This Week: "How to Report on Family Secrets" with NYT Contributor Susan Saulny

Join us for a special conversation with the veteran journalist behind this sweeping new "Great Read."

Happy June, writers! If you’re in NYC, there’s still time to join our in-person street photography workshop that starts this evening, and if you’re looking for memoir inspiration this month, “30 Days, 30 Essay Prompts” also starts today. Plus, we have a lot more coming up this week!

One of the most impressive feature articles I’ve read this year is “A Family Secret No More,” an epic story by Susan Saulny published in The New York Times a few weeks ago. Susan explores the dual life stories of her grandfather, George, who lived in the Jim Crow South as a Black man, and his lighter-skinned brother, Edward, who moved to Chicago and “crossed the line” to live as White. It’s a remarkable reported essay that I can only imagine took an immense amount of researching, reporting, and navigating complicated family dynamics to put together.

This Thursday, June 4 at 1pm ET, Susan Saulny, who has more than 25 years of experience in journalism — including as a national correspondent for The New York Times and as a staff reporter for The Washington Post and ABC News — will join us for a live conversation about how she reported and wrote this incredible piece.

If you haven’t read this one yet, here’s a gift link to check out “A Family Secret No More” before our conversation on Thursday, which you can join at this link.

We’re feeling extra chatty this week — we also have a live conversation coming up Wednesday over at Narratively.com. Mallory McDuff’s deeply moving Personals piece about how she came to teach a college course on eco-friendly end-of-life choices is our most popular story of 2026, and on Wednesday at 1pm ET, Mallory will join Narratively’s Jesse Sposato for a special conversation: All the Dirt on Green Burials.