This weekend, I spent 48 hours in Boston’s Prudential Center without venturing outside once. Yes, the fat snowflakes that drifted down past our hotel window Saturday morning were an enticement to venture outside. But not enough of one to convince me to miss any of the conversation taking place inside, at the Nieman conference.
Making the trip to Boston for the weekend involved taking a trans-continental flight, spending three nights in a hotel (with my lovely room-mate, Sarah Mott, who had recently returned from Hong Kong,) lining up a sitter for our two boys, and plunking down $375 to attend the conference. It also meant missing such sweet moments as the opening day parade for the start of Little League, which our younger son plays and my husband coaches.
So why did I do it?
Back in 2004, when I first began thinking about turning my newspaper story about the Mondavi family into a book, my friend Frances Dinkelspiel lent me her full set of recordings of a past Nieman conference. As I chugged along in my VW on reporting trips to Napa, I listened to these sessions over and over again. My challenge was to start thinking about how to create scenes for my book, and that required me to figure out how to re-create settings and describe characters in a way that would bring them to life.
I started studying other people’s books and I began looking for teachers – master storytellers willing to share their craft secrets. I couldn’t make all the sessions I wanted to attend. I particularly wish I’d been able to go to Alex Kotlowitz’s session on “the journalism of empathy.”
I first met Alex back in the late 1980s, on a softball field in Chicago where a number of young reporters use to get together to play ball. Alex’s first book, There are No Children Here, like mine, also grew out of a Wall Street Journal leder, was a stunning work of reporting, as well as a book that inspired many reporters to try to tell the stories of people who otherwise wouldn’t have much of a voice.
I’m planning to buy Alex’s session on CD when it becomes available, as well as the session called “Not-Dinner-Table Topics: Finding the right track for stories about race, religion, and other thorny subjects,” with Alex, the Washington Post’s Anne Hull, and Marcus Mabry, who recently joined the New York Times as its international business editor.
There was a good showing from the West Coast at this year’s conference. Elizabeth Farnsworth of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, who is nearing completion of her documentary, The Judge and the General for PBS, Laura Fraser, author of An Italian Affair, Katy Butler, who co-authored with the late Randy Shilts the San Francisco Chronicle’s stunning series on the impact of the AIDS epidemic, Jack Hart, the former managing editor of The Oregonian and author of A Writer’s Coach, Adam Hochschild, Ayelet Waldman, author of the “Mommy Track Mysteries,” Sandy Tolan and Judy Muller, both teaching at the Annenberg School, Marcia Parker, head of the business reporting program at Berkeley’s journalism school, and Dan Noyes, co-founder of the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Connie Hale, who is the new director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism, did a marvelous job. In fact, as I was riding in a van to Boston’s Logan airport yesterday afternoon along with longtime Weekend Edition senior editor Martha Wexler, who’s just left the show to freelance, I asked another journalist sitting beside me what he wished might have been different about the conference. He said, “I wish it would have gone on another week.”
I then bumped into Elizabeth Farnsworth, who was heading home on the same flight to San Francisco. As we gave our tickets at the gate, the United Airlines employee said something along the lines of, “truth is better than fiction. You just couldn’t make up the things that really go on in this world.” After three days devoted to the craft of narrative journalism, it was the perfect last word.