Here’s the headline from yesterday’s @OPB First Look newsletter. And oddly echoing the headline for the suspense series Newsroom PDX. https://ljbreedlove.com/newsroom-pdx/

Sometimes we need good fiction as well as good journalism to help us understand…/1

Before Jan. 6, there was Portland….
Here's the headline from yesterday's @OPB First Look newsletter. And oddly echoing the headline for the suspense series Newsroom PDX.https://t.co/IMiPb5Krr3
Sometimes we need good fiction as well as good journalism to help us understand…/1 https://t.co/RIzQ98eSlN

— LJBreedlove (@LJBreedlove2) June 22, 2022

@ljbreedlove2, 6/22/2022

So we’re reversing things today. This links to a Twitter series of posts about the OPB article and Newsroom PDX. So follow the link, to finish the essay, and comment there, if you would. (And give me a follow, while you’re there? This is my secondary account that focuses primarily on Portland, that I use for research. It could use some love, however.)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the need for both good journalism and good fiction to help us understand the the reality of events of this magnitude. I’ve written both (at least I hope both my journalism and my fiction were good). Journalism offers us the facts, the events of the day, a variety of perspectives, and a whole host of other things to inform us. But it can’t take us inside the heads of people in the way fiction can. (Although talented writers such as Tom Hallman of the Oregonian come close. He’s practically invented a whole new form of storytelling, and has a Pulitzer to prove it.)

Fiction, however, allows us to become people who aren’t like us, for the duration of a book at least, and we walk away changed by the experience. We can all name books that did that for us. And it doesn’t have to be a monumental work of fiction. Walter Farley’s Black Stallion made me crave adventure at age 8, a taste I’ve never lost. Ditto with Robert Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit Will Travel. My friends laugh at me, because I would still go into space, if given the chance, even if it meant close confines with Elon Musk. I never lost that sense of wonder and adventure either.

That doesn’t mean I base my understanding of the Middle East or space, either one, on those books. A lot of good journalism and non-fiction books have educated me on both topics since I first read those books. But that sense of wonder? Of adventure? Yes, that was fiction’s contribution to who I am.

So read the journalism. Read the fiction. What happened these last two years cannot go unforgotten.

As U.S. House committee hearings continue on the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, it is clear the violent day was the culmination of years of political violence. Oregon and other states served as training and ideology testing grounds. By @_jlevinson: https://opb.org/article/2022/06/21/ho...

— Oregon Public Broadcasting, June 21, 2022

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