I received an email today from Carl Abernathy, proprietor of Cahl’s Juke Joint: A rock, blues and jazz blog that features reviews and meditations on an eclectic mix of music. When I first discovered Carl’s blog I remembered being intrigued right away that someone so into music and with such diverse musical tastes would list books by John McPhee and Tracy Kidder among his favorites — both authors are masters of the narrative nonfiction genre — but I had forgotten that Carl works days as a college newspaper adviser. Guess I’m not the only one to mix passions for music and narrative tales. Carl writes:
I like the Nieman narrative writing site, too. I’ve been using bits and pieces from some of the stories in seminars.
A few weeks ago, one of my former students sent me a link to another site that features narrative writing: http://www.gangrey.com/
I don’t like all of the work featured on the site, but it’s a nice resource, too.
Gangrey, “Prolonging the slow death of newspapers,” is a blog with postings by Ben that contain links to stories in various newspapers. As Carl said, some are better than others, but it’s a great way to serendipitously sample the fare in papers around the country. Thanks, Carl.
Most blogs have an About Me link, but no such link for Ben on Gangrey. I did find a link, however, referring to a story on which he had been working, a story, it turns out, that he wrote for the St. Petersburg Times Online/Tampa Bay. I couldn’t tell if he was on staff or a freelancer, but now that I had his full name, Ben Montgomery, I googled him. Guess where his bio blurb showed up! On Neiman’s Narrative Digest. And that brings us full circle to my post from yesterday that precipitated Carl’s email.