Feature teacher

An update from my life: I’m having a blast teaching feature writing to a group of first-year journalism students.

So far, in the first four weeks of classes, I’ve had them read Jon Franklin, Susan Orlean (two pieces: The Lady and the Tigers and Figures in a Mall), Jon Lee Anderson, George Packer and Gene Weingarten. Before next week’s class, they have their choice of Rolling Stone profiles on the Jonas Brothers (groans) or Pete Doherty (more groans). All the readings are online, which saves my students the cost of yet another textbook.

Note: hat tip to Travis Lupick of Georgia Straight for suggesting the latter story. Hat-tip also to Howard Owens for pointing me to an optional reading that I’ve given them, a nice piece of musical criticism on The Kinks. Howard’s suggestion was slightly subversive, in that it serves to draw more attention to an under-appreciated, heavily-influential band, a campaign I heartily endorse. The links in the graf above go to the stories I assigned. And, for all you nationalists, Canadian content is coming.

All this reading has enabled some lively class discussion on themes, focus, structure, story-telling, ethics and research. (Research is “paper and peeps,” for documents and people, of course.)

For the past two classes, students have been focussing their story ideas and beginning to research their self-assigned semester-long writing project, a 3,000-word feature. Themes and ideas that they’ll be exploring include the need for violence in Western culture, what it means to be human in a technical age, what happens when you confront death every day, and what happened to the kid who one day told his kindergarten class that when he grew up he wanted to be a hot dog vendor.

Mostly what I love about this is that for five hours a week we all get together and talk about storytelling and writing. I should be paying for this privilege, but please don’t share that with my dean.