There are no names in this story.
If you’re familiar with the work of Earnest Hemingway you’ll find a piece of his from September 25, 1923 in the Toronto Daily Star beginning with exactly this line, ranking among my personal favourites. As the opener promises, he omits all names from the article, including his own, giving only the professions, genders and approximate ages of everyone he quotes, describing himself only as “the reporter.”
Sometimes us journalists have to write this way, because otherwise there’d be no story. In Hemingway’s case, his interviewees wouldn’t talk unless sheltered by anonymity and that’s the case here, at least in part…but while this literary icon was profiling survivors of a Japanese earthquake, I’m writing about forestry.
Continue reading “A Quiet Word on Forestry: The Loss of Lumber and its Enterprise”