Upsides to “I”

When Stephanie Hanes set out to write her first, forthcoming book, about an environmental project in Mozambique funded by a rich Westerner, editors and agents assumed it would be a memoir. “There’s this whole genre of storytelling from Africa that’s about the storyteller,” she says. But with a journalism background about as traditional they come—Hanes moved from a small-town daily to a job as a regional metro reporter to a five-year stint as a foreign correspondent—she resisted the idea of inserting herself into her story. “All this exoticism of the experience; it’s not the story that I wanted to tell at all.”