The next Editors’ Roundtable, which will run on Monday, looks at a story on the tornado that hit Rainsville, Ala., earlier this month. Unfortunately, tragedy has struck again, and journalists have had to write additional disaster stories about the devastation … Read more
Our latest Notable Narrative turns cliché upside down to see what will fall out of its pockets. Maybe you can’t go home again, but Esquire’s Scott Raab wants to see what happens when you try. Raab’s … Read more
“Show, don’t tell” is a mantra of narrative writers everywhere, but even the most useful adage can lose meaning with repetition. Before a lunchtime audience of writers at the Second Annual Compleat Biographer Conference on Saturday, legendary biographer … Read more
The Star-Ledger’s Amy Ellis Nutt won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for feature writing with “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” her five-chapter story on the sinking of a scallop boat off the coast of New Jersey. An adjunct instructor with … Read more
From a groovy explainer to a broken contortionist, here are some visual experiences worth a look. “My Water’s on Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song),” by David Holmes, Andrew Bean, Niel Bekker, Adam Sakellarides and Lisa Rucker from @Studio2oNYU in collaboration … Read more
We’re thrilled to hear this morning that Iran has freed detained journalist (and 2009 Nieman fellow) Dorothy Parvaz. Alan Cowell and J. David Goodman reported in The New York Times that, without advance notice, Dorothy called her fiancé, … Read more
[UPDATE: Good news! Iran has allowed Dorothy to return to Qatar. For more information, read our post on Dorothy’s release.] At a Nieman Foundation gathering over the weekend in Cambridge, a decade’s worth of current and former fellows … Read more
This week’s Notable Narrative,”What If Osama Bin Laden Had Been Captured?,” recounts the interrogation of Saddam Hussein, taking readers through recent history to a … Read more
From Leslie Jamison’s account of the extreme, bizarre Barkley Marathon to Christopher Hitchens’ meditation on what it means to lose the thing that has helped define him as a writer, here are some of the most interesting things that have … Read more
What does it take to make a great story? Boston University’s “The Power of Narrative” conference, held on campus April 29-30, aimed to offer some insights. The event included the kind of writing techniques and “show don’t tell” advice … Read more