Mrs. Siler is not so hapless ... Photo from Curly Wurly

In the spirit of "Mr. Hulot’s Holiday," the French cinematic parfait from 1954, I’ve decided to take a vacation.

Because this school year is in full swing, my holiday won’t involve jumping on a plane and heading to a seaside resort in the south of France, where director Jacques Tati’s character M. Hulot underwent a delightful series of mishaps.

Instead, I’m taking a reading holiday – a break from writing for a week or two to whittle down the mounting pile of books that is stacking up on my bedside table. Over the next few days, I hope to finish reading Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree, Lou Ureneck’s Backcast, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Wine and words: A perfect pairing Photo from Jupiter Images

Last week, I spent half an hour on the phone with a book group from Minnesota. Based on the laughter and high spirits I heard on the other end of the line, these fifteen or so women seemed to be having a rollicking good time together.

One explanation may be that they were sampling some of the wines that make appearances in The House of Mondavi – the Charles Shaw brand sold at Trader Joe’s (better known by its nickname of Two-Buck Chuck) and the Robert Mondavi Private Selection. As one of the members quipped, “Sadly, we just couldn’t afford Opus One!”

I was also fascinated to see that the group had just begun a blog called Chapter Chat. I’ve been in a book group now for eight years (it’s the impetus for my reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.) What a good idea.

I’ll confess that my reading holiday did indeed involve jumping on a plane and landing in a distant place. Not to the south of France, but to Boston, where the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism is taking place.

An offshoot of Harvard University’s prestigious Nieman Fellowships for mid-career journalists, this annual conference brings together some of the best and the brightest of the world’s storytellers over a weekend.

Photo by Boston University

I had the great fortune of attending a “master class” this morning with Lou Ureneck, chair of Boston University’s Journalism Department and author of Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-Fishing and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska. Lou also happens to be a friend of my Wall Street Journal colleague Steve Stecklow, who described Backcast as one of the best memoirs he’d ever read.

I’d agree – and not just because so many of the issues Lou explores in the book overlapped my experience as a parent of a soon-to-be-teenager and as a child of divorced parents. But what made Lou’s book stand out for me was his very distinct voice, which I would describe as human, funny, slightly laconic, and enormously likeable.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

I knew that the parents of teenagers are pitiful and hopeless in the eyes of their children. I took some solace in the thought.

I kept a supply of breath mints. I sucked in my stomach around him. And I never, ever, went around in my underwear. As the parent of a teenager, I had learned to keep my capacity for being disgusting to a minimum.

Lou told our class, made up of a dozen or so accomplished journalists and authors, that he had rewritten the first pages of Backcast a hundred times. Literally, a hundred times. And for him, the hardest part was getting the voice just right. Well, congratulations, Lou, because you did. What a wonderful book.

Tom French’s session on Sequencing was terrific too. He started by projecting the text of an email he’d received from his son on a screen: (nat+hockey stick+momentum+my eye+ow) explaining how that very short communication told the story of how his son Nat had gotten a black eye. He also mentioned that he’s been working on a multi-part series about zoo animals. I’m going to keep an eye out for that one.

My last session today was titled “Behind the Blue Pencil: Editors Talk about the Long Form,” featuring Jon Marcus, the former editor of Boston magazine, Larry Habegger, co-founder of Travelers’ Tales Books, and Vanessa Mobley, a senior editor at The Penguin Press in New York.

I asked Vanessa to tell us about her editing of Caroline Elkins’s Imperial Reckoning, a history of Britain’s gulag in Kenya which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. Based on her Harvard dissertation, Elkins book is a serious, dense book replete with original research. It is also very dark, in that it deals with a very shameful episode in history.

Vanessa explained that three months after buying Elkins’ book, she and the author learned of another book being published on the same subject. To try to beat their rival to publication, Vanessa came to Cambridge and spent a week with Elkins to edit her manuscript. They didn’t end up publishing before their competitor – but their close collaboration produced a book that the New Yorker described as “an extraordinary act of historical recovery.”

After that story, the conference attendees in the audience hoping to land a publishing deal couldn’t make their way up quickly enough to introduce themselves to Vanessa, which was not surprising. Who wouldn't want such an editor?

Photo by Nubar Alexanian

As a reporter, I often find that the most important conversations with sources came when I snap close my reporter’s notebook and started heading to the door. That’s what I discovered yesterday.

The second day of the Nieman conference was packed with smart, funny and inspiring speakers. Ann Hull and Dana Priest kicked the morning off by explaining how they reported their Washington Post series on the harrowing conditions at Walter Reed hospital.

One funny moment was their description of their “show-down” interview with the army brass was the image they painted of Ann in a down jacket, with its feathers sticking out, and a long row of colonels, all sitting behind them, a placement that Dana said, to much guffawing in the audience, “was all about messing with your head.”

Josh Benton, a Dallas Morning News columnist on leave from the paper for a year as a Nieman fellow at Harvard, gave a brilliant talk on blogging – ranging from the British poet/journalist James Fenton, who wrote “All the Wrong Places,” as an example of a collection of “reporting in its natural state,” to an exploration of the poet William Blake’s comment about establishment painter Joshua Reynolds, that “this man was born to depress art.”

Perhaps most moving and convincing of Josh’s point about the power of raw reporting was the teletype messages of John F. Kennedy’s assassination sent by a local wire reporter, and now displayed at the Sixth Floor museum in Dallas. I’m heading to that city this spring and plan to take a look at those dispatches.

As fascinating as those talks were, the most interesting conversation of the day occurred around a dinner table with that night with a far-flung group of journalists and authors who gathered to talk about the subject of history and journalism.

Sandy Tolan, who has recently joined the Annenberg School at USC, talked a bit about how he wrote The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, which was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist for nonfiction. In 1998, he was searching for a story to mark the 50th anniversary of the Israel’s declaration of independence, an event that Palestinians refer to as “the catastrophe.”

Sandy said he felt like a “casting agent” as he searched for the right people to tell the story. He found them in a Jewish family and a Palestinian family who had occupied the same house, weaving together their two stories into overlapping tragedies. With the goal of relating the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in human terms, he faced the challenge of how to stitch together these family stories against an enormously complex conflict, a process he described as being “like making a quilt.”

Sandy’s agent, David Black, warned him his book couldn’t just be a glorified transcript of his 43-minute radio documentary that aired in 1998 on NPR’s Fresh Air. That same year, Sandy attended the Nieman conference, where he came to the conclusion that he should aim to write a “history book in disguise” – and that the emotional heart of his story was the journey and intersection of these two families.

For the factual backdrop to these families’ circumstances, Sandy’s friend, the poet Erica Funkhouser, suggested he imagine putting the factual material into his book with great restraint and care, like drops out of an eye-dropper. Sandy asked for help, sending all or parts of his book to 43 readers.

Perhaps the best advice he got was from a top editor at Bloomsbury. He’d already asked for two extensions and was determined not to ask for another. So he mailed off the manuscript. Not long after, he got a call from the editor, who started off the conversation saying she knew he’d be upset with what she had to say and to sit down.

Your book isn’t ready, she told him his book, and Bloomsbury needed to extend his deadline again. “She saved me from myself,” Sandy said. He used the extra months to read a few extra books, lace in details, re-read all the chapters, and work on his source notes. The result was a history in disguise that the Washington Post called “an extraordinary book.”

Photo by Spark Media

When I first listened to the book King Leopold’s Ghost on tape a few years ago, I was mesmerized by the true story of the Belgian King’s rule of the Congo. I can still remember standing in our little kitchen long after I’d finished the dishes; hands clad in yellow plastic gloves, reluctant to click off the recorder as I listened to this horrifying tale unfold.

I found myself wondering about the person who had written such a powerful story and I wished I could ask him about the enormous research he’d done in constructing a narrative of King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo. Was the author Adam Hochschild a historian or journalist? We’d recently moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area after living in London through most of the 1990s. Now, after living and working here for a while, I now realize that Adam Hochschild is revered among many journalists and writers for his long commitment to social justice (he was a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine) as well as his generosity in helping other writers find their way.

Adam Hochschild has also long been a star of the Nieman Conference. His eloquence, modesty, and avuncular manner encourage even the greenest reporter to muster the courage to approach him. Sure enough, his talk at this year’s conference was spellbinding as he began with the proposition that “history is too important to leave to the historians.”

He admitted that although he initially worried that historians might feel resentful of him as “an unlicensed interloper,” in fact, the opposite was true. He asked six professional historians to review his most recent book about the British anti-slavery movement, Bury the Chains, to review his text before publication. Five of the six agreed. The result? “They saved me from making dozens of mistakes,” he told a crowd in one of the ballrooms of Boston Sheraton. Some of those historians even gave him literary tips.

He was drawn to writing historical narratives, after a long and distinguished career as a print journalist, because of “the thrill of time-traveling,” he explained, as well as a sense that books on history were likely to last, unlike newspaper stories.

Adam answered many sharp questions from a distinguished group. The first was from Shirley Christian, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and author of “Before Louis and Clark: The Chouteaus, the French Dynasty that Ruled America’s Frontier. She wondered if Adam would rule out writing a book about a subject if there weren’t many diaries and letters available about or from them. Adam noted that people have found interesting ways of writing about subjects when there isn’t a lot of material available, citing the many biographies written of Shakespeare.

Bloomberg’s Peter Green asked about the opposite problem: what to do if there’s too much research material available. “That’s the toughest thing of all,” said Adam, who continued that he’s working on a book about World War I – a subject on which 140,000 books have been written, though only about 85,000 in English. His approach is to choose characters to tell the story through, and then search out everything he can about their lives.

Miriam Pawel, a former L.A. Times reporter and editor who is nearing completion of her book on the United Farm Workers movement, asked a question that I struggled with in reporting and writing The House of Mondavi: how do you reconcile conflicting memories of the same event? Adam answered with the experience that most newspaper reporters have had in interviewing three or four witnesses at the scene of an accident: “memories are not reliable.” He suggests being honest about the reliability of your source, including flagging any skepticism or doubts you might have about it.

Eric Scigliano, an editor at a Seattle monthly magazine and author of Michelango’s Mountain and Love, War and Circuses, asked if Adam had ever considered abandoning a book project because the subject seemed too esoteric. Adam answered that his literary agent had sent out his proposal for King Leopold’s Ghost to ten editors. Nine rejected, citing a lack of interest in Africa. “The tenth got it,” Adam told the audience, “It’s not a book about Africa, but a book about greed, ambition, and imperialism.”

Since it was first published by Mariner Books in 1998, Bury the Chains has sold 400,000 copies worldwide. It was a National Book Critic Circle finalist, won a J. Anthony Lucas awardn and, most importantly, prompted a radical rethinking of the history of Belgium’s rule of the Congo.

As he told the writers gathered together this Sunday morning, summed up by Hermann Melville in Moby Dick, “to produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme.” So, Adam told us, write about whales, not fleas.

This weekend, I spent 48 hours in Boston’s Prudential Center without venturing outside once. Yes, the fat snowflakes that drifted down past our hotel window Saturday morning were an enticement to venture outside. But not enough of one to convince me to miss any of the conversation taking place inside, at the Nieman conference.

Making the trip to Boston for the weekend involved taking a trans-continental flight, spending three nights in a hotel (with my lovely room-mate, Sarah Mott, who had recently returned from Hong Kong,) lining up a sitter for our two boys, and plunking down $375 to attend the conference. It also meant missing such sweet moments as the opening day parade for the start of Little League, which our younger son plays and my husband coaches.

So why did I do it?

One thing I didn’t hear anyone mention at this year’s Nieman conference was the “New Journalism” – that movement pioneered in the mid-1960s by Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin. Perhaps because there seems to be a growing sense that at least some narrative nonfiction writers have gone too far in plucking techniques from novelists and applying them to journalism.

What drove this home for me was one of the books I bought from the Harvard Book Store to read on the airplane. It was The Fact Checker’s Bible: A Guide to Getting It Right, by Sarah Harrison Smith, who worked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Ms. Smith argues that the fabrications of Jayson Blair of The New York Times, Stephen Glass of The New Republic, and, stretching even further back, Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her fictionalized story about an eight-year-old heroin addict which ran in the Washington Post.

Photo by Mark Richards

Last night, on the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, I heard Anne Lamott speak at Book Passage, one of my favorite bookstores.

Anne (often referred to as Annie) was at the tail end of a three-week tour for the paperback release of her book, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith. She was in particularly fiery form, unleashing her hilarious fury at everyone from Dick Cheney to John McCain to the media pundit who criticized Hilary Clinton for fat ankles.

A hometown favorite, Annie grew up in nearby Tiburon, spent a lot of time in Bolinas, and now lives in Fairfax. With her dreadlocks tied back in a batik scarf and wearing red clogs and a lilac-colored jumper, she spoke to a large, standing-room only crowd, including many longtime family friends.

And the nominees are ...

In researching The House of Mondavi, I built up a modest wine library of fifty or so volumes. Some of my treasures came from the annual sale of the St. Helena Library, which has a wonderful collection of wine books. Others came from local, independent book stores or Amazon, or were given to me by people who knew I was working on a book about the first family of Napa Valley wine.

One of my favorites is George Taber’s Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine, which was published by Scribner in 2005 and justifiably earned wonderful reviews.

Suggested wine pairing? Ask the go-to guy. Photo by justinsomnia.org

Alder Yarrow and I had lunch together today at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher at San Francisco’s Ferry Building. After noting the $100-plus bottles of Shafer Hillside Select, Quintessa, and Blackbird Vineyards wines on offer at a take-out place that serves $8.99 burgers and $3.99 hotdogs wrapped in paper, Alder modestly mentioned that he’d just heard that morning that his brainchild, Vinography, had been named the best overall wine blog in 2008 by Tom Wark’s American Wine Blog Awards.

I started reading Vinography a few years ago after meeting Alder at the very first Symposium for Professional Wine Writers in 2006. We were both participants then; Alder has gone on to be one of the most generous and well-liked speakers at the 2007 and 2008 Symposiums. A corporate web designer and consultant during the day, Alder started Vinography in 2004 after realizing he had become the “go-to guy” for his friends who wanted wine or restaurant recommendations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Lunch in The Grotto Photo from sfgrotto.org

This month, I’ve been spending time at The Grotto, the famed San Francisco writers' community which is home to such West Coast literary luminaries as Po Bronson, David Ewing Duncan, ZZ Packer, Jason Roberts, Julia Scheeres, Ethan Watters, and many others. One of my favorite parts of making the trek to the Grotto’s offices on 2nd and Bryant Streets is lunchtime, when Grotto dwellers emerge from their offices, where they’ve been tapping away in the dim glow provided by their laptops, to gather in the brightly painted conference room for brown-bag lunches and conversation with other members of the tribe.

It’s not unusual for guests to join Grottoites over lunch. On Monday, Van Jones, founder of Green for All and co-writers of a forthcoming book called The Green-Collar Economy, joined us. Van, who lives in Oakland, was recently a guest on The Colbert Report and admitted to having been flummoxed by his host’s comments (including one about “green” love machines and another about “unicorn herding”). That prompted Laura Fraser to share her experience of having to strip down to her knickers while her suit was being ironed prior to her appearance on one of the network morning shows.

The future of community? Photo from smh.com.au (Sydney Morning Herald)

Writing, by its nature, is a solitary undertaking. Reading, too, is done mostly on one’s own. So why not bring writers together with readers in a virtual community?

Redroom.com is the one of several social networks devoted to the love of literature. Yet, it is pulling ahead in the race by attracting big names. Maya Angelou, Amy Tan, Jon Stewart, Salman Rushdie, and even Barack Obama are Redroom.com members. So are lesser known writers such as Belle Yang, author of The Odyssey of a Manchurian and Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders; Bill Hayes, author of The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy; and Peter Coyote, best known as an actor but also the author of Sleeping Where I Lie.

Christina Meldrum

I read the galleys of my friend Christina Meldrum’s stunning debut novel, Madapple, over a single, rainy afternoon a few months ago. I refused to get up off the couch, despite the requests of my husband and sons, until I’d finished the last page. What a book! I truly couldn’t put it down. Christina has written a gripping page-turner that explores the dichotomy between religion and science. Reading it, I felt as if I’d entered into a dream state where nothing was quite what it seemed.

Christina began her book nearly a decade ago, while she was still working as a high-powered litigator at a big law firm’s San Francisco office. She would rise at five a.m. daily and write in the darkness of dawn for about an hour, her computer providing the only light, before heading to her San Francisco office. She had majored in religion as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and then went on to Harvard’s storied Graduate School of Law. Although she had the drive and intelligence to be recruited as an associate by one of the top law firms in the world, Christina didn’t find what she was looking for in the practice of that profession.

Tony Horwitz: His blog details the "voyage long and strange" that is a book tour. Photo from voyagelongandstrange.com

I hit a low point on my first tour for The House of Mondavi on one of those days that come so seldom to Chicago. It was last June and the weather felt balmy, with the last burst of spring blooms still on display. Who would want to sit indoors on an afternoon like that?

Few did. At a bookstore known for its well-attended author events, only three people showed up (excluding my very patient Aunt Gene and Uncle Jack, who had sat through my book talk several times already.) I’d brought two bottles of wine – one from the Robert Mondavi winery and the other, a Charles Krug, from the Peter Mondavi side.

That was my mistake: the warm weather, combined with the alcohol, literally lulled a third of my non-family audience to sleep. The book lover who come to my talk that day had her head thrown back, producing a soft, ladylike snore.

President John F. Kennedy plays with children John. Jr., and Caroline in the Oval Office in October 1962, above, while below, his motorcade approaches Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Top photo from historyplace.com; bottom photo Walt Sisco, photographer/Courtesy The Dallas Morning News

I can’t remember the last time I choked up with emotion while visiting a museum. But the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas – which offers far more than just the preservation of historical artifacts behind glass cases – is an example of powerful storytelling about a tragedy that changed history.

What unfolds there is a recounting of the November 22, 1963, assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald, an event that occurred when I was a toddler. Illustrating the ways in which multimedia storytelling is often so much more moving than print or broadcast alone, I used the audio tour to guide me through the exhibition. The audio tour’s spare, muscular prose was narrated by Pierce Allman, who was the first journalist to broadcast from the Texas Book Repository, where the assassin took aim at the motorcade below.

On that day more than four decades ago, 200,000 people had gathered in the streets of Dallas to welcome the presidential party. One of them was dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the convertible limousine that the President was riding in that day through the downtown streets with his 8 mm Bell & Howell movie camera. As the car passed directly beneath the Texas School Book Depository, shots rang out. The stills of these moments captured on Mr. Zapruder’s film are profound.

Although on this visit there were no San Francisco mayors at Allegro Romano, there were plenty of people to meet and greet.

Photo from Allegro Romano

Allegro Romano, a small Italian restaurant on San Francisco’s Russian Hill, is the setting for a key scene in The House of Mondavi. The restaurant was where Timothy Mondavi broke bread with two of the outside directors of the Robert Mondavi Corp. in an effort to convince them to oust the company’s non-family member CEO. His efforts backfired. Instead of convincing them to fire the executive, his campaign only fueled the directors’ growing conviction that Timothy, himself, was a loose cannon.

I’d never been to Allegro Romano until I was invited there last week by Judy Miner, president of Foothill College in Silicon Valley. I’d given a book talk as part of the Foothill Authors Series and Judy took me there afterwards, since it was one of her favorite neighborhood restaurants. The restaurant’s ebullient Italian owner, Lorenzo Logoreci, welcomed us to a table scattered with rose petals and confetti. “Bella,” he called Judy, greeting her warmly and referring to her as his first customer. (Logoreci and Fusae Castelluccio, both from Rome, bought the long-established restaurant about eight years ago.)

Above, Margaret Mitchell at the typewriter she used to write the masterpiece that became one of the most beloved novels -- and movies -- of the 20th century.

Photo of Mitchell from Wikipedia.org; poster image from Jamd.com

A fifth-generation Atlantan from a socially prominent family, Mitchell stood just four feet ten inches and shocked Atlanta society during her debut by staging a racy “Apache Dance.” She was denied admission to the Junior League in part because of that dance, but also because she did charity work in the wards of a local hospital that served African Americans.

A fall from a horse, as well as ongoing pain in her ankles and feet, landed Mitchell in bed in 1926, forcing her to quit her job as a reporter. Her husband John Marsh, also a former reporter, brought her books from the library. But one day, as she lay in bed in the couple’s cramped one-bedroom apartment that Mitchell had nicknamed “The Dump,” John brought her something else insteada.

“Madam, I greet you on the beginning of a new career,” he said, plunking a Remington typewriter down in front of her. Mitchell started writing – stashing chapters or portions of chapters all over the house, tucked into manila folders. Three years later, in 1929, she completed the bulk of her book.

It languished in the proverbial drawer (or, more precisely in Mitchell’s case, those manila folders) for six years, until Harold Latham of Macmillan publishing, on a scouting expedition for new literary talent in Atlanta, read it and was mesmerized. His only major change was to rename Mitchell’s heroine Scarlett instead of Pansy, which was what the fiery-tempered beauty of Mitchell’s book was originally called.

Who knew such a dainty garden setting would occasion talk of "the two Ls"?

I’ve met a lot of wonderful people while touring to promote the paperback release of The House of Mondavi, but surely one of the most memorable was Helen Dufficy.

Helen, a lively 91-year-old who lives in a retirement community called The Tamalpais, came to the annual fund-raising talk and lunch for the Moya Library/Ross Historical Society in the small town of Ross, Calif., last week. The library is housed in an octagon-shaped building at the center of the Marin Art and Garden Center and is the oldest surviving structure of what use to be the estate of a founding family of the town. Tucked behind a pond near the library is a folly that delighted our sons when they were small – a fairy tale house that looks as if it came from the pages of one of the Grimm Brothers’ stories.

I’d been invited to be the guest speaker for the fund-raiser and had fun talking about my book to a group of 50 or so people which included my mother, several of her closest friends, and neighbors – some of whom I bump into at our small town’s local post office nearly every day. The average age of the group was perhaps 70.

After my talk, we had an al fresco lunch by the pond, and I had the great pleasure of being seated next to Mrs. Dufficy, who explained that her late husband, Dr. Rafael Dufficy, had often been asked whether the nearby town of San Rafael had been named after him (in jest, presumably, since the city of San Rafael dates back to California’s Mission Era). Mrs. Dufficy had been coming to the Art and Garden Center for years. “I’ve loved this place since I was young,” she told me.

Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson of Tartine Bakery share their James Beard award with the sweetest of their creations.

Photo from Gothamist.com

It was hard to escape “Sex and the City” even at the black-tie 2008 James Beard Foundation Awards Ceremony on June 8th at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall.

The evening’s co-host was Kim Cattrall, the actress who played Samantha in the movie and TV series. Kim didn’t disappoint her fans, at least in terms of adding glamour to the evening: she wore a short, gold-spangled dress with a plunging neckline. While it wasn’t a particularly body-conscious crowd (too many people who loved food more than fitting into size four dresses), Ms. Cattrall looked terrific.

Less terrific was the silly repartee she engaged in with her co-host Bobby Flay. The chef/restaurateur looked downright terrified by Ms. Cattrall, or perhaps just by her man-eating “Sex and the City” character.

I confess: I loved walking down the red carpet at the entrance of Avery Fisher Hall, with paparazzi snapping photos of celebrity chefs. It was very thrilling, indeed, for a plain old reporter like me. And it was even better to be accompanied by my handsome husband in his tuxedo and my beautiful, supportive sister.