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.”

“Telling Tales” by Tim O’Brien from The Atlantic (via Arts & Letters Daily). A first-person essay on why so many stories are boring — and how to make them interesting.

When Batman was 6 years old, he grew a big, bushy tail. Often, it popped right out of his pants. This was embarrassing, of course, especially in a place like Sioux City, where tails were out of fashion among midwestern children. As a result, Batman had no friends. Kids laughed at him. One day after school, as Batman was walking home, his tail dragging in the mud behind him, he looked back and saw that he had painted a long dark stripe down the center of the road. His grandfather, who happened to be driving by, took note of this, and of how the stripe neatly divided the road into two separate lanes. What a wonderful way to prevent collisions, thought his grandfather.

“In death, a promise for the future” from Thomas Curwen of the Los Angeles Times (via Gangrey). A terminally ill woman gains a kind of immortality.

A friend suggested that she start a blog, but she was reluctant. Jeering at ALS was fine if done in private, but she worried that her irreverence might offend those further along with the disease. Still she knew the value of words, and on June 23, 2008, posted her first entry. “I might as well join the rest of the human race,” she wrote, “and start blogging to kill a little time, since time is busily returning the favor.”

BOOKS

“Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design” by Debbie Millman from HOW Publishing. A design guru lays out first-person stories mixed with professional observations in a series of essays, each formatted with a layout and fonts that directly or indirectly evoke an aspect of the essay they present. Cross-stitched text anyone? (Check out the sample pages at the top of this post.)

“Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager” from n+1 magazine and Harper/Perennial. A book-length interview gives the skinny on how and why the economy blew up.

n+1: And so the computers themselves are making these trades?

HFM: You build the models and the computer does the trading. You actually do all the analysis. But it’s too many stocks for a human brain to handle, so it’s really just guys with a lot of physics and hardcore statistics backgrounds who come up with ideas about models that might lead to excess return and then they test them and then basically all these models get incorporated into a bigger system that trades stocks in an automated way.

n+1: So the computers are running the…

HFM: Yeah, the computer is sending out the orders and doing the trading.

n+1: It’s just a couple steps from that to the computers enslaving—

HFM: Yes, but I for one welcome our computer trading masters.

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.

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.

Those four categories you use don’t seem to just be chronological. They move you through the components of a story.

We call them chapters. We almost called them chapters right in the package, but we ran out of space. In an early brainstorming session we had, we said, “What are all the different components or issues that are happening there?” Part of it was the cultural change; part of it was the idea of rebuilding lives, levees and homes.

We wanted to have something in there to remind people just what it was like at the start. That was what we call the prologue – just to reset the tear to say, “It’s been five years. You might have forgotten how devastating it was.” To reset the clock on that, and then to divvy it up into these primary groups.

We looked at a lot of different parts of it, and what we settled on were chapters or categories. They’re a little bit chronological and they’re also grouped together. There are these lasting effects; the idea of what it’s done to the demographics, what it’s done in terms of nature taking over. Lasting effects, and then this idea of what’s being done on the rebuilding side to make it safe to bring people back.

Then the fourth part is looking forward. “OK, so this is where we’re at. What are we going to see moving ahead?” Which is mostly where the oil spill comes in, particularly in one video: effects on the fishing industry, the idea of how New Orleans is rebounding culturally, politically, socially. So that was kind of how we thought about it, but it started with listing all the different issues that we thought fell into this, and grouping those issues together in a meaningful way that led from one to the next.

Was this done in conjunction with anything on the print side?

A little bit. Actually, I think they probably still will do their anniversary stories, but mostly this is an instance when the Web actually led the way. We really thought that we could do some innovative and interesting and meaningful “of the Web” kind of work.

It’s turning what you might call the traditional model on its head a little bit, but they were great. They’ve done graphics based on what we’ve done online, and stories. The day we launched, the travel writer for the cruise blog had a post about cruises coming back to New Orleans. He linked to the package. There’s a lot of cross-promotional work, which is really a tribute to the efforts that have been made by people who have an eagle eye on these things. They look out for those opportunities and try to make the connections. We’re just so focused on getting the work done and getting the project finished, to have other people who can say, “Hey, they’re doing that, and folks over here are doing this. Those are related, so let’s make sure that gets together,” is really helpful.

There are a number of contradictions and viewpoints bundled into the project: people feel safer but not safe, the city is inspired and on the move but residents are still struggling, the Saints won the Super Bowl but then the oil spill hit. To what degree did you try to resolve that or to present the pieces?

I would just say we let the stories be told. I’m not going to volunteer myself, but I think somebody could find issues with the package, and maybe that’s one of them. But mostly we tried to group together content and stories that we think as a whole give you an idea of what’s happening. It’s a complex situation. There’s not an easy answer to any of it. There are these contradictions. You have people moving back but still angry at the Corps. You have the Corps spending so much money, and people saying it’s not enough. There is inherent contradiction in what’s happening down there. I think maybe it was beyond the scope of this package to resolve all that, but I think we do a good job of explaining what’s happening.

Can you talk a little about the lagniappe?

That was the idea of one of our visual journalists who was down there. They had these great panoramas of the cemetery and Bourbon Street. They’re fun to look at, and people, when I showed it to them before we launched, said, “Wow that’s great. They’re really beautiful.” But they didn’t really fit anywhere.

So he came back and said, “We ought to call this ‘lagniappe.’ ” It’s a little something extra you have on the menus down there.

Is there anything else about the project we should know that we might not?

The one thing I would mention is that although it works across all platforms and so on, one of the things we wanted to do was to make something that took advantage of the unique aspects of the iPad. So the whole thing is built to work on an iPad. It fits perfectly, and although there’s some Flash in the Desktop, that little bit of Flash is replaced with iPad-compatible technology. You can use your finger to do the panoramas and the then-nows and so on. The people who have experienced that absolutely love it. That’s really exciting for us to try and experiment and do new things, and to take these cool new devices and toys and give people new ways of interacting. Our thought was that it is like a microsite or a digital magazine that people could go through, and that’s been a lot of fun and is an amazing job by the people here to make that work.

Still, one of the things was that we tried not to do technology or neat things for the sake of doing them. Which is a little what the lagniappe is, but really everything in there we tried to make with the idea that this is the best way to tell this part of the story. And so we have the opening quote, the idea of epigraphs setting the stage and introducing the elements. I think that’s an effective use of text: getting a little intro and then you can just engage. I think we tried to do it so that it’s not just technology for technology’s sake but with a narrative purpose.

The other thing is the metrics. There are about 68 different elements in the package. So far (as of Friday, Aug. 20) we’ve had about 100,000 visitors to the package, and they see about 10 pages per visit and spend on average five or six minutes on there. And the way we’ve promoted it is that we drop people in at different points. What we’re finding is that people are coming in, looking at a whole chapter, staying for a while, and then coming back. It’s not a 30,000-word article that they have to read all at once. They can digest a piece of it, go back to work, then come back later and digest the next piece. I think that’s a cool way of making it work as well.

[For more, read our commentary on "Five Years Later: Hurricane Katrina."]

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.

While the bulk of the project addresses the serious challenges created by Katrina (and the oil spill), anyone who has visited New Orleans knows the spirited side of the city. USA Today’s project reflects this in the attention given to music in the aftermath (which we would expect) and a charming bonus – a lagniappe – at the bottom of the main menu.

We meet a lot of characters through short videos that tend to center on topics rather than profile individuals. What emerges is a complex picture of the city: People feel safer but not really safe. Whole neighborhoods rebuild, while elsewhere, empty streets are overtaken by vegetation. The Saints win the Super Bowl, but two months later, an oil spill devastates the Gulf. And if it sometimes feels like a funeral and a party all in one, well, New Orleans knows how to do that, too.

[For more background on the Katrina project, check out our interview with USA Today interactives director Joshua Hatch.]

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.

I had thought, “Wouldn’t it would be interesting to tell the true story of Christmas in America?” But I never got around to it – I thought it would be too long to be in a newspaper. But then ultimately I thought maybe it was the book that I wanted to write, mostly because it intersected with everything: the suburbs, strip malls, box stores, families – families being good to one another, families not being good to one another – popular culture, music, television, crap, credit cards, debt, sweetness, grandmas, mawmaws, meemaws and neeners. It had all those things about it that I’ve always liked writing about.

You dive right into these things that we, as readers, suspect you loathe a little bit – obsessive decorating, buying expensive presents – and you explore why they’re important to the people who do them. But then you drop back to just one or two lines that change the pages that came before. A woman behind the mall makes herself throw up. A baby dies. It’s almost like you’re trying to see what’s wonderful in what you’re looking at, but you can’t help seeing these other things.

I can’t help it.

Can you talk about that a little?

I honestly didn’t know if I was going in to write a book against Christmas or for it, but I did know that I wanted a book – actually I want this from all pieces of nonfiction I read: if there’s not a clear point of view pro or con, I just want to feel that I’m in the hands of someone who is really conflicted and trying to think this through out loud or on the page. I really did want this to be about a man who grew up with perfectly nice Christmases who somehow found himself – not careening away from mainstream culture at all – but just having a series of heartbreaks about how we live now and what we’ve become, and yet work this material with heart. I really do like these people. I really did enjoy living in Frisco, Texas.

That comes across. You’re not just wanting to draw us in – it feels like you want to find something out yourself. There’s that moment with the make-a-wish guy, Frank, on the radio –

Christmas Wish.

Yes. He fulfills their wishes. People submit these requests, and the station makes them happen. There’s an actual moment when you break out of your own storytelling, and you come up with all the questions that you as a journalist want to ask, because you don’t really buy what you’re hearing.

I don’t, and Christmas is larded with all of these hard-luck cases, and they show up on the radio and in the newspapers. It really does seem like people take off their reading glasses – again, it’s soft focus. They don’t ask questions of it, and when I ask, they say, “Why do you have to ruin it?” Really, my question about all that is why does it only happen this time of year? Why do the people who spend the rest of the year ticked off about welfare and taxes and literally being kind to others – at least fiscally – why does all that come off at Christmastime? Because of faith, because of religion, because of concepts I don’t really accept as good answers. I accept them as dear answers and important to a lot of people, but I don’t accept them as factual answers about why we do what we do at Christmas.

And I attempted to ask all those questions of Frank at Christmas Wish, and I was rerouted to the corporate office with a message that said, “We don’t think we can participate.”

In order for our Christmas to be good, we need to hear stories about houses that caught on fire, car wrecks that happened on Dec. 23, cancer diagnoses – the appetite for tragedy is very strong for tragedy at Christmastime, for things that were going on all along. There’s a very good book, Stephen Nissenbaum’s “The Battle for Christmas.” He writes from newspaper accounts in the 1880s, the 1890s, about how people used to buy tickets for Madison Square Garden to watch street urchins get fed at Christmas. The price of your ticket helped pay for the meal. People needed to observe the poor being fed at Christmastime.

It was performance art?

Yes. Something about that makes me deeply uncomfortable. And I would hope it would make others uncomfortable, too. But you know, we do a lot of the same thing – Angel Lists and Christmas Wish – it’s the same sort of imaginative idealizing of the poor that I think is just part of the experience.

I want to move back to your work at the Post for a moment, because these days, you’re writing some creative, voice-centered television reviews there.

I actually am willing to say after doing reviews for a year now that it’s much more of a challenge to me to make it work within the length and time allowed, and the subject matter, which is not terribly important, not important at all, or only kind of important. It’s a very difficult kind of writing.

There’s this middle part that I struggle with: what is the show? what is it about? what is it about to us? does this belong to any other conversation we might be having about ourselves right now, about life, grieving, laughter, disease, manners? Every TV show is about something in life anyway. In that regard, it totally feels like an extension of feature writing.

I really do interview these shows. I write down questions and quotes as I watch. Can I find out the answer to this or that, without launching an investigative story? It’s a very difficult way of watching TV. If you’re doing it right, you’re like, “Oh, God, it’s two hours long.” That’s going to be like a two-hour interview.

Stuever's Patented Outlining Method (click for details from his blog)

In addition to books and reviews, you’ve also done feature writing.

And spot news!

And spot news. When you sit down to write a story, do you have one way you start?

On the one hand, it feels like continuing a conversation we’ve been having, you and I – the reader and the writer. Really, early on, it kind of dawned on me that there was one massive epic story of people living in America, and that each piece was part of it. It just felt like the sensibility was first and foremost, as far as how to write a story, so I looked for whatever voice I would want to read it in. I followed that voice, that entity – not me and not the reader, but something inside that wanted to tell the story, that I usually trusted.

And so I feel like the reviews I’m doing now are part of that conversation. Now, I’m sort of interviewing a TV show, and I’m taking notes on it, and then I’m coming back and telling you what it felt like, which is sort of how I was doing stories about people’s weddings, stories about funeral homes, stories about one guitar shared by five different owners over time. It’s all the same voice to me.

I just wait for a good place to start – I listen for it. Boy, that’s not a very good explanation.

Do you start writing before you’re done reporting, or do you separate the two?

I’m one of those believers who says that if the writing is not happening at the usual clip, generally the problem is in the notes. You have not found the right person, you have not found enough of the right thing, you haven’t checked everything off the list. You’re trying to write too soon. For me, if there’s real serious stoppage in the writing, it usually is because of something that’s not in the notebook yet.

You comment a lot on stories at Gangrey.

I don’t know why I do that.

Whether it’s your own stories or other people’s stories, what do you see come up as the most common issues in stories you read? Actual ability to craft language? Structural issues?

I think there is a seriousness that gets in the way of a lot of stories that I read at Gangrey, here in the Post and everywhere. There just seems to be this – not overwriting – it’s almost like someone is telling you a great story on the way to church, and then we get to church and they shut up, or they kind of whisper it to you instead. Or it becomes an incantation. I feel like a lot of stories are written from that high point, not from the pulpit, but from the feeling that people are in sacred space and they’re too afraid of violating the space.

A lot of narrative stories have that hush of seriousness about them. That feels like capital “W” writing to me. They are honoring all the narrative or feature stories about serious or weighty or disturbing subject matter that came before, so therefore there’s going to be that mood. It’s too dramatic or liturgical.

Do you know about “they came”? Look out if the first two words of the story are “they came.” Usually you see it in vigils or people waiting for news about miners or plane crash victims. “They came” bearing objects. Who are they? We don’t know, because the writer has taken on that priestly seriousness. He’s just elevated his delivery in such a way that it’s getting in the way of what he wants to say. That, to me, is the first indication that I don’t want to read on.

What do you think the cost of that approach is, other than annoying Hank Stuever?

Isn’t that price enough?

What does it do to the story?

I think it just becomes too much reaching for art instead of being art. That’s the fine line in everything, that’s the fine line in cinema, that’s the fine line in making greeting cards, that’s the fine line in songs.

What’s the worst piece you ever wrote?

I will say that some of my worst stories have been about things that are very important to the gay community. Because I am gay, and a lot of times, the stories fall to the gay person. It’s the only time that journalistic red flags go up for me as far as representing. More than any other subject, I feel the need to explain. I keep telling, not showing.

What are the biggest challenges you have in writing your own stories?

My challenges have always been separating the good from the bad from the ugly as far as the material. I think in the decade or so that I wrote features for the Washington Post, I learned to get everything up higher, finally, which I still think is important. I wasn’t in this business very long before someone described the concept of throat-clearing to me. I was turning in stories with a lot of stuff up top. At some point, you learn that people don’t want to watch you build the set. They want to see the play.

What journalists have been the most instructive or interesting for you?

I would say Joan Didion, hands down. I know that she aggravates a lot of writers who don’t want to do that kind of thing at all. There are two things about her that I keep going back and rereading. One is the precise, meaningful detail that makes a sentence razor-sharp and completely right. And then the other thing is the sentences themselves. She over time really learned how to parallel park an 18-wheeler truck. Some of what she can do with a comma in a very long sentence is worth studying just for the craft.

I did an internship at The Washington Post in the summer of 1989, and there were some people going full guns at that time who I have paid attention to ever since: Henry Allen, who I think was and is really good at American character and meaning in the popular culture. I admired it early on and aped it. Martha Sherrill, who’s always worth looking up. She’s written four books. I think Paul Hendrickson is really good, but he was in the seminary, so he’s somebody who does the priestly voice, the prayerful, meditative opener, really well, and it’s worth going back to Paul Hendrickson’s stuff, and his books, because he does right what people do wrong. Well, sometimes he did it a little wrong, too, but he was willing to push it out there, that feeling of “bow your heads.”

In the ’90s, I really liked Susan Orlean. I really thought that she had just the right balance of the quirk and the heartbreaking. And presently, I go to Gangrey, just to keep abreast – anytime Ben (Montgomery) and Michael Kruse write, and it gets posted there, I like to read it.

Here at the paper now, I think Dan Zak is really starting to – well, he had a voice, he has always had a voice – but some of his features are turning into lovely pieces of work. And Monica Hesse. They’re the two people who are carrying the torch for the Style section now.

Any thoughts on the future of narrative?

I really hope that somehow, what we collectively think of as the hard bearing down on a story and sticking with it, and then writing it in a fantastic way so that people take time to read it – I hope that all survives the current mania. I hope people don’t lose heart in doing it. It’s so easy to talk yourself out of beauty right now in favor of speed. But that’s what you stand for; that’s what this whole project is about.

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.

And at the same time, I was reading a blog written by a guy named Julian Young, who is a British journalist now living in France. He was posting his stories about his early days on Fleet Street, and they were so interesting. So I started writing on my blog about the past, which isn’t nearly as glamorous as being on Fleet Street, but it was fun, and the blog readers liked it, and so eventually it became a book.

Adam Hochschild talks about the multitude of identities we have and how they can’t all fit in a memoir. So what identity did you choose, and what parts of yourself did you leave out?

I left out a lot. I didn’t write much about my family, I didn’t write much about my private life. This wasn’t a book about how I got married and got divorced. This was the story of a young woman who fell into something quite by accident and found that she loved it. That was how I viewed myself.

A couple people have said that they thought the first part of the book was overly self-deprecating, but I really felt that way at the time. I remember seeing these reporters doing this amazing stuff and being so confident, and I just remember thinking, “I could never do that.” And so this was the story of how I came to be able to do that.

Hertzel with a llama farmer in the 1980s, from "News to Me" (Univ. of Minn. Press). Photo: Joey McLeister.

I really never had any desire to go to a big city. I’m not a city person. I love the outdoors. I love walking in the woods. I love riding my bicycle. I am pretty provincial, actually. Those are the things that I love. Reading on the porch, walking in the rain. It sounds like a personal ad.

Or The Piña Colada Song.

I love living in the Twin Cities. We go to the theater, and there are nice places to eat. But those aren’t the things that I grew up with, and they’re not the things I really fundamentally value.

Duluth was a wonderful place, and the paper was wonderful at the time, because there were so many opportunities. I used to talk to journalism classes and say, “If you get a chance to go to a small paper first, you should do that, because you can move around much more easily than you can at a big paper.”

I don’t think that’s necessarily true anymore. I think big papers are much more flexible now, but when I first started at the Star Tribune, people were in the same beats for 20 or 25 years. You got a job and that was the job that you kept. So it was a real privilege to work at the Duluth paper where I could bounce around, and go to the copy desk, and then go to reporting, and go back to the copy desk. You could do it at a paper like that, and that was how I learned so much.

But I still love this city, and I feel very grateful that I ended up at a paper of the exact right size.

Like most memoirs, the book unfolds chronologically, which determines a lot of the structure. Beyond that, can you talk about how you approached organizing your material?

Well, I did end up throwing away big chunks that didn’t fit. The first half moves pretty quickly, because I didn’t make anything up — memories from back in the 1970s are not quite as distinct as memories in the 1990s, so there’s not quite as much detail.

I tried to structure it by pivotal moments in my career, so it was structured job by job by job. The harder chapters were the later chapters, where I had way too much material. I had help from a woman who is a wonderful writer herself, Ellen Akins, a novelist. She helped me to realize what I didn’t need.

For example, after I came back from the Soviet Union, the paper sent me to Cuba for a sister city trip in 1993. But it was sort of the same thing that happened to me in Russia, so that ended up coming out. The tricky part is figuring out what parts of your life to tell that keep moving the story of your life forward. And that was trial and error.

I had to write the book really quickly. I wrote it in a year while working full time. I got my job as books editor the same week I got the contract to write the book. So here I am, starting a new job where I should be reading everything that I possibly could read, but at the same time, I’m supposed to write a book and turn it in in a year. For a year, whenever I was reading, I thought I should be writing, and whenever I was writing, I thought I should be reading.

In your acknowledgements, you thank a lot of people for documents that helped you write the book. For anyone picturing memoir as something you write from your head, can you talk about what historical material you made use of?

One of the first things I did was to call the News Tribune to secure my date of hire, because I couldn’t remember exactly when I was hired. I had told people this story over the years about how I was working at the News Tribune as a clerk the day the Fitzgerald sank – the Edmund Fitzgerald. I remember very vividly one of the copy editors showing me a picture of a boat and saying, “You have to get the right photo. You have to run the picture of the right ore boat. If you run another ore boat and even Wite-Out its name, people recognize it. They don’t all look alike.”

So when I started working on the book, I called the paper to get the date of my hire, and then I Googled the Fitzgerald, and it turned out that the Fitzgerald sank six months before I started working there. So clearly that memory was not right.

But it was a vivid memory in your head?

I remember the copy editor making that point and showing me the picture, but I guess it wasn’t the day the Fitzgerald sank. Somehow I put that together myself. And that terrified me. I thought, “Everything I remember is suspect.” It really made me cautious about telling stories without checking them.

But I like research anyway, and so it really was a fun process: finding people that I hadn’t talked to in 20 years and asking them questions. I went up to Duluth and met with my old editor and a columnist who’d been there longer than I had. I went though tons of files at the public library. Jacqui Banaszynski sent me this whole packet of clips. I had thrown away most of my clips years before, because they’re not that great. I didn’t really want to read them again, but now I needed them.

The editor of the News Tribune at that time was someone I had never met; he’s not there anymore. For some reason, he decided he didn’t want me going through the files. He never communicated directly with me. I wrote him repeatedly to ask if I could go through the files and maybe find some photos I could use in the book. He never answered me. Other people I know who work there went in and asked on my behalf, and he told them all no. So I had no way of getting at my clips. There’s a copy editor who I had never met. I don’t know anything about this guy, but he thought this was unfortunate. So late at night, when his shift was done, he started going through my old clips, and he gave them to a friend who gave them to me. That was an act of huge kindness that was very helpful to me.

I guess what I would say is that the Edmund Fitzgerald story really gave me pause and really reinforced how important double-checking things and then triple-checking was. One thing I found is that no one else’s memory is any better than mine, and some are much worse. I talked to one guy who was a reporter there when I was a clerk back in the ’70s. He was telling me stuff that wasn’t right – and I knew it wasn’t right, because I had photos. I ran into that with some other interviews, too. You interview someone who tells you one thing, and your memory tells you something else. So then what do you do?

So I just verified as much as I could and then went with my memory.

We have centuries of self-aggrandizing memoir, and then we have the more recent popularity of the self-abasing memoir. In yours, there are no major tragedies. You didn’t lose a limb, you didn’t become an addict. But there’s sort of this intensity of the everyday, of how most people live their lives. It’s a celebration of person over image.

Which did make me wonder if anyone would read it.

Well, sometimes you read memoir and you feel that the writer is still struggling with what’s happened, but this feels like you’re done with it, and you’re not trying to convince the reader of anything.

I wasn’t trying to work through anything when I wrote this. I wrote this because I love remembering, and I loved sinking back into this world, and being kind of amazed at what it was like and how much it has changed. I don’t feel like I’ve changed that much. There are certain things I remember very vividly – clearly not the day the Edmund Fitzgerald sank. But other things – things I thought. Sitting there watching Jacqui Banaszynski tell stories, and thinking “I could never do that.”

And I thought that even when I started reporting, and they gave me the regional beat. I thought, “Oh, thank God, I have the easiest beat. I could never cover cops.” And then I had to do cops, and it wasn’t that hard, and then I thought, “I’m so glad I don’t have to cover the county board, because I could never do that.” And then I had to cover the county board. It would be hard for me to write a self-aggrandizing memoir.

What are you hoping the book will do?

I wrote it because I wanted people to know what the time was like. It wasn’t just preserving the feel of the old newsroom, because I think there are other books that do that. There are really two other things.

One is to impress upon people what it was like to be a woman there at the time. I think that we were behind the times a little bit. What we were going through in the late ’70s when I was there was what big-city newspapers had gone through five or 10 years earlier. But the way we treated women and called them Mrs. So-and-so in the paper rather than by their own names – all of those things need to be remembered.

And I also want people to know what you can do – my husband says I’m stubborn as a goat. So I guess I want people to know what you can do if you’re as stubborn as a goat. It wasn’t until I started writing the book that I realized I never got anything the first time. Nothing. I had to ask and ask and keep at it. I never even knew that about myself until I took a look at my life.

“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.”

“Take Care,” a short film from Gillian Laub, produced by Eric Maierson (via MediaStorm). Virginia Gandee, a 22-year-old living in Staten Island, New York, has a 5-year-old daughter and a dying grandfather, and dreams of becoming a nurse. Gorgeous visuals.

“Cartoons after Southampton ban photographers from Argyle match,” drawings from This Is Plymouth via MetaFilter. A football team bans photographers in an effort to corner the market on images from their games, so an artist picks up his sketchpad. Similarly unexpected images form the basis for “Red Eye,” a pictorial account of an airplane flight by Christoph Niemann, from The New York Times.

And on the lighter side, “Scene In” from Alexandra Garcia and Nick Kilpatrick of The Washington Post (from this year’s American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors multimedia prize winners). Easter Sunday outfits? Check. Gold Cup finery? Check. Local club scenesters? Yup. A series of beautifully shot and edited fashion spot-checks from greater D.C.-area neighborhoods and events.

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.

I didn’t want to do payback in terms of spite against specific editors, but I did want to relate specific experiences in quoting. As much as I could, I tried to quote, “Here’s what an editor said to me.” Facts, so that it didn’t seem like me being moody and bitter.

You didn’t name names, which I thought was interesting.

I quoted things, but I didn’t name names. There’s really no point in naming which Times editor told me not to bother coming to him anymore. But obviously people at New York magazine knew the editor who sent me that condescending email. Other people pieced it together, and people obviously know who Steve is, although I didn’t put his full name. He doesn’t need that showing up in Google.

People like to do sleuthing in comments with things like this. And so I was surprised, in a good way, by the comments, because I would really not want feuding to happen. I just wanted to relate the experiences in an honest way, and the way to do that is to quote people in actual instances. Like the stuff with the Fortune editor – it’s not important who that person is. It’s more about the experience, and that things can be sloppy. I think a lot of those examples show me as sloppy.

The email I wrote to Adam Moss is insane. I think I wrote it on a Monday, and he took until Thursday to reply, and I basically thought for those four days that I would be banned forever from writing for New York. When I wrote the piece for The Awl, I told Choire, “We should run the whole email,” because I’m not really a fan of excerpting things. He said, “Yes, but it makes you look crazy.”

That’s actually the part of your piece that we’ve quoted in our commentary.

The thing to Adam – I bounced it off of one person, a friend who does communications for another newspaper in town – and she was like, “This is really intense.” At the end of the actual meeting with Adam, I told him, “Thanks for replying to my email even though I was kind of a crazy person.” And he said, “Yeah, it was really intense.”

And I said, “Yeah, you know, but it all worked out.” And instead of saying anything friendly, he said, “Yeah, it was much more intense than normal.” But he was very chatty later.

I wouldn’t say the piece was spiteful. If you click to the other first-person piece that I did – 3,000 words about being in unrequited love with a straight guy – that’s not a relationship vendetta or anything, the kind of spiteful or passive-aggressive thing you might see in those “Modern Love” columns in the Times. It’s more like, “Here’s an experience that people don’t talk about.” So if I talk about it, hopefully people will feel less lonely. I’m an immigrant. I’m a gay man. I’m a Southerner. I went to public schools, which in New York is really a thing. I didn’t go to Yale or Princeton or Harvard.

There’s a sense that people don’t talk about that, and so if you do talk about it, other people feel less lonely. And that’s one thing that I heard so much in emails with people getting back to me: “You really made me feel like I’m not alone, and that there’s a shot for me, that it’s possible.”

You can’t think if you get one book on the New York Times bestseller list, or you get one TV show pilot greenlit, or one feature in Rolling Stone, that you’re going to be set. It’s this constant hustle, and I think people don’t talk about that. I guess it was payback or spite against the mythos or fantasy world of the “made career.”

Did you see in the comments on your piece that someone thought your essay was a hoax because there’s no Richard Morgan at The Commercial Appeal?

That’s because I don’t start until the 16th, which is actually awkward, because that’s the day that Elvis died, and it’s a big day of mourning in Memphis. But that person actually emailed me and said, “Please tell me that you’re real, because I wouldn’t want this to be another viral marketing hoax.” One of the people in comments was Toby Young, and he said something like, “You should have been more spiteful. You played nice, and I got a movie.” But I found the comments more often said things like, “That is the scariest and sweetest thing that I’ve ever read,” “That was so nerve-wracking and romantic,” or “It filled me with hope and dread.” I didn’t know if they were compliments or not.

I think the piece said, “Here’s what happened. Here’s a dissection of my seven years. Judge for yourself if this was a success or not.” On paper, when people introduce me at panels, my resume looks really good. But in the middle, in the gaps between, it’s vitamin soup. That’s Choire’s phrase, by the way.

With the piece itself, did you just suggest it, and Choire said, “Go for it”?

He just greenlit it, and then I just sort of filed it, and then he cleaned it up a little. It was edited, but lightly edited. He changed transitions here and broke up a gigantic paragraph there. It was pretty direct and clean.

I remember being very scared, because he sent me back a one-word email that was all caps. And the only other time I ever had that was when I quit Gawker, there was this thing where I sent them my IM transcripts with Nick Denton. And when I did, the reporter sent me back one word that was all caps: FASCINATING. I became extremely scared.

But when Choire wrote back, it was PERFECTION. I got really nervous. I didn’t know if that was sarcastic or not. I started looking at it again and wondering if I should take this part out, if I should make it less moody, less emotional, less jokey. In the end, you just sort of have to make peace with the facts of it.

When you asked (in an email) about using humor and the first person, there are parts of it that are really didactic, just very cold pieces of a factual essay. But if you wrap it in humor, that’s the best use of humor. Humor is such a great medium for disturbing or upsetting information, which is why there are so many racist jokes and sexist jokes and political jokes. But when you read it, you can tell that it’s just me.

So you didn’t create a persona? You wrote it as yourself?

I think that’s really important. I did struggle with voice for a while. When you write for ESPN, it has to be quick and jabby and fratty and funny. And when I wrote for the Times, I always felt like I had to tell myself, “Write as if you were wearing a monocle.” When you freelance for a bunch of publications, there’s schizophrenia in terms of the different voices and different audiences. I sort of got tossed adrift in the beginning, and then I established my own voice.

If I can make a piece in Scientific American resonate with the same voice that a piece in ESPN does, I feel like that’s an accomplishment. And if that’s me, then I feel more comfortable. It’s actually one of those things where when you find your voice, you get more comfortable with your voice, and you do it more, and it gets stronger. If you read that other piece, the personal essay, the relationship essay, you can tell it’s the same kind of me, even though it’s a me that has retreated much more into research and academic stuff with the citations.

The other pieces I’ve seen from you are similarly off-kilter: a nerd who becomes a star for a day, Barbie goes vampire and such. It does feel like that’s part of your voice.

Yeah, I definitely sympathize with the underdog, with Fesh in his story. That was very frustrating. That was originally planned as a “Talk of the Town” piece, and they were sort of like, “This doesn’t feel right,” and that was it. There are a lot of editors who say, “Oh, this is good, but it’s not right for us.” And I think, “If it’s good, why don’t you run it?” I still get frustrated with that kind of thing.

You use humor, and you write a lot about comedy performers. Do you have any background in comedy?

No, but I love comedians. I moved a lot when I was a kid, so I had to be funny. Unless you’re the star of the football team, the only way to make friends quickly is to be funny. And comedians are amazing in terms of their storytelling. I’m hypnotized by improvised comedy. A comic touch is important – that’s how people remember things.

So you were never a comedian, but were you really a ranch hand in Colorado, an evangelist in China, a hitchhiker in Costa Rica and a track & field statistician in North Carolina?

Yeah, I tried out for the track team, but I collapsed with a quadruple heartbeat, and that’s when I learned I had a congenital heart defect. So I became a statistician, so that is the only way I could be around all the male runners. But I broke the gender barrier, if that matters.

And then I was in the Young Life Ministries, and I was in Campus Crusade for Christ. When I came out, I came out in my college paper – I had an opinion column, and I came out while I was the head of Campus Crusade for Christ, which was the largest organization on that campus, at North Carolina State University. It was 1300 students meeting every week, or maybe 1200. And we did an evangelism summer program in China. I was a ranch hand in Colorado at a place called Frontier Ranch in Buena Vista, Colorado. And Costa Rica? I got abandoned in Quepos, which is this Pacific Coast town, and I had to hitchhike my way back to San Jose, which is a three-hour drive over rope bridges. That was really rough, but I managed to do it.

But that bio – I keep meaning to fix that bio, because one time I interviewed a guy, an archaeologist, and he slam-dunked a giant pineapple onto the table when I first started the interview, and he waved it in front of me. My bio says, “Pineapples are his weakness.”

I assumed that meant you loved them.

Yeah, I would probably eat anything with pineapple on it. But he sort of waved it around as if it were kryptonite and made a joke about it. It was weird and awkward and made me think I shouldn’t put that much information about myself out there.

A lot of working journalists who work full time for news organizations imagine that if they lose their jobs at newspapers or magazines, they’ll try to make it as freelancers. You’re moving the opposite way, going from freelancing to a newspaper gig. What would you say to them?

There are so many different considerations. You’re OK to be a freelancer if you have a spouse who has a job where you can get health insurance or you can lean on their salary. I don’t have that. But also the thing that’s difficult with freelancing is that if you sold a story today to GQ – a 5,000-word story at $2 a word – you’d get $10,000 three months from now, after it runs. It would be two weeks after publication – at least that’s how Condé Nast works. So you can have success right now, but there’s this perpetual motion machine where the money I’m earning now from freelancing is not related at all to the work I’m doing now. It’s related to the work I did three months ago or two months ago. The work I’m doing now will allow me to have a life three months from now.

When you first start that, you’re existing off the freelancing you did three months ago, which was nothing. So there’s this initial drought period. And then maybe you luck out, but it really takes a while to get a lot of work going. There’s a part of The Awl piece where I describe it as “choosy begging.” People emphasize the choosy part when they fantasize about being a freelancer, and not the begging part. But there’s so much freelancing you have to do that’s just 300-word stories.

Nobody wants to point to some 200-word infographic in the front of the book of some random magazine and say, “That’s what my career is.” But that’s what you have to do – you have to have a bunch of those to float your passions.

I really don’t want to say anything bad about any of my J-school professors, because they were all amazing, and I would not be the person I am today without them. But J-school has a problem where it only teaches how to do an 800-word AP story or a 5,000-word New Yorker story. I don’t know what they teach for broadcast, because I didn’t do any of that.

J-school doesn’t prepare you for 300-word front-of-the-book items. It shouldn’t – because like any education, J-school should be aspirational – but it’s really easy to write an 800-word AP story if you’re being told that a story has a lede and a kicker, and a beginning and a middle and an end. But it’s really hard to do all that and distill it into a haiku version for those front-of-the-book pieces that magazines require. One professor told me something that helped me a lot: “Stories are not beginning, middle and end. Stories are change over time. All you have to do is have the end of it, and the beginning of it, and then what happened in the middle.” Which is basically the same, but having it distilled as “change over time” makes it so that you can do it in two sentences. You can do it in sort of a Harper’s Index way, with just one sentence and another sentence, and that’s a story.

That was another one of those stress-relief moments for me. It really let me feel comfortable approaching things like tone, rather than dealing with structure. Structure is the most frustrating thing to deal with, but once you get over that, you can focus on tone and doing that subliminal aspect of journalism as a certain kind of evangelism.

And even when you can pull that off, editors will still sometimes kill the story.

You have to know that freelancing can be like an abusive relationship. You sort of get slapped in the face, and you say, “OK, great. I’ll try that again later. That’ll be great.” It’s extremely frustrating.

But you just stick with it. There are so many stories where I’ve made more money off of kill fees than from publication, because a story just got shoved from magazine to magazine or from department to department.

You have to be very hopeful. You can tell in that Awl piece that I’m basically hopelessly romantic and optimistic. You have to be someone who believes in what you do and believes that being a writer is who you are. I couldn’t be an ad guy. I could use my writing skills and my communications skills in PR or speechwriting, or advertising, or in book publishing, but I just know that I’m a writer. You have to know that.

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.

When you bring her to the hospital for the eighteenth time, or maybe it’s the twentieth, and she says, “I want roses, like a princess. Red ones,” you make sure she has them, even though it destroys your budget for the month. Raising your daughter makes it impossible to also hold a steady job, so you freelance, despite the fact that you’re not really cut out for writing about things normal people are interested in.

And you find out, interestingly enough, that there are so many not-normal people in the world that you don’t ever have to write for the normal ones if you don’t want to. Which is a huge relief. It’s a club and the password requires an appreciation for dark humor, and you have to have been through gut-wrenching grief to get here, and you look at the people who don’t know, and you realize, for the first time, that you don’t want to be them: innocent, unknowing, unformed, unrealized, their lives entirely unlived.

Morgan’s piece narrates a different kind of struggle. Along with offering cringe-inducing stories of the most awkward moments in his freelancing career, his essay serves to inspire and warn writers who believe they’re dying to walk in his shoes.

After getting the runaround for a month, I sent balloons to an editor at Rolling Stone with a note: “This is cheaper than skywriting. Lemme know about my story.” When the Times asked me for writing samples, I sent them only a 3,000-word essay I had written about unrequited love with a straight guy. I sent a looooong note to a personal and professional hero, Adam Moss, wherein I compared him both to Big Bird and The Pope and quoted him to himself— no, really.

It’s a style that’s easy to do badly, but these writers tell you something difficult and wonderful and secret — something no one else will, or can. Their words have a looseness that lives in a different ZIP code than Hemingway. The language feels impulsive and headstrong, and carries the reader through year after year, in tales that seem too long to possibly read to the end. But you can’t help yourself – you don’t stop reading, and you end up thinking about the stories for days.

[For more on vitamin soup, read our interview with Richard Morgan. And for a post-surgery update on Jennifer Lawler's daughter, see her new blog post.]

“The crisis of middle-class America” by 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.”

“The Empty Chamber” by George Packer from The New Yorker

Observed from the press gallery, the senators in their confined space began to resemble zoo animals—Levin a shambling brown bear, John Thune a loping gazelle, Jim Bunning a maddened grizzly. Each one displayed a limited set of behaviors: in conversations, John Kerry planted himself a few inches away, loomed, and clamped his hands down on a colleague’s shoulders. Joe Lieberman patted everyone on the back. It became clear which senators were loners (Russ Feingold, Daniel Akaka) and which were social (Blanche Lincoln, Lindsey Graham); which senators were important (Dick Durbin, Jon Kyl) and which were ignored (Bayh, Bunning).

“Pynchon in Poland” by Nick Holdstock from n + 1 (via Longform.org)

The conference room looked like the United Nations as depicted in ’60s spy movies: windowless, with curved banks of seats, and a microphone before each chair. All that was missing was the name cards. I took a seat at the back (in what would have been “Togo” or “Benin”) next to a man who resembled a Biblical prophet as drawn by Robert Crumb. He had a long, grey beard and eyes like hot coals, and was with a woman whom he introduced as an “illustrator”—which word required him to relate the entire plot of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. As he talked, and talked, I looked around the quickly filling room. Of the fifty or so people, most were middle-aged white males. It occurred to me that a) I had never met a woman who said she loved Thomas Pynchon and that b) while not a virgin, I was, at the age of 36, very far from married. I hoped these two facts were unrelated.

“Letting Go,” by Atul Gawande from The New Yorker. This is a similar take on end-of-life care as The New York Times piece by Katy Butler that we recently selected as a Notable Narrative. Butler’s story was a first-person piece from the vantage point of someone whose family felt victimized by modern medicine’s default setting favoring life-prolonging protocols. Here, Gawande, a doctor, identifies himself as an enabler of perpetual intervention.

…I sat with her sisters in the I.C.U. family room to talk about whether we should proceed with the amputation and the tracheotomy. “Is she dying?” one of the sisters asked me. I didn’t know how to answer the question. I wasn’t even sure what the word “dying” meant anymore. In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.

“Cancer victim tried to pack a lifetime of mothering into two years,” by Jamie Thompson for The Dallas Morning News

By dawn, the first of hundreds of responses began pouring in to her website and onto her Facebook page. The family was overwhelmed by the tender eulogies-before-the-fact. People from across the globe – as far away as Egypt and Israel – sent messages that could instantly be read aloud to Leah as she lay dying in her hospital bed. This was death in the age of the Internet.