Salt Institute term underway

Among my many projects, I currently teach the writing track at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies here in Portland., where classes started this week.

Salt, which also trains aspiring documentary photographers and radio producers, moved into a swank new space on Congress Street last fall, complete with all the 21st century gadgetry. Its hallmark is a prolonged documentary field experience, often involving cross-track collaboration with photographers or radio students. It's a fifteen-week program and, while Salt doesn't award a degree, credits earned there can be transferred to institutions that do.

My class is essentially a crash course in the basic nuts-and-bolts skills of journalism, the structural, investigative, and field skills of the narrative or literary journalist, and an intense magazine writing seminar all rolled into one. Several Maine-based editors have been kind enough to come to speak to my class, and many of them have ended up publishing student's stories.

As I need to be in Portland most weeks, expect more New England dispatches and fewer foreign ones over the next three months.