
Ed Grisamore accepting Will Rogers Humanitarian Award at Oliver Winery, Ind. Photo by Christy Pollock
BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Friday, July 9, 2010 — “Get Schooled” was the columnists’ theme this year, our conference hosted at a university for the first time, Indiana. Appropriately, our informal welcome Thursday night was at one of the town’s oldest college hang-outs, Nick’s Pub.
The meat of a conference like this is made up of lectures and panel discussions, and this meet was one of the most abstract held by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. A few people were disappointed and I could see what they meant, but most loved it. Russell Frank of Penn State called it mind-expanding. For the first time, My Beloved attended nearly every session, because the schedule looked promising and it fulfilled that.
What was it? First, what it was not. There were neither one-hour how-to’s on writing and publishing or state-of-the-business/craft analyses, which are our norm. Bloomington’s Mike and Mardi Leonard instead found people to talk about creativity itself, with a couple of insightful tangents.
This and the next Brick are on the long side, but they’re not complete. More than ever this year, reportage and comment can be found at a special page at Columnists.com. The page is being updated as new blogs and columns come in, and will be archived indefinitely. It’s not just that every conferee got something a little different from the next fellow from the presentations, but also that the writing is fine.
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Leading up to the conference every year, one program whets my appetite. This time it was “Choosing the Right Words,” with three published novelists who are former reporters or columnists.
Scott Russell Sanders, a novelist but mainly a memoirist. For him (and me) columns are essays: “Montaigne created the word essay, defined as a trial, an attempt, and it also survives in the word ‘assay.’ It looks for understanding that we don’t yet have,” he said.
Historical novelist James Alexander “Jim” Thom, participated with his wife in all conference events. Thom finds a famous moment to weave fictional pieces through: “The historical incident defines where I can go in my story, its boundaries.”
“We columnists — and I am a former columnist also — are the first historians of anything that happens,” Thom said. “Compare something present with something in the past. To get the reader’s attention, you have to connect [it] with the big picture.”
The celebrity role was played by Michael Koryta, whose latest novel, So Cold the River, has been well reviewed this summer. He cited storytelling techniques, the narrative toolbox, pointing out “the visual points of contrast: “All this [the tools of the novelist] can be helpful to columnists. Showing place, story and character in short fashion.”
“As long as the protagonist wants something, even just a cup of coffee, the audience will go along,” (Continued)