A Focus on Facts: The Value of Nonfiction Conferences for Literary Nonfiction Writers

Someplace around Leominster, Mass., my fellow drivers began to acquire the characteristics for which the state is known. The speed limit was 45 miles an hour, but my speedometer registered well over 70. Vehicles of all sizes slid sideways between one another. Not for the first time, I questioned why I was heading into the heart of Boston to force myself to make small talk with strangers.

In fact, I decided late last fall that I would attend this year’s conference jointly sponsored by Boston University and the Boston Globe, called The Power of Narrative: Telling True Stories in Turbulent Times. It seemed like a good idea. Over the course of 2017, I’d completed my graduate work, boosted my business to some level of sustainability, and spent three months driving from Maine to British Columbia, North Dakota to New Mexico, researching my book-in-progress. By late November, stuck in the northeastern U.S., I needed some sort of creative anticipation to lead me through the sure-to-be-icy winter. Which is why, on the Friday morning after the fourth of March’s Nor’easters, I tossed a small suitcase and my computer bag into the car. I took the long way through eastern New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts, trying to avoid that special breed of drivers for as long as possible, and hoping to drop into Boston by way of a smaller and less-crowded route than its crosses and loops of freeways. For the most part, I succeeded.  

What is it, really, that’s so darn special about nonfiction conferences?

More writers than not seem to be introverts of varying levels. I personally like the idea of people quite a bit. Actual humans in large numbers trigger an allergic reaction. In addition, nearly every writer who has studied the craft has been reminded of the quip that Ernest Hemingway may or may not have delivered: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” For nonfiction writers, debatable Hemingway quotes notwithstanding, that may seem even more true. After all, memoirists write things they already know. All other nonfiction writers research things they don’t know and then write them down. How hard can this be? And how much can there possibly be to discuss? Well. For nonfiction writers—purists of the opinion-editorial and news reporting varieties, as well as artistes of the narrative type—there are two different crafts to hone. Failing to pay attention to one leads to poor prose and a structural collapse. Failing to pay attention to the other leads to lawsuits and the potential destruction of a career.

What I needed was to tap the rich vein of righteous indignation, adrenaline, and purpose that often runs through gatherings of journalists.

Clearly, one of the crafts I’m describing is writing. Narrative storytelling techniques are making their way out of books and magazines and into shorter-form articles—not to mention audio and video channels. Learning how to blend exposition into the storyline, how to chop and dash turns of phrase to keep the story moving, how to structure a piece of writing to make it intriguing or inspiring to read, how to place the reader into the setting and introduce them to each aspect of a character—these are the writing skills that both nonfiction and fiction writers sculpt and mold throughout our careers. The other craft, though, is that of fact-finding and truth-telling. While a fiction writer might need to conduct research, it’s often fairly broad. Enough to know the world wherein the characters live and the action takes place. A nonfiction writer needs to have the know-how to track down leads, vet facts, verify reports, interview sources—and to determine exactly what words they need to capture. They need to weigh their options as they assemble a story that echoes the airtightness of a legal case or the emotion of a witness’s testimony. Like many conferences, The Power of Narrative offered a blended program with broad appeal. For hard journalists used to writing assiduous third-person accounts with as much objectivity as they can muster, expert-led breakout sessions provided tips about narrative techniques. For literary-savvy attendees, speakers revealed interview tips that might help win the trust of sensitive subjects and ways to vet facts before ever typing words on screen. Wild card sessions introduced new developments in podcasting, addressed time management for writing-as-a-side-gig, provided master classes in pitching, and more. As Barry Newman, a longtime writer at the Wall Street Journal, explained in his first-session breakout, the goal of attending conferences is just to “rub shoulders with some folks and maybe pick up a few useful tips.” In other words, a professional conference is not intended to be life changing. It’s intended to offer a bit of a boost, perhaps some refreshers, and possibly a few business cards. I found the expectation-setting reassuring, since I held neither the wide-eyed desire to be dazzled evident in the packs of journalism undergrads weaving through the hall, nor the bleary-eyed world-weariness of the professional reporters in attendance. Newman’s comments also served as a reminder that conferences take many different forms. Those focused on literary writing may use more of a workshop approach. Those focused on the nonfiction aspect may provide more of a backbone for the responsibilities of the genre.

It reminds us that we are responsible for truth-telling and exposing unseen stories to the cold, hard stare of the masses.

In either case, the value of the conference comes down to the needs of each individual attendee. I have a “day job” that involves helping businesses and nonprofit organizations communicate with their audiences. My literary nonfiction efforts, for the last three years and the immediate future, focus on lessons learned from a man who has spent the last 40 years or so being subjected to human right violations in a country that doesn’t have a free press. This soon after completing my graduate work and benefitting from dedicated attention to the literary side of things, I didn’t need a workshop. With my writing pace slowed by security concerns for my characters overseas, pitch sessions would have been a waste of time. What I needed was to tap the rich vein of righteous indignation, adrenaline, and purpose that often runs through gatherings of journalists. This is the value of the nonfiction conference. It brings us, as writers, back to scratch, reminding us that all forms of the genre—from essays to poetry to memoir to narrative to reportage and beyond—are held to the same basic standards, in terms of ethics and rigor. It reminds us that we are responsible for truth-telling and exposing unseen stories to the cold, hard stare of the masses. Whether trained journalists or not, literary nonfiction writers round out the canon of voices delivering viewpoints and nuggets of knowledge. Unlike our reporter colleagues, who are challenged to take their personal views out of their work, we leverage our individual impressions of color and emotion to bring facts off the page and convey them as truths. Yet, putting “literary” before “nonfiction” sometimes opens the door to a type of navel-gazing artistic self-aggrandizement that is at odds with the very heart of the genre. “Narrative can be the enemy of truth.” That’s the way HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen—former editorial director for NYT Global at The New York Times—addressed the issue. In her quest to elevate the pure reporting element of HuffPost’s news division, she’s leading the editorial team to identify when a narrative or literary approach is appropriate for a story, and when a topic demands a straight-forward research and reporting strategy. It's this sort of call to self-awareness that a nonfiction conference can offer those of us knee-deep in our own research and writing, fact-checking and source vetting. In a space surrounded by others who constantly balance function and form, we’re free to consider what it is that we’re doing. What’s the purpose? Why am I making the choices I am? Have I buried the facts that my reader will need? Am I being responsible in the way I’m telling this story? With his keynote address, Don Van Natta, Jr.—perhaps unwittingly—triggered exactly these sorts of questions from the audience. An alumnus of The New York Times and the Miami Herald—and now senior investigative reporter at ESPN The Magazine—Van Natta spent much of his time relating the events of the summer he spent winning the trust of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones over countless glasses of Johnnie Walker Blue. While the story is a grand example of Gay Talese’s “hanging around” approach to source cultivation and observational journalism, it made for a self-awareness and ethics check in the conference setting. “So, do you think you could have gotten the story without drinking?” That question really raised three issues. Would alcohol cloud writers’ perceptions of things they observed? There’s a long and well-documented history of alcohol abuse among journalists—would someone committed to sober living have the same opportunity Van Natta did? Did the extensive informal contact cross the line from reporter to pal and compromise the story’s integrity? After some dancing around the issue of “fitting in” while hanging around, Van Natta conceded that drinking had probably been a requirement for winning Jones’s trust. Perhaps it’s the exploration of those blurry lines at a nonfiction conference that’s most valuable to the literary nonfiction writer. After all, while Van Natta had to be careful not to get too close to his subject, I had to become comfortable with the idea of placing myself into my writing as a character—which required me to get very close to some of my most important sources. Close enough that my main character’s granddaughter calls me “Aunt JoAnn” and demands the giving of hugs and reading of storybooks when I visit her home. The literary aspect of my writing allows me to cast those interactions as a revealing part of my story.

How I’ve brought them to the verge of tears and seen their blank expressions when they face the doors in their memories they dare not open—and how I will not ask them to open those doors.

In another keynote session, Boston Globe journalist Sacha Pfeiffer chatted with her counterpart from The New York Times, Emily Steel, about the challenges of writing about sexual abuse, assault, and power. Pfeiffer is a member of the acclaimed Spotlight team that won the Boston Globe its 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service “for its courageous, comprehensive coverage of sexual abuse by priests, an effort that pierced secrecy, stirred local, national and international reaction and produced changes in the Roman Catholic Church.” Steel—with her colleagues—investigated the systematic cover-up of sexual misconduct on the part of Fox News network leaders that forced the eventual resignation of political commentator Bill O’Reilly. Paper arguments, the reporters explained, were at the heart of both stories. Their teams connected the dots between disparate sources and files until they had a substantial sense of clarity about what had happened in each situation. From there, they segued into the rationale for pushing their sources toward near-clinical descriptions of rape and abuse. Both agreed that in the world of daily news reporting, specific words captured on the record and in quotes were critical to audience understanding of the true horror the survivors experienced. (In one of the movie Spotlight’s most memorable scenes, Rachel-McAdams-as-Pfeiffer is shown having this very conversation during an interview with one of the church abuse survivors.) Both women explained that their language choices required detailed thought about how far to push their sources—and awkward conversations with their majority male editorial teams about what words needed to be in print and whether or not they violated the papers’ vulgarity guidelines. Again, their earnest assertions brought me back to the freedom and workarounds available to the literary nonfiction writer, but not to a reporter. I thought of Sebastian Junger’s classic moment in The Perfect Storm, when he deftly turns from the last hard facts about his characters’ lives to a graphic expository section on the process of drowning, based on the experiences of those who have survived or studied it, leaving the reader in open-mouthed horror at the way the crew of the Andrea Gail most likely met their end. I also recalled the technique I’ve settled on to preserve my characters’ dignity while helping my audience understand the nature of torture that’s commonplace in the prison where they were held. How I’ve brought them to the verge of tears and seen their blank expressions when they face the doors in their memories they dare not open—and how I will not ask them to open those doors. How I have the freedom to veer sideways into the testimony about the torture practices in that very same prison during that very same timeframe, provided by a host of other survivors. It doesn’t escape me that at least one of those survivors was, himself, a journalist. And, coincidentally, that I had met one of his colleagues that afternoon and was sitting next to her during Pfeiffer and Steel’s session. It’s these tangents of thought and connection that allow conferences to influence the genre of literary nonfiction. In a space that is, by and large, free of the daily demands on time and brainpower, a writer can compare approaches, weigh values, and make introductions that may be valuable in the moment or long into the future.

When we, as writers, and the people around us, get too focused on ourselves and our “art,” nonfiction conferences remind us that it’s the story at the heart of the genre.

I tend to rebel against the notion of celebrity. It’s a heavy weight to put on someone else’s shoulders. To me, Andy Warhol was a genius not because he was an extraordinary artist, but because he painted images of 32 Campbell’s soup cans, called the work Campbell’s Soup Cans, convinced large numbers of people that there was something meaningful about it, and then laughed all the way to the bank. I see it as a giant middle finger to the intelligentsia. Sometimes, it’s just 32 soup cans and the audience can make of it what they will. When we, as writers, and the people around us, get too focused on ourselves and our “art,” nonfiction conferences remind us that it’s the story at the heart of the genre. They also remind us that the ways of practicing our craft are as varied in form and type as the number of writers. At no time was that more evident than during a live interview with best-selling essayist and commentator Roxane Gay, whose editors have often tried to guide her toward framing her work around current events—providing a peg, or hook, for her readers. "I hate that word, peg. 'What are you going to peg it to?' I'm gonna peg it to fuck all, that's what." We sometimes need to be reminded of the bedrock of facts that supports literary nonfiction as a genre—and nonfiction conferences offer that moment outside the day-to-day. Beyond that, though, we build the truths as we see them. We’re free to choose and define our own approaches. We can be brash about our work, as Gay is. We can be perfunctory. We can be precious. We can be gentle. We can be shocking. We can be ourselves.