Studying Narrative Nonfiction

A conversation with journalist Moni Basu, director of the University of Georgia’s low-residency program in narrative nonfiction

I teach in a lovely little undergraduate degree program at the University of California, Irvine, where students spend their academic quarters reading, reporting, and writing features and narrative nonfiction. The Literary Journalism Program was launched over two decades ago by Barry Siegel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Los Angeles Times writer, who steadily built the curriculum into a unique and truly special major, unrivaled when it comes to other undergraduate degrees. Students take writing and reporting workshops and enroll in larger classes, where they discuss ethics and narrative nonfiction books.

This week, I have been finalizing my course readings for the upcoming academic quarter (beginning in April), which will include many of the writers I have talked to for The Reported Essay, and more to come. One class will be reading The Barn, by Wright Thompson, The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson, Strangers in the Land, by Michael Luo, and Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. (I also plan to bring you a few lessons and interviews from these authors along the way.)

Meanwhile, another class will be focusing on articles, including those by writers I have interviewed for this Substack, as well as others, like Ruby Cramer of The Washington Post, E. Tammy Kim of The New Yorker, and Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, who has a new reported book out in April, Atomic Dreams.

I do believe writing, reporting or crafting features in particular—and understanding what makes them meaningful and masterful—is a muscle we can keep building for as long as we can physically and mentally manage. Some of us come to this work early in our writing careers, while others might decide they want to tackle a new in-depth project, or shift from news writing to narrative storytelling or book writing later in life. The UC Irvine program is a treasure, and I love my students, who are mostly in their early 20s and don’t necessarily all want to become journalists (though many do go on to work in the field). It is also important to note that my campus does not offer a master’s degree program in literary journalism.

This is just one reason why I am delighted to bring you my conversation with the wonderful Moni Basu, director of the MFA Narrative Nonfiction Program at Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, at the University of Georgia—a low-residency program that allows students to travel to Athens, Georgia for intensive stints to learn from expert nonfiction writers and teachers, and return home to work on reporting projects, meeting regularly with their classmates and mentors online.

Basu is a former staff reporter for CNN and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she specialized in narrative storytelling from different regions: South Asia, the Middle East, and across the United States. Basu’s work has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and she is also a recipient of a Joseph Galloway prize, as well as two team Peabody Awards. Her freelance writing now appears in publications like the Bitter Southerner, where she has also served as a senior editor.

Moni Basu, director of the Narrative Nonfiction MFA Program at the University of Georgia.

Basu teaches students how to become stronger storytellers and embrace in-depth journalism as literature grounded in fact. The program also hosts a podcast, Hear-Tell, which features writing from current students, alumni, faculty, and visiting lecturers in Grady’s narrative nonfiction program, including this most recent episode with narrative writer and teacher, Kim Cross.

There is another excellent master’s degree program that focuses on narrative journalism, the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute’s Literary Reportage program at New York University, which places emphasis on elegant writing and rigorous reporting. Some of my undergrads have gone on to enroll in this program, and they praise its depth and expertise.

For others who don’t want to go the degree route, but would love to keep learning along the way, Narratively Academy has an ongoing menu of virtual course options, including fact-checking, longform stories, travel writing, and reporting personal essays.

I also recently came across this 6-week-long workshop from the Los Angeles Review of Books, “The Art of the Reported Essay,” with award-winning journalist and author Lauren Markham, which will take place on Zoom on Tuesdays from October 7 until November 11.

So, there are options out there depending on what suits your own goals and lifestyle. In Basu’s program, students can still hold jobs, parent, and tend to their daily responsibilities at home, while focusing on learning narrative storytelling. Basu’s graduates have produced successful books, published stories in major magazines, and won awards. She talked to me about her own remarkable reporting career, how she came to learn narrative, and how her program works.

Before we get into our Q&A, I also just wanted to give a shout-out to one of my favorite sites, Longreads, which frequently alerts me to stories I want to assign in classes. This week, Longreads selected my recently published 7,500-word story, “The Doctor, the Biohacker, and the Quest to Treat Their Long Covid,” as a “top five of the week” editor’s pick by Cheri Lucas Rowlands. It’s always such an honor to be included among so many admirable writers and pieces. Thank you, Longreads!

Here is my Q&A with Moni Basu, which has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Before we get into your work at the low-residency Master of Fine Arts Program in Narrative Nonfiction, I know you have had quite a career before teaching. Can you talk about your path into journalism and narrative writing?

I never intended to be a journalist. My father was renowned in statistical theory and he taught at various universities in India, Lebanon, Japan, the UK, Australia and of course, the United States. I grew up all over the world but we settled in Florida in 1975. I earned a master's degree in international affairs, in Latin American Studies. In college, I took one English class, poetry. I never took journalism..

My dad developed macular degeneration, and he couldn't drive anymore. My mother had a massive stroke on my 20th birthday. That changed the trajectory of my life. I started working for a feisty newspaper called the Florida Flambeau. I was an academic writer and wrote my first story like a master's thesis. The editor said: “Who, what, when, where, why and how. In the first paragraph.” But from the first few days, even though it was very challenging for me, I had to learn by doing. I thought: This is so cool. I can make an impact on what's happening in my community. People are reading my stories and writing letters to the editor. I can make a difference by storytelling.

I worked for a short while at the Tallahassee Democrat as an editor, and began as a copy editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1990. I held a variety of editing and reporting jobs in my 19-plus years at the newspaper before taking a buyout in 2009 and heading to CNN.

How did 2001 change the course of your career?

The year started with my covering a massive earthquake in Gujarat, a state in India. That was really the first time where I saw mass graves. Lots of bodies lined up. I remember very clearly a man who belonged to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is a Hindu fundamentalist organization. I saw him take a body and put it in a wheelbarrow, and cart it off for cremation.

I made the mistake of saying: “How do you know if this person is Hindu or Muslim?” This was a very mixed area. It could have been a Muslim person, who would need to be buried, not cremated. He pulled a burlap cloth off the body. Beneath it was just a piece of mangled flesh. He looked at me and he said: “Okay, you tell me if this is a man or a woman. You tell me if it's Hindu or Muslim. I'll do whatever you want me to do with it.”

I felt so small in that moment. I felt like I had acted like a snobby journalist, implying: How dare you take this body to cremation?

It was one of those moments that burns bright in my mind. After that, I learned a lot of humility, which helped me in my reporting. To not talk down to people. I had made all these assumptions. And I had shown arrogance. All that fell away in that moment, and it never came back.

That's so important with narrative writing too.

Absolutely. Trust is so important in narrative journalism.

After 9/11, I spent a lot of time in Iraq, both as an embedded journalist with the U.S. Infantry and Marines, but also independently. I was adept at producing standard feature stories—anecdotal lede and nut graf, talk to several people, present the issues, and end with a real kicker. But in Iraq, I had the opportunity to work with the great narrative editor Jan Winburn and I had an epiphany. I thought, Okay, I can write these feature stories that no one will really remember, or I can really narrow the lens and go deep with what I'm seeing in front of me, and tell a more powerful story.

I began telling stories of the soldiers I was with — a unit that lost 11 men in 11 days. That’s how I started writing narratives.

I eventually landed on Jan’s team at the newspaper and that was my second epiphany, working with her. She really saw my stories and said: “How can we reshape them, so the stories unfold with enough suspense and tension that the reader will want to read to the very end?” And I learned how to do that with her. She was my guru, my mentor, and now, my best friend.

When you were in the middle of covering these intense events, how did you start to first understand: I'm doing narrative. Were you learning as you go? Were you reading other stories?

I read a lot of narratives. And I went to narrative conferences. I won a Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma fellowship and that was life-changing. I admired the work that Dart fellows were producing — very difficult stories about sexual violence, or murder, or war. I became interested in recovery and resilience. A tornado hits a Mississippi town, and the media stays for two days and then they're gone. I became interested in what happens afterwards. How do people recover and go on with their lives? Because they do.

I think the work I am proudest of are follow-up stories. I would go to breaking news events, because I wanted to make contacts. I wanted to see people in the most terrible moments of their lives but then return to them to see how they had coped.

I was lucky enough to be hired by CNN in 2009. Lucky because I had an opportunity to cover big stories all over the world including the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2016 quake in Nepal. Or the campaign to oust ISIS from northern Iraq and the migration crisis in the Mediterranean. I also reported from my homeland, India. With many of these stories, I returned to people who had once been in the headlines to see how they had fared with time.

In most newsrooms or journalism programs, you are not always trained to think as a narrative storyteller, so you had to learn this on the ground?

I find myself constantly thinking about where the story might begin, where it might end, even as I am in the middle of my reporting. Narratives move forward in time through scenes. Reporting for narrative stories means you have to report scenes, develop characters and show how those characters deal with the problem or challenge they are facing. It means finding the right characters and earning their trust so that you can be privy to their lives.

One of the most difficult aspects of narrative writing for me was finding the right structure for a story. It was hard figuring out how to weave back story and expository material into the chronology of the story. When should I go back in time? How will I bring the reader back into the present? How will I sow tension so that the reader does not lose interest?

Are there stories you wrote that stand out for you as examples of narrative that stick with you?

I wrote an eight-part newspaper series called “Chaplain Turner's War,” which became an e-book. It was about an Army chaplain ministering to soldiers at the height of the Iraq War. And even though it was told from the chaos and tragedy of war, it was really a story about one man’s inner battles. Reporting the story was obviously challenging — I had to understand the chaplain whose point of view was alien to me in so many ways.

But it was also challenging to write the story in eight parts for a print publication. Each chapter had to hook the reader and end with a cliffhanger — that’s eight ledes, seven cliffhangers and one terrific ending. But I also could not assume that someone who was reading Chapter 3 had read Chapters 1 and 2. So each chapter had to have enough contextual information to bring the reader up to speed. These days, everything is online so you can simply provide links to related material. But we did not have that luxury back in 2008 when this story was first published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

At CNN, I told a story that unfolded on a migrant rescue ship in the Mediterranean and centered on a relationship that developed between a rescuer and a man who was rescued. That story had to be reported from the time that I boarded the ship in Malta and the time that the ship dropped off the migrants at a processing center in southern Italy. This story was challenging in a different way: I had limited time and had to quickly figure out who my main characters were going to be. At first, I had wanted to follow one of the divers on the rescue team. But then it became apparent to me that the man who was heading the team would be a stronger character because he had the perspective of time — he had been doing such rescues in the Mediterranean for two decades.

Two narrative projects have been life-changing for me. One is the story of a little girl named Noor al-Zahra Haider, “Iraq's Baby Noor: An unfinished miracle.” I've known her since she was three months old, when American soldiers discovered her during a raid in the Iraqi city of Abu Ghraib. She was born with severe spina bifida, and she was going to die in Iraq. There was no treatment available for her, and so the soldiers shuttled her out of the country, and brought her to Atlanta for life-saving surgery. The Associated Press, CNN, and other media outlets were covering her story. Then she went back to Iraq. Everybody forgot about her.

I continued following her story and have written about her several times. I always saw her as a metaphor for the Iraq War. The Americans had good intentions, but in the end, Noor was a broken girl in a broken land.

The other story I carry close to my heart was about Mathura, a woman who was at the center of a landmark rape case 50 years ago that helped change sexual assault laws in India. I grew curious about what had happened to Mathura after a young woman was gang-raped on a public bus in new Delhi in 2012. The rape was so horrific that the young woman died from her injuries, sparking vigils and demonstrations across the globe. Suddenly India was deemed the “rape capital” of the world. I wanted to look at the issue of rape in India through the eyes of Mathura. Her name came up in the media but no one knew what had happened to her in the years since she had gone public with her rape. So I went to India and found her. The story, “The Girl Whose Rape Changed a Country,” was published on CNN.com in 2013. It ended up being a rather personal story for me. It is definitely the hardest story I have ever told because I had been raped in college and had never told a soul.

When I sent my editor Jan Winburn the first draft of the story, she said: What happened? You went back home to do this story. But this story feels so distant.

That’s when I blurted out what had happened to me. Jan was so understanding and caring. She asked me to go home and think about how I wanted to tell this story. I decided to reveal my own rape in the story — right at the end. It's just one paragraph. This story could have turned out very differently with an editor who was not as empathetic as Jan. This kind of journalism is best when it’s a collaborative effort. Gotta have a terrific editor. I was very lucky.

I learned at CNN the power of first-person narratives. That is, narratives in which I, the writer, become the reader’s guide. It’s like I am saying to the reader: “Take my hand. I’m going to walk you through this difficult story.” I wrote about complex global issues at CNN. The stories that resonated with readers, the stories that amassed 8 or 9 million page views, were the first-person narratives. I became a big believer in first-person narratives, although I do think that some journalists don't understand that first-person doesn't mean memoir.

Yeah, that's partly also why I called this Substack “The Reported Essay,” to celebrate more of these stories where the writer is the guide, or the first-person is subtle, thoughtful, and intentional.

Absolutely. I was that person who was allergic to first-person. All through the ‘90s and early 2000s, I don't remember working on any projects or big stories that were first-person. Other people may argue with me on this, but I will argue them to the death, because there is so much richness that is lost when you don't use first-person in some stories.

It provides you with the tool of reflection, and the reflection can connect you to the reader and to the subject through what matters.

Yes, it adds this whole other dimension.

When you started to give yourself permission to consider first-person as another tool in the narrative toolbox, were there writers that you looked at who did this well? For some reason, what I flashed to when you talked about your war reporting was Langston Hughes, who also did war reporting in the first person. He used that essayistic voice when he was on the ground covering conflict.

I will tell you one thing that did influence me and you're going to laugh—but it’s the Modern Love column in The New York Times. I love it. I've been reading it for years. Those are essentially first-person essays, but they tell a story, and they're riveting. Sometimes you don't know what's going to happen until the end. I also have several friends who've written books of essays in recent years, and they were all about the Indian American experience, like Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, by Anjali Enjeti and This Is One Way to Dance, by Sejal Shah.

John Sutter, an award-winning environmental journalist who now teaches at the University of Oregon wrote this massive story on slavery in Mauritania and used first person. He is a white man doing this story, and he took enormous risks to tell it so it was important for him to be a part of the narrative. By putting himself in the story, he created an intimacy to a difficult subject.That story made a big impact on me.

I also think with the rise of audio narratives, first-person journalism became more acceptable and welcomed.

Yes, definitely. One podcast that I really admire is In the Dark, hosted by Madeleine Baran. The second season was amazing, about the case of Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Winona, Mississippi, who was tried six times for the same crime. Flowers spent more than 20 years fighting for his life while a white prosecutor spent that same time trying just as hard to execute him. And season three focused on Haditha, Iraq, where U.S. Marines killed 24 civilians at the height of the war — and why no one was held accountable. In the Dark’s ream of reporters are a part of the podcast and as such, they are completely transparent about their reporting process.

Now, can you tell us about the Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts Program in Narrative Nonfiction? How did it start at the University of Georgia and how did you end up there?

The program was the dream child of Valerie Boyd, who wrote the book Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. The biography is a narrative, which Valerie researched for many years. It's an incredible book. Valerie and I were colleagues at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and became close friends. I heard her talk about her dream to launch an MFA program for years and it finally happened in 2015. I have been teaching in the program since then and became the director after Valerie died of cancer in 2022. The program is a part of Valerie’s legacy and I wanted to do all that I could to preserve it.

How does a low-residency program work?

Students come to Athens, Georgia at the beginning of each semester for a week-long residency — somewhat akin to attending a conference. The mentors in the program are all highly acclaimed journalists and authors. They, along with guest speakers, lead a number of craft sessions and workshops. This week is definitely intensive. It often feels sacred to me; it’s a time to commune and get to know one another.

Each student is assigned a mentor and together they devise a writing plan for the semester. It’s a two-year program, at the end of which the students are expected to submit a portfolio of work. Some write book chapters, others, magazine-length pieces. Students are not required to have published anywhere, but many of our students have published by the time they graduate.

Is it designed for people who are aiming to write a book or a longform piece? Who are the ideal candidates?

I tell people, “Are you interested in becoming a better writer?” If so, apply to the program. We have had students come into the program who have already written seven chapters of a book, and they're coming in to polish and finish. I try to invite book agents and editors to come speak to our students, so they can make connections. For instance, David Black of David Black Literary Agency has visited us twice. But you don’t have to be writing a book. You don’t even have to come to the program with a lot of ideas. We’ve had students from all walks of life: doctors, family court judges, dancers, actors, epidemiologists, and of course, journalists.

The best thing about this program is you gain a writing community for life. Writing is, to me, the hardest thing on Earth. It's so solitary, and no one can help you go from your head to the page. But to do it well, you need to be nurtured by a supportive community that's going to lift you up in your moments of weakness, in your moments of doubt. I think when I retire, I will enroll in the program as a student!

How much of the focus is on the skills of journalism?

One hundred percent. We are, after all, housed in a college of journalism. We stress reporting no matter what kind of project a student takes on. A memoir, for example, cannot just be a stream of consciousness. It has to be reported out, verified.

Everything that's written must be grounded in fact. But it must also be written beautifully, like a novel or a short story. Some of the students have read One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America, by Gene Weingarten. He randomly picked his date, December 28, 1986, and decided he was going to find stories that tell what happened on that day. He came to our program to talk about it, and he told students that December 28th, between Christmas and New Year's, is usually a slow news day. Weingarten couldn't find a lot of big news. But he did it. He found and reported all these amazing stories. Students read that and said, “Wow, I feel like I just read a book of short stories.” It reads like fiction but everything is true.