Archive
Writing once featured on the original Gangrey blog.
Are y'all keeping up with this serial narrative? Here's Part 1 to get you going. From Gina Barton: Mark Zera and his father made their way down the deserted rural road from their h…
Konrad Marshall: Billy is a mean bastard. He has a lot on his mind. He isn't getting shifts. His missus is nagging him for petrol money. Didn't he already give her some? Billy gets…
Casey Parks (thanks, Emily): MYRTLE CREEK — Walter Dickens weaved through his mother's boxes to answer a knock at the door. It was the fourth one that Sunday afternoon, two days si…
Michael Brick: AUSTIN – The man behind the glass partition was famous. His photograph appeared on statewide news sites and national food blogs, wanted as the architect of a brazen…
Jessica Contrera (thanks, Michael): When 13-year-old Caleb LeBlanc's death made the news this week, millions of people already knew him. He wasn't a pop star, an up-and-coming acto…
Patrick Rapa: … About 24 hours before you read this, City Paper will cease operations. Like a lobster, we were purchased to be killed and consumed. For the purposes of this metapho…
Justin George: As massive protest marches continued across Baltimore, the pressure was building inside police headquarters, and Commissioner Anthony W. Batts wanted answers — fast.…
AARON YOST and TROY BRYNELSON in the Roseburg, Ore. News-Review: Hannah Miles sat on a plastic chair inside cavernous Douglas Hall, wrapped in a white Red Cross blanket, shaking. A…
Bradford Pearson: Hello, my name is Brad Pearson. In March 2006, you were one of three people who kidnapped me in West Philadelphia. I'm writing this letter not because I'm angry a…
Mark Warren (thanks, Tim): The forces of Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi had been firing high-explosive ordnance into the city of Misurata for weeks—they'd been shooting tank roun…
Robert Samuels: BUDAPEST — The train ticket would take Josef Majade to a place where he would be safe, but he no longer sought that refuge. Instead, he lay his balding head against…
Earl Swift: It is a quiet, restorative place, this clearing high on a Pennsylvania ridge. Ferns and wildflowers carpet its floor. Sassafras and tulip trees, tall oak and hickory st…
Some serendipity for you. I was searching for something today behind my desk at work and I found an odd envelope. Inside was a funeral program for my father, who died in November 2…
Matt Tullis has introduced a cool new segment on Gangrey, The Podcast, called required reading. But we need your help. Please take a look.
Go read this, from Kim Cross in Southwest Magazine. It's lovely.
Caleb Hannan on Dr. V's Magical Putter: "There's this idea that it's not going to happen to me. There is a momentum to a story that's hard to stop. … It would have been a blow to m…
Leah Sottile: RICHLAND, Wash. — The workers inside Hanford's nuclear reactors in the early 1940s knew their jobs were important, even if many of them didn't know why. They worked h…
Jill Lepore: For a long time, Joe Gould thought he was going blind. This was before he lost his teeth, and years before he lost the history of the world he'd been writing in hundre…
Jason Cherkis: In 1974, when she was only 14, Jackie Fuchs would wake up way before her parents and catch a ride with friends from her house in the San Fernando Valley across the S…
This is how you profile. Michael Kruse: One morning last month in Burlington, Vermont, at the law office of John Franco, one of Bernie Sanders' best friends since the 1970s, Franco…
Jeff Sharlet: Open your eyes. Sunday. Another lucky day. Darkness. A luxury afforded the man who owns two tents, one popped right inside the other. No street light filtering in, no…
Robert Samuels: URBANDALE, Iowa — As this state's most visible culture warriors, Bob Vander Plaats and Donna Red Wing have hurled insults at each other for years. Vander Plaats's o…
William Browning: On a Saturday morning in May, 2015, a group of law enforcement agents, the FBI among them, knocked on the front door of the Montgomery Homestead Inn in Damascus,…
Jay Cridlin: TAMPA — Minutes after midnight, Uncle John's Band closes another sprawling set at Skipper's Smokehouse with the Grateful Dead's U.S. Blues, drawing cheers from the tie…
Anne Hull: CHARLESTON, S.C. — The glow of their phones lighted up their faces in the night. Terrell White and his friends kept looking down at the updates, trying to separate rumor…
Eugene Patterson, Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 16, 1963: A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, on…
What are your favorite non-print presentations of stories? I'm partial to reading something on paper, but most of the things I most want to read are only available to me digitally.…
Thomas Lake: BB King always slept with the light on, even as an old man, because he'd never shaken his fear of the dark. One summer night when he was a boy, a tornado howled across…
Check out this story Keith Sharon at The Orange County Register. Great lede: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/woodward-657889-beach-huntington.html
I thought this, from the young man who lives in my shed, was very well done for the amount of restraint. Do read Zack Peterson: RIVERVIEW Christopher Marquis is not quite 6. He lov…
Big thanks to Mark Johnson for passing this gem along. Mark Kriegel, New York Daily News, Sept. 10, 1989:
Kate Fagan: ON THE MORNING of Jan. 17, 2014, Madison Holleran awoke in her dorm room at the University of Pennsylvania. She had spent the previous night watching the movie The Pare…
Tony Rehagen: It's the top of the first inning, and Leo Mazzone is already rocking. Each croak of the springs in Mazzone's brown leather recliner is punctuated by a knock in the wo…
Wright Thompson: CLAUDIA WILLIAMS FOUND comfort wearing her dad's favorite red flannel shirt. It smelled like him. Time frayed the threads, pulled apart seams, and years ago the sh…
Mitch Ryals: Chuck Lawrence is breaking Rule No. 1: Don't get too drunk. "The hell with this," he tells himself. "I'm goin' home." He buys a bottle of Skol vodka at a corner store.…
From George Getschow at UNT: Have you submitted your narrative to Mayborn's third annual The Best American Newspaper Narrative writing contest? In an effort to foster narrative non…
(Posted by Raja) Ben Montgomery raised some eyebrows and some questions about journalism ethics last week with his story about a mailman who flew a gyrocopter through protected air…
Matt Tullis: "Creech." The name escaped my lips somewhere in the third mile of a five-mile run. It was a name I had been trying to think of, off-and-on, for the better part of a de…
Kevin Koczwara: A sense of dread has hung over Jason Spare's life. Spare's father was 33 years old when he had his first heart attack. It almost killed him. Spare's mother had brea…
Joe Tone: It was a matter of seconds, closer to six than seven, before what was happening became obvious, the colt masked in pink kicking up clouds of red on its way into the lead.…
Paul Kalanithi: In residency, there's a saying: The days are long, but the years are short. In neurosurgical training, the day usually began a little before 6 a.m., and lasted unti…
Anna M. Phillips: PLANT CITY — In a strawberry patch thirty minutes outside of Tampa, just past the exit for a dinosaur-themed amusement park, Maria Zuñiga pulls on her mud-covered…
Joe Kovac Jr.: On the evening of July 14, 1915, a couple went into the Southern Railway station in Macon and tried to give away a baby. The blond-haired, blue-eyed girl was almost…
Brendan Meyer: John Reeb plodded down the cracked pavement of Washington Street, his thick white beard and frizzy gray hair glowing orange in the setting sun. His feet ached as he…
Anne Hull: The Hardee's biscuit slides toward the heat lamp, and the uniforms are waiting. "That one's mine," says Brandi Garner, snagging the cinnamon biscuit. A digital clock ove…
Dirk Chatelain: WAYNE, Neb. — Mike Barry bounces back and forth from the gymnasium to the ticket window, running the numbers in his head. Inside, bleachers are filling fast. Outsid…
Michael Patrick Welch: Chris Rose's Pulitzer crystal sits in his small French Quarter apartment, its glass badly chipped from various accidents. The disfigured accolade for his wor…
Robert Samuels: Robert Barksdale steps in front of the students in an English class at Eastern High School, searching for some semblance of redemption. "For me, school is a treat b…
Chris Jones: Tonight is Wednesday night in Las Vegas, which means Scott Thompson has to become Carrot Top a little earlier than he does most nights. He has Tuesdays off, so yesterd…
Leah Sottile: CALDWELL, Idaho — In the heart of the Northwest, there is Idaho. And in the heart of Idaho, there is God. And God, residents believe, blesses some and takes others aw…
Liam Dillon: On a late Friday afternoon in February 2011, dozens of police officers carrying assault rifles arrived at Sempra Energy's $1 billion liquefied natural gas plant on the…
Lane DeGregory: LARGO Two afternoons a week, after lunch, before laundry duty, a dozen women at the Pinellas County Jail leave their pods and thread down a long, dark corridor — th…
Dashka Slater: It was close to 5 o'clock on the afternoon of Nov. 4, 2013, and Sasha Fleischman was riding the 57 bus home from school. An 18-year-old senior at a small private hig…
Justin Heckert: Kyle Kinane is everywhere like farty Jesus. He is in the shower with a six-pack of beer. He is drunk at a Wendy's drive-through ordering chicken nuggets out of the…
Alex Vadukul (thanks, Klink): Joanne O'Connor keeps a three-ring binder as thick as a cinder block to contain the story that echoes through her head. It is stuffed with her researc…
Meant to post this a while back. Michael Kruse: FORT PIERCE — Bud Adams, slim and dressed in blue jeans and a blue button-down shirt and cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, drove his Fo…
There's a little bit of "of course stories change people… that's why we tell them" when I read this, but it's always nice when science says we're right. Elizabeth Svoboda in Aeon h…
Mike Hixenbough: Wes Van Dorn slipped out of bed around 4 a.m., pulled a green flight suit on over his boxers, then brushed his teeth and kissed his wife before driving to work. Bo…
Jeff Maysh: Colonel Jose Espejo was a man with a problem. As the Colombian army's communications expert watched the grainy video again, he saw kidnapped soldiers chained up inside…
Leah Sottile: Fear meets Sarah Wolff in the elevator. It's standing beside her as she rides to her third-floor apartment. Taunting her. Tapping her shoulder and whispering in her e…
Michael Brick: It was our ball when the fight started, game point. Oscar was giving some unsolicited advice to Curtis, who was on his team. Curtis was describing the adequacy of hi…
Lane DeGregory: PAHOKEE — On the day he thought would change everything, Fred left home early while his siblings, nieces and nephews slept. He skipped breakfast, not even a Pop-Tar…
Christopher Goffard: graciously shaded neighborhoods where they see him still. As a toddler, throwing bread to the ducks. As a sixth-grader, on a razor scooter. As a lanky teenager…
Holly Morris: Outside Hanna Zavorotnya's cottage in Chernobyl's dead zone, a hulking, severed sow's head bleeds into the snow, its gargantuan snout pointing to the sky in strange,…
Jessica Contrera: Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio — The phone call that made him famous came at 4 a.m. on Jan. 24, 2012. He was very much asleep. Ring ring. Ring ring. Actually, it vibrated,…