Memorable writing - on grief, mass shootings and a papal document on climate change

A few pieces of recent writing on different subjects have struck me as particularly powerful.

On grief was a Facebook post by Sheryl Sandberg written 30 days after her husband Dave Goldberg died and for the Washington Post, Juliet Eilperin wrote "What it was like to cover Beau Biden’s funeral" about her experience as a White House pool reporter. The Sandberg piece obviously more personal, but both really profound.

About the recent murder of nine in a Charleston, SC church were two pieces, one written and one for TV, with similar refrains. For Esquire, Charles Pierce wrote the incredibly good "Charleston Shooting: Speaking the Unspeakable, Thinking the Unthinkable" and there's six amazing minutes from Jon Stewart with this link containing both the Daily Show video and a few sentences out of him talking.

In another totally different category was writing on the recent Pope Francis document around climate change with another Charles Pierce piece for Esquire titled "Pope Francis Drops the Hammer on Climate Change" and Bill McKibben for the New York Review of Books writing "Pope Francis: The Cry of the Earth," with both pieces about just how influential this document from the Pope could be.

GQ piece by Paterniti on Spanish restaurant & Esquire by Pierce on Elizabeth Warren

Recent issues of GQ and Esquire had two really sold pieces of recent feature magazine writing to note here. From GQ, Michael Paterniti wrote about the Spanish restaurant Mugaritz and Charlie Pierce for Esquire did a fairly lengthy story on Elizabeth Warren.

Paterniti's recent writing is heavy on great description and feeling and this very much comes through in the GQ feature and while Pierce also an excellent writer, I'm most fascinated in the Esquire profile for who it's about in the Massachusetts Senator frequently talked about as a presidential candidate.

Racism in Italian Soccer Piece by Wright Thompson

Published last week for ESPN was a great feature by Wright Thompson with "When the Beautiful Game Turns Ugly". I've posted on and linked to a number of pieces by Thompson and he combines excellent writing with what appears to be a tremendous amount of reporting, with him noting on Twitter spending "34 days from leaving home until the story running" along with the below note and pic...

twitter.com/wrightthompson…

— Wright Thompson (@wrightthompson) June 8, 2013

Subtitle to the piece is "A journey into the world of Italy's racist soccer thugs" and one of the things Thompson does is look at how the recent spike in ugliness from fans towards black players coincides with larger trends that are inspiring hatred and violence. From the story was "I got sent to write about racism, which I found in staggering amounts. But Italy isn't like America, and racism there is tied into a thousand years of feuds, and hatred of anyone different, even if they're from only a few miles away, and fascism, and the recent wave of immigration."

Along these lines, the story reminds me of both how I've heard about a recent increase in xenophobia throughout Europe and blog post I wrote two years ago which linked to some very well done writing around what could be labeled "politics of discontent" and how the causes of horrible events must be examined. A couple of sections from the pieces I linked to were as follows...

From UK-based writer Penny Red on a post to her personal blog about rioting in London... "The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it."

From Charlie Pierce in his Esquire story "The Bomb That Didn't Go Off"... "'The radical Right,' cautions Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, 'is a response to real things that are happening to real people in the real world.' A political act of madness is still a political act. We use the madness to separate the events so that we don't have to recognize the politics they have in common. The madness of each individual act enables us to distance ourselves from the politics that burn under the polite society we've created like a fuse looking for tinder, like a bag in search of a bench.' 

It was great writing by Thompson and one of the things that made it great was it wasn't just about racist soccer fans, but rather those fans, the athletes targeted by them and the causes (as twisted and varied as they may be) of the hatred.

Jason Collins SI cover story & writing on Collins

While none of it as singularly impactful as the first-person narrative "Why NBA center Jason Collins is coming out now" that Collins did with Sports Illustrated writer Franz Lidz, there were some other excellent pieces of writing done on the heels of the announcement Monday by Collins.

About the piece itself was SI Senior Editor Chris Stone who wrote "The story behind Jason Collins' story: How it happened" and Lidz a day later provided "Jason Collins overwhelmed by enormous support for his announcement".

In terms of pieces published placed other than Sports Illustrated, Bruce Arthur wrote for the National Post the excellent "Jason Collins coming out a new beginning for sports" and specifically about the #98 jersey homage to Matthew Shepard, Sam Gardner wrote for Fox Sports "Collins' act wows victim's parents".

Additionally, "The meaning of Jason Collins' coming out" was written by Cyd Zeigler for SB Nation Outsports and "Just the Beginning" by Chuck Culpepper for Sports on Earth and the last piece to mention here was "The Decision" by Charlie Pierce for Grantland. Like many pieces I've seen from Pierce, it's extremely thought-out and contains the interesting idea that people shouldn't get caught up in basically congratulating themselves and society as a whole for being so accepting of Jason Collins on the heels of his coming out publicly.

Writing on Boston & on Guns - by Charlie Pierce & Gabrielle Giffords

It's somewhat remarkable to me that conversation around the Boston Marathon bombing would be completely separate from the larger question of weapons (i.e. guns) and the ease in which people can get them, but that certainly seems to be the case over the past week. While many people (myself included) closely followed the aftermath of the bombing and manhunt yesterday for apparent co-perpetrator Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the U.S. Senate voted Wednesday to block legislation strengthening background checks on gun sales.

On the subject of the Sentate actions (or inactions) were two great pieces of writing, with one from former U.S. Congresswomen Gabrille Giffords and one from Esquire writer Charlie Pierce, with Pierce more recently writing another piece that felt very much related.

The writing by Giffords was "A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip" published in the New York Times and an extremely direct and well written op-ed piece from someone in a position to write about gun violence.

From Pierce for the Esquire website the morning after the Senate inaction around background checks was "The Violence We Live With". It's a powerful essay that opines how we as American people seem to deplore horrific violence while at the same time accept that it's going to happen sometimes and not take steps that could curb it. It was a tremendously interesting idea put forth by Pierce and another Esquire piece of his published this morning had a similar notion in it to me.

"Guns Along The River: A Late Night In Watertown" was about the manhunt for Tsarnaev yesterday and exceptional writing.The thing that got me more than any other from his more recent piece was the repeated phrase "cops being cops" and Pierce writing of how capture of Tsarnaev means he can (and as he should) go to trial in our U.S. court system like any other criminal.

My thought out of this was that while the violence was much more high profile than that done by a "typical criminal with weapons", it's still violence resulting in the death of innocent people, just like the violence perpetrated by Jared Loughner in Tucson, James Holmes in Aurora or Adam Lanza in Newtown. It's a great thing that Tsarnaev will be tried for his crimes, but what will be interesting to see is whether the crimes committed have any impact on U.S. perception of violence or lawmakers reactions around violence through various means.

Would be a shame if the response is for Congressional leaders and other decision makers to either (A) accept that these things can happen and not try to look at additional ways to prevent it (basically what Pierce wrote in his essay about gun violence) or (B) put the Boston bombing in a specific bucket and try to stop that (i.e. make pressure cookers illegal). While this hypothetical option B may seem absurd, anyone that's had to pour out water or take off their shoes in an airport security line may recognize it as an approach that we've taken before.

Best writing linked to in 2011

As I was about to embark on the process of posting on my favorite writing linked to from 2012, it occurred to me that I never looked back at the best pieces linked to in 2011, with my last "best of" post being Close to Best 2010 Writing Linked To - Business. So, skipping 2012 for now and going further back...

Best writing on writing linked to in 2011

"Yesterday's News" by J.R. Moehringer for 5280: The Denver Magazine. Written on and linked to in July 2011.

"The Most Beautiful Word" by Joe Posnanski for his personal blog. Written on and linked to in Jan 2011.

"The Loading Dock Manifesto" by John Hyduk for Esquire. Written on and linked to in May 2011.

"Four Nights at Elaine's: The Last Will and Testament of a Great Saloon" by Wright Thompson for Grantland. Written on and linked to in Aug 2011.



Best writing on sports linked to 2011

"Terror, Tragedy And Hope In Tuscaloosa" by Lars Anderson for Sports Illustrated. Written on and linked to in May 2011.

"How To Become An American" by Charlie Pierce for Sports Illustrated. Written on and linked to in Dec 2011.

"Born to race, Dan Wheldon found happiness in town's slower pace" by Michael Kruse for what is now the Tampa Bay Times. Written on and linked to in Dec 2011.

"The Wheels of Life" by Gary Smith for Sports Illustrated. Written on and linked to in April 2011.

""Beat, Play, Love" by Michael Rosenberg for Sports Illustrated. Written on and linked to in Feb 2011.

"The Heart Of Football Beats In Aliquippa" by S.L. Price for Sports Illustrated. Written on and linked to in Jan 2011.


Best other writing linked to in 2011

"Heavenly Father!" "I love you all!" "I love everyone!" "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!" "I love all of you!" by Luke Dittrich for Esquire. Written on and linked to in Oct 2011.

"The Bomb That Didn't Go Off" by Charlie Pierce for Esquire. Written on and linked to in Aug 2011.

"Torn Asunder: How the Deadliest Twister in Decades Ripped Through Joplin, Mo." by David Von Drehle for Time Magazine. Written on and linked to in June 2011.

"Nina & Kristopher: A story of great love, great loss" by Tommy Tomlinson for the Charlotte Observer. Written on and linked to in June 2011.

"Diner for Schmucks" by Alan Richman for GQ. Written on and linked to in Aug 2011.

All 15 pieces linked to here were excellent and the ones that stood out the most to me the most were the following: on the Tuscaloosa tornado by Lars Anderson, on the Joplin tornado by Luke Dittrich (with his piece winning the National Magazine Awards feature of the year), on the bomb that didn't go off by Charlie Pierce and on working for a Denver paper by J.R. Moehringer (with that piece from 2008, but I wrote on and linked to it in 2011).

Politics & Individual Welfare Writing

Have come across some really good writing lately on the all too frequently not related subjects of politics and how people are fairing financially (with one of the pieces being about this very disconnect).

An overview of how individual people and families are doing came from two Charlie Pierce pieces in America's Muddling Purpose, Circa Christmas 2011 and then America Will Only Get Better When It Is Ours Again on the Esquire website. Excellent writing in both and to grossly generalize, the shared message is people are struggling to make it through and just how important that goal is.

Unfortunately, politics and the political process oft times seems to be removed from peoples daily lives as detailed well in The SportsCenter-ization of Political Journalism for The Atlantic by Patrick Hruby. One of those pieces that you hope and wish weren't true, but the arguments (which quote the aforementioned Charlie Pierce) valid.

People can still accomplish things (and we still have feel good stories like The Bank Around the Corner by Alan Feuer in The New York Times), but has definitely been some solid writing (including by James Altucher) which argues that political results and scoreboards oft don't matter for individual people.

Sports Illustrated Writing: from Alexander Wolff, Charles P. Pierce & Jim Gorant

Some great writing from the recent Sports Illustrated double issue that features Pat Summitt and Mike Krzyzewski as the SI Sportswoman & Sportman of the Year for 2011.

Longtime SI writer Alexander Wolff did the cover profile on the coaching icons and paints a revealing portrait of two driven individuals who appear focused on winning the right way. It's solid writing made the more so given that Summitt no longer does one-on-one interviews with her diagnosis of having early-onset dementia, Alzheimer's type.

If Wolff's piece was a well-written profile of exceptional public figures, two other features from this issue of Sports Illustrated stood out as really good writing on subjects known in much smaller universes.

Centered in the town of Magazine, Arkansas, How To Become An American is on the children of Hmong immigrants (with the Hmong portrayed by Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino) playing high school football. Written by Charles Pierce, it combines an almost lyrical beginning with an in-depth description of the athletes and their assimilation into the community and impact on the team. I see Pierce stories most frequently in Esquire and expected and then found a great piece after noting his name in this SI story byline.

A feature that actually turned out to be much more than I expected was According To Alex Kline... on the 17 year old college hoops recruiting guru. Written by Jim Gorant, the two things that stand out in the piece are Kline for creating a thriving avocation out of his interest and Gorant for the style of the piece. After the introduction, the writing flows backwards with sections on various ages of Kline's life to trace what led him to today. This approach helps take something that if done superficially could be little more than a puff isn't that cute? type of piece and makes it a revealing and interesting profile.

Luke Dittrich on the Joplin Tornado & Other Esquire Pieces

Remarkable feature on the Joplin Tornado in the October 2011 issue of Esquire (which includes an interesting, but not linked to online cover story by Chris Jones about his time hanging in full Bert & Ernie costumes with Justin Timberlake at Comic-Con).



Really, though, what stood out from the issue was the Luke Dittrich feature from Joplin, MO. It's one of those stories that pulls double-duty with being very well written, but also about an absolutely gripping topic. The storm killed 160 in Joplin and Dittrich profiles the experience of a dozen or so whose lives were saved by taking refuge in a convenience store walk-in cooler. Several times during the reading I felt a bit choked up reading about the decision points that led each person to that convenience store and just how arbitrary the difference between living or dying was for many hit by the tornado.

Two other Esquire pieces I found interesting recently...

- From the same Oct 2011 issue was the brief vignette on the Esquire Economy Car of the Year - the 2012 Ford Focus. Much less profound than the Dittrich piece (or Pierce one noted below), but I have grown fond of Ford lately and like quite a bit the looks of this car.

- Mentioned in the same issue's Note from the Editor was a Charlie Pierce profile on Barack Obama some six months prior to his November 2008 Presidential victory. The piece is titled The Cynic and Senator Obama and Esquire editor David Granger referenced the below passage on Obama from Pierce...

"There is a remove to his movements and a distance to everything he does that mutes his charisma and dampens what might be a frenzy in his crowds into a patient, well-behaved enthusiasm."

It's an interesting view and may well factor into how Obama seems to have garnered admiration for his efforts, but has also taking quite a bit of criticism (even from ardent supporters) for not selling his ideas well enough and even for not trumpeting well enough his successes.

Five for Writing Posts from Son of a Bold Venture Blog

I first mentioned it in a Feb 2011 blog post and lately have thought more about the Five for Writing Series done by Chris Jones on his Son of a Bold Venture blog. Concept as introduced in this blog post by Jones is five questions he e-mails to a writer and then their responses... with the writers covered (and each Series post) hyperlinked below:

1. Gene Weingarten - a Washington Post columnist and humor writer... winner of two Pulitzer prizes for feature writing. Notes the absolute need to get correct the details of what's been written.

2. Wright Thompson - an ESPN website writer who also provides some excellent and heavy on sentiment work for the ESPN/Bill Simmons site Grantland. Provided both links to some of his past work and content about the writing process and concept of becoming interested in a topic, hopping on a plane and go learn about it, and then recording it's details in print. Thompson also covers his seeming penchant for producing first person writing (reminds me J.R. Moehringer in this regard).

3. Jeff Pearlman - columnist for the Sports Illustrated website and author of multiple books about famous teams or athletes... Dallas Cowboys, New York Mets, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and now Walter Payton. Blog post has some solid writing process stuff both in relation to physical act of writing (where it works for Pearlman) and what type of book subject is (and isn't) going to attract readers.

4. Charles P. Pierce - highly esteemed Esquire and Boston Globe writer. Makes some interesting points in this post about writing the perfect words to describe something. Somewhat related to this, the post also had some good content on the power of language and rhetoric (which Pierce then expands on really really well in this Esquire piece).

5. Glenn Stout - editor of the Best American Sports Writing series and himself a book author. Post contains Stout's mention of the unequivocal need for a writer to tell a story with confidence and in a manner that doesn't let the reader's attention wane. Also of interest from Stout was his writing about words as his job... not that he doesn't enjoy it, but he's got to work to get paid. Also linked to this piece was an SI story "Heavyweight Championship Of The Word" by Jeff MacGregor on the writer W.C. Heinz.

6. Gregg Doyel - CBS Sports columnist. Nothing specifically stood out from Doyel's responses to the Five for Writing questions, but as Jones writes, he deserves definite credit for the incredibly fast turn-around answers provided to the questions posed.

7. Drew Magary - writer for the websites Deadspin and Kissing Suzie Kolber... now author of the novel The Postmortal. Almost counter to some of the other Five for Writing authors who wrote about the power of words, Magary writes about about the notion of words arranged on a page for the enjoyment of readers... and financial gain for the writer. As part of this is his commentary about viewing a novel as being a promising track to wealth given the (free) availability online of so much sports commentary or humor writing out there.

-----

Not to forget the blog host himself, there was a similar Q&A blog post done with Jones by the aforementioned Jeff Pearlman... this time on Pearlman's blog. Big take-away from this piece was late in the Q&A how Jones described the experience of writing in the flow... just as Charlie Pierce's above noted description of writing the perfect words.

Politics of Discontent Writing - Time Magazine, Laurie Penny & Charles Pierce

I've come across from a few different sources lately some excellent writing that definitely shares a common theme and seems to also offer the same take away idea.

The theme is around violence perpetuated at least to a degree by politics and examples of it have been way too common. In the US there's been the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and other innocents and in Europe recently both the attack in Norway and riots in London. Now, these atrocities are all distinct events and care should be taken to not link them too tightly, but they do all traffic at least somewhat in social standing and politics.

In terms of political discourse, the Charles Pierce Esquire feature "The Bomb That Didn't Go Off" examined the prevalence of right-wing violence and how what Pierce describes as an us vs them fragmentation of politics feeds the fire. I previously posted on the story, but it was just fascinating stuff that looks beyond the superficial causes people like to attribute atrocity to in order to make them feel better.

Not long after this piece came the aforementioned London riots and some excellent writing on them from both Time Magazine and a blog by UK-based writer Laurie Penny.



Latest issue of Time featured two really solid pieces on the London riots... one on the violence itself and one about the causes of it. "London's Long Burn" was by Nathan Thornburgh on the first subject and the more lengthy "The End Of Europe" from Rana Foroohar looked at some of the systematic causes and raises definite flags about prospects for stability in the future.

Naming convention for the story is obviously on Europe, but reading Foroohar's words towards the end brought to mind the political climate in the US as both described by Charles Pierce and evidenced by the recent budget debates and political entrenchment. Point is made in the story of the role Germany could play in the financial stability of the continent... but, both in Germany and elsewhere, the trend towards a politics of polarization would have to give way to a discourse around the greater good.

-----

Closely related to both Time features and that by Pierce was the aforementioned Laurie Penny blog post "Panic on the streets of London." It's good writing that in a short space conveys both the violence that was happening and how it's wasn't simply "mindless acts perpetuated without cause." This of course isn't to say they were justified acts, but just as Pierce wrote... to simply call a heinous act something heinous done by crazies and nothing more is to not look at the conditions behind them and whether steps can be taken to improve and prevent.

As George Santayana told us (according to Google): "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Politics Writing from Esquire - Pierce, Marche & Jones

Latest Esquire featured three different excellent pieces that dealt with politics.



One of them was a solid Presidential candidate profile, one a commentary on the President and one a ridiculously profound look at our country's political discourse and the violence it's wrought.

The profile is by Chris Jones and titled "Romney Doesn't Scare Obama. This Guy Does" on Republican challenger Jon Huntsman. It's a solid look at someone who could be a formidable general election opponent. On the subject of the President, Stephen Marche penned "How Can We Not Love Obama? Because like it or not, he is all of us". Oftentimes I find myself skimming Marche's monthly 1,000 words column, but here he provides a really interesting piece.

-----

Best of the three, though, is "The Bomb That Didn't Go Off" by Charles Pierce. It's a thought-provoking look at domestic terrorism and how it's caused in part by a poisonous climate of political conversation. Pierce begins the piece with the gripping tale of an attempted Martin Luther King Day parade bombing earlier this year in Spokane, WA.

That story in itself was compelling and worthwhile narrative, but it's then tied to what Pierce terms a fragmentation of politics into an us vs them combat rather than conversation between people and parties. The point is made that the perpetrators of such terroristic acts are simply labeled nut jobs and we go on with our lives, but perhaps a closer look should be paid to what's bringing so many cases out of the woodwork. Pierce references journalist David Neiwert who counts close to 30 such acts of right-wing violence (completed or foiled) since 2008 and uses that as backing for his point that ignoring the cause of the attempts and climate that ferments them just keeps the cycle going.

Pierce strikes me as home-run type of writer who I at times read without taking much away from and sometimes am practically awestruck by how good a piece he has written. This story definitely falls into the latter category with his combining together of an extremely human story of an attempted terrorist act with a larger take-away message. As stated in the beginning of this post... ridiculously profound writing.

Words, Writing & Wildmill Tilting...

I've written about it a few times here, but lots of great stuff on of the Chris Jones blog Son of a Bold Venture.

Content ranges from the tactical with writers answering questions on their craft to profound with missives on aspiring writers (or really aspiring anyones) tilting at windmills as they try to realize career goals.

The last two posts at Son of a Bold Venture trafficked more towards windmill tilting with "Lydia Could" about pursuing a Journalism degree in spite of the profession's career arc (much less arcy these days) and then "The Chattanooga Fix" about the small chance of success in writing a book measured against required time and effort.

Rather than leaning towards the doom and gloom, though, me thinks these posts both inspire based on what I take as the directive that... you try, you may or may not succeed, but you try. If you know what you want, great... you try to do that. If you don't know, but have an idea... you try around your idea and see where that takes you. If you have no idea, you scattershot about at different things... and hopefully find something of import to you. Either way... yep, you try.

-----

If these two most recent Son of a Bold Venture posts were about... duh, trying, there were a few prior to that on a different topic I feel strongly about, words. "A Parting Glass" featured a Charles P. Pierce written eulogy on fellow writer Clif Garboden. It was simply very cool reading about how someone loved what they did, and that thing being the writing of words on a page.

One other Jones missive from the past month that struck me around this topic, but it really wasn't his writing in the post that hit me, but who he wrote about... and then a reader posted blog comment.

"Opening Acts" begins with a reprinting of a J.R. Moehringer magazine piece, which I found of note as Moehringer's memoir The Tender Bar seems a close relative (if not ancestor) of what Son of a Bold Venture is all about. Both on writers, writing, words... all things I feel of import.

In relation to this specific post, though, what I keep thinking about is actually a comment from another reader of it.

Valerie said...
I have let the busy-ness of life crowd out the time and love I once had for reading. As a bureaucrat my own writing is dry and dull (but sometimes artful in its own way). Your posts are drawing me back. I must go out and buy something other than a newspaper to read right away. I need to find time again to slowly savor and enjoy someone else' art of telling a story.

I love it. While I enjoy the blog from Jones in part because it's about writers and writing as an act, it was great to see someone make mention of writing and words as a something to consume.

Whether I'm writing them or simply reading them from someone else... I love words organized on page in a meaningful way (note the heading of this blog) and it's cool to read other people say much the same thing.

Close to Best 2010 Writing Linked To - Sports

In the process of doing a post a week ago on my Best 2010 Writing Linked To, there were a number of really good pieces that just missed the Best cut.

One category of writing that said close to the Best stuff fell into was sports and there was some really good pieces I came across in the past year from both Sports Illustrated and elsewhere by SI writers.

-----

In terms of volume, Sports Illustrated writer Joe Posnanski stood out with three different pieces linked to that I found exceptional (yea, I guess they didn't make the Best cut, but exceptional nonetheless).

The two SI stories were both on football (and related to Posnanski's hometown Kansas City Chiefs). From the Dec 6 issue was A Dream In The Making about Kansas City Chiefs General Manager Scott Pioli and from the Aug 23 Sports Illustrated, a profile of NFL veteran Tony Richardson titled Made to Last. Both stories qualified as excellent writing... a thorough look at the subject, rooted in human interest, but not so much that it took away from the subject described (which can happen sometimes with stories leaning towards the profound).

Also excellent writing from Posnanski was his July 2 SI blog entry The Quisenberry Tree (on former Royals pitcher Dan Quisenberry). I wrote a fair amount of commentary when linking to the the piece and copied into my blog post a really cool missive from Posnanski that touches on words, writing and conveying meaning through them.

-----

Two other stories of note from Sports Illustrated...

In SI's June 28 edition, Chris Ballard (who wrote the Jill Costello profile referenced as Best Writing) provided The Magical Season Of The Macon Ironmen. Very interesting piece on a tremendous accomplishment... and which gave me reason to post a Hoosiers clip in my post linking to it!

From the April 12 issue was The Genuine Point Guard on Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns. Written by Charles Pierce, I wrote in my blog entry linking to it of how Pierce uses a specific choice of language to describe Nash. Very similar to Posnanski's writing on Quisenberry in that it shows both an appreciation of and excellent usage of words to tell a story.

-----

As I state in the heading...

Blog is all about words because... they matter, they influence, they entertain and when you take 'em and put them down on a page in a meaningful order, they acquire permanence.

Roger Ebert on Secretariat Writer Bill Nack

It's not terribly often I come across writing I consider to great because of what I feel is the confluence of events required to reach this level of... great.

Well written, you most definitely have to have that. Beyond that, the subject has got to either hold a certain gravitas of import or at the very least, be interesting (I write in this blog post about an example from Charles Pierce meeting this dual criteria).

Additionally, you might have some context of solid writing thrown in... typically in the form of work by someone you already like, but as this post will detail, there's another type of good writing context that can be in evidence.

Point of all this is to say that it takes a lot to make a piece of writing great and the follow on point is "The storyteller and the stallion" by Roger Ebert is great writing. Written on his Chicago Sun-Time blog, the work is about Ebert's college friend Bill Nack... including his life in writing (25 years of which spent at Sports Illustrated) and his authoring of the book Secretariat, since made into a movie.

From a writing perspective, it's really well done work by someone I'm tremendously impressed with as an author in Ebert. Additionally, I find it incredibly cool that one of my favorite current- day writers, Joe Posnanski, would link to the story on his twitter account and refer to Ebert and Nack as two of his favorite writers (very similar to the way Posnanski mentioned another one of my favs, Chris Jones, in an SI blog piece a few weeks ago).

From a subject perspective, I enjoyed this Ebert piece not because it's got content about horse racing, but because it weaves a tale of both the relationship betwixt Ebert and Nack and writing itself. Now, the phrase writing itself may seem a bit melodramatic to use, but what got me was how the piece is someone with both a proven love for words and the process of writing them detailing a friend and his love for words and the process of writing them.

To boil it down... that's just cool, and results in a piece of great writing.

Roger Ebert Blog Essay on Race & Racism

Great great piece from Roger Ebert on racism. Titled "How do they get to be that way?" the essay focuses first on the mural flap in Prescott, AZ and then goes wider to the experiences of Ebert himself with race.

I liked Ebert quite a bit after reading this Esquire profile of him (which I posted about here) and am glad that someone was good enough to link to Ebert's essay via Facebook so I could read it.

I've written about this a bit on this blog (most recently in this post about a Charles P. Pierce SI story), but the thing that really strikes me in writing is when an author can combine together great content and great writing.

Great content can be about something important (as Ebert's racism piece is), something interesting (as is the Pierce piece) or something profound (as is the Chris Jones story about fallen American soldiers returning home).

Great writing, however, is in how it's delivered to the reader. To this point, Ebert's writing on racism and his own experiences with race struck me as almost lyrical in his choice of words and phrasing. Sometimes I read a piece like this and am torn between being inspired to try to reach that level of prose and deflated in feeling I never could. Course, I then tend to "reinflate" when I think about all the bad writing out there and how I can do better than that.

All this said, just a great story by Ebert that can be best summed up in this quote from it...

"I believe at some point in the development of healthy people there must come a time when we instinctively try to understand how others feel. We may not succeed. There are many people in this world today who remain enigmas to me, and some who are offensive. But that is not because of their race. It is usually because of their beliefs."

Steve Nash Profile from Sports Illustrated

Really good feature on Steve Nash in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated.



The story is titled "The Genuine Point Guard" and interestingly (well, to me) was written by Charles Pierce. I first came across Pierce probably ten years ago via his book "Sports Guy" and have since seen him published (fairly regularly) in Esquire. Just a really good writer who penned the late 2008 essay "American Surprise: How Election Night Brought Us Home Again".

Back to the piece on Nash... what was so compelling about it was the rare combination of excellent writing about an interesting subject. I found particularly of note Pierce's description of Nash as "genuine" as opposed to "authentic". Authenticity is described as something packaged for the purpose of public favor, but genuine the much harder to find concept of someone who just is themself... and that being a good thing. Among other things, Nash founded the production company Meathawk... which is producing an upcoming ESPN movie on Terry Fox (that I posted about here with link to a Fast Company cover story on Nash.)

In Nash, there seems to be a really good guy who acts good without ulterior motives. An admirable concept that Pierce does a great job of bringing home to the reader through his usage of language and the meaning behind specific words.

In short, words they be might powerful things and are used really really well here by Pierce.

Best Magazine Writing: from Esquire & Sports Illustrated

Related to a prior post I did on book authors I look to read, I wanted to use this post to list out some of my favorite magazine writing I've linked to over the last few years.

It's tough to be terribly scientific in narrowing down my favorites and there's a good number of them, so perhaps the best way to go at a listing is to do so by publication said stories came from.

So... here's some of my favorite magazine writing from both Esquire and Sports Illustrated that I've linked to in this blog (with post, or posts, to follow containing work from other magazines):


Esquire Magazine writing:

- "The Things That Carried Him" by Chris Jones. Story won a National Magazine award for feature writing and is about one soldier's journey home after being killed in Iraq. Perhaps my favorite magazine writing and linked to July 2008 in my first iteration of consistent blog posting.

- "Why We Shouldn't End Our Manned Space Program" also by Chris Jones. Linked to from a Jan 2009 post that featured an image of the Barack Obama poster by Shepard Fairey.


- "American Surprise: How Election Night Brought Us Home Again" by Charles P. Pierce. Linked to in Dec 2008, it's a very short piece with the author's feelings of Obama's election in a historical context. One of those works that feels like every word was uniquely chosen for it's impact.

- "The World's Healthiest 75-Year-Old Man" by Susan Casey. About Malibu based workout fanatic Don Wildman and his exercise regimen... and cadre of celebrity and athlete workout partners. Linked to in July 2008.


Sports Illustrated writing:

- "Miracle on the South Side" by Lee Jenkins. Detailed and emotional filled piece about White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle's perfect game... the 18th in Major League history. Linked to in an Aug 2009 post.

- "Big Love "cc!" by S.L. Price. An in-depth profile of Yankees pitch CC Sabathia. Great writer that accomplishes something I wouldn't have thought possible... it made me want to see a Yankee player do well and win. Linked to in an Apr 2009 post.

Obama Election Night Piece from Esquire

A great piece from the Jan 2009 issue of Esquire Magazine is "American Surprise: How Election Night Brought Us Home Again" by noted author and frequent sportswriter-type Charles P. Pierce... whose website can be found here.

The short essay by Pierce is part of a collection of works from various Esquire writers who describe their experiences and thoughts about Barack Obama's election on Nov 4. I found all of them to be interesting, but Pierce's piece to be the most moving as he vividly paints this day into a historic context.

An image from the victory speech at Grant Park in Chicago accompanied Pierce's work.

Powerful.