journalism

Pulitzer winner on scene & structure

July 1, 2010 | 2 Comments

Today’s Mother Jones online features a fascinating interview with Gene Weingarten, now a semi-retired humor columnist for The Washington Post, who won two Pulitzer prizes for feature writing, most recently for his story about parents who forgetfully leave their children locked inside hot cars. He’s the author of The Fiddler in the Subway, a collection of his stories that originally appeared in the Post and its Sunday magazine. Interviewer Michael Mechanic writes that “very few living nonfiction writers could ever …

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Playwright David Hare on reality art

June 4, 2010 | No Comments

David Hare, known as a “verbatim playwright” for his plays taken from news events, gave a lecture on the relationship between nonfiction and art to the Royal Society of Literature in which he drew the distinction between what he does and ordinary daily journalism. In a nutshell, “without metaphor we have no art,” he said. The Guardian printed an edited version, under the headline “David Hare: mere fact, mere fiction.” In turn, I excerpt it here: Journalism is reductive. This …

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Dave Eggers on journalism’s virtues

May 3, 2010 | 2 Comments

Author Dave Eggers burst onto the literary scene with his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; his latest book, Zeitoun, is about the Homeland Security/FEMA ordeal suffered by a Syrian-American immigrant and his family in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Eggers recently gave an interview to Jeff Gordinier for Creative Nonfiction (Spring 2010) in which he talked about the immersion journalism he undertook to report Zeitoun. He talked about the influence of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road …

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Honesty in memoir, ver. 3.2

April 17, 2010 | 6 Comments

John D’Agata’s new book About a Mountain portrays Congress deciding to make Yucca mountain a nuclear dump, and, as if in response, a sixteen-year-old boy makes a suicide leap off the balcony of a skeevy Las Vegas hotel. In an otherwise rave review last February in The New York Times Book Review, Charles Bock took D’Agata to task for changing the date of the boy’s death to better serve his narrative (D’Agata gave the correct date in a footnote). D’Agata …

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Honesty in memoir, ver. 3.0

April 7, 2010 | 6 Comments

The etymology of fiction is from fingere (participle fictum), meaning “to shape, fashion, form, or mold.” Any verbal account is a fashioning or shaping of events. Remembering and fiction-making are virtually indistinguishable. The memoir rightly belongs to the imaginative world, and once writers and readers make their peace with this, there will be less argument over questions regarding the memoir’s relation to the “facts” and “truth.” —David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto A year ago I aired David Shields’s original …

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John McPhee’s plans & his surprises

March 17, 2010 | 4 Comments

The February 8 issue of The New Yorker featured an essay by John McPhee called “The Patch.” It’s about one of McPhee’s passions, fishing for chain pickerel, but it takes an unusual turn for McPhee when it also portrays the dying in 1984 of his physician father, who taught McPhee to fish. The elder McPhee, felled by a stroke at eighty-nine, was unresponsive until his son told him about a pickerel he’d just landed with his father’s ancient bamboo rod. …

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Virginia Woolf on journalism

November 23, 2009 | 7 Comments

“To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heart-breaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm’s way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin. And so, if one reads Mr. Lucas, Mr. Lynd, or Mr. …

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