FAQ: What is TellTale?

Just what exactly is happening in this Substack?

Nov 19, 2023

What is this newsletter all about anyway?

Common sense suggests that these kinds of vanity projects work best with a concentrated niche for a targeted audience.

Green Thumbs in Rocky Soil: a Substack on gardening in the mountain region.
Bricks *In* Mortar: a Substack on how to smash the windows of your favorite Big Box stores.
Great Danes R Us: a Substack about people who believe they are . . . Great Danes?

But I’m going against conventional wisdom here. Tell Tale: Stories. Sports. Culture. It’s the kind of generic tagline you might find in a vertical like Grantland or in glossies like GQ or Esquire. I’ve gone broad and general because I don’t want to get hemmed in or pinned down. I want to make a space where I can write and think about what I see in 360 degrees.

And I see a lot . . . on the TV, on the timeline, in my life, in the ether. And, mostly, what I’m seeing are stories. Real or imagined, I see the world in a million little narratives: people running around with other people trying to live meaningful lives, failing and succeeding and failing again, connecting the past to the future, making the most of the least. All of us here just trying to overcome our god-given frailties and flaws. Storylines. Narratives. Yarns.

And so, I’m calling it TellTale.

But Sports and Culture? What gives? You’ve never written about these things.

I mean, yeah. That’s kind of the point. This is new for me. I make my living as a teacher, researcher, and writer of narrative nonfiction. Most of my work has been pretty laser-focused on immersive journalism and narratives that look at urgent human concerns. But I don’t want to be stuck in any one lane. I like to doodle.

And it just so happens that I watch a lot of movies and a lot of TV and a lot of NBA basketball. (Too much TV? Too much basketball?) I want to be able to talk about the footage of Grizzlies’ point guard—Ja Morant—chugging tequila live on Instagram, on a private jet, surrounded by family and friends, and how he looks so alone and sad. I want to be able to talk about why so many people cared about the “winner” of Succession or why I think Tár is actually a comedy.

And I want to be able to write about all these things, sometimes extemporaneously and sometimes in a more formal way. My hope here is to be able to pivot from one thing to the next without being too jarring because, after all, what I’m talking about is just one story or another.

So then . . . nothing about narrative nonfiction? Isn’t that your thing?

Oh, geez . . . well, yeah. For sure. That’s definitely part of this. It would be like a frog trying not to hop. I’m organizing all of this under the umbrella of Storytelling, but my foundation is narrative nonfiction, and I’m just as transfixed by it today as I was back when I first learned about the genre.

All credit goes to my undergraduate teacher John Calderazzo whose approach to the craft is perfectly captured in a quotation by Eden Philpotts that John always placed at the top of his syllabi: “The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” In his classroom, John carried a gentle patience for our god-given ability to see something beyond the ordinary and a forceful belief that we will see it if only we’re willing to look. I’ve basically tried to mimic him where I can.

The book he used to really hook me into the genre was Jon Krakuer’s Into the Wild, a story about a young bohemian adventurer who died while backpacking in the Alaskan wilderness. It was amazing to see how Krakauer took a brief news column about the discovery of a young man’s corpse in backwoods Alaska and built from that a fully formed story about the beauty and sorrow and complexity of human life.

One simple little AP news story turned into a 9,000-word article for Outside magazine which became a 250-page book which became a full-length movie all of which lives in the ether forever. In his research and writing, Krakauer unearthed a raw core. He took his subject, the fearless and idealist Chris McCandless whose body was found rotting in a bus, and Krakauer revealed McCandless in his fullness—his cruelty and wonder and unknowability—and, in turn, made me feel that unknowability in myself. Which felt like magic.

Feels like magic.

And so, not to sound too corny, but this is the kind of alchemy that I’m trying to understand in this newsletter. I suspect it lives in every great story. Just so happens, nonfiction stories are the ones I know best. So yup! there will be a good deal about it.

Okay. So, why now?

A couple of reasons.

One, I have a little extra time. For the past seven years, I’ve been a full-time writing instructor at the University of Pittsburgh. This year, I’ve downshifted, teaching only part-time while starting a new job as a researcher for my mentor from grad school. Thanks to this, I have a chance to try something new.

The other reason is a little bit technological and a little bit existential. For whatever reason, I’ve always kept away from writing extemporaneously on the Internet, always either too proud or too shy. I skipped the blogging era. I skipped peak Twitter. I skipped the posting wars (mostly). And I never even knew people were on Tumblr.

Now, today, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that I’m only narrowly catching the tail end of the newsletter era. But the way I see it, since Substack is basically another way to blog, this is my atonement for missing my chance to go ham in the “blogosphere,” circa 2007.

Which is the existential bit, I guess. Atonement. Joking aside, I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time, but I’ve always been afraid. (Writing is scary!) And so I’m setting aside my pretensions and fears. I’m ready to say some shit online. Lol. To be a little vulnerable, to be a little weird.

And so whatever the cause, I’m here writing this dang thing. I’m giving it a year. I’ll post once every two weeks, no matter what. Even if it’s a one-sentence joke. Even if it’s bad. Especially when it’s bad. I’ll be here posting like it’s 2003.

And if you’ve read this far down, I tip my hat to you! And I’m going to end it here. Stay tuned! More to come!

I have an essay about Modest Mouse’s Moon & Antarctica that I’ll share soon. And I have another essay about the grotesquery of political punditry—featuring all kinds of goofs and gags. It’s gonna be rad. You’ll see!

And who knows? Maybe I’ll do more of these FAQs too. Lol.

xoxo