The Delacorte Review

11/02/2024

This week’s piece delves into the subject of portrayal, of the difficulties of accurately depicting others when a “truthful attempt can seem like grasping at sand.”
“People are not in a still life, and even those will wither after a time. Portraying others pitches us against our shortcomings in the face of the many moving facets of context, the individual, and the distance or proximity in time. And then there is that other distance, the doubt if we are too close or not as far removed as we should be…”

One of my favorite moments in nonfiction occurs about a third into Joseph Mitchell’s classic, Joe Gould’s Secret, composed of two New Yorker profiles of the same man, which ran in December 1942 and September 1964.

10/30/2024

How do you pivot within a career in journalism? This week, a reader tells us of her struggle to change what she writes about, “discovering, people see her only for what she now does, and not what she could do in a different place, with a different assignment, covering different kinds of stories.”

I got a note the other day from a reader with a problem that is as old as it is maddening.

10/14/2024

This week’s newsletter focuses on that perennial question, how to find stories?

“I did not know how to find stories. It was one thing to pick up on an event taking place and spin a feature out of it. Journalism’s default mode: working off the news, no matter how mundane. But when it came to generating ideas of my own, I was lost…”

The best thing that was supposed to happen to me early in my career was, if not a disaster, then certainly close.

10/08/2024

“I know writers for whom the greatest delight is in observing, in having work that allows them to be there. But that is not always possible. Things have happened, recently or long ago. Witnesses have died. Memories fade or are unreliable. Buildings have long since been torn down, and no physical evidence remains of the place and time. Yet you somehow need to get there, to see it as it was, fully. How else can you tell your story?”

There are books I read to my children decades ago and while many are forgotten, some are recalled, Goodnight Moon.

10/01/2024

“Memory, no matter how precise, is indebted to concrete places that anchor it, places where moments now gone lived, places where all the old yarns spun there unwind. Whenever I wish to remember an old writer I knew, there’s an address where a myriad of reminders outweigh his absence. It’s a secondhand bookshop, called Street of Obscure Booksellers…” https://shorturl.at/rh3A7

This week, we feature the story of an elderly writer and the place that kept him reading for as long as he could, where the “bookshelf, is like a phrase that the bookseller constantly rearranges.” Rue Des Bouquinistes Obscurs

09/28/2024

“Writing a book is akin to love in that it is always with you – days, nights, weekends, vacations. It follows you to the movies and interrupts your reading and watching TV. It begins seeping into your life and before you know it it’s there, all the time. It can make you tedious company, driving the people around you nuts: ‘yes, you can tell me this one new thing you discovered today but only one.’

Like love, writing a book has the capacity to keep expanding. Just as you discover greater depths of feeling, so too does researching and writing a book force you to confront that there is always more to learn…”

The expression comes from Penelope Leach, my generation’s parenting guru, in her assessment of newborns.

09/16/2024

In this issue of Writerland, we hear from a UK reader asking advice on returning told old stories, “outside of the original purpose and frame intended and discussed”. Read the answer to this ethical conundrum here: https://tinyurl.com/mryb6uj8

“You conduct an interview. You write your story. You move on. And then, some time later you recall or come across that interview and discover things that may not have interested you at the time, but do now. You possess the transcript. The interview was on the record. Which means that the transcript is, technically, yours. But are the words?"

We heard from Doubting in Devon the other day, a writer who had a question that while seemingly narrow, speaks to the larger and eternally vexing issue of the relationships we have with the people we write about.

09/13/2024

School is back and so is this newsletter. Professor Michael Shapiro reflects on the beliefs he holds dear after decades of teaching journalism. https://tinyurl.com/2cvju8rd

"I believe that a student who feels encouraged will perform better than a student who feels discouraged.

"I believe that a student fearful of making a mistake will correct only those mistakes called out but never learn to anticipate what might also go wrong.

I believe that if students are not encouraged to love what they do – and not merely to gain proficiency – they will struggle to find a passion for work that can be difficult, frustrating, soul draining when it is not thrilling."

Call out to journalists: If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at [email protected] and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need in this newsletter.

It is good to be back. There is a big banner hanging above the doorway of my school that reads: Welcome New Students. The students have already met their teachers and have begun to learn to become journalists, or perhaps improve on the skills they brought with them.

06/04/2024

We spoke to Kellianne Jones about her latest story in The Delacorte Review, and the years –and distance– it took to reach its final form.

“As journalists, we are taught that we shouldn't be part of the story – and I think it took me some time to come to terms with the story being partly about me. But the story had always been and I just wouldn't admit it. That was the beginning of me overcoming my resistance to the story; we figured out that the story was equal parts about me and my hometown. Once I accepted that I had a place in the story, it became easier to write.”

We’ve published a terrific new story this week that succeeds, I am compelled to say, despite me. The piece, My Home Towns by Kellianne Jones, captures powerfully the experience of being caught between the home you left and the one where you’ve settled. Because, as Kellianne writes of her own exp...

05/31/2024

Our new story “My Home Towns” by Kellianne Jones, powerfully captures the tension between the places we come from and those we strove to reach, the things we retain, those lost in our absence, and overcoming the rural/urban divide.

Why a Washington political journalist holds tight to her rural roots

05/29/2024

“No One Ever Asked” is an anthology of sixteen nonfiction short stories. Each is inspired by a photograph that captures a moment frozen in time. The photographs set in motion journeys of discovery -- about the people in those photographs, the place and time when they were taken, and the stories hidden behind those images. Memory believes, wrote William Faulkner, before knowing remembers. In "No One Ever Asked" sixteen storytellers set out to learn about memories -- and through those stories, about themselves.

“No One Ever Asked” is an anthology of sixteen nonfiction short stories. Each is inspired by a photograph that captures a moment frozen in time. The photographs set in motion journeys of discovery -- about the people in those photographs, the place and time when they were taken, and the stories ...

05/29/2024

How do you define success? Sixteen young journalists assess what they truly want their work to bring them as they publish an anthology of their stories.

In early February I wrote about my colleague James Robinson and I posing the question that we ask our students at the start of every semester: how do you define success for this project? The students had brought to the first day of class the photographs that would propel their reporting for the next...

05/13/2024

"Writers, like musicians, place great stock on experience, on having lived long enough to have witnessed and felt all that life presents that is good and bad, sorrowful and joyful, thrilling and heartbreaking. Life informs the work; how could it not?

The early recordings feel like a young writer’s voice – vibrant and new. Just as young musicians have so much to offer, I believe that young writers should never think they have to wait to begin writing; they have things to say right now, things best said when their voices are still taking shape.

But in the development of that voice there comes a point where the speed of its evolution slows and the voice, for all intents and purposes, settles into being what it is. When that happens, it becomes an instrument for a writer to do with what he or she wishes. The inevitable creative struggles are more about what you want to say than in how you want to say it."

I had never heard of John Mooney until I heard him play last Sunday. This was at JazzFest, in New Orleans, a wonderful music – and this being New Orleans food and drink – festival that features more musicians that anyone can keep track of, let alone hear.

05/09/2024

"Journalists see things that enrage them. They talk to people who infuriate them. Many of us come to journalism determined to expose injustice and repair the world through our work. Many of us never lose those idealistic impulses.

The question is how to do the work the right way – and by right I do not mean objectively; unlike, say, ChatGPT, we are driven by feelings and not just the accumulation and dissemination of fact. I am not necessarily even talking about fairness, because there are things we see that are profoundly unfair.

I am talking about rigor.

To that end, it is imperative to go about your work by challenging your assumptions, putting pressure on your arguments, and making your case by making the case of those with whom you disagree… "

Last week – before my university called in the police to end the takeover of a campus building and dismantle a protest encampment – I ran into one of my students and asked whether she thought her classmates needed to talk about the story unfolding around them.

05/08/2024

There’s alchemy to words, the chance that the right dosage and syntax can capture something about ourselves that turns what was vague solid, and spells out what we couldn’t bring ourselves to think. It’s the rare talent of Chilean writer Lina Meruane, the author of Seeing Red and Nervous System, both objects of beautiful disquiet. https://bit.ly/3JT3b90
Deep Vellum Publishing

Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik once wrote, “All night I hope my language might succeed in configuring me.” There’s alchemy to words, the chance that the right dosage and syntax can capture something about ourselves that turns what was vague solid, and spells out what we couldn’t bring o...

05/07/2024

Our latest story: “People often comment when they meet my son, He has your eyes. His eyes are blue, like a clear sky at dusk, outlined with the dark vignette of encroaching night. It’s this eye color that hides the truth of our connection. It’s a fluke, really, the unlikely outcome of genetic probability. I think of our shared eye color as my small reward for bringing him to term inside my body, laboring thirty hours to get him out, and ultimately delivering him through an incision that is my rightful battle wound of motherhood. But my son does not share my DNA.”

When Karin Jones and her husband finally decided to have a baby, they didn't expect to need an egg donor. And when they chose that egg donor, they didn't expect to start a lifelong relationship with a lovely, adventurous young woman and her parents. As this story unfolds, Karin tells of six lives i

04/23/2024

Student journalists, in their own words, as they approach the writing of the first, full drafts of their stories.

Over the years I made the mistake, time and again, of thinking that I understood what my students were experiencing as they approached writing the first, full drafts of their stories. I assumed that having gone through much of what they were going through when I was younger, and having edited hundre...

04/18/2024

Much as we talk of writing for “the reader,” what motivates us is the pleasure of seeing our words on the page achieving all we’d hoped they would. In poker parlance, what are “the tells” that we are shirking from the story we want to tell?

I am not a poker player which is just as well because I shudder to think what an easy mark I’d be for any halfway decent card shark. I am woeful at keeping my feelings to myself. In a poker-playing context this means I ooze “tells.” I would be unable, say, to stop myself from twitching anxious...