Articles

“Whether it is fiction or nonfiction, the voice of the author is what keeps us going. If the voice does not capture the reader, the voice is silenced by the…

Emily Hiestand is a poet and a visual artist as well as a magical essayist. A lot of what she talked about can be summarized as thinking like an artist…

Nieman Narrative Journalism ConferenceCambridge, MassachusettsNovember 30 – December 2, 2001Narrative journalism is in transition to a second phase. The first continues—the individual, dramatic phase in which lonely reporters get fascinated…

‘Without them, the stuff that happens would float around in some glob and none of it would mean anything.’

Lower your standards. Get something down. Swallow the bile that rises in your throat when you write a first draft. Print out early. Read aloud. Apply very critical standards.

‘Your character gets to the point where something changes.’

‘Your training as journalists is a tremendous platform on which to layer or from which to develop a personal voice.’

During the conference, there would come a time each day when writers would share their narrative writings with participants who wanted to listen. And many did. The hundreds of chairs…

A photographer uses digital video ‘to capture the passion and grittiness of contemporary Cuba.’

Roughly the first 20 years of my working life I spent almost entirely as a reporter for newspapers and magazines. The last six or seven years of it I have…