Pastor in Chief from Time’s Nancy Gibbs and Michel Duffy has a perfect anecdotal opening:
You have to climb a steep and narrow road, past the moonshiners’ shacks and dense rhododendrons and through the iron gates to get to the house on the mountaintop that Ruth Graham built after her husband Billy became too famous to […]
Why do men kill their wives? from the Boston Globe provides a great example of an effective anecdotal lead:
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, LISA HARTWICK WAS RIDING IN AN elevator in Boston when she overheard a conversation between two men. One of the men was going through a divorce, and he was venting to his […]
Shelley Gare’s Weekend Austraian Magazine cover story on Melbourne Chef d’jour Shannon Bennett isn’t a ground breaking piece of literary journalism but it is a very good example of a lively, meticulously researched and well structured profile that also tells a wider story.Gare inserts a bit too much of herself into the feature for my […]
Sharon Weinberger’s extraordinary feature for the Washington Post Magazine about “TIs” - people who belive they are “Targeted Individuals” of government mind control experiments - is a fine example of suspending judgement and allowing a sympathetic portrait to emerge from an unusal story. She does not avoid the humour in the story but she never […]
Time has slipped passed. The suite of faint sounds that tell me the guy upstairs is home has stopped. Now it is just the roar of the waves that come and go, with fierce full-moon tides. And the occassional car. And the sound of the night, that silence in between.
Thomas Curwen’s narrative about Johan Otter’s encounter with a grizzley bear is one of those features that grabs you and wont let you go - just like the grizzley in attack mode:
JOHAN looked up. Jenna was running toward him. She had yelled something, he wasn’t sure what. Then he saw it. The open mouth, the […]
