(These are end-of-the-day notes from the Harvard Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. I thought I might have a chance to come back and clean them up and flesh them out before now, but it doesn't look as if I'll be able to do that for a while. Too many deadlines, and Christmas looming.)

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Charlie Le Duff, unintelligible. Graves, promoting her own work, eager to talk about scandals, nothing else. DeGregory, I should have stayed for that one.

Met journalists from New Zealand and Denmark, Keri and Tina. Interesting talk about Dubya, world affairs, gender definitions in other nations, women in positions of power in NZ, narrative journalism in Denmark. Ate bad food. Cheese and meat table was raped and pillaged before we got to it. Poor traffic planning at Hyatt, always in conjunction with food and drink. Halberstam excellent. Says study mystery novels for best narrative structure, as they do it best. Likes Michael Connelly, my favorite mystery author.

Readings were mostly disease and disaster, as that gets the ratings, but come on. Loved the comic interludes and Hilton Als was fantastic and brave in his reading titled "marigolds." Susan Orlean appears very self-interested, ego-centric. Reading was ok about Skymall. Funny, though.

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© 2003 m. lucas