Points of Entry: Cross-Currents in Storytelling Issue 3: 2005

• New scholarly / professional journal publishes its third annual issue advocating narrative writing in journalism. The journal goes to hundreds of newsrooms and college journalism programs around the country.

• Harvard University's Mark Kramer, director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism, has praised the journal. "Anyone in the field who actually takes a copy of the new and beautifully designed Points of Entry in hand will realize after just a few minutes that it has become a primary document for presenting the case for news narratives, the depth of the ideas behind it, and the finest work done in the idiom."

More information is available at www.pointsofentry.org.

Points of Entry Publishes Third Annual Issue

News Release - September 24, 2004
contact:
Denise Waters
dwaters@cnu.edu
(757) 594-7331

(NEWPORT NEWS, VA) — When Ken Burns looks for a new documentary film project, he has his "antennae out" for a project that will help "advance a discussion of race." When novelist and City University of New York scholar Elizabeth Nunez, an emigree from Trinidad, hears the word "race," she says she hears "an attempt to define me and I will not be defined. I say I am a human being."

Burns and Nunez are among twenty-six nationally known writers, including two-time Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Jon Franklin, contributing to the third annual issue of Points of Entry: Cross-Currents in Storytelling. The issue, released in October, examines the problem of whose truth and whose reality gets represented in the media and print journalism.

The journal was founded and is edited by Terry Lee, an associate professor in the Christopher Newport University English department, which supports the professional publication. Roberta Rosenberg, professor of English and a specialist in multicultural American literature, is associate editor.

"CNU has given the journal its unqualified support from the start," Lee said, in the form of two faculty development grants and funds from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The journal premiered in 2002 at the Nieman Narrative Journalism conference at Harvard University, where it continues to debut issues each year by invitation.

Harvard's Mark Kramer, director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism, has cited Points of Entry as being" a primary document for presenting the case for news narratives, the depth of the ideas behind it, and finest work done in the idiom."

"Points of Entry works hard to include a diverse range of scholars and writers from around the country," Lee says, "to develop a meaningful dialogue about how reporters report news and about how they write the news they report." To do that, he says, the current issue concerns issues of race, medicine and healing, objectivity in journalism, and problems with whose truth routinely gets reported.

"Journalists face enormous difficulties in deciding whose truth and whose reality they will report," Lee says. As Peter Pitzele, an instructor at the Union Theological Seminary, writes in the current issue, "Modern reality is too protean for any single perspective. Truth in a relative world requires many relaters" to represent fairly "the complex truth of modern democratic life."

The role of storytelling in healing is explored by Margot S. Kruskrall, M.D., a professor at Harvard Medical School, who contributes a narrative about having the tables turned in her fight with ovarian cancer. Writer Jane Baker Segelken's memoir explores the revelations that occur as she writes about her breast cancer, and her husband, H. Roger Segelken, senior science writer at Cornell University, writes about her experience writing, at a time when his mother also fights breast cancer.

In "Whose Lies? Whose Realities?" Mark Noe, assistant professor at the University of Texas Pan American, considers the rhetoric during and after the President Bill Clinton impeachment, considering that narrative may be something one uses "in order to manipulate the facts, often for purely political advantage."

Two-time Pulitzer prizewinner Jon Franklin offers a work of literary journalism, "Moira's Ghost," about a physician who connects with her father, who died when she was an infant, and finds herself entering the profession for which he was training.

Stephen Bloom, acclaimed author of Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America , offers an original work of literary journalism about one man's obsession with a orchestra conductor, in "Ode to Maestro Järvi."

Paula Gunn Allen, who founded the field of Native American literary studies, and the author of the landmark study, The Sacred Hoop, writes a narrative memoir about the death of her father, which occurred Sept. 11, 2001, the death of her son, which came shortly after, and the writing of her new book.

Other contributions in the issue discuss the role of narrative storytelling techniques in newspaper newsrooms, and dispatches from writers traveling in Uganda, Ukraine and Croatia.

Points of Entry is annual publication that encourages writing in journalism by exploring cross-currents in storytelling in reporting, narrative nonfiction and oral tradition. The journal strives to serve narrative journalism by weaving connections among reporters, editors, teachers, students and storytellers.