MIREILLE SILCOFF

The joys of long-form journalism

‘You are in an article which is

a complete environment, a place you can live

in for a while.’

Afriend suggested I look at a website called longform. org. It’s a good site, beautiful even, a clear, simple site, which collects new and old pieces of magazine feature writing, non-fiction articles, according to Longform, “that are too long or too interesting to be read on a web browser.”

And I like it very much. Even if its existence is, in a strange way, symbolic of nearly everything that makes me depressed about today’s atrophying newspaper and magazine culture. When “longform” becomes such a rare and special thing that it requires its own website to be easily findable, it feels like a coffin nail to me. That in the ever-expanding universe of tweets and blogs and apps that never ask you to read more than a headline upfront, some kind of “slow writing” movement might be afoot means, for sure, that the short stuff called “content” (not “writing”) is print’s absolute and incontrovertible majority. In short: If a few people are feeling very proud for eating boar ragout cooked at 200 degrees for nine hours from a 19th-century recipe in million-dollar yurts while the rest of the world chows down on cheesy fries, it is not a beginning, it is a eulogy.

But forgetting that is useful when looking at longform.org, because there are so many wonderful articles to get into here. If you read nothing else, read Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Published in Es

quire in 1966, it is perhaps the most perfectly formed example of magazine profile writing, and it reads so vibrantly today, it’s hard to imagine how the words might have ramped off the page upon first publication.

I was also glad to reread Susan Orlean’s 2001 New Yorker profile of “Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkaide, and also James Wood on Saul Bellow. In an essay called “Give All,” which ran in The New Republic in 2000, Wood began, so memorably: “Everyone is called a ‘beautiful writer’ at some point or other, just as all flowers are eventually called pretty.”

Then there is Tom Junod’s memoir about his father, which was published in GQ in 1996. It’s called “My Father’s Fashion Tips,” and for me, it was a transformative story. I think many of us have a few of

these: Magazine pieces that somehow touched a deep seam of emotion. Usually, we remember where we were when we read them.

With Junod’s story, I was 22 and sitting on a big flat rock overhanging the lake under my father’s house in the Laurentian mountains. It was 1996, and Junod was writing about his father’s bathroom:

“First of all, he had a bathroom all to himself — his bathroom, Dad’s bathroom. And he made it his, by virtue of what he put in it — his lotions, his sprays, his unguents, his astringents, his cleansers, his emollients, his creams, his gels, his deodorants, his perfume … his soaps, his shampoos and his collection of black fine-tooth Ace combs, which for years I thought were custom-made, since that was his, Lou Junod’s, nickname in the Army: Ace. He called these things, this mysterious array of applications, his ‘toiletries’ and took them with him wherever he went, in a clanking case of soft beige leather made by the Koret handbag company of New York, and wherever he went he used them to colonize that bathroom, to make that bathroom his own, whether it was in a hotel or someone’s house — because, ‘I need a place to put my toiletries.’ He has always been zealous in his hygiene, joyous in his ablutions, and if you want to know what I learned from him, what he taught me, we might as well start there…”

There are s e nt e nces with Jamesian shapes here, sentences you can lose yourself in, which is the point: you follow and follow and are

rewarded. You are in an article which is a complete environment, a place you can live in for a while. So you are 22 and writing about pop music for free weeklies. You leave the flat rock you are sitting on and go up to your own father’s house to look at his phenomenally complete bathroom, and

you think: My father puts shoe trees in his slippers. He has his undergarments pressed. Maybe one day, I will be able to write about things like that the way Mr. Junod does.

That moment has run through the centre of my life, all the way into today, because I still can’t stop writing about my family (as regular readers well know).

Still, the feeling among the few still writing long stories for magazines can be almost nostalgic now. I don’t do as much as I used to — only about two or three big features a year now — but within that editorial realm the vibe can feel like that of the last DVD rental place in the neighbourhood. You know Netflix just needs to get a little bit better for the roof to cave in completely.

There was a time when the editing process for a piece of a few thousand words could take months. Staffs are tighter and things are gruffer now. In a world which includes Huffington

Post, an entity which can whip up and steal up hundreds of articles in the span of hours (or Slate, a site with a reputation for quality but where podcast transcripts given new headlines can sit side by side with articles where the act of writing actually took place) nurturing ideas in a single precious piece, massaging text until it’s as flawless as it can be, could increasingly be mistaken for indulgence, even by the most self-sacrificing of editors. The values of democratized content make art crumble, and so museums are required, places like longform.org, a site which even calls its act of gathering stories “curating.”

And like most museums, longform.org encourages donations. There is a button, on the site. Magazines like Harper’s in the U.S. and

The Walrus here in Canada — the types of magazines that run articles over 3,000 words — have also needed to hold their caps out in the name of generous word count. They have had to become foundations — charities — in order to stay in print. And it’s tough to say whether this is any kind of good life for a magazine, or just life support. It might be worth going to the newsstand and spending the few dollars to find out.