Helen Epstein and the art of narrative: live chat August 23, 11 am EDT

The feedback from the BlogHer '09 conference was loud and clear on at least one point: there's a lot of interest in the craft of writing. When it comes to having conversations about non-fiction writing, few have the stature as a literary journalist and teacher of writing that Helen Epstein has attained.



I'm pleased to announce that Epstein will be available for a live-chat with BlogHer readers on August 23, at 11 am EDT. Use the dialog box above to sign up for an email reminder, and to participate in the chat on Sunday morning.

The author of five books and dozens of magazine articles for such outlets as the New York Times magazine, Epstein was born in Prague to parents who survived the concentration camps during World War II, and raised in New York. Her childhood was the subject of her acclaimed first book, Children of the Holocaust. In May, Epstein reflected that she still gets letters and emails about the book 30 years later.

It was also the first of several works of memoir that followed, including the recent Amazon short, Swimming Against the Stereotype: The Story of a Twentieth Century Jewish Athlete. Another Amazon short, "Memoir: How I Read It, Write It, Use It," is especially useful for bloggers who write from life experience.

In this 2003 Washington Post article, Epstein shared some thoughts about memoir writing that will likely ring true for many bloggers:

"While accuracy in memoir is also a matter of honor, few of the other conventions apply. The first-person enjoys unchecked authority; objectivity has been debunked as a canard; literary and scientific theory question the validity of memory; and the economics of publishing have made hands-on editors nearly extinct. Memoir is a hybrid form, integrating techniques of fiction, poetry, travel writing, journalism, historiography and the essay. That's one of the reasons writers like it."

Epstein's writing about the arts is also top-notch. As with Children of the Holocaust, her biography of Shakespeare Company founder Joseph Papp was named a New York Times book of the Year. A new edition of Music Talks, her exquisite collection of profiles of musicians such as YoYo Ma, Leonard Bernstein and Vladimir Horowitz, is due out in September.

Epstein also blogs about the arts at Arts Fuse.

More programming in Scratch

I've been learning to use this Java-based language to create lessons for our interactive journalism camp, which starts tomorrow. Based on reactions, this is my best one to date, on photojournalism:

Learn more about this project

More here

With each project, my thinking on the completion of the Nancybelle project gets clearer.

A piece of editorial commentary in Scratch

Click on the image below to see my experiment...

Character development in literary journalism

Jack Hart provides an excellent checklist of details journalists should collect.

Limitations of the Holovaty model

As I noted Holovaty maintains that what journalists do is collect, organize and deliver information, and that much of that process can be automated.

Holovaty has applied that principle to a number of notable projects. However, he ackowledges that there is still a place for storytelling:

An article -- a "big blob of text" -- is often the best way to explain concepts. The nuances of the English language do not map neatly to machine-manipulatable data sources. (This very entry, which you're reading right now, is a prime example of something that could not be replaced with a database.) When I say "newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview," I don't mean "newspapers need to abolish stories." The two forms of information dissemination can coexist and complement each other.

Holovaty's concepets are most powerfully applied to the informational aspects of journalism, but reading Lule makes it clear that the most common straight news story may have a cultural meaning that transcends the facts of a single story. Holovaty uses a common staple of local news -- the fire story -- to make his point about structured data. The typical fire story might read:

"Two children were killed and a firefighter was seriously injured when fire tore through a row home on the South Side early this morning. The children's mother and two other children escaped the blaze, but flames and smoke prevented firefighters from reaching 7-year-old Tom Smith and his 5-year-old sister Tina, who were sleeping in a rear bedroom. They were pronounced dead at the scene.

"Fire Commissioner Lex Luthor said the cause of the blaze is still being investigated, but a hallway space heater may be to blame. He said the smoke detectors in the house appear to have been in working order. The two-alarm probably started around 3:30 AM, and was declared under control by 4:30.

"Firefigher Tess Truehart was overcome by smoke inhalation when she tried to rescue Tom and Tina. She was taken to Lakeland Hospital where she is listed in serious condition. The children's mother, Tonya Smith, 30, was able to carry 3-year old Terrance and 1-year-old Tyrone out of the burnning house, but firefighters prevented her from returning for the other two children. The three survivors were also taken to Parkland, where they are in good condition.

Smith's husband, Thomas Smith, Sr., 31, rushed home from his job at a nearby bakery when he saw smoke coming from the direction of his house...."

About this type of story, Holovaty says,

"I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire -- date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive -- with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen."

But both Lule and Mitch Stephens would likely note that such a rendering, while valuable, strips the story of its cultural worth. Beyond the bare facts of this case, there is tragedy, heroism and caprice. A database that scooped up the details of this fire from fire and police reports and organized it in the way Holovaty suggests would perform great service to people looking trying to assess the effectiveness of fire-prevention efforts, for example.

But people who know the Smith and families, or who live nearby, will probably want more. And depending on other things that might be going on in the community (for example, the frequency of fires, or the status of female firefighters), the story might assume complexities that lend themselves to narrative.

As I proceed to work on tools for automating aspects of narrative journalism, I don't want to lose sight of these limitations.

Statement of Need: Why attempt to translate literary journalism into a dynamic format?

The dizzying pace of technological, cultural and economic change that has engulfed the news industry. Melissa Ludkte, editor of Nieman Reports, put it this way in the introduction to their Winter, 2006 issue, "Goodbye, Gutenberg:"

"Journalism is on a fast-paced, transformative journey, its destination still unknown. That the Web and other media technologies are affecting mightily the practice of journalism is beyond dispute. Less clear is any shared vision of what the future holds."

When it comes to storytelling, one school of thought is that literary journalism is fast becoming a casualty of change. Jan Schaeffer, executive director of J-lab, an incubator for journalism innovation, told members of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications that one of the problems in journalism education is that, "We reward long-form storytellers and feature writing, even though a lot of newspapers and even magazines don’t run long stories or features." Parodoxically, she noted that citizens feel "rage over the crumbling American narrative."

At the same time, the authors of the canonical text, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and What the Public Should Expect insist that sharing news through storytelling will continue to fulfill a vital human and cultural need.

There is however, a tension between this need and the strengths of Internet-based publishing technologies, best highlighted by the work of journalist-programmer Adrian Holovaty. Holovaty's development of interactive news databases such as ChicagoCrime.org represent a fundamental re-thinking of what it means to deliver the news. Holovaty argues that, stripped to its essence, journalism is the process of collecting, structuring and presenting information, and that much of that process can be automated, if news organizations are willing to "stop the story-centric worldview."

Indeed, tagging, linking, commenting and blogging allow news consumers to select and recontextualize stories to suit their interests. Amy Gahran reports that new tools such as Joey and Zude to contextualize web content according to their tastes.

However, advances in game design technology as well as emerging web standards such microformats suggest that there may be ways of structuring narratives that are compatible with interactive databases. In addition, young people embrace games that pay attention to storytelling in the way that previous generations embraced books and film.

The hope, therefore, is that dynamic, nonfiction storytelling can attract a generation of gamers and thus deepen their understanding of and engagement with issues of the day.