The Outsider: Alex Kotlowitz
I’m a huge fan of the Longform podcast, those hour-long interviews with many of the best nonfiction writers in America. Recently I listened to one with the award-winning journalist Alex Kotlowitz, who many will know from his features in The New Yorker (“The Trenchcoat Robbers” is a classic), The Atlantic or The New York Times […]
Living With Rejection
Every writer faces rejection. It’s brutal and it’s not confined to early in a career. It never fails to wound and it welcomes self-persecution. It has the capacity to undermine confidence like nothing else. James Salter called it a daily “feeling of injustice.” An inability to deal with it may end more careers than any […]
The Line Between Fact and Fiction
Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow but raised in Sierra Leone. She lived through the rancorous break-up of her parents and the persecution, and finally execution, of her father, a doctor and opposition leader during the period of violent civil war in that country. She returned to Scotland to live with her mother and, after getting a […]
You Say Pilcrow, I say Para…
A friend, Marco Ursi, asked on Facebook about teaching his fifth graders about paragraphs. That made me think of the paragraph symbol, which I knew had a name but couldn’t remember what it was. So I consulted my copy of software engineer and writer Keith Houston’s book, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & […]
Asking Questions of Terry Gross
A recent Longform podcast featured Terry Gross, host of NPR’s Fresh Air and a master interviewer. Longform co-founder and co-host, Max Linsky, talked to her, and he does a pretty good job (despite unnecessarily starting out by admitting he’s nervous interviewing Terry Gross; I’m sure he was, but no need to say it). There’s an especially […]
The Zookeeper’s Wife
When my literary agent suggested I read Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, I was surprised I hadn’t heard of it. I’ve re-read Ackerman’s The Moon by Whale Light, A Natural History of the Senses, and The Rarest of the Rare; I think of her as a superb creative nonfiction writer with a special interest in […]
A Typewriter for Christmas
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Asking Questions in Advanced Feature Writing
Feature writers conduct many interviews, in-person as well as via phone or email, for almost every story. It’s among the most important skills a journalist develops, yet it’s rare to find a journalism school offering a dedicated course on interviewing. The subject is usually rolled into classes on researching and reporting and, in general, is treated […]
Monkeying Around with Typewriters
Many of you will remember the episode of The Simpsons when Mr. Burns gives Homer a tour of his mansion and shows him a thousand monkeys typing on a thousand typewriters which, he claims, will soon produce “the greatest novel known to mankind.” When he checks one monkey’s progress, he says: “‘It was the best of times, […]
Pauper Envy
A Truck Full of Money: One Man’s Quest to Recover From Great Success by Tracy Kidder Random House 2016, 288 pages Book Review by David Hayes October 1, 2016 The National Post The noted literary journalist Tracy Kidder has made a career out of documenting the lives of other, often ordinary, people rather than himself. […]