From time to time I look back at the stories we’ve published over the past ten years – first as The Big Roundtable and since 2019 as the Delacorte Review – to see if I can detect patterns that would allow me to define what kind of stories we run. People ask and I’d like to be able to come up with a pithy reply.
But beyond all the pieces being works of original narrative nonfiction, they are, truth be told, all over the place.
We seldom run stories pegged to the news or an event. We do not much care about word length; we’ve published stories that are 2000 words long and one that weighed in at 50,000.
We are, I suppose, guilty of the publishing sin of not being topical. Our stories exist because a writer decided she or he needed to tell it.
But when I looked through our archive the other day a pattern did begin to emerge: a good many of our stories are deeply personal.
They are written in the first person.
The writer is often the central character.
And yet, they are always about something more.
One of the difficult tasks of being a publisher is having to say no. Yes, it is part of life as a writer; but rejecting a piece, especially one that comes to us fully written is hard in that you know how much work and hope went into it.
I suspect some of those writers have looked at our backlist of stories, seen what I have seen, and concluded that their story would make a good fit.
Sometimes the problem is in the execution – in the writing, or reporting, or sense of how to tell a story a reader cannot put down. But in talking to my colleague Cissi Falligant, who reads our submissions, there is almost always something more important missing: curiosity about people and places beyond oneself.
An event, a turn of fortune has happened to the writers of these stories and they feel compelled to tell about it. Often it is sad, or painful. It happened to them. And that, unfortunately, is where the story stops: with them.
I took a deeper dive at some of our most personal – and widely read; audiences react as editors do – stories. In each instance, the writer had encountered trauma: dislocation; addiction; female genital mutilation; or confinement. The stories were dominated by their experiences. But somehow, in recounting their particular journeys, these writers felt the need to pause and introduce people they met, or things they saw that were adjacent to but outside of their own experiences.
Yes, they were focused on themselves. But not exclusively. And because they didn’t, because their stories reflected a curiosity beyond their circumstances, they grew in depth, and in heart. It made the stories better.
I’ve culled through our archive to find some examples of what I mean.
Here is Rachel Pieh Jones in The Proper Weight of Fear, describing life in Somalia, a nation she had fled and to which she later returned.
My first day in Boroma, population 40,000 to 80,000 depending on the flow of nomadic camel trains and the seasons: helpless. Redefining normal.
I needed to figure out how to feed my kids. No refrigerator. No cans of Ragu or pre-frozen meatballs. Not even any ground beef or jars of dried spices. In Boroma, tomato sauce came in tomatoes. Beef came in fly-covered slabs over bloodied wooden tables and I would learn to grind it myself. Spices came in their natural form. I walked to the market with the Somali woman we expected to hire as a housekeeper. As we maneuvered over the jagged winding path dotted with cacti, I felt small pebbles hit the backs of my calves. Two children stood in the narrow doorway of an aqal, a nomadic home built from sticks and cloth. They grinned and waved and tossed stones my direction. In Boroma, welcome came in stones against my skin.
In Damage, Mariya Karimjee wrote about the enduring emotional and physical pain of female circumcision. She also wrote a lot about her mother.
My mother’s expression was unreadable, cloaked in an emotion I knew but could not name. I was terrified that my question made no sense, that I’d have to clarify further. Then, as a beat passed without her responding, I realized I was even more scared that it had made perfect sense. That she’d been expecting this question since I was seven years old.
My mother’s explanation came out as fumbled as my initial question, something about women not being sexual and shortening my clitoris.
“You removed the part of me that makes me feel good while having sex?” I asked. Our Bodies Ourselves, and some of the Internet articles I’d read, gave me the confidence to say this last part. At sixteen, I thought I knew exactly what had been taken away from me, even if I wouldn’t have any idea what this really meant for another five years.
“I didn’t have a choice,” said my mother. “It happened to me too.”
Lisa Whittemore’s account of her life as an addict Heroin: A Love Story drew in the stories of others she encountered.
My friend Curtis met me at the airport and whisked me off to begin my clean-up plan. Curtis and I had been close since the early 1980’s. I had revealed portions of the truth to him. Curtis had been a regular visitor to my home in Venice, so he had witnessed some of the debauchery, the drugs, and the chaos. There was always an element of wry aloofness about Curtis; he always appeared more mature and reserved than the rest of us. While we stage-dove into the writhing masses at Black Flag concerts, Curtis, in a trench coat, with his dark, hooded eyes, remained recessed in the back of clubs. Watching intently from the perimeter, he calculated and assessed the shifting gears and interlocking pieces of punk rock. Curtis had since managed to create an empire at Taang Records, reaping a fortune from music no one saw a future in. He was a keen observer who went after what he wanted with silent deliberation. I knew I could rely on him not to divulge my secret.
Neither of us were strangers to the excessive drug use that permeated our circle, but Curtis kept his consumption at bay.
And in My Purgatory Kevin Heldman ended his story of coming of age in rehab facilities by finding the people with whom he had grown up. Among them a woman named Tara.
That girl is gone. Fifteen years later, when I met her, she was on-and-off-again homeless, sleeping on the streets of the Lower East Side. She had serious drug and psychiatric problems, a hardened version of a 15-year-old CDC girl still trapped in a 15-year-old girl world: her mother still threatening to throw her out of the house. I spent eight hours following her around the city in the freezing cold as she ran around like she was possessed, hugging homeless men she knew, racing around trying to find blankets or clothes to warm them. She was also on a mission: obsessed with pulling the plastic covering off of baby carriages, to save the children from suffocating. She already served a year in Rikers for this, but she won’t stop.
We parted in Penn Station with the requisite CDC hug which felt unusually meaningful; it was the only connection we made all day. Tara was eventually arrested and spent three years in jail on vague kidnapping charges (trying to save those suffocating babies).
These are not walk-ons by a supporting cast, or a bit of scene-setting. There is a depth to these sections, along with a desire on the writer’s part to either transport you or to make an introduction. These places and people matter to the writers, and come to matter to readers, too.
What happened to you, the writer, matters, and perhaps there is a story in it. But the difference between a story and a diary entry is that a story teller captures both what is taking place internally and externally.
They are not just feeling and remembering. They are listening and looking at everything and everyone around them.
***
Fittingly, our newest story, In Limbo In Tbilisi by Masha Udensiva-Brenner is at once deeply personal and expansive. Masha, who was born in Russia, tells the stories of Russian expatriate dissidents who now find themselves in the Georgian capital, caught between a home where it is unsafe to return, and an uncertain future elsewhere.
Think Casablanca.
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We’ll be off next week. See you on November 10th.
Shapiro was the best teacher students could have-- he cared about us after, long after we graduated.
I owe my whole career to him; same is true of many many of his students.
Honestly, I would've hung it up if it wasn't for him-- at the time I came out of school, with no work experience & a recession, there was no way into a good journalism job (tried working in cheerleader business journalism, only jobs available, lasted a month) unless you had a very very good in.
I wanted to write, report so badly at that time, was young and so hungry, had all this passion and energy and there was just nothing. That feeling of frustration, feeling stifled after 5 years of living and breathing journalism in college and grad school and then all of a sudden nothing -- so hard, drives you crazy.
Was working construction and staying up all night every night sending packages to every newspaper in America and a few overseas. And nothing.
Miserable depressing bored as hell 8 hour days of manual labor with headphones on listening to books on tape to keep me sane.
Shapiro ran into me by chance when I was selling books on the street for a couple of days at a table I set up near Columbia (also struggling financially so I'm trying to hustle).
He was appalled. He believed in me so much, believed I had talent and I should be writing and he did something about it, he did a lot about it.
He gave me a life. Can't thank him enough.
And I'm not the only one.