Vipond+SB

Shannon Billings English 2773 The Journalism of John McPhee

Response to: "**The Strange Case of the Queen-Post Truss: John McPhee on Writing and Reading**"

A lot of McPhee’s work has appeared in //The New Yorker//. He has written about several topics: "the Swiss army, birchbark canoes, oranges, nuclear weapons, geology and many more." (Vipond and Hunt 200)

In this article, Douglas Vipond and Russell A. Hunt interviewed several people asking them what they liked or disliked about "In Virgin Forest." Upon interviewing readers after they read the article, Vipond and Hunt contacted McPhee for a discoursed-based interview on the article. He responded to comments people had made about his writing.

Three short excerpts were pulled from the article and words were changed for readers to make //probes// (statements about the work made by other readers) on McPhee’s work. McPhee says that he does not imagine a reader and whether the reader is understanding the material while he is writing.

"I think that what I’m doing is trying to put it in the way that seems most effective to //me//. Not that I’m "writing for myself," in that old cliché, but since I have nothing to go on but what’s in my own head—in terms of selection of things that I’m going to set on the paper, and all the choices that go with that—I listen to the sentence until I both hear it and see it as something that I want." – McPhee

He said that he enjoys writing about people because they are the "common denominator." He likes to paint a picture of his characters for the readers and describe them in great detail. He likes to use "fancy language." He feels that descriptive literature is of more value than just the basic cold hard facts on paper.

He doesn’t understand why people feel that articles contain too many facts or are just plain "mixed up." He says that he follows a specific order while writing and that the literature is logically put together. The facts are chosen and he doesn’t include all of the facts about a topic. He narrows down the topics and only includes the important details.

He was motivated to write about the forest in his article "In Virgin Forest" because he lives about ten miles from a forest. He was born in the same town that he resides and he didn’t know anything about the forest until he visited it to write the article.

McPhee is a go-getter. If he doesn’t know anything about a topic, he will research nonstop until he is educated on the topic. He informs his readers of several topics that they would otherwise not be interested in if he hadn’t dedicated an article to the topic.