Larry Bird versus Magic Johnson. March 26, 1979. The NCAA Men’s National Championship was the final college game for the two rising basketball stars, and everyone in the country watched. The rivalry narrative built up over days leading up to the game, and it was quite a compelling one. 

In reality, the men hardly knew each other, only meeting once before the game and barely speaking to one another. Author and journalist Keith O’Brien called this a “disingenuous narrative” and set out to tell the story in a different way: starting with the Boston Celtics legend’s origin story from high school to early college.

“When you change that perspective, what you get is a really, completely different story,” O’Brien said. “And maybe more important than that, you get a completely different cast of characters.”

O’Brien, an award-winning author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, spoke at Boston University’s Power of Narrative conference in March about his bestselling book “Heartland” and shared lessons from his reporting process about the importance of showing up.

1. Investing in the story

At first, O’Brien tried to reach Bird through his agent. It was no surprise, though, that Bird did not want to participate; he is a notoriously private person, rarely doing interviews or projects unless he has some control over it. But — as Patrick Radden Keefe pointed out in his keynote earlier that day — access to the person centered in your story shouldn’t make or break the narrative.

O’Brien didn’t necessarily need Bird’s participation for the story. He wanted to tell a “compelling human narrative.” Perhaps Bird would have told a completely different story about those early years than the people around him that shaped his future career. To get those outside voices, he collected phone numbers and started calling around. 

In the first few rounds, nobody answered him.

“I need to invest in the story,” O’Brien said. “If people aren’t calling me back, maybe what I need to do is just go to French Lick. And so that’s what I did: bought a plane ticket, got a rental car and booked a room at the Best Western on the edge of town. And then before I left with those numbers and those addresses that I knew were right, I reached out again … and it was then that people started getting back in touch with me.”

He interviewed Bird’s childhood best friends, mentors, and family friends, meeting them everywhere from the local McDonald’s to people’s kitchens. O’Brien’s decision to travel to French Lick was pivotal for his story, gaining the trust and respect from residents who wouldn’t otherwise bother to return his phone calls.

2. Interviewing every witness to a scene

Reporting on scenes that you didn't witness firsthand can require a lot of research and specific type of reporting and interviewing. O’Brien makes it a point to talk to every person who was in the scene he wants to write about. If he knows that five people were in the room, he will speak to every person who was there, even if they don’t ultimately end up in the story.

Since he reported on events between 1973 and 1979, he understood memories can erode over time or someone could have a clear memory of events that never happened. That is precisely why he talks to every witness: to get the fullest sense of the truth in the commonalities.

“If you talk to all five people, you're going to get different details, different memories, and somewhere in the overlap of those memories, you know the truth likely resides,” he said.

For this story, he had to track down witnesses and relied on relationships he already built in town to access those people. In one instance, he was trying to track down one of the owners of a bar that Bird’s father, Joey Bird, frequented in the 1970s. The bar was long gone, but the owner could often be found in the town’s American Legion Bar.

O’Brien stepped into the bar on a weekday afternoon and 40 pairs of eyes turned to him straight away. He had to introduce himself and his intentions immediately.

“There was no slow rolling this: sit down quietly at the bar, order a drink, start to mingle. Between the door and the bar, I’m almost defensively saying who I am and why I’m here,” he said. “Within a couple minutes, everybody wanted to talk to me.”

The person O’Brien wanted to reach was not there, but he got in touch with him through the phone behind the bar and interviewed him right then and there.

3. Searching physical records

One of the important figures in Bird’s life that O’Brien identified was his father. Joey Bird was a well-known person in town but struggled a lot; a few months after his son graduated high school, he took his own life. 

O’Brien heard that his long battle with drinking came as a result of his time in the military during World War II and the Korean War. But he had to verify the claims himself. It took months to find the eldest Bird’s military records, and O’Brien said he learned a lot about Joey and Larry Bird in these records that he likely couldn’t find anywhere else.

He learned that Joey Bird enlisted in the Navy for World War II at 17 years old with a seventh grade education. He was a messman who likely didn’t go into battle and got in trouble for going AWOL during basic training and drinking on a ship. But he did see fighting a few years later in Korea, where he was an Army soldier and engaged in combat during one of the bloodiest battles of the conflict.

“Joey Bird has seen things and maybe done things that would shape him later,” O’Brien said. “I’ve learned something about my subject from these records. I’ve learned something that I think my subject himself might not even know about his own father. All of this is informative to my narrative.”

Once O’Brien was in French Lick, he stopped at the public library frequently, going through town records, yearbooks, and newspaper clippings. O’Brien said there are records in libraries that can’t be found anywhere else — not through interviews and not online. In the French Lick library, there was an entire section dedicated to Larry Bird. 

The library’s records went as far back as when Joey Bird was growing up and in the war. He was looking for letters or notes soldiers often submitted at the time. Just when O’Brien’s patience was waning after looking in the archives for hours upon hours, he finally found something in March 1951.

“This wasn't a note in a little notes column, it was on the front page, and it was a first person account that Joey Bird had written back to home about that winter in Korea. I mean, an incredible thing, right?” he said. “Libraries are critical to the work that we do.”

4. Risking time and resources for important material

O’Brien had embedded himself in the small town of French Lick (population: 2,000), interviewing multiple people every day and becoming a regular at the American Legion Bar. But there was one person he still couldn’t get a hold of who was essential for the story: Bird’s high school coach, Jim Jones.

Jones coached most young basketball players in town during the ’60s and ’70s. He taught Bird how to hold a basketball and shoot layups. He would come to Bird’s home to wake him up and take him to practice before school. “Were it not for Jim Jones, Larry Bird … might not have become the person he became,” O’Brien said.

In the weeks he was in French Lick, he could not get a hold of Jones. He thought about taking a gamble during the final days of his trip: Should he drive to Jones’s home an hour outside of French Lick and risk losing time if he didn’t answer? O’Brien believed Jones was so crucial for the story, he decided to make the drive.

He pulled into Jones’s driveway, prepared with a handwritten note card in case no one was home, and was relieved when he saw cars in the driveway. He knocked on the door and his wife answered. After a few moments, Jones came to the door and wordlessly let O’Brien through.

They talked for the next three hours in Jones’s kitchen about Larry Bird and the 1970s. When O’Brien thought they were finishing up, Jones showed him a custom Larry Bird championship-style ring and a letter from Bird to Jones, thanking him for all he’d done.

“I knew two things for certain,” O’Brien said. “First was, I had this story, whether Larry Bird was talking to me or not. I had it. And number two, I knew that I was not a stranger in this place anymore. I belonged here.”

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post Finding the narrative in small-town libraries and bars: How Keith O’Brien told the origin story of Larry Bird appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The 28th Power of Narrative conference returned to Boston University on March 27 and 28. Journalists, authors, podcast producers, and filmmakers came to the second floor of the George Sherman Union to share the lessons they’ve learned from their work. 

We've already shared a few notes from this year's conference, including Nieman Storyboard editor Mark Armstrong's Power of Narrative conversation with “London Falling” author and New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe. Now, here are six more takeaways from a weekend full of inspiration and education: 

1. Find the narrative, don't build it: Ken Burns

Ken Burns, whose latest PBS documentary series was 2025's “The American Revolution,” created a history of the colonies before, during, and after gaining independence from the British — fitting it all into six episodes, or 12 hours. 

Burns said the material often spoke for itself. The desire to seek out the truth is central to his work, but he’s often dealing with “grades of imperfection” since there is no such thing as objectivity, he said. But the story will tell you if it’s important to include.

“The greatest thing I love to hear is what I left out,” he said. “Bring it on … I know exactly the thing, I made a decision to leave that out. We’re not an encyclopedia.”

What also tends to speak for itself is the narrative. Burns gives an example of a mother named Rebecca Tanner of the Mohegan tribe from Connecticut who lost five sons fighting for the Patriot cause. There were many women, children, and enslaved people that fought on either side of the conflict. It's Burns's job to collect those lost or hidden stories.

“You find [narratives]. You never tried to build it. It’s there, and it’s inherent,” he said.

Burns acknowledged that current times are fraught, divided, and unpredictable. But so were the times during the Revolution, Civil War, and Vietnam War. He said there are “features of right now that are hugely terrifying and ought to be talked about.”

While Burns feels confident in telling these complex historical narratives, he said it took decades to get to that point. He realized that he knew how to do the work, even if something goes awry. And he leans into the unknown, working out the problem and coming out the other side having learned something.

“You have to first know that you have something to say, and that has to do with an incredible amount of introspection about what you want and who you are and what your capabilities are,” he said. 

2. Telling someone's story without a ‘perfect interview’: Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio and Jazmin Aguilera, The Boston Globe

The detention of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk in March 2025 was one of the earliest moments in Trump's second term that the nation witnessed increased aggression by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on the streets across the country.

The Boston Globe followed the story since Öztürk's arrest and detainment, publishing dozens of articles. Behind the scenes, Globe team members including senior audio producer Jazmin Aguilera and immigration reporter Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio worked to bring Öztürk’s story even closer to readers and listeners, creating the two-part podcast series, “Rümeysa Öztürk: An American Story.”

The central question the team sought to answer was, “Why had the Trump administration chosen Rümeysa to arrest?”

“We very quickly started learning that she wasn’t a protester or an activist that you would usually think of using those words on campus. She’s a very quiet, soft-spoken student. She loves children, she was simply passionate about the rights of children,” McDonnell Nieto del Rio said. “We wondered how the Trump administration had even found her, and those were answers we didn’t think we were going to get directly from officials, and so we had to figure out basically other ways to do that.”

McDonnell Nieto del Rio saw that professors were suing the Trump administration over an ideological deportation policy, and she started attending hearings in Boston. She saw ICE agents take the stand to testify, and she learned that they had most likely discovered Öztürk through a website that doxed protesters.

The team then went on to acquire hundreds of pages of court documents and hours of video footage to tell a bigger story. It also helped add context to Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown, a story that was “touching everyone,” McDonnell Nieto del Rio said.

One challenge for the team: how to tell a great narrative without a “perfect interview” with the central character. They were able to get written answers from Öztürk during the reporting process, but it wasn’t quite what they expected. They largely turned to other characters around Öztürk, such as her lawyer, a woman who was detained with her in Louisiana, and even the man who got the viral video footage of Öztürk being taken off the street by ICE officers.

“We all think the dream is to have the perfect interview with the person at the center of the piece. But I think there are a lot of other ways to go about these stories too,” McDonnell Nieto del Rio said. “And what's great about having restrictions on a story is that it forces you to be creative and find workarounds, and sometimes you'll get things from those workarounds that you wouldn't have already gotten.”

3. Look beyond the headlines for the hidden stories: The New Yorker's Sarah Stillman

The first story New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman ever reported was during her senior year in college. She saw a Fox News report while at the gym with the headline “Body Found in Lake Is Not Missing Fla. Girl,” about the 2005 search  for the missing 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford.

When Stillman saw the report, she wondered about the woman whose body was found in the lake. She went back to her dorm room and called the sheriff’s office in Florida and asked for the woman’s name, revealed to be Donna Cooke. Once she got it, she did a background check on her and found her last known address. Stillman traveled to Florida and learned about Cooke’s story — about her prostitution charges, and being brought on as a confidential informant for police, which led to her death. Stillman later wrote about confidential informants for The New Yorker, 2012's “The Throwaways.”

“One of my very first reporting experiences then became the story, not just of telling who Donna was, but also of telling how she wound up there, which had to do a lot with current U.S. drug enforcement policies around how we use confidential informants,” Stillman said. “It’s been incredibly guiding to me as a journalist, learning to watch news headlines and seeing where is something not adding up for me.”

Stillman also learned that the best stories come from learning one’s strengths. After joining The New Yorker, she went to cover Iraq and Afghanistan during the Iraq war. She didn’t know the nuanced history of the Middle East and certainly didn’t know the language, but she sought out stories using her background.

Stillman, whose family included labor workers, always thought about how labor fit into a bigger story. Through that lens, she reported on thousands of international workers being sent to Iraq to do menial jobs on military bases. She spoke with hundreds of these workers and found they had been sent to the bases under false pretenses and also found cases of sexual assault.

“So much of what I think is the most compelling kind of narrative journalism is thinking about, ‘Where are people encountering black holes, whether it’s policy or whether it’s of the existing narratives?’” Stillman said. “How do we create narratives that push back on that and actually fill in the blanks and ask for accountability?”

4. Showing the true humanity of a bombing victim: Rhana Natour and Seyward Darby, The Atavist Magazine

Over 1,000 children in Gaza lost a limb in the first two months of the war. That statistic stuck with freelance journalist Rhana Natour as she considered covering a conflict that has produced the largest number of child amputees in history. Natour spoke with photojournalist Eman Mohammed and learned that some organizations had been helping young children from Gaza come to the U.S.

She said finding stories from the Israel-Hamas war proved difficult, as international journalists could not access the region directly. But children were “coming to us” and could shed light on the war and their experience. Natour's National Magazine Award-winning story, “Coming to America,” featuring photos by Mohammed, was published in The Atavist Magazine in July 2024. It tells the story of a 14-year-old girl named Layan Albaz who lost her legs in an Israeli airstrike that also killed many of her family members. 

Natour learned she needed to equip herself with the right reporting tools to handle the story with sensitivity. She understood she was talking to a child that had gone through significant trauma in the last month. She consulted experts in childhood trauma ahead of speaking with Layan and other children. She also had Mohammed, who’s fluent in Arabic and has a deep understanding of Middle Eastern culture, to translate for Natour.

Some of these practices included “asking them frequently if you want to take a break, or the way that you approach a child,” Natour said. “The underlying suggestion is … that child doesn't want to feel obligated to tell you anything. You don't want to exhaust them through the interview process. You don’t want to do harm.”

But before Natour met Layan, she was described as “angry,” “moody,” “furious,” and “mean.” She wasn’t the sad and gracious “perfect victim” that Natour may have expected. Natour leaned heavily into writing about that anger.

“If in a story you come up against an obstacle, don't think of it as something, ‘Oh gosh, I need to somehow tuck this under the narrative.’ Maybe it’s actually part of the narrative. Maybe it makes for a richer story,” said Seyward Darby, Natour's editor on the story and editor in chief of The Atavist. “She is trying to assert agency. She's trying to process trauma. She is trying to regain a sense of control in her life. She’s furious that so many people and institutions failed her. So maybe her anger is part of the story. Maybe it is the story.”

5. Building a literary toolbox: Jabari Asim

Jabari Asim, a professor at Emerson College who has published 23 books including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and children’s books, likes to visualize his audience before beginning a project. He thinks of three different readers: himself (and his appetite for something he’s interested in or hasn’t seen anywhere else), someone who isn’t attracted to the subject matter at first but would read something that is well written, and someone who is adversarial to the topic he writes about.

Asim, who was previously an editor at The Washington Post and editor in chief at the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, also visualizes the finished product. “I see the book on the shelf. I see the spine. I see my name. I see the title. I see the color scheme. So I convinced myself that on some level, somewhere, my book already exists, and now it’s just a matter of working backwards.”

He's a big believer in the “ass to chair” theory of writing — and letting every idea spill onto the pages of the notebook with little distraction. He also encouraged finding a routine or habit that unlocks a creative flow state, whether it’s a regimented routine like that of Haruki Murakami or just some good beer and pizza. Either way, “Consistency is the operating principle. Find what works for you and stick to it.”

Asim keeps a “commonplace book” that contains profound phrases, observations or ideas that convey an element of style or prose that informs his own work. The book reminds him that he is entering into a collective discussion, and his ideas may only add onto what has already been expressed, keeping him grounded. The quotes in his book include the likes of Toni Morrison, Mary Oliver, Robert Frost, Andrei Tarkovsky, and many others.

Asim said he creates rough outlines, and it evolves as he goes through multiple drafts. After having a comprehensive outline, he can shuffle parts around and jump from place to place when writing (he said this is an antidote to writer’s block for him). In his drafts, he often highlights a “golden paragraph” that showcases everything he was trying to achieve and compares that paragraph to the rest of his paragraphs to see how he can strengthen the others.

Cleanliness, precision, ease and force are Asim’s four elements for writing. For cleanliness, “Don’t give [publishers] a chance to dismiss you easily. Get rid of all typos, grammatical errors and misspellings.” For precision, quoting E. B. White, “omit needless words.” For ease, “Never let your readers see you sweat. Successful writing tends to be a fingerprints-free exercise.” For force, “Your conclusion presents the final opportunity to close the sale, to gather your narrative momentum and drive home the full eloquence and fury of your prose.”

6. Becoming less of a stranger in a small town: Keith O’Brien

Keith O’Brien, an award-winning author and journalist whose work has appeared in New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, wanted to dig into the early years of Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird. But Bird is a notoriously private person, rarely doing interviews or projects unless he has some control over it. So it came as no surprise when Bird couldn’t be reached for O’Brien’s recently published book, “Heartland,” covering his high school career in his hometown of French Lick, Indiana.

O’Brien didn’t necessarily need Bird’s participation for the story. He wanted to tell a “compelling human narrative.” Perhaps Bird would have told a completely different story about those early years than the people around him that shaped his future career. To get those outside voices, he collected phone numbers and started calling around. Nobody answered him.

“I need to invest in the story,” O’Brien said. “If people aren’t calling me back, maybe what I need to do is just go to French Lick. And so that’s what I did: bought a plane ticket, got a rental car and booked a room at the Best Western on the edge of town. And then before I left with those numbers and those addresses that I knew were right, I reached out again … and it was then that people started getting back in touch with me.”

One of the important figures in Bird’s life that O’Brien identified was his father Joey Bird. He was a well-known person in town but struggled a lot; a few months after his son graduated high school, he took his own life. Since neither of the Birds could — or would — speak to him, O’Brien learned about Joey Bird through military records, newspaper clippings in the public library, and at the local bar in town.

O’Brien could feel that he was out of place, especially at the bar where he had to immediately introduce himself and his intentions. But he quickly started to acquaint himself with Bird’s high school friends, college teammates, and mentors. There was one person he still couldn’t get a hold of who was essential for the story: Bird’s high school coach, Jim Jones.

In a last-ditch effort, O’Brien decided to drive to Jones’s home an hour outside of French Lick. He knocked on the door and his wife answered. After a few moments, Jones came to the door and wordlessly let O’Brien through. They talked for the next three hours in Jones’s kitchen, where Jones showed O’Brien a custom Larry Bird championship-style ring and a letter from Bird to Jones, thanking him for all he’d done.

“I knew two things for certain,” O’Brien said. “First was, I had this story, whether Larry Bird was talking to me or not. I had it. And number two, I knew that I was not a stranger in this place anymore. I belonged here.”

***

Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post Look beyond the headlines — and five other lessons for journalists from Power of Narrative 2026 appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When Patrick Radden Keefe finds a story, he doesn't let go. He talks to every person until there’s no one left to talk to. He looks for documents and evidence to verify claims. He spends enormous amounts of time on story structure.

But, he admits, he’s somewhat of “a dilettante”: while he wants to know everything there is to know about a topic, he also wants the ability to walk away from it once the work is done.

“The best is when you sort of write your 10,000 words and then you say, ‘That's all I'm ever going to have to say on this subject ever again,’” Keefe said at Boston University’s Power of Narrative conference on March 28. “There have been four times in 20 years where I've gotten to the end of a piece and thought, ‘I'm not ready to move on.’”

That fourth time is the story of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who led a secret double life in London before plunging to his death from an apartment balcony into the River Thames in 2019. Keefe wrote about Brettler's mysterious death, and his family's investigation into what happened, for a 2024 New Yorker story, and he has now expanded it into a book, “London Falling,” published on April 7. 

Keefe, the author of bestsellers including “Rogues,” “Empire of Pain,” and “Say Nothing,” discussed his process with Nieman Storyboard editor Mark Armstrong at the 28th annual conference. Here are four takeaways for journalists: 

1. Meeting your subjects with no strings attached

Keefe learned about Brettler while talking to a stranger — something he often does. At the time, he was working on the television adaptation of his bestseller “Say Nothing” in London, and the person (a friend of the director) told him about Brettler's family.

He went home that evening and tried Googling everything the man told him — but nothing came up. He later learned the family was intentionally trying to maintain their privacy and not speak to the press during the investigation.

When Keefe contacted Zac's parents, Matthew and Rachelle, he suggested a meeting in a local cafe with “no commitment in either direction.” This way they didn’t have to prepare for a formal interview, and Keefe could decide whether he’d want to follow the story further.

“Our initial conversation … I didn't even take out a notebook. I wasn't recording it,” he said. “It was entirely just conversation.”

Over the next two hours, the Brettler family told their story. They didn’t have an official agreement after that chat, but they were “inching towards one” and had another meeting a week later.

People who experience profound loss and trauma, Keefe said, are often willing to share their story with those who want to listen. He said it was a privilege to do this work and have people open up to him about the worst days of their lives.

“I think it felt good for them to talk about it,” he said. “I think it feels good for anybody to tell their story, particularly if it’s a story that they've, for one reason or another, kept a little bit locked away.”

2. Access can be overrated

Keefe had full access to the Brettlers for this story, and he admits that they were key in making the book happen. But there were other key figures who would not speak to him, and access to central people shouldn’t make or break a story.

“Just because people don't want to play ball doesn't mean you shouldn't write the story,” he said. “Sometimes you should write the story.” Keefe recalled his 2018 New Yorker profile of “Apprentice” producer Mark Burnett, who wouldn't speak to Keefe for the story. (Burnett's ex-wives, however, did speak to him.)

For this story, Akbar Shamji, one of the men who was with Zac Brettler the night he died, didn’t grant Keefe an interview or a meeting but did email him quite a bit. Communication ceased after Keefe and The New Yorker sent Shamji over 230 fact-checking inquiries.

Because of this, Keefe had to lean more on the Brettlers and the materials he could get from them. But, he wanted to make sure they were all in. In their second meeting, he prefaced that they could not back out of the process if they were to go on the record. As he puts it, “the train is leaving the station.”

“[It’s] one thing that I'm trying to kind of get better at over the years, or that I've made more of a point of with each passing year, is just being very transparent with people on the front end of any kind of reportorial engagement, in part because I've seen where things can go wrong,” he said.

3. Deciding if a story should be an article, a book, or both

Keefe said he uncovered a lot from his conversations with the Brettlers, but only so much can go into a 15,000-word piece for The New Yorker.

One example he gave was Zac Brettler’s grandfather, Hugo Gryn. He had survived Auschwitz during World War II and, once he landed in London, he became a well-known BBC broadcaster and a beloved rabbi. Keefe noted that Gryn was a famous figure in London, but he wasn’t mentioned in his initial New Yorker story.

“This was one of the things that made me feel as though there probably was a book here — that there was this deeper history I've always been interested in, the way any of us are formed by our family lineage, the way families come to new places,” he said.

He felt each piece had a thematically different purpose: the article told the story of Zac Brettler while the book told the story of decades of family history that led to who Zac was.

Keefe also said he often feels torn about the right time to publish. The New Yorker will be publishing a new story from Keefe soon that he had been working on since 2020 and felt it was finally the right time.

“I love the process of going from knowing nothing about something to feeling pretty smart to feeling as though I've earned the right to weigh in on something, and it's usually a good sign if I feel like I can summon the confidence, honestly, to write,” he said. “That's a kind of helpful inflection point, and I certainly wouldn't publish before getting that point.”

4. How much to share with sources before publication?

A rule of thumb for many newsrooms is to not allow sources to read pieces before publication, and Keefe generally follows that same rule. But the Brettlers were an exception.

Because the material was deeply personal for the family — history, secrets, and inner thoughts — it didn’t feel right to Keefe to have reviewers read the book before they did. So it made sense for him to send three early copies of the book to Zac Brettler’s mom, dad, and brother.

“Those were stressful days for me,” he said.

He felt it was necessary to give an advance copy to the Brettlers to prepare them for the “weird” experience ahead of them. In tandem with being transparent at the beginning, he wanted to be clear about the feeling they might get when they see someone in public reading about their intimate family details.

“I'm a little bit like a vampire, because if you invite me in, I'm going to do what I do,” Keefe said. “There were some things that I think they, in the beginning, never imagined would end up in the book that ended up in the book, because if you set me free in your family history, I'm going to dig around a little bit.”

***

Read more: Nieman Storyboard's Patrick Radden Keefe reading list

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post Four lessons for journalists from Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest book, ‘London Falling’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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***

Dear Storyboard community: 

Journalist Stephen Rodrick is a proud generalist: He has written about everyone and everything from a scandal-plagued CEO to the Hollywood actor publicly feuding with his daughter, and personal topics including the toxic disaster in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, and his Navy pilot father Peter, who died in a plane crash when Stephen was 13, in his own memoir “The Magical Stranger.” 

For his latest story, Rodrick, a senior writer for Rolling Stone for the past eight years, traveled to the town of Shakopee, Minn. (population: 47,158), to cover ICE's continued occupation inside the state. Rodrick said he was laid out with the flu for much of January, so he was arriving in Minnesota “late.” “A lot of really talented people had already written about it,” he told me in an email interview. But whereas normally Rodrick says each new story means “starting at zero” with his sourcing, “for only the third or fourth time in my career, I already had sources in Minnesota from stories I'd done on Tim Walz and Melissa Hortman, the murdered House speaker.”

I made some calls and spoke to activists and leaders I'd met along the way. One of them was Brad Tabke, the state rep from Shakopee, who I had met on the Hortman story. At that point, I had no idea that ICE was hitting so hard in the second ring of Minneapolis suburbs where suburbs bleed into farmland. He told me some stories about what he was seeing on the ground and I decided to fly out two days later. From there, it was the proverbial peeling of the onion, he gave me five people to talk to and then they gave me five more people. I'd earned his trust writing about his friend Melissa, so he felt confident putting me in touch with victims of ICE raids and stops and that I'd handle their stories with dignity and restraint.

In many ways, all journalists are generalists, even when they have a beat. Our job is to be curious "normies,” (in the words of Drew Harwell). And sometimes I wonder if "starting at zero” on a story gives journalists a level of humility that requires them to be even more careful in how they report and write. As Rodrick says, “like the reader, you're entering a new world.”

I asked Rodrick about how he prepared for a reporting trip as intense as this one, and how he managed his time when he arrived in town: 

I was in Shakopee for 15 days, which gave me time to fall into the rhythm, if you want to call it that, of the terror people were feeling on a day-to-day basis. It also gave me time to not have to pack too many interviews into individual days. I say this with the full understanding that my trauma was 0.00001 [percent] of what the people of Shakopee experienced, but I want to be a good listener. Talking to two or three people, back-to-back, who had guns pointed at them Ieft me pretty shattered and I felt fortunate that I could catch my breath in the evening and regroup for the next day. 

I'm not a guy who prides himself on not getting emotionally involved in his stories, and I wept many times in those two weeks, a combination of reacting to the stories I was hearing, but also a clench-your-fists fury that this was being projected as “going after the worst of the worst,” but in reality ICE was stopping high school kids and house cleaning grandmothers. Marvin Gaye's line, “Makes me wanna holler, throw up both my hands” ran through my head repeatedly.

I felt guilty leaving after two weeks, there were more people I could have talked to, more things I could have witnessed firsthand, but I missed my kid and my wife. Sadly, I have the feeling what happened in Shakopee will happen again. So it goes.

Read more from Rodrick in the Rolling Stone archives. 

Links of note

• Audio Flux, the short-form audio storytelling site and podcast co-founded by Julie Shapiro and John DeLore, is accepting submissions for its seventh "circuit" (or season), with the theme “Trash or Treasure,” focusing on stories about climate change. The deadline for submissions is April 6, with more details and submission guidelines here.
• “How being isolated is bad for my writing.” Writer Christine Hyung-Oak Lee attended the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference after a long break and reflects on the importance of community when it comes to craft. “Once upon a time, one of my mentors told me, ‘The worst enemy of writing is your friends.’ She was not a particularly social person, even though she was and is well-liked. And she was spectacularly regarded as a writer. So who was I to tell her she was wrong? But through the years, I have come to realize that art is a process. And that process is directly correlated to each individual. So some of us do need community, even if others find it disruptive.”
• You're never too old, and it's never too late: At Oldster Magazine, Tom Junod reflects on publishing his first book at age 67, “In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man,” a memoir about his father. “When I was a young writer, Frank McCourt published his memoir, ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ to great acclaim at the age of 68. I was happy for him. But I couldn’t help but wonder: ‘Why in the world did he wait until he was 68? I’ll never do that.’ Well, I’m publishing my first book a month short of my 68th birthday. I guess I have the answer to my question.” 

Keep sharing your stories, at every age,

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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The post How Stephen Rodrick prepared for his story about ICE occupying a small town appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

There are many ways to tell a true story, and there's never just one path to finding the right idea or characters to bring those stories to life. 

Once a journalist finds that perfect idea, can they build trust with their subjects to make it happen? “A huge part of my job is demonstrating … that I want to understand their story as well as I can, and that I’m willing to take as much time as necessary to do that,” Washington Post reporter Peter Jamison told Nieman Storyboard in 2023.

From the Storyboard archives, here are seven journalists discussing how they found their story ideas and main characters — and how their subjects trusted them to tell those stories with care and empathy: 

1. Showing up for the story: Sarah Schweitzer of the Boston Globe on ‘The life and times of Strider Wolf’ (2016)

Sarah Schweitzer had written stories about young children before, but never as young as five years old. The child, Strider Wolf from New Hampshire, was on the edge of death three years before Schweitzer met him.

When he was two years old, Strider was severely beaten by his mother’s boyfriend, badly tearing his intestines that left a hole in his stomach. He underwent three surgeries in four days and spent three weeks laying in a hospital bed in Maine.

Schweitzer met Wolf when he was staying with his grandparents in Maine, who were between homes and struggling to keep up with the young boy and his even younger brother at their older age. The story is one of triumph over debilitating trauma and unfortunate circumstances.

This is how Schweitzer found the family:

When I’m looking for a story, I’m sort of casting about, so in this instance, court records were one thing I was looking through. I found the New Hampshire Supreme Court opinion rejecting an appeal by Strider’s abuser, his mother’s boyfriend, and I was pretty struck by it. The opinion was lengthy, it was heartbreaking, and I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened since with Strider. I tracked the family down to Oxford, Maine, but I couldn’t find a phone number so I called the local police. The chief told me he was looking for the family, too. It turned out the family had been evicted that week and child welfare workers wanted to make sure Strider and his brother were okay. He said he’d let the family know I was looking for them, and Lanette called me a few days later and agreed to a visit. Looking back, it does feel random, but I find stories often come about from some combination of luck and showing up, and those two things came together here.

2. Building trust with your subject: Christopher Solomon and ‘The Detective of Northern Oddities’ (2017)

Journalist Christopher Solomon learned about veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek while reporting on a story for the Scientific American. He sent her an email, but she never returned the message.

After forgetting about Burek and that email for a few years, Solomon heard her name again when National Geographic reporter Craig Welch had dinner with Burek and other scientists while doing his own story. Solomon knew he wanted to revisit her and her profession: studying aquatic animals after they die.

Solomon’s story starts off with Burek surveying dead otters and showcasing her offbeat and twisted humor. It wasn’t an easy path to get her to open up to him, though. Burek not only failed to follow up on Soloman’s email, but passed up press interviews for years:

It actually took Burek some time to warm up to me. As often happens with scientists, she had had some bad experiences with reporters in the past; as a result, she’d kept a very low profile in the media for years, almost never appearing in the news. She wasn’t keen to have a story done about her. At the same time, and as with many scientists, she wanted people to pay attention to what is going on up there. She had a message to get out. 

A couple of months after they first made contact and they had rapport built, Solomon asked if he could shadow her for a few weeks.

Once I got to know Burek, she turned out to be an amazing person: warm, smart, funny, passionate about her work, quirky and extremely quotable. Basically a writer’s dream. This is often the way it works, isn’t it? Once we knock down the initial barriers between reporter and subject, some fun and meaningful stuff can happen.

3. Following up in the comments: A revealing profile of a family that defied their faith’s edict on home schooling (2023)

Washington Post reporter Peter Jamison wrote a profile on Dan Cox, a lawyer-turned-politician from Maryland leading a movement among Christians toward home school education. Out of the several hundred comments the article received, one stood out to Jamison: someone claiming to have first-hand knowledge of Cox’s home-schooling network.

Jamison reached out to the commenter through the email they used to register with the Post and shortly got a response back from a man named Aaron Beall. He and his wife, Christina, grew up in a home school environment that demonized public education — yet at the time, three of their four children went to public school.

In a two-hour conversation with the parents in a conference room, Jamison learned that the pair were very bright yet did not pursue higher educational opportunities because of their upbringing. Seemingly, they did not want the same for their children.

Here’s what Jamison said about that initial connection with the Bealls:

A huge part of my job is demonstrating to people like Aaron and Christina that I want to understand their story as well as I can and that I’m willing to take as much time as necessary to do that. I like to think that by putting in the work — showing up for those early mornings when school starts, or nights when there are family events on campus; attending a child’s musical on the weekend; sitting and talking for as long as they are willing to talk — I’m “anteing up,” so to speak, showing that I’m committed to the process.

4. ‘Always looking for ideas’: Chris Jones and ‘The Things That Carried Him’ (2015)

Chris Jones said he felt “beyond driven” to write longer stories with complex themes five years into his career with Esquire. That drive led to him to write the longest piece of his career — a 17,000-word story about a soldier who died while serving in Iraq in 2007. 

It started out with reading around different publications, with Jones specifically reading a story from CNN about life at an operating base in Baghdad. One scene about a dead soldier being carried back to the base stood out to him. Then it led to a question: How does a soldier’s body actually get back home?

I’m always looking for ideas, and part of being a magazine writer is constantly looking for stories. And you know, the ideas are often the hardest part. You give a great writer a bad idea, and they’re not going to do anything with it. And you give a good idea to a mediocre writer, and they’re still going to come up with a pretty good story. The idea is so essential.

The story further required permissions from the family of the person he wanted to write about, and from the U.S. military. He felt like it would be difficult to get those two yeses, especially with the military. As it turned out, “like the pitch, it was an incredibly simple process.”

5. Finding the extraordinary: Jesse Katz goes ‘Inside the San Quentin Marathon’ (2016)

Jesse Katz said he felt like a fish out of water when he first started covering crime for the Los Angeles Times in the ’90s. He said the beat made him “develop a lot of skills and tactics, but also a lot of empathy and awareness.”

That came in handy during a visit to California’s oldest prison, San Quentin, some 20 years later. He visited the prison for another story but also learned that the prisoners hold a marathon race once a year. They made a course throughout the facility’s confined space, requiring 105 laps to make 26.2 miles.

I was quite taken by the vibe of the place, the medieval atmospherics there and the juxtaposition of this moldering castle right on this high-end, top-dollar, bayfront property. My eyes opened to San Quentin at that point. Then, when I heard they did a marathon there, it kind of blew my mind. There’s just something about the tension of trying to create distance in a place that is so confined.

While Katz talked to the prisoners and the guards, he regarded the San Quentin marathon course as its own character:

I was really intrigued with the course itself. I was very determined to document each twist and turn and explain the terrain that it navigated. I felt like the course was kind of central to everything — to the tension between freedom and confinement. Without that confinement, there was no zany course, and without the zany course, there was a lot less of a story.

6. Waiting for the right time: Eli Saslow and one Newtown family (2013)

For the Washington Post, Eli Saslow went to Newtown, Conn., shortly after the devastating Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in 2012. He wrote three daily stories in his time there, and most of the parents, understandably, did not want to engage.

Saslow spoke with his Post editor weeks after gun control legislation failed to pass in Congress. They wanted to write about a family advocating for something to change, and how attempts to try have not come to fruition. The timing was ideal, with the shooting still felt around the community but “enough time had passed that you could begin to see it fading in these small and brutal ways.”

Saslow spent days watching TV interviews of the families affected by the tragedy. He particularly took note of a “60 Minutes” program talking with 10 parents. He wanted to find someone active in gun legislation and with other children. After reaching out to a few people, he eventually landed on the Bardens, whose 7-year-old son Daniel died in Sandy Hook:

I explained what I wanted to do. I think it is always best to be pretty upfront about what you are asking for — the amount of time you want to be with them, the kind of story you are hoping to do, etc. They took a little while to think about it. They asked me to send them some other stories I had written. They talked with a PR person who had been advising the families, and then the PR person talked to me. Probably about a week after I called, they said they were up for it, and I flew to Newtown a few days later. Then, in terms of gaining access into their lives, it was mostly a matter of sticking around. I spent probably 12 or 14 hours with them each day when I was there. I sat next to them on the train to Delaware. I went to eat with them. I was there when they woke up in the morning. I stayed at a hotel nearby but spent almost all of my time at their house. Sometimes I was asking questions, but much of the time I was just there, trying my best to fade into their days.

7. Profiling people close to you: A reporter explores the laws and emotional impact of helping her father die (2022)

Esmé E. Deprez took her narrative storytelling skills at Bloomberg Businessweek and applied it to a subject she never thought she would explore: her father, Ron, and his final years battling ALS.

Her 5,000-word profile grappled with not only the relationship with her father while his health declined, but also about the state of medical aid in dying in the United States. In his state of Maine, Ron was one of the first people to take a life-ending drug, only available to those of sound mind with less than six months to live.

She saw the opportunity to write about her father as a way to memorialize him, and a conversation with a senior editor at Bloomberg to follow her along this reporting journey solidified it for her.

Interestingly, she didn’t tell her father that she would be writing this story — and it tore her up inside. She was afraid he would be angry, partly because he kept the severity of his condition away from most people he knew. But she said this after reflecting more:

Ultimately I convinced myself that a bigger part of him would be proud of me — proud that I confronted his death and my grief about it in a very head-on way. I also thought about how he was a policy guy at heart, having devoted his life and career as a public health epidemiologist and consultant to developing and advancing health reforms in his backyard of rural Maine and as far away as West Africa. I think he’d be happy that his story could illuminate the real-world impact of a government policy of growing significance and help shape the way people see and feel about it.

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post Getting the story: How 7 writers found their idea and main characters appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

There's a famous quote about creative inspiration, attributed on the internet to songwriter Sammy Cahn, who was asked in an interview, “What comes first, the melody or the lyrics?” He answered: “What comes first is the phone call.”

For many artists, and most definitely journalists, it is often the assignment and the deadline — not inspiration — that launches the work. Such was the case when the publisher Little, Brown called and asked if I'd be interested in writing another writing tools book, but this one for high school students who have to write their college admissions essays.

I had not planned on writing another writing book, but there it was — the phone call.

I said yes for several reasons: I have a long history of working with high school writers; I often contribute personal essays to the Tampa Bay Times; and, ten years earlier, I had offered Little, Brown a proposal to write just such a book, a pitch that went nowhere.

Last May, a new book was born to the world, a stylish looking aqua-colored text titled “Writing Tools for the College Admissions Essay: Write Your Way into the School of Your Dreams.” The book includes 100 tips and 25 full essays written by an interesting variety of high school students.

What surprised me most was how much I learned from studying the work of these young people, lessons I have been able to apply to my own writing and teaching. I have argued that, for those who are not professionals, the college admissions essay may turn out to be the most high-stakes piece of writing they will ever have to create.

All of the elements of sophisticated writing are there in the work of these aspiring college students: creative use of a prompt or assignment, a compelling opening, memorable and telling details, elements of storytelling (from scene-setting to dialogue), a credible and appealing voice, evidence of knowledge and curiosity — all in fewer than 600 words.

Of all the essays made available to me by students, one stood out as the most powerful, so I want to share it here, with the writer’s permission.

I used this essay as the final one in my book, a crowning example of how well-crafted, how creative, how moving a story by a high school student can be. I saved it for last, fearing that if I put it first, other students might find it intimidating and get discouraged. At the end, it was meant to celebrate the craft and inspire the spirit. Here is the essay. My analysis follows.

Leap of Faith

By Asher Montgomery (Accepted to Harvard University, 2023)

(645 words)

The sky was pitch black on Cotopaxi at 2 a.m. My headlamp barely lit the ice ahead of me. The snow turned my braided hair to ice, and every few steps I stopped to suck breath, like I was hyperventilating.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I thought.

As if he was reading my mind, the guide shouted down to me.

“Asher, you’re suffering because you are thinking about your pain,” he hollered. “Go to your happy place.”

Then I felt a tug on the rope tied to my waist, telling me to keep walking against the wind, against the sleet, against the snow.

I was too exhausted to cry, or to find a happy place. I could only think, “What am I doing here?”

I only had myself to blame. Climbing the 19,347-foot glacial volcano was my idea.

It was my idea because, the year before, on a hike in Alaska, I happened to look to my right and see Denali’s breathtaking peak and think, “That is where I want to be.” And because a few months later the Internet told me that Cotopaxi was great for beginner mountaineers. And, finally, because my dad found cheap flights to Ecuador for the summer of 2021.

I also thought it was something my brother would have liked to do.

Before Cotopaxi, before Alaska, and before my little brother died by suicide, we loved to go on hikes.

Long hikes.

For months at a time, we would camp and wake as the birds started chirping and walk along the rugged Appalachian Trail. Together we’d count the salamanders by the stream as my dad filtered water. We invented our own language — snails were “snake-cars,” birds were “up-dogs,” fellow hikers were “moving rocks.”

It wasn’t all fun. When I hadn’t showered in nine days and climbed into my sleeping bag like some kind of stink burrito. Or when we had to walk miles in the dark to make it to camp. But my siblings and I always left the trail feeling freer than we ever had, proud of ourselves and closer to each other.

We dragged my sister along on the Ecuador trip, but after three tough hikes to get acclimated to the altitude, she decided to opt out of the last climb: Cotopaxi. I tried to convince her otherwise, but she made the right call, for herself.

And my dad, he wasn’t doing much better than I was. His silence was a sign to me that he was in just as much pain.

He told me later that he only kept going because I refused to turn back.

I wanted more than anything at that moment to make it to the top because it never crossed my mind that we wouldn’t make it, and because I hoped I might be able to feel my little brother at the top.

But as the wind picked up and the air got thinner in the bone-biting cold, our legs grew exhausted and still hadn’t reached the steepest part.

The guide told us there that it was too dangerous to continue.

I finally started crying, tears of relief and disappointment.

We turned around. It was still dark. On the descent, the sun began to rise, lighting the clouds that surrounded the warrior mountain.

We stopped for a moment at the signal of the guide. He began pulling the rope out to give it slack. He told me to wait until the rope pulled to begin walking again. He walked out in front until I couldn’t see him. When it was my turn, I reached a gap in the ice. A crevasse. I knew what to do. I stepped back, ran forward, and put all of the energy I had into a leap.

Soaring over the bottomless crevasse, I understood, somewhere in this struggle, that pain and uncertainty are not an end.

What I see in the story

Of all the essays in my book, this one touches me the deepest. I have known the writer, Asher Montgomery, since she was a child. A multitalented young woman from a creative and adventurous family, Asher has been a musician, an activist, and a strong writer since she was in middle school. When I learned she had applied to Harvard, it did not surprise me, although I knew that many high-achieving students apply to Harvard and find themselves rejected.

When I read this essay, I understood why she was accepted and, in her first year, found a place at the Harvard Crimson, the school’s famous student publication.

As Asher was still in high school, trying to figure out her future, she and her family suffered an unimaginable tragedy, the death of her younger brother. If you have read her essay, you can begin to appreciate how skillfully she handled this traumatic experience as an element in her story.

Instead of describing the tragedy in all its painful detail, Asher makes the powerful decision to understate a devastating event that could easily have dominated her narrative. Understatement is a powerful tool in storytelling. When a story is lighthearted, as several of the essays in my book are, overstatement, even exaggeration, may work the best. But in a case such as Asher’s, less turns out to be so much more.

She encases news of the tragedy in a journey of aspiration and desperation, filled with descriptive language that builds a powerful narrative. Stories need characters, scenes, settings, and chronologies, and this one has all of those. It also is built around a symbol, of sorts, perhaps what we might call an archetype; she uses the act of climbing a mountain as a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving knowledge.

In the myths of ancient literature and religion, Sisyphus repeatedly pushes a rock up a hill, only to see it roll back every time. Moses receives the commandments from the top of Mount Sinai. Jesus delivers a famous sermon from a mount. Mount Olympus was where the Greek gods hung out. Even in our common language we talk about the hills we have to climb, and the glory that comes from reaching the top.

Asher proves the wisdom of my high school teacher who told us that in good writing “a symbol need not be a cymbal.” In other words, no need to force-feed meaning to readers. Instead, the meaning reveals itself in one final moment, when Asher is fully prepared to take a literal leap of faith: a jump across a crevasse that leads to an uncertain but hopeful future.

The story reveals so much about Asher’s character: her intelligence, resilience, physical courage, and sensitivity. This is the kind of person I would want to join my community of teaching and learning.

It was important for me to add in the book that students should not feel intimidated by the unique elements on display in this essay. A young writer may not have experienced such a terrible personal loss. They may not have been born into a family that has the resources to undertake exciting adventures.

But every writer will have their own experiences, and their own stories about loss, hope, family, aspiration, failure, and triumph. You don’t need to write the most dramatic essay in the class to get you where you want to go — only one that is revealing and true.

That is just as true for experienced writers as for students. Wherever you are on your own journey, just remember: you can do it.

A final note for journalists and professional writers 

The readers of Nieman Storyboard and the Poynter Institute website are in a position to make a serious contribution to education and literacy. Students benefit from a writing coach, and some families spend lots of money to procure one. Wouldn’t it be cool for a high school student to find an experienced writer in their communities to coach them? I would much prefer a high school writer to consult a human coach than a robot editor.

You may be thinking: I would not know how to coach someone to write such an essay. I am happy to point you back to my book. It is not only a guide for young writers; it is a guide for those who help young writers, including counselors, teachers, parents, neighbors, and older students. I turn an important part of the book over to Michelle Hiskey, an award-winning writer who has built a business working with students on their essays. She offers more than 20 important strategies that you can use to help students – and, in fact, any writer.

Most of us know families with students of high school age. It will not be difficult for you to express an interest in helping a young writer. You can also contact high schools or school administrators, expressing your volunteer interest.

Believe me when I tell you how gratifying it will feel when a young writer shares with you the news of being accepted to a school of their choice.

***

Roy Peter Clark has taught writing at the Poynter Institute since 1977, coaching students of all ages, from elementary school to Pulitzer Prize-winning professionals. He is the author or editor of 21 books on writing, reading, language, grammar, rhetoric, and journalism. He is a contributing writer to the Tampa Bay Times. Poynter has named a national short writing contest in his honor. 

The post High-impact storytelling in college admissions essays, and what we can learn from it appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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***

Dear Storyboard community: 

Five years after the January 6th insurrection, Washington Post reporter Ellie Silverman takes us into an incongruous place: a middle school classroom. Teacher Nathan Tate tells his students about his previous job as a D.C. police officer who defended the U.S. Capitol from pro-Trump protesters on that day. 

Silverman begins the story in Tate’s classroom: 

Nathan Tate had told almost no one about that day five years ago. He worried people might not believe him. Or they’d think he sounded weak. Or Tate would laugh, because that’s what he does when he’s nervous, even though nothing about Jan. 6 was funny to him.

Looking out at his classroom of 23 middle-schoolers — kids shifting in their seats and doodling in their workbooks — he wasn’t sure what they already knew. They were third-graders in 2021. This lesson could be the first time they heard about it from someone they trusted.

“Let’s talk,” the social studies teacher said.

Finding an ending for the 3,000-word feature proved trickier. When she turned in an early draft of the story, it left space with the note, “Something as the kicker,” said Silverman’s editor, Kelley Benham French.

As it happened, French and other Post staffers had been reading Susan Orlean’s memoir “Joyride” for their book club. Advice in the book, along with a Zoom discussion with Orlean herself, helped them find an ending. Here’s Orlean on why stories often can’t be neatly summarized: 

Conclusions, though, bedevil me. What are they supposed to accomplish? You’ve already followed me to the end of the story, so the act of seduction has succeeded; what do I do with you now? How do we say goodbye? It’s confounding. Stories do have beginnings, but do they ever truly have endings? The real finale of the story, the terminus, is the end of my relationship with the reader. I’ve led you all this way, and now I’m setting you on your way; our journey together is done. The story doesn’t finish—but our time together, yours and mine, does. That’s the conclusion, that separation of storyteller and listener, the small sorrow of the journey’s end.

My first significant editing experience at The New Yorker had to do with the ending of a piece. When Chip [McGrath, Orlean's editor] chopped off that wagging tail of a conclusion I had written at the end of my story about Benetton, I was dismayed. I thought it was like someone had stopped the action midmoment, the reading equivalent of inhaling sharply and holding it, holding it—and not letting it out.

After my initial shock at this excision, I read the piece again, and this time the abruptness felt right. Had I gotten used to the lingering note of the unfinished end? The way it left the reader falling forward, to complete the piece in his or her own head? I began to unlearn my habit of writing those summary upsurges, rehashing what I’d already written and then, effortfully, trying to round out the story, complete it, give it ballast, make it matter. But does a story end because the journalist’s eye has drifted from it? Can any of us set the seal on a story, ever? Should I tell you what a story meant, or is the point that you read it and then it’s up to you to determine what it means? I’ve come to understand that no story is ever over, and it’s the reader’s duty and privilege, not mine, to take stock of the story and give it weight.

Silverman went back through her notes. “I started asking her what else she had in her notebook,” French said, “and we were going through things and filling out sections and rearranging sections.”

Here’s how Silverman ended the piece: 

The class was getting a little rowdier, and Tate thought this could be a good moment to tell them what he wished the country had already realized.

He pointed at Allisson and said, “I was defending your democracy.”

She looked puzzled, and then she said: “Mine?”

Democracy, he wanted them to know, wasn’t just built or broken in revolutionary moments or clouds of smoke. It required one person, and then another, to pay attention.

Allisson blinked.

“Wait,” she said. “Mine?”

“That quote just felt to me like a Susan Orlean kind of ending,” French said. “Just let the reader experience that moment, too, and let the reader take it the rest of the way.”

It’s one small moment in one classroom, about an event that is still playing out right now. No story ever really ends, but the way we tell it matters — in real-time and five years later — to future generations.  

***

Author Grace Talusan on going to uncomfortable places in your writing

Storyboard contributor Erika Hayasaki speaks with author and essayist Grace Talusan, who teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University. As Hayasaki writes, “Before the holiday break, tragedy gripped the Brown campus in Rhode Island, as a gunman opened fire on students who were prepping for exams, killing two and wounding nine others. I interviewed Grace about her teaching and writing before the shooting, checking in with her again in the hours and weeks after. Still reeling, she is now focusing on helping students use writing to process and try to heal.”

[ Read the story ]

Links of note

• “Learning Succinct Storytelling from Pop Songs.” For her Culture Trip newsletter, culture writer Jennifer Keishin Armstrong takes us through the structure and emotional detail in the lyrics of some classic and modern pop hits — from the devastating three-act structure of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” to the foreshadowing of conflict in Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” “You just know when the opening lines are, ‘It’s fine, it’s cool,’ that it is neither fine nor cool. I love an opening line that implies ‘things are not right here’ without explaining everything.” 
• “When the only game in town is your own.” Journalist Paul Kix tells a story about any writer’s dream scenario: having their GQ magazine story adapted into a feature film that goes on to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. But what if the real dream is something else entirely? “Happiness is found when you listen to what you feel called to do and then you do it, over and over and over. The real prize of Sundance, I realized in the months after the festival, was the opportunity to write more.”
• “A ‘news’ story (more than) a year in the making.” The path to publication is usually not a straight line, as journalist Christian Elliott reminds us in his newsletter. He shares a refreshingly transparent timeline of publishing his latest piece, an 1,100-word story for Science Magazine about deep-sea mining that he first started working on in May 2024. 
• Speaking of long journeys to publication: At Sari Botton’s Memoir Land, poet-writer Maggie Smith offers words of encouragement from her book, “Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life”: “Before Meryl Streep read ‘Good Bones’ at Lincoln Center, before the poem was featured on an episode of ‘Madam Secretary,’ before it went viral and was read by millions of people, before it was published by the online journal Waxwing, ‘Good Bones’ was rejected by a few other magazines. I sent the poem out to a few print journals I admired, and it was rejected by all of them. (No, I’m not naming names.)” As Smith continues: “Sometimes you don’t know that a loss isn’t a loss, because what it makes space for is better—a good reminder for all of us working on creative projects, putting ourselves out there, trying, and then trying again.”

Keep trusting the process, and keep sharing your stories,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you do those exercises yourself too?

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

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

***

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

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

A journalist can ask their subject hundreds of questions and get a great chunk of the story. But it’s when the reporter listens in on an unprompted conversation — whether it’s with a friend or a stranger, small talk or a heavy heart-to-heart — that’s when the subject can reveal themselves in new ways unknown to the reporter.

People engage in dialogue with one another every day. Dialogue is in the books we pick off our shelves that reveal a character’s personality and flaws. The same can be said for countless narrative works, and are extremely effective when getting to know the subject.

From the Nieman Storyboard annotation archives, here are five pieces that use dialogue in a variety of ways, and what its authors say about it: 

1. Catching a natural conversation at the scene: Jeanne Marie Laskas and ‘Guns ’R Us’ (2015)

Jeanne Marie Laskas, a correspondent for GQ, was thinking about the shooting in Tucson, Ariz., that critically injured U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six others, and she wondered who decides to sell or not to sell guns to certain people. Her editor encouraged her to get behind the counter of a gun store.

Laskas did just that, starting with simple exchanges between clerk and customer, then leading into the bigger issue of gun violence in America.

Laskas starts out with this dialogue between two young men and a woman with a sparkly purse, looking at AK-47s in an Arizona gun shop:

"You have to admit this is pretty badass," the one man was saying. He had a carbine shorty perched on his hip, Stallone-style.

"I don't know," the woman said. "To me, it looks mean."

"It's supposed to look mean."

"They should make it in pink," she said. "Wouldn't that be cute?"

"You're shitting me."

"They should make it in Hello Kitty!" she said. "I would totally buy it if it was Hello Kitty."

"Sweet holy crap," the other man said. "That would be the worst possible death. Can you imagine? Shot dead by a Hello Kitty semiauto."

Here’s why Laskas wanted to start with this conversation:

It is just a glimpse of a moment. I’m writing about a shopping experience, and here is a glimpse of the shopper. Probably 15 of them happened, but here is a funny one. The idea would be to provide a quick moment. It’s not loaded, to use a pun here, but I don’t have a point. This is not a polemic. Almost trying to show that.

2. A ‘fly on the wall’ approach: Susan Orlean and the American man, age 10 (2014)

Susan Orlean believed that profiling the average person was more interesting than profiling a celebrity. Taking that thought, the New Yorker staff writer set out to follow a not-at-all famous 10-year-old boy for Esquire.

She followed Colin Duffy at school, at play dates, and at family dinners, again and again and again. The experiences Orlean had with him and the commentary she gives in the story give the reader a thorough glimpse into the life and mindset of a young boy.

A perfect example is this moment between Colin and his best friend Japeth:

The girls in Colin's class at school are named Cortnerd, Terror, Spacey, Lizard, Maggot, and Diarrhea. "They do have other names, but that's what we call them," Colin told me. "The girls aren't very popular."

"They are about as popular as a piece of dirt," Japeth said. "Or, you know that couch in the classroom? That couch is more popular than any girl. A thousand times more." They talked for a minute about one of the girls in their class, a tall blonde with cheerleader genetic material, who they allowed was not quite as gross as some of the other girls. Japeth said that a chubby, awkward boy in their class was boasting that this girl liked him. "No way," Colin said. "She would never like him. I mean, not that he's so ... I don't know. I don't hate him because he's fat, anyway. I hate him because he's nasty."

"Well, she doesn't like him," Japeth said. "She's been really mean to me lately, so I'm pretty sure she likes me."

"Girls are different," Colin said. He hopped up and down on the balls of his feet, wrinkling his nose. "Girls are stupid and weird."

"I have a lot of girlfriends, about six or so," Japeth said, turning contemplative. "I don't exactly remember their names, though."

Orlean said she does not tend to record conversations, so here’s how she got it:

I scribbled madly. They chattered to each other enough that I could catch up with my notes while they tracked off onto something less interesting. I definitely paid the price for not using a tape recorder, but I was with them for so much time that the tapes would have been ridiculously long, and I would argue that a tape recorder would have made them more self-conscious. Somehow, a pad and pen just doesn't intrude the way an electronic gizmo does. I also know I listen more attentively when I'm the one and only recording device, and at the end of the day, that's the single most important thing I can do. If I'm not really engaged and paying attention, it's not going to work. If I don't get every line of dialogue, I'll manage with what I have. If I haven't really paid attention, I can't write a good piece.

3. The use of both external and internal dialogue: How film class led to fighting wildfires which led to finding a home which led to a memoir (2015)

Sarah Berns went to study film at Wesleyan University, but when she wanted to make her senior thesis film, she had to get money fast. Always enamored with the West, she went to Washington state to be a smokejumper, a firefighter who parachutes from planes onto remote fires.

She ended up writing about her experience for Outside magazine in her piece “Finding Home in the West — by Smokejumping,” largely centered on how she fought to prove herself as an equal in a field dominated by men.

Here is a piece of dialogue that’s external as well as internal, detailing how her axe cut her leg after fighting a fire in Oregon:

I looked down at my now-red leather boot and wondered: retardant or blood? I yanked the ax from my leather boot and felt an enormous volume of liquid rushing out: definitely blood.

I hobbled off the fire and hiked to the nearest road (which wasn’t near) to catch a ride into the town of John Day and argue with a nurse.

“No, you cannot cut off my boot.”

I explained that it would take weeks to break in another boot. But what I was really thinking was: I’m not going to let this accident take me out of my own competition.

The nurse and I had reached a stalemate when the rappel base manager arrived. I was mortified to see him. I am not that weak, clumsy girl. Not me, not today. I turned to him.

“Will you pull off my boot?”

Berns explains why she chose to include internal dialogue, a device she uses throughout the piece: 

I am constantly rehashing events and conversation in my own head, so writing this way feels totally natural to me. The internal dialogue is my true voice – it’s the way I talk, negotiate and process with myself. My inner voice is often at odds with what I’m doing physically or saying aloud. This is the way I navigate the world.

4. Using dialogue as a literary tool: Navigating ethics, culture and safety to immerse in immigration and Covid (2020)

Immigration reporter Hannah Dreier has reported on violence in many countries in the past. But her coverage of a woman from Colombia living in a shared home in New Jersey while her tourist visa expired was “by far the most anxious reporting experience I’ve ever had.”

For The Washington Post, Dreier went to New Jersey to meet Tatiana Angulo and cover her story in the 24 hours before her visa expired — during the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dreier documents a conversation between Angulo and her friend Yesenia Sarria while they collected white rocks on the waterfront and confided in each other:

Tatiana wondered aloud if she would have been better off returning to Colombia, where at least she could visit her children, prompting Yesenia to reassure her that she was doing the right thing by staying. Yesenia reminded her how amazed she’d been when Tatiana managed to get a visa.

“That’s not an easy thing, to get to the U.S.,” Yesenia said. “You have to try, because you’ve been given everything. Everyone in Colombia wants the American Dream.”

They looked up and down the empty beach. Tatiana remembered how scared she had been when she first came.

“People always said there was lots of drug addiction here,” she said. 

 “And crazy people, like in the movies,” Yesenia said.

“But then you get here and it’s just normal. Beautiful,” Tatiana said.

Dreier said this when asked about her dialogue choices:

I liked that the friend was talking about the American Dream, because it would have felt too cheesy to insert that phrase into the story in my own words, but felt OK coming up organically in this conversation between two immigrants. [Post editor David] Finkel once told me that the most affecting parts of quotations are often the throwaway words people put at the beginning and end of sentences, so I was listening for that, too. Like the “beautiful” at the end of this one.

5. Including the reporter in the dialogue: Embedded war reporting with courage and common sense (2023)

Luke Mogelson has covered wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and, more recently, Ukraine. He has reported on the war from infantry units and combat zones, and stressed how important it is for him to see the war firsthand and through the lens of its most critical players.

In his story for the The New Yorker, he chronicled the war through the eyes of a team of soldiers.

Mogelson introduces one of the main characters, 37-year-old “Doc” from the United States, in a scene where they were at an outdoor restaurant in Kyiv. He includes this brief moment:

Toward the end of our meal, an older man in a leather fedora approached our table. “International Legion?” he asked, in accented English. I pointed at Doc; the man extended his hand and told him, “I just wanted to say thank you.”

Doc scrutinized his glass, embarrassed. After the man left, I remarked that such recognition must feel good. “It feels weird,” Doc replied.

Mogelson inserted himself in this exchange, and here’s why he thought it was necessary:

It’s much better if characters talk with one another than if they talk to the journalist. Of course, that’s not always possible, and in this case, because we were alone, I had to nudge Doc to get him to articulate what he was feeling. So, yes, I said, “That must feel good.” By not quoting myself, I hoped to emphasize Doc’s words rather than mine. For whatever reason, putting words in quotes makes the person who spoke them a more specific identity, and I don’t want to be that in the text — I want to be a cipher or a foil.

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post The art of dialogue: 5 conversations from great narrative stories appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

John Hammontree knows a good story when he hears one. Hammontree, the Murrow Award-winning head of podcasts for AL.com and current Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, says the idea for a podcast about domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph initially came to him following the events of January 6^th and the fall of Roe v. Wade. 

During a lunch outing with some of his newsroom colleagues in Birmingham, Alabama, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and 2021 Nieman Fellow John Archibald held the table rapt with the story of his trip to North Carolina in search of Rudolph, who bombed Birmingham’s New Woman All Women Health Care Center in 1997. 

Rudolph was eventually convicted in connection with bombings across the South from 1996 to 1998, including the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

After that lunch, Hammontree decided to reach out to Becca Andrews, a Western Kentucky University journalism professor and author of “No Choice: The Destruction of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect a Fundamental American Right.”

Together, they got to work on making an eight-episode serialized podcast, “American Shrapnel: The Weaponization of Eric Robert Rudolph,” which was released in July and tells a story of domestic terrorism and extremist political ideology that still resonates today. 

“I knew Becca through Reckon, and through her work with Mother Jones. Her deep history of knowing the history of abortion rights, abortion access, anti-abortion movements, was a piece that we needed for this story,” Hammontree says. (Hammontree, Andrews, and I were all colleagues at Reckon News, the now-shuttered digital publication that grew out of AL.com).

Even with the right team in place, producing a podcast on Rudolph and the bombings was no easy feat — and no one had anticipated production taking three years. I chatted with the team about a familiar issue to journalists that has grown more challenging as our nation’s politics have grown more fractured: getting sources to speak on the record. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

I clocked at least six reasons various people gave you for not wanting to be interviewed: it was too long ago, privacy, fear of being targeted for speaking on the record about controversial topics, concern about their careers, faulty memory, concerns about what their families might think. To some extent, this just comes with the territory as journalists, but it seemed like for this specific project, there was an overwhelming number of refusals to speak on the record. Would you agree?

John Archibald: There were a lot, but that also comes with the fact that we interviewed a whole lot of people. There were people who were never going to talk to us. [Jeff Tickal], who was instrumental in getting [Eric Rudolph’s] car tag number in Episode 1, said, in some ways, the case is still active, and “if I said something that didn’t match up with what I said, I could jeopardize the case.” But what he would never say out loud, I think, is that he’s a Republican sitting judge in Alabama and he would rather hang on a cross than talk about abortion, than how he helped catch a killer.

Becca Andrews: We have this person that I’m trying to talk to right now who has been very back-and-forth. She’s just genuinely terrified of this moment. She’s a private person and the political climate is not helping her feel safe to tell her story that is critical of white supremacy. And even though her experience is her experience and has nothing to do with politics, she’s just like, “I don’t know that I even want to consider touching that.”

As a journalist it’s frustrating because … I feel it right now in my position as a professor, this chilling effect of, “Can we speak freely…? What’s going to happen?” I think it’s affecting us in journalism too with our sources.

John Hammontree: Jermaine Hughes [the University of Alabama at Birmingham student who witnessed Rudolph leaving the scene of the crime and followed him] is a whole separate category of person. He hasn’t spoken to the media since [the bombing] happened. He’s just the true definition of a Good Samaritan and a hero. There’s something almost noble about it. I mean, it’s frustrating, don’t get me wrong, but he has this principled stance of … never going to try to seek out credit or anything for this story. I wish he had talked to us, I wish we were the exception, but there’s something to be said for the fact that he’s never spoken to the media.

We’ve spoken off the record to some people who knew Eric directly. One of them was an old Army buddy of his, who initially was interested in going on the record, and then called back the next day [after] he’d spoken with his wife and he just didn’t want to get his name dragged into all that, which I understand. I wouldn’t want to be on the record of being an old friend of a serial bomber. But some of those conversations did give us the chance to learn more about Rudolph, which, on deep background, did affect the way we told the story.

We reached out to everybody in his family: his brothers, his sisters, his mother. Some people talked to [Rudolph’s mother, Patricia] back then, but since then, they’ve gone cone of silence. The family’s not talking. Maybe that’ll change when [his mother] passes, maybe not.

And then Eric, we each wrote multiple letters. We don’t know if he got them, we don’t know if he read them, but we never heard from him.

Archibald: For everybody in the story that made the final cut, there were many more who didn’t get that far, who had other reasons for not wanting to talk, and a good many of them were trauma. 

It’s like one of those things with Jermaine Hughes, the witness who followed [Rudolph], the hero. We didn’t get to talk to him, but when we found that transcript of his police interview from two hours after the [Birmingham clinic] bombing, in some ways, it seemed even more perfect because he was telling his story fresh in that moment. And what we found from so many people is when they talk about things they remember — like me — they remember things wrong, and through their own particular filter in that moment.

Hammontree: And there were some mundane things like people not checking their Facebook messages or not checking their emails. We had about three — they responded two weeks after the podcast went live.

How did you care for the people you interviewed? Some folks got quite emotional during their recollections.

Archibald: [Chris Eidson, a paramedic on the scene featured in Episode 1] comes to mind on that. We just let him talk. I think some of that’s in the final tape. He was obviously very shaken by [the Birmingham clinic bombing].

I think I said something about, “I’m sorry to put you through it again,” and he said, “No, no, no, that’s what I think is supportive.”

We had a lot of conversations you didn’t hear with him about how it was going to be portrayed. He said he came to us because he knew we would tell it in a sensitive way. And then we talked about what that sensitivity looked like. And that’s what you end up with.

We basically said, “We just want you to tell your story, and you tell what you’re comfortable telling.” And he just opened up. And John and I, honestly, just sat there in an emotional state of wonder because he was summing up things that I thought were so extremely powerful and that we had never heard before. I think he understood that.

Hammontree: Some of the details he provided affected things like sound design or the music we would play. He talked about the ringing in his ears, and we tried to bring that to life for listeners.

One of the things I love about podcasting is just how intimate it is as a medium. If you’re just reading Chris Eidson’s words, it’s not the same as hearing the catch in his voice. It’s a great way to [practice] journalism because it takes audiences into the room with you. You can hear the timbre in [police officer] Jeff Postell’s voice, and you can hear [The Otherside Lounge bombing victim Memrie Wells Cresswell’s] birds tweeting in the background. You can hear [former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama] Doug Jones banging on the table for emphasis. I think, in some ways, that’s unique to the form.

Talk about Memrie, Becca.

Andrews: I’m still shocked that we got through the phone conversation, because the first phone conversation she was like, “I Googled you and you’re a liberal.” And because I’m human, I sometimes make assumptions about people too. I was taken aback because I was like, “Oh, you’re queer — you wouldn’t be conservative!” So it took us a minute to be like, “Okay, look, I’m not telling the story as someone who typically votes Democrat. I am telling the story as someone who cares about the story, we care about the story, and we care about what happened to you and we care about the societal repercussions that are echoing in our present moment.”

It was clear that she was still dealing with some of this trauma. Basically everyone who has been through a bombing is dealing with that trauma for the rest of their lives. I took that really seriously and tried to prep for the interview with that in mind: What’s going to make you comfortable? Do you want your partner there? How do we do this in way that makes you feel safe?

I just remember that interview and feeling so lucky to be able to sit there and listen to her talk about her experience and share. It’s a thing we feel as journalists, right? When you’re in an interview and someone’s sharing with you and there’s this intimacy and you feel so fortunate to do this work in the first place, but also to just be trusted with that kind of experience. The whole interview was like that. I just felt like I was holding my breath and awed by it, by her.

The other dynamic with [Memrie] specifically was she had also been traumatized by the media. She had been outed by the media. That was another thing that was very present in the dynamic, that I think that we all felt was important to be sensitive to and thoughtful about. And we were all horrified that that happened to her.

Hammontree: When we were structuring the podcast, we wanted to make sure that we built episodes around her perspective, around Diane [Derzis, owner of the New Woman All Women Health Care Center in Birmingham, Ala.] and Emily [Lyons, the nurse injured in the bombing there] so that it wasn’t just the story of Eric Rudolph. He’s a vehicle, and this is the story of dozens of people who were affected by him, and it’s also the story of the people trying to make a whole army of Eric Rudolphs. So we wanted to try to set aside specific episodes to broaden the scope of the story.

How were you all able to take care of yourselves? You all spent three years researching and recording the podcast.

Archibald: I’ve been doing this a long time and covered a lot of these things … but we’re in a fortunate situation in that anytime we come across this stuff, we get to write it down. And when you write this stuff down, you process it in a different way than when you let it sit and fester. I honestly believe, whether it’s executions or bombings or disasters, the fact that I’ve always had to do obits for people … you get to process it, and you give them some kind of honor with the way you do it, and you get to figure out how you think about it.

And having two other people in this situation to share it all with, and bounce it all back and forth, and hear them — even when they’re wrong — tell you what they think about it, and to just check yourself … has been really valuable.

Andrews: The group dynamic really helped. None of us can take ourselves seriously because the other two are there to check that. That’s a gift.

Hammontree: Doing this deep dive back into the history, about the rise of some of these violent movements, in some way made the current moments scarier — the assassination in Minnesota [of state Rep. Melissa Hortman], the [Charlie Kirk] assassination, January 6^th, the bombing of an IVF clinic, the bomb threats in North Carolina — you could just see the continuum of them. But I think it also helped us, or at least helped me, to understand that this is not brand new. This is something that’s been building, and that there have also been people kind of pushing back, and getting in the way. When you hear Memrie or you hear Emily or Diane, you hear that they’re still fighting 20, 25 years later, and it gives you resolve.

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Minda Honey is the author of the dating memoir "The Heartbreak Years" and writes a weekly newsletter, Writing for Fakers, at mindahoney.substack.com.

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