Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter, delivered every Friday in your inbox.

***

Dear Storyboard community: 

I am away this week. In my place, I'm excited to share a new guest post from journalist, author, and Storyboard contributor Erika Hayasaki. 

— Mark Armstrong

***

When Lillian Ross published the wildly controversial profile of Ernest Hemingway in The New Yorker in 1950, many believed the journalist had made a fool of the legendary novelist. Recently, when my students in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, read the piece, many of them also thought Hemingway came off like a drunken man-child. How, they asked, could the profiler and her subject possibly have remained friends after? 

It’s the kind of discussion that comes up regularly in the course, the history and ethics of literary journalism, a requirement for all students enrolled in the program. The ethics class — like the undergraduate major — was created by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barry Siegel, who has been at the helm of the undergraduate degree program since 2003.

“We recognize we’re in a field where there are ethical issues about what we do,” Siegel told me in a recent interview. “We have to believe in the value, the meaning of what we do.”

This winter session marks the third time I’ve filled in for Siegel, teaching the ethics class while he’s on sabbatical. I’ve had the privilege of teaching a range of classes in the program, but the ethics course is one of the most provocative — an auditorium of 50 to 75 students debating the ethical choices made by writers like John Hersey, in “Hiroshima,” and Janet Malcolm, in “The Journalist and the Murderer.” 

Students explore questions such as: When, if ever, is it OK for journalists to write with interiority from their subjects’ minds? Can we ever really know what someone else’s thoughts are? Students constantly question whether a journalist is exploiting someone or shedding light. 

“I emphasize that we're navigating in a sea of ambiguity,” Siegel says. “I don't have a rule book in my back pocket.”

Over the years, Siegel has added and deleted readings from his history and ethics syllabus. In discussing immersion journalism, students read excerpts from Jack London’s “People of the Abyss” or Nellie Bly’s “10 Days in a Madhouse.” When I teach the course, I weave in a few contemporary writers like Suki Kim, whose undercover journalism book on North Korea, “Without You, There Is No Us” was dismissively categorized as memoir, or Leon Dash’s “Rosa Lee,” whose drug-addicted subjects were constantly asking for money and favors.

I assign the Hemingway profile the same week that I ask students to read Zora Neale Hurston’s 1952 profile for the Pittsburgh Courier of Ruby McCollum, a Black woman on trial for murdering a white doctor. Ross was employing nonfiction narrative techniques like scene-by-scene reconstruction and status details, and Hurston used a chameleon-like point of view, before Tom Wolfe defined such techniques as the “New Journalism” in 1972. 

The Hemingway portrait embodies a timeless conundrum that spans all nonfiction, the thorniest terrain for all journalists who do deep, immersive work: How to navigate that relationship between writer and subject? “My point of view is always implicit in how I write the story,” Ross wrote in her book “Reporting Always.” Writers make their own subjective choices in terms of structure, style, and selection. As Ross put it: “A reporter is always chemically involved in a story.”

In 2022, I published a book about separated twins and transracial adoption. Readers were divided over my portrayal of the adoptive mother in the book. Some found her selflessly benevolent. Others saw her as willfully blind.

The adoptive mom I profiled also wrote to me with her own response, which I included in the epilogue: “In a world where there is so much tension and divide you could have told a story of love and inclusivity with difficult moments that were very real, but instead you have told a controversial, complex and ugly story with rare beautiful moments.”

Siegel’s advice on writing about real people: “It’s the hardest thing, but you’re not going to be a very effective writer unless you own this. Own the story. And to own the story, you can’t portray somebody the way they want to be portrayed, or the way they see themselves. Of course, it's easier to say this than to do it.”

You can read more of my interview with Siegel here.

Links of note

• Kavitha Cardoza and Oliver Whang were awarded the 2026 American Mosaic Journalism Prize from the Heising-Simons Foundation for excellence in long-form, narrative, or deep reporting about underrepresented and/or misrepresented groups in the United States. Each recipient receives an unrestricted cash prize of $100,000 in recognition of their exceptional work and promise. 
• Kim Cross at The Waterproof Notebook discusses when and how to use an expository aside in your writing, featuring examples from Kendrick Lamar’s work and Helen Macdonald’s hybrid memoir, “H Is for Hawk.”
• In her newsletter American Orphan, book critic Kristen Martin writes a tribute to the recently shuttered Washington Post Book World, which is worth reading alongside her insightful piece from last year: “What is book criticism for?”
• For Long Lead, Kelly Kimball (a UCI Literary Journalism Program graduate) interviews Frank Shyong, who writes the newsletter LunchBox. Shyong shares the story of how his reporting inspired the movie “Rosemead,” starring Lucy Liu.
• Speaking of ethics, the Centre for Anthropology and Journalism will be hosting a free Think-Tank Session on February 25, to discuss how anthropology’s paradigm of reciprocity could help journalists ethically compensate communities.
• The Institute for Independent Journalists is holding an online conference March 5 and 6, where you can hear from journalists-turned-bestselling-novelists Vanessa Hua and KJ Dell'Antonia, and from representatives of the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Journalism and Media, the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford, and the USC Center for Health Journalism on how to find funding for your reporting.

Keep writing, 

Erika Hayasaki
Professor of Literary Journalism at the University of California, Irvine
Follow The Reported Essay

The post Telling true stories: the hardest part appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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.

Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter, delivered every Friday in your inbox.

***

Dear Storyboard community, 

I am away this week, so it seems like a perfect moment to hand the reins over to one of our Storyboard contributors. Here's a special guest post from acclaimed author, journalist, and recent Nieman Storyboard podcast guest Erika Hayasaki. —Mark

***

As is the case for many journalists, Sara Kehaulani Goo’s decades-long career led her to far-flung places and new cities. She’s worked as a senior news executive who has helped lead media organizations such as Axios, NPR, and The Washington Post, where she was recently named President of the Creator Network. But for years, even while working with reporters covering the world’s biggest news stories, Goo felt pulled to return to tell a story of her family’s homeland on Maui. She long believed the dominant narrative about Hawaii needed to be corrected. But how would she begin to tell that story?

In 2019, the narrative thread found her. Goo learned that her family was at risk of losing its ancestral land, given to them by King Kamehameha III in 1848. “As a journalist, I was trained to keep myself out of the story,” Goo told me. “It took time and, honestly, life circumstances, to realize my family’s story was worth telling in my own voice, and that it could resonate beyond just me.”

There is a special kind of literary power and authority when a writer weaves their personal insights into a deeply reported story about a place they’re from or know intimately. Goo’s new book, “Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai'i,” invites readers to understand Hawaii’s broader, overlooked history through her family’s journey. 

Goo’s braided book is one of several new narrative nonfiction releases I’ve enjoyed reading recently, written by journalists investigating larger historical stories in their own childhood backyards, including “Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama,” by Alexis Okeowo, and “Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity,” by Joseph Lee, about Martha’s Vineyard.

Here are some key questions and tips that Goo shared with Nieman Storyboard for journalists to consider if they are thinking about writing a book that revisits a place from their past:

• Who’s your audience? Whom are you writing this book for? The answer to this question matters because it will help you focus on what kind of publisher you are trying to target and how to focus your book. For example, you might have a target audience of a certain population in mind — think geographic location or identity or people who will relate to a certain stage in life.
• What’s your story? A good story has a strong beginning, middle, and end. Sounds easy, right? Well, in a book, you may realize you don’t quite have all those pieces yet. In my case, I thought I had it figured out but it turned out I actually had more of my life to live and sort out before I had actually figured out the “end.” So my book wasn’t really ready. Maybe that’s where you are. Keep writing — it’s still material you can use for your book.
• Who are your characters? Think about them and develop them more than you would in a typical feature story. Pick a few main characters and decide who are smaller characters. You have to do some serious editing (and be ruthless) about who makes a good character. When it comes to your own life, this could be easy or it could be hard.
• Be patient with yourself. Expect that this process likely will take years, not months. The publishing business is slow. But you also only have one shot to do it right. So don’t rush it. You’re collecting string for your longest yarn ever. There will be times when you work hard at it for months and there will be months when you don’t work on it at all.

For more of my conversation with Sara, check out my newsletter interview with her. 

Links of note

• How do you handle it when people you write about get mad about what you’ve written? Raksha Vasudevan walks us through a story in which the subjects, to her surprise, didn’t like it. Vasudevan notes: “To shine on others a purely beauteous or monstrous light does nothing, serves no one.”
• Naomi Kanakia shares an excellent interview with literary agent Alia Hanna Habib, who represents Clint Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and other nonfiction writers. Habib recently published a book on building a nonfiction writing career and offers this great piece of advice: “I don't think anyone should write a book because it feels like the next logical step. … Don’t approach it as part of a checklist of a brilliant career.”
• Chloé Cooper Jones recently posted a Q&A with Kevin Nguyen, author and features editor at The Verge (who walked me through the story editing process at his publication a few months ago). Nguyen explains how he pitched and wrote his piece for The New York Times Magazine’s “Letter of Recommendation” on “How Interviewing Your Own Family Can Change Your Life.” 
• Tom Huang has worked hard over the past decade to make the Power of Diverse Voices: Writing Workshop for Journalists of Color one of the best writing workshops in the country. Free for participants, it trains journalists of color to harness the power of their voices through four intensive days at Poynter. The application deadline is Sept. 12 for the next session, which runs Nov. 11-14.

Signing off with words of advice for future book authors, first from novelist Isle McElroy, one of 11 writers who talked about “The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Published.” McElroy said: “My advice is to see the book as a moment in time, an expression of a self in amber, rather than a reflection of the person putting it into the world.”

And finally, from Sara Kehaulani Goo (who is also a mother of three) on finishing a book project: “My goal was to write one chapter a month. I gave myself a year to write the book, working every other morning from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m….I also gave myself incentives, like a reward at the six-month mark.”

Keep writing.

Erika Hayasaki
Professor of Literary Journalism at the University of California, Irvine
Follow The Reported Essay

Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

The post Revisiting the historical narrative in a reported memoir appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.