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, […]
Narwhal Tusk Justice
Last year, in the November/December issue of Canadian Wildlife, my feature was published on Gregory Logan, a former RCMP officer busted in Canada for illegally smuggling narwhal tusks from the Arctic to buyers in the U.S. http://davidhayes.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Operation-Longtooth.pdf Meanwhile, Logan was indicted in the District of Maine in November 2012 and charged with conspiracy, smuggling, and […]
A New Yorker Knock-Off in Jazz Age Chicago
Despite the 1893 World’s Fair, which was meant to transform Chicago into a world-class city, at the turn of the 20th century it still had a bad rep. “It is indeed a nineteenth century nightmare that culminates beyond South Chicago in the monstrous fungoid shapes, the endless smoking chimneys, the squat retorts, the black smoke […]
The Secret of Structure Revealed, in Advanced Feature Writing at Ryerson University
Anyone who’s been to journalism school or worked as a daily news reporter is familiar with the Inverted Pyramid. It’s a structural plan that reports the most important facts at the top of the story (the “lede” paragraph) and includes the rest of the information, in declining order of importance, in the following paras. It was […]
Gay Talese: The Voyeur’s Motel
Has Gay Talese been conned by an unreliable narrator or has he simply lost his ‘new journalism’ powers? By David Hayes, The National Post, July 9, 2016 The Voyeur’s Motel By Gay Talese Grove Press 240 pp; $36.95 If you were a high-profile journalist, how would you react if you received an unsigned letter from […]
Storytelling is All About… Stories (I)
“Storytelling” and “narrative” are the buzzwords of modern business, used by people working for small, family-owned companies, multinational corporations and organizations in the nonprofit sector. Of course, buzzwords in style today usually end up tomorrow on lists of “Most Annoying Business Buzzwords.” (Remember synergy, convergence, ping me?) But how do you tell a story? Instead of […]