Saturday Readings

By Jesse Millner

Reporting from the Nieman Conference here in snow-bound Boston. The presenters have been fabulous, and I just listened in on a great reading that included Cynthia Gorney, Melissa Fay Greene, and Barry Newman. In less than a half hour, I heard the story of a mother dying from alcoholism, a mining disaster in Nova Scotia in 1958 and a cool piece about a man’s fascination with the bugs of Florida. I was particularly inspired by Gorney’s piece about her mother, and the way she did what all good writing does: the abstraction of dying from drink became the horrible and real specific thing of her mother dying of liver disease. Great stuff.

Jesse Millner is an English Instructor at Florida Gulf Coast University.