What we’re reading, back-to-school edition: prison voices, the failure of imagination in storytelling, and the secret diary of a hedge fund manager

Teenage lifeguards abandon their perches to leathery veterans. The county fair’s bounty of funnel cakes and fried beer peters out. Corduroy shopping starts in earnest. The academic year begins. In honor of those entering the hallowed halls of education, reluctantly or with excitement, we offer these takes on prison, the challenges of teaching and what makes boring stories boring.

From Debbie Millman's "Look Both Ways" (details at end of post; click to enlarge)

NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES

Life in America’s toughest jail” by Erwin James from The Guardian (via The Browser). One ex-con considers the memoir of another.

Using a golf pencil sharpened on his cell walls and any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on, Attwood began chronicling the abuse that he and his fellow prisoners were subjected to. He smuggled his articles out to his parents, who posted them on the internet under the mantle of Jon’s Jail Journal. It was the first blog by a serving prisoner and soon attracted a large international following. Cockroaches featured heavily.

The Education of Ms. Barsallo” by Robert Sanchez from 5280. Sanchez follows an Ivy League Teach for America recruit in her first year.

“You all want to get to fourth grade, right?” Barsallo continues. “And you want to get through elementary school, middle school, high school, and go to college, right? Because, I’ve got to tell you, people are looking at your reading level and making a bed in prison for you. They’re betting half of you aren’t finishing high school.”

In with the new: the 2010-11 Nieman fellows arrive

The new group of Nieman fellows has arrived in Cambridge and will be spending this academic year diving into Harvard courses and research opportunities. I’ve taken the time talk one-on-one with some of the new arrivals this week, including narrative writers Darcy Frey and Josh Prager, as well as NPR’s Gwen Thompkins, who will be exploring the art of storytelling in several arenas, from music composition to epic poetry. In the coming months, we’ll continue to take advantage of the brain power and experience of this year’s group, and we look forward to sharing some of their questions and insights with the Storyboard audience.

But you don’t have to be a Nieman fellow to have connections at the Storyboard. If there’s an example of great storytelling that we haven’t covered, if you’d like to pitch an idea for a Storyboard post, or if you know of anyone who’s looking at narrative in new or unusual ways, please don’t hesitate to tell us all about it.

USA Today’s Joshua Hatch on digital storytelling, Katrina and using technology with “a narrative purpose”

We talked last week by phone with USA Today interactives director Joshua Hatch about “Five Years Later: Hurricane Katrina,” the paper’s attempt to document the recovery and continuing struggles of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. With a prologue and three chapters (Effects, Rebuilding and Unsettled), the project includes maps, interactive visuals, video and bare-bones text. In these excerpts from our talk, Hatch discusses pushing the envelope for visual storytelling, the scope of the effort and how it doubled as an experiment in presentation on the iPad.

What was the original idea for this project?

Everyone said we wouldn’t forget New Orleans, and we’d make sure the city comes back – the whole Gulf Coast, actually. It’s been five years, and we wanted to see where things stand now. How much progress has been made?

And the other part was to see what we could do to advance online storytelling techniques.

Was there a give and take between what you thought the story would be and what people actually found on the ground? Did anything change as a result?

Not that much other than that when we conceived of the project, the oil spill hadn’t happened. That was kind of a challenge, because you didn’t really know how big it was going to be and how long it was going to go on. So, while we’re trying to put this together, we’re trying to decide: How much of the oil spill do we need to incorporate into this? Is that its own project? Do we stop doing this and focus on that? Because it was ongoing, you never knew how it was going to play out. So we ended up taking the approach, well, how does it compare to Katrina? We got a sense that in some ways Katrina was much, much worse, and in other ways, the oil spill was much, much worse.

But because we have a reporter based in New Orleans, we had a pretty good sense of what we would find. USA Today has been doing a lot of stories following Katrina, so it wasn’t as if we ignored it for five years and then went back with no idea what to expect. We had a pretty good idea of what was going on, but we wanted to try to aggregate all that and then present it in a visual and digital way.

As far as the idea of doing something new in online storytelling, traditionally, in a print story, you’ve got an arc where words carry the reader through. Can you talk about the ways you were imagining this as a story without a lot of text?

You have a lot of options available. I admit to being a little more traditional; I kind of like a narrative arc and someone constructing a story. Although the digital experience can be very nonlinear, I’m somewhat partial to the linear path. So we tried to put it together in a way that you could flip through it as kind of a magazine in a linear way, but you could also dive into any part that you wanted to. We were working to get the best of both worlds.

USA Today’s Katrina anniversary project: stories from the second line

When clicking across the digital universe, we like new bells and whistles as much as the next Twitter jockey. But with big multimedia projects, we want to feel the bones of the story undergirding the graphs and demographics. So we’re pleased to select USA Today’s “Five Years Later: Hurricane Katrina” as our latest Notable Narrative.

How do you recap the five years since Katrina hit? By focusing the story and breaking it down. The project sets the scene with a few memories of the storm but moves quickly to what came after: the water, a pulverized cityscape, people seeking refuge in the Superdome. Three sections follow to create a skeletal narrative arc: “Effects,” “Rebuilding” and “Unsettled.” Each section has a handful of parts that weave together still images, video and graphics.

The project minimizes text and uses the wealth of details that pictures provide. Perusing then-and-now images of areas devastated by the storm, stacked for simultaneous viewing — as well as clickable maps that show changes in race, income and education – viewers get beautiful visuals backed with context.

Hank Stuever on story structure, really reporting Christmas and the problem with the “sacred space” approach to narrative

Washington Post reporter Hank Stuever writes in a variety of  narrative forms, from books to punchy television reviews and features. His latest book, “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present,” is based on time he spent in Frisco, Texas, beginning in 2006. Making good on the title’s evocations of both sweetness and Scrooge, Stuever explores the concept of Christmas in a big-box, Big Gulp suburb just hours from his hometown. A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, Stuever will keynote this year’s American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors conference. In these excerpts from two conversations, he talks about the joy and misery of Christmas, his struggles with story structure, and the two words that can make him stop reading.

What made you want to do a book about Christmas – something longer than the long-form stories you’ve done in the past?

I actually pitched this as a newspaper story a long time ago, when I was at the Albuquerque Tribune. I kept a private list of stories I should work on in addition to all the stories that I was assigned to do. I had written a line on my story list: “follow a family through Christmas,” because I had been the metro general assignment reporter who had to do different stories about Christmas every year.

It’s very hard to tell the truth about Christmas. People don’t mind being in online forums where they kvetch about their families and Christmas stresses, but that very rarely makes into newspaper stories about Christmas. Newspaper stories about Christmas need what I call “soft focus,” so they’ll be happier. Even back then, I thought it would be much better to follow a family and stay with them long enough to see the joy and the unavoidable misery that comes with Christmastime.

To deny the misery is to commit the same sort of malfeasance as saying, “The war is going OK,” “The economy is OK” or “Your houses will always be worth more than you paid for them.” There are a certain set of denial mechanisms. Christmas is one of them, journalistically, and it’s very hard to report. It’s hard to be a tough reporter and come back with a story and get an editor to say, “OK, great! Nobody’s happy at this toy distribution.” We just resist it.

Laurie Hertzel on growing up in newspapers and what she learned from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

In “News to Me,” Laurie Hertzel writes about life as an ink-stained wretch during nearly 20 years at the Duluth News Tribune. Now books editor at the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune, Hertzel is also an award-winning reporter and fiction writer (and occasional contributor to Nieman Storyboard). Projects and stories she has edited have won a National Headliner Award, a national Society of Professional Journalists Investigative Reporting Award and awards from the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors. In these excerpts from our chat, she talks about treacherous memories, being denied access to her own clips and the value of being as stubborn as a goat.

When friends ask you about the book you’ve written, how do you describe it to them?

First, I kind of say abashedly, that it’s a memoir. I say it abashedly because everyone in the world is writing a memoir. And then I try to describe it by saying that I think of it as the world’s longest coming-of-age story. Longest not in length, but in duration, because most coming-of-age stories take place over a single pivotal summer, and mine took 18½ years.

Hertzel in the USSR in 1986, from "News to Me" (Univ. of Minn. Press). Photo: Joey McLeister.

What convinced you to record it for posterity?

We have an in-house message board here at the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune. And a few years ago, a copy editor posted a message laughing at the lettering on one of the doors that leads to our basement. It said “Employes only,” and employees was spelled e-m-p-l-o-y-e-s – with one “e.”

He thought it was very funny that words would be misspelled at a newspaper. But it’s not misspelled, because anyone who’s been in the business as long as I have knows that back in the day when they were still using hot type, there were a lot of shortcuts they took in spelling. One was that cigarette ended with one “t”: c-i-g-a-r-e-t. There were a whole bunch of words like that they used just to save space.

I explained that in a note back on the message board, and he thought I was joking. He had never heard of this, and I started thinking about all the things about old-time newspapers that people nowadays know nothing about. Horseshoe-shaped copy desks – those are gone. Editing on paper with the time-honored editing marks – that’s gone. Cropping photos with a cropping wheel and a pica pole – all of this is gone. I wanted to remember them, and I wanted people to remember them.

What we’re watching, from Korean War veterans to skate punk trespassers and a town that lives off prisons

This round of selections shows the diversity of visual storytelling, from drawings to documentary and interactive immersion. Whether it’s kinetic camera work or the power of a single subject, each of these projects offers some aspect worth swiping. Happy viewing!

Cannonball,” a short film from California Is a Place. In the midst of economic turmoil, skateboarders take over pools on foreclosed properties.

Prison Valley,” a Web documentary from Upian, David Dufresne, Philippe Brault and ARTE, a European cultural channel (via Interactive Narratives). In this look at Cañon City, Colo., a longtime hub of the prison industry, ominous voiceovers evoke crime dramas, as if something terrible might happen at any moment. Then you realize in a town that lives off prisons, it already did.

The Korean War: Not Forgotten,” a multimedia project from The Virginian-Pilot (via Interactive Narratives). A timeline of the conflict provides context as veterans share their war experiences. “And the last night of the war, there was fighting all night. The Chinese and the North Koreans just flew thousands and thousands of soldiers into the battle.”

Richard Morgan on payback, freelancing and the myth of the “made man”

Richard Morgan recently found a new measure of fame writing about writing, with his funny/terrifying piece “Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How to Make Vitamin Soup.” Though Morgan’s work has appeared in some of the best-known outlets in print journalism – from New York magazine to Wired and The New York Times – his essay details the chronic humiliations of scrambling to make ends meet. We caught up with him by phone this week, as he prepared to leave freelancing for a post at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. In these excerpts from our chat, he dishes on the unexpected blessings of kill fees, explains how to distill a story down to two sentences and recounts an unsettling encounter with a pineapple.

I recently heard “The Liars’ Club” author Mary Karr talking about how memoir shouldn’t be about payback. When you were writing “Seven Years,” were you thinking about payback, or was it something else?

There was a story that The Awl had done about a week before written by a woman who had been in New York for five years. It was a story about “What I’ve learned in five years of being in New York,” or something like that. I know Choire Sicha, the editor of The Awl; we’re friends. And I said, “Hey, I’m leaving.”

People always ask me about freelancing. I do this stuff where I go to Columbia and I give talks, and people ask me for help with editors and help with pitches. And so I said, “Why don’t I just write about my experience in the last seven years?” And he actually said that normally he would not be up for that, but he knew that a lot of my anecdotes were really crazy, and so he said yes.

It’s the kind of thing that I wrote in my head mostly, and then I just sort of poured it out the way I would a late night email to a boyfriend, or a letter from summer camp. So it wasn’t really payback.

I’m not suggesting your piece is payback, but Karr was saying that a lot of people write first-person pieces imagining that they’re going to pay back people who treated them badly. Her point was that the best first-person pieces really don’t do that.

I definitely was aware as a journalist that people would comb through it and try to decipher it. People do that for everything, with Stephen Glass’ memoirs, or Michael Finkel, or “The Devil Wears Prada,” or Toby Young. Those are a lot more payback and a lot more like, “I got inside, and here’s what it’s like.”

One of the things that I did want to do – which is not really payback – I wanted to relate the normalcy of these situations. There are so many people who would give their kidney to have a story in The New York Times, or a story in GQ. Once you’re inside it, and you see how the sausage is made, it’s not so fascinating. And also it’s not like you get made; it’s not like you’re a made man.

One of the most telling moments in New York was that a friend was a Harper’s intern, which was this already-storied position to be in – so many great people have gone through that role. He related that he had to deal with writers who would be calling and asking desperately about their paychecks. The takeaway wasn’t that Harper’s is financially in trouble or anything like that. The takeaway for us was that you could be someone who gets to do 8,000 words at Harper’s, and you’re still fretting about money, that it’s still this juggling act, this vaudevillian situation of catch as catch can.

The very, very personal post: Richard Morgan, Jennifer Lawler and a new kind of Notable Narrative

Sometimes long posts appear online that would feel out of place anywhere else. These pieces are often first-person, revelatory and not edited to fit the brand of a magazine, newspaper or corporate website. While it’s hard to imagine a news organization adopting their style, these posts offer a vivid form of storytelling.

As is the case with the two essays we’ve selected as our latest Notable Narratives, they are often excruciatingly personal, with the blade of intimacy sharpened on a hard stone of humor. Richard Morgan’s “Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How to Make Vitamin Soup,” from The Awl, recounts the story of a skilled professional trying to survive as a self-employed journalist. Jennifer Lawler’s “For Jessica,” from her own blog, weaves a recent report about the happiness levels of parents into an account of her daughter’s crushing medical challenges. A very hard read, Lawler’s piece attempts nothing less than to redefine the idea of happiness.

What we’re reading: in which we consider segregated high school reunions, the vanishing middle class, notes from a Pynchon conference and “death in the age of the Internet”

As we try to get the mildew out of the swimsuits we left in the corner over the weekend, we wanted to leave you a pile of stories for when you take refuge from the baking heat of August and are looking for something to read other than the rusty box of Old Bay seasoning in the back of the cupboard at your aunt’s lakeside cabin (“same great taste for over 60 years”). Have a look…

The crisis of middle-class Americaby Edward Luce in the Financial Times (via The Browser)

Technically speaking, Mark Freeman should count himself among the luckiest people on the planet. The 52-year-old lives with his family on a tree-lined street in his own home in the heart of the wealthiest country in the world. When he is hungry, he eats. When it gets hot, he turns on the air-conditioning. When he wants to look something up, he surfs the internet. One of the songs he likes to sing when he hosts a weekly karaoke evening is Johnny Cash’s “Man in Black.” Yet somehow things don’t feel so good any more.

Carol City High reunion confronts vexing issue of race,” by Robert Samuels in The Miami Herald (via Gangrey.com). Be sure to read to the end.

Now, as adults, they spoke about classmates in code — the “other reunion.” Some didn’t even realize that reunions were segregated. “When I looked at the attendance list, I thought, boy this was small,” said Leslie Dee, who was on the swim team. “Then, I noticed that everyone was white. If I had known about the other reunion, I would have been there.”