The Power of Narrative 2018

As journalists and storytellers, most of us (especially at newspapers) write primarily about recent events, using narrative tools to render people, places, and scenes we witnessed ourselves or recreated through interviews, when the material was still fresh. But memory can be hazy and conflicting, malleable and unreliable. How do we reconstruct scenes and render stories that are vivid as well as true, and accurate about things that happened long ago -- one year, 25 years, even 100 years in the past, with no living participants or witnesses to interview? 

Boston Globe reporter Eric Moskowitz--who in recent years has written about the Kennedy assasination, the 1967 Red Sox season, and the 1916 Fort Point Channel trolley disaster-- will talk about how he tries to tap into transmissions from the past, gathering and sifting the kinds of details that help even old stories feel fresh and observed.