Good Stories, Well Told

Sorry for the blog trouble this morning. Go check out Nancy Nall's post on Colombus Dispatch columnist Mike Harden over on nancynall.com (which you should look at often):

I always called Mike the best colum­nist you never heard of. A gifted writer and com­pas­sion­ate reporter, he was a throw­back to an ear­lier era, before news­pa­pers embar­rassed them­selves try­ing to be a "prod­uct" that you "use," and were con­tent to be some­thing to read. He always told me the role model for his life's work was Jim Bishop, another guy you've prob­a­bly never heard of, but take my word for it — he used to be big. It's the papers that got small.

Mike told sto­ries, most often about other peo­ple, some­times about him­self. He could make anyone's story inter­est­ing, and fre­quently noble. He wrote a piece about a day in the life of a neona­tal intensive-care nurse that I used to read to writ­ing stu­dents, although it fre­quently left me a lit­tle choked up, par­tic­u­larly the part about how the NICU staff han­dle the babies who are about to die. They're taken from the warm­ers, dis­con­nected from the tubes and mon­i­tors, held close and rocked by the nurses until the end comes. It's the sort of killer detail a for­mer Navy medic wouldn't miss. ...