Editor’s Corner
March 6, 2009
Transformations
By
Constance Hale
Welcome to a reinvented Nieman Narrative Digest. Our new look has been in the works for the last few months, and we will roll out more changes over the next few. You, our readers, have informed many of our choices. Our webmaster, Barbara McCarthy, spearheaded the redesign.
The first change you’ll notice is that we now feature multiple stories. In addition to the “Notable Narrative,” you will find “Another Good Read” and one or two stories “From the Archives.” Sometimes these additions will converse with the lead narrative; at other times all the pieces will be discrete.
We’ve been stealthily revising other sections of the site—streamlining some and amplifying others—to provide helpful resources to working narrative journalists. The ways you can search for stories has also undergone change. And we’ll soon be offering “Classic Narratives” written by everyone from literary lions to young Turks.
One thing will not change: We will continue to cull through submissions for strong stories that allow us to unpack the secrets of narrative journalism. This month we have selected a series from The Los Angeles Times that places a profile of a complicated Catholic priest within a profile of a complicated country.
Christopher Goffard’s “The collar and the gun” contains the essence of every good profile: paradox. In his subject, Goffard found a psychological mystery in a tangle of contradictions: “There had always been two John Kaisers” Goffard writes, “at times coexisting uneasily. Growing up on a Minnesota dirt farm, he lavished as much attention on the rifle sights in his war drawing as on the sheep’s wool in a schoolhouse nativity scene. During a peacetime stint with the 82nd Airborne at Ft. Bragg, N.C., he was the gung-ho soldier who mastered bayonet thrusts, leapt in the skies from a Flying Boxcar and knelt in the chapel wondering if he could take a life.”
Coincidentally, the second story that rose to the top of the pack was also a psychological mystery, this one about a French imposter. David Grann’s New Yorker profile of Frédéric Bourdin, a thirty-year-old Frenchman who serially impersonated children, portrays this self-proclaimed “chameleon” in gripping detail. After pleading guilty in a Texas courtroom to perjury, Bourdin does time and then undergoes what he claims is his final transformation: into a happily married telemarketer in Le Mans who becomes, with the birth of a daughter, simply “a father.”
Enjoy the transformed Digest, and send us your thoughts, your comments, and your submissions.