Stranger Than Fiction: The Art of Literary Journalism

One of the reasons I didn’t major in journalism is because in my first attempt to take a course in the field, the professor began the class by asking, “What is news?” There followed a ninety-minute discussion of possible definitions, as a bunch of squirming eighteen-year-olds tried to come up with something that sounded serious enough to please the professor. At the end of that first class, the professor smiled smugly and said, “Well, of course, it can’t be defined.” I, for one, was steamed. I thought, “Then why in the hell did you waste ninety minutes of my precious time on this Earth trying to define something that can’t be defined?” And so I majored in history. But after working for newspapers and magazines, I became a journalism professor and I usually toss out that little anecdote at the beginning of every class. It’s my way of saying that we’re not here to waste time, but that a lot of what we do cannot be nailed down. We can’t say we have the definitive answer, because one may not exist. This course is my take on literary journalism. It’s about this kind of storytelling, but it’s clearly told through my eyes. Take this elephant over to someone else and he or she might have a different idea. But this is the way I see it, and I hope this is helpful as you develop your own way of seeing.