TellYourTrueTale.com is a non-commercial archive for stories written by students during writing workshops of the same name run by journalist Sam Quinones between 2013 and 2018 at East Los Angeles Public Library. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with any commercial entity sharing the same name.
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Tell Your True Tale was a writing workshop devised by journalist Sam Quinones, given at East L.A. Public Library between 2013 and 2018, and based on the acclaimed True Tales stories he’s been writing for much of his 39-year journalism career.
The goal of TYTT was to demystify writing, while helping new writers cultivate their storytelling voices.
Among the biggest challenges new writers face is figuring out what to write and how to start. Tell Your True Tale workshops got them to think of their own experiences, and the experiences of those around them, as raw material for avoiding writer’s block.
Often, this approach works best when new writers are from communities or families that have never told their stories.
Then, by insisting on telling stories in limited space, the True Tales approach forced writers to hone their pieces and their imaginations by eliminating unnecessary words, finding reader-grabbing leads and endings, and making the hard choices that are essential to strong writing, no matter the genre.
As you’ll see from the stories on this site, the goal is short nonfiction that reads like fiction.
All were written by people who had published very little, or nothing at all, before this.
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Sam Quinones, editor of Tell Your True Tale, has been a journalist for 39 years.
He worked for ten years at the Los Angeles Times. Before that, he spent a decade (1994-2004) working as a freelance writer in Mexico. From those years, he published two books of narrative nonfiction.
True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx was published in 2001.
In 2007, he published Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. His books were reviewed in major publications (The Economist, L.A. Times, The Nation) and highly acclaimed. Hundreds of university classes have used them. The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review called him “the most original American writer on Mexico and the border out there.”
In April, 2015, he published his third book of narrative nonfiction – Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic through Bloomsbury Press.
Dreamland was selected one of the Best Books of the Year by Amazon.com, Slate.com, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times, Buzzfeed, Entertainment Weekly, the Daily Beast, Boston Globe, Bloomberg Business, and others.
In 2021, he published his fourth book of narrative nonfiction — The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth.
In 2025, he published The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band and Hard Work — stories of tuba players and band directors, whose lives have something to tell a country mired in addiction.
He also writes the Dreamland Newsletter — subscribe for free at samquinones.substack.com. Visit his website at www.samquinones.com.