The Center for Documentary Studies welcomed Harper's Magazine Editor Roger Hodge for a conversation Wednesday night.
Hodge joined award-winning writer Duncan Murrell, who is teaching a course on documentary writing this Spring, in a discussion about the definition and impact of effective documentary writing. CDS Director Tom Rankin moderated the conversation before an auditorium filled with CDS professors, students and community members.
Although Rankin said documentary writing is an area of documentary practice that is not clearly defined, Hodge said he considers all writing to be documentary writing.
"We call it nonfiction or creative nonfiction or all these creative kinds of words, but it's all the same in my mind," Hodge said. "It's all writing. Everyone's trying to get the truth on some level."
Harper's Magazine, the oldest general-interest monthly in America, has featured the work of esteemed writers such as Mark Twain, Henry James, Annie Dillard and Tom Wolfe. Hodge, who once worked as a short-order cook at the former Ninth Street Bakery and wrote for The Independent and Chapel Hill News, has served as editor since 2006.
"If I've learned anything in the business of publishing so far, it's that if you hang around long enough and you work, you make your way to where you want to be," Duncan said upon introducing Hodge.
Hodge and Murrell both dismissed the idea of documentary writing being objective, saying that an effective documentarian is conscious of his role as an observer. It is imperative that the writer acknowledges his place, whether at the center of the story or as a third-party witness, Murrell said.
"Literal-mindedness is often a term of abuse," Hodge said. "What we're not interested in is a straightforward, naive attempt to capture what a person saw. We're interested in what a person saw but we're always looking for an oblique angle. We're always looking for an interesting perspective."
Frequently, writers find that the story they set out to write is not the story they ultimately uncover, Hodge said. Murrell's experiences as a writer attest to this phenomenon.
Murrell spent eight months living in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans while writing "In the Year of the Storm," a long piece for the July 2007 issue of Harper's. Although he expected to discover rampant corruption amid the destruction, the government's failure to deliver promised help to New Orleans meant that Murrell's experiences in the hurricane-ravaged city did not meet his expectations.
"What he turned in had absolutely no resemblance to what we had assigned," Hodge said. "The story turned out to be about what it was like to experience New Orleans as this city collapsed.... Nothing was happening but rot and drinking."
Rankin opened the floor to questions from the audience, shifting the conversation to a discussion of ethics when a student asked whether writing about subjects without their knowledge could be viewed as exploitative.
"Of course you're exploiting people," Murrell said. "You're pulling stories out of them. You're asking them to have them let you into their lives."
Rankin said he recognized the necessity of sensitivity when attempting to get a story or accurately chronicle experiences, but constant self-censorship as a writer is unproductive and hinders storytelling-something Hodge considers crucial to successful writing.
"The kind of work that we do and the kind of work that other magazines that have a real commitment to storytelling do-they'll survive," Hodge said. "We have a need for that kind of storytelling and we won't survive without it. The junk-food that we find on the World Wide Web will not satisfy us."
Freshman Shining Li, one of few students in the audience, said after the event that the discussion piqued her interest in documentary work.
"It was interesting that they see nuances in the field and they don't have specific answers about ethics," she said. "I'd never really thought of doing anything with documentary writing before, but I thought it was interesting, so I'm probably going to look up some more stuff about the department."
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