Gilbert King speaks at the Mayborn Festival.
"Pop-pops are OK. Zing-zings are bad."
Dallas Morning News photojournalist Smiley Pool offered that advice on avoiding gunfire during this year’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. Pool was on the team awarded a Breaking News Photography prize for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2006. The conference took place the Frank W. and Sue Mayborn School of Journalism at University of North Texas, July 22-24.
The conference theme was the Pulitzer Prize Centennial, and many prize-winners traveled to Denton, Texas to participate, including 1995 Criticism winner Margo Jefferson, 2013 Nonfiction winner Gilbert King, four-time photography winner Carol Guzy, and Marty Baron, who as Boston Globe editor led the paper to multiple prizes.
As Michael Merschel reported in the Dallas Morning News: “If you write, read or care about the power of great journalism, my gosh, what a gathering of rock stars. Maybe not Woodstock. Definitely akin to one of the better jam concerts that they have at the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies.”
Shacochis
The conference website features many readings and personal stories from Pulitzer winners and finalists. Bob Shacochis, a 2014 Fiction finalist for The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, contributed an essay titled, “A ‘Monstrous’ Novel,’ and on the reading list was a contemporaneous Washington Post piece: “The woman lost her soul, Bob got a t-shirt.”
Alex Tizon, 1997 Investigative Reporting winner with Eric Nalder and Deborah Nelson of The Seattle Times for an investigation of corruption in a federally sponsored housing program for Native Americans, was interviewed in the “Pulse” section of the site. George Getschow asked Tizon about how his journalism background influenced the research and writing of his book, Big Little Man. The book is about being Asian in America — Tizon has Filipino heritage — and he discusses how different it is to write a personal memoir :
As a journalist, you’ve written profiles on murderers and oddballs and cataclysmic events such as Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet you say the hardest and most perilous thing you’ve ever done is look deeply into your own experience. Why?
Because you’re crossing this sort of infinite ocean to get to the other side, to see a glimpse of something you think will finally give you the right answer to yourself. And so you just keep rowing and rowing, farther and farther. Was it Carl Jung who said that the self is the hardest thing to fathom? And yet, despite all this mystical stuff, you have a deadline and an editor saying, ‘Is it coming in anytime soon?’
Don't worry if you missed it — the Mayborn will be hosting another Pulitzer Centennial-themed event on September 29, 2016.
Check the Pulitzer.org events calendar for details in the coming weeks.