Longreads

How Reporting Creates Change: A Conversation with Pamela Colloff

Pamela Colloff is an award-winning reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. She recently spoke with Brendan O’Meara for the Creative Nonfiction podcast about why writing is and should be hard, dealing with self-doubt, and more. Check out a short sample of their conversation and be sure to read the full piece. 

Brendan: What do you make of the fact that regardless of how skilled, experienced, and accomplished you become as a writer, it’s still really, really hard? And yet writers put together amazing work that creates change, and if not change, at least true art that makes meaning.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

In this week's Top 5:

* Climbing catastrophe (The New Yorker) * The game of parenting (Virginia Quarterly Review) * Avian appreciation (Guernica Magazine) * The sons of spies (The Atlantic) * Respect for raccoons (Literary Hub)

Q: What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?

A: Go report. Talk to an actual person. Reality has a useful habit of ruining your elegant but incorrect idea and replacing it with a messier, better one.

Up on Longreads today is an excerpt from Kyle Devine's new book, Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change, published by @versobooks. As vinyl’s popularity has surged over the decades, so has scrutiny of its environmental cost, and the music industry’s efforts to address it. In this excerpt, Devine visits a record-pressing plant, taking a look at one business working to green the industry.

Billy is keenly aware of the problems of plastic pollution, and he knows what it means to make records from petroleum products. 'People talk about vinyl and wax, and it sounds cool,' he says, 'but there is no getting around that vinyl records are PVC and every one that I make adds to the plastic in the world.

Our Top 5 reads:

ㆍConcrete memories, Places Journal ㆍGrief science, @newyorker ㆍCaptive cats, The Narwhal ㆍRelentless pain, The Common ㆍMyth meets reality, @theatlantic

Recently, Brendan O'Meara sat down with Susan Orlean for the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, where the pair engaged in a wide-ranging, thoughtful conversation about her new memoir, Joyride, why it's important to cultivate curiosity and resilience and a writer. 

Check out this short soundbite from the episode and be sure to read the excerpt. 

 "What motivates me is a very optimistic, very joyful commitment to the idea that the more you learn of the world the better, whether it’s subjects that disturb you, something that surprises you, delights you." 

The People Who Know Too Much: A Reading List on Amateur Experts

"To care intensely about one narrow subject is to reject the idea that value must be broad, immediate, or easily monetized. So while fixation can seem bizarre, it is also to resist the thinning of attention that modern life demands."

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Joseph Trinidad’s new essay collection, Lucky Creatures, published by @sarabandebooks. In “The Cousin Returns,” Trinidad, a Filipino writer based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington, recounts a visit home to the Philippines:

The last time I was in Cabuyao, there weren’t townhouses, private swimming pools, or major shopping malls in the area. It was long stretches of grassland. There wasn’t the fluorescent glow of fast-food chains every three minutes. There weren’t as many potholes. In the name of progress, much of the town, like everywhere in its vicinity, is dragged through time.

A blip, a turn, and suddenly, I’m in a present I no longer recognize. Exhausted, my mind retreats toward sleep.

I can never truly return.

Visit Longreads to read “The Cousin Returns.”

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

In this week's Top 5:

* Quiet, please (The New Yorker) * An ode to art (The New York Review of Books) * The value of vultures (The Washington Post) * The Big Ea(t)sy (Oxford American) * A marginal conversation (The Yale Review)

Author Lavinia Spalding has edited The Best Women's Travel Writing series seven times, so she's learned a thing or two about strong travel narratives and writing about place. “I see how stories suffer when a writer attempts to fit the play-by-play of an entire experience into a few thousand words,” she says. "I remind myself that it’s almost always more effective to focus on just one illuminating slice of an experience and bring that to life on the page, excavating it for the inner story and zooming in close, so I can move beyond shallow observations.  Spalding takes us behind the scenes of volume 13, published this week by Travelers’ Tales. She considered more than 1,600 submissions for this edition and ultimately curated 27 stories—a collection of essays written by best-selling authors Susan Orlean and Roxane Gay, as well as emerging writers who have never been published.

Friction: A Reading List on Why Inconvenience Can Be Meaningful

We prize convenience and efficiency, almost to a fault. Sometimes, though, we're missing out on surprise, serendipity, and anticipation when we avoid friction. Courtney E. Martin brings us five reads that examine the pros and cons of life's little hurdles.

This week’s Longreads Top 5:

Reign makers, Harper’s Magazine

Board brothers, The New York Times

Filling blanks, The American Scholar 

War games, The New York Review

Field dreams, @fastcompany

The new @atavist issue, by investigative journalist Barry Meier, is stranger than fiction. 

The McCanns vanished, as did Sally and Steve. It wasn’t that hard; they were living in the golden age of fugitives. Passports were easy to counterfeit, hotels and airlines took cash, and there weren’t cell phones or personal computers that authorities could track.

The Grate Cheese Robbery 

One chancer, who was stopped at the Russian border near Kaliningrad, was found to be carrying 1000 lbs of imported cheese. He valiantly claimed personal use, but the authorities didn’t buy it. Another, traveling from Finland, had stuffed 67 wheels of cheese into the side compartments of his Volkswagen.

Getting Unstuck with Ramona Ausubel

Writing well is hard! Today at Longreads, we've got an excerpt of episode 528 of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, in which host Brendan O'Meara talks with author Ramona Ausubel about getting unstuck in your writing projects, developing your voice, and embracing friction.  

Students constantly ask, so what do you do about writer’s block? You keep writing, you find a specific and small entry point and you continue on. There is no moment when that stops happening to you. For the most part, most of us have to say, okay, I’m in this dark place, it’s all foggy, I can’t see anything. What do I have? I have a sense of who this character is. I have a sense of the space of the world, and there’s like, 100 flashlights hanging on the wall. Why? I don’t know. Let’s see what we can do with all of those things. It’s just that next little step, and the next little step opens it up a little bit further, and you might get to another stuck place that’s different than the one before. But again, you’re going to look at what you have and keep moving forward. There’s 101 ways of creating that one small step forward, so that it doesn’t feel like a giant impossible task. But it’s a continuous act of discovery, which is not only not a problem, but a good thing. It’s the fun part. So not knowing also means that you get to discover so much more. You just have to keep asking again: Where am I? What am I interested in? What would be the next most fun thing, and what do I have in front of me that I can work with?