These days, it can be hard for a star to keep up with his Facebook feeds and the television and newspaper stories about him, not to mention where he’s been and who he’s met—especially if he’s a monkey. But in our latest notable narrative, St. Petersburg Times reporter Michael Kruse ties up the loose ends of a macaque on the loose in a way that any primate could appreciate.
Taking on the kind of assignment done by hundreds of journalists a year, Kruse rejects the straight-news approach and seriously examines the monkey as a character. Clocking in at just shy of 2,000 words, the piece is not pure narrative but uses narrative elements in ways we imagine could still make it into the pages of any one of dozens of newspapers nationwide (including some that have dropped narrative).
Here’s a sample:
The man from Fish and Wildlife fired a tranquilizer dart at him.
Hit.
The man from Fish and Wildlife fired another.
Hit.
Something to understand about these monkeys is that they’ve been used for research for more than half a century. They’ve had rings screwed into their skulls and electrodes embedded in their skin and they’ve been key in AIDS research and in finding a polio vaccine. A rhesus macaque was the first living thing to get shot into space and come back alive. These monkeys are tough.
So the monkey removed the one dart, then the other, and then he ran. His adrenaline surged. He bolted to a different tree and across a street and he hopped a fence and he disappeared and found a place to lay low and sleep it off.
Note, too, that while Kruse doesn’t use a lot of literary flourishes, describing the monkey as lying low and sleeping it off helps tag the critter as character on the lam. Kruse also folds his reporting about the monkey genome and primate experts in with eyewitness accounts of the fugitive. The sparse but entertaining multimedia for the story includes a Google map, short video clips and links to the monkey’s Facebook fan club and fan page, as well as a humorous take on lookout posters used for criminal suspects. The individual pieces add up to something funny, sad and strange—an everyday event made fascinating because it tilts toward story.
[For more monkey mayhem, read our interview with Michael Kruse, in which he also talks about "After the Crash," his prize-winning story on NASCAR and the economy.]
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Michael Kruse is on the St. Petersburg Times' enterprise team. His award-winning stories have earned recognition in regional and national competitions, and in categories ranging from sports explanatory to business reporting, from short features in newspapers to long profiles in magazines. Before St. Pete, he worked for a couple years at the Times Herald-Record in New York's Hudson Valley, where he covered two towns and Major League Baseball and was the paper's writer at large. His recent subject matter has included a guy who won the lottery and lost his life, a guy who faked his own death on a Bruce Springsteen message board, a place cut from the Florida palmetto scrub called the Redneck Yacht Club, and the state's unemployment crisis. He's covered the World Series, the Super Bowl and Hurricane Katrina, he's written for Charlotte magazine, the Sporting News and ESPN.com, and in a previous professional life he scouted high school basketball talent. Kruse was born outside Los Angeles, raised outside Boston and educated at Davidson College in North Carolina.