CRAFT TALK: “Reporting and Writing the Unknown”

“Reporting and Writing the Unknown” covers a range of techniques that help us contend with gaps in accessible information.

Whether what’s unknown stems from omissions in the archives, from all the eyewitnesses being long-since dead, or from some other workaday reportorial impediment, we’ll discuss reconstructing, re-envisioning, and “reporting around” as strategies for gathering the scene and story details necessary to create compelling narrative nonfiction. Informed by works that challenge essentialist notions of Truth (with a capital ‘T’), we’ll also discuss how confronting dominant paradigms and recognizing expansive notions of knowing can push the boundaries of the form.

➡️ How do we maintain factual integrity while reckoning with notions of “reality” that prioritize only certain people’s experiences?

➡️ How do we represent, in more balanced ways, the multiple frames through which events and issues can be seen?

➡️ How do we open our reporter-minds to different ways of knowing without violating the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction/truth and imagination?

Finally, we’ll examine how transparency about your reportorial process can fuel and enhance reader engagement and trust.