An episode for your weekend: Théoden Janes, Features & Entertainment Reporter: Charlotte Observer
Trying something different here, inspired by reading the newsletter, Your First Byline.
This week’s episode of the podcast is an interview with Théoden Janes. Théoden is an award-winning features and entertainment reporter for the Charlotte Observer, for whom he’s worked for more than 18 years. Théoden writes both vibrant profiles and intriguing first-person pieces that showcase the different writing styles in which he thrives.
An excerpt of that interview is below. I hope it gets you to click and listen to the whole interview.
You were adopted at 9 months old, which you've written about and we’ll talk about. Was there anything in your family or heritage that foreshadowed a path to telling stories?
My dad was like a lot of dads of his time, kind of this grandiose storyteller.
But he wouldn't just tell bedtime stories. He actually wrote for himself, for our family, a few that he would pull out just depending on how he felt, about dragons and about kings and queens and that kind of thing.
He did these dramatic readings. So I think that might be one way in which that rubbed off on me. But the other thing that might be that a lot of the stories that I write are (ones where) I'm talking to people and trying to get them to tell me how they feel.
And I'm trying to write in a style and write stories that evoke emotions from readers. My, my mom is a therapist and she was always very interested and not just within the family, but in other people: How does that make you feel? What are you feeling right now? And while as a kid, that was the last thing that I was interested in, talking about my feelings.
To some degree, that probably rubbed off on me too.
How do you describe your beat?
I do write features. I write less entertainment now than I used to. When people ask me to describe, what I do, and I don't have to put like a short label on it, I generally tell people that I do kind of longform narrative storytelling, and the goal for me is to write about people, places, or things in a way that, evokes emotion out of the reader, whether that emotion is heartbreaking or is inspiring or, gives you some sort of sense of outrage or justice or, sometimes occasionally attempts at humor.
I am trying to do kind of high-end storytelling and I'm a little bit of a last of a dying breed at the newspaper. Feature journalism, is becoming less and less common. Just as an example, when I got to the Observer in 2006, the feature staff had two dozen features writers.
I am the last one of those.
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You won an award for essentially an obituary that you wrote about a woman named Deborah Triplett who was a local fixture in Charlotte. A lot of good quotes, great kicker certainly at the end of that piece. What's the writing process like for you in terms of trying to do that piece?
I don't write obituaries that often but I love ones that are about some sort of character like Deborah. In this case, I talked to all these people around her who, kept mentioning this garden behind her house, that if she invited you back into her garden, that meant that you were someone who meant something to her.
And this garden was full of this really eclectic mix of living things, plants and ornaments and statues that she would find. I felt really fortunate to not only be asked to write something about her, but to stumble kind of upon that aspect of it.
I don't think that my interviewing skills are necessarily any better than anyone else's. But if I had to give you an answer as to why I am able to get good quotes out of people, it may just be that my interviewing style is more suited to eliciting that. Because I try to treat the quote unquote interviews that I do with people, as much as I possibly can, as conversations that I'm just sitting with someone having a cup of coffee and I'm the one who's hypercurious about the other person's life.
One other exchange I liked from the interview was about his going to South Korea to try to find his birth family and to learn about his home country. He talked about his writing style for that story.
I tried to make it as cinematic as possible and to block it again, kind of into these scenes.
And, so I viewed each chunk of the story as a mini episode and where I built, I don't know if suspense is the right word, but built to a point of tension where you didn't necessarily know what was going to happen next to drive people in the next sort of chapter, almost like an ad break or commercial break in a TV show.
It's totally there. I, I actually wrote down within this I feel like you specialize in building suspense!
Listen to the rest of my interview with Theoden Janes here or on the podcast app of your choice
Please subscribe to this newsletter - and e-mail me and let me know what kind of guests you’d like to hear on our podcast - journalismsalute@gmail.com.
Next week: We talk to Vivienne Serret, a student at the University of Florida who has gotten national recognition as part of team coverage of the resignation of school president Ben Sasse.