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Reporting can be a useful tool when writing non-fiction or memoir stories. They can help the writer tell a factual sequence of events, deepen their understanding of the story and build trust between the writer and their subjects.
In this class, published memoirist and NPR journalist Malaka Gharib will teach journalism basics and how they can be deployed in storytelling. We’ll discuss how to ask for an interview, create a question list, record, transcribe and what to disclose to a subject about the piece. We will go over basic journalism ethics, like what is “on the record” and “off the record.” We will learn how to triangulate and fact-check, especially claims a subject might make in an interview. We will ask ourselves: How might race, gender and power affect the outcome of an interview? The last part of the class will be devoted to coming up with a question list for a potential source.
• In-Class Writing Lift: Light
• Homework: None
• Workshopping Drafts: None
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Malaka Gharib is a journalist, cartoonist and graphic novelist. She is the author of I Was Their American Dream, a graphic memoir published in 2019 about being first-generation Filipino Egyptian American, which won an Arab American Book Award in 2020. Then in 2022, she published It Won't Always Be Like This, a graphic memoir about her summers in the Middle East.
By day, she works as a digital editor at NPR for Life Kit, a lifestyle podcast about health, finance, relationships and more. Her comics and writing have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Catapult, The Believer Magazine and The New Yorker. She has been profiled in The Washington Post and The New York Times. Some of her comics and zines are archived at the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, the Arab American Museum and Barnard College’s Zine Library. Her art and writing has been exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Harvard Radcliffe Institute and Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery. She lives in Nashville, Tenn., with her husband, son and Shiba Inu.
Malaka is new to The Porch. Welcome!
