" The History and Future of Literary Journalism" By David Abrahamson Presented at Northwestern university's Communication Residential College as as part of a " Fireside Chat" series May 27, 1998 The topic is literary journalism and I was given a fairly broad commission to talk about the history and future of literary journalism. Whoever came up with that title, that's a great title. You can use that title for anything. In fact, when you're out there on an assignment and you're kind of doing a story but you're not sure you want to tell the person you're talking to exactly what the story's about, and let's say it's about how oregano is actually a carcinogenic and someone says, "Oh," and you're talking to an oregano expert and you figure they'll be defensive about something and you don't want to say, "Well, I'm trying to figure out whether or not it causes cancer," you just say, " I'm doing a story on the future of oregano." -- " Oh great! I'll talk to you about that." The "future of" is a great catch-all. I also gave Mark, who has been working on this, some readings, mostly by one person who could fall into the category of literary journalism, called Sallie Tisdale. Did anyone get copies of them? Did anyone have a chance to do anything more than scan them? Tell the truth. One person? A couple people? Okay, I hope that we can take a portion of our time in using Sallie's work as a study ...kind of use that as a key study. It's also interesting because when we taught the literary journalism course in the fall quarter, Sallie was a guest and came here for like parts of three days and they had a public presentation...the students. This will go into our recruiting pitch (?) We're offering the course again in the winter quarter next year and there was enough interest this past year that we'll actually offer two sections of it so I don't know exactly how one qualifies in this...but if you're interested in this there'll at least be a greater opportunity... Let's start with maybe what do we mean by literary journalism? What could that possibly mean? And an easy way to understand it is--imagine two circles that kind of overlap and one is called literature and one is called journalism and that intersection between the two is where literary journalism lives. Does that sort of make sense? And it is a starting point and we know that the boundary between that's journalism...you think about literature that you read that's quite journalistic. Can you think of anyone you've read like in high school English courses---novels that sort of had a real journalistic quality to them? An awful lot of the people that we read in English courses so. Anyone guess one? We're taking nominees for journalistic novelists? A: Fitzgerald? DA: Of course. Anyone else? A: Richard Wright. DA: Could be. Very much so. Could be. Dickens. It's almost hard to think of one that hasn't written with an example of it. Hemingway we'll actually come back to in a second. Now think of journalists who you can think of who've written in quite a literary way-- I don't know how much journalism you've read. You probably won't find it...you'll find some of it but not a lot of it in the daily newspaper. Sometimes you go to magazines. Or a few very special broadcasts. Can you think of journalists that write in sort of literary ways? Do you know the work of any? If I said the name Gay Talese, does that mean anything to you? If I said the name Tom Wolfe, does that mean anything to you? Big movie just opened a couple of days ago--Hunter Thompson--does that mean anything to you? Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Those are all people that define themselves as journalists but there's that sort of overlap into literature. We still haven't answered our question yet but we're kind of seeing-- there are some samples and we judge the frontier--it's a lightly guarded frontier--not many customs stations there--don't need a visa to cross over--that if you're a novelist that wants to somehow directly capture the social reality of the day, which is more a definition of journalism, you don't have to ask anyone's permission to do it and if you're a journalist that wants to write in a more literary way--provided you don't have a daily news beat in a newspaper--you could probably do it. So we kind of have a picture emerging in our mind and whatever this thing is, it's been around a long time. People can trace it back to people like Charles Dickens or Mark Twain. Have you ever read any of Mark Twain's journalism? Most of you read his works of fiction but he was very gifted as a journalist --in fact he started as a journalist. And many novelists actually began as journalists and then became novelists. That's a very, very well-trodden career path. Twain wrote his journalism for newspapers in California and in the Gold Rush in the southwest. He actually began as a printer's devil, which was like a copy boy for his older brother, Hannibal, and then went to seek fame and fortune. There was a great quote--he arrived at the California Coal I think was the name of the paper, he said, " My name's Sam Clemens and I've come to make your newspaper better," or something like that. And he wrote some quite lovely stuff. I can get copies if you want to read it sometime. So it goes back a long, long way this sort of journalism that was this literary quality to it. The next major figure that a lot of people have studied is someone named Stephen Crane. Does that name sound familiar to you? Of course you know because you've read The Red Badge of Courage but he also did a lot of really quite wonderful journalism--much of it during the Spanish-American War. There's a great piece of his called Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo Bay and it Œs a story about a gun boat or battleship offshore and it's firing its guns somewhere in Cuba, it's deck guns and they tell them, " Aim higher, move to the left." To direct the fire the fire, a marine has to stand up on a hill with two red flags and go, " This means farther to the left, this means farther to the right," while the marine up there is exposed to that people on the ship can see him. They're like a mile away, of course he's being shot at by Spanish people who don't want them to come any closer with the big artillery shells and it's this beautiful piece that describes the unphaseability of this marine and how it-- a little footnote that's wonderful--a lot of people were with Crane...Spanish-American War, a lot of other journalists, you know that Stephen Crane died very, very young, like 29-years-old and he was like 24,25 at the time and other big names--the biggest names in journalism of that age, names you don't know, like Richard Harding Davis, or really very, very important illustrators like Frederick Remington--you ever seen the Frederick things of Indians? Remington was in Cuba too. They all noted that Crane was crazy. That this guy Crane, you the know the guy that wrote The Red Badge of Courage, and he was just absolutely fearless about exposing himself to enemy fire--and we don't want to go, you know, when they say, " Okay, let's go over and talk to this unit, you know, it's over here...we don't want to go with Crane because Crane will jump up and look around . People will shoot at us while they're shooting at him." He was almost suicidal with his behavior. In this piece, Marines Signaling Under Fire, he wants to demonstrate the bravery of the marine, doing the flag and so he creates a foil of the journalist and in the story, there's the story of the journalist looking up at the marines signaling and he describes the journalists as cowering and cowardly and weaseling into the ground and wetting his pants and doing all kinds of things. He demonstrates the least courageous individual that you could imagine. He sets as the journalist to make the story move... and everyone heard this and said, " Oh my God, he wrote it as if it were him," but everyone knew that he was the exact opposite. Okay. So after Stephen Crane, there were a bunch of other people--Crane was sort of the turn of the century--there's a bunch of other literary journalists that appear in sort of he golden age of magazines--the first golden age of magazines--which is in the 20s and 30s. A whole bunch of magazines--they're still around today, rolled out then, magazines like Time, magazines like Fortune, a whole bunch and those magazines have a lot of money and they were able to hired really gifted writers to go out and write interesting things for them and people like Hemingway could be numbered among them. World War II was the venue for a lot of them like that... Does the name Ernie Pyle mean anything to you? He was a newspaper writer but wrote very, very evocative things. No, doesn't mean anything. There's one piece called, " The Death of Captain Washcow" --if you ever come across it--it's 1,000 words. That is one of the most poetic renderings of a death in battle that's ever been written. It's wonderfully done actually--another digression--it's wonderfully done because we never meet Capt. Washcow--Capt. Washcow's a body and the reporter comes in front of a group of men who are being very silent and their leader, this young captain from Philadelphia, his body is being brought down the hill in Italy on a donkey and they're sort of remembering him and his honor, his courage, the way he cared for them. It's a love story in a way--and it's very, very sad. And then finally, the donkeys come down and deliver the bodies--they take the bodies off, they're kind of in body bags, sort of...and the reporter talks to the men about what Capt. Washcow was, why they love him and it ends with one of the soldiers straightening the collar on the corpse--you know, sort of making sure that the ...is right on the corpse before the corpse gets taken away. And then sort of dawn breaks and they have to go back to the war again. And then literary journalism in the period of the 60s suddenly got this great big burst of energy by something called the New Journalism and the New Journalism was essentially a reaction against straighter forms of reporting. We call the basic newspaper format, you know the name we use for that kind of journalism? Objective journalism? Inverted pyramid? You've heard all of those words? Which are pretty much a capturing of the facts and that's all--going out of its way to not be literary and an awful lot of customary ways of doing things got sort of challenged in the 60s. I bet you've heard your parents go on about this. But one of the things that got challenged was that sort of objective and inverted pyramid journalism. Does that really render the truth? Or because that formula is so rigid and you talk to all of the usual suspects, maybe that's just sort of the official version of the truth and there's a truer version of the truth somewhere behind that maybe we can get through other ways and so people like Wolfe and Breslin and Talese and a whole bunch of others sort of stretched the boundary and some of it was done really poorly and some of it was done really well and it sort of established a place for this kind of journalism that has continued to today. I think some of the excesses have been reigned in but there's still a number of people quite successful in practicing literary journalism and they probably trace their specific roots back to that time in the 60s with the New Journalism. So, if you think of the New Journalism as a period in the history of literary journalism that blossomed in the 60s and early 70s and we are still sort of, in some way, we are still in that era today. So that's...But we still haven't defined it yet and okay, let's really bear down and ask ourselves, what is it we mean by this? If I gave you a piece of writing and told you that's literary journalism, tell me, what's different about it? Tell me what makes it special. What do you think you'd answer? Do you have any guesses? A: It's in the narrative form. DA. It's in the narrative form. Well, let's generalize--let's say there are devices and modes that fiction writers use--by fiction, we mean novelists--being applied to journalism--the narrative form, a clear point of view, a dramatic thrust, not just the facts now but kind of telling a story. We're using the forms of the novelist, that's a big part of it. Let's dig a little deeper. A: (inaudible) DA: Okay, how can you tell that? How can you tell it's journalism? What makes journalism journalism? It's real. It happens. It's a rendering of the social reality. Not just a rendering of the social reality but I think that's a very narrow definition. Let's take it larger. Let's say a rendering of--and maybe even assigning a meaning to some events of a social reality. But we want to know--it starts with the facts and nothing but the facts, we don't make anything up. Though we'll talk about--remind me before we get done we'll talk about some people that have made things up and whether it's right and whether it's wrong, what they've said about it. Okay, so forms of novelists. A: (inaudible) DA: True...let me suggest two ideas or two big ideas I think go a long way toward helping us really kind of figure out what's in the intersection. What makes literary journalism literary journalism to me is the two really important things. The first one's kind of the toughest one to understand but it's certainly one worth thinking about and that is: It is writing, fact- based writing that offers the reader, should the reader be so inclined to look for it, a number of levels of reading. You can read it and enjoy it just as a factual, you know, a rendering of something that happened or you can find other themes, other messages, other morals. You can explore metaphors that are strung together with a specific purpose--an awful lot of writing in the fictional form have levels of meaning to it- -I think applied to journalism and that becomes a very, very powerful tool for the writer and becomes a source of incredible pleasure for the reader. Okay. Let's ask a little ancillary question. You told me this is literature, I'm reading it and finding levels of meaning. Suddenly, I stop and say, " I see a second and a third and a fourth level of meaning here. What this is really about is what?" And I stop and I ask myself and I say, "I see that fourth level of meaning and golly, that's going to improve my understanding of the human condition or whatever. There's an insight there of some value but maybe I'm just making that up. Maybe the writer didn't intend that at all. Do we have a conundrum on our hands now? So, I stop and back up and go forward--how should I resolve that question and I think the answer is: It's a question you don't need to resolve. I think when you're finding levels of meaning, in any form of communication, it's in the eye of the beholder and in fact, you can assume intentionality on the part of the writer. If you find meaning that had purpose for you, that's a completed transaction in itself and if you ever talked to a writer and said, "Did you really mean that?" and if they didn't say, "Whatever you find is up to you," which is what they should say, if they said, "No," that wouldn't mean that your analysis was wrong. We find what we need to find. And as writers, we put it and we hope that people will find the things we put and they may find that, they may end up finding different things. That's a big issue. ...conversation an hour ago--I'm thinking of levels of meaning. Has anyone here seen The Usual Suspects ? Great, powerful film. Levels of meaning--that's the story about a this and a that--but give me one of two levels of meaning now. What was the real theme of that movie? What was that movie really about? I asked in a conversation and a couple people sort of answered the question and they all kind of came up with a variant of the same idea which I will offer to you just as an example. One could argue that what that movie was really about was the possibility, not the fact but the possibility of the existence of absolute evil. Would you buy that? Or someone could say it was about the fear of the devil. Not the devil but about the fear of the devil. Slightly different interpretation but sort of in the same way--well, that's the kind of thing that literary journalism sort of encourages us and asks. Levels of meaning, that's number one. Number two, I would offer, has to do with the use of language itself. Let's talk about language for a minute. It's likely that everyone in this room has a vocabulary in excess of 150,000 words--probably by the time you finish college, you'll have a vocabulary of 200,000 words. Put another way, the median 10th grader in a U.S. high school has a vocabulary of 40,000 and a typical newspaper never uses more than just about...Now you have a sense of vocabulary? The smartest person you ever met had a vocabulary of 600,000 words and the dictionary has 1.2 million words in it. Okay, most newspapers don't use more than 10,000--and a big part of the extra is in medical stories. Take the medical beat out of these and it's probably down to 5,000. Okay, literary journalism probably starts with the range of 50,000 or 60,000 or 70,000 words but its not just the vocabulary--the importance is what you do with the vocabulary. If I said that the nature of the language, the rhythm of the language, the poetry, the way the language is used, the rhythms of it, the way it stops--beyond sort of the expository prose of newspaper writing, there's another sort of quality where you find yourself responding consciously or unconsciously to the language and how it's used. You've all read pieces like that right? I think that's another big factor in literary journalism. For example, in our hand out, there's a great passage--...but I'll find it for you. It's in the "We Do Abortions Here" piece and this piece was deeply personal-- students, no matter what your position on pro-choice or pro-life is, one wonderful thing about this piece is since an awful lot of students write a lot of first person stuff because that's the stuff they know and a lot of teacher ask you to write first person stuff. The great thing about Sallie's work is she takes first person journalism to the profoundly untrivial level and writes really important things in a very personal voice. This is on ...page five, where the journalist is describing a particular technique of using ultrasound. It said--it's the top left column: It takes practice to read an ultrasound picture, which is grainy and etched as though in strokes of charcoal.(DA: You ever seen a charcoal drawing where they put the thing on the side? Oh my God, I've seen a whole bunch of ...a dozen ultrasound, on TV...Yeah, it is like charcoal. Ultrasound is, you know, some kind of sound wave going out...charcoal is something that's used in an act of creation. You make things with charcoal. ). But suddenly a rapid rhythmic motion appears--the beating heart. Nearby is a soft oval, scratched with lines--the skull. (DA: You see how the language is being used here? ...Sallie's doing something else). The leg is harder to find, and then suddenly the fetus moves, bobbing in the surf. (DA: There's kind of something nice about that but there's also an intimation of helplessness ...in the surf, things get thrown around on the beach ...vulnerability). The skull turns away, an arm slides across the screen, the torso rolls. I know the weight of a baby's head on my shoulders (DA: Sallie is a mother, Sallie has three kids), the whisper of lips on ears, the delicate cure of a fragile spine in my hand. I know how heavy and correct a newborn cradled feels (DA: That's a nice one.). The creature I watch in secret requires nothing but to be left alone, and that is precisely what won't be done. DA: That is a very nice paragraph, capturing all kinds of stuff, levels of meaning but also the language itself. The architecture of it. Which leads me to another idea I sometimes share with ? students, it sometimes has this meaning, it sometimes doesn't . As a story, it was deliberately crafted. If you are attempting to find whatever measure of art you will keep creating at that moment when you're writing the story--abandon any inverted...say, " I'm going to try to do something else--a more aesthetically-pleasing result. " So you have to communicate the information that I want to find other truths that can only be communicated with art--such as the art of that paragraph. One way to think about that is to imagine a piece as a trajectory--that it's something that you start and then it goes up and then it comes down. But it doesn't do he arc that I did with my hand--it goes up and then it has to go over here and then it has to speed up and then it has to slow down and then it has to diverge over here. And somehow you're sort of carrying the reader along, knowing exactly when it's all over where you want them to be. Not what facts you want them to have--what sort of larger truths, what feelings, what insights, what ambivalences...You're trying to share with them and you do that, I think, with the structure of the words themselves. Now that same sort of trajectory model--if you can imagine that in a piece, you know, you write the lead, you write the middle, you know the other facts. When you're doing your outline you kind of know what the close is, the close has to somehow you know the metaphor about you know the gun that you fire and throw on the table in the first act? You've heard that before? Well, it's really, really true in writing, that a great majority of all of the most effective writing, the close being probably the most important part of the piece, has to be set up by something that goes before. When the gun goes off at the end of the third act, someone putting it one the table , plotting all of that stuff out using the trajectory idea, I think it also applies to parts of the piece, to parts of the paragraph, may even be sentences. To know exactly where you're taking the reader, where you're trying to take the reader. ...think a little bit about these...though. Now, does every writer sit down and say, God I'm going to write this piece tomorrow, I want it to be literary journalism and I want these six levels of meaning and I want to use this kind of language and I want to -- No that's not really how it works. I think how it works is we kind of open ourselves up to do it, number one. Number two, we read a lot of it, we become students of it so we go and we sort of internalize things when we read and think about things. Say " Oh, how'd they do that?" Some of that internalization is conscious, we try to figure out oh, Sallie used that dash before " the beating heart" --that's a nice device-- conscious...I'm going to use that. I'm going to be writing along and think, " I'm going to use the Sallie dash here." Sometimes it's internalized unconsciously which is we write stuff, we've thought about it, we've been a student of it and it an...puts itself there and it comes out sometimes consciously, sometimes not, and you just get to that point in the paragraph and somehow in the creative process, the unconscious mind is kind of tells itself that this has to be a moment of drama and you find yourself typing a dash and writing in " a beating heart" and you look at it and say, " Oh my God, that was Sallie's dash." Maybe you'll remember it, maybe you won't. So, I don't to set this off as this incredibly contrived sort of thing where I know we're going to make a piece of sculpture and we've decided oh where ...go- that's not how it works. If anything, art is an expression, seems to me, anyway, of some of my deepest feelings, it's an expression of some of the things we care most about. A lot of it happens unconsciously. It won't happen if you're not at the keyboard. You do have to sit there with a chisel and a hammer in your hand. But a lot of it happens without, a fair amount of it happens without conscious guidance. How much is conscious, how much is not doesn't really matter. Once you're being as conscious about it as one can and then when you sit at the keyboard and create, open yourself up to something surprising and let the other things happen. Did Sallie sort of work all of this out at times? No, she didn't. However, once that sort of positive ...we have to be free to our own expressiveness. there is one way to clearly to make it more successful, to make it more effective in the literary sense and that is to do what? And every literary journalist I've ever talked to lives by this and that is, it's called: re-writing. And so, unlike the sculptor who gets one crack at the piece of stone, who surely can't put anything back after he's taken it off, we don't have that problem. We paint an oil...and an awful lot of this is going back and after you've attempted to write it, a piece of literary journalism, then you go back and now read it as a consumer, as a student, and say how can this be improved, does this work, does this not work? And that part of it is pretty conscious. Sallie says that these two pieces were both rewritten between eight and ten times. Clean sheet of paper rewritten. It's so terrible, the computer has really sort of taken a fair amount of the art out of writing it seems to me. Do you guys use the phrase vomit draft? Do you guys use the phrase? It's a big thing at Medill. I really hate it. That's...just spew it all out, don't think about it, make none of these kind of craft decisions, it's not a trajectory, it's a hose, you know, a hose ... like that. And then we'll go back and we'll move stuff around, you know. That's not the way you create art. The way you create art is to at least start with a plan--a plan that you can modify when... you're done, before you're done but to start with some idea that you're trying to do. I think the computer has... a fair amount of thinking has to go in before...We're talking not about the speed of which you write but we're talking about the speed with which you think. And the writing is just key-stroking, that's sort of the easy, fun part and to kind of just spew stuff out seems to me...It's not a bad way to do kind of regular, objective newspaper journalism, a lot of people do it, it's fine. But if one is sort of attempting something more than that I think that a bit more planning ... Did anyone get a chance to read the, Talk Dirty to Me piece? Did anyone find any nice passages? Oh, there's one wonderful device in there, let me find it. Do you remember the part in here where she's talking about, I can't remember how she sets it up, I think she's talking about her own view of her own sexuality and then how pornography sort of alters that definition of her own sexuality of herself. But she's not talking in sort of clinical terms, she's talking in very, very direct, very honest and there's a little thing where she stops and says, " Dear reader, are you getting turned on by this?" Do you remember that part? It's just a wonderful...and I'll never forget the first time I read it, I was reading along and suddenly, I stopped and it was like someone caught me in a ....movie. And I talked to her about that and she said it just sort of came to her and she realized that she had an opportunity to sort of make the reader kind of think about their own sexuality and to do it in terms of whether or not they were turned on by what she was writing. I've had friends and students who've read this piece that said they were really kind of upset by that. They thought somehow it kind of violated, somehow it kind of insulted, somehow that wasn't fair, that's not the contract between the writer and the reader, you know. Whether you want to expose anything, go ahead but I get to be protected, I get to be separate from this, I'm a reader, you can't, you do what you want but I'll always be safe. And in a really wonderful sort of way, Sallie sort of undermines that thought. " No, no, no, we've got a contract that you don't know about and I'm going to suddenly make it clear to you." Very, very interesting. Do you know what part, what passage I'm referring to? It's not fair to do it unless we've pointed it out to those who ....it's on the last page? Ah, here we go. The...after a few minutes. I tell him I'm looking for a movie popular several years ago, called Talk Dirty to Me. " Hey, Jack," he yells. " We got Talk Dirty to Me ?" In a few minutes four clerks huddle around me and the computer, watching me type in the title, offering little suggestions (DA: It's really interesting that the woman became the typist and the four clerks gather around) .From across the store I can still hear the helpful clerk. " Hey Al," he's shouting. " Lady over there wants Talk Dirty to Me. We got that?" I still blush; I stammer to say these things out loud. Sex has eternal charm that way-- a perpetual, organic hold on my body. I am aroused right now, writing this. Are you, dear reader? Do you dream, too? DA: Wonderful, wonderful. Now, where did that come from? Did that just sort of come to her while she was typing that passage and sort of say, " Oh my God, this is a great way to sort of draw the reader in" ? Did it come on a rewrite? Was something missing there and she was trying to set up the end of it? We don't know and we don't really care. I guess the idea of studying the stuff is to kind of open yourself up to these kinds of possibilities and so that when you are writing that at least you attempt that even in the telling, the rendering of a factual reality that we attempt to kind of do this stuff. I've now been babbling for 40 minutes. Let's leave some time for discussion. Questions? SQ: Okay, I have a question about the first piece, the abortion piece. How did she write this? It's obviously first-person... DA: No, she is. She was a nurse and like a lot of other people that write important stuff that other things they do in their life make it possible, give them entrée into worlds that they can write about at a ..profound level than the typical journalist sort of parachuting in, you know, three phone interviews...She made a living as a nurse and she submitted a couple of pieces to Harper's which is a very, very distinctive voice and she's written half a dozen books . When I saw her last fall, she wanted to go back to nursing. She wanted to sort of recharge her reality batteries and I said, " Will you go back to pediatric or gynecological nursing?" and she said, " No." She wanted to do geriatric nursing--she wanted to be around really old, old people, really wise, old, pained, dying, funny, special people. She said, " I can take a course at a community college and get my GRA geriatric." Not because she wants to write a piece for Harper's, not because she wants to do a book but I'm sure she will. She just sort of said, it's that great advice, you know, never to choose a life with a career or a career with a life. Sallie likes to have a life too. But that's how she got... SQ: Where does she get...published? DA: Where does she get published? A lot of it is in magazines that you know: Esquire, GQ, Atlantic, New Yorker. Probably the steadiest stream is published in The New Yorker. Do any of you have a subscription to The New Yorker? They don't do those 10,000 word stories on zinc anymore. It's much more sort of connected to the events of last week. It's a really good read and you'll always find two or three wonderful pieces in every issue. If I could do anything to improve the reading habits of my students, I would have them buy two subscriptions, one from The New Yorker and one from The Economist. They'd get their news from The Economist and their writing inspiration from The New Yorker. A couple of very recent, very, very successful pieces of literary journalism include Into Thin Air, the John Krakauer book about Everest. Have any of you read that? You know, about the people who died a few years ago on Mount Everest and all... tourists taken up Mount Everest and John Krakauer wrote a book called Into Thin Air which was very, very successful and has done very well, a good example of the genre. Another one that's set all kinds of records, it's been on the best- seller list for, coming up on two hundred weeks now is Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt. We'll come back to that in a second. If I could just have you read one of them ...would be The Perfect Storm by ...It's a wonderful book about five years ago there was this really just king hill storm in the north of Ireland almost like a storm...you know, the meteorology just concocted this oh my God storm and there was this fishing boat, you know, a trawler, there was a bunch of fishing boats out there. One trawler decided to come home at the wrong time and got in the really terrible part of the storm and went down -- the author went and talked to all of the family, all of the friends of the people that died, the guy that owned the boat, the bartender in the town where they lived and recreated the world of the North Atlantic fishermen, which is kind of an interesting world and developed a character of the people as well as the people that worked for them, this whole sort of sociological thing but told in a pure, narrative form. And did this really interesting thing. If someone said something to him, the author, it was in quotes. If someone said that they said it to something to someone else, They were told that I told Bob that I was going to do a fireside. It would read, David, I was going to do a fireside. But it's not in quotes, it's set up without the quotes. And it's reconstructed but he doesn't note for a fact that this happened, a very, very effective use of the conditional, saying, " It could have happened this way, this might have been the way it happened. " When he talks about the sinking, he said, " With storms, this is what crews do, they go below, smoke dope, drink beer, kind of try to ride it out. And when it sank, it probably sank this way. But he's very, very correct -- you could go back with a highlighter and find all those little conditionals and say, " This he knew, this someone said, this someone said they said, this he's guessing." And there was an awful lot of speculation in it, it's very dramatically told, really wonderfully done book. But he saw that whole problem of, you know, not making up a quote-- in a way I think a lot of other writers will be doing in the future--he almost sort of established this wonderful, new device. Even though this raises one of the big issues of literary journalism-- I've said four times now, we don't make it up, it's journalism, it's not fiction. One of the problems is some people believe when they're writing that they have to make it up, then they get better marks, that the reality...Well, to use Berendt, John Berendt was the former editor of a bunch of magazines, he knows journalism but there are a couple of conflicts of characters in that book and there are a couple of conflict of experiences where he took a whole bunch of things and put them all together. When asked about this, he has said, " Yes, I rounded off a few corners." Was that...? I don't think so, I think he made a mistake to do that. Because if you tell your reader, this is real, this is true, this is journalism, you're asking them to accept the reality of what you're telling them which is completely different from when you tell someone I made this up...it's very evocative, it might move you--but it was just my imagination. If you're asking them to believe that it's true, then it better be true. John Berendt--He's a zillionaire now, the book's been a best-seller on hard-cover for almost 4 years, unreal. I can't remember the last time a book's...has a book ever done that before? I don't know that it has. It's a little book. And it was made into a movie. Did anyone see the movie? I'm told the movie was really bad. It was awful, huh? So, that's always thing, that we're always reaching for the stars here--I urge you always be careful about am I ....made up? So, that's the answer but it's done in a bunch of magazines, all of which you know. And a lot of its done in book length form and if you're looking for a sample of it, The Perfect Storm would be a, it's a great read, it's a compelling story. He has been criticized actually, for, he didn't make anything up, there was a whole kind of thing where people were being critical of other people's success which always happens. But it was kind of taken to task for --during the storm there's a sailboat that has an owner that's sort of a cowardly lion down below and a woman that he hires to help sail the boat, to deliver it some place, they get caught in the storm too and she desperately needs some help doing stuff and the owner kind of goes below with a bottle of whiskey. Said, " No, no, I'm not going out there," and she injures herself and there's all sorts of dramas ...she's lifted off by a ...helicopter. ...helicopter, by the way goes down in the storm and another one has a coastguardman jump to try to help someone in the water and that ...rescuer or whatever they're called disappears in the waves. And the author tells his story, who this guy was and about his wife and his little kid....but in telling this thing about this one sailboat, the woman is rescued, and he never says this but you are led to believe that the boat sinks. The sailboat sinks. You just never hear what happened to the sailboat. But the story moves on and it turns out that the owner just sat in the back, got drunk, passed out, and three days later the sailboat was, you know, hundreds of miles ago, rocking gently in the waves and the owner of the sailboat wrote a whole bunch of letters. He comes off as kind of a fool in the book, the owner does, and he wrote a bunch of letters ...true about the boat...I was right all along, that woman shouldn't have gotten off the book , etc. And I don' think the author did anything wrong. You're left with the impression the boat sank, he doesn't say it sank, he just moves on. If the worst mistake you make when you're doing literary journalism is that mistake, you're doing just fine, not to worry, not to worry. Any other questions about it, we have another couple of minutes. Can any of you see yourselves attempting any of this? I got one nod, got a shrug. SQ: (inaudible) DA: Well, that's a good question. Is someone going to come up to you and say, " Hey, you look like a really talented guy, I'd like you to write some literary journalism for me" ? No, it's not going to happen that way. There's a lot more market for the straighter stuff, right? So, you just have to sort of, you've got to accept the responsibility for doing this yourself. You've got to try to write it, you've got to show it to teachers, show it to friends. Try to be critical, try to get better at it. Send it in to the places to publish it, then you can get a whole bunch of rejection slips like a lot of people do. You can't wait for anyone to ask for it and you can't wait for anyone to give you permission to do it. I think, the aspiration has to be within you and knowing that there'll probably be, certainly in the beginning of the career, that'll be less appreciated than in the end of a career. What the upside of it is, and this might serve as a concluding remark, in my own writing life and in my own reading life as a consumer of writing, it's obvious that it's much harder to do, it takes a lot more out of you, you have to be a.... Sallie's a good example of someone able to reveal herself but maybe like an awful lot of things in life is what you get out of this stuff is a function of what you put it and if you do at least attempt to practice it and you work at it hard and you practice, practice, practice -- and you get reasonably good at it, I think the people that are in this world, this particular world, say it is infinitely more rewarding than the other things they write. Now, it's just fun being a journalist, right? Go in ...police station, chase fire trucks, to be connected to stuff that's going on, to be the first one that finds out, I mean, certainly early in a career, just being a working journalist can be an awful lot of fun. It gets you up in the morning. And there' s some people who do it for a lifetime. And other people, they see it as more formulaic and it becomes less rewarding over time. Not after one month, maybe not after five years. But at some point, they yearn to catch a larger truth or tell things in a more artistic way, if you will. They feel that they have it in them. That appetite emerges. And if that appetite should ever emerge in you, if you hear that little voice in the back of your head, I would urge you to listen to it. Because if you do do it and you work at it, there's incredible sense of accomplishment, you know, those kinds of things that I've written in my life that honest to God, fifteen years later I'll be eating a burger on some...in Mount Washington or New Hampshire and someone is talking about something and we'll chitty chat...and I'll say, and they'll mention a piece to me that I wrote fifteen years ago and tell me that the meaning, not necessarily the meaning I put in, that's okay with me. If part of our reason for writing in the first place is to somehow reach out to other people, to touch other people to add meaning to other peoples' lives, I don't think there's any question that this kind of journalism does it better than any other. And so, I'd encourage you to at least try. So...go for... SQ: (inaudible) DA: She was raised in the Pacific Northwest, no excuse me, she was born in Ohio, but I think her family...She lives in Portland now. She has three kids. Her husband works for an ad agency. One of her kids is adopted. She's 46, I think, 46, 47, something like that. She teaches periodically at local colleges and stuff like that. When she came here, it was really wonderful, rather than just q and a with the students, she actually ran workshops in the class. She did one ...she was saying, " Okay, what do you think the best stuff you got in you, where does it come from?" And they sort of fumbled with it and she went to the black board and wrote number one, my boyfriend/girlfriend would be upset with me, number two, my mother would be upset with me, my father would be upset with me, my best friend would never talk to me again. All these kinds of something....can you think of something that meets number one? Can you think of something that meets all of these? Go write that down really quick...that's the thing you want to write. That's one of the deepest wells within you. If I'm afraid to write this, I don't want the world to know this about myself. I don't want to believe this about the rest of the world. All those sort of..it was a great workshop...really responded well. Copyright 1998 David Abrahamson. All rights reserved.