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The truth train steams into town
Stellar authorial talent on board as COM gears up for narrative journalism conference

By Rebecca Pollard

About 40 years ago, Tom Wolfe did the unprecedented. A young reporter on assignment for Esquire, Wolfe spent a week researching the West Coast’s custom car fad. But instead of writing a conventional article, he produced a 49-page stream-of-consciousness manuscript that detailed not just the facts, but his experience in the fast world of California’s chrome and steel. Esquire published the piece, titling it "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby." An innovative moment in literary history had occurred.

		CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE:
				Adam Hochschild has written articles for The New Yorker, Harpers, Mother Jones, and others. His book Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels won the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay.
				Anne Fadiman is the editor of The American Scholar and a visiting lecturer in English and American studies at Smith College. Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for current interest nonfiction.
				Rick Bragg is the author of All Over But the Shoutin’, a best-selling memoir that was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1997. His book Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg was published this year. Bragg won the 1996 Pulitzer prize for his feature writing in the New York Times.
				Mark Kramer is a writer-in-residence and COM professor of journalism. He has written articles for the Boston Globe, Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, and Outside as well as several nonfiction books.
				Kevin Merida writes political and sports features for the style section of the Washington Post as well as a bimonthly column for the Post’s Sunday Magazine. This year he was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists.
				Tracy Kidder writes for the New Yorker and is a contributing editor for the Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of several books and won the 1982 Pulitzer prize for nonfiction and the National Book Award for The Soul of a New Machine.

Wolfe (Hon.’00) hardly took the first foray into the world of narrative nonfiction – or the last. Narrative writing, or more simply, the art of telling true stories, existed long before the who-what-when- where-why-how cadence of today’s journalese. Wolfe and his contemporaries, including Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, and John McPhee, popularized the style with long, in-depth articles replete with personal insight and strong authorial voice.

On December 2 and 3, journalists will converge on the BU campus for Aboard the Narrative Train III – A Conference on Narrative Journalism. The two-day conference is directed by BU writer-in-residence and COM Journalism Professor Mark Kramer and includes a cast of 22 award-winning writers, radio personalities, and filmmakers who will lead discussions and workshops on various issues in the field.

In its third year, Aboard the Narrative Train has attracted writers and editors from across the nation; 525 have already enrolled this year, and planners expect as many as 150 more. Previous conferences drew many new and aspiring writers, but this year, say planners, they’ve tried to target a more experienced audience. "We wanted to reach the most sophisticated audience, and boy, have we ever," says Kramer, adding that the roster of attendees includes six Pulitzer prize winners.

National awards abound among the speakers, as well. Pulitzer prize winning writer Rick Bragg will kick off the event Saturday morning with a keynote address. Other accomplished journalists follow, such as Susan Orlean, author of the New York Times best-seller The Orchid Thief, and Tracy Kidder, who won a Pulitzer prize and a National Book Award in 1982 for his book The Soul of a New Machine. Boston Globe special projects writer Mitchell Zuckoff will talk about the fight for narrative in less-than-receptive newsrooms. Zuckoff earned a 2000 Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors for his serial narrative "Choosing Naia," about a young couple’s decision to give birth to a baby with Down’s syndrome. Filmmaker Ross McElwee, whose film Sherman’s March won best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993, will lead a workshop on narrative documentary.

The popularity of narrative writing has risen in recent years. Serial narratives about the lives of everyday people have become standard in many newspapers; radio features that cover mundane events have vied with more conventional news reports for air time.

Web-casts and 24-hour cable news channels make the facts available, but audiences must search for meaning in the barrage of information. According to Kramer, narrative journalism delivers that meaning while other genres fall short. "This style will handle all of the art, all of the erudition of human nature that a reporter would want to use in a story," he says. "I wish I could say the same about most reporting styles, but I can’t."

Still, since narratives take longer to research and write, and editors may lack the time or skills to edit the unconventional, often lengthy stories, literary nonfiction is not a favorite of editors. Kramer, although a champion of the style, does not recommend "that a set of tales replace all news stories," and Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar and faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a professional school devoted to training reporters, agrees.

"There is a clear difference between a story and an article," says Clark. "People need articles for information; they need stories for a lot of different reasons."

The Poynter Institute recently included BU’s Narrative Train conference as one of its 10 official National Writers’ Workshops, a move that Kramer says "probably signals to newspaper editors that [narrative writing] is becoming more mainstream." The conference is the only National Writers’ Workshop focused on narrative journalism. Clark, who attended the conference last year as a panelist, says that narrative reporting, by its nature, will further the Poynter Institute’s goal of training better journalists. "Narrative, in a sense, creates meaning that transcends the news," he says. "Narrative provides the opportunities to enter into worlds where we can learn the truths and insights that we need."

Aboard the Narrative Train III – A Conference on Narrative Journalism will take place Saturday, December 2, and Sunday, December 3, at various locations around campus. Registration is $50 for full-time BU students with valid ID, $80 for the general public. For more information, call 617-353-7738, e-mail story@bu.edu, or visit www.bu.edu/narrative.

7 December 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations