Telling Stories

NO Me Versus No, ME: Journalism and Creative Nonfiction

2011-02-24T14:39:00.000-08:00

This past November I was invited to speak at the NonfictionNow Conference at the University of Iowa. The topic was journalism versus creative nonfiction and whether or not to include the self. My background is in traditional daily journalism (NO Me), but my best piece of writing is probably my story about egg donation which was written in first-person (No, ME).

Here are the thoughts I shared that day:

How many of you self-identify as journalists?
How many of you identify as creative nonfiction writers?
How many of you aren’t sure where you fall?

Some definitions might help --- sometimes I feel like we can’t talk to each other because we don’t know what the other means when they say creative nonfiction vs. literary journalism.

CREATIVE NONFICTION IS …
"'Creative nonfiction' precisely describes what the form is all about. The word 'creative' refers simply to the use of literary craft in presenting nonfiction—that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid manner. To put it another way, creative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting… using literary techniques like scene, dialogue, and description, while allowing the personal point of view and voice rather than maintaining the sham of objectivity." -Lee Gutkind, the godfather of creative nonfiction.

LITERARY JOURNALISM IS …
“a form of storytelling as old as the telling of stories. The genre recognizes both the inherent power of the real and the deep resonance of the literary. It is a form that allows a writer both to narrate facts and to search for truth, blending the empirical eye of the reporter with the moral vision -- the I -- of the novelist.” -Lauren Kessler, narrative nonfiction author and director of the graduate program in literary nonfiction journalism at the University of Oregon.

To me, these definitions sound more similar than distinct. To be honest, I think what we do as literary nonfiction journalists and creative nonfiction writers is essentially the same.

I don’t think one is more powerful, or more valid, or more worthy.

A thoroughly researched, thoughtfully written memoir has the potential to be better work of a journalism than a third-person nonfiction book that is sloppily written and poorly researched … And vice versa.

It doesn’t have to be one or the other. The categorization, in my opinion, has more to do with how the writer prefers to be identified or what shelf her work going to sit on in Barnes & Noble or how it’s being sold to a general audience --- and that general audience really doesn’t care about the nit-picky details of whether it’s called literary nonfiction. Creative nonfiction. Factual fiction.

What people care about is whether it’s TRUE. As a reader, I just don’t want to be lied to. I don’t want to be told that I’m reading a factual story and find out later that the author has intentionally twisted the truth or omitted relevant details. As long as you’re honest with what you are doing ---- if it’s written from memory that can’t be substantiated, fine. If you’re approximating the dialogue/scenes, OK. Just say so. I just want things to be true to the best of the writer's knowledge, that the writer hasn’t made things up purposefully.

But people do make things up in both creative nonfiction and journalism. There are lots of notorious cases. When it’s intentionally fictionalized and you’re trying to pass it off as nonfiction, it’s just wrong.

What bothers me about journalists is that we stand with our chests puffed out and say we just deal in cold hard facts and telling the truth. We dismiss any further discussion on how much actual truth comes out of what we do.

I didn’t contemplate this in any significant way until I liberated myself from the old school rules of journalism and wrote my first, first-person piece. As I was writing, I came to a point where I had to explain my motivations – and I thought to myself, why did I do that?

I wrote the first idea that came to my head. But it felt off. I tried on another explanation but that didn’t ring true either. I realized I couldn’t explain my actions. It took weeks of contemplation until I’d written myself into a place where I finally understood my true motivation.

And then it dawned on me how ridiculous is it that I’ve been conducting interviews for years asking questions like, “What motivated you to do X?” And I’d give the subject all of 30 seconds to respond.

As writers, we spend a lot of time in our heads. We reflect. We mull. We question ourselves (incessantly at times).

The average person doesn’t dig that deeply into the psyche.

So when we as journalists ask a person “Why did you do that?” We may be asking her to think in a way that she rarely thinks. And while the answer may not be intentionally false, it may not be entirely true either.

--

Because I find writing about other people more interesting than writing about myself, I returned to the No Me camp. It wasn’t easy though. I had the nagging feeling that what I was doing as a journalist was fraught because it seemed impossible to gather much less tell the complete truth.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop trying to tell true stories.

Because we live in a culture where we are inundated with facts and soundbytes that are often devoid of insight, we need creative nonfiction / literary journalism whatever the heck you want to call it, to give context to information and human experience.

We need this type of storytelling (Me, or No Me) because it helps us all make sense of the world.

Q&A with Peter Laufer

2010-11-22T17:08:00.000-08:00

I interviewed Peter Laufer this summer for Etude, the Journal of Literary Nonfiction. And now Peter works with me at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication. I also just got his butterfly book. Here's an introduction to Peter followed by our Q&A.

...

Peter Laufer is an investigative journalist, broadcaster and documentary filmmaker working in traditional and new media. Laufer is the author of several books dealing with critical social and political issues. His book Mission Rejected focuses on American soldiers who return from Iraq opposed to the war. Laufer worked as a news correspondent for NBC News, reported for CBS and ABC radio, and was the Berlin voice of the public radio program “Marketplace.” He has also produced and directed an award winning documentary film on immigration in Europe (“Exodus to Berlin”), and anchored national television talk shows such as LinkTV’s “FAQs”. Laufer is currently writing a natural history trilogy published by Lyons Press. The first book, The Dangerous World of Butterflies (May 2009), is an examination of the strange subculture of rare butterfly enthusiasts. As a follow-up, Laufer wrote Forbidden Creatures (June 2010), a study of the exotic pet industry. The third book tentatively titled No Animals Were Harmed during the Writing of this Book is due out in 2011. Laufer was recently named the James Wallace Chair in Journalism at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication and will begin teaching this fall.

You are two books into a three-book deal. Most writers dream about a three-book deal. Is it a dream...or a burden...or a little of both?

It is a dream and a challenge. The Dangerous World of Butterflies led directly to Forbidden Creatures because many of the issues I encountered researching the butterfly book — poaching, illicit trade in animals, endangered species, habitat loss, fascinating characters — are replicated in the world of so-called exotic pets: great apes, big cats, long snakes, and the like. The third book in the trilogy deals with the point where animal use becomes animal abuse. Careening into this moving target of use vs. abuse is proving to be not just a reportorial challenge, but also a personal one. I've been a vegetarian since Jimmy Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan, but the research for this third book pushed me into a vegan lifestyle — difficult to pursue on the road and undoubtedly an irritant to friends and relations still gracious enough to invite me for dinner.

So my short answer to your query must be: It is a dream (as long as I get back to my desk quickly so that I can meet that looming deadline for book number three).

You are what is now being called a multi-platform storyteller. You tell stories with text, with audio and with video. How do you know which stories deserve which treatment? Should all storytellers be conversant across platforms? What about the "jack of all trades, master of none" idea?

The story is all that counts, I remain convinced. The platform — from the wall of our caves to the screens of our G4 iPhones, and beyond — is just a platform. The "jack of all trades, master of none" idea is not an issue because storytellers must be master storytellers to make an impact, especially in today's information overloaded culture. And when the story is well told, the platform is merely the vehicle that delivers it. Most storytellers working today grew up in the mélange of print, audio, and video, and should be able to move seamlessly across these "platforms." I use that buzzword in quotes because I think our mediated societies can now dispense with such labels. A story is a story. I expect I should be able to tell it to you via whatever means works best to get it into your (likely) distracted head.

All that said, I'm promoting my Slow News Movement, announced in the butterfly book and inspired — of course — by Italy's Slow Food Movement. My slogan is "Yesterday's News Tomorrow" and I believe we need to consciously and carefully moderate our incoming media. I've taken to writing letters with a fountain pen and sending them through the post. I try not to respond immediately to email messages, I leave my mobile phone in the car when I go out to restaurants, and I'm seriously considering closing my Facebook account (I shut down Twitter after just a few “tweets”). We need to decide for ourselves what media is worth our while to read (and as a writer I want to use the word "read'' and not "consume"). We're in danger of missing the story because of the noise. So although I exploit all media to tell my stories to the widest possible audience, I embrace the legacy and permanence of the printed word on paper — and prefer it for my long-form work. My other first love is radio; live sound is ideally suited for triggering the imagination and blasting news out to the world fast and first.

Today I visited the Hermann Hesse Museum here in Switzerland and was intrigued to see collections of his letters, musing to my wife Sheila that it's hard to imagine our contemporary email traffic making a compelling graphic exhibit. I encourage us all to write more letters by hand and leave a legacy impossible for the quartermasters at Facebook and Amazon to delete.

What have you learned from all your years in radio that you apply to your work as a book author?

There is no better training ground for reporting, writing, and editing with accuracy and clarity than a traditional radio newsroom. Radio news, with its relentless perpetual deadlines, requires one to work under extreme time pressure (minute-by-minute deadlines!) and in close proximity (physical and conceptual) with usually stressed-out colleagues. It mandates telling complicated stories with brevity. I like to share the paraphrased quote attributed to both Twain and Pascal, "Sorry for the long letter. I would have written a shorter one, but I didn't have the time." Radio news equals that elusive short letter. Writing for radio teaches us how to make the complex concise and how to communicate clearly in today's information-cluttered marketplace. Facing radio news deadlines day after day makes any other deadline appealing. Working a live audience that will jump to correct errors is a constant reminder to check facts. Crafting a story in a noisy newsroom full of unrestrained egos tempers a writer from the romantic notion that she or he requires an idyllic atelier on a Left Bank equivalent in order to compose compelling prose.

Radio is the most visual of media. Before I explain, I must define terms. The word "radio" meaning sound transmitted through the airwaves and listened to over a radio receiver is antiquated. In today's world the storytelling we enjoy as sound comes to us via a variety of devices besides a Bakelite transistor and its variants. "Audio" is a more precise label for those sound stories. But I lobby for the continued use of "radio." The word need not be restricted to the old technology and it conjures a sense of using a device to hear a story. Despite my rejection of the romantic Paris writing studio, I'm romantically attached to the word "radio" and I'm betting its use doesn't die no matter how many podcasts you download, even though National Public Radio decided to change its official name to NPR. That foolishness makes me think of a story that circulated around Rockefeller Center when I worked as an NBC News correspondent. Correspondent Irving R. Levine supposedly was asked by a producer if he would drop the “R” at the end of his reports, making the precious second it took to pronounce the initial available for more editorial content. My colleague’s reputed retort was, “I’ll drop the ‘R’ in my name when you take the ‘B’ out of NBC.”

Radio requires concerted effort be exerted by both the producer and the listener in order to function. When we create radio we must trigger the imagination of the listener. The listener — by default — creates a visual image of what he or she hears. It is an unavoidable phenomenon cleverly demonstrated in one minute by one of my radio heroes, Stan Freberg. In an example of how radio is superior to television, Freberg describes Lake Michigan bombed with whipped cream by the Canadian air force, which then drops a huge cherry on the top to the cheers of thousands of bystanders. No one can listen to that minute without envisioning the ludicrous sight of a whip-creamed Great Lake.

Successful radio writing must incessantly project visual images; such writing translates well to the printed page. Successful radio writing is informal and conversational; that tone also works well for stories presented as printed words on paper (or pixels on Kindles and iPads).

I love radio.

Tell us about your investigative reporting process. Do you pursue questions? Do you follow people’s stories? Do follow the money? How do you think about it?

That there are no stupid questions is a key to my process. I often look to guidance from the detective portrayed by actor Peter Falk, Colombo. I observe and follow my curiosity, and I try to listen long and hard when I ask questions. Initially I cast a wide net (animal metaphor!) and then follow the stories and characters both most appealing to me and that seem most likely to reveal those truths I'm seeking.

Your list of book titles, documentaries and radio programs is extensive — okay, that’s an understatement. You’re one heck of a prolific journalist. How do you maintain such energy for your work?

For me the answer is the inverse of your question: The work energizes me. It is much more exhausting to consider waking up to no assignment. In fact, it is impossible to consider. As my friend and colleague Markos Kounalakis remarked to me years ago when we were musing about how lucky we were to have chosen journalism for a profession, "We're sentenced to a lifetime of learning." There never can be a blank page. There are no slow news days; there are only slow news reporters.

I understand you are in Lugano, Switzerland at the moment. What brings you there? Are you there on a research adventure? (If so, can you tell us about it?)

In fact I am writing this on the deck of the gracious apartment of family friends, looking out on Mt. San Salvatore, eating tofuwürst. I'm here for the launch of the Italian edition of my butterfly book, and yes, I am engaged in some research for the animal use and abuse book (the working title is No Animals Were Harmed during the Writing of this Book). Lugano was the home of Hans Ruesch, a man with an extraordinarily varied career: race car driver (Alfas and Maseratis, a Grand Prix winner), novelist ("A born storyteller," said the New York Times), film writer (for films with Anthony Quinn and Kirk Douglas), and — for my purposes — an early and longtime anti-vivisection activist, and author of the nonfiction animal rights book, Slaughter of the Innocents. He died a few years ago well into his nineties, but a foundation dedicated to his animal rights work remains active.

Finally, we ask all our authors, what are you reading at the moment?

In preparation for my arrival at the University of Oregon and Eugene I've just finished two books assigned to me by a grammar school friend who moved to Eugene years ago: Amis's Lucky Jim and Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. The former teaches moderation at the bar during faculty parties and the latter suggests it rains now and again in Oregon. I just started Ruesch's Slaughter of the Innocents. Aside from the animal rights issues, the preface to the 1983 edition I'm reading offers detailed documentation and analysis from the author regarding what he considered was a concerted effort by the drug industry to marginalize his work. It is a fascinating essay about journalism, storytelling, and the challenges of moving ideas and information to an audience.

Telling Stories Short Nonfiction Contest Winners - part 4

2009-06-18T14:09:00.001-07:00

Many thanks to everyone who entered stories into the Telling Stories Short Nonfiction Contest. I apologize again for how long it has taken to announce the winners. Thank you all for your patience.

We're very pleased with the winning stories. They are such different stories --- a dating disaster, a travelogue to a surreal land, a travel nightmare, and a mini trauma memoir. We've posted each here with an explanation of what we liked about them.

***
This winning entry from Celene Carillo stood out for many reasons — the hook at the beginning, the pace of the storytelling, the self-deprecating humor, the kicker we didn’t see coming. It’s one of those stories that invites the reader for a fun ride that finishes before you feel like you’ve had enough. We’re satisfied but want to hear more about this writer’s adventures in dating. Thanks so much, Celene, for sharing this entertaining tale of woe.

In the House of Vomiting and Despair

By Celene Carillo

It started with the e-mail.

I read it and felt like I’d been punched hard in the stomach.

Sure, two months isn’t a long time to be dating someone, but things were intense. For example, a few years ago I used to dream about a man who built a blacksmithing shop in his yard. I loved this man. I wanted to find this man. So you can imagine how it felt when Mr. e-mail told me he’d built one in his yard just before my dreams started. They even looked alike – these two men – taller, lithe versions of Jon Stewart, and for a while I thought hotter versions of Jon Stewart, which I now believe is impossible in reality.

But I’m wandering. It started with the e-mail, and by “it” I mean the vomiting.

It didn’t happen right away, which is something of a surprise, since immediately after reading the e-mail I stood, faced my friend Jenny and her husband, David, who had both been reading over my shoulder, and said, “I am going to vomit.”

I said it over and over that day and largely thought it was true. The e-mail was like a scourge that had found its way from Oregon, where I live, to North Carolina, where I was visiting my best friend and her family. Perhaps learning a little more about it will help explain why. Here’s an excerpt, paraphrased:

"I like being with you. You make me laugh. But for various reasons I do not
understand I hold people at arm’s length. It might be past relationship baggage or
poor organizational skills. I need to figure out which. I guess what I am looking
for at this point is to find people who are interesting, kind, comfortable and are up
for an activity now and again. I would still like to meet up to play backgammon,
or watch a movie, with no other obligations but enjoying that time."

Activities.

Backgammon.

These were not entirely in keeping with my man friend’s prior behavior, which had included, among other things, pursuing me; bringing blueberries and red wine to an outdoor performance of Shakespeare we saw; claiming full credit for making the first move; being my date at a good friend’s wedding; shooting me that goofy, misty-eyed, “I want to sleep with you” look when I’d go off on topics like plate tectonics or the lottery; and, as it follows, sleeping with me.

It made no sense that this fit, seemingly virile 36-year-old man could suddenly go so Mr. Rogers on me.

Jenny and I spent the evening mocking the e-mail. “Would you like to play mah-jongg?” she asked. “No,” I said. “I am too busy participating in a Parcheesi tournament at the assisted living center. But let’s meet up for water aerobics next week. That’s an activity I enjoy.”

It felt good to laugh at him, at his sudden, panicked retreat. It felt good to toss words around like, “eunuch,” “flaccid” and “emasculate.”

We’d pay for that.

The next day I read my weekly horoscope. It was about purification, and included an anecdote about how an addled Robert Downey Jr. once purged himself of drugs by eating so much Burger King he vomited.

Now, say what you want about horoscopes – go ahead, I understand – but later that night Jenny threw up spectacularly in one brief but powerful episode. She woke up the next morning feeling like she’d been steamrolled. We made no connection to the e-mail, or even the horoscope, and instead put the incident down to old rice.

But it wasn’t the rice.

Two days later the shit hit the fan. Jenny had more or less recovered, and it was supposed to be my last day there. Almost as soon as David left for work, their 15-month-old son puked on Jenny’s shoulder. Then he puked on the bed. We put the incident down to the fact that babies throw up all the time. But an hour later their three-year-old vomited in the bathroom.

As if on cue my stomach started hurting. I was convinced it was autosuggestion. I had just eaten a large portion of tuna salad. This could not happen to me. I had to go work on Monday and hear the results of my Myers-Briggs personality assessment, the thought of which unsettled me somewhat less than my gut at that moment. I had to go and deal with the shambles of a relationship.

Trying to pack proved to be fruitless when I realized I was not packing at all, but instead curled into a fetal ball on top of a pile of my clothes and breaking into cold sweat.

Then the tuna salad came back.

And so, it seemed, did everything else I’d eaten in the past several months. I hurled so hard and so many times I thought I’d lose vital organs. I scared the children. Jenny called David at work to tell him most of the house was vomiting. He felt nauseous the moment he hung up. He managed to drive home before throwing up in the bathroom – it’s the only one in the house, so we carried buckets around that night due to the demands placed on the toilet.

Traveling was impossible. My low point came when I was on the phone with a representative from Northwest Airlines, delirious as another case of the sweats was coming on. “I was calling…I have to make a flight change…to see if you have any waivers…very ill…in the morning can’t fly my stomach…can you please hang on one moment,” I said, and turned to my bucket and vomited in a manner I can only describe as theatrical. When I picked up the phone again I had been put on hold.

Throughout this I experienced ebbs and flows of clarity and cognizance. I remembered what I said about vomiting earlier in the week. I remembered my horoscope. I remembered that goddamn e-mail. Something about it seemed dodgy, like a Ponzi scheme, or like milk left out in the sun.

The only advantage to the virulence was its brevity. When it was over the next day I felt like I had been steamrolled. Jenny and I concurred that the e-mail’s monumental crappiness had somehow invited bad juju into the house. We cannot, of course, prove this, but we don’t feel like we have to. Everything fell into place too neatly – or rather, not neatly at all, but you get my drift.

But we never did stop mocking the e-mail. And neither did any of the other people I forwarded it to, which numbers somewhere in the dozens.

This man and I live in a small town. The first time I saw him after the e-mail he froze for a good 10 seconds before bolting like a prey animal. I imagine this will become par for the course. But maybe I can put it down to his being late for something. Like a game of shuffleboard. Or canasta.

Telling Stories Short Nonfiction Contest Winners - part 3

2009-06-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

This winning story from John Givot takes us around the world and places us in the midst our worst travel fear, the one Visa ran an ad campaign on for at least a decade: You’re in the middle of a foreign land and your credit card won’t work. You have no money. No place to stay. No way to get home. You haven’t eaten. What do you do? In this story John tells what he did and what he learned.

Broke in India

By John Givot

It was half past midnight and an army guy had just kicked me off the bench I was sitting on in the train station. He asked me what train I was waiting for. No, I told him, I wasn't waiting for a train, I needed to make a phone call.

The problem, which I didn't tell him, was that I had no money. Well actually, I had five rupees, about ten cents US.

There were so many poor people, I mean really poor, both in life and pocket, that I felt I didn't have the right to ask anyone for money. All around me, people were begging for a few rupees for something to eat. How could a rich westerner ask for the money it would take to make a phone call to the other side of the world, let alone get dinner and a hotel room.

I was in Patna, India, the capital of the state of Bihar, one the most over-populated, poor, and illiterate states in the country. And I could feel it. On the trains and the buses, on the streets and at the roadside stands. There was a heaviness.

I didn't realize it for a while. I didn't know why I felt like I did; yeah I was traveling alone and too far too fast, but still, my health was mostly good, I was meditating lots and whether I was alone or with people I knew, I was happy.

It was on the bus ride to Lumbini, Nepal, from Uttar Pradesh (the next state over from Bihar and in a similar state), that it became clear.

In the days before this bus ride, I had been feeling very judgmental and negative toward the local culture. I kept finding myself saying, "Indians this..." and "Indians that..." And then, while I was meditating in Kushinigar, the place where the Buddha died, or attained his final Nibanna, I felt this hardness on my body, a hardness toward other people. And then I felt it begin to crack. I felt myself soften a bit, and the hardness began to be replaced by compassion. Little by little.

So the next day I am on this bus from Gorakpur to Lumbini. I had gotten on the bus after all the seats where full, so I stood in the aisle. Almost immediately though, I was told to come to the front of the bus and was given a seat. Part of me wanted to say, no, I'm not any better than whoever gave up their seat, but it felt like it would have been offensive to say no at that point, and I was grateful to sit down, not minding that it was under the TV, which was about shoulder height.

Next to me was a nice Nepalese couple and their daughter who was about ten. After an hour or so, the man told me to switch with him so I would have more head room. This put me next to the bus door, where I watched the completely full bus take on more people. The isle was packed with people standing, and just when I thought there was no more room, another family of six would get swallowed into the mass. And then another family of five. It was amazing. About this time another couple, very poor, also with a small girl got on the bus. The woman grabbed my leg to support herself as she sat down on the floor, pretty much between my legs, and I could feel a deep agitation in her touch. With this couple and their baby, came that palpable heaviness. I could feel it, I could see it, and I could hear it in their voices.

After about half an hour, they got off the bus, and the mood completely shifted. It got lighter; the heaviness left with them.

But in the Patna train station a couple days before, I wasn't especially conscious of this heaviness, this "misery," the ignorance and deep aversion, the apathy of people surviving life. I just felt pulled down. And broke.

The thing was, I didn't feel poor. Here were really poor people all around me, and I simply had no money.

A few days before, my Visa card was rejected at an ATM as I was leaving Bhod Gaya, the place where the Buddha became enlightened, and a popular tourist spot. I didn't think much about it, I had some cash, and there were ATMs in every town. A couple days later, in the next town I was staying in, my card was rejected again. I got a little worried and went to the bank, where they told me the problem was that this was a small town, in the city it would work no problem. I changed the last of my US currency, a twenty-dollar bill, to rupees at the one fancy hotel in town, and continued on.

After arriving in Patna after a long day of traveling, I went straight to the museum to get in before it closed. It has a large portion of the "Bhudda relics," bits of his bones, which were left after his cremation. I don't understand why, but there is an intensity when meditating near them, and I had been told by a British guy to go there.

To see the relics, it costs five-hundred rupees, only about ten dollars US, but a fortune in India. So I spent my last five-hundred rupee note to meditate in front of the relics for fifteen minutes, then I meditated some more in the museum and a bit more outside.

Then I was rushing to the next train. Fifteen rupees in a jam-packed shared auto-rickshaw got me to Hajipur, the next train station, which was an hour away on the other side of the Ganges (and the world’s longest bridge I was told, at 7 km).

I arrived late for my train and without enough cash to buy the R60/ ticket anyway. Twenty minutes of standing in line for the ATM confirmed my fears -- my Visa card didn't work. I walked a mile down a dirty, dusty crowded, hot and humid night street, trying different ATMs along the way, not willing to pay for a taxi with my last few rupees. The ride back across the river, this time in the dark haze (the pollution makes the air in Los Angeles look like paradise) cost R20, leaving me with five rupees. I could only hope the card would work in the city, but I wasn't feeling it.

Back at the main Patna train station, and five ATM rejections later, I sat down on a bench and tried to sit my evening hour of meditation, while getting hammered by mosquitoes.

This is when the army guy kicked me off the bench. My five rupees weren't near enough for a phone call, which was about R30/ per minute to the US, but they would buy me a couple of samosas the next day, which I would want. (I had gotten sick the day before, and had only eaten fruit that day, after blowing my dinner out both ends the night before.)

I was exhausted, hungry, broke, without a plan, and didn't feel like I had the right to ask anyone for help. I had already been rejected after asking for help from an office in the train station. Part of me wanted to curl up and escape to sleep, but if I was going to get help from the US, it had to be during the Indian night, since the time difference is about twelve hours.

Surprisingly though, I felt OK about it. On the way down the platform, I walked into a different office, one that had five or six Indian Rail workers passing the time in it.

I sat down and explained my dilemma to one guy who spoke English. He wanted to try my card, so I humored him and we went out to the ATM together. Back in the office, he asked me how I was going to solve "my problem."

I shook my head; I didn't know, I really didn't. Another old guy sitting across the room gestured with his hand to his mouth, asking if I had had "kana," dinner. I shook my head.

He pulled out a hundred rupee note, quite a lot of money and handed it to me. I had to hold back tears.

Forget food though, a hundred rupees is enough for a three minute call home. I asked if I could receive a call on one of their cell phones and I about danced off to the phone guy's booth.

While I was waiting for my mom to call back with info about Western Union, the train guy asked me what my work was. Did I have children? Was I married? What was my religion? Sorry, I don't have a job, no wife, no kids, and no religion. The clincher though, was when he asked me whether I bathed every day. Made me feel pretty pathetic in his eyes. And to give him credit for the last question, I was filthy.

Sometimes we need to get humbled and helped and patched up by those who we think are less and who we think make our lives harder. It makes me realize we are all trying to get by, in the best way we know.

Telling Stories Short Nonfiction Contest Winners - part 2

2009-06-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

Great writing can take you places, make you feel like you know how a place looks and feels on the other side of the earth. In this winning story, Zack Barnett takes us to a place few of us will ever see, to the edge of a Ukranian pit mine so large it can be seen from space. What does it look like? How does it feel? What lessons can it teach us? Read on.

A Pit Mine on a Spring Day

By Zack Barnett

How many times have you heard, “Hey, this weekend you and your wife want to go have a look at one of Europe's largest open pit iron ore mines?" That's not an invitation you're going get twice, if ever. After all, this is Ukrainian iron, the stuff they used to make the mythical curtain.

After this winter, an invitation to damn near anywhere would have sounded fascinating. For four months, the ice didn’t melt. It just turned browner by the day. Now, it was turning to brown slush and we were oozing our way into spring. An outing, even if it was to an open pit mine, sounded fantastic.

As newly arrived Peace Corps volunteers in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, we were up for anything to get us out of our dormitory apartment, which, with sheets of wrinkled red linoleum on the floors and walls of dusty chalk, had begun to feel like a prison.

Besides, like my friend Robert says, "You gotta recognize an opportunity when you see it." I think Robert was talking about a trip to Lake Powell or a raft trip the Colorado River.

But this, too, was an opportunity. Lena, a teacher from my school, and her husband picked us up like we were going on a picnic or something. We presented them with some pricy coffee and a box of chocolates, as is the Ukrainian custom. On our way to the mine we happened by Ukraine’s largest steel mill, which is no small potato in a country that produces more steel each year than all but a handful of countries in the world.

The signature aroma of the mill, maybe a mile from our apartment, lacks the subtlety of even a dime store perfume. My iron lungs will probably set off airport metal detectors when we get home from two years of sucking in the smell. An escape from that smell and the brown ice made this outing downright sublime, even if did take an hour or so of pothole slalom to reach the southern outskirts of our 80-mile-long city.

We pulled up to the pit mine's security gate, Lena’s husband got out and talked our way in. It wasn't unlike walking into a national park, only you don’t need to sweet talk the park service. Moments later we walked to the edge of a great chasm, a pockmark on the face of the Earth, like standing on the edge of a popped zit. A little horrifying, but still an amazing sight. The ecological irony wasn't lost on Lena, "Is it like the Grand Canyon?" she asked

Yes and no.

At almost 1,200 feet deep, 1.5 miles wide and almost two miles long, the seemingly bottomless man-made pit is a spectacle. Oxidized ore on one side even looks like Red Mountain in southern Colorado’s San Juans. Roads and rail lines spiral into the pit. Countless trucks ascend and descend. We stood on a small precipice overlooking the operation, not unlike an overlook at a national park. It truly was something to behold. I could have stayed all day watching the excavators dump raw ore into train cars to be hauled up a spiral of track to a giant conveyor belt pulling the ore from the depths to a processing plant, on its way to the giant, smelly mill.

It's one thing to breathe the air of an industrial city. It's another to watch the operations stir up the dust. They say our city boasts its own weather patterns because the five giant pits around town alter the temperatures so much they change the air pressure. They say the bottom of the pit can reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.

This place is like an ant farm. From our viewpoint off-road haulers with tires taller than I am and elevating scrapers half a block long looked like nothing more than busy little insects gathering food on a crumby picnic blanket. The sheer size of the operation mesmerized.

Andre, Lena's husband, worked at the mine for three years after he finished university. His job was in explosives. Once a week miners drill holes into the bottom of the mine. Then they throw in a few thousand pounds of explosives and "boom" one the largest open pit iron ore mines in Europe gets a little bigger, loosening rock to be sorted and loaded into train cars.

It’s not too different from standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and reminding yourself that the little winding brown ribbon of Colorado River carved and is carving the Grand Canyon as you watch. I had to keep reminding myself I was watching similar work in progress as I stared into the pit.

Pits and mines like this made Kryvyi Rih an industrial jewel in the Soviet crown. Our region is one of a few on which the USSR relied on for steel production. Here, they mine and make it. What comes from the ground leaves the city as hardened pig iron. Blind, efficient resource extraction and production mark this town.

Locals say that during World War II, the Nazis took over the pit and processed the ore here before sending the steel, along with tons of the black Ukrainian top soil back to Germany. It is said that it took several years to rebuild the ore mining and steel-making operations after the German occupation ended.

Now, a company that owns one of the giant pits boasts that there is enough ore in the ground there for 60 more years. I'm still trying to figure out how a country that can oversee such an operation can't engineer a way to keep its teachers paid and its streets paved.

"We don't have a lot of museums or art in our city," said Andre. "But we do have a lot of mines."

After our visit to the open pit mine, we stopped by a store and bought the makings for a picnic: some fried meat, assorted mayonnaise salads, and a little beer – to kill the germs from stale mayo and meat – before heading out to a reservoir on the Ingulyets River.

"Extreme," smiled Andre as he negotiated his compact car over the lumps of what seemed to me to be an old Jeep track. What we found at the end of the road sent me reeling into a blue-collar Bruce Sprinsgsteen ballad.

There was a small pine forest with families throughout, playing soccer and picnicking. Meanwhile across the lake were the smokestacks, standing sentinel over the industrial empire. It felt like Gary, Indiana or somewhere in New Jersey, maybe.
Still, the day managed to wash the stink of winter from my brain. The frozen brown masses had finally melted from the sidewalk. Buds were coming and fresh blades of grass peaked out from the ground.

Even the vista of the open pit mine had been appealing. Never has fresh air or the smell of evergreen trees found a nicer home in my nose than that day. After a winter slogging through or balancing on the grime of the city sidewalk, a visit to the pit was just the quarry for my citified bones.

Even if it wasn’t the Grand Canyon.

(To see more of Zack Barnett's writing, visit http://zackbarnett.com/ )

Telling Stories Short Nonfiction Contest Winners

2009-06-18T12:28:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to finally announce the four winners of the Telling Stories short nonfiction story contest. We will dedicate a blog post to each of the winners and share their stories and explaining what we liked about them.

***
Sometimes we have to tell our own stories to fully appreciate where we have been and where we are now. This mini autobiography from Dawn M Tucker gives a perspective on a lifetime of addiction – what causes it, what it begets and what it takes to overcome. Many thanks to Dawn for sharing her story.

Three Words

By

Dawn M Tucker

Why couldn’t I have someone else’s affliction? Grandma Tucker saves every issue of National Enquirer she buys, and Aunt Elsie’s old age insures she only makes hard right turns in the snow. Me? I am an alcoholic.

From the moment I was conceived I wasn’t wanted. Both of my parent’s were married…only… not to each other. I was adopted at nine days old by the man who would become my father. When I was 4 years old he married the woman who would become my mother. We moved into a huge house in Cleveland and I had one sister and three brothers. We were a ready made family, just add water…or alcohol.

I was hit, kicked, stabbed, punched, thrown down, jumped on and choked all by the time I was nine years old. When I was nine years old I got down on my knees and prayed to a God I believed in. I knew there was a God, I just thought he was angry with me. I prayed to him anyway, I prayed for courage.

The courage to kill another human being. I wanted to kill my stepmother, the reason for all of the violence and pain. I thought if I killed her, I would also kill the pain. It was a prayer that was never answered. When I was twelve years old I got back down on my knees to pray again. Only, this time I was praying to a God I was certain had forgotten me.

I prayed again for courage, the courage to kill myself.

It isn’t my lack of trying that has kept me alive. I slit my wrist 8-10 times. Overdosed on pills and even turned the gas on in my oven and blew out the pilot light, in an attempt to drift off to sleep forever. When I put the razor to my wrists, I don’t know that I wanted to die as much as I just wanted something to hurt worse than my heart.

The violence never got better in my home so I found my own way to deal with it. I took my first drink. It did for me what I couldn’t do for myself. It made me pretty, even though I quit taking care of myself. It made me smart, although I often slurred my words. The best part? It took away all of the pain.

I found another solution to all of the pain. I ran away. I hitchhiked across the United States and got in to cars and trucks with both men and women. Most of whom were willing to supply me with drugs and alcohol. Sometimes for a price, sometimes not, though I was willing to pay whatever price there was.

I married at eighteen years of age and proceeded to have children. I drank through all of my pregnancies. When my children were infants I put them to my breasts, and never put down the drink. I piped my poison into them. When they were toddlers they followed me into the bathroom and held up my hair as I puked. They said things like “It will be okay mommy,” and “You’ll be okay mommy. It was never okay, because I was it, and I was never okay.

I guess I never knew what my drinking was doing to those around me. My family avoided me, my children asked me “Why do grownups drink?” I wondered why I drank? I wondered when my children would pick up their first drink?

That was a moment of clarity that finally saved me.

I crawled into the bathroom on my hands and knees like an animal and pulled myself up by the sinks edge. Looking into the mirror I fully expected to see a stranger staring back at me. Instead I saw absolutely no one. I had ceased to exist. I dropped to my knees and said three words that would save my life; “God help me!”

I am a recovering alcoholic with a wonderful marriage, career and life. My children grew up around the 12 step program I attend, and seem to learn much faster than adults (myself included.) I think my life can't possibly get better, but it does.

***

Returning to the blogosphere

2009-06-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

I apologize sincerely. I've been feeling very guilty about how long I've been absent from this blog. All I can say is life took over. Writing, teaching and multimedia projects have meant little sleep in the past six months.

In the thick of the busiest times, I'd wake up in a bleary-eyed panic over how I hadn't blogged in days ... then weeks ... then months. I'd vow to post something that day, but then my to-do list would present itself, all full of angry exclamation points and capital letters.

Looking back now, it felt like six months of back-to-back deadlines.

But I've conquered most of the list and can now turn my attention to blogging. Here's a preview of the exciting posts to come ... the Telling Stories Short Story contest winners, a new web design contest, my latest multimedia projects, author interviews and some great audio slideshows produced by my students.

Stay tuned. I promise it won't be long.

Amazingly Beautiful

2009-02-12T10:36:00.000-08:00

Vacation photography has been a hobby of mine since age 9 when my parents took my brother and I on a driving trip to Yellowstone gave us 110mm point-and-shoots to document the family vacation.

We each shot at least an entire role of Old Faithful. They turned out as bad as you might imagine. I remember flipping through picture after picture of the steaming spot on the ground. Disappointing. The photos didn't capture the energy or the excitement or even what I remember it looking like. In 3X5, the geyser looked puny.

But some part of me was hooked and my parents must have recognized it. For the next vacation, they upgraded my gear to a real 35mm point-and-shoot. And ever since it's been kind of a side quest to make photos that look at least half as beautiful as the places I visit.

So I was excited this week to learn that one of my more recent vacation photos was selected for inclusion in the Amazingly Beautiful World Gallery. It's the photo below of the Mesquite Flat Dunes in Death Valley. If you look closely you can see a speck on one of the far off dunes. It's another photographer hunched over a tripod.

I encourage you to visit ABW Gallery. Its name says it all. The photos are inspiring. And I'm so pleased to have a photo residing among such gorgeous images.

Dear Inaugural Committee

2009-01-20T00:49:00.000-08:00

On the day of President Barrack Obama's inauguration, I'm pleased to share a guest column from a dear friend. Lisa Raleigh wrote this letter to the Obama inaugural committee in hopes of earning a ticket to the grand affair in Washington today. But her piece is so much more: It captures a sentiment felt across the country. And so I wanted to share it with you.

Dear Inaugural Committee,
When Barack Obama was elected President in November, I thought I would feel only uncomplicated joy. So I was very surprised by the sorrow and grieving that came along with it: sorrow for the suffering and loss of two wars, a bittersweet grief for a long-lost sense of trust.

Grief had not been invited to my post-election celebration, but I did not resist it, seeing it for what it was: an opening of the heart. It’s like the moment when an accident is over and the wreckage is cleared and you can finally let down your guard. This election — and its amazing landslide proportions — represented a homecoming of sorts, a sense that I was finally safe after a long, uncertain journey. Safe enough to feel what I’ve been feeling all along, but have hardly let myself experience — for the past eight years, to be sure, and for much, much longer, nearly a lifetime.

The two wars I am grieving are Iraq and Vietnam. I am a child of the ‘60s and ‘70s , born in the latter days of the baby boom, and now a 52-year-old woman who honestly can’t wait for the post-boomer era that Obama is said to exemplify. Finally, thankfully, I am ready to get past it: the distancing and resignation that have been my defense for so long.

Here’s how I got there: Like so many others, my worldview was formed by indelible images brought into my living room by network news and Life magazine — starting, of course, with the horse-drawn cart of JFK’s funeral. Then fast-forward just a few years to soldiers in triage; Medevacs hovering; body bags on the tarmac; a monk consumed by flames but seated in a perfectly calm lotus; a kneeling man, his face contorted sideways as a pistol is fired into his temple, his executioner just at the edge of the frame. These were overwhelming images for a child in elementary school, for anyone of any age.

But then there were the protests, and this made sense to me. I thrilled to learn of young people marching in San Francisco and Berkeley, not far from my home, but I was far too young to join them. I studied the face of Lyndon Johnson, who addressed the nation again and again, but his expression did not reassure me; he looked more and more defeated over time, and in fact he was. Johnson had concluded that the war could not be won, yet he concealed this from us; all he revealed at the time was that he would not run again. Fortunately, Bobby had the fire; even an eleven-year-old could see that. Bobby Kennedy would end the war.

I didn’t realize my heart was broken when Bobby died. I couldn’t go there. I felt disgust toward at his assassin, but not sadness for his death. It was the beginning of numbness, a protective shell that I would eventually layer with outrage and cynicism, both of which I cultivated throughout my teens and beyond.

Questioning authority is any teen’s prerogative, but my adolescence happened to coincide with Richard Nixon’s presidency, and this was the perfect foil. I didn’t know anything about politics, didn’t feel the need: it was enough that the counterculture reviled Nixon as a schemer. It’s only now, after years of looking back, reading, researching and educating myself, that I know more of the particulars, the machinations devised by Nixon and Kissinger that prolonged the war for years, condemned tens of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese to their deaths and ended finally in the pretense of “peace with honor.” At the time, I scorned this distortion of language as just so much spin (we called it BS then). Yet as uninformed as I was, history has proved this exactly on the mark and so much more.
Today, however, we do call it spin.

Fast forward 30 years. It is March, 2003, I am 46 years old, and I am driving home from work, tears streaming down my face, listening to George W. Bush reassert his reasons for launching an attack on Iraq, which would commence the very next day.

Over the previous weeks, as the Bush administration made its far-fetched case for war, that sense of outrage I had discovered in the Nixon years caught fire as never before and finally found an outlet for expression. I joined millions around the world marching in the streets, protesting the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. But this wasn’t just the realization of a childhood fantasy. This time, I was informed. Not for a moment did I believe that the looming mushroom clouds, ominously invoked in unison by Bush and Cheney and Rice, were anything but a willful delusion — if not a cynical manipulation of our vulnerability and fear of future attacks. But the massive protests failed to halt the crusade; in fact, Bush seemed to welcome the vast scale of resistance (bring it on), allowing him to display his resolve in his reckless rush to war. And so I wept in my car, anticipating the devastation that would come. This rawness was short-lived, however; the sense of helplessness and futility was too big to contain, and gave way to bitterness and resignation. No more tears. Not till November, 2008.

In the early days of the Obama campaign, when I was first dazzled by his eloquence, I didn’t trust my response. Could this be optimism? Hopefulness? Exhilaration? It seemed so incredibly naïve. But then I literally had to ask myself “what’s wrong with being inspired?” And so I let myself be moved. Moved to exuberance throughout the campaign, moved to tears of joy on election night, celebrating along with so many millions of others this shining moment in our history. It was electric, astonishing. What if we all dared to care and dream and stake our claim in the impossibly possible? Now we knew. It felt like coming home — but to somewhere I had never been before.

And yet I was a raw nerve, too.

Just after Obama’s election, George Bush appeared before the press to declare, among other things, that he would make history by leaving his successor two active wars. His tone and body language suggested the profundity of the moment, the awesome weight of responsibility — and the absurdity of this struck like a dagger to the heart. There wouldn’t be two wars had he not arrogantly agitated for Iraq; there would be only Afghanistan, and maybe not even that had he prosecuted that war with sufficient commitment and integrity. A legacy of two unfinished wars does not signify greatness. It is not a point of pride. It is an open wound.

Bush reminded us, too, that he’s a “wartime president” — and even though I had heard him use this self-aggrandizing phrase before, it was a fresh blow in my vulnerable state. The tone-deafness of it: As if wartime is something he has honorably navigated. As if this particular wartime has not been a catastrophe, the direct result of his failed leadership.

It hit full force then: the heartbreak. I found myself sobbing at the spectacle of this cluelessness. The forced language of legacy-making. The incalculable human cost.

They crashed into each other, a train wreck, and I wept for all that’s been lost and shattered and ruined, lives, families, futures, the divisiveness at home, the chaos abroad, the shameless disrespect of our intelligence and trust. Then and now. I let the full weight of it in because I could now afford to bear it, because this particular train wreck was all but over, ready to be cleared. The grieving went on for days, not continuously but always ready to be tapped, the tender core of it: We deserved so much better.

It’s safe to come out now, is what Obama’s inauguration will mean to me. “Safe” may seem a fragile commodity in the world awash in crises, economic and otherwise. But there’s a more elemental kind of safety, I believe: the security in knowing we are now in the hands of a leader with wisdom, maturity and heart — whose vision inspires confidence, whose authority we can trust. And it’s not just the man himself; it’s the millions upon millions who elected him. We have affirmed, together, that this is what we want, and this collective wisdom is a comfort and a blessing, too, a redemption. I feel as if I’ve found something I lost a long time ago.

And so I’m ready. Maybe we’re all ready. To move on.

Thank you for the opportunity to put this into words.

Sincerely,
Lisa Raleigh

Behind the Book: Pitch Perfect singers describe the interview process from the subject's perspective

2008-12-07T23:01:00.000-08:00

This summer I reviewed Mickey Rapkin's book Pitch Perfect: The quest for collegiate a cappella glory for Etude magazine. I enjoyed reading about the lives of these talented students, especially the women from the University of Oregon's female a cappella group, Divisi. Since I've lived in Eugene for two years, I've had the chance to see Divisi live a number of times and, I admit, have become somewhat of a fangirl.

After reading Pitch Perfect, I found myself wondering what the whole being-the-subject-of-a-book experience was like for these college-age singers. I mean, did they realize what they were getting into having a writer hanging out with them for the school year? Did they like how the author portrayed them? Did they feel like he captured the essence of their experience? Would they agree to be part of a book again?

And then I thought, "Well, why not ask them?"

Since the women of Divisi are literally on the same campus where I work as an adjunct professor of journalism, I decided to see if they'd be willing to share their view of the behind-the-scenes experience of being in Pitch Perfect.

Lucky for me, they were up for being interviewed again.

Listening to these young women helped me reexamine at the information gathering and fact-checking process from the perspective of the subject. I was struck yet again by how easy it is for journalists to get the little things wrong and by how much these little factual errors bother the subjects of our stories. When it's in print, it's a record of the truth, so getting it right is paramount. I was also impressed by how much these young women trusted Rapkin who became, as they said, "like a confidant."

To hear my interview with five Divisi women (and some of Divisi's fabulous music), click here. I'd be interested to hear your impressions.

And if you just can't get enough a cappella, here's a Current TV documentary that features both Divisi and Mickey Rapkin.

Extending the contest deadline

2008-11-30T23:41:00.000-08:00

Because of popular demand, Telling Stories is extending the deadline for its short nonfiction story contest from December 1 to December 15, 2008. The response so far has been fabulous and we are very much looking forward to reading all the submissions. (Writers have been sending stories from as far away as Kenya!)

Check out this previous post to get the details on the contest. Remember the top 5 winners receive copies of The Best Creative Nonfiction vol. 2. And multiple submissions are welcome.

Maybe the deadline crept up on you or maybe you just experienced a particularly poignant (or painful) Thanksgiving. Whatever the case, you have 15 more days get your short nonfiction story sent to katie.ann.campbell [@] gmail.com.

Winners will be announced and published on Telling Stories in January.

The Writer-Editor relationship

2008-11-25T08:00:00.000-08:00

Poor editors are notorious for being hopelessly vague when critiquing writers. They want something different, but what exactly? Well, they can't quite say or don't quite know.

This drives writers crazy.

The following video of of this BBC sketch comedy That Mitchell and Webb Look does a pretty good job of capturing what it's like.

Yes, in this sketch they're talking fiction, but this can happen just as often with nonfiction writing. For example, I've had an editor say something like this... we need a really great anecdote here, you know, something shows how the main character feels about his mother or something like that, but not necessarily that. And even though the story may have nothing to do with the character's mother, you, the writer, go back and observe your main subject patiently or even ask leading questions, searching in vain for something "like that but not necessarily that."

The New Yorker's Multimedia: Photojournalists Eating on the Road

2008-11-20T00:06:00.000-08:00

Compared to most newspapers, magazines have been slower to enhance their web product by adding multimedia, but now even The New Yorker has regular online multimedia features.

Check out this multimedia feature of photojournalists showing their images of and talking about some of the strangest meals they've eaten while on assignment around the world. It's very simple. But brilliant all the same.

What The New Yorker and other magazines (like The Atlantic with its podcasts and videos) have done is put a lot of thought into what stories would really lend themselves to multimedia. Too many newspapers have fallen into the rut of adding multimedia just for the cache, demanding their photographers or reporters produce web video more because it makes the newspaper look like it's on the cutting edge, rather than because it's the best way to tell that particular story.

The problem with this mentality, in my opinion, is that you end up with a lot of garbage.

Since the world online is already cluttered, doesn't it make more sense to increase the quality rather than the quantity? Or at least to really consider the questions: What kind of multimedia would enhance this particular story? What can we do with multimedia that we couldn't do with text and still images?

That's what I love about this week's audio slideshow from The New Yorker. It's not rocket science: A handful of photos thrown into a slideshow with audio of the photographers talking about the images in the style of sort of a photographer's notebook. (Here's a post on how to do it yourself.) But this piece was a perfect feature for The New Yorker's food issue. It makes sense and it's captivating.

Q&A with narrative writer and humorist Beth Lisick

2008-11-07T01:40:00.000-08:00

Beth Lisick wears about a billion hats. She's a poet, essayist, short fiction and narrative nonfiction writer. She also a humorist and spoken word artist, who does freelance voice work and even some acting. This New York Times bestselling author also moonlights as a giant banana that hands out fruit on the street. No kidding. This woman is worth getting to know.

After reading her latest book about her adventures in the self-help business, Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, 10 Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone, I interviewed Lisick and, I have to say, the result of the Q&A session is one of the funniest we've done at Etude.

So take a read below and get to know Ms. Lisick and what she has to say about being a storyteller. You won't be disappointed.

Q: You majored in American Studies at UC Santa Cruz and once aspired to be a pastry chef — how did you learn how to tell stories and write?

A: My last couple years in college, while I was working as a baker, I started writing things down in notebooks. Mostly overheard conversations or childhood memories, nothing even remotely resembling a poem or story. That part seemed too daunting, the act of writing something “real.” It wasn’t until after I was out of college and stumbled upon an open mic that I really got serious about trying to write things. I liked the immediacy of that scene, the fact that you could write something and test out whether it was working or not. Still, what I was writing was only intended for people to hear, not to read on a page. When the publisher from Manic D Press asked to see my manuscript of spoken word poems and stories, I didn’t want to give her what I’d written. I was embarrassed. What was I doing? Once she talked me down, helped me out, and put out that collection (Monkey Girl), I began writing with a reader, not just a listener, in mind.

As far as telling stories goes, I have always been a superfan of listening to other people’s stories. The ham gene is definitely in me, the one that makes me like to get up on stage and tell stories, but I also have a good dose of the observer. I had two best friends growing up and we would always try to tell each other good stories, even if it was just about going to Costco with our parents or trying to reenact something that happened at a school dance. I love thinking about how you sequence events to maximize hilarity or drama. You know, do you reveal what your dad said about the enormous can of frank and beans before or after you’ve described the stockboy’s hairdo? That kind of stuff.

Q: Besides being a writer, you are also a spoken word artist and a humorist. Being funny on paper isn’t easy — the humor often doesn’t translate. How have you developed this skill and how do you know when it’s working?

A: I like to write conversationally and I’m always thinking about whether what I’m writing is going to translate to a spoken performance or not. So I’ll read stuff out loud to myself to see how it sounds. A lot of it is trial and error. Sometimes I write something for a book and I just know that I will never read that section out loud at an event. Conversely, I write things to read out loud that I would never publish. You can do a lot in performance, using your voice and body language, to make up for mediocre writing. Hurray for that! The trick is learning how to distinguish between what you publish and what you read to a crowded bar. Sometimes a piece of writing can be both, but I am still learning.

Q: For your latest book, Helping Me Help Myself, you dedicated yourself (in 2006) to a year-long experiment in self-improvement, devoting each month of that year to an area you wanted to work on (e.g. fitness, organization, spirituality, personal finances, etc.) What were the easiest and most difficult months of the experiment to write about?

A: The absolute easiest was the home organization chapter. I wanted so much to improve that area of my life that I was pretty dedicated to following the advice of the expert. Just about every other chapter felt difficult. Even the Richard Simmons cruise where all I had to do to be entertaining was describe what was happening and throw in some of Richard’s direct quotes. He’s so intriguing. I really struggled with that book because there is so much to make fun of in the self-help world, but I didn’t want to go with the easy laughs all the time. It was a constant battle, juggling the sarcasm and irony and honesty. Also, the chapters on sex and fashion completely evaporated because I could not bring myself to do them. I’m pretty complacent with both of those areas of my life — not that I’m a sex machine with a killer wardrobe — but it just seem disingenuous to dedicate entire chapters to things that I ultimately wasn’t that unhappy with.

Q: Of all the self-help advice you consumed two years ago, what has stuck with you most?

A: Probably the idea from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that you need to determine what your life purpose is. I always thought that kind of thing was unbearably cheesy, that it messed with my laidback m.o., but it started to make a lot of sense. Once I defined my main creative purpose as storytelling — and I did this just by thinking about what makes me really happy and excited — I felt more focused and inspired. I could better see that my life isn’t the random and chaotic mess I sometimes perceive it to be. Not that I have become a streamlined machine. I’m just a little more confident about what I do. And it’s still hard to write this stuff without cringing.

In the chapter on personal finance, we learn that making a living as a writer isn’t easy — even for a New York Times bestselling author. What advice do you have for other writers when it comes to money?

Don’t expect too much and then you’ll be happy when it comes! I love talking about money because it’s such an uncomfortable subject. People often email me about that chapter, surprised that I could be so strapped for cash when my books are seen as being pretty successful. I think I make about as much money a year as a public school teacher, which I’m proud of, though I do a lot of other things besides write to earn it (and while I’m at it, if anyone in charge of anything is reading this, schoolteachers should be paid more.) I emcee events, run a storytelling series, teach writing to high schoolers, dress up in a banana costume, judge writing contests. I got a hundred and fifty bucks last week to have dinner with some marketing people for Levi’s and talk about What Women Want. Plus I got some free jeans. And then there’s the fact that I live in the Bay Area, which is an expensive place to be, and my husband is a self-employed musician and recording engineer, so neither of us have a job with health benefits. We pay a ton for private insurance. When I say that I will pretty much do anything for a hundred bucks, I mean it. I don’t think my money issues are very different from regular middle class people, but if you get your picture in a magazine, people sometimes think you also must have a hot tub and a cleaning person and no credit card debt. Very few writers get rich doing it, so you have to make sure you love to write. But you can make a living. Don’t listen to people who tell you that you can’t.

For the complete interview, visit Etude's new fall edition.

The Obama Ground Game - A narrative

2008-11-04T13:04:00.000-08:00

In honor of Election Day, I'm posting an excerpt from a recently published narrative piece that gives a ground-level view of the inside of the Obama campaign. The writer, Nancy Webber, has been on the trail for Obama since January, campaigning in Oregon, California, New Mexico, Texas and Colorado.

After you vote, take a break from CNN and check out Nancy Webber's story. It's well worth the read.

For the entire piece, visit Etude, the journal of literary nonfiction.

January 13, San Francisco
A week later, I walk into Obama's San Francisco headquarters during a precinct captains’ meeting. The organizer asks, “Who is volunteering on a campaign for the very first time?” More than 80 percent of the people raise a hand. These people don't know it yet, but some of them will form lifelong friendships because of this campaign. As I listen to the organizer prepare this new group of volunteers for what she wants them to do, I'm struck by her approach. She doesn't jump right into the instructions, she asks them why they are here. It's standard procedure on the Obama campaign to ask, because it prepares canvassers for a different way of reaching voters.

“He was right when a lot of people were wrong, including myself, about the war,” said a Naval Academy graduate and veteran of the first Gulf War. The vet thought he probably had more in common with McCain, but that Obama had the potential to make real change.

“It’s personal," said Ben Muhammed. "My son had five job interviews with no call backs. He came and asked me if he could change his name to something other than Muhammad. We talked about it and I finally agreed to see if it made any difference. He changed his last name, sent the same resume to the same institutions, and he got three different offers.”

Each volunteer in turn speaks and the bond is formed. The work of contacting voters isn't easy, but they have learned that their job is not to persuade others to believe in Obama, but to persuade voters to believe in themselves — that their concerns are valid and that they can be agents of change. After today, this group will be back many times. They now owe it to each other. ...

Telling Stories With Audio Slideshows

2008-10-25T11:13:00.000-07:00

Michael Werner and I are giving a workshop today at the Society of Professional Journalists' Building at Better Journalist Conference in Eugene, Oregon.

For those of you who can't be here or those who did attend but want some resources to refer back to later, I've uploaded a quicktime movie file of our powerpoint presentation.

As we explained in the workshop, Soundslides (downloadable from the link) is a handy tool for compiling photos and audio (but not for editing photos or audio). You must prepare your photos (save as jpgs) and audio (save as mp3s) in other programs. Uploading them to Soundslides is the easy part.

Here are links to more info helpful in producing slideshows.

Check out the Audio Journalist's Toolkit for info on audio gear, editing software and handy guides to using Audacity. Here are sites where you can download free music and sounds: Freeplaymusic.com, CreativeCommons.org, CCmixter.org and the Free Sound Project. Be aware, however, that just because they're free to download, doesn't necessarily mean they are copyright free. If you're making a sideshow for journalistic or commercial uses especially, read the fine print.

Check out the Photojournalist's Toolkit for info on basic photo composition rules and Photoshop basics.

Here's a workflow map of how to use the Soundslides software. If you click on this, you'll open a larger version to print. Let me know if there are problems. I can email you a pdf.

After you finish compiling your slideshow, you'll want to "export" it. This is one of the fussy aspects of Soundslides. It doesn't export a neat, compact file. It creates a folder called "publish_to_web" and that entire folder is what you need to publish. If you're working with a web team, just hand them over the folder, they'll know what to do. If you want to email it or publish it to your own personal website or blog, follow these instructions on the Soundslides online manual under "exporting and publishing."

Pre's Rock Pilgrimage

2008-10-21T00:03:00.000-07:00

In the hills above Eugene, Ore. there's a roadside memorial that draws hundreds of people each year from around the country, people who pay homage to a long-distance runner that went by the name Pre.

Steve Prefontaine died in 1975, but the track star's legend continues to flourish.

During the 2008 Olympic Trials, which were held in runner's mecca of Eugene, more than 3,000 people visited the rock -- Pre's Rock -- which commemorates the location of the car crash that caused his death. These pilgrims brought offerings of sorts: old running shoes, jerseys, socks, flowers, letters, track metals. Some treated the memorial almost like a sepulcher.

A team of graduate students from the University of Oregon Folklore Department documented this pilgrimage, gathering more than 10 hours of raw video.

It was my job (at Cascade magazine) to decide how to tell a story with the footage.

Here's what I came up with ...

I got the idea to do time lapse on split screens from a multimedia piece I saw a this spring in the New Yorker. Check it out.

I remember thinking, gee what a simple yet perfect use of raw video to tell a story. Ever since I came across it, I've been watching for an opportunity to use that technique.

What do you think? Does it work?

Telling Stories Nonfiction Writing Contest

2008-10-17T10:50:00.000-07:00

I decided recently there aren’t enough short nonfiction writing contests. Take a look. A quick google search will turn up oodles of “short story contests,” but by “short story” they mean fiction. I mean nonfiction.

In response to this realization, we at Telling Stories have decided to host a short nonfiction story contest to encourage those of us compelled to tell true stories.

Beyond those two rules—true and short—anything else goes.

Submissions could take the form of a compact narrative, a mini essay, or simply the description of a person, a moment or a memory. Submissions can blend genres, be experimental, be creative, be humorous. It could be the type of story you tell your mom when she calls. Or the type your inappropriate uncle tells on Thanksgiving when he thinks only the guys are listening.

Really, anything goes. We at Telling Stories just love a good story and aren’t persnickety about the form.

Need more motivation? How about this—winners will receive their very own copy of the recently published The Best Creative Nonfiction, vol. 2 (autographed if you like).

Now I know you’re excited. Okay, go to it. Ready, set, write!

Rules
1. It must be true.
2. Keep it short. (As my editor Dave Schwartz used to tell me, Write it as long as it needs to be and not a syllable more. You decide what that means.)

Prizes
1. The top five will receive a copy of The Best Creative Nonfiction, vol. 2 (W.W. Norton), 2008.
2. The top five stories will be published here on Telling Stories with the author’s bio.
3. The winners can add the following title to their resumes: “Winner of the 2008 Telling Stories Nonfiction Writing Contest”

Deadline
Email your story to katie.ann.campbell [at] gmail.com by Dec. 1, 2008.

Judging
Submissions will be judged by myself and narrative nonfiction writer Michael Werner, who is a visiting professor of journalism at the University of Oregon.

Books gone bust?

2008-10-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

I’ve been hearing lately that unless you’re Tina Fey, it’s not a good time to be selling a book.

You may have seen the New York Post report that one publisher right off the bat offered our beloved Sarah Palin look-a-like a $5 million advance (and that the subsequent bidding war likely raised that to $6 million). Hmmm… Hardly seems like a sign that the financial crisis has hit the book business. Unless you view it from the perspective that publishing houses aren’t gambling on anything but the sure bestseller.

So how is this global financial crisis affecting publishing?

Here’s an anecdote I can offer: Last week a writer friend lost a book deal. After two years of perfecting a book proposal and securing a publisher, this writer was sent back to the drawing board. No more deal.

I’ve also recently talked to other authors who shared concerns about their chances of securing their next contracts. These aren’t folks looking to break into the industry. These are proven, multi-book authors.

Beyond the anecdotal, what’s the word from industry insiders?

I haven’t seen too much yet.

Victoria Barnsley, CEO of HarperCollins UK, told thebookseller.com this week: "People always say books are the last thing to be affected by an economic slowdown, but the magnitude of this crisis is surely making everyone nervous. However, publishing is a gambling business and, as usual, I’m sure we’ll see a couple of fairly insane offers being made next week—if they haven’t already been made."

Would the Fey book deal be one of those insane offers?

But as media fellow Peter Osnos pointed out in a Sept. 30th column for The Century Foundation, people have been proclaiming for decades that the end of the publishing is nigh. And many have said for years that it’s an industry that ought to die. For example, The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan recently decried, “If any industry deserves oblivion, it’s book publishing.”

Yet somehow books and publishers remain. How? Why?

Lauren Kessler recently took a closer look at the question of the death of books (which was written before the stock market tanked). Her piece, called “R.I.P” was published this summer in Etude. Here’s how it starts:

"The book is dead.

That’s the title of the book I’m currently reading. Of course the fact that this book was written and published, that I bought it and am reading it would seem a powerful argument against its main premise.

In fact, 172,000 books were published in the U.S. last year. If you count vanity press and print-on-demand, a new book of fiction is right now being published every 30 minutes in America. How can the book be dead?"

So dear readers, can any of you offer any evidence of the health of the publishing industry? Or thoughts on the future of books? Or advice on how an author who doesn’t have her own TV show gets a book deal?

The Boundaries of Memoir

2008-10-09T13:00:00.000-07:00

Memoir inhabits a nebulous place in the literary world.

In memoir, fact and fiction aren’t always black and white, emotional truth may not match historical truth and ethics and aesthetics often collide.

A few months ago I moderated a live roundtable discussion on the topic for Cascade magazine.

On the panel were three writer/professors from the University of Oregon, one who writes memoir, one who analyzes and writes autobiography and one who refuses to write memoir. The fraud memoirist and former UO student Peggy Seltzer (a.k.a. Margaret B. Jones) was the inspiration for the debate.

Here’s a link to the magazine where you can read highlights from the discussion and listen to some of the most interesting parts. [Photo info: Laurie Drummond, Gordon Sayre, David Bradley and me. Photos by Jack Liu.]

One thing is clear: Memoirs continue to be wildly popular. The “memoir craze,” as its called, is still going strong. Here are a few memoirs on the New York Times best seller list this week:

The Year of Living Biblically, by A. J. Jacobs, a memoir of his attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible;
A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah, about his life as a child soldier from Sierra Leone and his drug-crazed killing spree;
Through the Storm, by Lynne Spears, you can imagine what it’s about;
and don’t forget Stori Telling, the actress’s memoir.

We could argue whether the last two are actually memoirs. The label memoir usually implies that we’re going to learn part of the life story of a relative nobody. (And the fact that the Spelling book has been on the list for 18 weeks kind of freaks me out. How interesting could it actually be?)

The more memoirs that are published, the more dramatic they seem to be. Entertainment Weekly this summer put together a list of the types of lives captured in recent memoirs: A child of a woman who left the convent and assumed a false identity. A man who double dates with his recently widowed father. A woman who survived an unhealthy religious fixation (on top of having an eating disorder).

Every potential memoirist should check this list first to see if their life story has already been done. It’s a long (and quite hilarious) list.

Published!

2008-10-03T00:35:00.000-07:00

The Best Creative Nonfiction vol. 2, is now in bookstores, marking my initiation into the book world. (That is if we don’t count my appearance in Rupert Sheldrake’s book, The Sense of Being Stared At, for my powers of telepathy — if you ask, I just might tell).

As soon as my personal copy of the Norton anthology arrived in my mailbox, I tore open the package and turned the pages until I saw the title of my story about egg donation called, “The Egg and I” on page number 131, sandwiched between a piece that appeared in Harper’s last year about the amazing oceanic journey of thousands of plastic floatable toys and a previously unpublished essay that shed light on the challenges of being a part of a 21st century multiracial family.

I’ve been reading the pieces slowly, enjoying them immensely. My copy is already feathered with post-its, noting favorite phrases, poignant real-life observations and well-told dramatic moments. The opening piece by Anne Trumbore is gripping—I don’t want to say more for fear of spoiling the read. David Bradley’s essay about the death of the N-word is at once hilarious, reflective and instructive. And Laura Sewell Matter’s story called, “Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist” is the ultimate example of the kind of down-the-rabbit-hole adventures we writers often send ourselves on when we're avoiding writing. Only in this rabbit hole, she found a story worth telling.

Critics have given high praise to the anthology. Here’s what Publisher's Weekly said in a starred review:

From Publishers Weekly
In his follow-up to last year's volume, the first in a re-launched, annual version of his journal Creative Nonfiction, Lee Gutkind gathers another fresh collection of exemplary essays from a wide range of authors and sources, tackling everything from multiracial love and familial exile to the connection between memory and digital photo manipulation. Relatable situations and eccentric writers keep the stories intelligent but accessible, and often poignant; especially resonant is Gwendolyn Knapp's attempt to rehabilitate her mom's terminal case of pack-rat fever. Sarah Miller-Davenport provides some levity in a piece on guilty (and expensive) pleasures called "Here I Am in Bergdorf Goodman." Many accounts run up the old stranger-than-fiction flag, most notably Sewell Matter's piece regarding her discovery, on an Icelandic beach, of a page torn from a book; captivated by the "amazingly, almost unbelievably, bad" excerpt, she sets off on a global search for the complete novel. Proving again his chops as an anthologist, Gutkind's latest collection-which also includes Heidi Julavits, Pagan Kennedy, William deBuys and the guy behind IAmGettingFat.blogspot.com-is a 30-run homer, a whirlwind of moods and thoughts captured by some of the biggest talents on the essay and blog beat.

You can The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2 at any bookstore. Here's a link to Powells Books where you can order it from for $15.

I'm have a number of copies to give as prizes ... I just waiting for inspiration on what the contest should be. Any ideas?

The King's English Bookshop

2008-08-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

Literary nonfiction writers are always complaining that books within this genre have no real home in bookstores. If you visit the big box bookstores, here's what you'll find: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family is filed under "Sociology." Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief is under "Gardening" and "True Crime." And Ted Conover's Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hobos is in "Travel Writing" of all places.

That's why I felt like I had to pinch myself when I entered The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City last weekend and found a section -- in fact about three floor-to-ceiling shelves -- called "Literary Nonfiction."

Gaping in awe and disbelief, I peered through the stacks finding books by some of the genre's darlings including Didion, Wolfe, Dillard and McPhee. Feeling all warm and fuzzy, I gushed to the people at the front desk, "I LOVE that you have a section for literary nonfiction. Thank you, thank you, thank you."

The next time you're in Salt Lake City, find a moment to visit the eight cozy, book-packed rooms of this independent bookshop. Owner Betsy Burton opened the shop more than 30 years ago and has written a book (called The King's English, of course) about the adventures of running an independent bookstore.

If you're like me and not in the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake, you can admire The King's English from afar by checking out their blog called The Inkblotter.

Does anyone else have any favorite independent bookstores we should know about?

Reviewing Mickey Rapkin's book Pitch Perfect

2008-08-05T17:57:00.000-07:00

It’s hard enough to pull off a book about music. (Wouldn’t radio or film be a better choice?) And then to go and choose a cappella — sounds like certain disaster.

But writer Mickey Rapkin discovered just the opposite. In his book Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory, Rapkin proves that the world of competitive a cappella is rich with fascinating factoids and entertaining, albeit gossipy, stories. It’s anything but the snooze fest one might imagine from a story about a musical genre where even the harmonica is forbidden.

Writing from the informed perspective of a former insider (Rapkin’s an alumnus of the all-male singing club at Cornell), the a cappella veteran pokes fun at this dorky yet lovable subculture while also offering plenty of evidence as to why these kids should be taken at least half as seriously as they take themselves. Rapkin, senior editor at GQ, has ferreted out and woven in such jaw-dropping details as the fact that some groups net $30,000 a year from shows and record sales. Top-tier groups are hired to sing at Disneyland or even travel abroad for gigs. As additional proof, Rapkin outs other now-famous former undergrad a cappella-ites like John Legend, Anne Hathaway, Art Garfunkel, and Diane Sawyer. Even Osama bin Laden sang in an a cappella ensemble.

Throughout Pitch Perfect, Rapkin incorporates the history of a capella, tracing it from its religious roots through to its recent revolution. Breaking almost completely from traditional barbershop, a cappella today favors the arena of rockin’ pop hits. The cover songs they produce sound nearly indistinguishable from the originals, making you ask, “Did they really manage to sing that guitar solo?” Rapkin answers all those how-the-heck questions, providing ongoing mini music lessons on what it takes to transform a multi-instrument composition into an all-vocal arrangement. The reader can almost hear the imitation snare drum and a bass, as Rapkin describes it: sh-sh-k-ts-sh-sh-k-ts.

But the book is about much more than music. Rapkin chronicled the seasons of three collegiate a capella powerhouses, which all happen to be at a crossroads. The University of Oregon’s red-hot, all-female group Divisi is about to compete for the first time after being robbed of the 2005 international championship title. Tufts University’s Beelzebubs, legendary in a cappella circles, are back in the studio stressing over how to produce an album that will stand up to their last — the CD that redefined contemporary a cappella. And finally the rowdy, frat-boyish Hullabahoos of the University of Virginia are trying to figure out how to get serious without losing their signature cool.

Along the way, Rapkin introduces readers to a handful of singers from each group, but opts for breadth over depth. Most of the people in Pitch Perfect are sketched lightly — Rapkin makes the real characters the groups as a whole. As each chapter progresses, we become embroiled in each ensemble’s plight, its inner politics and inside jokes.

Pitch Perfect is like the a cappella culture’s Best In Show, but sweeter and more heart-breaking. The only missing piece is the soundtrack.

Book Details: Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

By Mickey Rapkin 275 pp. Gotham Books, 2008 $26.00

Rapkin also maintains an entertaining blog on all things a capella that's worth checking out.

And you simply must take a listen to Divisi. They've posted a number of their songs online. I have their latest CD Roots and highly recommend it.

This review was published this month in Etude. Visit Etude for more reviews of new narrative nonfiction, including books by Tony Horowitz and Mary Roach.

Literary Nonfiction Reading

2008-08-02T11:44:00.000-07:00

The day after graduating from the Literary Nonfiction graduate writing program at the University of Oregon, we held a reading of our final projects at Tsunami Books in Eugene.

Here are the five graduates for 2008: (left to right) Aaron Ragan-Fore, Misty Edgecomb, Katie Campbell, Michael Werner, Sabena Stark.

What I've been up to

2008-07-30T10:14:00.000-07:00

Maybe only my dear friend Henry A. Stephens has noticed the absence of my blog posts, but I thought an explanation was in order. (He demanded one actually.)

I've been a tiny bit busy.... graduating.

This photo is my offer of proof. Pictured here are myself and my partner, Michael Werner, and in the middle is Lauren Kessler, the director of the the literary nonfiction graduate program we completed this June at the University of Oregon.

The push to the finish was intense, fueled by gallons of coffee and small doses of sleep. But I'm sure in a few years, I'll only remember the excitement of it all.

Naturally, in the wake of graduate school, I've needed a little time to recover: to break my addiction to coffee, to soak in Oregon's amazing summer months and yes, to return to a more healthy (and sustainable) writing life.

More soon. I promise. But I must go pick some blueberries first.

The Dixon Narrative Workshops

2008-04-01T08:07:00.000-07:00

As writers, don't we all just love workshops?

They offer an opportunity to take a day off of the writerly life and step back and reflect and ask: How far have I come as a writer? And where might I head next?

It's also a chance for a momentary respite from what can be a solitary existence, to mingle with others who share similar anxieties and might even fall prey to some of the same neurosis that tend to attack people who dare to tell stories. Workshops remind us that we aren't the only ones who haven't got this writing thing all figured out, but that we're not at the beginning anymore either.

For me, the best workshops give us a sense of inspiration. They are rejuvenating. Attendees may arrive feeling stagnate, but they leave feeling as though they've just gotten a jump start. They can hardly wait to get home and hit the keyboard. They're overflowing with ideas, techniques to try and new practical skill to apply.

There's a workshop coming up soon in Portland that promises do all of these wonderful things. The Dixon Narrative Workshops The Dixon Narrative Workshops is a one-day intensive workshop on narrative storytelling techniques on Saturday, May 10 at the Turnbull Center in Portland, Oregon. Narrative nonfiction author Lauren Kessler will lead the sessions, which will focus on the craft of writing, on how to think about stories and how to gather information in order to tell compelling true tales. Michael Werner and I will join Kessler in offering a session on multimedia, sharing what we've learned by applying our narrative writing techniques to producing audio-visual stories.

In essence, it's a day long session in becoming a better all around storyteller.

Check out the site for more information and if you have more questions feel free to comment below or email me.

See you there.

Top bird: My favorite multimedia story of 2007

2008-02-06T23:33:00.000-08:00

Who would have thought that chickens in Missoula could be so funny? Or that they would make a great subject for a multimedia project?

Well, Anne Medley knew. Her video , "Missoula Squabbles Over Urban Chickens" tells a story of a classic struggle of where to draw the line in allowing rural elements to enter city life. It's wonderful in so many ways. I don't know what to praise most - the opening money shot of the chicken at the door .... the subtle use of cluck, cluck, clucking sounds ... the talk of neighbor-on-neighbor fights paired with the image of a chicken trying to peck another chicken's eyes out ... the banjo instrumental of "America The Beautiful" playing behind a chicken photo montage ... or just the quote: "I'm mostly neutral but I guess slightly pro-chicken."

I first saw this video a couple of months ago and have watched it about a dozen times since. And I still enjoy it.

Beautifully shot. Hilarious. Just plain brilliant.

This is what the future of journalism should look like. Bravo to Anne and to www.NewWest.net . I stumbled across New West this fall and was surprised by the quality of the content and the spread of the coverage area (Oregon, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming). After e-subscribing, I have consistently been enticed to return.

They call it "a next-generation media company" and I've been keeping an eye on it because of its online-only format, wondering if they might have figured out the mystery that seems to be eluding so many news outlets: How to produce quality journalism and profits.

As far as I can tell they must be doing something right because they've actually recently added a print magazine .

Has that happened before? Starting out online-only and moving to print? Interesting.... I may just have to subscribe to that as well.

The Best Creative Nonfiction, vol. 2

2008-02-06T20:03:00.000-08:00

One of my stories, The Egg and I about egg donation, published this past summer on Etude has been chosen to be included in the 2008 edition of The Best Creative Nonfiction .

Here's a story , announcing the news, which I've copied below.

SOJC graduate student Katie Campbell among Literary Nonfiction’s “cutting-edge best.”
by Zanne Miller — last modified 04:34 PM Thu Jan 03, 2008
Literary Nonfiction student Katie Campbell's essay "The Egg and I," published in the summer 2007 Etude, has just been chosen for inclusion in The Best Creative Nonfiction vol. 2, edited by Lee Gutkind, to be published July 2008 by W.W. Norton & Company.

Literary Nonfiction student Katie Campbell's essay "The Egg and I," published in the summer 2007 Etude, has just been chosen for inclusion in The Best Creative Nonfiction vol. 2, edited by Lee Gutkind, to be published July 2008 by W.W. Norton & Company. Gutkind, editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction and professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, has been called the “Godfather of Creative Nonfiction”; the book is described as “Narrative nonfiction at its cutting-edge best from writers at the cusp of recognition and fame.”

Campbell “pretty much has it all,” says Lauren Kessler, professor and director of the SOJC’s program in literary nonfiction. “She knows a good story when she sees it and has the talent and skill to develop it. During her first year in the program, she developed a number of significant stories that involved both traditional journalistic research and immersion fieldwork. "The Egg and I" was one of those -- carefully researched, beautifully and sensitively crafted. A gem, really. I am thrilled, delighted—and not at all surprised—that it was chosen for inclusion in the anthology.”

Campbell, who has a B.A. in journalism and English (2002) from the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minn., has worked as a reporter and photographer at newspapers in Minnesota, Florida, and Wales. She and her partner, Michael Werner (also an LNF student), came to the SOJC in fall 2006 after living in Costa Rica for two years, where they taught English and were later hired to be co-directors of the English program at Universidad Latina.

Below, an interview with Katie Campbell.

Q. How did you feel learning your story was chosen for the anthology?
A. I got the news in an email and my feelings went something like this: Confusion followed by the sensation that I was going to either faint or vomit. Then I looked up the publishing company to make sure that it was actually the same Norton of the Norton anthologies. Then I just sat there shocked. Having my story being selected is a huge honor. I’m thrilled really. So often the emotional experience of being a writer is up and down. There have been many times when I’ve wondered if I’m any good at it at all, so getting this news was like receiving a nod of assurance that I have some business being in the business of writing.

Q. Tell me about the story—what gave you the idea to do it?
A. I didn’t think my decision of whether to donate my eggs was something to write about until months after I first saw the egg donation advertisement. I wasn’t looking for an immersion journalism project. It really started out as something that caught my eye as a way to support myself during grad school. When I did start thinking about writing about it, I thought it would only really become a story if I went through with it. But I wasn’t just going to donate my eggs so I could write about the procedure firsthand. That would be messed up. As I contemplated donation and did all the research to make an informed decision, I realized there was a lot of the tension and internal conflict surrounding the decision itself. I talked to a lot of my friends and family members at the time and they were very interested in learning about my decision-making process. Across the board everyone I talked to was eager to find out my final decision. It seemed clear then that it was a story worth writing whether or not I ended up donating.

Q. It's very personal—was that easier or more difficult to write than other pieces?
A. I usually write about other people because I tend to think other people lives are way more interesting than my own. Also my background is in newspaper reporting and there just isn’t much room for personal narrative writing. So while I don’t shy away from writing in first-person if a piece calls for it, this is one of the few stories I’ve written that really is all about me. And I’m not sure whether it was easier to write than non-personal stories. In some respects yes and in others no. One thing I’ve always thought was really hard about writing about other people is knowing whether I’m getting a good sense of the truth when I’m reporting. I always want to know what people are or were thinking and feeling at specific times or why they reacted to something the way they did, but that takes a ton of self analysis and some people aren’t used to being that introspective or they tell me what they think I want to hear. It’s hard to know if they’re being honest. And when I’m observing, I’m trying to interpret their actions and reactions and figure out what it all means and that’s incredibly challenging. It’s difficult to know if I’m getting it right. It was much easier to analyze myself and I feel like I was able to interpret my actions in a way that accurately reflected their meanings. On the other hand, being so open about my personal life was very difficult. It took me months before I was able to share the story with anyone besides my boyfriend and my professor Lauren Kessler. I was worried that people would judge me and I had to get over that.

Q. What made you choose the LNF program?
A. I took a graduate-level course in Literary Nonfiction the final semester of my undergraduate career and I fell in love with the genre. After graduating I began experimenting with trying to write in that style in my newspaper articles and when it came time to look for graduate school options I really wanted to hone those literary writing techniques. This is the only graduate journalism program that’s focused exactly on that, so it seemed like the perfect choice.

Q. How has the experience been?
A. I’m so happy to be here in the J-school and in the LNF program. Lauren is a fabulous writer and a wonderful teacher and I feel like I’ve grown so much as a writer/reporter in the past year. During our LNF writing workshops last year, I’d leave class knowing exactly what I had to do to put together a good piece. I knew what to look for while reporting and how to think about structure. Lauren breaks it down to the essential parts and gives us the tools to be great writers. She also really de-mystifies the process, which does a lot to empower the writer. I had high hopes for what the LNF program could be and it’s been even better than I imagined. I seriously love studying here and I don’t want to leave.

Q. What are you working on now?
A. I’m co-producing a historical documentary for Oregon Public Broadcasting on WWII conscientious objectors who were interned in work camps here in Oregon. I’m also in the beginning stages of research for a book proposal on environmental activism.

Reviewing Elizabeth Hess's biography of a talking chimp

2008-02-06T19:37:00.000-08:00

Some writers can make something as bland as bananas interesting by the way they write. Others choose a subject matter that is so inherently fascinating that the prose simply has to stay out of the way of the material. Elizabeth Hess’s Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human falls into the second category.

Essentially an animal’s biography, the book chronicles the at times heartbreaking birth-to-death journey of Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee at the center of the much-publicized 1970s experiment that aimed to disprove linguist Noam Chompsky’s claim that language was a uniquely human trait.

Could a baby chimp be raised among humans and learn to communicate with people using American Sign Language? That was the question the researchers planned to answer. What do you do with an animal that is half wild and half human? That’s the question they never anticipated.

The first half of the book, which focuses on Project Nim, as the experiment was called, is a page-turner. Hess’s prose is both educational and entertaining. It moves along so easily that I could almost overlook the fact that Hess introduces us to 50 named characters in the first 50-odd pages.

The book’s real muscle comes from its deep reportage. Hess gathered incredible details from interviews with the people who moved in and out of Nim’s life: those who raised him like a son, those who taught him his first words, those who became his advocates later in life and those who would ultimately fail him. Hess fills in the gaps by combing through countless academic papers, books and articles.

Through the course of the book, Nim rightly becomes its heart and soul, growing into a complex character, a lovable and sympathetic protagonist you can’t help but root for.

Post-experiment life for Nim is, sadly, much less interesting. Nobody is paying attention to the chimp’s day-to-day activities. It’s a biographer’s perennial challenge. Some chapters of a life, chimp or human, aren’t well-documented. Hess’s solution? Shift focus to other researchers conducting experiments on different chimps. During this nearly 100-page section, the plot plods through some tedious detours, making us wait a long time to find out what happens to our primate friend. But like the rest of the world, I’d fallen for Nim and cared little to invest emotionally in the twenty-some other chimps Hess introduces.

But Hess succeeds on a critical point: The story of Nim is hardly forgettable.

--
For more reviews of new works in narrative nonfiction, such as David Shields' new book "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead," visit Etude's Books in Brief .

Jon Hassler: A writer for life

2007-12-03T13:24:00.001-08:00

Imagine you’re 74 years old. You’ve written 21 books. And you’ve developed a Parkinson’s-like disease that leaves your hands incontrollable, making typing with any accuracy nearly impossible.

If you’re Jon Hassler, you start your next book.

Over the last 30 years Hassler has written 14 novels, two collections of short stories, two young adult books and three works of nonfiction. Most of his writing takes place in small-town Minnesota, where Hassler has spent most of his life writing and teaching English. Long retired from teaching, he’s working on novel No. 15. He composes about a page a day through a painstaking process that involves Hassler typing the first draft, which comes out looking like dummy text. He then prints the page, holds it inches from his eyes, (He has double vision as well) and reads the prose aloud to his wife. She retypes a clean version, prints it and reads it to him. They edit together from there.

Wow. That’s a man compelled to write. Reading this story by Dave Wood about Hassler made me think of my grandma, a lifelong reader. At age 82 her vision had deteriorated so much that she could only see through a hazy fog out of one eye. But she so loved to read that even that didn’t stop her. Up until a bad fall this past spring that lead to her death this fall, she read an average of a book a week, on top of reading three daily newspapers.

I wonder how many of my writer friends today will still be writing into the years when everything becomes harder. What will we think looking back on our days when all we had to complain about was writer’s block?

Check out this video that accompanied the story on MinnPost.com.

Gag me with a million little pieces

2007-09-14T01:22:00.000-07:00

So you may have heard that James Frey has a new novel coming out and this time he's actually calling it fiction. Fine, good for you, James. At least you're sort of telling the truth this time. I guess I might be willing to forgive you.

Wait a second. I'm not ready to forget the whole debacle. Especially after I read how publishers have been falling all over themselves to get their hands on the new Frey book and that it went for something like a million dollars. HarperCollins got to him first. As publisher Jonathan Burnham confirmed the news, he gushed over Frey's writing skills, saying, "James Frey is an immensely talented writer who has written a truly extraordinary and original novel, one of great breadth and ambition."

Oh, gag me, Jonathan. As if it were really about extraordinary writing and not dollar signs.

Last winter, I set forth to try to figure out exactly what magical ingredients made a bestselling nonfiction book. I analyzed "A Million Little Pieces," by you know who, Jon Krakauer’s "Into the Wild," Jonathan Harr's "A Civil Action," and of course, Mitch Albom’s "Tuesdays with Morrie." I suppose the writing did play somewhat of a roll, but there seem to be other overriding factors. Here's an excerpt of my piece and a link to the rest of the story.

What Makes a Bestseller?
So different, yet so much the same
By Katie Campbell

I finally decided to give James Frey’s book a chance.

While A Million Little Pieces was causing such an uproar this past year, I was busy shunning it, ignoring Oprah’s recommendation and subsequent condemnation, and striding past the strategically placed stacks of hardbacks at bookstore end-caps without being enticed in the least.

My years immersed in canonized nonfiction made me scrunch up my nose at the thought of wasting my time with such tripe. But a question always lingered. The mass attraction of this book and its sky-high sales befuddled me. What was it about Frey’s much-beleaguered trauma memoir that catapulted it into the bestseller list? In fact, what makes any book popular?

To understand the bestseller phenomenon, I decided to see how Frey’s book measured up to other nonfiction bestsellers. I chose three additional books that seemed to have nothing in common aside from their impressive financial success: Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, an intriguing but small-scale narrative of the disappearance of an unheard of young man; Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie, a simple story of a dying man’s final days that has become an international phenomenon on the scale of Harry Potter; and a serious, critically acclaimed legal thriller, A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr. Then I hunkered down, attempting to discover if these books had any similarities that might give clues as to why they became so widely irresistible.

Some parallels weren’t all that surprising. All four authors write with no-frills vocabulary and simple sentence structure. Of course, I thought, accessibility and bare-bones writing are keys to making the books fast-reads. These books were almost effortless. Albom’s book I consumed in one sitting.

Another common aspect of all four is the universal allure of the topics. We’re attracted to the themes in the same way we’re drawn to watching the tragedies on the evening news. We become absorbed in other people’s misfortunes because of the frightening knowledge that it could happen to us (or the happy relief that it isn’t happening to us). In Albom’s book, the theme is facing terminal illness. In Frey’s it’s the grip of addiction. In Harr’s it’s the scary environmental health threats that surround us. In Krakauer’s it’s the mystery of self-destruction, a young man’s suicidal journey. These topics embody our collective fears and pique our interests.

While any of these themes would be fine choices for fiction writers, as nonfiction they become more potent. Think of the end of a film when the words “Based on a true story” roll across the screen. Knowing the story is authentic makes it more significant (and knowing that it was, in part fabricated, as with Frey’s book, makes us feel betrayed).

Adding to the weight of fact is the writer’s ability to create tension. The muscle of these books as page-turners startled me.

...

For the rest of the piece, visit Etude Magazine.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what makes a bestseller.

Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer's

2007-09-07T10:47:00.001-07:00

Narrative nonfiction author Lauren Kessler talks about her new book, "Dancing with Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer's" published in June 2007.

Kessler is the director of the Literary Nonfiction graduate program at the University of Oregon.

Making a film in 48 hours

2007-07-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make:

I've taken on a mistress -- a video camera. I think I'm falling for filmmaking. At the start of the summer I took a week-long course on laptop filmmaking and had such a good time that I immediately signed up for a course on digital video and audio. You know how the story goes ... one thing lead to another ... and soon I found myself immersed in the world of making films and feeling like I had a new lease on life.

I'm still holding on to my first true loves, writing and photography, but there's something about video that's captured and inspired me.

This past weekend my filmmaking team drove to Seattle to participate in the 48-hour Film Project . We pulled a genre out of a hat and had to produce a film from it in 48 hours. The final film had to incorporate a character named Lenora (or Lenny) Chavez, who is a veternarian, and a helmet and the following line of dialog: "Everything is going to change, starting now."

It was a fitting line and I'm starting to wonder if it's going to apply to my career focus, making such a big switch makes me nervous. But when I think about it, it's really not that big of a switch at all. It's still all about telling stories. It's just a different medium. And telling stories is at the core of what I'm all about.

Our 48 hour Film Project weekend was intense. We were disappointed with what we came up with for a film at the end of the 48 hours because we ran out of time to really futz with the editing, sound and special effects. But the film premeired in Seattle on Wednesday and Thursday and while we didn't attend a few of our actors did and I heard from them that compared to the other films shown, ours "kicked butt." We've spent the rest of this week re-cutting the film, boosting the effects, adding filters and writing a soundtrack for it.

If you're interested in seeing it, send me an email and I'll burn you a DVD.

Here's a story written about our team that ran yesterday in the University of Oregon's daily newspaper, The Emerald:

Horror finds students at film festival

(Michael Werner, the director, Katie Campbell, director of photography, and Sasha Rae, producer, set up a shot at a trailer park in Kent, Wash., the main set of the film)

The 7 students traveled to Seattle to attempt to create and edit a horror film in 48 hours for judges

By: Andrew Greif | Freelance Reporter

Posted: 7/20/07

What could you do in 48 hours? How about write, shoot and edit a short movie?

Didn't think so.

But for seven students in professor Jeff Goolsby's digital arts class, that's exactly what they did last weekend in Seattle.

Journalism graduate students Michael Werner, Katie Campbell and Sasha Rae, along with undergraduates James Skidmore and Nathan Arbuckle from Lane Community College, Sander Gusinow from Lewis & Clark College and Jeffrey Borrowdale, a professor of philosophy and religion at LCC, teamed up to make the Seattle 48 Hour Film Festival their final class project.

"It's a real intense course for the summer, so this fits in perfectly," said Goolsby the day before the group traveled to Seattle. "I wouldn't say all of the students could pull it off right now, but this group can."

Intense is one word many used to describe the experience, but two more seem to fit even better: Sleep depriving. Campbell reported that in 65 hours, she was asleep for only one.

The University filmmakers, dubbed Unconventional Minds Media, applied for the competition on a whim. Because they were added to the festival's roster only a week before the July 13 start, the filmmakers found themselves scrambling to match the months of preparation the 41 other teams had.

The Seattle festival is but one stop on the 24-city national festival tour. What makes the festival so difficult is that teams must integrate a chosen name of a character, prop and line of dialogue into a film, whose genre is also chosen at random.

Once in Seattle, the group met with volunteer actors and actresses who had replied to the group's Craigslist post from earlier in the week. At 7 p.m., Skidmore and Rae relayed the genre to the rest: Horror.

"Of all the genres out there, it's probably one of the hardest to do well. I mean, think of all the horrible horror movies you've seen," said Campbell, the film's producer. "We had thought up basic storylines for every single other genre except for horror and sci fi so we were like 'Oh no!'"

The work to produce "The Neighbor" - about a couple who encounter disturbing events while searching for their lost dog - was a nonstop race until Sunday evening.

"We were all so exhausted that by the time Sunday came people were just delirious," said Campbell. "I know I didn't eat anything off of a plate for the entire time I was there."

Shooting began at midnight at the chosen locations, one of which was an eerie mobile home park in suburban Kent, Wash. Once the filming began, so did the editing, which the team quickly realized would be a much more complicated task than they previously realized.

With the 7:30 p.m. Sunday deadline looming, the final steps to finish the movie resembled, appropriately, a movie scene. One team member grabbed the DVD out of the burner, handed it to Rae who ran it out to the team's car, which, with its passenger door already open, was pointed north toward the drop-off site. In the end, however, the film was turned in five minutes late, nullifying the film's inclusion for judge's awards. The film is still eligible for audience awards.

"I think how we envisioned the film and how it came out are two different things. We just ran out of time," said Campbell, who termed the feeling of the result as "disappointed." Local screening ended Thursday, but the team won't know how it placed until the coming weeks.

The time crunch left the team with several regrets, notably not being able to include sound and special effects, video filters and a soundtrack.

Despite the technical and unforeseen setbacks, Werner came away from his first filmmaking experience with a positive feeling, and if he didn't know it before, Werner certainly understands one other reality about filmmaking now.

"Movies are not meant to be made in 48 hours," he said.

Slate.com’s new online video magazine

2007-06-26T02:08:00.000-07:00

Continuing on the theme of new media, here’s something interesting happening at Slate: Andy Bowers the man who started Slate’s popular podcasting programs has left the podcast for a promotion to start Slate V (the V is for video), a new online video magazine version of Slate.com.

Yes, folks at Slate know there’s tons of video content out there. You already know about Youtube and you may have even heard of Funnyordie.com (if you haven’t, I highly recommend it). But the problem with sites like those is the perennial problem of the Internet: Too much junk to sift through.

So the idea with Slate V is that they’re going to give us video content that’s a cut or two above the usual YouTube-grade home videos. I checked it out, excited for a new avenue to high quality video. I wasn’t impressed by the first video, a hybrid of live footage and animation that followed the format of Dear Abby, except it’s called Dear Prudie .

It’s mildly amusing, I guess. But the video doesn’t add much. I think the medium of audio or text works just fine for advice columns. What can video add to that really? Not much, in my opinion.

But another video by Bowers about the role of web video in the presidential campaign was fantastic. Check it out:

Here's one more worth watching: an analysis of a campaign commercial that features Bill Clinton stumping for Hillary Clinton, was smart, interesting and even funny. They could use footage from the commercial and even compare it to a commercial from back when Bill was running and Hillary stumped for him.

Both of these videos were a much better use of video as a way to enhance coverage in a way that plain text or audio would fall short. Very interesting, thought-provoking and great examples of how web videos can add value to news websites.

Too bad, Slate has to pay for this new content by forcing viewers to stare at an obnoxious still photo of a car advertisement for what feels like at least 30 seconds, (long enough to make me want to click to a different site). And the video kept breaking up as it was loading and it caused my web browser to crash about six times. I eventually gave up. But what I found in a few of the videos has made me decide to revisit later, and you should too.

I’m also a big fan of Slate’s podcasts. So check them out too while you’re at it. I really like this one called Google’s Buried Treasures . It’s about all the cool things you can do on Google that most people don’t know about.

Signs of blogging as mainstream media

2007-06-11T00:33:00.000-07:00

Blogging has officially gone mainstream. I say this because blogging – more specifically live-blogging – is being done from the campaign trail, AND it’s being done by New York Times reporters.

Now if that’s not a sign that blogging is part of the transformation of journalism, I don’t know what is.

So those of us who are interested in, or addicted to, up-to-the-minute news on campaign 2008, we have a source. But here’s a question: Since these reporters are New York Times reporters, will they provide anything different or better than the average blogger?

Check it out. What do you think? Click here

June 10, 2007, 3:26 pm
Sunday Sampler Platter
By Brian Knowlton
Colin Powell made news on Sunday, calling for the immediate closing –- immediate as in “this afternoon” — of the Guantánamo detention center. The former secretary of state also said that he had met twice with Senator Barack Obama as the young Democratic presidential candidate sought foreign-policy advice. And the retired general and Bush administration veteran left open the distinct possibility of endorsing a non-Republican
candidate. ...

The fourth estate under fire

2007-06-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

For the past half a decade or so the news media has been under fire, taking shots from bloggers, consumers and from members of the news media themselves. The complaints vary widely. The Jayson Blair / New York Times incident brought questions of credibility and trust to the forefront. The Dan Rather / CBS blunder instigated widespread concern over accuracy. Fox News makes us wonder daily about objectivity. And the consolidation of media outlets forces us to think about profitability.

The response by members of the traditional media or the “corporate media,” as some prefer to call it, runs the gamut from looking at the bottom line to looking the other way. But what we should have done long ago was to look to Philip Meyer, the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For years Meyer has been trying to tell mass media outlets what they ought to be focusing on to keep up in the information age — it’s not doing journalism on the cheap or blindly staying the course. According to Meyer, the quality of the product is where journalists and news companies ought to be focusing.

“Journalism, in order to survive in all this noise, has to offer something better,” Meyer wrote in USA TODAY in September 2004. “It needs to be a more credible, highly processed product.”

Blogging has allowed the everyman/woman to hold giant news companies accountable and has offered consumers more variety and quantity of information. Journalists can no longer ignore their own flaws. It’s easy to make excuses about lack of time to vet stories or lack of support from editors. This is a tough job, but if we want to continue to be journalists, we have to find ways to do it better than the average person who will do it for free. Meyer has been trying to tell us how: Be transparent, be professional, be trustworthy, be accurate to a scientific level and offer data analysis and critique the controversy.

Journalists have been humbled as Meyer says in his column below. Now is up to us to be better.

Closely watched media humbled
January 2005
By Philip Meyer
Some of the chattering heads on television would have you believe that journalism in the USA is falling apart. It's not. Instead, it is assuming a new form.

The recent reporting scandals are not a sign of new corruption as much as a sign of new transparency. …

What gives bloggers their power is not their access to information but their ability to put it on the public agenda. …

Now, even its agenda-setting power is being taken away. Bloggers do it better because they reinforce one another, adding bits of fact and encouragement.

Agenda-setting power had a negative side. By ignoring their own deficiencies, the mass media could keep us from thinking about their weaknesses. But that's no longer possible. There's a new kind of competition, not among media giants, but among innumerable sources of information and ideas all trying to be heard.

The agonies of the old mainstream media are part of the process of adapting to this new reality. We still need strong national voices that earn our trust, and the mass media need not become obsolete. But they will have to understand that it is a different kind of game.

When Edwin Lahey was Washington bureau chief for Knight Ridder, he liked to say, "The greatest virtue is humility, and the shortest route to humility is through humiliation." The old media aren't getting worse. They're just getting humble.

For the entire story click here

The Challenges of New Media

2007-05-31T00:46:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to share this YouTube video I came across related to new media. I thought it was especially appropriate for those of us who may be experiencing frustration as we learn how to blog. Enjoy.

The start of Opus Dei - Recreating a moment

2007-05-30T22:03:00.000-07:00

(Writing a scene in history through narrative nonfiction)

When Father Josemaria Escrivá de Balaguer arrived in Italy on June 22, 1946, he was hungry.

It was 11.30 p.m. and the last he had eaten was coffee and a few cookies thirty-two hours before when he left Barcelona. Most of those hours were spent crossing the Gulf of Lyon during a violent storm on the J.J. Sister, a thousand-ton postal steamship, which lurched and plunged as waves swept the deck. Everyone on board was seasick, but Josemaria stayed in good humor, eagerly anticipating his first visit to Rome, which would become his home. His reason for relocating to the holy city was specific: To urge Pope Pius XII to bestow pontifical approval on the organization Josemaria had founded, Opus Dei.

On the wharf in Genoa, Josemaria, a 44-year-old man with a small build, round glasses and hair combed over from an extreme left-side part, broke into a smile at the sight of his friend, Alvaro de Portilla.

"Here you have me, you rascal! You got your way," Josemaria said in a lisping Spanish, teasing Alvaro, who had pleaded with him for months to come to Rome and talk to the Pope directly even though Josemaria had been struggling with diabetes. By the time they arrived at their hotel at about midnight that night, the kitchen had long closed. The only food Alvaro could offer Josemaria was a chunk of Parmesan cheese he had saved from his dinner.

At 7:30 a.m. the next morning, Sunday June 23, Josemaria and Alvaro said Mass at a nearby Church before setting off for Rome in a rented old-model car that had a strong rancid odor. They arrived on a clear evening as the sun was setting.

Their destination was an attic apartment in the Piazza della Citta Leonina, immediately outside of the brick wall surrounding the Vatican. After climbing the five flights of stairs to the sparely furnished apartment, Josemaria stepped out onto the roofed terrace to behold the dome of Saint Peter's Basilica in the fading twilight. Taking in the long-anticipated view, Josemaria spotted the lighted window of the Pope's private library. His heart swelled and the exhaustion from the long journey melted away. He knelt and prayed, holding vigil on the balcony all night.

###

Here's a great writing exercise. Choose a random day before you were born and find an event that happened on that day. Collect all the details (using newspapers, diaries, etc.) related to that event and write a 400-word narrative scene based on the event.

If you try this, please share it with me by posting it here. Thanks!

Sources:
I based my writing/recreating of this moment in history on the following sources, which featured details cited of Josemaria's personal dairies and letters as well as audio of his speeches and photographs Josemaria and of the important moments in his journey to Rome.

Web sites:
Josemaria Escriva in English
Josemaria Escriva in Spanish

Book:
The Founder of Opus Dei: The life of Josemaría Escrivá, Volume 2: God and Daring
by Vázquez de Prada, Andrés

This I believe: The power of making lists

2007-05-29T09:50:00.000-07:00

I believe in making lists. All kinds of lists. I make daily, weekly and monthly to-do lists. Grocery-shopping lists. Before-I-die lists. Gift-idea lists. Story-idea lists. Lists of questions to ask people, of recommended books to read, of homework assignments, of new vocabulary. And of course, lists of New Year’s resolutions.

I can’t think of a more appropriate way of explaining my belief in the power of making lists than by making a list of my top reasons. So here they are.

1. If you write something down, it gets done. There’s even science to prove that if you say you’re going to do something and then you write it down, the chances of it actually happening increase exponentially. So making those life-goal lists is especially important. Here’s my anecdotal proof: Since I made my first of this kind of list, I’ve been able to put a checkmark next to the following things: Learn another language fluently, downhill ski in the Colorado Rockies, live abroad, skydive and sing on stage.

2. Making lists almost always saves time. Sometimes I “forget” that my life runs on lists. Once in a while I’ll say to myself, “Okay, you can forgo making a shopping list this one time. It’ll be fine.” But whenever I do, I end up coming home with another bag of basmati rice when I already have three bags in the cupboard. And I’ll have forgotten that the toothpaste tube has reached the critical level, which means another trip to the store, during which I cuss myself out for ever denying that I must make lists.

3. Lists allow you to accomplish more. This may be an obvious one, but I learned it the hard way after wasting too much time at work. Now I keep a running task list on my computer, so that I always have a bunch of possible jobs to attack. If I don’t feel like doing a certain job, I have ten others to choose from. And when I have a spare 30 minutes before an appointment, I can scan my to-do list for a job that will take me 30 minutes or less.

4. When you accomplish something on your list, you get to do something even more fun than making lists: You get to cross an item off the list. Crossing off items can be so satisfying that I admit I sometimes even make lists of menial tasks I’ve already completed, just so that I can cross them off.

So that’s why I believe in making lists. I suppose my list-making obsession isn’t for everyone. That’s okay because I also believe in knowing thyself.

I know I need lists. I know they motivate me to start a project and complete a project. And I know that by putting pen to paper to make my lists, I’m capturing my thoughts and dreams before they flitter away. My lists become plot lines on a grid, setting my course and showing me all at once the person I was and the person I hope to become. With my trusty list in hand, I’ll know where I’m going and where I’ve already been.

Gabcast! I believe in making lists #1

To learn more about NPR’s This I Believe project go to: This I believe

Joe Sacco: Comics as storytelling’s new medium

2007-05-24T15:20:00.000-07:00

For the past few years I’ve been attracted to new high-tech media and their power in storytelling, but last week my eyes were opened to the potential of the old-fashioned medium of comics.

Joe Sacco, a comics journalist, spoke at the University of Oregon last Friday afternoon to a group of comparative literature students. The class has spent the term considering how different forms of media have unique effects on our collective understanding of the content. They’ve looked specifically at work related to genocide, including such media as prose, poetry, films and finally comics.

The students read Sacco’s most popular work published in 2000 called Safe area Gorazade: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, a 240-page examination of a small Muslim village in war-torn Serbia. It’s unlike anything I have seen. It looks like a graphic novel, but it’s all based on facts and is a first-person account that tells the untold story of Bosnia in a way we’ve never experienced it.

When Sacco first developed his unique hybrid of eye-witness journalism and comics, he wasn’t sure that anyone would take him seriously. He hadn’t learned anything like this as a journalism undergraduate at the University of Oregon. A few years after he graduated, Sacco realized he knew nothing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“I decided to educate myself and it just came to a point where I thought, if I don’t go and see for myself, I’ll kick myself for the rest of my life,” Sacco said. So he got a travel visa and went on a trip through the Middle East. Sacco had always drawn cartoons, and while if felt silly to draw them of what he saw on his trip, he just decided to go with it.

When he was abroad researching, he steered clear of other journalists and had a hard time explaining to his sources what he was planning to do with the material he was gathering. But after publishing his first major work, Palestine, in 1993, Sacco could show the book to his subjects and he found that the images were immediately understandable in a way that a book in straight prose isn’t.

Cartoons, like photographs, are universally readable. But there’s a big difference between the two forms, Sacco pointed out.

“Photographers hit the viewer with all the relevant information at once, which is powerful, but not necessarily complete or true. As a cartoonist, I’m trying to create an atmosphere through multiple images,” he said.

It’s closer to narrative nonfiction prose than anything else I’ve seen. But I have to admit comics journalism has something that even literary nonfiction doesn’t have.

Sacco pointed out, “A prose writer will describe the setting once, and the reader may forget. But as a cartoonist you get to bring the setting in again and again by drawing it in each scene. The background is always there.”

So the reader is immersed in the setting constantly reminded of how the place looks. That’s powerful.

Another intense aspect of Sacco’s work is that he includes images from his fieldwork that almost no mass media outlet would publish. Sacco’s sketches of dead, decaying bodies in Safe area Gorazade are shockingly detailed.

Explaining, Sacco said, “I decided I would depict things you don’t normally see. I’m using comics to portray violence realistically. I want to confront the reader with real violence as opposed to movie violence.”

To the room, Sacco asked, “You can tell me if it’s effective or not …”

As we looked over the images of skeletons with sunken frozen faces, we sighed almost collectively in resounding affirmation.

And one student spoke for all of us, saying, “We watch a lot of movies and see a lot of this stuff and it’s not that often that we cry a little when we see it, but with this I did.”

Now that’s powerful journalism.

For more information on Joe Sacco click here

Interviewing by email? by blog?

2007-05-23T23:52:00.000-07:00

Email interviews can be dangerously attractive for both journalists and sources.

Here are a few reasons why they’re attractive: Email-formatted interviews can happen at anytime of the day. They require no scheduling. The reporter simply shoots off a list of questions. The source can take his or her time answering, thinking of exactly what they want to say so they get their response just right. Personally, I would much prefer being interviewed by email because I’m more articulate and thoughtful when I write than when I’m talking off the top of my head. From a reporter’s perspective, it’s lots easier to cut and paste quotes into a story, than to transcribe a recorded interview or type up notes.

So it’s no wonder more and more interviews are being conducted this way. But I chose the phrase “dangerously attractive” because I think getting comfortable with the by-email-only terms some sources are demanding is a step a journalist can take toward working mindlessly.

“Wait, wait, wait a second,” this is a voice inside my head, which has just reminded me of an interview I conducted by email just last week. Here’s the backstory: I’ve met with this particular subject in person probably a half dozen times over the past month for an immersion journalism project I’m doing. Mostly I hang out and ask a question here and there, but she’s been a little cagey and not detailed in her responses. So I tried a different track. I sent an email with just a couple questions. The next morning I opened my email to find a lengthy and exceedingly honest response. Wow, I thought as I emailed her back asking for a clarification of a few things she mentioned and posing a few more questions. And within a few hours she sent an opus, an emotional, highly detailed account of the past few years of her life. By the end of the email she was thanking me for asking and showing interest.

So I guess I can’t completely write off the email-formatted interview. Now that I think about it, the more comfortable we become in communicating through electronic media, the more it will be like communicating face-to-face. In fact, when I think of what people willing to put on their MySpace pages, it seems like people are already more comfortable with sharing the details of their private lives through electronic media than in person.

Here’s what that got me thinking about this in the first place: Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post wrote a column
this week about how electronic communication in general and blogging specifically is changing the way the journalistic interview is being conducted.

Here are the opening paragraphs:
Interviews, Going the Way of the Linotype?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 21, 2007; Page C01

The humble interview, the linchpin of journalism for centuries, is under assault.

It is a transaction that clearly favors the person asking the questions. A print reporter writes down someone's answers, then picks and chooses how much, if any, to use, how to frame the quotes and where to put any contrary information. Television correspondents slice and dice taped interviews in similar fashion.

But in the digital age, some executives and commentators are saying they will respond only by e-mail, which allows them to post the entire exchange if they feel they have been misrepresented, truncated or otherwise disrespected. And some go further, saying, You want to know what I think? Read my blog.

"The balance of power has shifted," says Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at New York University. "Everyone used to be landlocked, and the media was the outlet to the sea of public discussion. But now there are many routes. . . . Readers have more power because they have more sources, and sources have more power because they can go direct to readers."

The greener side of news blogs

2007-05-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

The Business of Green, a blog put out every two days by the International Herald Tribune in hopes of creating a global dialogue on the environment, is worth looking at. What’s interesting about this blog is how much the emphasis is on starting a dialogue. Each posts begins by introducing an issue and ends with a question. The questions are posed directly to “you,” the reader.

The authors, Libby Rosenthal and James Kanter are both award-winning journalists. Kanter covers European and global business for the IHT and writes a weekly column called the Business of Green. Kanter often uses the blog to continue the discussion he starts in his column, asking specific questions in a less rhetorical and more direct way as he does here:

From Kanter:

“…In my Business of Green column this week, Klaus Lackner, a professor of geophysics at Columbia University, says we’re going to ‘need technologies that at first light seem like silver bullets because the scale of the climate change problem is so large.’ Lackner also says that on current trends, the earth is only 35 years away from the point at which global warming would be impossible to reverse and that ‘we need to throw everything we can at the problem.’

“What do you think about so-called geo-engineering projects that could someday save the planet? Do you think politicians are taking enough responsibility in case there is climate catastrophe in the coming decades? And do you think scientists at the most recent meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel were right to reject geo-engineering as untested and unproven?”

And here’s a comment responding to Kanter’s questions by a reader in Hanoi, Vietnam:

“We should take the most pessimistic conclusion based on good evidence and analysis for the allowable gases and particulate matter. And a solution consistent with the laws of nature that will keep us below that. Whether it is “traditional” things such as limiting emissions or non-traditional ones that can actually work to lower the effect of the pollutants. The latter as contrasted with actually limiting them.

“But in all this must remember something: using our present societal system based on coercion we have never solved even one of our basic societal problems in 5,000 years.

“And we can not expect that this system and the people using it who have not been able to make healthcare, pension and school systems work, will be able to solve the much more complex and contentious problems related to global warming.”

And with that, we’ve got a thought-provoking discussion that couldn’t have happened in the traditional media formats. The discussion is rising to new levels of detail rather than just skimming the surface. But there certainly is a balance in this blog and it seems to be the co-blogger, Rosenthal.

Rosenthal has written for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times usually on topics related to health care as she also went to Harvard Medical School. So sometimes her posts don’t feel as smart as commentary from people who have more of a background in environmental issues. And folks who comment on her posts sometimes end up providing more revealing and thoughtful fodder for discussion than she does.

For example, in her May 18, 2007 posting on the mayors of 500 U.S. cities protesting the nation’s lack of support for the Kyoto treaty since it was introduced at the turn of the century, she simply sums up the news and then she asks:

“Isn’t it odd that a nation like the U.S., which is so green in so many places, can not commit to a stronger national plan of action?”

In my opinion, she’s thrown out a highly pedestrian question that people have been asking for nearly a decade. And the resulting discussion peters out after three comments.

So now I’m wondering… does the technique of introducing a topic and then posing an open-ended generic question work? Is there a better format? You tell me.

Nicholas Kristof brings us the story of Darfur

2007-04-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

Tonight I met a man who had been shot in the throat and left for dead in a pile of bodies.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof introduced me and a packed lecture hall to the man by way of a slide show of his trips to Africa during his keynote address, the closing event of the University of Oregon’s weekend-long symposium on the crisis in Darfur called, “Witnessing Genocide: Representation and Responsibility.”

From the picture, we could see his twisted arms and scarred neck. The day he was shot, his village had been burned and his family murdered by janjaweed, the tribe the Sudanese government claims not to support. What Kristof has witnessed, however, shows the opposite. One side has bows and arrows. The other has AK-47s.

“There’s no question of the level of Sudanese government’s support,” Kristof said.

The situation in Darfur began as a rebellion against the government. The government responded by systematically terrorizing and killing three African tribes, he explained. “These are rational pragmatic people who saw a problem and thought the simplest way to solve it was to slaughter a lot of people.”

The death count of the past four years is unknown, but estimates run as high as 500,000.

The man Kristof told us about who lay bleeding from the neck in a pile of bodies that included his mother and father maybe one of the dead. But he didn’t die that day.

His brother had been shot in the foot but was able to run, escaping the janjaweed’s pillaging. When the brother returned to bury his family, he discovered his still-breathing brother. The man carried his brother for the next 49 days, traveling only by night, fleeing the country along with 30,000 others.

That was back in 2004. The situation has grown much worse. And the stories Kristof has gathered in his many trips since are even more brutal. The janjaweed have begun using bayonets to gouge out eyes and mass rape is common. Listening to story after story, I kept thinking, “Why don’t I remember hearing anything about this?” How come Darfur has only recently become a part of the national conscious? (Is it a part of the national conscious?)

Maybe it’s because the Darfur genocide has only recently been covered by the corporate media, (and usually with some connection to Angelina Jolie). I wasn’t terribly surprised when Kristof told us that during all of 2004 the TV news network CBS devoted just three minutes of coverage to the situation in Darfur. In 2005 they cut that to two minutes.

“If you look at the historical significance … you feel embarrassed as a journalist,” Kristof said. I too felt embarrassed, not just for my profession’s obsession with the sensational, but more because I felt just as guilty by not taking time before today to educate myself on the story of Darfur.

It took looking into the bludgeoned face of a man from Darfur projected larger-than-life on the wall before me for me to really see and care.

Thank you Nicholas Kristof for bringing the story of Darfur to us.

NY Times video on the Darfur crisis

Nicholas Kristof's blog

Living it: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Immersion Journalism

2007-04-26T00:45:00.000-07:00

As a reporter I was lucky to get to spend more than a day to report and write an article. That’s why I can’t imagine spending 12 years on a one project as Adrian Nicole LeBlanc did in writing Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx, the award-winning narrative nonfiction book about the lives of two Puerto Rican girls who grew up in the impoverished, drug-dealing world of the Bronx.

LeBlanc gave a speech to University of Oregon journalism students recently called “Journalism for the Long Haul,” an apt topic for a journalist well known for her time-intensive research methods.

To understand the lives of her subjects, she essentially lived right alongside them. During the day she was an editor of Seventeen magazine, but in the evening she hung out with her subjects in the Tremont Avenue ghetto. She sometimes even slept overnight at their apartments, changing into her work clothes the next morning in the lobby bathroom of her posh downtown New York City office building.

“Immersion journalism is journalism with the incredible luxury of time,” LeBlanc explained. “I had time to spare. I could spend as much time as needed.”

LeBlanc didn’t go to a journalism school so she didn’t know how to launch into the reporting. She just decided to visit the neighborhood and introduced herself to people on the street, saying, “Hi, I’m Adrian. I’m a journalist and I want to write about your life.”

She returned, day after day with her notebook and audio recorder and documented their lives.

These anthropological techniques aren’t usually taught in journalism school. Instead we’ve learned to gather information by holding question-and-answer interviews, often by phone to save time.

But while we save time, we lose so much more.

We aren’t privy to intimate details of our subjects’ lives. We don’t know their daily routines. And we often aren’t trusted with the real story. As a result, we tend to write flat lifeless accounts.

“For me reporting makes (life) happen in Technicolor,” LeBlanc said. “If you love it and you can figure out how to make it work (financially), there’s nothing like it.”

Since listening to Adrian, I’ve launched my own immersion-reporting project into the subculture of roller derby. I followed LeBlanc's lead. I went to the roller rink and said, "Hi I'm Katie. I'm a journalist and I want to write about roller derby."

In the past week and a half, I’ve spent 18 hours with the Emerald City Roller Girls. I’m just beginning to understand the team’s dynamics, practice routines, and individual players’ motivations and dreams. Already I know so much more than what I would from basic interviewing, but even more revealing is how much I realize I don’t yet know.

It’ll take time, but I’m looking forward to being there to watch their stories unfold.

To read an interview with LeBlanc by Michael Werner visit:

Etude, the University of Oregon's literary nonfiction online magazine

From Reporter to Blogger

2007-04-24T00:03:00.000-07:00

In my career as a journalist I’ve worked at six newspapers and am now trying to establish myself as a freelance writer and independent blogger. I can’t help but wonder what I should take from my print journalism background into the blogosphere.

Some of the transferable skills seem obvious. Clean, concise, easy-to-follow writing is a must if you want to be read. As a reporter I learned to unfurl tangled issues related to urban development, environmental protection policy and social services and then lay the issues out in way that both educated and entertained. That’s a valuable skill in any kind of writing, blogging included.

Relevance seems like another biggie. I imagine, like in newspapers, writing about topics that matter to a wide-ranging audience will increase readership. But in this realm, a writer can choose her ideal audience and cater to them if she wants.

But on the flip side, if a topic has been written about ad nauseam online chances are you don’t want to blog on it unless you have something new to add. Blogs seem to have become popular for giving media consumers reports that traditional media outlets didn’t offer. In newspapers, content decisions are often based on what journalists think the audience needs to know. That’s why I had to slog through so many agendas of the planning and zoning boards. But in blogs it seems to be much more about what the audience wants to know. Media consumers today can act more like patrons at a salad bar, feeding on those reports in traditional media outlets and in the blogosphere that interest them most.

One aspect unique to blogging is the potential to hold a real discussion. I’m anxious to experience this side of blogging first hand. As a reporter I could never really participate in the discussion. I had to be objective, or at least I had to pretend not to be a politically minded being. Feeling obligating to turn off that part of my brain hurt my writing and reporting. I didn’t feel free to develop and share insights I gained from reporting.

Even when I spent months investigating and writing issues-based enterprise projects, I rarely felt like my writing generated much of a greater discussion. At least if the discussion was happening, I never saw it. I quit my last full-time newspaper job and moved to Central America for two years in the summer of 2004. Because of the timing of my leave, I haven’t experienced what it’s like to be a print journalist in a world where blogging rules. The only back-and-forth exchange that I experienced was the form of an occasional letter to the editor or personal email.

The nature of traditional media has been one-way communication, from the news gatherers to the masses. Real discussions used to take place only on a small scale, usually face-to-face or in the form of phone calls, letters or emails. But the Internet in general and blogging in particular have revolutionized how we communicate and share ideas because it offers a public venue for an infinitely large multi-directional exchange.

I’ve become a blog reader and now I’m anxious to be a part of the revolution as a blogger, one of the many who get to start the conversation.

What Journalists Can Learn from Bloggers
What Bloggers Can Learn from Journalists

The Bloated Blogosphere

2007-04-23T22:54:00.000-07:00

Here I am adding yet another blog to the bloated blogosphere, where already more than 57 million blogs exist. My wee blog is just one of the about 75,000 added each day, which makes me wonder: Will anybody read this?

I imagine I’ll never build a readership similar to what I enjoyed when I worked for newspapers. I was a reporter for a 120,000 circulation daily corporate-owned paper in Florida charged with documenting and reporting the most important issues of the day. Now I’m one of millions of bloggers writing on whatever I want.

As I begin this venture, I can’t help but feel small. I guess I must put faith in the credo, “If you build it they will come.” So I’m building this blog as a venue for my own storytelling, my observations on the ever-changing face of mass media and my musings on the ever-present challenges of the writing life. I hope to be read as I was a newspaper reporter. But even more importantly I hope that this format will allow me to interact with my readers in a way that wasn’t possible before. I hope this blog can provide a setting for large and small discussions with anyone who cares to join.