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Beth Macy on Edna Buchanan, sources in conflict, and stories too sad to tell

Our January Editors’ Roundtable looked at “After the battle, Mike Sword’s war within,” a story by Roanoke Times reporter Beth Macy about the death of an Air Force veteran in Virginia after service in Iraq. A former Nieman Fellow, Macy has also been a contributor to the American Journalism Review, Parade, and O, the Oprah Magazine. She talked with us by phone this week about the Sword story, and in these excerpts from our conversation, she discusses reporting on PTSD, navigating FOI stonewalls and the value of persistence.

How did you first hear about Mike Sword’s death?

It was in our newspaper, and it was reported widely. Even when stories came out that proved that the police had acted appropriately – there were even follow-up stories where they won awards for valor – you never got a sense of what really happened with him. People just assumed it was PTSD, but it was never brought up.

Then I did a story about a woman soldier who had been a prison guard at Abu Ghraib right after the big ruckus there. And she had PTSD. She was one of the first to come back and really get involved with the VA community, so writing about her was a great way of writing about the VA. She was buddies with all these old vets from World War II, a guy from D-day. But she had a lot of problems, and one of the things that she and the vets focused on was Sword’s story. You could tell it was really powerful in the vet community. “What happened with him?” “I’m sure it was PTSD.” And they would tell their own stories about hearing a lawn mower and ducking behind the bushes.

I mentioned Mike Sword’s death in writing about Debbie (Camicia), and his sister contacted me. She was trying to come to grips with what had happened and wanted to know if Debbie would speak with her. I followed up with her to see if she would be willing to tell her story, and she said no.

Fast forward a few years to last year: We wanted to do a story on PTSD. The guy I was initially following was a National Guardsman from an hour away. He was really suffering. He was on full disability, with back issues and PTSD. I spent a lot of time with him, and he eventually decided it was too painful to discuss. His wife said, “After you leave, he’s a mess.” Of course that makes you feel horrible.

So my story backed out, and a couple other reporters were working on other stories. And in the meantime, Mr. Sword’s father contacted our top editor. He wanted an anniversary of 9/11 piece honoring all the fallen heroes, including his son, who he thought was a fallen hero because of his PTSD. Finally, we got our chance to tell the story.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jan 27, 2012 | posted in words | comments (1)
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January Editors’ Roundtable: The Roanoke Times on PTSD and hard questions

Our January Roundtable looks at “After the battle, Mike Sword’s war within,” by Beth Macy. In her story, Macy explores the death of a combat veteran in southern Virginia, tracing the effects of the loss on his family and asking what role PTSD might have played in how his life ended. The story, part of a multimedia project from The Roanoke Times, was edited by Carole Tarrant.

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

One of the great challenges of narrative journalism is veracity. As you set the scene and build your character, you must remain absolutely faithful to the facts. What do you do if there are things you don’t know? (There will always be things you don’t know.) What do you do if the main character won’t talk to you – or can’t talk to you?

In Beth Macy’s story, Mike Sword couldn’t talk to her because Mike Sword was dead. And how he died, and why, are the crux of her powerful piece – even though the “why” is never entirely answered.

Macy’s piece is admirable for many reasons. It’s seamlessly written, it’s rich in telling and heartbreaking detail, and it’s well-reported. Most important, she tells only what she knows. The question that drives the piece is stated clearly in the second paragraph:

How did it come to pass that the 24-year-old, an expert marksman and former military cop, opened fire on police from Roanoke and Franklin counties in the ­early-morning hours of Feb. 29, 2008, provoking a shootout that ended his life?

It is a question that is never entirely answered, and yet the piece remains satisfying because Macy makes the wise decision to turn unanswered questions into a recurring theme. She poses questions, and she lets us know that the answers are a mystery.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jan 26, 2012 | posted in editors' roundtable | comments (1)
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“Why’s this so good?” No. 29: Andrea Curtis and the rhythm of mercy

by Bruce Gillespie | January 24, 2012

As a rule, I’m not one of those readers who flips ahead to the last few pages of an article or book before committing myself to reading it. I like a little mystery in my life.

But that’s exactly what I found myself doing when I started to read Andrea Curtis’ “Small Mercies” after it first appeared in Toronto Life magazine in 2005. I was on a train crowded with commuters, heading home from a day of work, when I found myself in the unusual position of getting choked up after only a couple of pages.

You see, Curtis’ story begins with the realization that, at 32 weeks into a “medically uneventful” pregnancy, she can’t remember the last time she felt her baby kick. From there, the story launches into her trip to the hospital for an emergency C-section and the birth of her 3 1/2-pound son a full five weeks before he could be considered full term.

She recounts the ordeal and seeing her son Ben in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for the first time:

… I could make out a reddish-looking infant lying in a nest of rolled blankets inside the box. Fully extended, he would have been about the length of a squirrel, with a big belly and pencil-thin limbs, but at the time he was lying on his side, legs propped up in front in the fetal position. A strip of white tape held transparent plastic prongs in his nostrils, and there were large rectangular splints made of foam taped to his left hand and his right foot to keep IV lines steady. You could see purple bruises on his hands and feet where they’d tried and failed to find a vein. He was wearing only a disposable diaper, but it was so big it covered nearly his entire torso. He had wires attached to his body, tape tabs holding them in what must have been a specific order, though it looked to me like a writhing tangle of mating snakes.

My tiny child looked solitary and foreign, as if he weren’t of this world. I tried to say something appropriate, something motherly, but I had no words.

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Pamela Colloff on storytelling, justice and letting readers think for themselves

Our latest Notable Narrative, the story of a mother convicted of killing her adopted son with salt, comes from Pamela Colloff of Texas Monthly. A two-time National Magazine Award finalist, Colloff has been at Texas Monthly since 1997, and her work has also appeared in The New Yorker and three editions of “Best American Crime Reporting.” In recent years, she has developed a reputation for drawing national attention to problematic convictions. She talked by phone with us this week about how she picks cases, writing about guilt and innocence, and the Skip Hollandsworth method of drafting stories. The following are excerpts from our conversation.

How did you find the story of Hannah and Andrew?

This has never happened to me before, but a reporter with the San Antonio Express-News called me out of the blue one day and told me about Hannah’s case. I’ll back up for a second to say that I wrote an article in 2010 about a former death row inmate named Anthony Graves, and that story was partly credited with helping eventually win his freedom, with the help of his attorneys and a special prosecutor.

Because of that, after that story came out — and this continues to this day — I get letters and calls literally on a daily basis, usually from inmates but sometimes from attorneys. This is the first time it came from another reporter. People will come to me and say, “There’s this innocence case, and I really wish that you would look into it.” It has gotten somewhat overwhelming, with letters piling up.

But in this case, this reporter from the San Antonio Express-News, John MacCormack, who is one of the best newspaper reporters in Texas, called me. John and I didn’t know each other, but I’ve been following his work for a long time. He said, “I’ve been writing about this case out of Corpus Christi, and I’ve done as much as I can do with it on a newspaper level. It’s a really important case, and I wish you would look into it.”

John ended up driving to Austin and giving me notes and documents. Again, I’ve never had anything like this happen before. And four days after John called me, a TV cameraman I was talking to for other reasons said, “There’s this case in Corpus you should look into. It’s the case of Hannah Overton.” To have two different media people tell me this was an important case, obviously, I was going to look into it.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jan 20, 2012 | posted in words | comments (1)
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Death by salt: Texas Monthly opens a case

In our latest Notable Narrative, “Hannah and Andrew,” Pamela Colloff recounts the story of a child and his adoptive mother, who was convicted of killing him by forcing him to eat salt.

At more than 12,000 words, Colloff’s narrative – which ran in the January issue of Texas Monthly – unfolds largely as straight chronology. It reads cleanly, with each section focused on a single piece of the story. But the reader can feel thousands of pages of documents lurking in the background, leaving a psychic trail on the page even as Colloff compresses events for readers.

We find out that the boy, Andrew, would have had to eat 23 teaspoons of Zatarain’s Creole Seasoning or 6 teaspoons of table salt to hit the lethal level. We learn about the amount of water in his stomach, which has implications for what happened in the hours before he received medical attention.

But along with information that seems to exonerate Hannah, Colloff also delivers the specifics of her delay in getting Andrew to an emergency clinic. Describing the trial, she writes that “just as the prosecution could not show exactly how Hannah had forced Andrew to ingest a lethal dose of salt, neither could the defense give precise details for how the four-year-old had come to have so much sodium in his body.”

This journalistic restraint matters. Colloff shows that it is possible to create tremendous emotional engagement while giving readers enough information to interpret events for themselves.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jan 19, 2012 | posted in notable narratives | comments (1)

“Why’s this so good?” No. 28: Vanessa Grigoriadis on Britney Spears

by Jenna Wortham | January 17, 2012

There’s a video of Britney Spears shot in 2007, not long after Valentine’s Day. She’s pacing around a tattoo parlor, where she’s just gotten a pair of bright red lips inked on her wrist and a cross etched onto her hip. She’s bookended by men so large their silhouettes rival refrigerators, but enough of her is visible to see that her hair is freshly shorn, by her own hand as it turns out.

Britney turns and faces the camera. There is a loopy, crooked grin on her face, and her eyes, when they skip across the lens of the camera, have a feral glint to them. That expression, in combination with her buzzed skull, gives off the distinct impression of someone unhinged, someone teetering on the verge of an unknown abyss. It’s unsettling how satisfied she seems.

After that scene, in the days and weeks to come, any time Britney Spears’ name came up in conversation, whether you were a fan from the start of her meteoric fame or just someone who tuned in toward the end to watch with amusement as she married a dopey backup dancer nicknamed “meat pole,” flashed her bare derrière to the paparazzi and toddled in and out of public bathrooms barefoot, the same question arose again and again: What in the hell happened to Britney Spears? And what did it mean?

Today, in an era of Kardashians and Winehouses and “Toddlers and Tiaras,” this is the norm. But back then, it wasn’t. Britney turned her private life inside out. She put every terrible piece of it on display for us to dissect.

And in “The Tragedy of Britney Spears,” Vanessa Grigoriadis tries to understand what her demise, set against a backdrop of an unhappy country, knee-deep in an overseas war and an uncertain future, all meant.

The challenge of any journalist tasked with writing a celebrity profile is to tell readers something they don’t already know, and I’m not talking about revealing the little-known fact that your subject is actually a devout vegetarian who wanted to figure out a way to test pharmaceuticals without harming animals when she grew up, but got discovered in a shopping mall in Wyoming and things took off from there, and boy, wowee, isn’t life a strange and bizarro ride. No. I’m talking about getting an accurate portrayal of what celebrities’ worlds are like and satisfying our insatiable appetite to know what it is truly like to be famous, what life is like when all of your wildest dreams come true.

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“Watching the detectives” at the New Yorker Festival

We were sad to miss the New Yorker Festival a ways back, but have finally had a chance to look at some videos from the event, and wanted to deliver a few highlights relevant to storytellers. There were a lot of tempting sessions – Atul Gawande! Janet Malcolm! David Remnick! – but given the number of people who highlighted David Grann’s work on their Longreads end-of-year lists, we took a cue from them and focused on his panel for this post.

Grann hosted a talk with a collection of investigative types – not investigative journalists but people whose careers require them to delve into other peoples’ business. (You can see a free preview of part of the session here). The panel included

Grann noted that he had assembled an unconventional combination of participants but swore some patterns would emerge. And sure enough, a lot of the things that were said about how to approach sleuthing in different fields are relevant to storytellers, even if those of us who aren’t calling out French SWAT teams to make high-security arrests or chasing down murderous mafiosi.

Schiff, when asked what drew her to the art of detection, quoted the adage that “all biography is high-class gossip.” She talked about sneaking from her desk at a publishing house to the New York Public Library on her lunch hour to look at material on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a project she orginally thought she would find someone else to write for the company. She had heard that one of the biographies, perhaps the best one, had been written by his mistress but published under a male pseudonym. Hoping to identify the mistress, she sat at a table with the various accounts piled around her. Eventually it dawned on her that the mystery biographer was the one who had avoided any discussion of his marriage. A lot of biography, concluded Schiff, “is reading the silences.”

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jan 12, 2012 | posted in words | comments (1)
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“Why’s this so good?” No. 27: Christopher Goffard tracks love in flight

by Mark Johnson | January 10, 2012

One drawer of my desk – the largest – contains a mound of stories, the best I’ve found in newspapers and magazines over the last 20 years. In addition, three or four “great writing” folders float around the top of my work space; faux-wood fragments of the desktop are seldom visible.

Then there are a handful of individual stories I value enough to keep beside my keyboard at all times. When I’m struggling, when writing feels like running in mud, I go to one of these stories, start to read a page or two and then end up reading the whole thing. For some reason, it helps. Amazing work is possible, even if it feels beyond my own grasp.

Since I first read it in May 2009, Christopher Goffard’s narrative “Fleeing all but each other” from the L.A. Times has been among the treasured handful. I remember reading it, handing it to my wife and saying something like: You have to read this now.

So why do I reread it every few months, and why does it inspire me each time?

The story, about a young couple who hop trains together, seeking an alternative to an adult life of routine and responsibility, is tightly written – just 2,401 words. Early on, in just a few brush strokes, Goffard makes the two main characters, Adam Kuntz and Ashley Hughes, real:

He was 22, tall and rangy, with a goatee, wild black hair and a disarming smile. She was 18, with blue eyes and dishwater-blond hair. Crudely inked across her fingers was the word “sourpuss,” advertising the side she liked to show people: the rebel and sometime dope fiend who bristled with free-floating anger.

But he saw another side of her too: the frightened runaway who, like him, found a tramp’s dangerous, hand-to-mouth life less terrifying than the adult world.

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Ben Montgomery on a cold case: building a story and taking names

This week’s Notable Narrative recounts the murder of Claude Neal by a lynch mob in 1934 and introduces his family, which has been waiting for decades for someone to name the killers and hold them to account. Tampa Bay Times reporter Ben Montgomery talked with us by phone this week about reporting and writing “Spectacle: the lynching of Claude Neal.” Here are excerpts from our conversation.

There was a line in your piece that made me think you had been working on it since 2009, when you were in Marianna doing “For Their Own Good.” Is that true?

It is. I was spending a lot of time in Jackson County then. You talk to enough people, and pretty soon that story surfaces.

So you don’t remember where you first heard about it?

It may have been as simple as the Marianna, Fla., Wikipedia page. I can’t really recall. I do remember originally thinking it was potentially a story when I was in a hotel room in Jackson County on a “For Their Own Good” reporting trip, and I was just doing some research online. There’s a branch of CNN’s website called “iReport,” or something like that – it allows some kind of citizen interactivity. It was a solitary, random post from Orlando Williams saying, “We need a reporter to take a look to try to figure out who is responsible for the 1934 lynching of my uncle Claude Neal.”

Montgomery working on “Spectacle.” (Click to enlarge.)

I thought, “Well, there’s a willing descendant who could maybe help me tell the story.” So I emailed him originally, and he was completely on board. I was shocked to learn that this had such a large impact at the time. It ran on the front page of the New York Times but had been almost forgotten. Nobody had ever been brought to account for this barbaric act of terrorism. I thought maybe I can take a shot at it, all these years later.

Had the paper already committed to a story on it, or did the FBI involvement in 2011 make the difference?

No, no. We didn’t know anything about the FBI until I had already spent about – obviously I work on different things all the time – but I had invested about a year of reporting on Claude Neal before I heard anything about the FBI’s involvement.

It’s useful for people to know about the time in. It’s not like you can go down, spend a week, and come up with a story like this.

We thought it was a story from the very beginning. It randomly happened that the FBI decided, for the first time in 76 years, to open the case.

When it came to writing, did you think a lot about how to describe the place, the setting?

It’s one of the great challenges in doing historic narrative nonfiction, connecting people in 2011 to a small town in Florida in 1934. How on earth do you do that? So we started in the present, but I wanted, in that section where we kick it back to ’34, I wanted to very quickly, in almost a pretty way – it’s not necessarily poetic, but in some fluid, pretty way – to rattle off this list of items that might help people connect to that time period. … I wanted in this tangible way to immediately stick people in that time period, sort of creating a mental collage of items from that era, with prices as well, give a sampling of what it was like, of how they existed.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jan 6, 2012 | posted in words | comments (1)
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The Tampa Bay Times unearths a tale of grief and justice denied

Our latest Notable Narrative, “Spectacle: the lynching of Claude Neal,” comes from Ben Montgomery of the Tampa Bay Times.

Montgomery reports that Neal, a 23-year-old African-American farmhand, was arrested in 1934 on suspicion of the rape and murder of a young white woman. Hidden from white mobs for days, he was eventually taken at gunpoint from a jailer. A lynching party was set up; invitations were issued. The governor of Florida, along with millions of others, knew of the publicly announced plans to kill Neal, but no state or federal investigators intervened in Florida. What happened afterward was horrific. No one was ever arrested or prosecuted.

The narrative sticks with the third person, and the writing is subdued and steady, as if to say, It’s okay, you can keep reading. I’ll be right here with you. The story is rooted deeply in place, and Montgomery evokes the landscape and the era in one beautifully compact paragraph.

Jackson County, Florida, 1934: Drip coffee, Purity Ice Cream, turnips, chuck roast, mustard for 15 cents a quart, 26 cents for a dozen eggs. Sun-bleached overalls, Baptists, Methodists, kerosene lamps, screen doors, mosquitoes, pine trees, knee stains, brick chimneys, K & K Grocery, and cotton, 12 cents a pound. Cotton on the roadside and cotton in the ditch and cotton in forever rows stretched across fields flat as tabletops.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jan 5, 2012 | posted in notable narratives | comments (1)