A Tree Falls
Greg Weatherford is a vital staff member of Broad Street Magazine. He is a founding advisor of Broad Street as well as the Director of Student Media at the Student Media Center at VCU—out of which Broad Street is produced. His essay “A Tree Falls” was originally published in Henrico Monthly, and won an award...
“David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact” by Josh Roiland
This week Broad Street recommends Josh Roiland‘s Fall 2013 article “David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact,” which originally appeared in Literary Journalism Studies and was recently made available by the good people at Longreads. In the article, Roiland investigates accusations about Wallace’s literary journalism, including allegations of “embellishments” and invented dialogue. Roiland reminds us...
Writing from the Space Between Us
by Hannah Morgan The New York Times recently published an article by Joshua Rothman entitled “Virginia Woolf’s Idea of Privacy,” and if you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it. In the piece, Rothman analyzes excerpts from Mrs. Dalloway and comes to the conclusion that Woolf conceives of life as “a gift that you’ve been given, which...
Are We Taking the Thought out of Nonfiction?
by Hannah Morgan We’ve all heard it a million times: “Show, don’t tell.” In creative writing classrooms nation-wide, this is the guideline. So, naturally, a commonly voiced criticism in workshops is something like: “This doesn’t need to be stated outright; it would be more engaging if the reader could glean it from the scene.” I have...
The Case for Really Reading
We recently blogged about an article by Tim Parks wherein he suggests that we don’t need stories. Parks admits that the idea that stories help us “to shape a trajectory for ourselves in the increasingly fragmented and ill-defined social world we move in” seems viable, but he dissents, claiming that there is no way around the truth...
