Departments
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Week of 20 February 1998 |
Vol. I, No. 21 |
Feature Article
Reportage card
Literary journalists to assess their profession
by Eric McHenry
When he was an undergraduate in the late 1960s, nothing excited Robert Vare like finding fresh copies of Esquire, Harpers, or the New Yorker in his mailbox. He couldn't get enough of what was then an infant literary genre -- narrative journalism -- a style of writing that defied the conventions of traditional reporting: brevity, authorial detachment, and the inverted pyramid structure.
Vare went on to become an editor for the New Yorker, to write for Esquire, and to work in one or the other capacity at the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and Rolling Stone, among others. Narrative journalism went on to flourish, and recently, to wane somewhat. Vare will discuss its objectives, attributes, and future at Aboard the Narrative Train, a conference organized by College of Communication professor of journalism and writer-in-residence Mark Kramer. It will be held Friday evening and all day Saturday, February 28 and 29, in the School of Management and Morse Auditorium.
Conference director Kramer, along with codirector Vare, will host nationally known colleagues for panel talks on the topics Reporting for Human Presence, Writing and Editing -- Toward a Journalism of Ideas, and Narrative and Commerce. A reading by eight master practitioners of literary reportage, including Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy Kidder, will inaugurate the weekend early Friday evening.
Kramer and Kidder have been coconspiring to expand journalism's prerogatives since they met in the late 1960s. Richard Todd, then an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, recognized that the two shared a penchant for narrative reporting and introduced them.
"We started talking about the subject, and trying to work out how to do it," says Kramer, "how to include this level of emotional reality, how to write about routine events engagingly, and how to expand from there, digressively, to acknowledge individual difference, to acknowledge class difference, to do the very things that newspapers succeed by not doing. We wanted to be as well-spoken and engaging as we could be, using the wonderful devices of set scenes and dialogue, using the wonderful devices of interpretable social symbols and irony.
"For me the thing that distinguishes literary journalism from daily journalism," he adds, "is the intimate, almost confidential voice of a narrator who presents the world on what Henry James called the level of 'felt life.' "
Like Vare, both Kramer and Kidder have followed through on their early commitment to narrative nonfiction. Before arriving at BU in 1990, Kramer spent 10 years as writer-in-residence at Smith College. There, he wrote Invasive Procedures, an acclaimed study of surgery and surgeons that required 18 months of field research. Recently, he coedited the Ballantine anthology Literary Journalism and wrote a book about rural Russia, Travels with a Hungry Bear. Kidder is best known for The Soul of a New Machine, a work of narrative journalism about the obsessive creators of an early computer, which, in addition to the Pulitzer, captured the National Book Award in 1982.
All of the conference's presenters have similarly impressive dossiers. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, for example, has been a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College, served as fiction editor for Seventeen, and is currently a contributing editor at the New York Times Magazine. Bruce DeSilva founded and directs the Associated Press Enterprise Department, which produces news features with a narrative emphasis. He'll speak on the Narrative and Commerce panel, addressing the marketability of literary reportage.
Although the genre experienced an initial boom, demand for narrative nonfiction has tapered recently. The magazines that once were sanctuaries for such writing are giving a narrower berth -- of time, money, and column space -- to contributors.
"I think it's getting harder, certainly in the magazine world, for writers to practice the art of literary journalism," says Vare. "It's a situation that was brought about in part by the advertising climate of the '80s, which was a very good one. But there was also an aesthetic determination made by the editors of these magazines -- that readers today have a lot of demands on their time and they don't have the patience or the attention spans to wade through long pieces that build slowly, which is the hallmark of this genre."
As the media become saturated with compressed news-bites, however, longer reportage becomes attractive again. Although the magazine market continues to contract, ambitious newspapers, Kramer says, are permitting more deliberative, more thoroughly wrought stories into their pages. He brandishes an article from the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review; its subhead reads, "Some newspapers are giving writers a wealth of time and space, urging them to get intimate with subjects."
"Making stories longer is another direction that editors can choose," Kramer says. "And many are moving in that direction. But it's a direction that confuses some old-hand newspaper people. It requires editors who understand narrative construction, and most newspaper editors abhor storytelling. It requires not handling reporters as interchangeable tools, but actually recognizing individual talent. It requires giving reporters time to write artfully. And it requires redefining news to include what's routine in readers' lives, as well as what's phenomenal."
For more information or to make reservations to attend Aboard the Narrative Train, call 353-5015 or e-mail andee@bu.edu. Also, the event's Web site address is: www.bu.edu/COM/narrative_train.