Back in 2017, White House Press Secretary Kellyann Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” to describe realities that were inconvenient to the first Trump Administration. Eight years later, as the second Trump Administration reconfigures the federal government around the facts, opinions and impulses of its choosing, the US public is becoming desensitized to life in a country where reliable information is harder to find—and where the few remaining independent news outlets are routinely attacked for faithfully recording the realities of our fast mutating world.
At a time when reporting the facts is becoming a lost art, how can artists—no matter what they’re making—respond to history in the making?
This is work that used to happen in newspapers. But since the early 20th century, the roughly 24,000 newspapers regularly published in the US has been reduced to 6,000. The US has lost some 2,900 newspapers since 2005 alone, 130 of them in 2023. And with that dramatic reduction in news coverage, thousands of reporters and editors—writers trained in how to seek, evaluate and communicate facts in the form of stories and images—have lost their livelihoods. Worse yet, much of that storytelling and image making has been outsourced to machines and algorithms.
Not only are news sources dwindling, but, in spite of the right-wing obsession with the so-called “leftist media,” an increasing number of outlets are owned by the right. The brazenly conservative Sinclair Media controls 294 broadcast stations nation-wide. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, where he attempts to manipulate his editorial staff to cater to his business interests—and has recently shown a willingness to even to pull advertising critical of the administration and its billionaire allies. Speaking of billionaires, Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the once venerable Los Angeles Times. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, both of these newspapers declined to run an endorsement for President in the 2024 election.)
A recent Pew poll shows that 20 percent of US Americans rely on Meta for their news, and another poll showed 59 percent regularly using X for news. The billionaire owners of those corporations have made their subservience to the Trump Administration clear as day.
Even as readers are drowning in information, our ability to reliably source facts, and to make meaning from those facts, is more imperiled than at any point in US history. As journalists, we are devastated to behold the wreckage of our field. As writers and artists, we wonder how literature can help fill the void.
For us, this middle space where language, fact, art, and meaning mingle is where we find the most agency and purpose.
We believe there is urgent social value in what is more traditionally thought of as “creative writing” (we’ve always felt this term sounds like an activity they’d assign one of our kids in preschool, rather than a vital field of art. Alas.). Such work does not replace journalism, or make up for journalism’s flailing or failures. Literary texts, however, can do the important work of tending to the socio-political circumstances in which we’re living (either head-on or through the side door, through documenting the present or the past), tracing how we got to this point in history, and presaging how we might emerge somewhere else.
We’re thinking, here, of essays, longform reporting, historical texts, and even memoirs that grapple with facts—those of the present or past or both—and make meaning of what has occurred in the world through the art of language. Works like Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s The Man Who Could Move Clouds, Mychal Denzel Smith’s Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, Jesmyn Ward’s The Men We Reaped, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Children of the Land.
But we’re thinking of fiction and poetry texts, too. Some of the most affecting writing of record today is found in poetry (Solmaz Sharif’s Look, for instance, which is rooted in language from The Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, or Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied, or Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic) and fiction (like Omar El Akkad’s American War and What Strange Paradise, Hernan Diaz’s Trust, Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility, and Ana Maria Matute’s The Island). These texts don’t only plumb human experience but human experience as shaped by the facts of their time.
We’ve begun to think of such works as fact-based creative writing—not in the sense that they are based entirely on true events or that they’d stand up to the rigorous fact-checking of the magazines we most love to write for, but in the sense that they look to real events and face the conditions of social and political experience head-on.
This is the kind of work we are committed to reading and writing. We saw early on in our careers that some of the best work out there—the kind of work we wanted to create ourselves—was straddling, blurring, and complicating those lines. For us, this middle space where language, fact, art, and meaning mingle is where we find the most agency and purpose.
All the same, as our careers have unfolded, we’ve both found ourselves straddling a strange writerly no-man’s land. In the field of so-called “Creative Writing,” our work as reporters is sometimes sidelined as wonky non-art. To journalists, our creative, lyrical sides are sometimes perceived as distractions, unmoored from the rigorous work of reporting. When we first met we instantly understood ourselves as literary kin: two burgeoning journalists who felt like orphans in the land of “creative writing,” and creative writers who were misfits in the land of journalism.
As more newspapers and magazines are sold off or shuttered, and as authoritarians around the world threaten the inherent value of both fact and art, we need more writers making beautiful art of fact and instilling more fact into our art.
The more we taught writing to others, the more we noticed that many of our students found themselves trying to reach across the same fact vs. art divide. Our MFA students frequently want to know how to get out to research and report—in the spirit of the New Journalists, but without the macho posturing, and with greater respect for facts, for history in all its forms, and with an interdisciplinary curiosity, drawing from fields across the humanities and sciences, but also delving into popular culture, criticism, and autotheory. Our journalism students, for their part, often wanted to work on their lyricism, their sentences, their essayistic chops, the art of the word. There were two writing worlds, in other words, eyeing each other from afar but who, in this era of arts and letters, aren’t doing a great job speaking to one another.
We were so simultaneously dismayed by the art vs. fact divide, and energized by the work that flouted it, that we decided to start an online course: a year-long class for “fact based creative writers,” as we put it. We were shocked by how many people signed up, and their range—poets, academics, fiction writers, memoirists, journalists and everyone in between. That first Storyboard cohort felt like a revelation, and even a form of rebellion against the needless fact vs. art divide.
We don’t want to be pollyannas here, trilling about how art can change the world. It’s of course fair to wonder what the power of words are when the world is, quite literally, burning (or flooding or melting) and when those in power not only aren’t doing anything to stop it, but are fueling the conflagration. It’s fair to wonder why we spend our time writing instead of, say, blockading oil pipelines or immigration prisons or weapons shipments to Israel. What concrete good does writing do?
While some pieces of writing (The Pentagon Papers, Jodi Kantor, Meghan Twohey, and Ronan Farrow’s Harvey Weinstein reporting) certainly have concrete, momentous outcomes, most do not. This is, in part, because while writing is an individual act, a piece of writing moves into the world—whether we like it or not—as part of a larger chorus. It is also true that a piece of writing is a record—a contemporary work of art that will form a future archive of the present once the present (blip—here it comes) becomes a past to be looked back upon and reckoned with.
And we do know, through our own experiences and the experiences of our students, that art can change individual lives. And motivated, clear-eyed individuals can indeed change the world, especially if they’re working with others toward a common purpose
As more newspapers and magazines are sold off or shuttered, and as authoritarians around the world threaten the inherent value of both fact and art, we need more members of this chorus making beautiful art of fact and instilling more fact into our art. And we need to be in community, acting as cheerleaders, co-conspirators, and also as loving observers and investigators of truth.
Back when we were teaching those Storyboard classes during the deep pandemic—classes that have led to published books and magazine articles—we dreamed of holding an in-person space to discuss what we were making, how we were going about making it, what roadblocks we were facing, what ethical frameworks we wanted to hold, and how we could do all of this well and better. Now, in 2025, we see that the need for this work, and the need for just such an in-person gathering, is even more urgent than before.
This is where our manifesto becomes an invitation to anyone who has made it this far and who, like us, is yearning to make work at the intersection of fact and beauty, meaning and truth: We’re convening a group of writers at Saint Mary’s College of California this summer for a six-day residency focused on building community around just this sort of writing project. We’re bringing together creative writers and journalists, academics and advocates, emerging artists and seasoned ones for a week of workshops, craft conversations, and presentations devoted to finding beauty in truth—and to support each other in the pursuit of these kinds of fact-based projects.
To us, this work—reading it, writing it, shepherding it into the world—feels like an effort at survival. We’ve always needed facts and art and ethical storytelling. Today, facing climate crises and genocides and techno feudalism and totalitarian rule, truthful stories, and beautiful stories, are a key to illuminating the systems of power that shape our lives—and to transform them before its too late.
