If you want to pass along stories you think we should include in future lists, please don’t hesitate to send them along via email or Twitter.

SPORTS

“In search of the perfect round rolling object” by Ian Jack from The Guardian online (via TheBrowser.com). Jack looks at the evolution of the soccer ball in international affairs from Kashmir in the 1890s to this year’s World Cup in South Africa.

The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series – The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, by Joe Posnanski (via Tommy Tomlinson).

Tony Perez was standing at home plate, ready to hit. They called him the Big Dog, or Doggie for short. Doggie had grown up in Cuba, before Castro’s men came rushing down from the mountains. He had been raised to spend his life lugging bags of sugar at the refinery near his home. That’s what his father did, that’s what his brothers did, and when he turned 14, that’s what he did too. He would never forget the way his body felt at the end of those days. And he would always tell his mother that he wanted something more, he wanted to play baseball in the United States under the bright lights. She told him to grow up and stop dreaming about nonsense.”You will work in the factory just like everyone else in this family,” she told him.

THE BP OIL SLICK

Not surprisingly, now that the oil has begun to come ashore in the Gulf states, classic storytelling about human-petroleum encounters have begun to appear.

“Oil blankets Pensacola Beach,” by Ben Montgomery from the St. Petersburg Times, with a nod toward the Book of Revelation.

The tide came in Tuesday night, under a moon almost full, and when the sun came up and the water retreated there it was: a broken band of oil about 5 feet wide and 8 miles long. It looked like tobacco spit and smelled foreign, and it pooled in yesterday’s footprints as far as you could see.

“Seven Days in the Life Of A Catastrophe,” by Gary Smith from Sports Illustrated. The svengali of sports profiles looks at the Gulf spill up close for a week, from the God’s-eye view to the perspective from the ground, and tries to figure out what it has to do with athletics.

PARENTAL LEGACIES

“Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure” by Thomas Goetz from Wired. Goetz looks at Google co-founder Sergei Brin’s odds of getting Parkinson’s, the $50 million he’s plowed into research and the ways in which the flood of data made possible by technology will change the way medical research will be done.

“A love of story was my Dad’s gift to me,” a Father’s Day remembrance by Roy Wenzl from The Wichita Eagle (via Gangrey.com).

Dad grinned a half-grin. He was dressed in the grease-stained denim jacket he wore to drive the tractor in winter. “Why is Achilles interesting?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Because he is great?”

Dad frowned, and opened the door to walk outside.

“Achilles is interesting because Achilles is flawed.”

“What flaw?” I asked. “WHAT FLAW?”

“Figure it out,” he said.

“Where I Was,” a blog entry from Laura Zigman on HearLauraBrant.com (via @susanorlean).

Everyone has had a phone call, or a moment, like that — one that divides the present and the future: who you’ve been and who you suddenly become. My phone call came on a cold quiet day in early January. It was from my mother telling me she’d gotten her CAT scan results back and that there was a growth on her pancreas.

THE WAR

“From Vietnam to Afghanistan: Not winning hearts and minds,” from former Washington Post editor Henry Allen.

I’d done some counterinsurgency work as a corporal in the Marine Corps. This was in 1966, three years earlier. I was at Chu Lai, south of Danang. We gave away truckloads of flour, cement and roofing tin. The Vietnamese were cool with their thanks, but that was understandable. We’d gotten a warm response from one village chief we worked with until the Viet Cong worked with him too, by cutting off his head. I think of him when I read of Taliban reprisals against Afghans who work with Americans.

One day our 105mm howitzer battery was particularly noisy, taking out a Viet Cong hamlet. Then came a cease-fire order. It seemed it wasn’t a Viet Cong but a friendly hamlet. We’d leveled it.

How did you first hear about John Behnken?

I started to work on this story from a place nowhere near John Behnken. Basically, we knew that the CDC was here in Atlanta, and people didn’t write about what happens there all that much—or at least we hadn’t at the magazine. I called up their media people and asked if I could take a tour. At the time, the H1N1 flu scare was in full swing. They were telling me some about what they had done to develop the vaccine, and I thought, “What an interesting idea. Maybe we could try to do a science-related narrative that talks about how this all came together.”

As the story developed, I found myself having a harder and harder time getting a single really compelling character from the CDC, because I talked to a whole bunch of scientists for just a few minutes at a time. They’re all very busy, so there wasn’t really one person who emerged that I could focus on.

I thought, “Well, is there another way to do this? Maybe we could turn the story in another direction and say, write about someone here in Atlanta who was somehow affected by this.” What better way to do that than to find someone who was really affected?

I thought we might find someone who had died. It was surprisingly hard. There were very few people written about in the local paper, and so I did what I find myself doing maybe too often, which was starting to call up medical examiners’ offices to see if any of them had autopsy reports where the cause of death was identified as the H1N1 flu.

I know this probably varies from state to state, but here in Georgia any autopsy report is a public record. I knew I could get it. So I called up the Fulton County medical examiner’s office here in Atlanta, and the chief medical examiner called me back and said, “Yes, we have one report like that.” That didn’t mean only one person in Fulton County had died from the disease, because the majority of deaths don’t result in autopsies. But this one did because it happened so quickly. It was what’s known as an “unattended death.” I said, “Okay, can I have that report?” And I took a look. Even then, I knew I didn’t have the story about him—I knew I would need to talk to people who knew him.

I started by just writing a letter to his widow, because her address was listed there on the report. I wrote a letter, and I included a previous story that I’d done—a  copy of it—to give an example of another story about a man who died in a way where I thought I treated it with some sensitivity.

Was it the soldier’s story that you sent her?

Yes, the one from last year, “The Last Heavy Footfalls of Doc Hullender.”

When you’re writing about a death, do you approach the story any differently than you do your other pieces?

Certainly when you’re doing a profile of someone who has died, you can’t talk to the main character. That happens a lot—like I said, perhaps too often in my case. That was true with the longest story I’ve ever done, from last year, called “The Debtor,” about the guy who had been James Brown’s son-in-law and was killed by a hit man. However, I think the same is true if the person is alive or dead. You want to interview as many people as you possibly can who know them. Of course you want to talk to the main character, if you can. But a lot of times the people around them can shed more light on them anyway.

I honestly thought there was about a 40 percent chance the wife would get back to me. I figured, “Well, she’ll probably ignore this.” But that’s why you always try, because there’s always that chance. And in this case, she did get back to me.

Can you talk a little about the structure of the story? It’s divided into sections, but they’re not quite scenes.

That’s true. It was very hard for me to plot out the structure. I must have spent hours, many hours, looking at it and trying to figure out what would make sense. You have two parallel tracks—the one about the virus itself and what the people at the CDC were doing about it, and the other one about John Behnken and how it ultimately affected him. I knew the two would converge at the very end, but I had to figure out how to split them in the meantime.

I played around with a bunch of things. The section that’s now listed as number two that starts to introduce John—that was initially at the very beginning of the story. When I’m starting a story, there’s so much pressure in my mind to say things quickly, to give the reader a very fast idea of where the story is going. I felt like putting that up top wasn’t going to give me enough time and space to really start to get into John’s character, because if I did it at the length that you ultimately see in the story, before talking about the other stuff, about the virus, I felt like the reader was going to get a little lost.

So I did try that and thought, “No, let’s give that a little breathing room. Let’s put it further down after the reader has been entrenched and they know what they’re getting into.”

But then of course, there’s the whole thread about the white plastic tube—I wanted to make sure that was introduced early in the story and was referred to a couple more times to get people wondering exactly where that would go. I always want to give the reader as many possible reasons to keep moving forward, because they’re hoping to find out all the answers at the end.

Another interesting technique is a pretty liberal use of the second person “you,” addressing the reader directly. Do you do that often?

I guess so. I might say too often. Every story is different, but sometimes I want to feel like the reader and I are having a conversation. So if I feel like the situation calls for it, I’ll try it. If it looks right, I’ll leave it. If the editor says it doesn’t make any sense, I’ll take it out. But he didn’t say that this time.

Flipping over to your personal life for a moment, I saw in your bio that you were homeschooled. How long did your mom teach you?

Almost the whole way, with the exception of two years, where I went to a small private school. Just about the whole way.

What kind of impact did that have on the way you ended up writing?

I’m still trying to figure out the answer to that. I do know that we read all the time growing up. The program was not very structured. There were six kids, and we would go to the library in the station wagon and literally take out a total of 60 books at a time. So my mom and sister would make a list when we got home before anyone could start reading, otherwise the books would be lost and never recovered. It would still happen anyway sometimes.

We would read what we were interested in. For me, a lot of times that did involve some kind of conflict and struggle and death. I mean, I don’t know, I can’t explain to you why I was interested in that from an early age. But for example, one of my very favorite books when I was like nine was this small hardcover book in some kind of historical series about World War II. It was about the Dunkirk boat lift where—and I‘m probably not remembering the details right—you had the British army in full retreat toward this French beach. They were in real trouble from the Germans. And all these boats came from England, fishing boats, everything—they came across to rescue these soldiers. Something about that resonated with me so much. I’m sure that’s the kind of dramatic narrative that still resonates for me. It’s still the kind of thing I think about when I’m writing now.

Who are you reading these days? What’s the last great story you read?

This is terrible. There are way too many books on my shelf that I’m half done with. I’ll get 50 or 100 pages into a novel and realize it’s not moving forward as quickly as I want it to. These are some books that are supposed to be great books, and I’m sure are great. For example, Ulysses by James Joyce or The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. For whatever reason, they lost me on page 42, and I keep meaning to finish them, but I don’t.

As far as what I’ve really liked: I did enjoy that new nonfiction book The Lost City of Z by David Grann. I thought it moved forward really well, and I was satisfied by the end. Even though I could imagine some people might have been disappointed, I really liked the way it turned out.

As far as great stories, have you seen that site longform.org? I’ve been finding some really cool stories there, including a favorite one I’ve come across recently called “Death on the CNN Curve” about that man who rescued the little girl from the well, and then it basically ruined his life. What a heartbreaking story, but told so very well. An interesting thing about that one was that the ending was basically given away right at the beginning, and yet I still wanted to read it to the end. Sometimes that works.

You did that with the story we’re talking about today, didn’t you?

Sort of. Yes, a little bit. Are you talking about those first three sentences?

We get a pretty good sense this is not going to end happily.

You have to set the hook somehow.

Did anything end up on the cutting room floor that you wish had gone in there?

There have been some other stories I’ve done that have been cut way down from their original drafts. With my story from last year, “The Debtor,” which ultimately was about 7,200 words, the first draft was closer to 10,000 words. There were a bunch of things there that could have gone in and didn’t. With this one, what you see is very similar to what I turned in, with the exception that I initially had a much more complicated and involved metaphor to explain what the flu virus does. I had worked very hard on it, and I thought it was just about right.

Usually the first person who reads my stories is my wife, because I feel like she’s a good reader who is probably like a lot of the people who read the magazine. It didn’t really work for her, and when my editor read it, it didn’t work for him, either. It was depressing, because I’d spent many hours putting it together, but I pretty much had to get rid of it. Ultimately, I came to realize that was the right thing, but you know how that is—sometimes it’s hard to kill your darlings.

Anything else about the piece?

I never know when I’ve written a story how the main characters or the family of the main characters will feel about it. Usually, I hope they’ll like it, but I just don’t know. I can’t predict. In the past, when I thought people would like a story, they’ve hated it. That’s happened several times. In this case John Behnken’s wife and a couple of his friends wrote in to say, “Thanks for the story, you got it just right. This helps keep John’s memory alive. We appreciate the way you treated us all the way through.”

That really meant a lot to me. I try to treat people right when I’m interviewing them, and get the details correct and the spirit of what they’re saying. But sometimes even if I have all the facts correct, I may not portray the person as their family would like them to be portrayed. I guess that’s something you have to get used to. In this case, he was such likable guy, and nobody had anything remotely negative to say about him. When it came out, they all loved the story, and I was glad about that.

Were you going for a fairy tale sensibility or tone on this? It read that way to me, but I didn’t know if you’d intended it.

I think possibly that happens with a lot of what I write. It may not be something I consciously set out to do. But that may go back to the style and the tone that I enjoy reading the most. It ends up coming out in what I write. I like it when stories sound old or somehow mythical even though they’re true. So maybe even when I’m not setting out to sound that way, it’s so deeply ingrained that I just do.

The monkey story seems like a very traditional assignment that any metro desk might have to cover, but you tackled it in a different way.

A couple months ago, there was a story by Emily Nipps, one of our reporters here. And Vernon Yates, this character of a trapper from Seminole, had a quote maybe ¾ of the way down the story. I’m not looking at it, so I’m going from memory—something like, “The monkey’s not necessarily having a good time out there, you know. For him, what this is like is if you were dropped onto a desert island with no other humans.”

I read that quote and thought, “That’s kind of interesting. I wonder if that’s true? Because I would look at the story totally differently if that were true.” And it made some sense—monkeys are like us.

So that’s what started my interest in the monkey. I would bring it up from time to time in our meetings for the enterprise team. “I want to profile the monkey. I want to take it real seriously.” And people would laugh. And I would sort of laugh. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it, but it was something along these lines: “Is the monkey lonely?” How can I get at that? Because obviously, I’m not going to be able to talk to the monkey.

At one point, you talk to a loneliness expert, which was great.

I got to the point where I was feeling good about the monkey, and I needed to know about what loneliness does to people and to primates. I actually tweeted and said I needed a loneliness expert. Pretty quickly I got a tweet back from one of our news researchers here, Shirl Kennedy, saying she had the person. He was this guy John [Cacioppo], from the University of Chicago—he’d written a book called Loneliness. So I scooted over to the local Barnes & Noble and bought their one and only copy and read that. Then I felt like I was ready to have a conversation with him.

The subject line of my email to him was “A story about a monkey.” I’m sure the nation’s leading loneliness expert has never gotten an email with that subject line. But he got back to me immediately and he was totally on board with the idea. There were some things in his book and in our conversation not just about primates but about Rhesus macaques—the effects of social isolation on that particular kind of monkey.

It’s easier to make the case that the monkey is isolated than to make the case that the monkey is lonely. The monkey is not going to go down to the bar and have a drink because he’s lonely. But the monkey is isolated, and the chances are good that he hasn’t seen another monkey of his kind since he’s been on the loose. So he’s definitely isolated, and that definitely has physiological effects on him—the same way it would have effects on us if we were dropped on a desert island or put in solitary confinement.

How long did you take to research and to write the story?

I’d say for two weeks, the monkey was my primary focus as far as reporting is concerned. I went up to a conference in New York then, too, but it was a couple weeks of reporting and reading and talking to people.

One afternoon, I took a few hours and drove the route of the monkey—where he’s been this calendar year. I started from the first address he was spotted at and drove from address to address, just to get a sense. Obviously, I’m driving on roads and the monkey isn’t, but I can kind of envision where he might have gone. That was really helpful. Looking at yards where he was spotted, patterns started to develop. The monkey likes the same kinds of yards, the monkey likes the same kinds of trees. That’s a little speculative, but at least it’s kind of an earned speculation.

The actual act of writing typically isn’t a huge commitment of time relative to the total time spent on a story, at least for me. At some point when I thought I was ready to go, I headed over to a coffee shop with Bill Duryea, my editor, and said, “Here’s what I’ve got, and here’s what I’m thinking.”

We almost never don’t do that. We talk about the story to work out kinks in structure before I ever put anything to the page. It probably took me a day and a half to pull it together. And then Bill, as he always does, came back at it with some wise suggestions and made it better than it was when I sent it to him. I basically wrote it on a Tuesday, and then Wednesday we went over it, and by Thursday it was sitting in the can ready to go.

You’ve done narrative in a lot of forms, not just for the Times, but also your book and feature stories for Charlotte magazine. Does a narrative approach come by habit now, or is there a mindset you have to work to get yourself into?

It’s kind of interesting to me that you wanted to talk about this story, because there are certainly parts of narrative in this story, but I don’t think it’s a “pure narrative”—whatever that is. There’s some essay in there, there’s some science in there.

But I think, to answer your question, anywhere there’s movement, there’s possibility for narrative. I knew I had that to work with—there’s nothing but movement: the monkey is moving from point A to point B to point C. So there were possibilities.

I guess at this point, it’s how I think about stories. I always want to have narrative components in a story, because that means a story is moving. And if a story’s not moving, a reader is probably stopping.

Maybe I’m less wedded to the idea of narrative for the sake of narrative than some people are, but I think it’s the most natural, most obvious way to tell most stories. I’ve done what lots and lots of people have done—read the people who do this the best, go to conferences to hear the people who do this the best, pick the brains of the people who do this the best, and hopefully over time, some of that rubs off.

Your story has some clearly narrative elements but could have run in any of a number of papers around the country. It seemed like a good model for journalists interested in doing this kind of writing but working for papers that may not encourage it.

I don’t know the end inch count on this. It’s long-ish for some places, but it’s not overly long. It’s certainly not long for us.

There’s an idea behind this story, and that’s something that is really stressed here in St. Pete. And I feel like I’m really lucky to work in a place where that is encouraged, where the editors I get to work with are always pushing it. Mike Wilson always says, “What’s the big idea?” I guess the big idea here—if it’s not too presumptuous to call it that—is the tradeoffs we all make between wanting to be free and wanting to be part of a greater whole, whether that’s valuable space in a community or a healthy, loving relationship.

You brought up my Charlotte magazine work. There was a story that I did in it last year called “After the Crash.” That story is totally an idea story, to a point that is unique for any story I’ve ever done. I didn’t talk to anybody, not a person—I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a 5,000-word idea story that was reported by reading for months, on and off: NASCAR coverage, NASCAR books, magazine stories about NASCAR, stories about the housing crisis and economic collapse, and American studies. And then going to Daytona for the weekend and just walking around with a notebook, just walking and walking and literally resisting the urge to talk to people. Some people liked it, some people didn’t.

Why did you decide to take that approach?

Because what am I going to ask people? What am I going to ask the man on the street? “Can we have a conversation about the ways in which NASCAR at this current moment is similar to the housing bubble?” How do we even start that conversation? I just had to recalibrate my idea of what reporting is, or was, for that story.

This is something that I’ve been having some internal conversations about recently: the idea of thinking as reporting, which sounds ridiculous when I hear it come out of my mouth. Because of course you think when you report. Sometimes I think the more people I talk to, the better reporting I’m doing. Well, maybe. And for some stories, the more conversations you have, the more you’re learning.

But to really stop and consider the whys and the whats: I felt like I was getting the whats over the weekend and over the course of reading for that story. What I had to do was to start to tying together the ties of the whys. That was something I had to do on my own, in my head, and I had to organize it in a way that worked for that story.

What is your process for tying together the whys?

I brought up the NASCAR story because it is the most extreme example. I think the monkey story is definitely an example, too—it’s just they’re two different stories, two different approaches. In both cases, it was, as it always is, important to learn as much as I can about those different pieces of the story, those dots. For the NASCAR story, those dots are—I’m painting with a broad brush here—NASCAR, the economy, the highs and lows of American real estate. For the monkey story, those dots are rhesus macaques as a species, this rhesus macaque and loneliness.

So whatever it takes to learn as much as you can about those dots, that’s what you do. For the NASCAR story, it wasn’t talking to people, it was reading, reading, reading, and then really observing that weekend, walking in Daytona with a notebook.

For this piece it was also plenty of reading, but it was also visiting the yards where the monkey’s been spotted, talking to experts. Once you have all that, you can start putting some meat on those connections. You have a sense of where those connections might happen, but you can’t support those connections without that learning.

That’s maybe one difference in how I approach stories now versus how I approached stories five or six years ago—now I’m reporting stories as little self-taught, self-put-together seminars. I’m making a syllabus as I go along. And once I feel like I’ve learned the material on that self-inflicted syllabus, I can then make those connections and tie those ties of the whys in the most illuminating, most concise ways.

“What” is everywhere—more than it’s ever been. It’s still our role, but one of our additional roles, perhaps more than before, is making sense of the whys, or the reasons.

What journalists are most inspiring or most interesting to you these days?

I really like reading Michael Lewis, because I feel like he combines some of those things: narrative movement, big ideas, characters, and does it in an enormously readable way. I’m unbelievably lucky to share an area of the newsroom with people like Ben [Montgomery] and Lane [DeGregory] and John Barry. Somebody that I read a lot of and admire who used to work here is Tom Lake, who’s now at Atlanta magazine.

There are so many people, and you start throwing names around, and you don’t want to leave anybody out…

Like the Oscars. You don’t want to forget to thank somebody…

There are so many different kinds of work. I love Gary Smith’s long stuff in Sports Illustrated, and I love Tommy Tomlinson’s short stuff in The Charlotte Observer. They’re almost two different forms, but they end up doing the same thing—they make you think and they make you feel. Charlie Pierce is one of those journalists—I don’t care if he’s writing in Esquire, for The Boston Globe, or on his blog. I don’t care what he’s writing about. I read everything he writes.

There are others, like Elizabeth Gilbert—pre-Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert. Not that I didn’t enjoy and read that, and her last book, Committed, too. I’ll read everything she writes. But some of her work from 10, 12 years ago—magazine work—I just pick that up from time to time and reread it. The people who hide—maybe that’s the wrong word—big ideas and big stuff in unbelievably readable stories, that’s what we’re all trying to do.——

[For more, check out our commentary on Kruse’s monkey story.]

Taking on the kind of assignment done by hundreds of journalists a year, Kruse rejects the straight-news approach and seriously examines the monkey as a character. Clocking in at just shy of 2,000 words, the piece is not pure narrative but uses narrative elements in ways we imagine could still make it into the pages of any one of dozens of newspapers nationwide (including some that have dropped narrative).

Here’s a sample:

The man from Fish and Wildlife fired a tranquilizer dart at him.

Hit.

The man from Fish and Wildlife fired another.

Hit.

Something to understand about these monkeys is that they’ve been used for research for more than half a century. They’ve had rings screwed into their skulls and electrodes embedded in their skin and they’ve been key in AIDS research and in finding a polio vaccine. A rhesus macaque was the first living thing to get shot into space and come back alive. These monkeys are tough.

So the monkey removed the one dart, then the other, and then he ran. His adrenaline surged. He bolted to a different tree and across a street and he hopped a fence and he disappeared and found a place to lay low and sleep it off.

Note, too, that while Kruse doesn’t use a lot of literary flourishes, describing the monkey as lying low and sleeping it off helps tag the critter as character on the lam. Kruse also folds his reporting about the monkey genome and primate experts in with eyewitness accounts of the fugitive. The sparse but entertaining multimedia for the story includes a Google map, short video clips and links to the monkey’s Facebook fan club and fan page, as well as a humorous take on lookout posters used for criminal suspects. The individual pieces add up to something funny, sad and strange—an everyday event made fascinating because it tilts toward story.

[For more monkey mayhem, read our interview with Michael Kruse, in which he also talks about "After the Crash," his prize-winning story on NASCAR and the economy.]

Melissa Lyttle/St. Petersburg Times

You’ve done reporting from war zones before, haven’t you?

Yes, Afghanistan and Iraq. I’ve been to Haiti a bunch of times, but not for about 10 years.

How was Haiti the same or different, in terms of the humanitarian crisis versus the war zone?

The magnitude of the disaster and the number of people whose lives were destroyed felt much greater in Haiti. When I was in Iraq and saw so many injured Iraqis, it was very often the U.S. who was injuring them. So there wasn’t that sense of guilt in Haiti, but in other ways it was much worse.

You sometimes offer a small and positive note to end your stories. How do you straddle that line between reporting on the magnitude of the suffering but also offering something else? I’m thinking of the birth of the baby in the story about the missing brother.

I was really happy that that happened the way that it did because I was having trouble seeing my way out of the rubble. That was a moment that helped me to do that.

In reporting on humanitarian crises, sometimes there’s a worry about dulling readers’ response to the survivors by making it seem like they come from the kinds of places where this is just how life is. Did you struggle with that?

I did try to pick really small things to tell the big story. Like the amputations piece—a little girl in a body cast with the lower half of her body crushed putting latex gloves on the feet of the naked Barbie and screaming “Socks!” I was showing that this is the face of the nation now, but let’s look at it with this guy coming from Tampa to find his brother. Let’s look at it through the eyes of this nursing student who’s just had her leg taken off. I don’t know that most of it was very upbeat, but I did try to tell it in a very personal way.

You did more than one account with a storytelling approach while you were there. Was that your decision, or did your editors ask you to focus on narratives?

The assignment was that there would be so much coming out of Haiti, so much wire news, that I needed to tell stories about people from this area, from the Tampa, St. Pete and central Florida area—or from Florida. So I was always trying to find people and focus in on what someone from Florida was doing. That in itself made it more of a narrative, because I wasn’t telling the big news story. I was writing about a person doing something.

A lot of reporters seemed to find that amputation theme at the same time. A few stories ran that were about the same length as yours that were straight news pieces. But your piece was a real story. How long did you have to turn that around?

Every piece I did—except for the last one— I had one day. On the amputation story, I got to the hospital in the afternoon, and I had to file fairly early in the evening. I had no time, and the logistics were terrible. I had no idea how I would get from the hospital back to where I could sit and write. Often I was writing in a moving car. It was really tough, the logistics of trying to get those stories done.

I had set a goal of trying to get a different story every day: search and rescue, amputations, relief, someone trying to find a family member.  And then I had the added challenge of trying to find someone from this area. So I was running around madly trying to find a story, trying to take notes and make it personal, and then finally trying to get it written and filed. It was very, very rushed.

Was there anything you wish you had been able to do? I was wondering if you had even had time to confirm the cannibalism story about Fenel, Daniel Thelusmar’s brother. In that situation, where you didn’t have access to resources you would normally use to check things out, did you find it hard to check your stories?

I had heard that things like that were happening [back then]. I had been in Haiti around that time and knew that story wasn’t that far-fetched. I had also found Daniel Thelusmar, who was the subject of that story, to be very credible. But you’re right, I could not go pull clips and talk to people to confirm that had happened in that market at that moment.

But you had been in Haiti before.

Yes, and I knew at that time there were reports of that kind of thing happening. I also found Daniel [Thelusmar] to be laid back, low key and not sensational. And that helped.

You asked about regrets. I think my greatest regret is that some of the people that I wrote about and was so worried about, I lost track of. They were carted in trucks out of the hospital. I’m very worried about what has happened to them. I’ve asked people to try to find them and see if they’re okay, but I haven’t had much luck, and that’s really concerning to me.

Is there anything else you’d say to someone else who may be sent into this kind of situation? Do you have any tips?

One of the things is if you’re not trying to do a story every day, you have a little more time to get the story and sit down and write it. We were just so rushed. So trying to arrange to have a little bit of time would be good.

The editor on these stories was Bill Duryea, which really helped. For instance, on the amputation story, I was at this hospital, trying to see amputations, going around talking to people and trying to get to know them, so that it wouldn’t be just one more leg removed, but it would be the story of the nursing student who’d come out of poverty and had put her life into her career and now it was over. I was doing that on my end, but he was seeing it as the new tragic face of Haiti. Having him on the [other] end with an overview was really helpful.

How did you get the stories to him?

I had a little tiny notebook computer that was not connected, so I would type into that, then put it on a Zip drive and run it over to the photographer who had a satellite phone, and she, Melissa Lyttle, would send it.

Running, rushing, not eating, it was nonstop. Phones go dead all the time, so you can’t get to people. You’re trying to call in something or letting them know you’re trying to do this piece, and you cannot get in touch with your editor. Or you’re in a car and you can’t use the satellite phone. There would be hours where Bill wouldn’t know if we even had a story. I’d say, “I’ll call you at 4 and tell you,” and then I couldn’t get through till 7.

The logistics are much harder than you think they’re going to be. You think you’re going to get there and have people who are going to take you places, and that you’ll leave at 6 in the morning and it will take two hours and you’ll be at this place at this time. But you leave at 9 in the morning and it takes four hours, and the people who were supposed to be there aren’t there, so you wait another three. Everything takes much longer than you think it will, so allow for that. We couldn’t. That was tough.

[For more on Laughlin's reporting from Haiti, read our commentary on her amputation story.]

Melissa Lyttle/St. Petersburg Times

Many reporters in the region noticed the massive numbers of limbs lost as a result of delays in treating the injured, but Laughlin zeroed in on her subject, did all her reporting and filed her piece in less than one day—and she told it as a story. In just 700 words, she lays out the setting and introduces characters like nursing student Joaz Nancie, who says that cripples are not accepted in Haiti, and that she will not be able to attend school any longer.

We even get a little context, learning about the 19th-century operating conditions and how the medical staff tries to comfort the patients by engaging in wishful thinking about how everyone will eventually get prosthetics. Meanwhile, the noncritical “victims line the entrance on the floor for days.”

Laughlin delivers a true narrative arc, building tension across amputation after amputation, until a 5-year-old girl cries out in an adjacent room. But the resolution Laughlin offers (we won’t spoil it) isn’t a Pollyanna take on the situation as much as it is a hint suggesting just how much suffering Haiti still has ahead of it.

[You can also read our interview with Laughlin, in which she talks about finding and reporting stories in the wake of a natural disaster.]

An Indian narrative journalism magazine called The Caravan launched this month. Or perhaps re-launched might be the better term, as publisher Delhi Press traces the magazine’s roots to a journal with the same name founded in 1940 by Vishva Nath. The Caravan bills itself as an Indian Granta or Harper’s, and for the cover of its January issue, offers a straightforward but informative story on how the Indian-American community goes about lobbying Washington. Inside is a meditation on Lyari in Karachi written by Fatima Bhutto that made us want more: “The British worked Karachi to the ground, but never to its death.”

What do you do when you’re an MBA who’s having hard luck finding a job? If you’re Don Gould, and you have three kids you’d like to teach about the importance of a work ethic, you start as a bag boy at Publix. But it’s not so simple. From Michael Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times.

If you had won the world chess championship at the age of 22, you would probably have coasted on it for the rest of your life. But you are not Garry Kasparov. Kasparov went on to dominate the world of chess for two decades, and then took up a career in politics as a burr under the saddle of Vladimir Putin. But that is still not enough to keep Kasparov busy, and so here he writes a book review—well, we think it’s a book review, but it’s more about Kasparov going up against ever-better computers as technology has improved and why the focus on supercomputers may be missing the point. Not an intimate narrative voice, but with an opening line about playing chess against 32 computers at once, who can resist? In The New York Review of Books.

After our focus last week on multimedia projects using poetry in journalism, we were thrilled to hear that gifted author Sherman Alexie had dashed off some nonfiction sports poetry in a matter of hours for ESPN, in an effort to get Allen Iverson not to play in February’s NBA All-Star Game in Dallas. (Thanks to Laura Nathan-Garner for spotting this one.) Alexie has long taken an interest in basketball and protested the Seattle SuperSonics’ departure for Oklahoma City mightily, so we will consider this a sort of poetry op-ed. At any rate, we at Storyboard are in favor of Alexie’s newsroom-style spirit and his ability to deliver on a self-imposed deadline. The poem? Not so much. (But you can see the winter issue of Contrary to take a look at some of his more serious work.)

Happy reading!

Tyler Cowen

Earlier this month at the mid-Atlantic TEDx in Baltimore, blogging economist Tyler Cowen gave a 16-minute talk about the dangers of narrative. He spoke about the oft-discussed universal stories we use to make sense of events, such as the quest, a stranger comes to town, comedy, and tragedy.

But he quickly dove into why he distrusts the very stories that move us most, suggesting the cautionary remedy of imagining our IQs dropping 10 points every time we take a simple narrative at face value.

The full talk is available online, but here are a few of the highlights from his lecture:

“The good and bad thing about stories is they’re a kind of filter.  They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter, it always leaves the same things in. You’re always left with the same few simple stories.”

“What kind of stories should we be most suspicious of? Again, I’m telling you, it’s the stories very often that you like the most, that you find the most rewarding, the most inspiring. The stories that don’t focus on opportunity cost or the complex unintended consequences of human action. Because that very often does not make for a good story. So often, a story is a story of triumph, a story of struggle. There are opposing forces which are either evil or ignorant. There is a person on a quest, someone making a voyage, and a stranger coming to town. Those are your categories, but don’t let them make you too happy.”

Cowen’s blog, Marginal Revolution, is devoted to “small steps toward a much better world.” Sustaining that theme, he does not actually recommend that we “burn Tolstoy.” Cowen comes across as part contrarian, part town crier, but he makes a point here that is useful for narrative journalists: the real world is often messier than the stories we tell ourselves about it.

A succinct understanding of story is important to be able to explain (and even sell) a concept to an editor, but I think we’re mistaken if we never give a story a chance to evolve and become more complex.

What does that mean for journalists? A recent example is a St. Petersburg Times project, “For Their Own Good,” an investigative report about abuse at The Florida School for Boys. Reporters Waveney Ann Moore and Ben Montgomery had a ton of material on what seemed to be multiple staff members’ regular policy of beating boys bloody during the 1950s and 60s.

They had their tidy, compelling story, and they could have stopped there. Instead, they looked further back, and forward, and found that the same story emerged cyclically every few years in relation to the school. The public expressed outrage, some changes were made, and a few years later, revelations of abuse would emerge again.

In all, they found a century of abuse, making the point that real reform had never taken root. Their project turned from a simple exposé of bad conduct by a few administrators into a broader indictment of public inattention. They kept on the story after the initial project was published, uncovering additional disturbing material about the current situation at the school.

In a recent interview, Montgomery said, “I view this whole year-long project—all 10 stories, or whatever it ends up being—as one big narrative.” A little messier, maybe, but a more honest—and more complete—story.”

“Sacia’s Promise,” from Kaitlin Manry of The (Everett) Herald:

“She remembers waking up in the middle of the night, just 2 or 3 years old. Her nightgown is wet. So is her bed. She walks into the living room, calling for her mom. She’s not there. Sacia instead finds a stranger, a man, dividing piles of little white rocks spread across the coffee table. The pearly white stones are like baby teeth and crumble when he touches them. She runs back to her bed and stays up all night, kneeling on wet sheets, waiting for a mother who never comes.”

“Did self-help course lead to woman’s suicide?” from Kristen Gelineau of the Associated Press (who also has a 2007 story on the Nieman Narrative Digest):

“The young woman stood naked in her downtown office building, swaying next to an open window. Her final words were sudden and calm: “I know I am going to jump.” Rebekah Lawrence — so modest and shy she often blushed around others — burst into song and leaped out the window.”

“Father, son get a second chance in the most unlikely place,” from Colleen Jenkins of  the St. Petersburg Times:

“A sore back brought Michael Thornton to the jailhouse infirmary, but far worse problems plagued him. He was in trouble — again. Even more devastating, his youngest son had gotten into trouble, too. Serious trouble. Somewhere in the jail, William was wearing the same inmate uniform.”

For more than four years, Gangrey.com has rounded up the best print narratives on a daily basis. Founder Ben Montgomery, who is also a reporter with Florida’s St. Petersburg Times, talks here about his personal motivation for starting his site and what he thinks narrative journalism can do.

Why did you start Gangrey?

I used to keep a big, growing clip file of stuff that I liked to read. I found myself at times on deadline trying to quickly switch from reporting to writing, and searching for new stories that would get me there. Sometimes I’d dabble around the Pulitzer site, but after a while I found I’d read everything on there. I’d get on Nexis and search for early ’90s material from Rick Bragg.

I thought, “If I’m doing this, there must be other people who are doing the same thing.” So I thought that maybe it would be a service for other people if I started collecting new stuff every day in one place in a simple, streamlined blog. If it didn’t help anybody else, I thought it would be a resource for me—it would be my digital clip file. And I found pretty quickly that there were a number of other people who wanted to go there, too.

Waveney Ann Moore and Ben Montgomery with documents for the Marianna project

Has it changed since the beginning?

The idea is the same: a daily inventory of good journalism. But it’s also become more of an online community, a place where we can criticize each other’s work and make each other better—argue about things and learn from new pieces of journalism.

It’s also become a place to showcase new writers. That’s sort of rare. I got an email from Wes Ferguson the other day, asking if I’d take a look at what he’s done. He’s at this little paper in Texas, and it turns out he’s a fantastic writer.

So maybe in a small way, I can also introduce people to new writers’ work.

What makes a good Gangrey story?

Maybe a little bit of what Tom Shroder was talking about. I don’t want to be bored. It might be as simple as that. There’s no set of things that I’m looking for. Does it have something that’s surprising? Is it entertaining? Will it keep my attention? Is there some device being used that I’ve never seen before?

Do you get any payment for Gangrey, or is it a labor of love?

No [he laughs], no payment. I added a little amazon.com bookstore to the site, hoping maybe referrals to people buying the books would generate some income. I have yet to receive a dime. I sold some t-shirts a while back, thinking the same thing. I sold out my stock, but I’m not even sure I made any profit.

How do you find the stories you highlight?

I’ve got a decent network of people that has developed. They’re just serious readers and know what to look for or what makes a good story. They supply a pretty good stream of new stories. Beyond that I have a pretty insatiable reading appetite. I’m reading all the time. Even while I’m working, I find stories I’ll go back to read later. I’ve also invited some people to post.

Who else is involved? I’ve seen Tom Lake post, I think.

Yes, Tom, and also Michael Kruse, who works at the St. Petersburg Times, though he hasn’t posted for a while.

Your tagline is “prolonging the slow death of newspapers.”Do you think print narratives have a future?

Absolutely.  I kind of like the pessimism in that tagline, because that’s who I am. But I think we’ll be doing print narratives forever. They did them on the cave walls, right? They’re not going anywhere.

In your Marianna story about abuse in a boys’ home, you had some interesting multimedia components that really added to the whole project. How do you feel about the shift toward multimedia narratives?

I love it, and I love that video we did. That didn’t require a lot from me. Much of it came from the photographer Edmund Fountain shooting over my shoulder while I did interviews. I couldn’t have pulled that off if it had required more effort from me. We wouldn’t have achieved the same level of—I don’t want to say excellence—the same level of story for either of those things, if both of them had required my attention.

If journalists are required to write the story and compose the multimedia elements going into it, both parts tend to suffer. It was my job from the beginning to do my thing for the story, while Edmund worried about the multimedia.

When it came time to create it, we had a meeting. We outlined the story on the giant pieces of paper. And then we met with Edmund and storyboarded the video, asking ourselves, “How can we make it different?” I think it complements the story. I think the story is the more important element there, but I’m totally in favor of good multimedia.

I see you’ve followed up that Marianna story with more installments. The project itself was a beautiful complete narrative. What do you hope to accomplish with more stories?

This ongoing thing wasn’t the idea at first, but we kind of decided we’d call it part two when it became clear that it would be part two. I’ve written probably eight stories total on this, about 17,000 words. When we’re writing about the stuff that happened in the 1950s and ’60s, the constant question we got was, “What’s this place like today?” Or, people would say, “It’s a good thing it’s closed.” And we’d say, “No, it’s not closed.” And they’d come back with, “Well, what’s it like?” It’s a natural question. So we delivered part two. And there are going to be a couple more that we’ll work on.

I view this whole year-long project—all 10 stories, or whatever it ends up being—as one big narrative. I have written some news leads for a couple of the pieces, but I think they all have a consistent tone and point of view. And hopefully, if someone ever considers the body of work, it will be clear that this thing happened, and then this part came here. I hope there’s a consistency in the voice.

What do you see as the role of narrative journalism—to tell good stories, to cause some kind of change, or something else altogether?

I got an email from a guy who used to be an editor at the Times a while back—Martin Dyckman. He wrote and said, “I’m glad to see the Times is still crusading.” It feels good to know you’re crusading on the side of social justice.

Had we approached this with the idea of writing a bunch of inverted pyramid stories off of this news event, there’s no way we could have kept readers’ attention. The evidence is in the letters to the editor, and the phone calls, and the comments. We wouldn’t have achieved this response if we hadn’t told the stories. Also, I think you confuse people if you don’t give them a chronological account of the evolution of this place.

What should good narrative journalism do?

At its best, it grabs you by the shirt collar and brings you from your kitchen table in St. Petersburg to a cell at the Florida School for Boys, so that you can witness an atrocity. And then hopefully when it returns you to your table in St. Petersburg and you read the last line, you put the paper down and say, “Damn, I’m glad I went on that journey with this reporter.”