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Good Reads: Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough
It isn’t often remembered that one of the leading entries in Norm Sims’ field-opening collection Literary Journalism in the 20th Century (2007) was a pairing of two essays by Mary McCarthy, “Artists in Uniform” and “Settling the Colonel’s Hash,” both from the 1950s. (The latter sometimes appears as “Unsettling…”).… Read More
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Facts and After-facts
For much of my time in universities, I taught standard literary-history courses—mostly American literature from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. But a funny thing happened when I started teaching narrative journalism: I learned that students in my classes would often investigate, online, what had eventually happened to… Read More
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Student Tip: Two Forms of Useful Rule-Breaking
It’s a cliché that failure is often the best teacher. But that goes for journalism, too – that is, nothing so clearly clarifies the rules of narrative journalism so much as rule-breaking can. By “rule breaking,” though, I mean two very different things. First, there are those… Read More