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Saturday

Mike Mooney and Ashley Harrell

Infiltrating Subterranean Subcultures: Getting in good with those seedy groups your mother warned you about

If you want that story nobody else can get, you need to be willing and capable of talking to the types of people most reporters usually avoid. The slum-dwelling drug addicts and dope dealers. The pirates. The prostitutes. Those folks wearing the horsey-riding fetish gear. And for a great story, you’ll need to talk to a lot of them. Breaking into these groups can be daunting and even dangerous, but there are certain ways to approach interview subjects that can up your chances of survival, and get you fantastic material to boot. Ashley Harrell and Michael J. Mooney, staff writers for Village Voice Media, have infiltrated groups ranging from a vigilante pack of Guardian Angels to drunken decadent Spring Breakers to the homeless unofficial parking attendants of San Francisco. Hell, Mooney even dated a bunch of prostitutes for a story. These young writers have forged careers talking to rogues and outsiders, the human beings the rest of society might rather forget. During this panel discussion they'll share with you how they did it, and how you can do the same.

Bill Minutaglio

Summoning Spirits

         When Bill Minutaglio began working on a narrative nonfiction book about the greatest industrial disaster in American history, he decided to tell the story through several biographical portraits that were intertwined. But which biographies to tell? And how, exactly, to write about lesser-known people who had perished a half-century ago? It was a different task than writing about people who were very much alive and in the news -- as he did in his unauthorized biography of George W, Bush -- and it posed an entirely different set of challenges. Minutaglio will discuss writing narrative biographies about lesser-known figures from the past versus writing narrative biographies about people who have been in the public eye. What are the challenges, temptations, pitfalls? What were his editors looking for? What it is like, in the modern media age, to write about figures who live above the cloud line - and what is it like trying to write an objective narrative biography of a powerful person in an increasingly polarized era?

Dianne Solis and Alfredo Corchado

Wasting away in Margaritaville: Where Empty Barstools Tell the Border Tale Better Than Body Counts

Join Dianne Solis and Alfredo Corchado as they take you on their 20-year journey through the backwaters and big cities of Mexico and the United States to tell their tales of hope and heartache. At this session, you'll discover answers to an elusive question: How do you keep stories memorable, even cinematic, amid fatigue over immigration and narco-cartel violence?  You take an empty bar stool in a fabled border bar and give it life even when death is all around. You interview a five-year-old named Jorge in Mesquite, Texas about his father's deportation to a place that even a child knows one must flee. You listen to Taps at a homage to one of the border's most famous battles as it stirs the ghosts of your own past. You turn on your recorder for a balladeer who sings shared songs in the middle of the Rio Grande so folks can remember when they were one people. The Dallas Morning News scribes will discuss their never-ending quest to discover new ballads--narratives that reveal the Mexican and the American experience with deeply felt emotion, drama and other elements of good storytelling. They'll even be a door prize for the most probing question.

Joy Sewing

Fashioning a Beat in a World of Reality TV, Red-Carpet Celebrities and Two-Graph Articles

The battle call for many features beat reporters is to write shorter, blog more and, above all, do what it takes to appeal to the iPhone, You Tube/Facebook generation. So how if you’re trained to tell the story with words, how do you survive? Houston Chronicle fashion and beauty writer discusses the dilemma for many traditional journalists as they try to find a place – and a voice - in the ever-changing world of print journalism. She talks about how the nation’s obsession with celebrities from Brangelina to First Lady Michelle Obama has changed the direction of coverage and how quick videos and photo galleries are as much a part of the story as the written words. With her weekly popular Recessionista column, she’s discovered just how much readers crave information, especially if it comes itemized. But making the lists tell a story is the key. And every now and then, she finds a story that deserves an old-school narrative approach.   

Allen and Cynthia Mondell
Lights, Camera, Action! The Naked Truth about Documentary Story Telling

In their award-winning documentary history about the Great State Fair of Texas, Allen Mondell and Cynthia Salzman Mondell take you on a journey through a corny dog eating contest, a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1923, an Elvis Presley concert in 1956, a pig race and so much more. A Fair to Remember takes you on a roller-coaster ride chronicling the history of the Fair from its inception in 1886 to its destination today as the largest and longest-running Fair in the country.  The filmmaker and writer begin their trip using the same methods-interviews, research online and at the library and observation. Once the subject matter is gathered in their heads and on paper, the tools take them down different paths, but the common ground between storytelling in film and print might surprise you.

Michael Hall

Lost Causes: Finding Great Stories in the Criminal Justice System

Michael Hall, known as Texas Monthly’s “patron saint of lost causes,” has been writing about the Texas criminal justice system for ten years. He's written about innocent men in prison: how and why they got there, how good men and women behaved badly and put them there. And he's written about wrongly convicted innocent men after they got out, and how hard they found freedom. Many of the cases Hall has written about have been lost causes, such as that of Richard LaFuente, an innocent man in federal prison who will most likely serve out the rest of his Life sentence. And he's taken up causes that haven't been so lost after all--two convicts Hall has written about are now free. How does a writer find good cases among the thousands of possibilities? How do you figure out who the real bad guys are? How do you write about shady characters in a way that makes readers care about them. How do you figure out which lost causes are worth fighting, which people are worth profiling, which lost causes are truly lost?

Stephanie Elizondo Griest

The Accidental Memoirist: The Art and Ethics of Living Backward

James Frey. Margaret B. Jones/Seltzer. Misha Defonseca. The Rosenblats. So many sham memoirists crowd the bookshelves these days, even Oprah is growing skeptical. Why does the genre still hold such appeal? We’ll debate this and more with a former AP reporter who, at age 34, has just commenced her third book in the genre. She’ll divulge the pitfalls of memoir writing – such as losing friends and scaring off lovers – as well as its merits. She’ll also discuss the ethical dilemmas she routinely faces on the job. What are the ramifications of putting your family in a literary Petri dish? When do you take “creative license” and when do you call a lawyer? What does it mean to view life as “potential material”? If you’re still willing to take the memoir plunge after this presentation, we’ll conclude with some tips on marketing and publishing your work.

Roger Thurow

Consumed by Hunger

It was true, Roger Thurow discovered, what a veteran worker of the World Food Program had told him on his first day in Ethiopia during the epic famine of 2003: “Looking into the eyes of someone dying of hunger is a disease of the soul. You see that nobody should have to die of hunger.” Thurow had lived in Africa and reported on the continent for years for The Wall Street Journal, but he had never looked. In Ethiopia, he looked, and his life hasn’t been the same since. Writing about hunger, he recognized, had become his calling. For him, all other stories diminished in stature. Nothing else – be it political intrigue or economic meltdown -- measured up to this journalistic outrage: Nobody should have to die of hunger. His coverage of the Ethiopian famine, and others in Africa that year, became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. But, he knew, his soul would never rest if he didn’t look deeper. The result is Enough, a book with his Journal colleague Scott Kilman that examines the shame of our generation: how we brought hunger with us into the 21st Century. Thurow will discuss how to get editors and readers to care as much about a subject as you do.

Julia Reed

The Art of the Narrative Essay
                                  
When you write a narrative essay you are essentially telling a story, and Julia Reed has told plenty: about growing up in the South; about the glories of fried chicken and the relative merits of the hostess gown; about canceling a wedding (and about going through with one); about southerners' tendency toward violence (and church going); about the search for the perfect South Sea pearl and travels with politicians ranging from the now-incarcerated Edwin Edwards to both Bill and Hillary Clinton. In almost thirty years as a journalist, primarily for Newsweek and Vogue, the great majority of her pieces took this form. She'll discuss the importance of the hard-won detail, how to keep from sounding pompous while drawing on your own experiences (key: never take yourself too seriously), and other successful rules of the game. She'll also take you on her own rollicking narrative from her birthplace in the Mississippi Delta to Manhattan and back again to her current home, New Orleans, as well as lots of points in between--and beyond.

Roy Blount Jr.

Alphabet Juice: Getting Physical With Your ABC's

Don't let anybody tell you that the letters and combinations thereof with which we create effects on a page are arbitrary symbols. They have roots and inherent energies, they convey sounds, they make kinesthetic connections: at some level, all English is body English. In writing as in cooking, the more we appreciate our ingredients, the more we can draw out of them. But we can't just chunk them together helter-skelter in a pot, we have to fuss with them some. For instance I'm not entirely pleased with "just chunk them together helter-skelter in a pot." Not to mention, back there in that first sentence, "thereof with which." The great thing about writing -- as opposed to stone-carving or snapping at loved ones -- is that you can keep on changing it, damnit.

Ira Glass

Radio Stories and Other Stories

"This American Life" host and producer, Ira Glass, will give our conferees a chance to look under the hood of his public radio broadcast, showing them what makes for a compelling radio story and what doesn’t. Glass will dissect the process of taking raw material - monologues, interviews, recorded events – and with careful editing and added music, show how he’s able to create compelling narratives.  Glass will also retrace the path that lead him to becoming a storyteller. He'll play clips from his program and recreate the sound of his radio show onstage, with music and quotes and sound.