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The Delacorte Review

Real True Stories (And How They Happen) The Delacorte Review is the narrative nonfiction publication of the Columbia Journalism School.

New stories appear every month at www.delacortereview.org, and in print four times a year. Its weekly newsletter, Writerland, https://thedelacortereview.substack.com/, is a guide to finding joy in the often difficult work of writing. At the core of The Review's mission is discovery -- of new writers, new voices, new stories, and new readers. We believe that the most powerful stories are the ones writers need to tell. Our commitment is to be home for those stories, and for those writers.

09/11/2025

The struggle to write is not limited to the young. With the years come more skills with which we can better do our work. But those skills do not always prepare us for stories that, on the surface, look familiar but that can be altogether new, unsettling, and sometimes frightening.

This week, a homage to departed journalist Paul Colford, and the story it took him decades to return to.

“Time had sanded away the four-foot bluff and left a long, manageable slope to the water’s edge, now mere inches off. When I turned around at this spot, I could see again the doctor and the cops emerging from the growth, finding us too late to matter.”

It's good to be back. It is also good to have had what all writers need but which we too seldom are allowed, or allow ourselves: time to step away and hopefully see our work more clearly and fully.

06/02/2025

Reporters develop all sorts of connections with subjects, every hue of interaction. In a profession hard-wired to be dubious, it is not always easy to see the best in people. But sometimes we meet someone whose unique goodness stays with us. This is a homage to such a person.

My students have graduated and dispersed and I am kicking myself for sending them off without telling them about one of the most profound experiences that awaits them: that if they do their work right and remain open, they may well meet – loved ones aside – the best, most honorable, most generou...

$“Places read and places traveled accumulate over time, and continue to change with experience. Each is a fraction of the...$

05/23/2025

“Places read and places traveled accumulate over time, and continue to change with experience. Each is a fraction of the ongoing genealogy of where we’ve been or dreamt of going, some of it faded and some indelible, leaving a strata of sorts.”

Whether research, a companion to travel, or a pilgrimage, the intersection of place and page can be enriching and tell us how and why we read. In this new chapter of Writerland, we delve into some notable examples:

A series of winding roads through the mountains descended into a canyon, with a river running along its bottom.

05/21/2025

There is nothing new in writers holding fast to their conclusions, but that inclination toward certainty feels so much more a part of our culture. We know what we know and as a result we end up doing too little asking, too little second guessing. This piece describes what feels counter-intuitive for this moment: the delight in being humbled, in being reminded that there is always, always more to learn.

An anxious email landed in my inbox the day after my students’ book went on sale earlier this week.

05/19/2025

Fresh off the press: Fourteen writers uncover the hidden lives behind old photographs: a son battling for a mother's love in a family of thirteen; teenagers forced to grow up too soon; a Chinese-American descendant chasing lost family histories; a young woman discovering the heartbreak behind her father's fading memories. From long-buried secrets to quiet triumphs, each story reveals how photographs can capture more than a moment — they can hold the untold struggles, dreams, and fragile connections that define who we are.

By turns raw, tender, and unforgettable, Piece by Piece invites readers to see how the smallest image can unlock an entire world.

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05/15/2025

The time between stories can be as unsettling as the time between romances. A love story ends and before another begins you wonder and worry whether you will ever find joy again.

We find ourselves needing to start over, each time with the knowledge of what will await us.

So, how do writers deal with the time between stories and the void on the page? Here are some of their answers.

And so you have written.

04/29/2025

Something gets lost when students from abroad come to America and learn to write as journalists here: the voices they carry with them. Imagine landing here with all your bags and ideas of what stories are supposed to sound like, only to be told that you might have left those traditions and sensibilities behind. Here they explain how they see their work, and how where they grew up and the languages they spoke shaped them.

Something gets lost when students from abroad come to America and learn to write as journalists here: the voices they carry with them.

04/21/2025

“When you are new to writing for a living it is as if you have discovered a power you didn’t know you possessed and that you cannot wait to use. We are learning to command our voices, to use words and sentences in ways that, we hope, will draw readers in and along, and maybe even move them to tears or, harder still, laughter. That is us on the page. Our work is a statement of achievement, of what we can do. And better still, people tell us they liked what we wrote. All life’s promise, distilled in the words “good story.”

There is no harm in this thrill, this delight. But it can work to our disadvantage – we try too hard to dazzle, to show off our burgeoning skills. We want to be seen, recognized, applauded. And what better way than to use words and phrases that serve like a big flashing light with an arrow pointed right at us.

"The habit of what’s called 'writing for lines' consists in embellishing wherever possible. We are all prone to it, and how could we not be when the reward is the praise we want and need.

Instead, begin by thinking not in words, phrases, and sentences. Instead, think in paragraphs. Paragraphs, done right, should introduce, explain, illuminate, delineate – capture – an idea. Paragraphs have a life of their own, a trajectory, a pace that builds, all the while drawing in the telling details, essential facts, bits of necessary color, and insights that lead the reader along and along and along until, boom, you bring it to a close – to yes, the punchline. The landing. Which in its very satisfying way leads readers to the next paragraph, when the same wonderful thing happens all over again.

When you think in paragraphs you are taking the long view, certainly in relation to words and phrases. You are writing in a way that creates a flow from start to finish, as opposed to the herky-jerkiness of writing for lines.

If writing is at its core about making choices, when thinking and writing in paragraphs you are making a different set of choices than simply the well-turned phrase for its own artistic sake. You are thinking instead in more ambitious ways, in what you want this paragraph to achieve in the role it plays in your story.”

Chapter 178: Don’t Let ‘em See You Sweating

04/16/2025

There are treasures beyond our reading diet of the usual newspapers and magazines, seen as guarantors of quality. Precious work is found in improbable places: Borges wrote in a family magazine, Proust in obscure revues, and great journalism in small dailies. Sometimes, the condition for a work is the possibility of existing somewhere, however unexpected.
https://tinyurl.com/yckybchs

Growing up in Southwest Mexico in the 1960s, my mother often said she owed her lifelong passion for reading to an unlikely source.

04/08/2025

Writing is not rational work. Day in and day out, we assemble words, sentences, and paragraphs that we hope the world will see and, better still, appreciate. We do not write for ourselves, not really. We write to be read, which means leaving ourselves exposed and vulnerable.
So it is that a rational solution to addressing the fears we experience in the mad, exhilarating, terrifying work of writing will often fall short. Sometimes, you need to fight terror with tricks, artifice, and games designed to fool our all-too-powerful inner critics into thinking nothing to see here. For example, how would you pitch an imaginary movie producer in an imaginary elevator, going from the first floor to the fourth? Here is how journalism students fared.

It is spring, the season of crocuses, daffodils, seasonal allergies, Opening Days (please, please let this be my Mets’ year) and, if the past is its usually reliable guide, panic among my students.

04/01/2025

Reconstruction, as a reporting tool, is a skill long employed by historians to great effect and, in recent decades, by journalists who appreciate and accept that the only way to do this work well and honorably is through the long, slow, and exacting business of gathering a fact at a time. Only then can you look back at what you’ve learned, see how you’ve distilled it on the page, and feel that you’ve succeeded in taking readers there, too. A master of this craft, Meryl Gordon, tells us how she does it.

So many fun things in our line of work, and few can bring more delight than being transported in place and time by means of the essential and never easy task of reporting.

03/24/2025

“Almost all of the leading characters in my book are dead”, writes the author. What remains to obtain answers? Where do we look to learn? How do we avoid assuming? Sometimes, a paper trail of letters and photos can send us on your way.

Almost all of the leading characters in my book are dead.

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Our Story

Stories do not write themselves, much as writers may modestly insist they do. Stories exist because writers need to tell them—a need so deep that they will endure false starts, woeful sentences, dead-end paragraphs, two-dimensional characters, flabby prose, wrong turns, and shaky narratives. In short, they will risk all the things that, taken together, comprise the writer’s greatest fear: failure. Specifically, failing to tell the story they need to tell.

Still, they persist. If the best fiction is propelled by imagination, we believe that the best narrative nonfiction is propelled by the relentless and often-lonely business of finding out things that are often maddeningly difficult to find. In a word: reporting. Nonfiction storytelling can be as compelling, riveting, and transporting as fiction—so long as you come back, as they say, with the goods.

Our mission is discovery, and it comes in two parts: First, for our readers to discover new, original works of ambitious narrative nonfiction, often by writers they are reading for the first time. And second: allowing our readers to discover how those stories came to be told. And why a writer needed to tell it. http://www.twitter.com/delacortereview http://www.delacortereview.com