Cool piece in The Wall Street Journal about the rebirth of radio dramas:
February 25, 2010
January 11, 2010
A New Newspaper
I’ve been reading the San Francisco Panorama, a one-time newspaper published as issue 33 of the literary journal, McSweeney’s. It’s a fascinating publication that features some great investigative writing, on everything from the financial problems and missteps of the Bay Bridge construction project in San Francisco, reported on by writers from the Center for Media Change, to the politics of water in California’s Central Valley. At the same time, the Panorama is an argument for the viability of the newspaper and of long-form journalism. It demonstrates all that is good about newspapers, and all that newspapers might still do, even in this era of print’s precipitous decline. In an “information pamphlet” included in the paper, the editors analyze the economics of publishing a newspaper, based on their experiences with this issue, and they come to the conclusion that it can still be a reasonable enterprise, if you’re not a multinational media company looking for extraordinary profits. Elsewhere in the paper, an article looks at the electricity used and the environmental damage being done by the large server farms that keep the Internet alive and growing, showing that the extent of this damage could, eventually, far exceed the damage done by harvesting the renewable resource of trees in order to produce paper.
Yes, it’s an experiment, and yes, it’s a one-shot deal, but the Panorama is, essentially, an argument that if you’re creative, if you make full use of the newspaper’s possibilities for expansive page design and long, developed stories, and if you’re committed to remaking the form to appeal to younger audiences, you might be able to produce a paper that can compete with the Internet. It’s an unlikely, idealistic proposal — one that’s just crazy enough, I think, to consider.
December 28, 2009
November 20, 2009
Telecommuting Internships
I’ve been noticing an uptick in telecommuting journalism internships on sites like JournalismJobs.com. Many of these are unpaid, and some of them are for new, unproven Web sites, but I’ve been recommending them to my students as a way to get their foot in the door in this rapidly-changing profession. Particularly for students in rural areas and small towns, telecommuting internships offer the possibility of working for national or international publications that they might not otherwise have.
October 19, 2009
Documenting Fairfax
I just returned from L.A., where I attended a session of the Comedian’s Way workshop with Beth Lapides & Greg Miller. While there, I stayed at the Farmer’s Daughter Hotel on Fairfax Avenue, and I spent a lot of time walking up and down the street, exploring. I’m fascinated by Fairfax, since my dad went to Fairfax High School when his Jewish Hungarian immigrant family moved to Hollywood in the 1950s. 
Carrying my camera and notebook, I realized I was seeking unconsciously to document this place that plays such a significant role in my family’s lore, this place where my dad grew into an American teenager.
One afternoon, I walked all the way from the Farmer’s Daughter to Fairfax High School, taking photos of the CBS Studio, a bird of paradise flower, workers on a roof, a kosher bakery, Canter’s Deli: everything I saw.
On Fairfax Ave.
I’m not sure what, if anything, I learned about my father and his teenage years by doing this. After all, that was over 50 years ago. But I learned something about Fairfax now, about how it’s a bustling, multi-ethnic, always-evolving place. And that was enough.
I realized, as I did this, how there really isn’t a divide in my life between family and public history, between doing memoir work and doing journalism.
I’m always both a memoirist and a journalist. It’s just what I do.
CBS studio on Fairfax.
Bird of Paradise on Fairfax.
Workers on Fairfax.
- .
Fairfax High School
October 4, 2009
Stories from Iowa
I love Mediastorm’s multimedia project, “Driftless: Stories from Iowa,” directed by Danny Wilcox Frazier. It tells the story of Iowa through a series of videos and photographs that tightly focus on small pieces of the state’s culture: a family farm, the town bar, a swimming hole, migrant labor, a butcher, an older couple. These videos are interrelated while at the same time telling part of a larger story of the the evolution of the Midwest. Mediastorm has been at the center of this kind of creative, multimedia work, and I think a project like “Driftless” can be done about any place or any community. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) did something similar: telling about a place through the aggregation of disparate stories, voices, and perspectives. It’s an effective technique that works especially well in our fractured, fragmented, postmodern world.
September 15, 2009
Postcards from Lucy
Jackalope
My aunt Lucy, who lives in an RV park in New Mexico when she’s not on the road, likes to write postcards. She sends these regularly from her travels, even when those travels are just up the highway, into the mountains, or over to some little town out in the desert she’s been wanting to see. Postcards of Jackalopes and Smokey the Bear, of remote, sagebrush-surrounded antennae that listen for sounds from outer space. Postcards that give the details of rattlesnakes and gophers, duststorms and heat. Little, everyday stories from her life in and around New Mexico.
Listening to outer space
Lucy’s cards remind me of the letters my mom, Lucy’s sister, used to send when she was alive. These were also full of minute-by-minute updates from her world, information about temperature and moon phases, sports scores and dreams.
Dude & Lucy visit the antennae that listen to outer space
My mom used to tell me in college, back in the 80s before we had e-mail, that my letters were too general, that she wanted specifics about my life, like what I ate for lunch, who I talked to that day, what I read, what color the sky was. And so I’d try to be more specific, try to give her a detailed accounting of my days. Even when we transitioned to e-mail, I tried to keep pace with her electronic postings, tried to meet her expectations, tried to give her a picture of what I did each day. While I was in graduate school, moving from state to state, and then at home with two small children, day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year, my mom and I e-mailed our lives back and forth across the continent. It was from my mom, letter by letter, e-mail by e-mail, that I learned how to write, and I’d give anything to still be getting her updates, to still be able to send her mine.
Smokey the Bear
Lucy also sends e-mails, but it’s the postcards, with their paper heft, and their photos, and their stamps and postmarks, that are most fun. My kids and I read them, imagining her and her dog Dude out there criss-crossing the desert, battling dust devils and ferocious heat, eating soup, filling up for gas, gauging the time of day by the slant of the sun, and stopping at far-flung post offices to send her latest dispatches.
I’ve got my own antennae up, listening, loving every little detail, every fact, every word. And I never want them to end.
September 13, 2009
Living life vs. writing life
In a Q&A with Jane Friedman, N.M. Kelby, author of The Constant Art of Being a Writer: The Life, Art, and Business of Fiction, says that “I write when I am sleeping, lying, eating, flirting, praying, and pulling weeds. Living life is writing. It’s paper optional.” It’s a lovely idea, really, about how we “write” all the time, even when we’re not writing. I know exactly what she means, about how when we’re going about the business of daily life we can constantly be thinking, observing, feeling, and thinking like a writer. But on the other hand, there’s a real divide between living life and writing about it. Life is immediate and messy, with multiple plots and characters, lots of confusing subplots and secondary characters, and infinite meanings and details. Writing about life, though, is a craft, and it involves taking the chaotic, unpredictable, and neverendingly complex world and shaping it into something that makes sense.
In my introduction to journalism class last Friday, we were talking about narrative journalism, and the work that’s involved in observing an event, place, or person and then shaping it into a story. We looked at the opening paragraphs of “Self-Storage Self,” a story by Jon Mooallem in last week’s New York Times Magazine about self-storage units. It begins with a description of the setting, in Antioch, California, where Mooallem says that Statewide Self Storage is “wedged between a car dealership and a Costco.” Then we get our first character, a man named Jimmy Sloan, who “dresses and styles his hair like James Dean,” and who is there to sort through the stuff stored in a unit by his ex-fiancee. We looked at the reporter’s decisions in this description, how out of infinite details these were the ones that Mooallem picked to narrate the beginning of this piece. They weren’t random details, but rather ones that give us a glimpse into the self-storage world as Mooallem perceived and interpreted it.
In my own work, I’ve been struck by the ways that events and people and places transform when I begin to write about them. It’s not like I’m making things up; everything I write is nonfiction. It’s just that the process of writing brings things and people and places into focus, makes them clearer, gives them meaning and substance where before they might have fluttered away, lost and unexamined.
It’s not at all a one-to-one correspondence, in other words, the relationship between life and art, between the world and the world as it’s recreated by the writer. It’s not like stories are out there, waiting to be told. The raw material for narrative is there, but it’s up to our imagination, curiosity, and observational skills to create that narrative.
Which, perhaps, is what Kelby meant, after all. Living life is writing, but only if right after you pull weeds or pray or flirt you head back to your computer or notebook or recorder and get to work.
September 12, 2009
Therapy for Stories
Greg Miller
While finishing my fiddle book last spring, I was in a sorry state. I’d recently gone through a divorce, and I was distracted, uncertain, confused. When I’d started the book a few years before I’d had a pretty light, chipper tone, but by the time I was wrapping it up I was on the brink. Of what, I didn’t know. Still, though, I had to finish the thing, which would be due in a few weeks to the publisher, and I knew I had to tell, or re-tell, my story of traveling around the country, meeting musicians, and learning to play fiddle, all while experiencing the break-up of a marriage, with some kind of distance, some kind of humor. The fact was, I had neither. Grasping for whatever I could find, I recalled something I’d run across on Facebook through my friend Amy’s postings about her friend Ray’s stand-up shows: “Un-Cabaret Lab.” Uncertain of what these words even meant, I Googled “Un-Cabaret” and found Greg Miller and Beth Lapides’ Un-Cabaret Free-Range Comedy. It said on the site that Greg did consulting for book projects, in addition to stand-up comedy workshops. A consultant. A humor consultant. THAT, I thought, is what I need.
So I e-mailed Greg and told him about my project, and my dilemma, and how I needed to revise and rewrite my manuscript, and I needed to make it funnier. Or, at least, I needed to make it less not-funny. He agreed to take me on as a client, and I bought a session with him, paying him through PayPal. I couldn’t really afford to do it, but I also felt that I couldn’t really afford not to do it. I didn’t have anywhere else to turn. Greg was my last chance. He read my manuscript over a couple of days, and then we set up a phone consulting session. He went through the manuscript line by line, page by page with me. ”That’s funny,” he’d say. Or “That’s almost funny.” Or, “That, not so much.” Good, I thought. This is what I need. Humor consulting. I took notes, starring the funny bits, crossing out the not-so-funny ones.
As the session continued, though, he began to give me other advice, as well: advice about developing characters, about when to start and stop scenes, about how to narrate a plot, about what to do with an A-story and a B-story, how to weave them together. I listened to everything he said, rapt. And I realized that he was helping me to tell a story. Was it getting funnier? After a while, I realized it didn’t matter. It was getting better. It was getting more real. Some of it might have been funny, some not so much. But through his help and guidance, it was becoming a better narrative. I spent a few weeks revising the manuscript after that first session, and then we set up another one, and he went through the revised manuscript again with me, helping to tweak it here, polish it there. By the time I was done revising, I had a plot. I had characters. I had scenes. I was still in a post-divorce funk, and I still wasn’t feeling very funny, but I’d learned something about storytelling, and maybe just a bit about survival. And for that, I’ll be forever grateful to Greg. He’s like a therapist for stories. And he’s worth every penny.
September 11, 2009
The Art of the Tiny Story
I’ve entered a few nonfiction stories this week in a daily essay writing contest sponsored by the journal Creative Nonfiction. The catch? The contest is held each day on Twitter, and the stories have to be 130 characters or less. That’s 140 characters for a tweet, minus ten characters for the #cnftweet that needs to accompany each entry. The prize isn’t a big deal, just a re-tweet by cnfonline each day, and all the fame and recognition that comes with that. Rather, it’s the challenge of the thing. How to tell a story in 130 characters? How to do all those things a good narrative requires — plot, setting, character, theme — in just a few words? My entries haven’t been spectacular yet. One was about planting an oak tree in my yard, another about my dad in a missile museum. I feel like I’m still learning how to write in this form. Full-length essays and narratives, I understand. They’re not easy to write, by a long shot, but I’m familiar with them. I’ve grown up with them. I write them pretty regularly. But microstories? They’re still a mystery. The winning entries in the cnfonline contest have often managed to tell tiny plots, tracking a growing fissure in a relationship, detailing the effects of a fire, exploring a moment of self-possession in the presence of a cop. I’m reading these entries like any good apprentice, trying to figure out how they succeed, and why. There’s a lot they leave out, by necessity, but there’s a lot they manage to pack into those 130 characters. Studying these entries, and writing my own, is great training, really, in brevity and clarity, skills that are useful in writing of all kinds, even long-form essays and articles. Though now I’m wondering if someday, 130 characters will come to be considered long-form. If so, all the more reason to try to master it before we’re forced to go shorter yet.
