After Kapuściński: The Art of Reportage, cosponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, the National Book Critics Circle, the New York Institute for Humanities at NYU, and the Literary Reportage concentration of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU, in association with the Overseas Press Club and Worlds Without Borders, focused on Literary Reportage Between Self and Other, Fact and Fiction. The panel was moderated by Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and featured Alastair Reid, Wojciech Jagielski (Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya) and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx, finalist for a National book Critics Circle award in nonfiction in 2003.
| The panel was moderated by Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and featured Alastair Reid, Wojciech Jagielski and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. |
The podcast will do the panelists more justice than I can, but among the highlights is Weschler’s introduction, in which he identified Kapuściński’s method as a “double kind of reporting.” Kapuściński filed daily wire service reports, then explored a personal dimension to his writing after “working” hours, occasionally returning to themes discovered while on assignment five or ten years before, culminating in a kind of “rhapsodic nonfiction.”
Also of note:
Reid sharing internal memos from former New Yorker editor William Shawn, who declared in 1979 that good writing humanizes facts, and that above all the magazine was looking for style, for “writers who don’t sound like [a] nobody.” Known for his translations of Borges and Neruda, Reid went on to discuss the “I,” distinguishing via Borges the lived reality versus the word reality. He found room in the brave librarian’s notion of all writing as fiction to define reportage as something that must be lived.
LeBlanc, mentioning that she doesn’t use the first person; she explained that she is clear on the POV in her work because of the time she spends in the field, developing relationships with her subjects. She hopes that they will recognize themselves in her books, and that general readers will be engaged and not feel betrayed by her privileged access to the world she reports on.
And Jagielski’s eloquent summary of the way that communism shaped the art of writing in Poland echoed Smolenski’s allusion to the totalitarian in both Baghdad and Poland. Writers learned to escape “between the lines,” writing about other places to make their commentary safer. This, he argued, is why Kapuściński became a far-flung correspondent.