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Entering the Dark Side

I owe my relationship with American Periodicals to Susanna Ashton. It was 1997, and I was early in my graduate studies at the University of Minnesota when I met Susanna, then a graduate student at the University of Iowa. Following our mutual participation on a panel about print culture at the Midwest MLA conference, she urged me to seek publication for my paper, a study of the literary choices that journalist Julian Ralph used to construct his coverage of Lizzie Borden’s murder trial for the New York Sun in 1893. “I know the perfect journal for you,” Susanna said. “It’s called American Periodicals. Really, you should send this to them.” Encouraged that such a smart, knowledgeable scholar saw worth in my efforts, I introduced myself to Professor James Tanner at the annual American Literature Association conference a few months later, then submitted what was to become my first full-length scholarly article, “A Front Seat to Lizzie Borden: Julian Ralph, Literary Journalism, and the Construction of Criminal Fact.” I sought in the article to turn tables on the familiar concept that newswriting served as “apprenticeship” for fiction writers, exploring instead how late nineteenth-century reportage depended upon reporters’ narrative choices and underscored a symbiotic relationship between literature and journalism, yielding significant influence in both directions. Ralph’s coverage of the trial, I argued, highlights the “intersections between documenting and storytelling, representing and symbolizing, subjectivity and objectivity,”