The first Pulitzer winner for feature writing is still relevant and amazing
Jon Franklin penned “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster” in 1978. It’s a story that I like to throw at fledgling features writers as an example of how to get it right.
Whenever I sit in on interviews for new reporters at The Emerald — something I admittedly haven’t done in quite some time — I like to end the conversation with one question: “What do you read?”
The three most common answers are as follows:
“The New York Times, of course.”
“ESPN and stuff.”
“Uhhhhhhh.”
It says a lot about a person when the answer goes beyond the names of publications. If the prospective staffer veers off into a lengthy discussion about the last story that he or she loved, you know you’ve got a keeper.
And when that same breed of journalism student inevitably asks for stories that can provide inspiration for feature writing, I always fall back on the same answer.
It’s the same story I kept thinking of during the 90 minutes that Lisa Heyamoto, Jack Hart, Bret Schulte and Thomas Schmidt discussed features Friday afternoon in Room 150 at the Turnbull Center.
Like many of the other pieces the panelists touched on, the story I’m thinking about isn’t particularly new. That’s the thing: A good features story never shows its age, a takeaway that resonated with me as I watched these storied journalists engage each other.
The story I’m thinking of is “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster.”
Jon Franklin wrote the piece in 1978 during his tenure as a science reporter for The Baltimore Sun. The next year, it won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.
That’s right: A science writer won a Pulitzer — the first Pulitzer — for feature writing. Read the piece in the link above and you’ll see why.
What could have been a dryly written profile on a woman dealing with a brain aneurism is instead a magnificently composed account of a complicated surgery and a doctor’s failed quest to save a patient.
It’s also a story that connects me to two of my mentors.
My news and editorial adviser at The Torch at Lane Community College, Frank Ragulsky, had me analyze it for a feature writing class. Frank taught me much of what I know about writing and reporting. He also wrote the recommendation letter I’m to this day convinced landed me my first internship at The News-Register in McMinnville, Oregon.
Likewise, Ryan Frank, former publisher at The Emerald, helped me get to The Oregonian — where he worked as an investigative reporter for 10 years — last summer. His faculty adviser when he was a student at the School of Journalism and Communication was Jon Franklin himself.
The ties I share with the author of “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster” may boost its prominence in the catalog of stories I share with student journalists, but they don’t diminish the fact that it’s a fantastic piece of journalism.
Franklin’s style, his prose, his attention to detail are the standard by which any feature writer should measure his or her work. It’s engaging and informative. Hell, Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard was still analyzing the piece 33 years after it was published.
Good writing moves you. It makes you feel something. Jon Franklin’s 1978 story of a doctor’s struggle with a monster hiding in a woman’s skull does both.
Whenever I read it, I can see Dr. Ducker fighting Mrs. Kelly’s monster. Just writing about it, I hear that “Pop, pop, pop.”
