Tomorrow morning I’ll head up to Boston to attend the Nieman Conference on Narrative. I attended last year and was thoroughly impressed with the quality of the panels and speakers. Roy Peter Clark, Adam Hochschild, Tom French, Lane DeGregory, and Jacqui Banaszynski were all amazing. Most of the attendees at the conference are working journalists. A few, like me, are students or freelancers. It was both inspiring and humbling to attend.

This year, the climate may be a bit different, with the seeming implosion of the newspaper industry. The theme of the conference this year, “Telling True Stories in Turbulent Times,” dives right into the fact that the nation, as well as the business of journalism, faces a daunting, uncertain future.

Grim as it is out there, I’m excited to be going back. I hope to post a few thoughts from the conference along the way. This year, I’m going to try and be a little less introverted and force myself to network more. It’s a conference full of writers, after all. No one should be at a loss for words…