31
Jan
2010
Canada’s Narrative Nonfiction Babe Ruth (19.01.10)
Listen as the unemployment diaries celebrates a bunch of firsts: a famous, willing, and multimedia participant on the blog…and a game-show
Let’s play jeopardy! (A favourite pastime of any unemployed person).
Category: Famous Canadians.
Clue: Globe and Mail columnist and feature writer, author of three books (most recently and most famously Boy in the Moon, about his handicapped son), host of two documentaries and a CBC Radio show.
Answer: Who is Ian Brown.
Trebek: Correct.
Category: Explaining strange events
Clue: Ian Brown sits with unemployed journalist, Angelina Chapin, after she e-mails him to say she loves his writing and is coming to Toronto.
Answer: He’s just a nice guy?
Trebek: Correct.
Well, it’s the best explanation I can come up with. That, and the fact people love talking about themselves.
I e-mailed Brown two weeks back to say I’d be in Toronto and would love to meet. I’m a big fan of his writing, which is mostly in the narrative nonfiction style (the genre I’ll be doing my Masters in) and, he manages to do it in that ready-to-choke publication, the newspaper.
The first time I read Brown was in a university narrative nonfiction course. His article was about Toronto’s Mount Sinai hospital during the SARS epidemic and the general struggles of a health care system under pressure. Canadian health care? Pass the Perez Hilton…
But Brown did something different. He created characters, scenes, and evoked feeling. I learned intimate details about people that brought the story to life: Dr. Wunder (actual name!), one of the hospital’s surgeons, is a handsome boyish man, “renowned for sending e-mail messages at 3 a.m. and working all the next day.”
I came away from the story with more than facts. I had questions about myself, about what I would do in the moral dilemma 
doctors (whom I now felt I knew) are faced with. This is the point of narrative nonfiction. It’s journalism, in terms of its factuality, but is storytelling, in terms of its affect on the reader.
As we sit in the Globe and Mail cafeteria sipping tea, I ask Brown if he’ll share some of his insights on whether newspapers can still traffic in good storytelling in the tweet-it, you-tubey, blog-your-face-off media landscape.
His answers are surprisingly optimistic (and my questions, not surprisingly, awkward).
Enjoy, and remember to pass on to any friends in high places.
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