Literary Tidbits

Julia Flynn Siler, who wrote the bestselling House of Mondavi, has started a blog. She’s at the Neiman Narrative Nonfiction Conference in Boston and her reports are fascinating.

Garrison Keiller pens an ode to San Francisco. His sweet spot? A café on Irving Street in the Sunset.

“It was a glorious four days and I didn't even go to the beach. I just sat in a coffee shop on Irving Street near Golden Gate Park and smelled spring and watched the passing parade of youth.

Everybody in my coffee shop seemed to be in their 20s, locked into laptops, clicking and dragging, jumping to new links, sending IMs while text-messaging with the left hand, and the sheer volume of communication was impressive to behold. Here I was, chugging along writing a novel in which a guy meets up with his own mortality and is shocked into an outburst of passion, a sort of coming-of-old-age novel, typing taptaptaptap, and all around me beautiful young people were disseminating information in all directions by all media.”

The future of conversation is noise. Read Bay Area freelancer Dan Fost’s incredible article on how Twitter and social networking is changing lectures, conferences, and other gatherings.

Bay Area Reporter to Head up Neiman Program on Narrative Journalism

Constance Hale, a longtime Bay area journalist and former editor of Wired and Health magazines, has just been appointed the new director of the Neiman Program on Narrative Journalism at Harvard University.

Hale got this job after setting up a series of fantastic conferences at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, including the one that David Halberstam spoke at in April right before his death. She is an accomplished teacher and freelance writer as well, with her stories appearing in the Atlantic Monthly, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, among others.

With so many journalists losing their newspaper jobs because of cutbacks, the world may soon see a spurt of narrative nonfiction books. Connie will now be at the center of this world, organizing the well-respected Neiman Conference on Narrative Nonfiction that occurs every December, working on a website devoted to narrative, and reaching out to newsrooms to encourage narrative.

“For years, the Nieman Foundation has done a superb job of nurturing top reporters in traditional media,” Hale said in a press release. “But newsrooms across the country are now in turmoil and journalists have new, urgent questions about how to tell stories. I look forward to helping them explore new ways to report stories and bring insight and skill to everything from print to video, from broadcast to podcast.”

I’ve known Connie for years through a loose association of freelance journalists. I think she is a wonderful fit for the job.