig — there are hundreds of these names, and they’ve been used for centuries. Not only does the military encourage this, but so does society. We have boxcar loads of names we’ve learned since childhood for people whose politics, race, religion and even sexual orientation differ from ours: MAGAs, wokes, coons, crackers, prods, mackerel snappers, jihadis, bible thumpers, sodomites, rug eaters…it takes only a small push to move from people we dislike to people we want to kill.

This psychological fix, however, is only temporary. Some length of time after the killing takes place, often several decades later, that sand rat or gook we killed turns back into a frightened 18-year-old boy — just as we were. Eventually we must come to terms with the killing of another human. In this regard, Raptor perhaps has it easier than Gibbons-Neff and I have because, as Gibbons-Neff points out, Raptor was defending his sisters and brothers from rape and torture and fighting for the survival of his nation and the right to live under the rule of law. Because of the morally ambiguous wars our country sent Gibbons-Neff and me to fight, we have had to come to terms with killing without such helpful justification.

Now we’re discomforted by our own killings, aware of the details and the violence we committed under the bright banners of “nation-building” or “winning hearts and minds,” or whatever our officers told us as the seasons changed. In the shadow of our failures, our silence hangs over it all.

It was hard not to be jealous of Raptor and his team, especially in the wake of my lost war. Therein was the trap, the dizzying seduction of the “good kill.”

* * *

Karl Marlantes is the author of the Vietnam novel “Matterhorn” and three other books. He lives in Washington state.

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I’ve been both accepted and rejected by Nature Magazine.

For the same submission.

It all started when I met a bumblebee veterinarian at the UPOD Writer’s Conference this past January.

Some people keep a bucket list.  I keep a publishing bucket list.

Nature had been on my publishing bucket list for pretty much forever. I had no real business being in Nature. I write a lot of personal, usually humorous essays for places like HuffPost and Newsweek; quirky, in-depth, forgotten-by-time pieces I call history-mysteries; culture/trend stories, including book reviews; and occasionally a health story, though not much in the sciences, and Nature is the creme de la creme of science publications.

But I had gotten smug of late, which I blame on my incongruous acceptance a month earlier of a lengthy, history-mystery piece in Smithsonian Magazine, another magazine in which I have no real business appearing.  And I was an avid, almost fanatical reader, of Nature.  I was particularly enamored of their short “Where I Work” pieces on the last page, which feature an interview with a scientist in a particularly unusual, sometimes bizarre, job, written in the first person. Truth to tell, I also loved it because it was the only part of the magazine I could consistently understand.)

So when we went around the room and did introductions at the writing conference, and Elizabeth Hilborn introduced herself as a veterinarian for honeybees, I immediately flashed to Nature Magazine. In my voracious readings of the “Where I Work’ column, I’d never read about a bee veterinarian or anything similar. It seemed a perfect fit.

I interviewed Hilborn the next day, channeling her story as a first-person piece. I titled my piece, “I never expected to be a veterinarian for bees.” I decided to send Nature the finished interview, rather than a pitch, since pitches are easier to reject. I’d been reading that particular Nature column for so long that it practically wrote itself. I knew what the approximate word length should be; I knew it was meant to be breezy first-person. I’ve never finished a piece so quickly.

Famous last words.

No submission guidelines? No problem

The first inkling that something was wrong was when I couldn’t find the Nature “Where I Work” submission section.

Even neophyte writers know to check submission guidelines. Or should. Most magazines have them, if only to save staff the drudgery of having to tell dozens of freelancers the same basics: We only accept nonfiction. We don’t accept more than 500 words. We only look at pitches, not completed pieces. At writing conferences they tell you to be sure to read these submission guidelines before you start the pitch or the piece, but of course, some of us aren’t as good at following the rules. I quickly found Nature’s submission guidelines for their research studies and articles. But on the “Where I Work” column, Nature was curiously mum. I wondered briefly at the oversight, but assumed that maybe the column was just too short to warrant its own guidelines.

I found a name and position on the masthead that seemed like it might be right, and sent in my interview to someone named Jack. Because I had noticed there was always a photo with the interviews, I mentioned that I had two photos of Elizabeth, one in her jazzy bee-keeper garb.

Two weeks later, I received a very polite, but lukewarm, response. The gist of Jack’s reply explained why I hadn’t found submission guidelines:

“Where I Work” was not a freelance-driven section of Nature.  It was entirely staff-written.

Oh.

Oops.

Jack was declining my submission because they never took freelance interviews.

But he also said he really liked my piece. And he was curious about something. He asked me a question about honeybees that hadn’t been clear from the interview. I wrote him back immediately.

Two weeks went by.

Again I heard from Jack. He repeated that he still didn’t take freelance submissions for this column, but he had another question about honeybees. Again I responded. Again he retreated into a stretch of radio silence.

A few more weeks passed, and Jack wrote to ask if I could send him those photos of the veterinarian that I had mentioned. I quickly forwarded him two high-quality photos.

Then … crickets.

An idea that finds its time

But timing sometimes works in a writer’s favor. A few weeks later honeybees were hot. There were worries about honeybees going extinct, disaster warnings about the end of pollination and honey because of global warming, and articles about new honeybee diseases. Bees swarmed all over the news.

I wrote Jack again, noting that bees were a trending topic. I wondered if, in light of all the buzz, he might still be considering my piece.  If not, maybe I would submit it elsewhere. (Though it had been written specifically for Nature, and I really had no idea where else I could pitch it.)

Jack apologized once more; he still didn’t take freelance pieces for “Where I Work.” But he reiterated that he had liked the piece, and asked me to try him again sometime.

Ordinarily, such an offer would have put me over the moon; short of an acceptance letter, interest in seeing another piece is as good as it gets.

But in this particular situation, all I felt was disappointment.

I wrote back to Jack, thanking him sincerely for his time and attention, but noting that if I couldn’t get a piece into “Where I Work,” my chances of getting anything into any other, more technical, part of Nature would be very slim indeed. I appreciated his encouragement, but figured this was probably the end of the road for me and Nature.

Jack wrote back, saying, again, that he was unable to accept the piece —  because of the freelance thing. But also because of the photos. “Where I Work,” he noted, was a photo-driven column. They never consider a piece unless it comes with an interesting photograph and meets publication standards; the two photos I’d submitted weren’t high-enough quality.

The problem was photos?

As someone who had been avidly reading Nature for years, I was surprised to learn that “Where I Work” was photo-driven. Despite all the years of reading that column, I doubt I could even describe any of the photos — although I could remember plenty of the bizarro science jobs.

Also, that seemed a flimsy excuse to not consider my interview. What if, I suggested to Jack, I asked the veterinarian to have a better photo taken? Would that be possible?

Jack didn’t know. He wrote to tell me he was passing me up the chain to his editor.

The supervising editor was, like Jack, incredibly nice. She apologized, said they really didn’t accept freelance submissions for the column (surprise!) and reiterated that it was a photo-driven column.

By now, I was getting antsy. If they really weren’t going to consider this piece, why were they spending so much time on me? I asked Karen if hiring a freelance photographer for a better photo might be an option.

Three weeks later, the bee vet and I were notified that Nature was sending a photographer to North Carolina, to take a better photo. Hilborn cleared an hour on her schedule for the photo. Five hours later, the photographer had images that satisfied the magazine.

I thought we were done.

But then followed six weeks and a flurry of edits.

A hive of editors

There was a strict 350-word limit for the “Where I Work” column, thanks to the prominent photos as part of the features. But that meant that every time a writer clarified one point, usually with extra words, those words had to be hatcheted somewhere else. We went back and forth, Word-track documenting the entire process. Again and again and again. While I admired the painstaking attention to detail as a reader, being at the other end of the process felt a little arduous.

When at last I thought we were done, Jack’s supervising editor clarified that, of course, London would be doing the next set of edits, pre-publication.

London?

All the final edits go through London, she said.

Maybe I should have anticipated London; Nature is a British-based magazine.

There followed several more rounds of edits.

In the end, many weeks and literally 17 edits later, the article appeared in both the online and physical incarnations of Nature Magazine. Cool headline: “If I drop this, I’ll kill the queen.”

I made $400. In terms of hours per word, this assignment was the most onerous in which I’d ever engaged.

But I think the moral of this particular story is, if you believe in your piece, you will find a way to publish it. “Bee” confident.

I’ve now crossed Nature off my publishing bucket list (and, in case you were wondering, received Jack’s permission to publish this essay). But if you bump into me at a writer’s conference and identify yourself as a cryptozoologist whose profession is to study possibly-mythical creatures, or a snake milker who extracts venom for a living, or even a pet-food taster (ugh!), watch out. I still have Jack’s email.

* * *

Fern Reiss is an author and self-publishing entrepreneur. Her essays have appeared in publications including HuffPost, Newsweek, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian.  She ruminates at FernExpertizing.substack.com, and is writing a memoir.

The post Not taking “no” for an answer appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: From the archives, an essay by an Indigenous journalist, inspired by a story by another, about the myths of Thanksgiving and its white-bread centerpiece: turkey.

It happens enough in my life that I have become self-conscious when people ask if I celebrate Thanksgiving. I don’t mind the question. I only wish I had a more interesting answer.

Growing up, my grandparents spoke only Navajo. My parents are both bilingual; they still have to take a pause mid-conversation to recall how to translate some words or ideas from Navajo to English. My siblings and I were raised speaking English, a strategic choice my parents made with public school greatness in mind. Their hope, that we would eventually pick up the Navajo language, never quite made it to fruition.

With all this said, we celebrated Thanksgiving every year that I can remember. My parents would pack us into a pickup — the truck bed filled with food, paper goods and potable water — and we’d make the two-hour drive deep into the Navajo Nation. My grandparents lived in a single-room, cement hogan. An iron woodstove in the center kept it at a constant just-a-few-degrees-too-warm. There, our entire family would enjoy that traditional American meal, the only time of the year we ate turkey.

Turkey. We never mentioned “Thanksgiving” or talked about the history of the holiday. Yet we always ate turkey. I never questioned why. It was the meal the pilgrims ate when they invited the Indigenous people to the first Thanksgiving and that meant we all had to eat this giant, dry, bird every year.

“Turkey never tastes good,” agreed Washington Post reporter Dana Hedgpeth. “The meat is always dry. If it was that great we’d eat it all the time. I’ve never tasted a good turkey in my life.”

Earlier this month, Hedgpeth published a myth-busting piece exposing the myths that have formed about the origins of the holiday: “This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later.” Her story, which ran Nov. 4, challenges the traditional understanding of Thanksgiving, in particular popular ideas like the pilgrims wearing those huge black, buckled hats and inviting the Wampanoag people — who, as the myths go, were adorned with the feathered headdresses — to enjoy a celebration of the bountiful harvest. According to her tenacious reporting, Hedgpeth found that it is unlikely that turkey was even featured at that first meal.

Actually, most of what has been taught throughout history about American Thanksgiving is false, and Hedgpeth made it her goal to challenge as many fictions as possible. Among the most surprising is that the pilgrims never actually invited the Wampanoag people to that harvest feast. That graceful invitation, shaped through history as a ‘thank you’ to the tribe’s people for helping the settlers survive the harsh new (to the settlers) land, never happened.

Instead, as Hedgpeth’s piece explains, tribal members arrived to the exclusive, celebratory event after hearing gunshots, likely fired in revelry:

At the sound of gunfire, the Wampanoags came running, fearing they were heading to war.

The tribe’s people decided to stay, but seeing that there was not enough food for the new guests (“The pilgrims aren’t really great at hunting at this point,” Hedgpeth told me.), Wampanoag hunters retrieved venison. The full menu that day likely consisted of several types of meat including quahogs, fish and shellfish — all foods plentiful in the Northeast at the time. Records show the meal also featured “fowl” — probably duck. Wild turkey was also plentiful, but Hedgpeth, who said she spent 10 hours researching Butterball, determined it is unlikely it made the menu. Even the English back then reportedly were not big fans of turkey, she said. “There’s so much better food,” Hedgpeth said. “Have venison stew, have rabbit, have shellfish.”

Even I am not sure why I, much like Hedgpeth was in her reporting, am obsessed with the turkey. Perhaps because it is the most iconic symbol of one of the most iconic American holidays. And as a Navajo, one of the more than 570 recognized tribes in the country, the story of Thanksgiving was distorted to me, my family and my second-grade class. That is when my class did the classic project: making Thanksgiving hats out of construction paper. I and most of the other Navajos in the class chose to make a paper headdress. At the time, I knew there were Navajo kids and non-Navajo kids, but did not yet really understand tribal identity. I do remember a sense of pride that tribal people played a major role in such a big holiday —  one for which we got to do an art project on a Wednesday and then two days off of school!

And yeah, a Thanksgiving lunch. I remember distinctly, at the request of one of the non-Native students, that the entire class wore our new paper headwear to eat that turkey.

History undressed

Over time that second grader grew up and learned terms like appropriation, assimilation, genocide. It would become clear that American history is fraught with atrocity. But turkey at Thanksgiving always seemed so deliberate, despite its unlikely place at the first table. The Wampanoag people didn’t even wear feather headdresses, according to Hedgpeth’s piece. If they wore anything to that feast, it was the tribal roach, a headpiece made from porcupine hair that looks like a mohawk. A Wampanoag roach would have been an exponentially cooler art project.

The entire lesson of Thanksgiving, as taught in American schools, was manufactured, and done so with almost no effort. Therein lies the value of pieces like this. Hedgpeth, herself a member of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe from the North Carolina area, picked up where decades and decades of school curricula floundered. One of the hardest things to write in news is history. How do you sell a centuries-old story to an audience without sounding like a textbook? Hedgpeth wanted a story full of moments that would make the reader pause contemplatively with an “Oh!” moment. Specifically she wanted to bust myths about Thanksgiving and offer unknown information about a national tradition most of us were taught in grade school.

Long marginalized and misrepresented in the American story, the Wampanoags are braced for what’s coming this month as the country marks the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving between the Pilgrims and Indians.

But the actual history of what happened in 1621 bears little resemblance to what most Americans are taught in grade school, historians say.

***

For the Wampanoags and many other American Indians, the fourth Thursday in November is considered a day of mourning, not a day of celebration.

Because while the Wampanoags did help the Pilgrims survive, their support was followed by years of a slow, unfolding genocide of their people and the taking of their land.

Bringing history to now

Being a Native American in a non-Native newsroom can get confusing. You want to be a great journalist. You want to offer your perspective but not be pigeonholed as “the Native.” Hedgpeth, who has worked for The Post since 1999 and currently covers breaking news, tries to squeeze in one story a month about tribal issues. “Some people don’t want to be pegged like, ‘I’m Native American so therefore I should cover the Native American beat,’” Hedgpeth says. “Other people are fine with that. I think I have a sweet spot. I like what I do.”

In her story, Hedgpeth cites previous journalists and historians who probed the origins of the American holiday. She also credits her editors, who encourage her to write and question her stories, asking for more detail when needed and reigning in the narrative when it’s not. This helps reporters find a balance in how to belong and contribute to a newsroom without coming across as overbearing. Hedgpeth refers to a specific, non-Native editor, Lynda Robinson. “She’s very conscious of what she does and doesn’t know, and she’s never afraid to ask,” Hedgpeth said. “If she’s unsure, she never hesitates to make you go back to your subjects and say we need more to understand what this is about.” I have worked with non-Native editors who, lacking knowledge of the Native American experience, would give me almost free-reign — or no reign — to write about tribal issues. That only sowed self-doubt and over-analysis as I struggled to find that balance.

Hedgpeth is married to a non-Native. They are raising their kids in the D.C. area. When it comes to her family traditions, she is thoughtful and deliberate in both talk and action. Her children are aware of their heritage and their history. That includes this holiday, which a lot of Indigenous people see as a day marking the beginning of genocide. But Hedgpeth prefers to focus on Mother Bear, a Wampanoag elder who became the focal point of her Thanksgiving piece. She introduces her by placing her in a “modest, clapboard museum” a few miles from Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Inside the three-room house sits Mother Bear, a 71-year-old Mashpee Wampanoag, hand-stitching a deer skin hat. She’s lived her whole life in this town and is considered one of the keepers of the Wampanoag version of the first Thanksgiving and how the encounter turned into a centuries-long disaster for the Mashpee, who now number about 2,800.

She returns to Mother Bear a bit later in the piece:

Mother Bear, a clan mother … whose English name is Anita Peters, tells visitors to the tribe’s museum that a 1789 Massachusetts law made it illegal and “punishable by death” to teach a Mashpee Wampanoag Indian to read or write.

She recounts how the English pushed the Wampanoag off their land and forced many to convert to Christianity.

“We had a pray-or-die policy at one point here among our people,” Mother Bear said. “If you didn’t become a Christian, you had to run away or be killed.”

But it wasn’t bitterness that Hedgpeth drew on when we talked: “I think Mother Bear says it best: ‘Every day your feet hit the floor is the day to be thankful to the Creator.’ My two arms, two legs, two eyes. I am blessed, blessed, blessed to have these things able to move. Every day should be a day of Thanksgiving of sorts.”

For myself, when people ask if I celebrate the holiday, from now on, I’ll think about being a kid on the Navajo reservation. Before dinner, my grandfather would pray in Navajo, a prayer that my mom would say loved all of our family no longer with us, and protected those who still were. And much like the Wampanoags would tell Hedgpeth about how they come to terms with American history, I will keep in mind that it’s being with family — not the holiday —that is the real reason to celebrate.

“As many Wampanoags in my story say, today is about reflecting and being thankful,” Hedgpeth said. “Not for that first Thanksgiving, not for the slow years of genocide that happened to Native Americans. But be thankful that we survived and that we persevered and we’re still here.”

***

Jason Begay is an associate professor at the University of Montana School of Journalism where he teaches the Montana Native News Project. He grew up on the Navajo Nation and has worked as a reporter at the Navajo Times, The New York Times, the Oregonian and the Oakland Tribune.

The post Two Native American journalists talk turkey about Thanksgiving appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR'S  NOTE: This essay is from the archives. If you celebrate American Thanksgiving, I hope it was grand and that you have some leftover pie.

One Saturday morning several years ago, during a substantial storm, my friend and I parted the drapes to enter the sanctuary  a warm restaurant. Snow squeaked behind us as the door to the temporary vestibule stopped short of closed. Memories of that day live on my fridge in the form of a postcard that arrived with our bill.

The image of mottled brown paper is blotched with ink: bread, jelly, milk, onions, coal. It was a scan, the owner told me, of an original mid-1800s grocery list found in her family archives.

Family history and food have long intersected, a convergence more visible around the holidays. Each platter and bowl on the table represents a story. That knowledge forms the basis of an essay by Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, provocatively titled “Can America save its national dish?” with an equally bold subhed: “Americans invented the dessert we call pie. Why are we letting it die?”

McArdle takes us on a delicious journey through history and culture — one she fears we’ll lose in the back of an industrial grocery freezer crowded with ready-made pies and crusts. She opens with a statement that, in her childhood home, “pie was spoken fluently.” Soon enough, she asserts that hers is not a mere bit of memoir:

It is a polemic. I want to convince you that American pie is special, because it is. American pie is great, in part, because of its rich, unlikely history. But American pie is also in dire straits, because American cooks have mostly forgotten how to make the most important part. Which means that we are at risk of losing not just a dessert, but a little piece of who we are as a country.

Pi(e) Day delay

“Food is memory,” McArdle told me when I spoke with her about why she launched a zealous investigation of dessert. She typically writes about economics, politics, and publicy policy, but “I’ve always been passionate about pie.” More specifically, she said, “it’s pie crust.”

Yet her family techniques of gathering and rolling crust never stuck. So about five years ago, she asked her mom to teach her again. McArdle brought along friends who wanted to learn, and recorded the lesson on video: “I had always made pies with her, but I had never made the pie crust.”

She decided to write about what she learned, both about making pie and about the history she uncovered. Her publication goal: March 14, better known as Pi(e) Day by math proponents, pizza devotees, and dessert enthusiasts.

But that was in 2020, and COVID-19 was declared a national emergency on March 13. McArdle emailed with her editor and the art director: The lighter tone of her essay didn’t feel right for the moment. The piece was bumped again by the summer’s social justice protests, and then again by the coronavirus surge last Thanksgiving.

It finally published this past July, in time for anyone interested in converting their 2021 summer berry pickings into a last course of the first order. Appropriate, as McArdle’s piece makes clear that though pie arrived in America with English settlers, generations of colonists transformed the dessert.

Working with archival sources

Pie in Britain meant savory and most likely meat-filled, McArdle notes. Ben Jonson wrote of “immortal crust” in 1631. His poetic description had nothing to do with a grandmother passing down her knowledge to children and grandchildren. Pie, in that era, was a preservation technique.

Not much changed in the 250 years between Jonson and Mark Twain’s satire of European hotel food. His humorous recipe for pie crust: “Take a sufficiency of water and a sufficiency of flour, and construct a bullet-proof dough.”

McArdle’s essay connects the dots that explain how American bakers established pie as a sweet treat instead. The path includes Harriet Beacher Stowe, the geography of apples, the U.S. Supreme Court, and of course, technological wonders like refrigeration and electric ovens. McArdle also introduces readers to a sampling of the kooky 19th-century arguments (Pie causes alcoholism!) that portrayed the dessert as a public health disaster.

All of this accompanies a sharp explanatory section on the tricks and challenges of conjuring a handmade crust — “not just a vehicle for filling but a delight itself,” she writes.

McArdle comes from a family of pie makers, but my baking lineage centers on cookies. Several aunts earned my loyalty with assorted shapes and sizes of sugary crumbles. My pie obsession likely started when pie paired with my favorite season. Each summer, my family would trek to northeast Wisconsin for a week, and tart cherry pie would finish every dinner.

McArdle and I took different paths to the dessert table, but we talked about how an essay on baking can offer lessons for reporting and writing effective stories regardless of beat or subject: working with archival sources and better tuning our eyes to the story leads around us, sometimes quite near.

Given the range of text materials she compiled, I asked her how she chose what to leave out of her essay and what to use from the vast available troves.

“I ended up with a huge number of quotes,” she said. “I picked the ones that were the most germane. What is the best one to illustrate this thing? What is the interesting money-quote that readers won’t have heard before?”

We all search for a succinct illumination, a description said better and with more emotion than we could paraphrase. That’s true whether we peel notebook pages from an interview with a mayor or high-school athlete or scroll through thousands of PDF images. McArdle sifted through a whole roster of historical cookbooks hosted at Michigan State University. “I just downloaded everything from Amelia Simmons through 1900,” she said.

Like the community members we spend time with for our stories, archival sources — maps, photos, books, data — tend to provide more material than we need for any single story. And identifying foundational superlatives for readers can apply across many types of story subjects. “You’re always going to mention the first American cookbook,” McArdle said of Simmons’s 1796 text. “But I could not read everything ever written on pie.”

The basic recipe from Simmons’s cookbook included in two variations is the same that sneaked through the hysteria of the health reformers: pumpkin pie. That realization in my own reading spurred me to immerse myself in pie history.

Surprises for you and the reader

 If we claim any pie under the banner of American exceptionalism, the flag should be planted in the whipped topping that crowns a pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. Pumpkins, after all, are native to North America. Apples, not so much.

“The day after Thanksgiving is the day of eating pumpkin and apple pie for breakfast,” McArdle said.

We can thank Sarah Josepha Hale for that connection. As the editor of a prominent monthly magazine, Hale campaigned with her pen for decades, beginning with an 1827 novel that included a lengthy description of a Thanksgiving meal where “pumpkin pie occupied the most distinguished niche” on the side table, “an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving.”

The regional intensity of the origins of American pie amazed McArdle. “I hadn’t realized that New England ended up writing the history of America because they were so economically and culturally dominant,” she said. “That really shows in pie. It’s not that no one else does it, but New England does it more than anyone else.”

Her comment was a useful reminder that when we are surprised to learn something about the world around us, odds are that the observation will also surprise our readers.

Consider the 1844 children’s rhyme about traveling to grandmother’s house. The poem is based on the family memories of Lydia Maria Child, who galloped to her grandfather’s house, still located near the Mystic River outside Boston. Despite the white and drifted snow, the poem celebrates Thanksgiving, not Christmas. The final verse:

Over the river, and through the wood—

Now grandmother’s cap I spy!

Hurra for the fun!

Is the pudding done?

Hurra for the pumpkin pie!

Editor Hale continued to lobby for Thanksgiving as a national holiday, then mostly marked in New England. She included an appeal in the September 1863 issue of her magazine and mailed a letter to President Abraham Lincoln. Less than a week after receiving it, with the United States still in the grips of the Civil War, Lincoln signed a proclamation for the whole nation to give thanks “with one heart and one voice.”

The allure of pumpkin pie endured after the war, when the dietary crusaders pounced, exemplified by Sarah Tyson Rorer. In her 1886 chapter on “Pastry and Pies,” she advocated for fine flour and “none but the best butter” to make a crisp and flaky crust. “Have everything, including yourself, cool.”

Still pertinent advice, but the modern marvel of ice does help when you’re mixing the flour and butter into dough. Rorer’s tone changed by 1902. “All forms of so-called pie crust are to be condemned.” The chapter, then renamed “Pastry,” shrank to a scant three recipes we might recognize as pie with a proper bottom crust — but pumpkin persisted.

Good pie and good journalism

As I read McArdle’s essay last week, I studied one of the photos published with it. In the background, a recipe for pumpkin pie is printed in a careful hand, graced by a papery corn stalk border and a dappled blue watercolor background. The framed recipe hangs in McArdle’s mother’s kitchen. As the story goes, McArdle’s mother would call her own mother every Thanksgiving to remind her how to make the crowd-pleaser.

“It has become much more than a recipe,” McArdle said. “It’s a physical piece of family history, and unlike the pies themselves, not ephemeral.”

When I consider the magic of archives, I often think of family archives, of attics and closets so incredibly bountiful but commonly overlooked or unconsidered. Archival sources don’t need to be housed on the climate-controlled shelves of a public institution.

With that in mind, I brushed by the 1800s grocery list as I opened my fridge to assess what I needed to to bake a version of the McArdle family recipe. At the grocery store, I pushed a cart past piles of frozen pie shells and stacks of frosty boxes that promised “THAW & ENJOY!”

I thought of a passage from McArdle’s essay:

Every time families make those choices, they break a chain that had stretched across centuries, from mother to daughter and oven to oven. And reknitting the links is exceedingly difficult, because the children and grandchildren of those who incrementally abandoned pie don’t even know what to aim for.

I’m thankful to have some family experience with that North Star.

Back from the store, my favorite cookbook provided a refresher for a simple crust, and I set about whisking flour, mashing butter with my fingertips, dribbling ice water. In another bowl, I swapped brown sugar for the standard granulated and filled the small space of my kitchen with aromas of earthy cloves and citrusy ginger.

McArdle’s essay points to how much we have forgotten about the history of our national dessert and the skills of making it. But like the process of pie, the process of journalism is learned, McArdle said.

Inverting that idea a bit, an exceptional story — like a memorable pie — invokes at various points our full humanity: sight, sound, smell, touch—and of course, taste.

***

Dustin Renwick is a story editor for National Geographic Live and a journalist who focuses on stories about science, sports, and history, especially from the Midwest and Great Lakes. He writes a short monthly newsletter called Archival Magic.

The post A journalist’s journey into her family story leads to a history of American pie appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.