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Advanced Reporting: The Art of the Profile

Rutgers University-Newark
The Department of Arts, Culture and Media
Advanced Reporting (21:086:338:Q1)
Fall 2020 | Mondays & Wednesdays 10 a.m. – 11:20 a.m., Held Virtually Through Canvas

Professor Gaiutra Bahadur | Email: gaiutra.bahadur@rutgers.edu
Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Office Location: Zoom Via Canvas

Advanced Reporting: THE ART OF THE PROFILE

In this course, students will learn the art of profile writing through reading some of the best practitioners of the form, including Susan Orlean, Helen Benedict, Walt Harrington, Nat Hentoff, Jose Antonio Vargas and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. We’ll read one profile a week, from publications including The New Yorker, GQ, Elle and The New York Times, and work together to figure out makes them good. On Mondays, we’ll discuss the profiles. On Wednesdays, we’ll talk about the processes of interviewing, researching and writing. Students will work together in teams of four people to produce a profile, with a multimedia element, of an immigrant health care worker on the front lines of the pandemic.

REQUIRED READING

Profiles, resources, craft articles as noted in the weekly schedule. They are all available as PDFs through Canvas and/or links provided in the weekly modules. You are not required to buy any books for this class.

ASSIGNMENTS

Attendance and Participation: You will earn points for attendance and participation throughout the semester through group discussions and exercises and quizzes. Each week, you’ll earn a maximum of 3 points, adding up to 42 points. The remaining points will be earned through the following assignments.

Assignment #1, due Sept. 11: Submit edited audio file of interviews you will conduct with each other, along with a 250-word reflection on what you learned from exercise. Worth 5 points.

Assignment #2, due Sept. 18: Submit a 400-word profile of each other based on the interviews you conducted. Worth 10 points.

Team Project: You will work in groups of four people to produce a 1500-word written profile, with a multimedia element, of an immigrant health care worker on the front lines of the pandemic. Each group will have: (1) a researcher/reporter, (2) an interviewer, (3) a writer, and (4) a multimedia producer. Using a survey that asks which role you are most comfortable with and what times you’re available to meet, I’ll form the groups. You should all be working together through each phase to decide who to interview, what questions to ask, what context to place him or her in, what images, audio or video element would best supplement the profile, and how to tell their tale. This is a team effort that asks you to think together, plan together, and work together to produce the best project possible. You’ll all receive the same grade for each step of the project. Each of you will also be given an individual grade based on feedback from your peers on how well you supported the team. Due dates and the point spread for the project are:

October 19, edited audio interview of immigrant health care worker due: 3 points.

November 6, first draft of written profile due: 10 points.

November 23, drafts returned with my editorial questions and comments.

December 9, final draft due: 20 points.

Individual grades based on team feedback: 10 points.

We’ll offer the work we produce to Newest Americans   (Links to an external site.)  for publication! Let’s make it sing.

GRADE DISTRIBUTION

A+       97-100             C+       77-79

A         90-96               C         70-76

B+       87-89               D         60-69

B         80-86               F          <60

Policy on Cameras

The course will be a mix of asynchronous and synchronous elements. During our synchronous sessions, you will be required to have your cameras on. All students will be required to use the same Zoom backdrop, of the Atlantic Ocean. Every student must download and use this virtual background.

SEMESTER SCHEDULE

WEEK ONE

Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2020

  1. Introductions to the course and each other

WEEK TWO

Tuesday, Sept. 8

Assigned Profile: “The Sporting Life: Feathers,” by Reeves Wiedeman, The New Yorker, March 7, 2011, about Mike Tyson.

Wednesday, Sept. 9

Process Focus: Interviewing I

WEEK THREE

Monday, Sept. 14

Assigned Profile: “A Transit Worker’s Survival Story,” by Jennifer Gonnerman, The New Yorker, August 24, 2020.

Wednesday, Sept. 16

Process Focus: Interviewing II

WEEK FOUR

Monday, Sept. 21

Assigned Profile: “An Imam in America: A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling Two Worlds,” by Andrea Elliott, The New York Times, March 5, 2006.

Wednesday, Sept. 23

Process Focus: Research I

Assigned Reading: “Muslims in America: Creating a New Beat,” by Andrea Elliott, Nieman Reports, Summer 2007.

WEEK FIVE

Monday, Sept. 28

Assigned Profile: “Living Large: Profile of Fab Five Freddy,” by Susan Orlean, The New Yorker, June 10, 1991.

Wednesday, Sept. 30

Process Focus: Finding the Right Subject for a Profile

Assigned Viewing: Susan Orlean on Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary

WEEK SIX

Monday, Oct. 5

Assigned Profile: “The Watergate Hero Faces Himself: Carl Bernstein,” pp. 27-48 in American Profiles: Somebodies and Nobodies Who Matter (1992) by Walt Harrington.

Wednesday, Oct. 7

Process Focus: Research II

WEEK SEVEN

Monday, Oct. 12

Assigned Profile: “Filling Silences with Strong Voice: Paule Marshall,” pp. 77-83 in Portraits in Print: A Collection of Profiles and the Stories Behind Them (1991) by Helen Benedict.

Wednesday, Oct. 14

Process Focus: Interviewing III

Assigned Reading: “Marshall Commentary,” pp. 84-86 in Portraits in Print: A Collection of Profiles and the Stories Behind Them (1991) by Helen Benedict.

WEEK EIGHT

Monday, Oct. 19

Assigned Profile: “Mr. & Mrs. B,” by Alexander Chee, Apology Magazine, Winter 2014

Wednesday, Oct. 21

Process Focus: Writing Character

WEEK NINE

Monday, Oct. 26

Assigned Profile: “A Translation Crisis at the Border,” by Rachel Nolan, The New Yorker, January 6, 2020.

Wednesday, Oct. 28

Process Focus: Writing Place

WEEK TEN

Monday, Nov. 2

Assigned Profile: “Manchild in the Promised Land: Where Darryl Dawkins Came From,” by Pete Dexter, Inside Sports, April 30, 1980.

Wednesday, Nov. 4

Process Focus: Writing Scenes

WEEK ELEVEN

Monday, Nov. 9

Assigned Profile: “How Missy Elliott Became an Icon,” by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Elle, May 15, 2017.

Wednesday, Nov. 11

Process Focus: Writing and Structure

WEEK TWELVE

Monday, Nov. 16

Assigned Profile: “A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof,” by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, GQ, August 21, 2017.

Wednesday, Nov. 18

Process Focus: The Ladder of Abstraction

WEEK THIRTEEN

Monday, Nov. 23

Assigned Profile: “A Boy of Unusual Vision,” by Alice Steinbach, The Baltimore Sun, May1984.

Wednesday, Nov. 25: NO CLASS, THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY

WEEK FOURTEEN

Monday, Nov. 30

Assigned Profile: “The Face of Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg opens up,” by Jose Antonio Vargas, The New Yorker, Sept. 13, 2010.

Wednesday, Dec. 2

Process Focus: Editing

WEEK FIFTEEN

Monday, Dec. 7

Assigned Profile: “Among the Wild Things: Maurice Sendak’s Fantastic Imagination,” by Nat Hentoff, The New Yorker, Jan. 22, 1966.

Wednesday, Dec. 9

Process Focus: Closing Thoughts

Categories
Book Reviews The New York Times Book Review

Tale of a Puerto Rican Plantation Mistress

The New York Times Book Review, July 17, 2011 – Conquistadora‘s strength is its Rubik’s Cube portrait of Ana, an unconventional, ambitious woman whose attitudes toward children, slaves and lovers are so perplexing, they kept me riveted. Ana isn’t much of a mother, but she takes in a humpbacked baby girl abandoned on her doorstep the same day she trades her own son away in order to keep running the plantation. She’s a liberal mistress, expressing interest in the African songs her maid sings and allowing the slaves’ midwife to deliver her son. (“We all look and function pretty much the same down there,” she declares.) Yet she achieves freedom by exploiting those who, starkly, lack it. Noting that none of her slaves have challenged her, Ana reflects: “But of course, they could. . . . She would, if she were one of them.”

Is Ana believable? Esmeralda Santiago, the author who created her, herself has asked that question. “I worried that I was creating a character who would have been impossible in that time and that place,” she said in an interview on her publisher’s Web site. In fact, a small percentage of women did own or control plantations in the Caribbean. Whether the obstacles they faced in a world dominated by white men sensitized them to the oppression of slaves is another question entirely. White women in the 19th-century Caribbean were largely silent on the subject of slavery. Most who spoke publicly, defended it. With her tough portrait of a female planter, Santiago speculates, charitably but unromantically, about those who didn’t speak.

Continue reading my review of the novel here.

Categories
ALL Essays The Virginia Quarterly Review

“Coolie Women Are in Demand Here”

The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2011 – Our journey took us past endless fields of flowering yellow along the northern banks of the Ganges. When we pulled into towns, we asked for directions, from children balancing loads three times their size on their heads, from crouching women tending baskets of cauliflower and eggplant by the roadside, from men in the stores that stared open-faced onto the street, framing a tailor at his sewing machine or a man pumping air into bicycle tires. We sought the guidance of random people on the route, turning to them as to a massive human compass. And they obliged. They pointed us along bumpy roads bracketed by tiny pastel altars made to worship the sun, until one man finally indicated a rocky path. “That way,” he said.

We had traveled five hours over shell-shocked roads and narrow dirt lanes to arrive here, at the threshold of a place I wasn’t even sure still existed. It did a century ago. That’s what a document that I had discovered two years earlier, in Guyana’s national archives, indicated. It was the emigration pass issued to my great-grandmother on July 29, 1903, the day she sailed from Calcutta to the Caribbean.

Catalogued on this brittle artifact, yellow and crumbling with age, was everything about Immigrant #96153 that the imperial bureaucracy had considered worth recording: “Name: Sheojari. Age: 27. Height: five-feet, four-and-a-half inches. Caste: Brahman.” Here was colonial officialdom’s cold summary of an indentured laborer’s life. Yet, it included strokes of unsettling intimacy. The emigration pass told me that my great-grandmother had a scar on her left foot, a burn mark. Someone had scribbled “Pregnant 4 mos” in pencil at the document’s edge. On the line for husband’s name, there was only a dash.

Continue reading in the Spring 2011 issue of VQR. The excerpt was reprinted in India in the Sept. 2011 issue of The Caravan. You can read the excerpt in full here, at the Caravan’s Web site.

Categories
ALL Book Reviews The New York Times Book Review

Homeland Revisited

The New York Times Book Review – In the middle of his accomplished book, “India Calling,” Anand Giridharadas tells of meeting a Maoist revolutionary in Hyderabad. The city, nicknamed Cyberabad, serves as a base for both the globalized Indian economy and an armed insurgency at war against the country’s inequalities, rooted and new. India’s Maoist — or Naxalite — movement began as a rural struggle against exploitative landlords in a caste-conscious, socialist nation but has now arrayed itself against the forces of global capitalism reshaping India. When Giridharadas pushes the Naxalite — What does one fight have to do with the other? — the man answers with a striking notion: globalization is reducing people to their specific economic task, stripping them of their humanity, just as caste had done. And software engineers in gated communities have become the new Brahmins. Giridharadas follows the curve of this argument, allowing it to seduce us. Then, he reveals that this rebel, although waging revolution by night, reports by day for a newspaper he himself describes as a shill for the multinational transformation of India. “I have to earn my lunch,” the man explains. “I’m not a whole-timer for revolution.”

The scene accentuates Giridharadas’s appeal as a writer. “India Calling” has what Hanif Kureishi once described as “the sex of a syllogism.” Full-figured ideas animate every turn. So, simultaneously, does Giridharadas’s eye for contradiction. The combination both pleases us and makes us wary — distrustful of shapely ideas, including the author’s own.

Continue reading my piece in this past Sunday’s New York Times.

 

Categories
ALL Book Reviews The Washington Post: Book World

Years of Red Dust

The Washington Post – It just so happened that Qiu Xiaolong was in St. Louis when the Chinese government massacred pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. A T.S. Eliot translator, Qiu had won a grant to conduct research at Washington University, founded by Eliot’s grandfather. Because of that chance timing, his life diverted dramatically. Publicly sympathetic to the protesters, Qiu never made it back to China, except as a visitor. Instead, he became a U.S. citizen and a novelist in English, the author of a popular mystery series about a Shanghai police detective named Inspector Chen.

Outcomes like his own, the accidental kind, befall many of the characters in “Years of Red Dust,” Qiu’s witty, evocative book of interrelated short stories just published in English. Read my review of the book for The Washington Post.