Atlanta-based artist Daniel Troppy had always worked in visual media: painting, photography, and sculptures from found objects. But after the death of his brother, Darrell Troppy—a painter in Beaumont, Texas, whose work was shown in New York galleries and The Louvre—Daniel found himself turning to words.

“When my brother passed away, that’s when I started to write,” he told me. “And I am not a writer. I wasn’t an artist with words. But writing saved me.”

In grief, he found catharsis in writing tiny true stories—defining moments, memories, micro-narratives—each paired with a black-and-white photograph with the mood and grain of film. Written with telling detail and brevity, the stories averaged 100 words. A minute or less of reading.

“I just started to write these little stories,” he said. “I Iiked how I felt after I purged them from my memory and my body. I discovered that writing was the best form of therapy.”

His project, eventually titled “Good Mourning,” evolved as he began taking care of his aging parents. Immersed in their world, he documented the last phase of their lives with a caregiver’s heart and an artist’s eye. The story unfolds on an Instagram feed that looks more like a black-and-white contact print. (It’s also on Facebook and Daniel’s website.)

As a friend and a distant observer, I was captivated. His images were arresting, more concerned with a mood and a moment than technical precision. His writing used specificity of detail to avoid cliché. He precluded tropes and stereotypes by focusing on individuals. This was something remarkable. But what was it? Was this journalism? Art? Documentary? Visual memoir? A serial narrative unfolding in real time?

“They’re love letters,” Daniel said. “Each story captures a small moment in time. A visit. A question. A memory. A feeling. I wanted to use my photography skills and write these short stories to document my parents’ end-of-life journey.”

Amid the selfies and cats of Instagram, Daniel’s silver gelatin prints stood out: An empty swing set that reminded me of William Eggleston’s untitled Memphis tricycle. An old woman pushing a walker through a hallway lined with portraits. A wrinkled hand with an IV line. Thinning hair in curlers.

The writing knocked me out with tender specificities: She once had a full head of hair. Thick, luscious, jet-black wavy hair, so thick you could hardly run a brush through it. Today, her head of hair tells another story. She strategically tries to conceal her balding spot by brushing the front hair straight to the back. Today, a brush easily glides through her hair, reminding her of her vanished youth. Mom will turn ninety in two months, so her battlefield is littered with carnage.

It was all so raw and intimate. It made me slightly uncomfortable, but also moved me. Brave and unflinching, Daniel pressed the shutter in moments that might have caused me to look away. They pulled me into a world I felt I shouldn’t be privileged to see, like Sally Mann’s family portraits. There was a touch of documentary, a la Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but this photographer wasn’t an outsider. He was part of the scene, invisible but present. Shooting not only with permission, but love.

What was going on here? I had to learn the story behind these stories. So I gave my friend Daniel a call.

The Backstory

I first met Daniel 12 years ago in Atlanta, where he owned a designer consignment shop called Doubletake. I was a new author with style anxiety about my upcoming book tour. Daniel gave me an extreme makeover, dressing me in vintage Celine, Oscar de la Renta, and Prada, stretching my $500 wardrobe budget at the cost of his bottom line. We kept in touch through Instagram and text conversations that often began with a photo and an urgent question: Which dress? What shoes?! Does this work?!

In 2015, Daniel closed the shop and took up analog photography, learning to process 35 mm film and develop prints in a darkroom he set up at home. His Instagram feed transformed into a series of black-and-white portraits and profiles of people in Atlanta. None of them lived under a roof. But his subject wasn’t homelessness. It was people. Individuals.

With permission, he took each person’s photo, interviewed them, and shared their story in the Instagram caption. His images and words convey a genuine connection. As the individual vignettes amassed, they comprised a bigger mosaic, a portrait of a community of people living on the streets. Daniel wasn’t a journalist, but what he was doing looked a lot like it. He put a human face on a problem. He told their individual stories. That made it harder to look away.

People started to send him money to help the people they saw in the photos. So Daniel created a non-profit called YIMBY Georgia (short for Yes In My Back Yard) to distribute backpacks filled with toiletries and home cooked meals in biodegradable containers.

On Christmas morning in 2021, Daniel got a phone call. His brother, at work in his studio in Texas, had died of a heart attack. The grief drove Daniel to writing. Stories poured out as fast as he could scribble them in a little black notebook. Not long after his brother died, Daniel became a caregiver for his elderly parents, who lived in the Rio Grand Valley, about 20 miles from the border. He flew to Texas for weeks at a time. Sometimes weeks turned into months.

Two themes in his life began braiding together: aging parents in Texas and people on the streets in Georgia. Sometimes his stories would correspond with the photo. Other times, they didn’t. “That’s deliberate,” Daniel said. “I was never the type of person who wanted the sofa to match the painting behind it.”

Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook became his gallery. He curated photographs—some old, some new—to pair with the stories. These were not iPhone photos, but silver gelatin prints he made by hand in a darkroom. Once dry, he laid the prints on a table and digitized them with his iPhone. On Instagram, you can tell they are prints by the asymmetrical border and curl of the corners.

To him, this was art, not journalism. But there were elements of memoir, autobiography, and longform immersive journalism. The constraints—one image, one minute of reading—were a deliberate creative conceit, and also a nod to his brother.

“He had such bad ADHD,” Daniel said. “So I wrote stories that could be read in a minute or less. That was a way for me to pay homage to him.”

The Fine Line

As a writer, I want my stories to not make readers not only think, but feel. And Daniel’s photos stirred me up with complicated emotions. I admired his courage for documenting not only the tender moments but the messy indignities of aging. He did it in a way that was honest, but also respectful to his mother.

Last year, when my mother’s Alzheimer’s made it unsafe for her to live alone, she moved in with me and my family, and I became her caregiver. There were moments I felt compelled to document, but I struggled with that impulse. I didn’t want to exploit her vulnerable condition, which she found embarrassing and humiliating. But I also knew our story could help someone feel less alone. That’s one of the reasons I write.

When mom got violent with me one night, I took out my phone and filmed it, planning to show her Mr. Hyde moments to her Dr. Jeklyll self. (I didn’t.) When she covered the ceiling and three walls with chocolate milk, I documented the comical carnage, so we could laugh about it later. (We did.)

When a horrific phone call summoned me to the hospital, I took photos of her body on life support. The last time I saw her face in the crematorium, I took three death portraits. Writing this publicly fills me with guilt and shame. But it was something I had to document, or else I would regret it. I may never show any of this to anyone, but I need it for myself.

My impulse to document awful moments is rooted in my fear of losing my memory. My mother’s mother had dementia, too, so the genetic odds terrify me. I also know that when I’m ready to write about this—probably years from now—I will want to fact-check my memory, as I have always done when I write memoir. (A student once asked me where the dialogue came from in The King of Tides. I pulled out a notebook and showed her.)

Writing about intense emotions is like mincing through a minefield of cliches. The best way to avoid them is hyper-specificity. Capturing the universal through the particulars. The Ladder of Abstraction is a wonderful tool for this. Stay low, in the realm of concrete imagery and telling detail, and you’ll immerse the reader in a cinematic scene and maybe even stir their emotions.

Daniel did this well. He wrote about moments I related to, though his details were unique. He portrayed the awkward dance of pride and humility the first time he bathed his mother. He wrote about taking her for long drives, and how she’d ask him to turn down a particular dirt road that she’d never travelled before. He confessed his well-meaning folly of making her superfood smoothies, only to learn, explosively, that her 89-year-old body couldn’t tolerate that much fiber.

Many of his micro-stories have all the key narrative elements: dialogue, scene, character, tension, point of view, and an arc. Some are more like pencil-studies an artist sketches before committing to a painting. Collectively, they comprise a longform story that evolves over time.

The Long Arc

As time passed, and his mother’s health declined, Daniel’s caregiving duties expanded. He had to make a choice: Run his nonprofit or care for his parents. He couldn’t be in two places at once. He chose to care for his parents.

This also meant he no longer had the time and energy to develop film and make prints in a darkroom. To keep the project going, he needed the speed and ease of digital photography. He didn’t buy a digital SLR. He figured out how to make his iPhone produce images like film.

In his Instagram project, you can see a shift in the fall of 2024. The border and curl of physical prints disappears. The images lose much of the blur and grain.

Yet the collection retains a sense of visual continuity. Some viewers might not notice the shift from film to digital. Some of the iPhone images suggest the blur of camera shake, the warp of a tilt-shift lens, or the high-contrast grain of Tri-X film. Some project the weight of daguerreotypes.

How did he do that? He shared some tricks. For this shot, he smeared Vaseline on a plate of glass, then holding the glass against his iPhone lens—a DIY filter. This stylized blur in this photo comes from shooting though a screened door. For the pinhole camera effect of this image, he curled his hand into a circle and shot through it.

After he shuttered his nonprofit, Daniel archived most of the portraits of the homeless community. The collection centers his family, plus occasional portraits of other people, and some Egglestonian vignettes (without the vivid color).

Now five years into the project, he has amassed more than 650 stories. He’s still caring for his 93-year-old father, and he will continue until the inevitable end. Daniel envisions the end of the story: when his parent’s Texas house is sold, and he walks away for the very last time. His dream is to find an agent and publish the project in book form, though the emphasis is more on the writing than the photos.

“I didn’t just write 655 short stories,” Daniel said. “I’m documenting a lived experience. I view them as love letters for my parents.”

How did his parents feel about this? Did he tell them about it? Or show them?

“You know, I did,” he said. “I showed them one evening, and we spent two hours at the dining room table. I read them the stories. They looked at the photographs. They cried at some and they laughed at others. And my dad put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, ‘That would make a great book.’”

For other examples of short-form narrative storytelling, subscribe to the Nieman Storyboard newsletter. I was asked to guest-edit next Friday’s newsletter, in which you’ll find links to my favorite narrative song and other examples of storytellers using Instagram as a platform for short-form stories.

Other Storyboard resources for narrative writers:

• How to pitch and get published

• Elements of narrative craft

• Best books on narrative storytelling

• How to interview for narrative (vs news)

This winter, a week-long reporting trip in Oahu required immersive reporting in tricky conditions: Video interviews on a beach with wind and background noise; filming in a pool, while treading water in two-foot waves, and while surfing.

For reporting on whitewater river trips, I have used a waterproof housing for my iPhone. It was big and clunky, but I could stuff it in my PFD and pull it out quickly, though it came at the expense of paddling. For filming while fishing and surfing, I needed a hands-free device.

Waterproof gear for hands-free filming

In Alaska, I used the GoPro Hero12 Black for some of the footage on this Food & Wine film about commercial fishing. It’s waterproof and fully submersible without a waterproof case, and has voice-commands that allow you to start and stop filming without pressing a button.

For Hawaii, I borrowed a GoPro GoPro Floaty case from my good friend Ian Highlands, a surfer and one of the best professional outdoor adventure sports photographers I know. (See his work on Instagram @ianhighlands.)

Generous friend that he is, Ian gave me a Pro Standard Grill Mount 3.0, a mouth mount for hands-free filming of POV shots. It positions the camera around chin-level. Which works for surfing, but if you’re treading water, the lens pops in and out of the water (a head mount would work better). On the surfboard, I was too nervous about wiping out, getting pounded, and losing the camera in a gasp for air. I loaned it to a Hawaiian surfer with better skills and no such concerns. Here’s his video:

For self-facing surf shots, I used an articulating Gooseneck clamp mount from Amazon that clipped onto the nose of the longboard. The waves knocked it down during the paddle-out, and it fell off in at least one wipeout, but the Floaty case — hunter orange — made it easy to spot and retrieve. Below is a video shot with this setup.

For iPhone videos with higher quality audio, Ian loaned me a RODE Wireless Micro 2-Person Ultracompact Wireless Microphone System, a bluetooth lav mic that was intuitive and came with little furry windshields that cut down on wind noise. If I have to do more iPhone interviews, I’m going to buy one for myself. The RODE app also enables you to simultaneously use your phone’s front and rear cameras to film a video interview of two people talking on a split-screen. (I can’t share any of these yet.)

Pro Tip: At the end of your trip, take a photo

At the end of reporting trips requiring a lot of gear, I lay out the gear that actually got used and take a photo, which serves as a packing list for my next trip. For this trip to Hawaii, I used my Alaska gear photo and packing list.

Here’s the photo and full gear list (with links) from the Hawaii trip:

1. Epson WorkForce ES-50 Portable Color Document Scanner. I usually rely on the ScannerPro app on my iPhone, but this is quicker for multi-page documents.

2. Thule Gauntlet Laptop Sleeve. Wirecutter’s pick for a tough (and splashproof) cover for my Macbook Air.

3. Osprey Waterproof Pack Pocket (on clearance at the time of this post). Submersible protection for iPhone, digital audio recorder, chargers, and other small electronics.

4. Rode Wireless Micro lav mics. This tiny pair of clip-on wireless microphones connects to your iPhone via Bluetooth and improves the audio quality tremendously. Tiny furry microphone covers muffle wind noise.

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In January, I took a long-planned reporting trip to Hawaii. I was still reeling from December. My mother was cremated the day after Christmas, the day before my son turned 18. Two days later, on Mom’s 85th birthday, the void in our house, where she lived with us, echoed with her absence.

Her memorial service will come later this year, in Alabama or Florida, where most of her family and friends are. But I filled an aspirin bottle with her ashes and tucked it in my pack. I wanted to bring her with me—again.

Born in 1941 to Japanese-American parents, Mom was a girl who wished to climb trees, but had to play the violin. In one black-and-white studio portrait, she is holding a doll and smiling unconvincingly. In other photos, on horseback, she is beaming.

In her twenties, Mom bought a horse, rode English, and competed in dressage. Her first love (besides horses) may have been her horse trainer.

Her other passion? Cards. On special occasions, she performed two of the most spectacular card tricks I have ever seen. One involved lighting a piece of paper on fire and rubbing the ashes on her arm for the big reveal.

In the 1970s, she was the only female member of a Japanese poker group. Once, when a guest was invited to poker night, she bluffed him so successfully that he threw his cards in her face. Her poker buddies escorted this man to the door. He was never invited back.

When she met my dad, she had no interest in marriage. “I loved walking down the street by myself,” she once told me. “I felt so free.” But the scientist convinced her to go out on a date. While he was filling the tank at a gas station, she locked the doors of the car. As he tapped on the window—Joyce! Unlock the door!—she pretended not hear him and kept looking straight ahead. Poker-faced.

When she was pregnant, the only friends who threw her a baby shower were the men from her poker group. They gave her a Pack ‘N Play and a year’s worth of diapers so she wouldn’t stop coming to poker night. She gave birth at 35, a woman of “advanced maternal age.” The epidural she ordered never arrived. My father, seeing her face contorted by pain, immediately tied his tubes. He couldn’t go through that again.

She spoiled her daughter, her only child, with opportunities she didn’t have. Swimming lessons before two. Gymnastics at three. Summer camp in kindergarten—with archery and riflery. Ballet, tap, and jazz in elementary school. Track and soccer in high school. Thirteen years of competitive water-skiing. She drove me to tournaments long after my dad stopped going. When I won Nationals, she ran to the edge of the lake and I skied right into her arms.

During my college study-abroad, she visited me in the Netherlands and slept in my dorm room, which was so ascetic she joked that it would make a monk feel deprived. In the dormitory kitchen, she helped me prepare a sushi dinner for 35 friends. She was acrophobic, but agreed to try rock-climbing at an indoor gym. When she reached a tricky overhang, she asked to be let down. I shook my head. I knew she could do it. Reaching the top of that 65-foot wall (rated 5.9) became a point of pride.

Her visit coincided with a class trip to a Dutch island called Schiermonnikoog (a name so impossible to pronounce it was a WWII password). I tried to opt out. How weird is it to bring your mom on college trip? My peers disagreed. (She’d won their hearts with sushi.) When we all went out to the discotheek, she decided to stay at the hostel. On the dance floor, I turned around, and there she was. My friends had dragged her along.

On the island, we booked a horseback riding excursion on a mile-wide beach. “Who has riding experience?” the guides asked the group. Mom and I shyly raised our hands, so we got the most spirited horses. “Keep them nose-to-tail,” the guide told us. “If they jump out of line, they’ll see the open beach and want to race.”

Before that day, I had never experienced a canter. Nothing faster than a trot. I had always dreamed of learning to gallop. So when I found myself on a runaway horse, racing its sister down a mile-wide beach, I leaned into the wind, wild-eyed and hooting maniacally, punch-drunk on epinephrine.

Then I looked over at mom and saw that her girth—the strap that holds the saddle onto the horse—was loose. With each four-beat stride, the saddle slipped, and rotated another degree. Soon she’d be underneath the horse and its fiercely beating hooves.

To save herself, she did a move she had taught me as a child: an emergency dismount. Out of the corner of my bleary eye, I saw the blur of her body spinning in the sand. When she came to a stop, thoroughly breaded with sand, her sunglasses were broken. She got back on the horse, but her spine, twisted into an S by childhood scoliosis, would never be quite the same.

Age didn’t slow her. At 65, she could still do three one-armed push-ups. She learned to mountain-bike at 69, riding logs and features that intimidated me when I learned the sport in my twenties. In her 70s, she was mountain-biking with a 30-year-old friend when she crashed. It wasn’t lack of skill; she was looking back at a male rider trying to pass. (It turned out to be her pain doctor; he didn’t even stop to help.)

Her arm hurt, but she took two Tylenol and cooked her friend dinner. The next morning, two more Tylenol didn’t kill the pain, so she drover herself to the ER. The X-ray showed two broken bones in her arm. Surgeons fixed her arm with metal plates and screws. She kept riding.

At 80, she rode the beginner dirt-jump line at the bike park. (She didn’t catch air, but she pumped the rollers with textbook form.) At 83, she went on her first whitewater rafting trip and “rode the bull.” (Usually reserved for kids, that means sitting on the nose of the raft in a wave train.)

Seven days before she died, just shy of 85, she left notes, written on paper towels and placed in every doorway, and under the Christmas tree, begging to go on a bike ride. How could I say no? Not knowing it would be her very last ride, I filmed it and made an Instagram reel. It got 14,000 views, which I thought was a hit, until this slide show of her life went viral and got 50,000 views.

How did my mother become a badass?

Her mother, a second-generation Japanese-American woman, was a Sakura-parade princess, a doctor’s wife, and nothing like her at all. My mother modeled unspoken values for me: It’s okay to be unapologetically strong, to not act your age, to play with the boys and beat them as often as you can. But who modeled this for her?

It must have been my mother’s mother’s mother. My great-grandmother, a “picture bride,” came from Japan on a ship in 1912 to marry a man she had never met. They settled in El Paso and ran a farm. One of our nation’s first registered midwives, she delivered babies, mostly to poor families who paid for her services with chicken and produce. She delivered so many babies that two historians have referred to her as “The mother of El Paso.”

When I was born in Santa Barbara, my great-grandmother lived next door, in my grandparents’ house. I called them “Little Grandma” and “Big Grandma.” By then, Big Grandma was bedridden, and Little Grandma was her caregiver. When I was three or four, I would sit by Big-Grandma’s pillow and brush her long silver hair.

In my thirties, before I became a mother, I made my first trip to Japan. I visited my Big Grandma’s grave in the tiny fishing village where she was born. A distant cousin—the great-granddaughter of her sister—showed me how to honor her by pouring water on her gravestone. Family lore (which I’m trying to fact-check) holds that Big Grandma was the illegitimate daughter of the emperor.

On my trip to Oahu in January, I decided to scatter Mom’s ashes in the sea. Like me, she loved the water. In her twenties, she water-skied with her brothers on the Colorado River. In her late sixties, on the day we scattered my father’s ashes in the Gulf of Mexico, she learned to stand-up paddleboard. She bought two YOLO SUPs and paddled the still waters of the bay behind her Florida home, accompanied by her first mate: a miniature Yorkie named Tchotchke.

In Hawaii, between interviews, I got to surf a few gentle breaks. I was curious, after two years of learning to river-surf in Idaho, whether the skills would translate to ocean surfing. The two are very different. In river surfing, the energy is coming straight at you. In ocean surfing, it’s coming from behind.

On my last surf session in Hawaii, I asked my Hawaiian friends if it was all right if I scattered some of my mother’s ashes. “Of course! It’s called a paddle out,” they said. “We do this all the time.”

As we suited up on the beach, a memory resurfaced. After my mother lost her mother, she used her small inheritance to plan a family trip to Hawaii. My father, mother, husband and I spent a week on the Big Island.

I thought about that as I paddled out. As the sun sank over the Pacific, I straddled the board and pulled out the tube of my mother’s ashes. I unscrewed the cap, and sprinkled her into the waves. “Mom, I miss you,” I said. “But you’re always with me.”

I had time to shed exactly one tear before a rogue wave bucked me and made me laugh. It felt like an elbow in the ribs from my mother, ever the practical joker.

“Her spirit—we call it mana here—it’s like power,” my Hawaiian friend said. “So now she’s with you on this surf. And she’ll be with you wherever you go.”

The waves came, small and clean, in perfectly timed sets. I felt my mother with me. And we surfed better than ever before.

Grandma’s Funeral at Stand Five

Shortly before my mother died, I published “The Persimmon Tree at Stand Five,” a story about her mother’s funeral at a deer stand on land owned by uncle and cousins in Montgomery, Alabama. It ran in Southlands, a new print magazine dedicated to Southerners’ unique relationship with the outdoors.

Before this, I haven’t written much about my Asian-redneck childhood. The assignment caused me to question: How did my Japanese-American family come to be Southerners. Are we? Am I?

In December, mom awoke one morning raging around in what I came to call a “dementia fugue.” Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease that hijacks the minds of its victims. Seeing Mom in a fugue was like watching my loving mother possessed by some malevolent intruder.

“Hey, mom!” I said, looking for a way to distract her. “Want to see the story I wrote about grandma’s funeral?” That tripped the dementia circuit, and she slowly wound down. We sat hip-to-hip on a beanbag chair and I read her the longform story. She nodded, and the memories seemed to resurface. I blew a deadline, but I didn’t care. We needed this beautiful moment.

In memory of my my mom, Southlands is offering a gift to my readers. Later this month, when I do the drawing for my Waterproof Notebook giveaway (a perk for paying subscribers), I’ll also give out a free subscription to Southlands (they’re even throwing in a hat). If you knew my mom, and want to honor her, skip flowers and subscribe to Southlands or Geezer. Mom subscribed to every magazine that published my work, and she loved the family stories that ran in these two new magazines just before she died.

Island of Souls

I’ll leave you now with one of the saddest songs I know. “Island of Souls” is the first track on The Soul Cages, a meditative, melancholy album Sting wrote in the wake of his father’s death.

“I felt emotionally and creatively paralysed, isolated, and unable to mourn,” Sting told one interviewer. “I just felt numb and empty, as if the joy had been leached out of my life. Eventually I talked myself into going back to work, and this sombre collection of songs was the result...”

Some mornings I wake up feeling paralyzed. Others, numb. Every once in a while I feel so lonely and raw I hide, because I can’t bear to drag others down, but I also don’t know how to lie or pretend that everything is fine.

On the day of Mom’s cremation, I didn’t want to be comforted or pitied. I just wanted to be alone and process emotions in my own way. I did the two things I do to survive. I wrote in my notebook. Then I went to the river to surf. As her body rolled into the flames, I threw myself into a frigid rapid, surrendering to liquid chaos and the non-linear nature of grief.

A few days ago, I found the waterproof notebook I’d tucked in my vest on Mom’s first (and last) whitewater rafting trip, two summers ago. I’d written down something she said day. Today I hear her voice telling me exactly what I need to hear: Advice for how to face the lonely world without her:

I received some exciting news this week! The American Society of Magazine Editors announced the 2026 National Magazine Awards nominations. “Out of the Wild: I Followed a Wild Salmon from Sea to Plate” (Food & Wine July/August 2025) was named a finalist in the Lifestyle Journalism category, alongside stories in The Cut, New York Magazine, Philadelphia Magazine, and Texas Monthly.

Congrats to fellow NMA finalists Bridget Read, Madeline Leung Coleman, Bradford Pearson, Kae Lani Palmisano, Adam Erace, Victor Fiorello, Emily Goulet, Jason Sheehan, Regan Fletcher Stephens, and Daniel Vaughn. Go follow their work!

To celebrate, I’m doing my first giveaway. As a special perk for paid subscribers to The Waterproof Notebook, I’ll do a drawing for a waterproof EDC kit I assembled with some of my favorite waterproof products: A Lochby Sidekick V2, one Rite in the Rain Stapled Notebook, 10 Rite in the Rain 3x5 Index Cards, and one Rite in the Rain All-Weather Pocket Pen.

The Sidekick, which can double as a wallet, is made of waxed canvas, which repels water. It has small loop for a keychain or carabiner, plus interior pockets for cash, credit cards, and a pen. (It’s a tight squeeze for more than three index cards). The pen writes through water, grease and mud.

I’ve fallen into a whitewater rapid with a Rite in the Rain notebook, and can attest this waterproof paper stands up to thorough soaking and spin-cycle tumbling. This kit will fit in your back pocket and endure whatever the world throws at you.

To be eligible for this and future giveaways (plus some subscriber-only posts, such as a previous post about How A Book Becomes a Hollywood Movie and an upcoming one about how to write a documentary) subscribe, or give a gift subscription, or recommend The Waterproof Notebook.

NOTE: This giveaway was NOT sponsored by companies or swag. These are products I bought and paid for myself. I’m giving them away because I like them and when something good happens, I like to pay it forward. :)

I’ll do a random drawing on my birthday at the end of March, and will contact the winner directly and (with permission) post on my Notes.

I never achieved my childhood dream of making the US Team. (My sport is not an Olympic sport, though it does have a World Championship.) I want to share what it feels like to choke under pressure, in a moment you’ve spent years training for. How one failure can get into your head and infect your confidence. And how, through trial and copious error, I learned to break the pattern with a sequence of mental skills. Many of these skills apply to life beyond sports. I hope you find them useful.

My story begins on a catfish pond in a podunk town called Ozark, Alabama. I was nine when I learned to water-ski on that muddy pond. It had a slalom course with buoys the size of my head, a jump that rose five feet from the water, and occasional water moccasins. I spent the best days of my childhood here, training with three older boys who came to feel like brothers. We shared a ski boat with a perfect wake: small at high speeds for slalom and jump, big and crisp at slow speeds for trick skiing.

At first, it was all about joy and fun. Between practice sets, we’d have seaweed fights and slam-dunk each other like Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. We messed around on kneeboards, learned to barefoot, and did at least one pyramid.

In 1985 I entered a tournament “just for fun.” I went up against two Junior Girl national champions who later went pro. I carved arcs of spray around six bouys, starting at the minimum speed of 24 mph. With each successful pass through the slalom course, the boat speed increased, up to 34 mph (36 mph for men). Then the rope started getting shorter. You made up for lost rope by letting go of one hand and stretching your body to the buoy line.

I’m pretty sure I came in dead last. But I was happy because my expectations were low. I just wanted to run my opening pass.

The next year, at 10, I won the Alabama State Championships, a fact I had forgotten until I found this newspaper clip. I may have been the only one in my division, or one of two or three Junior Girls. Considering my winning score—6 buoys at 28 mph—the competition wasn’t too stout.

When I was 12, I qualified for Nationals. Based on my scores in other tournaments, I was ranked No. 2, which meant I skied next-to-last and had a very good shot at the podium. This was the first time I remember feeling the pressure of expectations.

It was the year we moved to California, where reservoirs prohibited motor boats. I was limited to training three months a year at a ski school in the Mojave Desert. From the ages of 12 to 15, I spent summers living 200 miles away from my parents at the first man-made ski lake in the world, located somewhere between L.A. and Las Vegas, 20 miles from the nearest town.

Nationals were in Zachary, Louisiana. On the starting dock, nerves manifested as nausea, flopping around my gut like hungover butterflies. My legs felt weak, like my knees might buckle. I kept yawning—I sign I was forgetting to breathe. The big sister of one competitor said something to me that “psyched me out.” My head festered with self-doubt. I just wanted it to be over.

As the boat took off, the water felt warm and soft, smelled faintly of mud, and tasted sweeter than the water out west. As I made my first cut, I felt like the boat was going too slow. The wake felt mushy under my legs, which felt like overcooked pasta. My timing was off, and as I entered the gate, my ski tagged a buoy. I spent the next six turns and 16.08 seconds praying no one would notice.

Of course the judges noticed. Hitting a gate buoy meant instant disqualification. A zero score. On the ride of shame back to the dock, I hung my head, already crying, feeling the burning of everyone’s eyes on my face.

My zero score in the slalom event meant I was also disqualified from Overall, the category for three-event skiers who also competed in tricks and jump.

I cried for four hours, until my eyes swelled shut. Failure felt like a fever, a whole-body ache that wouldn’t go away. I wanted to crawl out of my skin or lock myself in a dark closet. I hated myself for disappointing my coaches and letting my parents down. All that money and time for nothing. Weighty feelings for a twelve-year-old kid. My heart still bears the scars.

Four years of training had produced the physical skill to be competitive. But I didn’t know—wouldn’t know for years—that in the absence of mental skills, world-class physical skills can (and will) fail under pressure. Athletes must train their minds as deliberately as they train their bodies.

When I sixteen, we moved to Florida, where I’d wake at dawn to train before school on my backyard bayou. After school, I’d drive 45 minutes to a private lake with a world-class ski school. I got a job there driving the boat, washing dishes, cleaning the toilet, and coaching beginners to pay for my summer training—three to five sets a day, five to seven days a week.

I learned to adjust to changing conditions: headwinds, tailwinds, crosswinds, “nervous” water, the difference between “fast” and “slow” water (a key factor at my first Nationals). I found that if I felt confident, I could perform in competition at the same level I could in practice. But at bigger tournaments, I often fell short. The weak knees. The sudden lack of coordination. Why wouldn’t my body do what I’d trained it to do in practice?

Every time I choked in competition, it added to the fear and doubt I’d fight at the subsequent tournament. Every failure eroded my confidence and reinforced the pattern. I was prisoner to the love-child of a self-fulfilling prophecy and a positive (reinforcing) feedback loop. It felt like swimming against an undertow.

My dad eventually quit coming to tournaments. He said he thought his presence made me nervous. I believe he was tired of sitting around all day, only to watch me choke.

It wasn’t until college that I learned some mental skills that broke the choking pattern. I don’t recall where I learned this stuff. But if I did certain things—the same way, in the same sequence—I could perform under pressure. Consistently. The year I developed my sequence, I ran 2 at 35 off—a level I rarely exceeded in practice—almost every single tournament. At Nationals, due to a slow boat speed, I had to do it twice in a row. It was enough to claim the national title—and qualify to go pro.

“It was a psychological battle…” my younger-self wrote in my journal. “There is a saying that pertains: ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ It’s so true—it is all in the mind.”

(Older-self: It’s also in your body. Read “Pressure Is Not Just In Your Head,” by Sally Jenkins of The Atlantic to learn the physiology and neurology of choking.)

The Mental Skills that Broke the Choke

Feeling I’d finally cracked the code, but worried I would forget it, I recorded the mental sequence in my journal. Here’s the gist (with some edits for clarity):

• Wake up at least 2 hours before competition. (It takes your body 2 hours to fully wake up.)

• Eat breakfast. Always the same thing. (Honey Nut Cheerios with 2% milk.)

• Warm up with light movement/stretches. Always in the same sequence.

• Walk the lake and study the course. Note the boat path out of the turn island. Look for stray buoys that might cause errors in lining up for the gate.

• Get your mind in gear. Avoid socializing. Go to a quiet place away from people to focus. Put on headphones and listen to music (always the same psych-up album) to signal to the mind and body it’s time to compete. (Headphones signal: Please don’t talk to me now.)

• Tie your ski handle to a tree and lean like you’re pulling across the wake. Or let Mom hold the rope and practice your trick run on dry land.

  

  

• Visualize. Envision a solid performance. Nothing heroic. Just the same thing you do every day in practice.

• Breathe deeply from stomach (shoos away butterflies). In through nose, out through mouth. If you’re yawning, it means you’re shallow-breathing.

• If your mind is racing, read a book. Don’t think about your competitors. Focus your attention on what you can control. Don’t worry about what you can’t.

• Repeat your mantra: Strength. Courage. Confidence.

• In the water between sets, don’t let the boat rush you. When they ask, “Are you ready?” Say “Just a sec.” Take three deep breaths, then say, “I’m ready!”

At the time, this all felt like a weird and slightly embarrassing mix of cheesy rituals and woo-woo superstitions, seasoned with a pinch of placebo effect and a dash of prayer. I believed it was my own idiosyncratic way of dealing with pressure. I had to do part of my sequence in public, but I did as much as possible out of sight. I didn’t like talking about it. I feared people would laugh and make fun of all my weird and cringey rituals.

A few years ago, while interviewing a sports psychologist, I learned my secret rituals were not just “my thing” but A Thing. A near-universal suite of mental skills and tools, employed by elite athletes in every sport. And also by people in high-pressure roles that have nothing to do with sports.

The Science Behind the Skills

The sports psychologist was Dr. Craig Manning, whose master’s thesis examined the attributes of high-performing athletes across all sports. He’d use his findings to coach tennis teams, Olympic skiers, Red Bull athletes, and pros in the NFL, NBA, and NHL. His book, The Fearless Mind, explains all of the mental skills I’d cobbled together through trial and error. He laid out a framework, a better vocabulary, and backed it all up with science.

These mental skills would help pro mountain biker Braydon Bringhurst do something that had never been done, something experts thought was impossible: Ride his mountain bike UP the Whole Enchilada, a world-famous downhill trail in Moab, Utah. He wanted to pedal up every inch, including The Snotch, a slab of sandstone as steep as a playground slide. This quest was The Dawn Wall of mountain biking.

Braydon hired me to write his documentary, 8600 FT, which tells the story of how he trained, prepared, and struggled through the day of the climb. Even if mountain biking’s not your jam, it’s hard not to feel a rush of inspiration watching the 90-minute film on YouTube, which has 1.2 million views. For more details on the mental skills, you can read the Bicycling magazine story: Braydon Bringhurst vs The Beast.

I recommend The Fearless Mind to the athletes I coach through Flow State. I also recommend The Inner Game of Tennis, one of the first popular sports-psychology books, a classic since the 1980s. It shares tactics for overcoming nerves and self-doubt by getting your mind to relax so your body can do what you’ve trained it to do. For a more recent take on the prefrontal cortex, listen to this NPR/TED Radio story about the cognitive science of why we choke under pressure.

You don’t need to be an athlete to flex these mental skills. Dr. Manning now coaches CEOs and leads corporate training seminars. Last week, I had to deliver a keynote speech to a ballroom of 800 people, the biggest audience I’ve ever addressed. Before going onstage, I found myself unusually nervous and shaky. I snuck into a back room, did 30 push-ups, and repeated my 30-year-old mental sequence. It still works!

Prioritizing Joy Over Performance

As I watched the Winter Games, Alysa Liu’s story of burning out and coming back—on her own terms—made me want to leap out of my chair and scream YES! THIS!

The risk of burnout is high for elite athletes striving for greatness in any sport. Being great requires discipline. Self control. Sacrifice. Pushing beyond your comfort zone. Learning to live in the pain cave. Falling. Failing—over and over. Without getting too discouraged.

Yet the nature of sports is that no amount of suffering, preparation, skill, and confidence can guarantee a good outcome. You can do everything right, and in competition, some factor—often outside your control—can cause it all to unravel. The harder you work, the higher the stakes, and the harder the disappointments. The worst thing that can come of it? Losing your love for the sport.

Skating came to feel like a job for Liu, whose father controlled almost every aspect of her training and career. After a disappointing performance at the 2022 Beijing Games, she announced—without telling her father first—she was retiring from the sport. She was sixteen years old.

Years later, skating for fun with friends, she felt a spark of joy that reignited her love for the sport. She announced she would return to competition, but she would now be in charge. She would pick her own music. Choose what she wore. Decide when she needed to train harder or back off and prioritize rest. And by golly, she would eat lava cake whenever she damn well pleased.

“No one’s going to starve me,” she said. “Or tell me what I can and can’t eat.”

That quote made me think of my first Nationals and the twelve-year-old girl who won. A few years later, she vanished from the sport. I always wondered why. We bumped into each other as young adults, and she told me about her struggle with anorexia. “It was the only thing I felt I could control,” she said.

The other thing about Liu’s story that hit home? Joy. The key word in the headlines, the emotion exuded in every frame. She wasn’t skating for gold. She was skating for joy. Winning a gold medal was awesome, but it wasn’t her main objective.

“I don’t NEED this,” she said of her medal. “What I needed was the stage, and I got that, so I was all good no matter what happened… If I fell on every jump, I would still be wearing this dress.”

Reading that strummed some long-silent chord. I dug out my 30-year-old notebook to fact-check my ancient memories. “I’ve never seen that before,” my husband said.

I’ve only shown it to three people. My teenage son, as he prepped for mountain-bike Nationals this year, and two teenage girls who compete at the national or world level in road racing and cyclocross. I thought they should hear it from a teenage athlete, not some preachy middle-aged coach.

“I did something different this time,” wrote my 19-year-old self. “Instead of skiing driven by fear—getting my energy from panic—I reached deep into my heart and soul to bring forth every powerful emotion—hope, fear, joy, pain, love, desire, and passion…and focused it on the moment.”

Joy and focus on the the present. Key ingredients in the secret sauce. I just want this to be over, I used to think. My mindset switch that changed everything: I’m grateful to be here, doing what I love, and I want this moment to last forever.

Even after I cracked my mental code, I didn’t always nail my performance. I underperformed at every US Team Trial and never went pro. I retired at 23. Fifteen years later, after training harder and than ever for the off-road triathlon world championships, I finished DFL (Dead Frickin’ Last).

“I have learned all my best life lessons through sports,” I wrote in The Art of Losing, a story for ESPN. “How to suffer. What to sacrifice. When to compromise. Why teamwork matters. That falling is an art. And that sometimes, what you learn from losing can be even sweeter than winning.”

As a lifelong athlete in more than 10 sports, I’ve lost WAY more often than I’ve won. It forged a joyful tenacity, a deep respect for process, and an ability to fail repeatedly without getting too discouraged. I no longer feel much desire to compete, but learning new things still thrills me. What keeps me going is chasing the joy I found on the water as a nine-year-old kid.

For his latest book, “The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine,” journalist Brendan O’Meara wrote his first biography, the life story of one of the most charismatic competitive runners in America. Because his main character was no longer alive, bringing him to life on the page required not only the skills of a journalist, but the skills of a historian.

I asked Brendan about his process for mining historical archives, organizing a book-length nonfiction narrative, fact-checking when sources disagreed, and developing a real-life character who you’ll never get to meet or interview. Find our Q&A below—an exclusive for paying subscribers to The Waterproof Notebook. For more tips and a detailed example of a reconstructed scene from his book, see this Nieman Storyboard Annotation. (If you’re new to the Annotation franchise, it’s like a “Director’s Cut” of a written story, with a craft Q&A right there in the text.)

What’s the difference between a reconstructed scene and an observed scene?

An observed scene is when you’re there on site. You’re witnessing everything, and you can just fill up your notebook with all the details there in real time. Maybe your recorder is going to catch some fanfare and some other bells and sirens or whatever might be going on. That’s wonderful. You don’t have to rely on anybody else’s recollections.

A reconstructed scene means you’ve got to go into the newspaper archives, and you’ve got to read everything—even if you think it’s a repeated story that’s been syndicated. There might be another detail in there that is just a little bit different. Glenn Stout [author of Young Woman and the Sea and other historical narratives] talks about it a lot. He says that if there’s a particular story beat, you read the 20 newspapers that covered it. Because in one story, maybe there was a car. The next story might mention it’s a blue car. In the next one, it’s a blue Cadillac. So now you’re just layering in all these different details.

What if another story says it’s a red Nissan? Then what do you do?

Read more

Like scene, summary, insight and reflection, the expository aside is one of the key ingredients of narrative nonfiction. It’s particularly important in narrative journalism, when a story serves as a vehicle to explain something complex to the reader.

What is an expository aside? It’s a brief diversion from the narrative, when you “break scene” and go into explainer-mode to tell the reader something important. It’s like pressing “pause” while watching a Netflix show with your mother, so you can brief her on the pop culture memes that will otherwise sail over her head.

My favorite real-life example hit me during the 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show. I was watching it with my teenage son, who brought me up to speed on the 2024 Diss Track feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake.

If you didn’t know this Diss Track history—what a NYT critic called “an incredibly hot, burning, deeply toxic exchange of songs”—you would miss the layers of meaning sprinkled through the lyrics, the show, and even the wardrobe.

Case in point: The next day, Facebook was filled with dismissive comments and ignorant criticism of the half-time show by people who Just. Didn’t. Get it.

If you knew the backstory (even if, like me, you’re not a huge consumer of rap) you got the lyrics, the symbolism, and the show. Maybe you even noticed the blinged-out lowercase letter “a” dangling around Kendrick Lamar’s neck and recognized it as an allusion to a lyric from “Not Like Us.”

This line is the most devastatingly clever “diss” in the whole Diss Track war, the atomic insult you can hear echo through the Super Bowl stadium as everyone in the know sang along:

Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A MINOR!

That’s a Shakespearean-level insult, by the way. A triple entendre. IYKYK. (And if you don’t know, watch this.)

I noticed another great example of an expository aside in “The Man Who Broke Physics,” Sally Jenkins’s story in The Atlantic about Ilia Malinin, a 21-year-old figure skater headed to the Olympics.

This aside expands the audience of the piece beyond figure skating fans. Even if you don’t know a triple-lutz from a salchow, you can grasp—and be awed by—the athleticism illustrated by the following expository aside:

To fully appreciate how revolutionary Malinin is, consider some fundamental physics and biomechanics. The gold-medal-determining long program, also known as the “free skate,” lasts for four and a half minutes. Roughly 30 seconds in, Malinin’s heart rate rises to 90 percent of its capacity, about 180 beats a minute, and stays there for the duration. The effort is comparable to that sustained by the world’s fastest milers.

Wearing carbon-composite skates that weigh about two pounds each, Malinin reaches a vertical leap of approximately 30 inches on his quad axel—one kinematic study captured it at 33 inches, similar to the standing vertical leaps of NBA players such as Stephen Curry, Devin Booker, and Kevin Durant. He lands on a blade that is just 3/16 of an inch wide.

Malinin enters the jump skating at about 15 miles an hour. As he snaps into his shoulder turn, he draws his arms and legs inward, creating a spin. At this stage, he experiences at least 180 pounds of centripetal force. By way of comparison, a NASCAR driver rounding a corner will experience about 400 pounds of centripetal force, while wearing a seat belt. As he reaches his apex, Malinin is spinning at 350 revolutions per minute. This is about the same as a kitchen stand mixer or the marine engine of an oil tanker.

Expository asides are not just an element of nonfiction. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Anthony Doerr weaves historical and technical asides into his fiction. In All the Light We Cannot See, it appears in dollops about atoms, radio waves, or the electromagnetic spectrum. In The Shell Collector, it informs scenes of a scientist handling a tiny mollusk with a lethally poisonous bite:

Under a microscope, the shell collector had been told, the teeth of certain cones look long and sharp, like tiny translucent bayonets, the razor-edged tusks of a miniature ice devil. The proboscis slips out the siphonal canal, unrolling, the barbed teeth spring forward. In victims the bite causes a spreading insistence, a rising tide of paralysis. First your palm goes horribly cold, then your forearm, then your shoulder. The chill spreads to your chse. You can’t swallow, you can’t see. You burn. You freeze to death.

One of my favorite literary examples is one I spotted in H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald’s memoir about training a goshawk as she grieves the sudden death of her father. I’ve included a 500-word passage so you can see how seamlessly it tucks into the narrative, between a flashback scene and the author’s personal reflection on the scene and what it means.

The expository aside (bolded below) sets up the insight in the author’s reflection, elevating the meaning into something more expansive. This is an example of how the best first-person writing is “not just about me.”

In a scrapbook of my childhood drawings is a small pencil sketch of a kestrel sitting on a glove. The glove’s just an outline, and not a good one—I was six when I drew it. The hawk has a dark eye, a long tail, and a tinny fluffy spray of feathers under its hooked beak. It is a happy kestrel, though a ghostly one; like the glove, it is strangely transparent. But one part of hit has been carefully worked: its legs and taloned toes, which are larger than they ought to be, float above the glove because I had no idea how to draw toes that gripped. All the scales and talons on the toes are delineated with enormous care, and so are the jesses around the falcon’s legs. A wide black line that is the leash extends from them to a big black dot on the glove, a dot I’ve gone over again and again with the pencil until the paper is shined and depressed. It is an anchor point. Here, says the picture, is a kestrel on my hand. It is not going away. It cannot leave.

It’s a sad picture. It reminds me of a paper by the psychologist D. W. Winnicott, the one about a child obsessed with string; a boy who tied together chairs and tables, tied cushions to the fireplace, even, worryingly, tied string around his sister’s neck. Winnicott saw this behavior as a way of dealing with fears of abandonment by the boy’s mother, who’d suffered bouts of depression. For the boy, the string was a kind of wordless communication, a symbolic means of joining. It was a denial of separation. Holding tight. Perhaps those jesses might have been unspoken attempts to hold on to something that had already flown away. I spent the first few weeks of my life in an incubator, full of tubes, under electric light, skin patched and raw, eyes clenched shut. I was the lucky one. I was tiny, but I survived. I had a twin brother. He didn’t. He died soon after he was born. I know almost nothing about what happened, only this: it was a tragedy that wasn’t ever to be spoken of. It was a time when that’s what hospitals told grieving parents to do. Move on. Forget about it. Look, you have a child! Get on with your lives. When I found out about my twin many years later, the news was surprising. But not so surprising. I’d always felt a part of me was missing; an old, simple absence. Could my obsession with birds, with falconry in particular, have been born of that first loss? Was that ghostly kestrel a grasped-at apprehension of my twin, its carefully drawn jesses a way of holding tight to something I didn’t know I’d lost, but knew had gone? I suppose it was possible.

—From Chapter 5: Holding Tight (p 48 in the hardcover)

It’s worth noting that a well-deployed expository aside is like salt in a recipe. It enhances the other ingredients.

When should you use one? When the reader needs to know something important to understand the next scene. Without it, the full meaning of the scene would be lost. (See: My Kendrick Lamar test.)

Like salt, expository asides should be used deliberately and sparingly. A little goes a long way. Too much can ruin the whole story (or dish). Why? Pacing. Expository asides used in excess can stall the narrative momentum.

When I think about narrative pacing, I imagine Scene as a “Play” button on a movie that’s running inside your reader’s head as they read your story. Summary is like a “Fast Forward” button, condensing time and getting the reader quickly to the next scene. Expository Asides are like a “Pause” button.

Just don’t press pause for too long. Your reader is anxious to get back to the Halftime Show.

The Front Runner

On a recent college scouting trip to the University of Oregon, I visited a solemn roadside memorial with my teenage son. On a rainy day in November, we stood before a mossy outcrop at the bend in Skyline Boulevard where one of the most prodigal and charismatic runners of the 1970s died in a car crash at the age of 24.

On May 30, 1975, Steve Prefontaine was driving home from a party when his ‘73 gold MG convertible ran off the road, hit this rock, and flipped, pinning him. He had a blood alcohol level of 0.16%, above the legal limit. I wanted my son to see this proof of vincibility, hoping it would leave an impression more lasting than a motherly lecture.

We were touring Eugene with my friend Brendan O’Meara, whose biography, The Front Runner, chronicled Prefontaine’s life and lasting impact on distance running.

As always, “Pre’s Rock” was littered with medals, race numbers, running shoes, and other mementos left by visitors who’d made the pilgrimage. One of those pilgrims was Lance Armstrong, who’d recently Instagrammed a photo of his visit. “First trip to Eugene, Oregon and the one spot I knew for sure I had to visit was Pre’s Rock,” Armstrong wrote. “I get asked from time to time, ‘If you could have dinner with anybody, alive or not, who would it be?’ Personally, I’d pick a table for 4. Steve Prefontaine gets a seat every single time.”

Before I read The Front Runner, I didn’t know much about Prefontaine, the charismatic middle-distance runner who became the first celebrity face of Nike. Confession: I hate running. It’s a sport I’ve always dreaded, endured, and considered as a painful means to a worthy end: a faster way to get to the soccer ball or finish a triathlon. But I connected with the sport through Brendan’s biography. Why? Interiority.

Getting inside a character’s head

“Interiority” is a new and intimidating word to me. I like to think of it as “getting inside your character’s head.” Doing it well is is one of the most challenging elements of narrative nonfiction. Even when you can interview your subject—and ask what they were thinking, feeling, and doing in a particular scene—it’s still hard to capture their point of view with accuracy and nuance. When they’re not around (or willing) to be interviewed, it’s exponentially harder.

Pre died five years before Brendan (who lives in Eugene) was born. So the author had to get to know his subject intimately, without the chance to meet or interview him. And in his work on an unauthorized biography, he faced an additional hurdle: primary sources unwilling to consent to an interview.

Brendan shared his challenges, solutions, and overall process in a Nieman Storyboard Annotation of a chapter excerpt. If you’re new to Nieman Storyboard, it’s Harvard’s platform dedicated to the craft of telling true stories. An Annotation is like a Director’s Cut: a conversation between writers about craft. The conversation plays out in the text itself.

I consider Storyboard Annotations one of my favorite sources of continued education. Every great narrative is a master class in and of itself, and I learn so much from reading (or hearing) writers discuss the reporting and writing decisions that went into it. My other favorite way to study the craft is to listen to podcasts of writers talking about their process. In the graduate feature writing class I teach for Harvard Extension School, my reading list consists of narratives paired with a podcast or Annotation.

One of the podcasts on my syllabus is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, on which Brendan interviews writers like Susan Orlean, Laura Hillenbrand, and David Grann. (The 500th episode featured my longtime literary crush: John McPhee.) A generous literary citizen who is always spotlighting other writers, Brendan also has a Substack called Pitch Club, where he breaks down successful story pitches with intel from the writers. Both are excellent resources on the business and craft of nonfiction writing.

Paying subscribers to The Waterproof Notebook will get a bonus post with Brendan’s biography tips for mining archives for vivid scenes, organizing research for book-length writing projects, and fact-checking conflicting details when secondary sources disagree. I’m also going to do my first product giveaway soon—another perk for paying subscribers. Thanks for supporting my work, either way!

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More Running Reads

50 Years Ago, He Was an Olympian. At 80, He’s Just as Happy to Finish Last
In the 1970s, Olympian Jeff Galloway created a Run-Walk-Run method that helped runners train for marathons and longer-distance events with a reduced risk of injury. In this NYT feature, Danielle Friedman shows how Galloway’s decades of training likely saved his life during a heart attack in his 70s.
Bonus: Give the Galloway Method (aka “Jeffing”) a try with his Run Walk Run app.

Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women
Author and journalist Maggie Mertens blew my mind with all I didn’t know about the history of women’s running. Her book weaves together stories of female athletes who overcame sexism, racism, and societal expectations and norms to rewrite the narrative on women as endurance athletes.
Bonus: Listen to Maggie and Brendan talk shop on this episode of the CNF Podcast.

Running With Ghosts: A Memoir of Surviving Childhood Cancer, by Matt Tullis
In his unflinching memoir of sickness and salvation, reporter Matt Tullis tells the story of his coming of age through cancer. With equal parts grace and gravitas, he resurrects the people who helped him survive – but didn’t themselves. A great supporter of narrative writers through Gangrey: The Podcast, Matt died in 2022 from complications following emergency brain surgery. He was my friend and I miss him.
Bonus: Stories Can Save Us is a collection Matt’s interviews with some of the nation’s best narrative journalists. After Matt’s death, a group of his writer-friends got together to see this book project across the finish line. The proceeds go to his widow and children. (Please buy it!)

Running Man: A Memoir of Ultra-Endurance
I met Charlie Engel decades ago, when he and my husband were teammates in Eco-Challenge: New Zealand (2001). Charlie successfully redirected his addictive personality from cocaine to ultra-endurance events and ran two marathons a day for 111 days—across the Sahara desert. Then, in 2010, a white collar crime conviction landed him in federal prison, where he published a blog called “Running in Place.” I’m curious to read his telling of it all in this 2016 memoir.
Bonus: See Charlie Run in Running the Sahara, a documentary produced by Matt Damon.

Going Nowhere Fast: Running Away From My Life as a Teacher
Keith Wilson found sanctuary in running to escape the emotional toll of teaching, a profession in which the sacrifices sometimes exceed the rewards.
Bonus: Keith also know a thing about salmon runs. Owner of Wilsons’ Wild Salmon, he spends summers fishing in Alaska and run a Community Supported Fishery (like a CSA for fish) in Ketchum, Idaho.

Brendan’s Waterproof Gear Review: iKamper Rooftop Tent

When you’re on an author-subsidized book tour, you find ways to save some dough. My iKamper X-Cover 3.0 helped with cost because I could roll up to any campground and ten minutes later be set up to sleep off the ground. Fun fact: RV parks are not much cheaper than a hotel and they don’t usually let you rent a tent site if you’re not putting a tent on the ground. [Ednote: iOverlander is a handy app for finding free dispersed campsites on public lands.]

A major advantage to the rooftop tent is being off the ground and on a queen-size mattress. It’s easier to set up than a ground tent in that it merely swings open. After setting up the rain fly with a few flexible metal poles, you’re ready to catch some Zs. The drawback compared to a ground tent is that you’d better be done with your adventures for the day because the last thing you want to do is pack the whole thing back up to make a beer (or marshmallow) run.

On a 29-degree night in Ketchum, Idaho, it kept me plenty warm. With the windows zipped and the waterproof rainfly providing extra insulation, I was cozy.

It retails for $2,695 at iKamper.com, but we were able to use a 20% off coupon at REI, whose employees helped install it on my car. I chose this model because we have a low garage door entrance and anything taller than 11 inches (closed) wouldn’t fit. It was less than half the cost of other brands, including some with aerodynamic hard cases. Other brands to consider are Thule, Yakima, and Tepui. —Brendan O’Meara

What’s On My Nightstand

When H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald, came out in 2014, it won all sorts of critical acclaim: The Samuel Johnson Prize, Costa Book of the Year, a Sunday-Times bestseller, a New York Times bestseller, one of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year.

If you’ve not heard of this book—or the film adaptation released January 23—it’s a memoir about a woman who copes with her father’s sudden death by training a goshawk named Mabel in the ancient traditions of falconry.

Back in 2014, I couldn’t wait to read it. To my disappointment, I couldn’t finish it. I started and re-started the book three times, but I couldn’t get into the story. I didn’t see what all the buzz was about. Was there something seriously wrong with me?

Then, a couple of months ago—around the time my mother moved in with us after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s—the book absolutely slayed me. Sometimes stories (the ones I’m writing as well as those I am reading) won’t let me in until they’re ready, or until the very moment I need them.

This go-around, I’m tearing the pages up with notes and underlined passages. This habit often corresponds with my teaching season. I’m ever hunting for examples of the literary techniques and narrative skills I’m trying to teach my students. Last week, a passage jumped out at me that I’d missed upon my first reading. Probably because it’s a model of the semester’s first graded writing assignment: The Personal Artifact. (Tip of the hat to Jacqui Banaszynski, who taught me this writing prompt.)

I’m also reading it closely to study its blend of memoir, science, nature writing, and a wisp of a biography of a falconer who died long before the author discovered his book as a child. I’ve been wrestling with eight years of research to write a book proposal for a story that crosses genres. I want to see how Macdonald weaves all of these different elements into a deeply personal, emotional journey that touches on something universal.

The book opened itself to me, I’m sure, because as I cared for my mother every day, watching dementia’s slow erosion of self and cognition, I was already actively mourning. Even though she was still alive, I had lost the mother who’d raised me.

Some of you may already know this from my posts on Instagram: A week before Christmas, my mother died suddenly and tragically from catastrophic injuries sustained in an accident in our home. It was horrific and traumatic.

I was already reading H is for Hawk and coping with my preemptive grief in my own unique way: river surfing. As a way to cope with chaos and uncertainty in turbulent times, I’ve been learning to surf a man-made wave on the Boise River. Every time I surf, I fall into a Class II whitewater rapid that tumbles me underwater like a rag doll in a washing machine.

I’ll share more about this next month. In the meantime, I want to thank everyone who has reached out with words of sympathy and comfort. I’m mostly okay most of the time. In the intermittent moments of really-not-okayness, I’ve learned, as the river has taught me, to surrender to the hydraulic and nonlinear forces of grief.

What’s New

One of my favorite nonprofits in Boise, the Learning Lab provides free, individualized instruction for adults, kids, and families who are learning English, earning a GED, working toward citizenship, and otherwise improving their reading and math skills. Last year, 305 volunteers served 490 students and 91 families.

This month, I have the great honor of being the keynote speaker for their biggest annual fundraiser, the Lunch for Literacy. I’ll be giving one of my all-time favorite talks about What Stands in a Storm, which was a community-wide read in two states and has been studied in high school and college classes in California, New Jersey, Ohio, Alabama, Georgia, and Idaho.

Buy a Ticket

What’s Next

I’ve been enjoying my six-month tenure as Boise City Writer-in-Residence. This month, 45 writers showed up for our workshop on Dialogue (we needed more tables!)

If you’re in Boise, these are free writing workshops open to the public. Writers of all stripes and levels are welcome. Huge thanks to The Cabin, Boise Public Library, and the Boise City Department of Arts & History for organizing, funding, and promoting these community events.

Saturday, February 28: Story Structure
Learn how the deliberate sequence of revelation—what writers reveal to the reader, and when—shapes a story’s impact.
12-2 pm at the Library! at Cole & Ustick

Thursday, March 12: Pitching and Getting Published
Learn how to pitch your stories to editors and publications.
6-7:30 pm at the Library! at Hillcrest

Boise Writers! This is a wonderful PAID opportunity with a generous stipend. It’s a great way to connect with other writers and give back to your community. For more info on how to apply, connect with The Cabin.

Kim’s Whims

If you live in Boise (or happen to be passing through), I beseech thee to visit Oldspeak, a Book Beer Bar in Garden City. If a speakeasy and an indie book shop had a love child, it would be Oldspeak. (The name is a play on Newspeak, from George Orwell’s 1984.) It’s the Third Space of my dreams — a coffee shop by day, pub by night (with sexy NA options) — and they generously host Rough Draft, a quarterly happy hour I organize for nonfiction writers in Boise.

I begged them to let me be the “bookshop cat,” and they BOUGHT ME THIS ADORABLE ROLL-TOP DESK! Which I keep stocked with sweet treats, notecards, colored pencils, and other surprises for the curious. If you leave me a note, I’ll write you back! (Someone recently wrote a poem here… and it just got accepted for publication!) This micro-community brings me a macro amount of joy.

Share The Waterproof Notebook

A freelance journalist based in Minneapolis, Emily Sohn writes about science and the environment for National Geographic, the New York Times, Outside, Nature, the Discovery Channel, and other outlets. Last month’s issue of The Waterproof Notebook featured “The Catch,” her profile of Virginia Kraft. One of the first female staff writers for Sports Illustrated (SI) Kraft wrote about (and was skilled in) big-game hunting, tournament fishing, and other male-dominated pursuits in the 1950s.

“The Catch,” won a 2024 Webby Award, a Newhouse School Mirror Award for Best Profile, was anthologized in The Year’s Best Sports Writing, and and was selected by PopShift for the 2025 IP List, which includes 25 pieces of journalism worthy of film adaptation. She was selected as the winner of the 2025 Sharon Begley Award for Science Reporting and will use the $20,000 grant to work on a book, tentatively titled The New Wilderness, that “uncovers creatures thriving in human-altered environments.”

I asked Emily about her experience breaking into in outdoor writing and the challenges she encountered in reporting and writing “The Catch.”

How did you find this story idea?

The idea originally came from my friend David Wolman. He is a journalist, author, and founder of Story Bureau, an agency that works with writers to place stories that have potential for audio and video adaptation. He had come across a short piece about Virginia Kraft in a trade publication for horse breeders, and he had a feeling her life would make a good longform story. Given her background, he thought a woman should write it and brought the idea to me. I was intrigued.

How did your reporting unfold? Was your approach or process for this story different from that of other stories? What was it like to profile a character who isn’t around to interview?

When I’m profiling someone who is alive, they are usually the first person I reach out to. Since that wasn’t an option here, I cast a wide net. Kraft was a prolific writer in her journalism days, so the first thing I did was read her stories in the Sports Illustrated archive. It felt like the closest I could get to her voice, if an edited one. I scoured her work for any glimpses I could get of her opinions or personal life.

Then I reached out to anyone I could find who knew her. That included family and friends, as well as writers who overlapped with her at Sports Illustrated in the 1960s. I hit a lot of dead ends but every time I did find someone, they led me to others.

Kraft was well-known in her time, so I also collected a ton of newspaper and magazine stories about her. Those were fascinating because they helped me piece together a timeline of her life. They also raised new questions. Different accounts had different and sometimes contradictory details, which led to fascinating questions about how she may have shaped her own narrative.

What was your biggest reporting challenge? How did you overcome it?

One of the biggest challenges was just the sheer amount of material I ended up with. I am a huge fan of Scrivener, which helped me organize many dozens of interviews and articles in one place. I also wrote the story in sections, which helped me break down the process. Still, it ended up just taking a lot of time to read through everything and figure out how to string it all together. I went through all the materials multiple times to make sure I hadn’t missed anything important.

Can you describe the structure you chose for this story, and why you chose that structure?

When I first started reporting the story, I organized my interviews into three main buckets. There was Kraft’s personal life story (family and friends); her life as a sports journalist (colleagues); and her legacy and impact on women in sports writing (current women sports journalists). Part of my original plan was to retrace some of her reporting steps in order to investigate her legacy. So I added a fourth bucket, which became my reporting trip to Louisiana to attend a woman’s fishing tournament put on by the International Women’s Fishing Association. Kraft had written about the same organization back in the 1950s, and it is still going strong today.

The fishing trip became a useful narrative thread that brought me into the story. I was in the first draft but only minimally. The feedback I got was to slim down sections that I had over-reported and instead add more reflection. Ultimately, the narrative that emerged is a journey of discovery. Without giving too much away, I start out thinking I’m looking into the story of an overlooked hero. Along the way, I discover complexities. By the end, I’ve come to terms with a woman who broke down barriers but was far from perfect.

Did this story force you to learn any new skills in reporting or writing?

I had never written such a deeply historical or biographical story before. I learned a lot from story editor Glenn Stout about searching with Newspapers.com and Ancestry.com to track down a family history and articles that aren’t digitized. I also spent a few delightful hours in the archives at the University of Minnesota, looking through issues of Field & Stream magazine from the early 1950s. An old news story had mentioned that she wrote for the magazine under a male pseudonym, and I went looking for any mention of her actual name or image. Those old magazines were fascinating to look through. There was a lifetime of future story ideas in them.

Learn more about Emily and read her work at her website, Tidepoolsinc.com.

The downside: Some wool can be itchy, and the more delicate natural fibers can be prone to abrasion and moth-holes. It can also be expensive. (Though the right pieces are a worthy investment—and on sale right now.)

The Magical Properties of Merino

The benefits of merino wool sound almost like an infomercial: It keeps you warm in cold weather, and cool when it’s hot. It’s lightweight, wicking, and dries quickly. It can feel as soft as your favorite cotton T-shirt, but—unlike cotton—retains heat when wet. Sweat as hard as you can (for days!) and the garment won’t stink.

The anti-stink benefit was the ultimate game-changer that made me replace many of my synthetic base layers, which got funky after one use. But wool can be less durable than its synthetic counterparts. My favorite extra-fine merino wool base layers (made by Rapha, a high-end cycling brand) were soon riddled with moth holes.

It got me wondering: How long could a wool garment realistically go between washings? Would it snag on branches, abrade in slot canyons, or lose its shape on a river trip? Could it survive a year in my closet without moth-holes? I decided to put a variety of wool garments—with different blends and textile technologies—to the test.

The 2-Month Test

My methodology: Wear each item non-stop for three days—with at least one sweaty workout and no showers or deodorant. After letting the garment dry, I’d run it under the nose of my husband and my (back then) 12-year-old son, asking them for a stink-rating of 1 to 10. I’d even throw in some “control” garments—unworn wool shirts and synthetic shirts subject to the same testing conditions.

After three days of wear, my armpits reeked. But the garments didn’t. I continued to rotate through the mix for more than a month, thinking that surely some funkiness would accumulate. It didn’t. My husband and son could generally tell if a wool shirt had been worn, but it didn’t retain body odor. (My synthetic “control” shirts, by contrast, made us all gag.)

Why is that? To fact-check the “antimicrobial” buzzword, I asked wool-industry folks what that meant. They told me it’s not our sweat that stinks, but the bacteria that feast upon the salts and proteins present in sweat. Because of the molecular structure and chemical make-up of wool fibers, bacteria can’t cling to them.

Discussing this with my gear-obsessed husband, he retrieved from his closet the Icebreaker sweater he bought in New Zealand twenty years ago. Aside from a tiny moth hole, it was in good shape, and not even the slightest bit funky.

“It’s never been washed,” he said.

Ew.

While I don’t recommend that, I can say this: For my 2019 test, I spent nearly two months cycling through less than a dozen wool shirts without washing them once. When I finally broke down and did laundry, it was because of the psychological “ick” factor, not the build-up of actual odor.

Most of the wool garments performed like a dream. And the technology has come a long way since my first merino quarter-zip, which I wore for at least a decade. A natural fiber, wool is prone to abrasion and wear, so companies often blend it with synthetics like Nylon and Lycra are intended to add strength and abrasion resistance.

The 5-Year Test

I conducted my 2-month test back in 2019, on assignment for a fly-fishing magazine. Then the pandemic hit, the magazine went out of print, and the story never ran. But I continued wearing the garments, so I can now recommend, with confidence, the pieces that withstood five years of frequent wear and outdoor abuse.

Ridge Merino Convict Canyon Hoodie (above)
Cyber Monday Deal: 25% off with code CYBER2025

Of all the garments I tested, this is the piece that gets the most wear. A half-zip hooded mid-layer, it has a grid-fleece merino interior that feels soft against bare skin and a merino-blend exterior that resists abrasion. It’s extremely lightweight, stretchy, breathable, and cozy. I wear it on constant rotation—as a base-layer under overalls and waders, as a mid-layer on fall bike rides, with jeans on a plane—and I can attest that it never gets funky like a synthetic fleece.

Icebreaker Women’s Merinoloft Vest (above)
Cyber Monday Deal: 25% off

Instead of down filler, this vest is insulated with a thin layer of wool. Unlike down, wool holds its shape and retains heat when wet, so it’s my choice for fishing and river trips. I appreciate the slimmer profile, which eliminates the Michelin-Man effect of some puffer vests. Stretch side panels allow freedom to move, and zippered pockets keep keys secure. A pocket doubles as a stuff sack, so it fits in my carry-on.

Voormi Women’s High-E Hoodie (above)
Cyber Mondey Deal: 20% off

This hoodie is like a good backpacking partner: tough, capable, thoughtful, and understated. The surface-hardened thermal wool is blocks wind and resists abrasion (and Velcro snags), which makes it my pick for rock-scrambling and canyoneering in cooler temps. The balaclava-style hood covers more of your face than the average hoodie, and a ponytail pass-through is a plus for anyone else annoyed by that prickly feeling of hair on your neck while wearing a typical hoodie. Other features: zippered kangaroo pocket, chest pocket, interior pocket, thumb holes.

Voormi River Run Hoodie (on river guide)
Cyber Monday Deal: 20% off

Proof that merino wool can be light enough to wear all summer and tough enough to withstand considerable outdoor abuse action, this hooded sun shirt survived multiple years’ worth of whitewater rafting trips, backpacking expeditions, and rock-scrambling. But you don’t have to take my word for it: I saw veteran whitewater guides wearing this and swearing it survived several seasons of guiding. (Tough!) The hood fits over a ball cap and buttons under your chin to protect your neck and the sides of your face from the sun, and the thumb-holes hold the sleeves in place and shield the backs of your hands when rowing.

WoolX Brooke Quarter-Zip (above)
Cyber Monday Deal: 8% off with code BFCM

In the fall and winter, a quarter-zip or half-zip is one of my favorite layering pieces, allowing quick venting during high-intensity activities or transitioning from the cold indoors to somewhere warm. WoolX consistently delivered the softest wool in all of the products I tested, with some shirts I could even sleep in. (Other brands wore well during the day but felt itchy at night). The slim fit and sleek cut layered equally well under waders, bibs, and even a blazder. (For a looser fit, check out the Quinn Ribbed Quarter-Zip.) I wear their summer-weight tees in all four seasons.

Rapha Merino Base Layer
Cyber Monday Deal: 25% off

The garment that won me over to merino base layers was an extra-fine merino wool tank by Rapha, a high-end cycling brand. It’s still the softest and thinnest piece I own, but it’s riddled with holes from critters that eat merino wool. This has happened to more pieces I own by Rapha than any other brand. That said, I still wear them, because they’re so very soft. (The holes add a sort of out-of-the-Matrix edge.) I love the sleek cut of the long-sleeve crew and the short-sleeve crew has slightly longer sleeves that I find more flattering.

How to Shop for Merino Wool

When shopping for wool, size matters. That is, the diameter of the fiber, which is measured in microns. The smaller the number, the finer the fiber, and the softer the fabric feels against your skin.

“Wool has barbs, kind of like fish hooks,” says Dan “Butch” English, founder and CEO of Voormi. So when it feels scratchy, those barbs are to blame. Longer wool fibers can be woven together in such a way that the barbed ends stick out less.

How to Care for Wool

Wash it infrequently (seriously). When you must wash, use cold water, a mild detergent (I like Woolite) and the gentle cycle. Better yet: Hand-wash in the sink with a squirt of Dr. Bronner’s. Hang or lay flat to dry. Store in a drawer with cedar or lavender to keep moths and other wool-munching critters at bay. I make my own moth-repelling sachets from lavender from my garden and tuck them in the drawer where I store all my wool. It makes my clothes smell like summer all winter.

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The Catch

I first learned about Virginia Kraft—one of the most important outdoor sports journalists of her time—when a journalist named Emily Sohn asked to interview me for a story about Kraft.

Virginia who? I confessed I’d never heard of her. When Emily told me more, I realized I wasn’t alone—in not knowing, and wondering why. One of the first female staff writers for Sports Illustrated (SI) Kraft wrote about (and was skilled in) big-game hunting, tournament fishing, and other male-dominated pursuits in the 1950s. As Emily wrote in her award-winning Long Lead story, The Catch:

Over a 26-year career at SI, Kraft wrote deeply reported and immersive features, just like her male colleagues. All the while, she quietly racked up an unrivaled collection of firsts. She was the first woman to race in a major dogsled event in Alaska, the first woman and first foreign journalist to hunt with General Francisco Franco of Spain, and likely the only mother of four to traverse six continents to take down all of the Big Five trophy animals. Yet despite the enduring reputation enjoyed by her male contemporaries at SI — including George Plimpton, Frank Deford, and Roy Blount Jr. — her work has since faded into obscurity.

Despite more than 100 SI bylines and significant accolades and attention in her time, Kraft is absent from lists of pioneering women in journalism, and her articles are excluded from discussions of notable SI stories. Her work isn’t covered in journalism schools, and when asked, none of my peers was even familiar with her name. Virginia Kraft might be the most influential sports journalist nobody has ever heard of. Why?

Emily wanted to interview me about what it’s like to be a minority in a minority: an Asian-American female outdoor sports writer covering largely white male-dominated sports—mountain biking, road cycling, and fishing. She’d read my stories in Outside about equity in sports and was curious about my personal experience.

“I honestly didn’t feel like being a woman was a disadvantage until the last few years, when I started thinking, ‘Oh, yeah, sometimes women are kind of treated like Junior Varsity in the sports writing world,” I told her. “Maybe I was just really naive.”

Once I started looking, I noticed an interesting pattern: More women were making a name in “the boy’s club” of long-form narrative journalism and the sub-niche of long-form narrative sports writing. Which rocks! But online, at conferences, and in collegial groups, the men tended to celebrate work by other men more loudly and frequently than they celebrated similar work by women. (With some notable exceptions. More on that in a minute.)

This pattern incurred furtive conversations among the women: Should we say something? We didn’t want to alienate the men, be seen as complainers, or risk our seat at the table. I bit my tongue for years. Then, in a moment of excruciating vulnerability, I gently shared my observations with a few male colleagues I trust and respect. Their response led me to believe the cause is a genuine lack of awareness.

So how do you raise awareness without assuming the role of an activist? Virginia Kraft didn’t see herself as an activist. As Emily wrote, Kraft “may have already realized that she was going to advance in the very male world surrounding her only if she beat the men at their own game and became one of the best shots who ever lived.”

Did Kraft encounter the pushback that activists often face? My friends Kathryn Bertine, who advocated for a women’s Tour de France race, and Shannon Galpin, who supported women cyclists in Afghanistan (and later helped them escape the Taliban and evacuate to safety) have been vilified, gaslit, and terrorized by trolls. I wish I had their courage. Compared to them, I feel cowardly.

In my quest to write more about fishing, I’ve encountered some sexism, mostly in the form of patronizing comments, man-splaining, being ignored in busy fly shops, and the occasional dude who assumes that by fishing I’m really trolling for a hook-up. I try to let it roll off my back like water off a duck. Fishing is too joyful to let some knucklehead ruin it.

Often, though, I’m pleasantly surprised. When a male editor at Garden & Gun asked me to contribute to their annual sporting issue, I was thrilled to write about chasing chinook. When the issue hit newsstands, I got an email from one of the other writers—all men—whose bylines appeared in “For the Love of the Game.” I was the only writer in the bunch that he didn’t know, and he wanted to make it a clean sweep.

On the phone, Worth Parker and I connected across 2,000 miles, commiserating about raising kids, getting skunked, and splitting wood. He edits the Tom Beckbe Field Journal, a small online journal of storytelling about upland hunting and fly fishing. Would I like to write for them? Of course I would! I also felt I’d made a friend I could call and say, “Hey, man. I’m in Wilmington. Wanna go fishing?”

Moments like this are worth pausing to appreciate at a time when women’s rights are being eroded. I want to acknowledge the good dudes, some of whom are even more aware than I am. The ones who notice when my class reading list needs more female authors, do gender-audits of popular podcasts, and go out of their way to mentor women and women of color. All of the guys I’m nodding to here (y’all know who you are) are white men.

I’m equally grateful for the many women who go out of their way to help other women (so many that I’m nervous to name them here, for fear of leaving someone out). As Emily mentions below, it’s been encouraging to feel part of a community that believes we’re all in this together.

The Perfect (Waterproof-ish) Warm Layer

If you’ve never owned a garment made of merino wool, the benefits of this natural fiber sound almost too good to be true. It wicks moisture and dries quickly, keeping you cool in hot weather. Unlike cotton, it retains heat when wet, so it can keep you warm(ish) if you fall out of a boat or get caught in a downpour. The fiber has anti-microbial properties, so it won’t stink like a synthetic shirt.

The downside: Some wool can be itchy, and the more delicate natural fibers can be prone to abrasion and moth-holes. It can also be expensive. (Though the right pieces are a worthy investment—and on sale right now.)

Back in 2019, I gear-tested a range of merino wool base layers. Then the pandemic hit, the magazine went out of print, and the story never ran. But I continued wearing the garments, so I can give you a true testimonial about the pieces that withstood five years of street wear and outdoor abuse. (More on this in tomorrow’s post.)

Of the handful of products that stood out, the one I wear most is the Women’s Convict Canyon Hoodie by Ridge Merino. A half-zip hooded mid-layer, it has a grid-fleece merino interior that feels soft against bare skin and a merino-blend exterior that resists abrasion. It’s extremely lightweight, stretchy, breathable, and cozy. I wear it weekly—as a base-layer under overalls and waders, over a jersey on fall bike rides, with jeans on a plane—and I can attest that it never gets funky like a synthetic fleece.

Ridge Merino, an American company based in Mammoth Lakes, California, has generally well-priced options (any quality long-sleeve merino shirt under $100 is reasonable). This mid-weight layer is $135, but with the 25% percent code CYBER2025 it comes down to $101.25.

In a Cyber Monday bonus post, all subscribers to The Waterproof Notebook will get the full list of merino wool garments that stood out in my 5-year test, including some by a lesser-known innovative company that engineers its textiles in-house with methods that blend the benefits of wool with the durability of synthetics. (For Black Friday and Cyber Monday, they’re all on sale!)

What’s On My Nightstand

As part of my reporting for an upcoming Title IX story, I’m doing a deep dive into the history of the fight for equity in women’s sports. (Any other recommendations? Reply to this email and let me know!)

• Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women, by Maggie Mertens

• Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside, by Melissa Ludtke

• Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress, by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink

What’s New

• This month, Laura LeBleu, a brilliant writer/editor who dazzled me in my Harvard Extension School class, launched a gorgeous over-sized print magazine called Geezer. Target audience: Gen Xers committed to “kickin’ ass in our second half.” For Geezer vibes, watch a silly Instagram reel of me losing my mind over a hard copy and read my essay, “Memory of a Goldfish,” about the sandwich years of preparing kids to launch and caring for aging parents.

• Last month I talked shop with Lee Gutkind, aka “the Godfather of Creative Nonfiction” about Dialogue: The Secret Sauce of Cinematic Scenes as part of Narratively Academy’s Open Book live video series. ($ubscription required)

• The Alchemists, a story about Afghan teenage girls who convinced their culture that women and girls should be allowed to ride bikes, was anthologized in The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2025. (Subscribers to The Waterproof Notebook can buy a copy from any bookseller, and if you email me your address, I’ll mail you a signed bookplate with a personalized note. Same goes for any of my books!)

What’s Next

• Spring 2026: One semester a year, I teach Feature Writing for Harvard Extension School. I adore my smart, non-traditional students, some of whom have gone on to launch magazines (See: Laura, above), publish their first feature in Esquire (looking at you, Jen Golbeck!) and get full-time reporting jobs (fist-bump to Ania Hull and Emily Piper-Valillo).

• March 28-April 4: In my new role as Food & Wine contributing editor, I’ll be guest-lecturing about salmon aboard an 8-day Food & Wine / National Geographic cruise. Between off-ship adventures, guests will enjoy wines curated by Food & Wine executive wine editor Ray Isle and locally sourced, beautifully prepared cuisine. (Fingers crossed, I’m trying to get them to serve sockeye salmon caught by Reid Ten Kley, the fisherman in my F&W story, Out of the Wild.)

3 Questions With Emily Sohn

A freelance journalist based in Minneapolis, Emily Sohn writes about science and the environment for National Geographic, the New York Times, Outside, Nature, the Discovery Channel, and many other outlets. Her story about Virginia Kraft, The Catch, won a 2024 Webby Award, a Newhouse School Mirror Award for Best Profile, and was anthologized in The Year’s Best Sports Writing. She was selected as the winner of the 2025 Sharon Begley Award for Science Reporting and will use the $20,000 grant to work on a book, tentatively titled The New Wilderness, that “uncovers creatures thriving in human-altered enviroments.”

I asked Emily about her experience in outdoor writing and the challenges she encountered in reporting and writing The Catch. Paid subscribers will receive the full Q&A—with tips on reporting, writing craft, and process—in an exclusive issue of The Waterproof Notebook.

How did you break into the boy’s club of outdoor adventure longform journalism?

I have always been primarily a science and health journalist, but I love outdoor adventures and try to incorporate them into my reporting whenever possible. Unlike in sports journalism and adventure journalism, a large proportion of science journalists are women. I am lucky to have a strong support network of other writers, both female and male.

That said, it took me ages to break into Outside magazine, a longtime goal. In my early years of freelancing, I wrote a few short sciencey stories for Backpacker and one tiny blurb for a package in Outside. But I couldn’t figure out how to land larger feature stories in the outdoor adventure magazine world. In 2019 I finally got a long feature assignment for Outside, which included a reporting trip to Australia. I spent all day hiking 15 miles into a gorge with my source in July of 2019. I was living the dream!

For years, I blamed myself for my unsuccessful attempts to sell adventure-based longform. Maybe I only knew how to do science stories? I assumed my pitches weren’t good enough. It wasn’t until I was reporting The Catch that I started to wonder if there were other barriers I had been up against. It turned out that Outside had commissioned stories mostly to men until about 2017 or 2018. That’s when the magazine began a conscious effort to diversify its writers. My first meaty assignment for them came shortly after that. It’s possible that my earlier pitches just weren’t that great. But it made me wonder if there was more going on than just that.

I remember talking to you about all of this while I was researching The Catch. Your reaction to learning about the history of women in adventure journalism sounded a lot like mine: How had I never really noticed this before? It wasn’t the only conversation I had like that.

One really cool outcome of reporting The Catch is that I have connected with a few female sports and adventure journalists that I am really happy to know. It’s a bonding experience to realize we’re all in this together.

What did you learn about yourself in discovering Virginia’s story and talking to other female outdoor sports writers?

I had not intended this story to be about myself in any way. The plan was to write solely about Virginia Kraft. She was a complicated person who lived a fascinating life, and there was a lot to cover. As I dove into the research, though, I pretty quickly started reflecting on my own career. I mean, Kraft walked into the very male office of Field & Stream magazine in 1951 and talked her way into a job. She essentially did the same thing at Sports Illustrated a couple years later. This was a time when women weren’t writing for these kinds of places. It was such a bold move. I couldn’t help but wonder: Would I have had the guts to do it?

There were other parallels, too. When Kraft gave up journalism after 26 years at Sports Illustrated, she was the same age that I was when I was working on my story about her. She then married a wealthy man and threw herself into the world of thoroughbred horses. These choices made me weirdly reflective, too.

Putting myself in the story ended up being a really useful narrative structure. It allowed me to explore Kraft’s legacy in a way that made her life relevant to current issues, including the lingering gender imbalance in sports journalism. One of my driving questions from the beginning was: What is still the same and what has changed since Kraft started her career? That led me to contact a number of female journalists working today. I wanted to know if they had heard of Virginia Kraft (none had). I also wanted to hear about whether they felt like the women who came before them, including Kraft, had opened doors for them, and what challenges they felt like they still faced.

What was most interesting to me about those conversations was how similar they were with each other. It seemed like most of us just don’t really know about the history that led to the opportunities we have or haven’t had. After the story came out, multiple people told me that they wished they had known more about Kraft before. That included both men and writers who had worked with Kraft at Sports Illustrated.

These conversations made me feel like part of something bigger. They also made me think about my own legacy. If someone were to ever look back at my life like I looked at Kraft’s, what would they see? Thinking about that made me want to find more ways of giving back and helping younger writers.

What’s your favorite piece of waterproof gear?

If I am allowed to stretch the rules, I’ll recommend something that is not waterproof but is my favorite piece of gear as an always-cold person who lives in Minnesota: my Ooro Heated Fleece Vest. (Ednote: currently on sale!) I wear it inside when I’m working and outside under a puffy coat on cold days.

A warm core goes a long way to happiness! If I have to pick something more weather-proof, I’ll go with BOGS Neo-Classic Solid Kids’ 3-Season Boots. I always got them for my kids. When my older son’s feet were the same size as mine, I threw them on one day and have been wearing hand-me-down kid BOGS ever since.You can just step right into them and walk out the door into the snow and keep your feet warm and dry.

Kim’s Whims

This is the spot where I share some random thing that brings me joy. This month, ignoring the big-box stores and shopping from indie makers. Some of my favorie earrings (below) are made by two good friends. Everything they make is one-of-a-kind. The feather earrings are by Angela Marie, a Boise-based artist whose small business, Birds of a Feather, you’ll find only on Instagram and at select craft markets. (She ships and does custom designs.) The beaded pairs are by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Alysia Burton Steele, who makes jewelry as a way to de-stress from her primary work as a historian, photojournalist, and writer covering civil rights. You can shop her selection on Instagram and Etsy at Al’s Side Hustle. Maybe someone on your Christmas list would love a pair!

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In my first issue of The Waterproof Notebook, I highlighted three key pieces of gear that passed field testing on my trip to Alaska. It was one of the most logistically challenging reporting trips I’ve ever planned. I had to get to Bristol Bay and a fishing lodge on the Kvichak River, both of which are in a roadless wilderness. One leg of the journey required a sea plane to a boat ride to a plane with wheels that could land on a beach with no runway. Another day required two bush planes and a helicopter.

I had to travel as light as possible, with one rolling duffel bag nearly as wide as a Piper Super Cub (a two-seater, single engine monoplane, shown in the photo above) and a waterproof backpack that could keep my laptop dry in a downpour and double as a carry-on.

Before I left home, I laid everything out on the floor and did a careful edit. A sports fishing story for Travel & Leisure (coming soon) required fly-fishing waders and wading boots. I needed commercial fishing bibs to repel the fish blood and slime I’d encounter on a commercial salmon fishing boat for a story for Food & Wine. Everything else had to pull double-duty as layers and streetwear.

Below is the final edit. I wore and used every single thing and did laundry once in two weeks (thanks to the stink-resistant antimicrobial properties of merino wool.)

Here’s the complete list, starting from the top, from left to right in approximate rows.

Read more

The series editor of Best American Sports Writing and author, editor, or ghostwriter of more than 100 books, Glenn Stout is one of the most prolific writers—and generous editorial mentors—I know. When his book got optioned, I was excited to see, through the eyes of a friend, how a book becomes a Hollywood movie.

First published in 2009, Young Woman and the Sea tells the story of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. Fifteen years later, in 2024, the feature film starring Daisy Ridley was released by Disney in theaters and on Disney Plus. It was a long and roller-coastery journey. I asked him to share a few insights about his research and writing process, as well as the process of adaptation and theatrical release.

How did you find this story? What gave you confidence you could turn it into a book?

When I published The Best American Sports Writing of the Century with David Halberstam in 2000, we recognized the characters and authors skewed heavily male. We envisioned a similar book that could feature overlooked female athletes, female sportswriters, or both. I began casting about for those stories in older magazines and newspapers. Meanwhile, I was poking around in microfilm newspapers to research a historical baseball book. (There were virtually no newspaper databases back then, so I scanned A LOT of microfilm.)

In the microfilm I kept encountering stories about an American teenager named “Gertrude Ederle.” She was the first woman to swim the English Channel, and I was surprised to learn that she had beaten the existing record—held by a man—BY TWO HOURS! I started collecting stories about her, and stories about her written by women, including Julia Harpman, a pioneering female journalist who wrote for the New York Daily News.

Read more

(Water) Logging 27 Miles

Last month, my longtime friend and groomsman Michael Heacock completed a lifelong bucket-list goal: Swimming the English Channel. “This year is the 150th anniversary of Captain Webb’s first crossing of the Channel,” he said. “To date (since 1875) about 2040 people have made the solo swim.”

The Channel is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean between northern France and Southern England. Its narrowest stretch—the Strait of Dover—is 21 miles. However, swimmers who cross it almost always swim farther, pulled by shifting tides into a path that looks more like an S-curve. That can stretch the distance to 33 miles, or more.

Let’s put this into perspective. If you ever swam the length of a lap pool, you know what 25 yards feels like. Do that 70.4 times, and you’ve swum a mile. The shortest distance possible across the Channel—21 miles—would be 1,478 pool-lengths. (A “lap” is two pool lengths, down and back.) The daily workout of a competitive high school swimmer might range from 3,000 to 6,000 yards (1.7 to 3.4 miles), while professional athletes might clock 10,000 to 20,000 yards a day (5.7 to 11.4 miles).

But that’s in a pool. In windless air and water heated somewhere between 77 and 82 degrees. With a bottom you can see. Walls to hold onto. And lights.

Imagine starting at 2 a.m., in the inky pre-dawn waters. Temperatures typically range between 57 degrees to 64 degrees Fahrenheit. In a paper-thin layer of Lycra.

For a Channel swim to be officially recognized, you can’t use “artificial aids” for buoyancy, warmth, or speed. No wetsuits. No floatation devices. No fins or webbed gloves. Just you in a standard swimsuit—legless and sleeveless. That rules out jammers and kneeskins (think bike shorts). For men, that means swimming in a brief with no more coverage than a pair of tighty-whities.

You’re allowed one swim cap (two would be warmer—and therefore cheating!), a pair of goggles, with the option of earplugs and/or a nose clip. A support boat provides visibility and protection in one of the busiest shipping channels in the world. You can’t touch the boat or rest on a floaty. An official observer is appointed to the boat to ensure you don’t violate the rules.

“The first half of the swim was calm and fast. It felt great to glide smoothly in relatively comfortable 62-degree water,” Mike said. “About halfway the wind and swell picked up in a big way; about 15 knots with gusts and a two- to three-foot swell.”

If you’re wondering what 62-degree water feels like, it would probably take your breath away. When I’m surfing on the Boise River, which is around 65 degrees in the summer, I’m generally wearing a 5-mm wetsuit. Hypothermia can occur in water temps as warm as 60 to 70 degrees. Staving it off requires constant motion.

In a pool, the water is calmed by lane-lines. In the Channel, you’re buffeted by wind and waves, currents and tides. Some swimmers even get sea-sick.

“You feel like you’re in a 6-hour boxing match, or a cosmic washing machine; constantly fighting each wave, nausea, and depleting energy,” Mike said. “It’s defeating to look up once an hour and not see the cliffs of France. Once you do see them 9 hours in, you’re afraid to look again because they don’t seem to get closer for 3 more hours.”

Mike logged around 27 miles and finished in 12 hours and 27 minutes. Afterward, he signed the wall at the White Horse Pub in Dover—a longstanding tradition for swimmers who successfully crossed the Channel.

Last year Mike completed the Catalina Channel Swim, a 21-mile passage between Catalina Island and Palos Verdes in Los Angeles. “Next year I’ll complete the ‘Triple Crown’ of swimming with a circumnavigation of Manhattan,” Mike says.

A Marin County architect and father of two teens, he trained with 8-hour open-water swims in the frigid San Fransisco Bay. I asked him to share the (mostly waterproof) gear that got him through the swim—and the 459 miles of swimming (!!!) he endured over the past year of training.

Mike’s Favorite Waterproof Gear

• Hard Core Sport Catalina Channel Swimming Federation towel “Luxurious".”

• Arena Air Speed Mirror Swim Goggles

• Keen Men’s Kona Leather Flip Flops “Seriously. The best ever from a guy who knows.” (On sale for 25% off)

• MySwimPro “This AI training app has literally changed my life… every day.”

• Swimswimswim Radio “Give this playlist a listen.”

Share The Waterproof Notebook

• Course Correction: A Story of Rowing and Resilience in the Wake of Title IX, by Ginny Gilder

• Wrecking Ball: Race, Friendship, God, and Football, by Rick Bass

• The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine, by Brendan O’Meara

What’s New

• The Sawtooth Writing Retreat in September drew participants from fives states, including Alaska, North Carolina, California, Georgia, and Idaho.

• Print magazines are actually having a little renaissance! I’m excited to be writing for two brand-new ones: Southlands and Geezer.

• Author and CNF podcaster Brendan O’Meara interviewed me about pitching my viral wheelie story to Outside. You can read my tips in Pitch Club, his new Substack.

• I’ve been named Boise City Writer-in-Residence! For my 6-month term I’ll be teaching a free public writing workshop each month from November to March.

What’s Next

• October 15: Narratively Academy (free online): Join me and Lee Gutkind, “the Godfather of Creative Nonfiction” according to Vanity Fair, in a writerly chat about how to capture, find, and incorporate dialogue in narrative nonfiction.

• Nov. 6-8: The Society for Features Journalism is hosting their first in-person conference since the pandemic. On Friday afternoon, I’ll lead a discussion with Mark Warren, author of this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning feature story.

• Spring 2026: Feature Writing @ Harvard. This online graduate course requires reporting and writing two longform narratives in 16 weeks. The class is small (12-16 students) and fills up fast. Registration opens on November 6.

• March 28-April 4: As Food & Wine contributing editor, I’ll guest lecture about salmon aboard an 8-day Food & Wine / National Geographic cruise down the Snake and Columbia Rivers.

Kim’s Whims

This is the place where I share some random thing that brings me joy. This month, it’s Brochet — an Instagrammer (and new book author) who crochets weapons of moderate destruction, tests them, and films the carnage yarnage.

5 Questions with: Glenn Stout

The author of Young Woman and the Sea on bringing a character to life on the page—and the silver screen.

The series editor of Best American Sports Writing and author, editor, or ghostwriter of more than 100 books, Glenn Stout is one of the most prolific writers—and generous editorial mentors—I know. We met at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction conference about 10 years ago. When his book got optioned, I was excited to see, through the eyes of a friend, how a book becomes a Hollywood movie.

First published in 2009, Young Woman and the Sea tells the story of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. Fifteen years later, in 2024, the feature film starring Daisy Ridley was released by Disney in theaters and on Disney Plus. It was a long and roller-coastery journey. I asked him to share a few insights about his research and writing process, as well as the process of adaptation and theatrical release. Here’s a heavily abridged version (paid subscribers get the unabridged deets).

How did you find this story? What gave you confidence you could turn it into a book?

When I published The Best American Sports Writing of the Century with David Halberstam in 2000, we recognized the characters and authors skewed heavily male. We envisioned a similar book that could feature overlooked female athletes, female sportswriters, or both. I began casting about for those stories in older magazines and newspapers. Meanwhile, I was poking around in microfilm newspapers to research a historical baseball book. (There were virtually no newspaper databases back then, so I scanned A LOT of microfilm.)

In the microfilm I kept encountering stories about an American teenager named “Gertrude Ederle.” She was the first woman to swim the English Channel, and I was surprised to learn that she had beaten the existing record—held by a man—BY TWO HOURS! Soon it became clear to me that A) There was enough material out there for a book; B) Her story was interesting enough to carry a book, and C) She had been almost entirely forgotten. Since swimming the Channel in1926, she had been almost completely overlooked—by sports writers, historians, women studies, everyone. I mentioned her to both my agent and an editor, and they both though it worth exploring. But it took about five years before I had time to put together a proposal.

What was your biggest reporting or writing challenge?

There were several, and they all centered around making her come alive on the page. There were no contemporaries to interview, no Ederle “experts.” Her family chose not to cooperate at the time. So how could I take this two-dimensional story, told primarily in newspaper articles (in a time before features and profiles were written), and create a three-dimensional portrait? Otherwise I’d have an encyclopedia entry.

What you end up doing as a writer is layering information from multiple sources. A single sentence in the book might be built from information and insight from a half-dozen sources. One story about an event provides one detail, a different story supplies another, then a third source even more. Suddenly you have not just what happened, but the story of what just happened.

How did you get inside the head (and goggles) of a character you couldn’t interview? Did you do any literal immersion reporting (swimming)?

Trudy died in 2003 and had been in a home for several years, so I could not talk with her. Her family chose not to share any material they had. Saying what took place and describing it is one thing, but trying to deliver an immersive scene—how it felt and was experienced by her—is another thing entirely.

I took every sensory impression she had ever mentioned—what she saw, heard, felt, and thought while swimming. I put her in the water on the first page, and allowed the reader to swim with her. Just for a couple of pages. We don’t just get the exterior accomplishment, but her interior world. The reader needed to understand that the primary pull for her was not political. She wasn’t swimming for a cause. It was personal; the water was where she felt most like herself.

Can you describe the process of a book being turned into a movie?

There is no better metaphor for the experience of seeing a book made into a film than attempting to swim the English Channel. My agent warned me that even when a book or feature is optioned, the chances are still about 1000 to 1 that it will ever get made, not to mention by a major studio. Like what takes place for so many swimmers when they try to swim the Channel, the weather is unpredictable and the tides change. You can be almost across—literally within fifty yards—and not make it to shore.

That’s what happened to the film. The first studio, Paramount, got us about two-thirds of the way there, but then some executive change led them to drop it. For 99 percent of all films, that’s it. It’s called “going into turnaround,” and you usually don’t get another chance. But like Trudy, we did. [Ednote: It’s a long story. Paid subscribers will get the whole unabridged answer...]

What’s your favorite piece of waterproof gear?

My reporting often takes place in libraries and (now) databases rather than in the field. I live in Vermont and for most of the year we might be fighting rain or snow. In the spring we have what we call “mud season,” which is when the snow melts and the ground is still frozen and every step is in a quagmire. You gotta have a good pair of boots. I wear my waterproof Oboz Sawtooth X boots almost all year around. I hate having cold, wet feet. Probably a good idea I didn’t try to swim the Channel!

The unabridged version of this Q&A is available for paid subscribers. Glenn goes into a lot more detail about his research and writing process and the complicated journey of his book becoming a feature film.

Glenn and I teach (individually and sometimes together) writing workshops at the Larry McMurtry Literary Center in Archer City, Texas. This March, Glenn taught Writing the Non-Fiction Book Proposal. In May, he returned to Texas to join me and Hampton Sides to teach Feature Writing: The Reconstructed Narrative. (Esquire is publishing one of the features a student workshopped with us!)

Next up, Glenn will be speaking at the “Beyond the Breakers” Open Water Summit in Waltham, Massachusetts on November 8 and will appear on the Unstoppable podcast celebrating women athletes on October 22. Oh, and he does take private editing clients. So if you need coaching, find him at glennstout.com.

Welcome to The Waterproof Notebook, a monthly dispatch of accessible adventures, writing tips, and immersion reporting tools from an narrative storyteller frequently working off the grid. I’m often reporting on rivers, in the rain, or on a bike with a sweat-soaked notebook in my pocket, so many stories begin in a waterproof notebook.

Who I am: Hi! I’m Kim Cross, an author, narrative journalist, and full-time freelance writer. I write nonfiction books, longform magazine stories, and articles about storytelling craft. To offset the hours I spend riding an office chair, I also have fun side hustles: I’m a mountain-bike skills coach, I teach Feature Writing for Harvard Extension School’s master’s program in journalism, and I lead writing workshops and retreats in Idaho, Texas, and beyond. I also do some editorial coaching and editing.

My goal for this newsletter: Provide a peek under the hood of the writing life. Demystify the process, reveal the struggle, and share honest insights and revelations about the work. Whether you’re a fellow writer or a curious reader, I hope it will make you feel less alone and more empowered in your own quest to make sense of—and find meaning in—this complicated world.

What to expect: Curated round-ups of outdoor narrative stories, Q&As with my favorite writers, and recommendations of outdoor gear and immersive reporting tools. Occasionally I’ll reveal “the story behind the story” or geek out about the behind-the-scenes process and systems that make the hard stuff look easy.

Why your presence here matters: Editors and publishers want authors with “a platform”—a track record of engaging and connecting with readers. I love hearing from readers, I love coaching and teaching, and hopefully we can build a little community here. (Read on for ways to connect IRL!)

How you can support me: Open the newsletter, click on some links, and share. Review my books on Amazon or GoodReads, or recommend one to a book club. Publishers and editors look at all that, so it’s like voting for my next book. (Thanks!)

How can I support YOU? Please tell me! I don’t want this newsletter to be all “Look at me and my cool writing life.” I want to provide something that helps, inspires, or entertains you. Have a question? I’ll answer it in a future newsletter. Want me to amplify one of your stories? Send me a link. If there’s something you’d like to see here, I’m open to your ideas.

How to Pack for Alaska

Last summer, I flew to Alaska on a reporting trip to follow a wild salmon from net to plate for Out of the Wild, a story in the July issue of Food & Wine. It was the most logistically complicated trip I’ve ever taken, requiring bush planes, sea planes, helicopters, ATVs, and a multitude of boats. The immersive reporting required a lot of weather-proof gear: fishing waders, blood-proof bibs, dry bags, and gear for reporting and filming. It had to fit in one large rolling duffel and a waterproof backpack.

Here are three products that stood out in the field test. (Subscribers get the whole list!)

• Osprey Ultralight 20L Dry Pack. A minimalist design with just enough pockets—two exterior mesh side pockets that are easy to reach while wearing the pack, and a waterproof exterior pocket that doubles as a stuff sack—it weighs almost nothing and is astonishingly waterproof.

• Mystery Ranch Wingman Multi-Pocket. Provided quick access to my notebook, pen, phone, and audio recorder while keeping my hands free for holding a rod or picking fish out of a net. It attaches to backpack straps and functions as a chest pack for gear and a water bottle. Doubles as a hip pack. (It’s currently 25% off.)

• Rite in the Rain waterproof notebooks: I once fell out of a boat and swam a whitewater rapid with one of these notebooks tucked in my PFD. The notes didn’t bleed. (My pride did). Of many sizes and versions, I prefer the No. 146 Top Spiral Notebook and cover. The size (4 x 6 inches) fits in the Wingman pocket and feels like a reporter’s notebook. SALE (ends Sept 1): 20% off site-wide, plus free shipping: Use promo code BTS25.

What I’m reading

• I Am A Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein, by Kieran Fox

• Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences, by Jedidiah Jenkins

• Stronghold: One Man’s Quest to Save the World’s Wild Salmon, by Tucker Malarkey
  

What's New

• Out of the Wild: I followed a salmon from net to plate (Food & Wine)

  What I learned inspired me to change my shopping (and cooking) habits.

• How Bo Jackson reunited Alabama after a record storm (ESPN)
  My son and I rode with the G.O.A.T. of all G.O.A.T.s and learned why ESPN’s Greatest Athlete of All Time is an even better person.

• Death Row Inspired this Art Exhibit (High Country News)
  ”The Last Supper” compelled me to think about the death penalty, something I’d only considered abstractly, through the distance of moral reasoning.

• The Sunday Long Read True Crime Spotlight (SLR)
  Each month, I curate the month’s best true crime stories. (Free to subscribe.) Please send me your recommendations!
  

What's Next

• Sept. 18-21: Sawtooth Writing Retreat. This four-day gathering takes place in the mountains that inspired Ernest Hemingway. Held at a rustic camp outside Ketchum, in our country’s first gold-tier International Dark Skies Reserve, it’s drawing writers nationwide. Apply soon!

• Nov. 6-8: The Society for Features Journalism is hosting their first in-person conference since the pandemic. Speakers include Eli Saslow, Lane DeGregory, Mike Wilson (deputy editor of The Great Read at the NYT, and a longtime mentor of mine). For the Saturday morning keynote, I’m moderating a conversation with Mark Warren, author of this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning feature story.
  Sept. 1 is the cutoff for the Earlybird rate.

• Spring 2026: Feature Writing @ Harvard. I’m heading into my fourth year of teaching this graduate course for Harvard Extension School. One of my students this year sold two stories she developed in this class—one of them to Esquire! Designed for writers with solid fundamental reporting and writing skills who want to learn longform narrative, the 16-week course runs Jan. 26 - May 16, 2026. Limited to 16 students, the class fills up in a day, so mark your calendar: Registration opens for degree candidates on Nov. 3 and for non-degree students on November 6.

Kim’s Whims

This is where I’ll recommend something (not necessarily related to writing) that brings me joy. This month, it’s the hauntingly beautiful music of Hermanos Gutierrez, a Latin instrumental band of two Ecuadorian-Swiss brothers. Watch this video of “Elegantly Wasted” (a collab with Leon Bridges!) or check out my Spotify playlist, which has been my writing soundtrack this month.

Thanks for reading! Hope to see you here next month.