AEJMC 2016 Long-form Journalism Panel: Successful Assignments “If you are willing, please share your most successful reading and/or writing assignments. If you would like credit, please include your name so the assignment can be properly attributed to you.”

(1) Capstone Seminar for undergrads in Professional Writing and Technical Communication: Using Jack Hart's Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Narrative Nonfiction as principal text, an 18-25 page narrative nonfiction piece developed around scenes. Additional writing (10-12 pages total): responses to articles on issues in narrative and storytelling. (2) Writing about Place for advanced undergrads and graduate students: Using The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonficton, 6th ed., Root and Steinberg as principal text, I assign the following: (1) 8-12 page essay on a nearby place with significant natural elements; (2) a 12-18 page memoir that emphasizes place; (3) a 4-6 page satirical essay that plays with place (with readings collected from a variety of contemporary sources plus Swift's "A Modest Proposal." Additional writing: brief responses to readings (total 6-7 pages) --Brian Nerney, Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, MN Analysis of a book of their choosing. I recently worked with an Honors Program student to produce a series of articles about an anniversary of a tornado tragedy. As a final product, it is close to 30 typed, double-spaced pages. Essay 1: Comparative essay of 10-12 pages, double spaced and formatted according to MLA Guidelines. This essay is comparative in scope with a focus on collective history and autohistory. Discuss how the two Native American writers Thomas King and Linda Hogan approach the telling of national, tribal, and personal histories and how their storytelling deviates from conventional historiography or the discourse we associate with the discipline of history. Draw from your annotated bibliography, which you can always expand and modify, for theoretical support of your interpretation of these texts. Essay 2: Comparative essay of 15-17 pages, double spaced and formatted according to MLA Guidelines. This is the culmination of your research, essay writing, editing and revising, so take my feedback on Essay 1 as your starting point. The objective of this essay is to compare Solnit, Meloy’s and Bowden’s approaches to literary journalism and life writing. Carefully select some theme both in terms of social issues and poetics to construct a coherent comparative reading. You can limit your references to one section from each of the three primary texts in order to sharpen the focus of your reading. The main topic is the writer’s representation of self in relation to place. You should draw on your annotated bibliography for relevant theoretical lenses to support your close reading, structural analysis, and critical interpretation of writing strategies and poetics. For undergrads: A year-long thesis project. The students choose and develop the topic over two semesters which include applying for grants from the college and presenting the research at the end of the two semesters. They do an element of their reporting in December at 1800 words and the full piece at 6,500 to 10,000 words by May. For grad students: "A Lot About a Plot," for which they research a New York property/building back through its entire history and write the piece, incorporating images of primary documents. These are published each year on Bedford + Bowery, the New York Magazine's website that covers the East Village, Lower East Side, Bushwick, Greenpoint and Williamsburg, nymag.com/bedfordandbowery. (It is produced in our department.) Grad students have three other assignments in this semester-long course. In

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both classes, we read and "chart" or "x-ray" seminal works in the 6,000 to 10,000-word length with an emphasis on those that illustrate a variety superb use of structure and/or writing. Reading Drum writers of the 1950s in South Africa. Reading New Journalism preface by Tom Wolfe and applying to critique. Compare and contrast the following two passages from In Cold Blood and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, outlining the principal features that identify their work as narrative literary journalism and explaining how and to what effect Capote and Didion fuse literary and journalistic techniques in their writing. You must use secondary references and your essay should be about 2,500 words in length. Capote: When Perry said, ‘I think there must be something wrong with us,’ he was making a painful admission ‘he hated to make’. After all, it was ‘painful’ to imagine that one might be ‘not just right’ – particularly if whatever was wrong was not your own fault but ‘maybe a thing you were born with’. Look at his family! Look at what happened there! His mother, an alcoholic, had strangled to death on her own vomit. Of her children, two sons and two daughters, only the younger girl, Barbara, had entered ordinary life, married, begun raising a family. Fern, the other daughter, jumped out of a window of a San Francisco hotel. (Perry had ever since ‘tried to believe she slipped’, for he’d loved Fern. She was ‘such a sweet person’, so ‘artistic’, a ‘terrific’ dancer, and she could sing, too. ‘If she’d ever had any luck at all, with her looks and all, she could have got somewhere, been somebody.’ It was sad to think of her climbing over a window sill and falling fifteen floors.) And there was Jimmy, the older boy – Jimmy, who had one day driven his wife to suicide and killed himself the next. Then he heard Dick say, ‘Deal me out, baby. I’m a normal.’ Wasn’t that a horse’s laugh? But never mind, let it pass. ‘Deep down,’ Perry continued, ‘way, way rock-bottom, I never thought I could do it. A thing like that. And at once he recognised his error: Dick would, of course, answer by asking, ‘How about the nigger?’ Didion: I ask why they ran away. “My parents said I had to go to church,” Debbie says. “And they wouldn’t let me dress the way I wanted. In the seventh grade my skirts were longer than anybody’s—it got better in the eighth grade, but still.” “You mother was kind of a bummer,” Jeff agrees. “They didn’t like Jeff. They didn’t like my girlfriends. My father thought I was cheap and he told me so. I had a C average and he told me I couldn’t date until I raised it, and that bugged me too.” “My mother was just a genuine all-American bitch,” Jeff says. She was really troublesome about hair. Also she didn’t like boots. It was really weird.” “Tell about the chores,” Debbie says. “For example, I had chores. If I didn’t finish ironing my shirts for the week I couldn’t go out for the weekend. It was weird. Wow.” Debbie giggles and shakes her head. “This year’s gonna be wild.” “We’re just gonna let it all happen,” Jeff says. “Everything’s in the future, you can’t pre-plan it. First we get jobs, then a place to live. Then, I dunno.” --Martha Evans I assign long form feature writing assignments in one unit (2,000 words) with a market report to show awareness of audience; and in another unit I assign a piece of creative nonfiction (2000 words) followed by an exegetical essay to critically reflect on genre and process (2000 words). This has worked well. One interesting writing assignment I do is take an excerpt from a work we are studying (a couple of pages) and get students to analyse it in a small group (4-5) and then perform it as a spoken "chorus". I ask them to use a range of techniques like: one person beginning a sentence and another finishing it to emphasise the rhythmic structures; introducing pauses and silences into the text; multiple people reading sections in chorus; introducing movement into the performance of the text; experimenting with volume and emphasis. This kind of perforative reading is a really good way of getting students inside the expressive elements of a writer text. --Dr. Marcus O'Donnell, University of Wollongong

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Students are assigned to write a feature that is "outside their cultural comfort zone." This has resulted in overage of a local Mexican-American soccer league, the trade mission project to Honduras by the local Black Chamber of Commerce and many others. Two of my favorites were written by a Japanese international student who spent a day with a ranch hand hauling hay and a French international student who covered a goat cook-off. --Cheryl Bacon, Abilene Christian University One of the recurring topics of discussion in literary journalism is how an author should manage his or her own presence in a story. As we have seen with Hunter Thompson, a few literary journalists put themselves at the very center of the story (we will see more of this strategy, in a very different tone, in Ted Conover’s decision to write about his experience working as a prison guard). Other writers seem to value their distance and impartiality, and strenuously keep themselves out of the story, remaining nearly invisible. John McPhee is generally thought to be a writer who keeps the focus on his subjects and does not talk much about himself, except in a small number of occasional essays that are explicitly and deliberately autobiographical. And yet throughout his work there is evidence of his authorial hand. A careful reading of McPhee always reveals interesting examples of how he manages his stories, sometimes by making himself a character, but often by subtly shaping the action, as in Encounters. I want you to write an essay on “The Presence of the Author in John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid.” THREE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS, all fueled by students reading Anne Fadiman's THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU and Bill Cheng's SOUTHERN CROSS THE DOG. Stories published in Vox, the local city weekly magazine edited at Mizzou: --Interstate 70, Missouri's Main Street. The freeway was the site of first Interstate project in the U.S. just west of St. Louis. Twelve students were assigned "beats" on 20.9 miles each, running from the entire stretch from the Illinois line at the Mississippi River to across St. Louis west to Kansas City and the Missouri River border with Kansas. (Project underway now.) -- Race on Campus. 14 students spent close to a semester reporting and writing about race relations at Mizzou. They began in August 2015, about two months before tumult erupted at Mizzou last fall, and then continued reporting, writing and revising as the two top leaders of the university and university system resigned after a grad student staged a hunger strike that was supported by the football team that also went on strike. Online, multimedia interviews with the writing class students illuminated what they learned from the project. --First Generation. Fourteen students wrote stories reflecting the range of undergraduates as the first in their family to attend college--close to one in four undergraduates at Mizzou fall into this category. Stories included first person by one class member who had a remarkable story growing up in rural Ozarks town, his ill mother's wish that he go to school even though the family was impoverished due expenses to her cancer treatments. Then a miraculous donor to paid full tuition for the writer who was valedictorian of his tiny high school. Online multimedia interviews of that student's story and interviews with other subjects of the stories complemented the print and online text. READING ABOUT RACE, CLASS AND CULTURE IN LITERATURE OF JOURNALISM GRAD CLASS Includes Ida Barnett-Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman & Luis Rodriguez as part of literature of journalism class. --Berkley Hudson, Associate Professor, Magazine Faculty, Missouri School of Journalism My students are largely English majors. To help drive home the difference between most of the works they study in the curriculum and what they read in my course, I contact people who have been subjects in the stories we read. Several years ago, curious about a story Joe Eszterhas published in Rolling Stone ("Chief Perkins' Fury"), I tracked down one of the marginal characters in the piece. I was curious how closely Eszterhas' highly

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stylized account matched his subject's recollection of events. What followed was an illuminating exchange which underscored some of the license Eszterhas took with the story (nothing, though, amounting to fabrication) while also giving voice to one of its characters. You can't do that with Hamlet, I tell the class. My culminating assignment for the class as a group is the creation of a complex web site centered around a social justice topic. This year's topic is American Wealth Inequality. Past topics have included Food Insecurity in 2015, Peacebuilding Around the World in 2014, Water Issues in 2013, The Arab Spring in 2012, Domestic Violence in 2010, Breaking the Chains of Global Poverty in 2009, Activism by Young Adults in 2008, The Effects of War on the Individual in 2007, Immigration in 2006. I am still struggling with writing assignments and readings. Ask me next spring 2017. Heen Garner; David Marr; David Leser; David Foster Wallace; Joan Didion; Hunter S. Thompson; Janet Malcolm; Virginia Woolf; James Joyce Reading: "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" (Talese) Writing: 1) profile; 2) scene with dialogue The course is pretty straightforward in its structure. First, students write a summary and critical response essay. Then, they write a textual analysis essay. Then, they write a rhetorical analysis essay. Finally, they write a source-integration essay. Along the way, they complete smaller writing assignments. Once exercise asked them to interview three people on campus about how the ongoing "war on terror" has shaped their lives. They then wrote a short essay using the responses from these primary sources as the material for analysis. Hiroshima Last American Hero Wireless operator's account of sinking of Titanic In Cold Blood New Yorker stories: Susan Orleans "Her Town" #1 Not so much a single assignment as it is an approach. Each semester that I taught the LJ course at my previous institution, I used a thematic approach. The class selected a theme, and each of their writing projects had to focus on the theme in some way. They way the justified the theme in their piece was left up to them. Some themes I've used include the following: "Fault Lines" - Stories exploring the themes of age, race, gender, class, geography and how they divide and unite us "Unexamined Lives" - Stories of the unexplored "Think. See. Feel." - The motto for our state's Humanities Council one year. The times were created either 1) by me, 2) by the class at the start of the semester or 2) by the class at the end of the semester, for the students enrolled in the course the next year. One thing I thought would be a good idea would be to take a list of yearbook themes and select a few for the students to choose from as a way to approach their stories. I never got to try that approach out, however. #2 Story Proposals. Before each assignment, students submit a 2- to 3-page description of their nonfiction narrative piece. It includes the following: I. A paragraph describing what the student intends to write about. They must review the assignment guide for the assignment. They are to fully describe their subject, explaining the significance of the topic and how it relates to the semester theme of the course. They must answer the questions "How is this subject connected to the theme?" "Why is this subject worth exploring?" II. A paragraph explaining what readers will gain from reading the piece. Readers of literary journalism expect to be informed and surprised. Even if the subject is familiar or mundane, a writer can still interest readers by presenting it in a way they have never before considered. A student must fully explain what readers should expect to learn from his or her piece. What understanding about the human condition will readers get from the narrative? III. A paragraph explaining the plan of action. The writer must discuss how and when he or she plans to observe their subjects in action or and when they plan to in conduct interviews

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with people involved in your observed subject. They are asked to fill in a calendar on and submit with their proposal. IV. A brief annotated bibliography. The main purpose of observational writing such as literary journalism is to inform readers. They are asked to consult library and database research and list three to five research sources that you plan to use for background information you will incorporate into your piece. The sources should be books or other primary research sources. Briefly summarize the document and explain what information it possesses that you will use in your piece. Use Chicago, MLA, or APA style bibliographic entries for each. After the proposal is submitted, a student has two days to revise/change his or her subject. After that, time, they will have to find a way to make the make the subject work. Once they proposal has been submitted and graded, no changes in subject are allowed. #3 Identifying Details. This is proposed assignment that I thought about after having attended a mystery writer's workshop where we had a session on point of view. No matter how fine the writing, every detail in a literary journalism piece comes from one of the following sources of information: -Observation - Watching people do things; hearing them say things over an extended period of time in various situations and environments -Interviews - Talking with subjects to discuss what you observed, to get a sense of what subjects were thinking and feeling about what they were doing -Research - Exploring the background -- historical, sociological, or other -- of the subject. The fine writing that is a key component of literary journalism comes from the writer's unique presentation of the information gathered. Each creative line in a piece of LJ should be traced to a source of information. There is no "making stuff up." To show this to students, take a section -- a paragraph, a page -- of a piece and go through each sentence. As you do so, ask students which source of information the writer used to craft the sentence. Which information source allowed the writer to be able to present this turn of phrase or description or dialogue? Ideally, this should give students an idea about what kinds of information to collect and suggest possibilities for how they may present the information they collect to write their pieces. It can also give them a sense of how writers go from information to creative presentation of that information in nonfiction narrative, which will inform and enhance their own writing. It should lead to good discussion about how a writer came up with a particular detail or insight into a character's thinking. No need to give my name. I'll likely be in the audience for the presentation, so If you decide that any of these are good ideas to share, I'll know and speak up. James Baldwin's 'Notes of a Native Son' is my most recent but I mention it here because it was the one I was most anxious about (American! nearly a century old! yikes! what relevance down here at the bottom end of Africa??). It turns out to be HUGELY relevant (thanks to Natalie Goldberg's insights) and at least one student has already responded with a stunning piece about her father and why she hates apartheid. Thank you James Baldwin. --I am Gillian Rennie and I teach Writing & Editing in South Africa] Sad to say, the convergence of our journalism program has effectively squeezed out long-form magazine writing. The longest piece of writing students produce in any of my classes is 1,200 to 1,500 words, which I would not call long-form. All our journalism students now learn to shoot and edit still photography and video, to record and edit sound, to package content for various print and digital platforms. This has required new courses, which has squeezed out courses and squeezed new content into old courses. Several so-called legacy forms have suffered, including long-form writing. This is true at the undergraduate and graduate (Master's) levels. The best I can do is require students to read a few long-form pieces, so they at least know what it is and might be inspired to produce work of that sort for our various publications. --Scott Fosdick, San Jose State University, California

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I have them write a personal experience story that incorporates research and interviews with others who were either present, have had the same sort of experience, or could serve as authoritative sources on the experience; a long profile of someone, which includes observing the subject of the profile in various environments and interviewing sources who know the subject; and an enterprise feature about a complex and multi-faceted topic. Anything by Chris Jones from Esquire is a hit! Over the years, students love the story "Prairie Fire" from the New Yorker by Eric Konigsberg. It always provokes lively conversation. Another very successful reading/film is the article "Midnight in the Garden of East Texas" from Texas Monthly by Skip Hollingsworth and the film "Bernie" that Skip wrote. David Sedaris essay on giving up smoking, "Letting go", available via New Yorker May 5, 2008, and included in the book collection "When you are engulfed in flames", is always popular. Sedaris is not a reporter, as such, but his work is full of social detail and the level of craft and story structure is high. I use it as an example of the personal essay, which can segueway into the personal reported essay. Setting a journalism piece together with an exegesis (2000 words each) has worked well both in terms of encouraging critical reflection but also providing feedback to teaching staff. I have previously submitted one. Here's a rough synopsis of another…Your assignment is to write a 4-5 page interpretive analysis of one of the journalistic stories below. Calvin Trillin, "It's Just Too Late" from his book on local murders and deaths, called Killings. John Howard Griffin, the selections from his famous Black Like Me (about a "white" man who posed as an African American); Jon Krakauer, “For the Love of God” about murder, Mormonism, and kidnapping; Michael Lewis, “Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities” (about a kid investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission). Ted Conover, from Coyotes, his book about crossing the US-Mexico border (write on Chapter 1, Chapter 2, or both chapters together). Cristina Rathbone, a chapter from A World Apart, about women in prison. What do I mean by an "interpretive analysis"? Well, I mean: try to assess the impact of the reporting method, and the style, on the interpretive account your work of journalism makes. By this I mean therefore: take account of the literary dimensions of what you read (point of view, narrative structure, any “archive” the writer seems to consult; fold in an understanding of the elements we've talked about (legwork, persona, style, access points, immersion, aporia, “double truths” and so forth; and--where relevant--the “mapping” of place and space; and then and only then assess how and how well the interpretation inside the journalistic story comes to term with what it reports on. Be sure to have an intensive look at a passage somewhere in your paper, and be sure, as well, to balance empathy and critique: your goal (85% of your goal) is to get inside your journalist’s head, methods, and writing style; nevertheless, sympathy improves if it is matched by critique (the other 15%) For class assignments, I often ask the students to bring a 'key' or an 'old photo' with them to class, and then ask them to write about the memories that are invoked by the items. Sometimes, I show silent documentaries and ask the students to write the story. I have worked with students on long-form, in-depth reporting for projects that turned into published books. They were done through on-demand publishers under an imprint launched by our department. The books took on cross-cultural topics beginning with the stories of (and surrounding) a non-profit in Santa Ana that did gang intervention for kids and their families. We did one about Skid Row, about an after-school visual learning

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course in South Central L.A. housing project, and about baseball and young boys in the Dominican Republic. Our most recent was about the fifth year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake and how education, local business and faith were part of the comeback in that country. It was successful because it was student-driven. The books grew out of an upper-division course called Media Narrative Project and each semester we broke the class up into teams of writers, editors, photojournalists and videographers (for a parallel Web site.) We've done literary journalism in a magazine writing class as well, with each student taking on a topic that turned into a magazine that got printed by the end of the semester. I assign students a series of short writing assignments. One focuses on setting, one on character, and one on historical background. Readings: "On duty with Inspector Fields" by Charles Dickens "The Yellow Bus" by Lillian Ross Hiroshima by John Hersey Levels of the Game by John McPhee As of now, I use four books edited or written by me. They are a collection of essays about the form, two collections of professional work by many journalists (including some by me), and a collection of my past student articles that have been previously published. Students do one story on an ordinary life subject and rewrite and re-report it three times, four if publication is likely. Scores of articles have been published from my class over the years and many students have won the annual departmental feature article awards and probably a half-dozen have won Hearst feature writing honors. --Walt Harrington The most successful ones are the stories in which I give them little restriction; meaning that it doesn't have to be about something related to our college, but a subject something true and meaningful in their world. Difficult to say. I find that certain things hit a chord some years and then flop in others. I keep on changing tactics and responding to different cohorts of students trying to find ways to connect them and their lives and experiences to the readings and writings they do. I assign: human experience/personal journalism, profile and sense of place assignments.