Photo by Linda Davidson, courtesy Washington Post

The story: The activists wanted to make their point with fence cutters, graffiti, protest songs, and the thawed blood of a colleague who died in 2008 but hoped to “join” one last mission. Zak tells their story but also that of Oak Ridge, Tenn., built by the federal government as a bomb-making town. “Though you haven’t needed a badge to get into the town since 1949, Oak Ridge’s soul hasn’t changed,” he writes. “It’s still a company town, and the company is the government, and the business is bombs.” The facility housed “enough radioactive material to fuel over 10,000 nuclear bombs, which would end civilization many times over,” material used in warheads renovation programs that could take 25 years and cost $20 billion. The activists, who were convicted last week of injuring the national defense and damaging government property, each took different paths into custody. There’s riveting writing in Zak’s tale—

The lights of the Antichrist flickered through the trees.

The drifter prayed.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. For all the glory is yours, and on the last day Jesus will come like this, like a thief in the night, and the warmongering United States will fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy by beating its swords into plowshares.

He had duct-taped the head of his flashlight to reduce the beam to a sliver. On the downward slope of Pine Ridge, he moved in front of the nun, clearing branches and stones from her path. He was just a frail earthen vessel, he believed, but she was a daughter of God. He was her bodyguard.

On his head was a construction hat painted light blue, with “UN” marked on the front. On his breath was the stink of Top brand tobacco. In their backpacks, he and the nun carried twine, matches, candles, a Bible, three hammers, six cans of spray paint, three protest banners, copies of a letter they wished to deliver to Y-12 employees and two emblems of sustenance — a packet of cucumber seeds and a fresh-baked loaf of bread with a cross molded into the top.

And six baby bottles of human blood.

—and the presentation is beautiful, clean and striking. The Post ran the story on its website magazine style. Illustrations depicted the break-in, and still photos and a slideshow worked as secondary art. The 14 chapter titles alone tell a story: “Mission,” “‘…and the Earth Will Shake’” and “Sabotage.” Have a read, and join us back here on Thursday, to talk about how this project came together.

A steel-haired woman, 89 years old and an inch short of five feet, sat on a pillow in the driver’s seat of her Buick LeSabre, just thinking. Parked outside a convenience store on one of the last days of winter, she was considering a pre-Easter treat for herself: an ice cream cone. Butter pecan.

Two girls, 15 and 14, appeared at the window, calling her “Miss” and offering to pay for a ride to the other side of town. Her inclination was to say no, but her strong belief in offering kindness to strangers won out. She said yes, of course, and no need to pay her.

Uncertainty soon joined the ride, as her passengers directed her to one house, then to another, and another. Then, according to the police, they snatched her keys, causing a tussle between two girls and a small woman three times their combined ages.

Youth won out. They locked her in the trunk.

The Buick roared away with its frail owner curled up in the hold’s casketlike darkness. She was tossed about like forgotten luggage with every bump and turn. She could feel the vibrations pounding from the car radio that drowned out her calls for help. As a woman went missing, so did time, with day turning to night, night to day, day to night …

Miles

Examined the captain’s possible motivations for steering his ship into an epic storm, laying out revealing details including:

Still, the number of incidents surrounding Walbridge has led many to question his judgment. He didn’t do himself any favors last fall when he spoke to a reporter for a Belfast, Maine, public-access station. In a 30-minute shipboard interview first broadcast in August and later posted on YouTube, Walbridge describes taking the ship through 70-foot waves, telling the reporter flat out, “We chase hurricanes.”

Friends and family said that Walbridge didn’t really mean it, but it’s hard to explain what follows: a detailed description of how he drives the ship through major storms. “You don’t want to get in front of it,” he tells the reporter. “You want to stay behind it. But you’ll also get a good ride out of the hurricane.”

Chronicled the capsizing and rescue so vividly you may feel seasick just reading it:

McIntosh put the plane in a quick descent as his crew rushed around the open hold, reconfiguring the ramp for a life-raft drop as rain pelted in. Within minutes, however, the plane hit its bingo-fuel level, the moment when any aircraft must turn around. They dropped the rafts and headed back, not knowing if anyone had made it off the ship alive.

At least 14 did, but they were fighting to survive. When the vessel capsized, it rolled sharply onto its starboard side, sending the crew and everything on deck—including the emergency drybags—tumbling into the sea. Svendsen, who’d been on the radio with the Coast Guard, was the last off the vessel; he broke his right arm and cut up his face as he crashed into the rigging on the way down.

The wind was blowing 50 knots and gusting higher. The sea was chaos. Its force pulled the Bounty’s masts 20 feet out of the water before slamming the rigging—and the tangled crew—back down. Josh Scornavacchi estimates that he was dragged 15 feet underwater. Barksdale says he was trapped underwater multiple times.

“That was the scariest part,” he says. “I didn’t know if I was going to make it or not, but I did know that I needed to get the hell away from that ship.”

Illuminated a subculture of people devoted to tall ships:

Close bonds are common on tall ships. Seasons run six months or longer, and crew members rarely have much more personal space than a coffin. They are notoriously overworked and underpaid—the Bounty’s crew worked 12-to-18-hour days for as little as $100 a week. They are united, however, by their love of being at sea.

Check back tomorrow for a Q-and-A with Miles about the reporting and writing of “Sunk,” and more.

Storyboard: The story, about 2,300 words long, covers García from the moment he learned his latest MRI results. At what point did you come into the story, and how?

Curwen

Thomas Curwen: I first met Jesús García last May. I spent the previous year profiling men and women who encounter death each day in their jobs – undertakers, embalmers, cemetery groundskeepers, teachers, even students – and it seemed logical to try to get closer to dying. Not that I am morbid: I have found in all these stories remarkable affirmations of life. My first piece in this new series was about a nurse who helped children with brain tumors. I followed her for a day at the hospital, and her last appointment was with Jesús. He and I had a chance to talk before the doctor arrived. I was impressed that he was alone, that he had taken the bus – more than an hour, with transfers – and by his style. For how he dressed and how he spoke, Jesús was, in a word, cool. That manner, the wit and charm, made the doctor’s news all the more difficult: There was little the hospital could do to help him. So the question – how does a 19-year-old live with the imminent possibility of death – became the reason for telling this story.

How did you decide to frame it?

From the beginning, my editor, Millie Quan, and I wanted this to be Jesús’ story and not a medical story. It would have been easy to spend time with the doctors and medical experts and to focus on their challenges. Indeed, there were moments in the reporting when I veered in that direction: It was simpler than facing the hard realities of the story. Yet we decided that anything Jesús didn’t see or think or feel – up to a point, of course – was extraneous. With that in mind, I tried to keep the story as close as possible to his experience, which meant capturing everything almost exclusively from his point of view. He had his first seizure when he was 11. During the last eight years – while going to school, hanging out with his friends, navigating the city – he had had three surgeries as well as radiation and chemotherapy. Given the complexity of his life, I knew I needed to keep the chronology tight. If I had tried to cover a broad swath of time, the narrative would have been too drawn out. Millie and I discussed the opening and decided to set the clock running after his appointment with the doctor. This meant that Jesús’ past would have to be told in flashbacks, which is something of a risk: Any digression from the narrative breaks the momentum of the narrative. The story would have to be anchored with strong scenes, each of which advanced his condition and the chronology, and any detail from his past would have to be brisk and concise.

Why did you want to tell García’s story? What about it appealed to you?

Stories about death and dying often focus on either the very old or the very young. The former try to say something about the wisdom of age, and the latter, about the capriciousness of life. Millie and I hoped to find something different, something we couldn’t anticipate. I once asked Jesús if he was scared of death. “Scared? Of what?” he shot back. “Monsters?” His answer came so quickly that I realized I had asked the wrong question. I was asking him to think like an adult, someone fully aware of the nuances of life. But Jesús was just a teenager, a young man whose reactions to life were still a reflex, a quick response to the world around him. He had no middle ground, no place to stand to contemplate life or death, and under no circumstances was he going to allow himself to think about death. We also found his personal circumstances profoundly compelling. The two-car garage where he lived with six other family members was a little more than five miles from downtown Los Angeles. The family income amounted to less than $2,000 a month, a little less than half going to rent. Jesús and his family had been buffeted around this city all their lives – from an abusive father to an apartment fire, from the lure of gang life to the challenge of being a teenager – all of which struck me as a powerful backstory to the illness itself.

What do you generally look for in a narrative project?

I like complicated stories. In this case, there was the straight chronology beginning with Jesús’ appointment in May. Add to that Jesús’ personal history, and add to that the family’s circumstances. Each element allowed for a certain amount of layering that makes the writing – and I hope, the story – interesting. I’ve also come to value access and willing participation from everyone involved. I need the freedom to ask a lot of questions and the freedom to sit quietly. I need to be kept informed of changes in routine and of special occasions, and I need to be told if and when I’ve overstepped. Stories like this require a commitment of time and patience from everyone involved. In this case, I met with Jesús and the family three times before pulling out my notebook. I wanted them to think about my request and to talk about it among themselves. It’s always a tricky negotiation. As much as I want a story, I have to be ready to walk away, and clarity in the beginning saves misunderstandings in the end. I even remember saying to Jesús, “This is a story that you will probably never read.” They were the most difficult words I ever said before starting.

What is the journalistic value of such stories?

I’m wary of making any claims for a story like this, but I’d like to think that by opening the door on such a world as Jesús’ – a world caught between this disease and the family’s poverty – I can add a chapter to the history of this city, indeed to this moment in time. Of course I had heard about people living in converted garages, but not until I saw the sunlight gleaming through cracks in the unfinished walls or felt the broken concrete beneath the rug in the back room, did I know what that experience was like. And of course I knew people died of brain tumors, but not until I heard Jesús in his delirium, see the anguish on his mother’s face or experience the brief happiness when he rallied, did I know what this was like. Stories like Jesús’ strengthen feelings of empathy. This is, I believe, the reason we read – to walk in another’s shoes and see the world outside our own narrow perspective – and this is, I believe, the reason we as writers need to set our standards high.

The multimedia treatment was a big part of this: “The Thin Gray Line” video (9 minutes, 12 seconds) shows us parts of García’s life that prose can’t capture as powerfully. Can you talk a little about the L.A. Times’ approach to multimedia and why it was important to include it in this project?

For a number of years, photographers at the L.A. Times have shot video in addition to making stills. The work always complements the story, offering a perspective that words cannot convey. “The Thin Grey Line” is no exception, and while its photographer, Arkasha Stevenson, and I worked closely during the reporting, we worked independently in our approach to our stories. From the moment Arkasha and I met Jesús, we were drawn into his world. Given all that he and his family were facing, there was more material here than the written word could possibly capture. I especially admire the small details that she brought into her story: the sheets on the clothesline, the food on the stove, Jesús’ mom dancing with her youngest child. Plus she incorporated a voice-over narrator – the hospice nurse – who provided commentary for what the readers were feeling. It’s a powerful combination. And because I wanted to stay focused on Jesús’ experience, Arkasha had room to explore the family’s experience, paying particular attention to Jesús’ mother, Valentina. Arkasha wanted readers to see what it was like for a mother to slowly lose her son. The more Valentina tried to stay optimistic and stoic, the more her grief showed itself visually, in how she carried herself, in what she didn’t say out loud.

This story is full of wrenching sentences. “For Jesús, the world was just coming into focus, and no matter how difficult the treatments or debilitating their effect, he was determined to live,” for example, and “He wondered out loud about all the other girlfriends he could have had and all that he could have done in his life.” How did the story affect you emotionally?

There were times when I resented this story, when I didn’t want to go to the hospital or listen to the doctor or take further note of Jesús’ decline. Arkasha felt the same way. From time to time, we would meet to talk about the work, to help each other along, and we soon realized that our discomfort mirrored, albeit in a small and limited way, the family’s discomfort. Watching someone die is an awful, heart-wrenching experience – no question – and for all the moments we were able to slip away, we gained a little more empathy for what Jesús and his family were going through, for what they could not escape. I also allowed myself to be buoyed by Jesús’ confidence and his family’s confidence. He was convinced and they were convinced that he was going to be all right; his experience in the past gave them no reason to think otherwise. I might have thought they were in denial, but I’ve learned not to trust my own interpretations or judge any circumstance beyond what the people I’m writing about tell me. Anything more is presumptuous. The first time that I visited the family after the story was written, I walked into the backyard, and I started to cry. The memories of that space – all the meals the family shared out here, the young children running around, Jesús laughing and teasing everyone – rushed back to me, and I was overwhelmed by the stillness and quiet.

What did you learn from doing this piece?

I have often thought it incongruous that Jesús would let me into his life. Some 35 years – and a gulf of opportunities – separated us, but he was always generous, less interested in our differences and guided instead by what seemed to be an impulse to trust. I attributed that impulse to his mother, who always kept their door open to us. One October night, I visited them late at night. It was past midnight. The younger children were asleep in the front room, and Valentina and Jesús’ sister, Claudia, were in the back room, watching their favorite soap opera on television, “Corazon Valiente.” They sat on one bed, and Jesús was lying in his bed, tossing and turning in his own twilight, that cross between wakefulness and dreaming. As he would talk to them, playfully insult them or ask for the ice cream cone that he saw on the floor, they would tease him and laugh over what he said. They would also cry over their memories, and as I listened to them, I imagined the TV as a fire we were huddled around, trying to keep warm, trying to ward off the inevitable. For a few moments, it felt like we might succeed. I had approached this assignment on that spring afternoon hoping to understand how a young man like Jesús would live his final months, and by the end, I gained a greater understanding of faith and love undiminished by poverty or disease. The night that Jesús died, a neighbor built a fire in the backyard to ward off the cold for the friends and family overflowing from the house. Others gathered inside to make coffee, doze on the empty bed, stand beside Jesús and share memories. They kept vigil like this all night, and moving among them, I realized how fortunate I was to have been a part of this community.

>It’s brave. What horror this experience was, for the writer and her husband, Tom French, and yet she treads steadily, gracefully, through each unimaginable step without self-pity or sentimentality. If only every fighter-child had a mother so well equipped to tell the story of what it takes to survive. “Never Let Go” is a love letter, a document, an acknowledgment:

Tom wheeled me to her portholed plastic box. The nurse introduced herself as Gwen, but I barely heard her. There, through the clear plastic, was my daughter. She was red and angular, angry like a fresh wound. She had a black eye and bruises on her body. Tubes snaked out of her mouth, her belly button, her hand. Wires moored her to monitors. Tape obscured her face. Her chin was long and narrow, her mouth agape because of the tubes. Dried blood crusted the corner of her mouth and the top of her diaper. The diaper was smaller than a playing card, and it swallowed her. She had no body fat, so she resembled a shrunken old man, missing his teeth. Her skin was nearly translucent, and through her chest I could see her flickering heart.

She kicked and jerked. She stretched her arms wide, palms open, as if in welcome or surrender.

>It’s honest about the embarrassing, gross things that make us human, and about the conflicting feelings over whether her baby should live or die, and about fleeting feelings toward caregivers, whom we tend to gild in hindsight (“If another nurse called (breast milk) ‘liquid gold,’ I was going to spit.”) Not many writers would admit to snarling at a nursery full of regular newborns on her way to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, but French does, sort of hilariously:

Vicodin had been prescribed, but I had skipped the dose because I wanted to keep drugs out of the milk. I came to the long window of what I thought of as the Fat Baby Nursery. This was the place for healthy newborns — goliaths who wailed petty complaints with robust lungs. “What’s your problem, fatty?” I said to one. No 9-pounder had any right to complain.

>It’s well reported and beautifully handles exposition. We learn about the medical limbo-land of micro preemies not in discrete chunks – here, Reader, is your background, and here is your context – but rather strictly through the French family’s narrative and the characters French chose to bring forward: an emotionally wary nurse, a physician everyone called “Terror Doc,” etc. One great passage:

There were rows of incubators covered with quilts to shut out light and sound. I couldn’t see or approach the babies inside. I expected to hear crying, but babies didn’t cry here. Their faces contorted in protest, but the tubes in their throats stopped the sound. The machines beeped and alarmed. The room swarmed with people in scrubs. Here and there sat bleary parents in various stages of boredom and shock. I did not know my place in this new world.

The NICU was a technological triumph. Science had made life possible at earlier and earlier stages of development, but inside those possibilities, terrible bargains were made. Science, ambition, compassion and common sense collided here, every day.

Another parent once called it the Zero Zone, and when I heard that, my mind flooded with context and understanding. It was a place that existed outside of time, apart from everything I used to know and from the person I used to be. It was as if I’d been jerked out of my own shoes, out of the life I recognized. Every second was an improbable gift and an agonizing eternity. Would my baby die today? Would she die before lunch? If I left for an hour, would she die while I was gone? There was no future, no past. There was only a desperate struggle to maintain.

The Zero Zone. The idea became hypnotic, took on multiple interpretations. Our baby was born at a unique window of time, at 23 weeks and six days’ gestation. She was a thwarted miscarriage, not yet fully her own person with her own standing. Because the questions were so unanswerable, the decision to put her on life support and allow her a chance to live had belonged to Tom and me, not the doctors and not the state.

This place was a frontier. Between life and death, certainly, but also between right and wrong, and between who we used to be and who we were becoming.

>It explores the ethics of parental desperation, medical aggressiveness, and the un-democratic nature of global healthcare:

Juniper’s situation raised broader questions that are impossible to consider when a newborn baby is gasping for breath. How does one long-shot baby justify so much expense, when so many people go without health care?

One day, a friend asked me a difficult question, trusting that I knew she meant no harm.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but wouldn’t it be better to vaccinate a million kids in Africa?”

>It nods at the human need for levity:

Tom and I discovered it was impossible to stay miserable around the clock. We amused ourselves by speculating about the romantic lives of the doctors and nurses. One doctor looked like a lost Kennedy. Another one — I called him Dimples — kept the nurses laughing. We could hear them out in the hall. Our favorite was a glossy-haired nurse we called Cupcake who wore Grey’s Anatomy label scrubs. I imagined all of them screwing in supply closets and gossiping at the nurses’ station. One of the doctors, while sketching a diagram of the untenable situation in my uterus, asked if I had any questions.

“Just one,” I said. “Is it me or are the people on this floor unusually hot?”

“Yes,” he said, “and thank God for it.”

All of these people had been between my legs, and I was too wrecked to care.

>It’s inspiring. You think Kelley and Tom French are the main characters – and they most certainly are – but then somewhere in the middle of Part 2 the baby – kicking, squirming, batting away caregivers’ hands, opening and closing her eyes – becomes the clear protagonist. It’s a transition so deft you almost miss it. The baby’s physical responses begin to imply human will, and suddenly we have a whole new heroine. Named Juniper:

Juniper’s eyes were just starting to open after being fused shut for so long. Now she opened them wide and looked right at her.

The doctor saw a baby who was almost a month old and not yet 2 pounds, whose body was shutting down, who was sedated and groggy and in so much pain, but was fighting to engage with the world. Her eyes were opening and closing. Opening and closing. Dr. Shakeel felt her saying, I’m here. I’m here.

>It’s art. Care went into every sentence but not in any precious look-at-me-I’m-a-Writer way. French’s sentences do every kind of work: They shock and lull and devastate and soothe, and at just the right moment, and in just the right way. Every sentence serves the narrative. Every sentence earned its right to be there, and belongs.

We’ll come back to this piece in the New Year, with a conversation about this piece between Kelley Benham French and her close friend and Tampa Bay Times colleague Ben Montgomery, who runs the feature-writing website Gangrey.com.

Andrew Corsello’s “The Wronged Man” swept me up and kept me thinking for days. The story, from the November 2004 issue of GQ, is about a poor black man who was wrongly convicted of rape and eventually exonerated by DNA evidence. He was exonerated primarily because a hard-luck white woman fought the legal system’s indifference for more than 20 years.

Fitzgerald

The story gripped me in part because the two main characters, Calvin Willis and Janet (“Prissy”) Gregory, endure enough suffering and ill fortune to qualify as modern-day Jobs. I found it almost incomprehensible that they could take what life whacked them with and keep going in the way they did. Were they fictional characters, I think I might have thrown the piece down in disgust at the author’s unfairness. I kept reading because Calvin and Janet form a kind of double-helix of hope, carrying us through a dark, dark story. Despite everything that befalls him, Calvin never gives up on himself or his faith, Janet never gives up on him, and they receive redemption.

It’s a powerful story, but what felt compelling to me as a reader was that Calvin somehow became my friend. Most stories I read about people wrongly imprisoned evoke pity, and make me doubt our justice system. This one infuriated me. When Calvin is finally exonerated, it outraged me that the State of Louisiana not only took six months to let him out of prison, but also refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing. Then comes this quote, from the chief of the sex-crimes unit at the district attorney’s office: “Calvin Willis is not innocent. He’s just not guilty,” adding “There is no reason whatsoever for us to ever say that the legal system made a mistake.” I wanted to hit him in the face (and I haven’t thrown a punch since middle school). I was even a little angry at Corsello for failing to note that somebody should punch the guy in the face.

So, what got me so attached to Calvin? I’m not friends with garbage men in real life. I grew up with people who had lives similar to Calvin’s, and we’re at best Facebook friends now. I think Corsello, a National Magazine Award winner and five-time finalist, drew me in by making me intimate with him, and by very quickly giving me facts that let me decide on my own that Calvin shouldn’t have needed DNA evidence to exonerate him.

Corsello starts the piece with the rape scene:

Three little girls sleep in a house. They’re alone. It’s a strange house, long like a shoebox and only one room wide, tin-roofed, set on cinder blocks, removed from the street by a long steep rise. The house has no toys, no television, so the girls have spent the night playing dress-up – they’ve all gone to sleep wearing comically large women’s nightgowns. Katina is 7. She lies in her mama’s bed. Her 9-year-old sister, Latanya, curls on the living room couch with their friend, Lucretia. It’s a dim, grimy room, littered with beer cans and lit by a single red bulb propped in the front window.

The scene unfolds and we are forced to watch it:

The man mashes a thumb into Lucretia’s throat. Then, palming her forehead with both hands, he wallops the living room wall with her skull once, twice, three times.

We find out the perpetrator is black, big, bearded, wears a cowboy hat and boots. At the end of this brutal rape, he leaves behind a pair of size 40 boxer shorts. Then we meet Calvin:

Eleventh of June, 1981. Dawn. Calvin Willis wakes with a start. He feels odd. Not himself. He feels larger than himself, as if his spirit has grown beyond the boundaries of his body. … 

At 22, Calvin Willis has a gift, an ease—the guileless, guileful appeal of a man with a blessed body that he is unafraid to fully inhabit. Big Hands, they call him. Not just for the physical fact of the hands, which would look enormous on a seven-foot man, much less one standing five feet eight, but because he is, simply, a handler. A man who knows how to dance fast and dance slow, how to tell a story, how to make his friends feel they’re at the center of things, afloat with him in his bubble of youth even as they’re stuck in Shreveport, Louisiana, an industrial smear near the Texas border.

Corsello

In four sentences, I know Calvin is unusual, perhaps even special, a man who puts people at ease. Corsello then writes, “Calvin has always enjoyed being Calvin. Some months ago, the thrill began steadily growing.” I chuckled. There’s a thin line between being filled with yourself and full of yourself. Corsello puts Calvin on the right side of that line. It probably helped me that Corsello immediately tells us that Calvin’s increased love of himself brought a sense of purpose: He married his long-time girlfriend, he’s just quit his job as a sanitation worker because “he doesn’t want his kids having to say their daddy rides the back of a garbage truck,” and he’s about to take a test to become a long-haul truck driver. We see him openly talk to Jesus, like when the detective tries to get to him: “Sweet Jesus, I been trying to get good with you. You know that, right?” and we get his inner dialogue with God.

Corsello’s deft use of physical details throughout this piece helps me decide Calvin is innocent. In the first scene we see that he wears “a thick black belt with the nickel-plated buckle, tightly cinched around the taper of his 29-inch waist.” He makes love to his wife, and takes off his boxer shorts to do so. Corsello told me nothing directly, but from this detail I know that Calvin, like the rapist, wears boxers. Unlike the rapist, he is not big; his waist is not 40 inches. When a detective interviews Calvin, Calvin tells him about his shoes: “Dress shoes. Beige. Leather.”

These sorts of details stuck with me as a reader, and led to bewilderment and then anger in scenes where detectives, prosecutors and a judge all ignore them. Late in the piece, we will find out that the rape victim named the man who had come to the house when police came, and his name was not Calvin. By then, I was primed for outrage. Primed, in part, because I’ve spent the story experiencing Calvin’s life, and the life of his wife and Janet. Corsello puts me inside Janet’s head as she deals with the intransigence of Louisiana’s appeals system, and in the intricate, deep relationship she and Calvin develop. I am inside Calvin’s wife’s head the night before he comes home. I also experience Calvin’s life in prison. Here’s how Calvin feels about not being able to see his children:

…his need for his babies seizes and terrorizes him. There is no controlling it. He will try to numb himself, dip his mind in a gray vagueness for days at a time, but then something sharp – the ammoniac sting of industrial solvent in the mess, the cold shock of his cell’s stainless-steel shitter against his haunches – will jerk him to a state of full awareness and he will freeze, clasp his son’s first bib, which he keeps with him, over his eyes and say aloud ‘My babies.’ He discovers that his desperate hunger to touch them, compounded a hundredfold by the fact that he’s innocent – he is innocent! – is sometimes ameliorated by physical pain. One day he goes so far as to sneak into a room he’s not supposed to be in. When, inevitably, a guard approaches him saying “hey, you,” Calvin calmly wraps a hand around the man’s forearm, lowers himself into the man’s chest and flips him on his back. The storm comes within seconds, half a dozen guards with billy clubs, calling him nigger and bludgeoning his kidneys and shins until he no longer feels the agony of his lost children.

Corsello shows us the whole man, and in his desperation Calvin is not a model prisoner. But neither is the prison system a model. We see how guards beat prisoners and throw them in isolation chambers for even looking at a female guard, an offence called “reckless eyeballing.” We see how in Calvin’s time there, the sons of prison guards go from calling him “nigger” while he’s picking cotton for 4 cents an hour to become guards themselves, quick to punish. We come to understand how an isolation chamber provides a haven for an innocent man, a place where he can escape the attentions of guards who, when Calvin is exonerated, tell him every chance they get, “You’ll be back.” Through it all, we see that Calvin, with Janet’s help, maintains his sense of self, and, oddly, becomes more loving.

I read this as a story of faith and conviction. Religious faith, yes, and the literal conviction of an actual person, but also faith in humanity, conviction of human innocence, and the conflict that arises when such faith runs into a system that believes in itself so deeply it strives to ensure that its decisions, even when fraudulent, become fact.

Someone else could have read it as a narrative about what it’s like to be poor in America if you’re black or a woman. It’s also a cautionary tale about the corruption of justice. And it reflects the state of relations between white and black Americans in the 21st century. All of those are present in Corsello’s narrative, because they are part of Calvin’s life, and Janet’s.

I told someone that Corsello has an operatic writing voice he somehow shushed in doing this piece. In the end, this story echoed across the contours of my brain as if he had shouted.

Tomorrow: a conversation with Corsello about how he did this story.

The Saslow story we’ve chosen as our latest Notable Narrative is “Life of a salesman: selling success, when the American dream is downsized.” It’s about a swimming pool salesman in dry times. The curtain opens on middle-aged Frank Firetti of Manassas, Va., as he walks out of his office on the hottest day of the year, saying, “What a perfect day to sell a pool.” Saslow sticks with Frank through a season of sales pitches and promises, and the inevitable disappointments, ultimately delivering a layered story of one struggling man, one desperate economy.

This story, like his others, is like a master class in the kind of observation that immerse the reader in story. We like to imagine Saslow on the job with a notebook in hand and red lasers shooting out of his eyes, just zap-tagging details: Frank rummaging through six pairs of shoes “before grabbing his dockside loafers;” Frank sitting on a “knee-high stool in the center of the room” and grabbing a box containing 42 swimming-pool contracts; Frank walking into his corner office; Frank’s son “bumping his head” to rap music on his iPod; Frank’s father, Sal, “taking the stairs up to the office two at a time, chest hair rising over his yellow Hawaiian shirt.”

Also, voice. Listen to this:

The more he learned about pools, the more he found them representative of something larger. They were carvings etched into back yards as a mark of ascent, commemorating a customer’s arrival in the upper middle class. They were a signal: You had a pool, you were an American somebody. Frank loved to visit his construction sites, exchange his few words of Spanish with the crew and then patrol the area with a digital camera. The crews sometimes found it peculiar, but Frank didn’t care. He wrote into each contract that he was allowed to take pictures and chronicle his creation. A black hole in the earth became a smooth bowl of white-and-blue speckled plaster, filled with water so calm and pristine that it offered a promise. Here was a place of undisturbed relaxation, of aqua blue and sandstone, a monument to luxury that could be owned. He hung photos of his favorite pools in the office and brought others home to show his wife. He wanted one.

Tomorrow we’re talking to Saslow about this story and more, so check back.

And have a happy Thanksgiving!

Levenson

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ cover story for the September issue of The Atlantic, “Fear of a Black President,” has had the kind of impact for which magazines hunger. A long-novella-scale account of the way in which, Coates argues, America has proved to be much more ready to elect a black president than to be governed by one, the article has powered a conversation about race that, as the piece notes, the president himself cannot engage.

At the same time, this essay offers a lot of opportunities to think about the technical side of what Coates did. What goes into constructing a piece on this scale, especially given Coates’ ambition not just to inform but also to evoke emotion, to persuade his readers?

Coates, a senior editor and blogger at The Atlantic, is teaching at MIT this year as a Martin Luther King Jr. scholar. Last week we sat down on campus for two conversations on the choices he made during the story’s eight- or nine-month gestation period, his approaches to writing, and what he hoped readers would gain from committing to spending 10,000 words in his company. The exchange started out as something of a writer’s-workshop exercise, looking at the technical side of putting together such a major effort, but we soon found ourselves flipping back and forth between those issues and questions about the layers of meaning Coates discovered as he worked.

What follows are excerpts from that conversation, with my questions and/or later gloss in blue. I’ve done minor editing within quotes, removing cross talk and trimming some of the conversational byplay. Also, as our conversation touched on similar topics over two separate sessions, I’ve assembled thoughts that may have come up more than once into single sections of text.

With that, Coates on the making of “Fear of a Black President:”

I had this idea, about September (2011). I knew the election was coming. I knew in some degree I wanted to assess Obama and race and the country. I talked with James Bennett, (The Atlantic’s editor) about doing that, and he was totally into that piece. But what is that piece?

 I talked to Scott (Stossel) – he’s number two at the magazine – about some of the ideas I was thinking around that. And it was in this really, really vague and, frankly, very, very scary place. Because he said, “Okay. That sounds good. Do it in 6,000 words.” And it’s like, “Oh, okay.” I guess that means I actually have to write something.

The fun part of writing is bullshitting about the idea and everybody telling you how great the ideas is. That is really fun. When they say, “Okay. Go do it,” then you start, (and) the weight comes on you. And you realize, oh, I actually have to say something.

But, you know, I think what’s most important, even as somebody who has already written about race, is to have enough respect to say, “Okay, I need to go write about this some more.” Not, “Oh, I clearly know this. I can start writing.” I mean, one of the things we thought about, too, was like, should this be like a heavily reported piece? In other words, should it be some sort of investigation? Should you be trying to talk to black people who served in the White House? Should it go like that?

Coates

Despite such concerns, the piece as published possesses very few of the trappings of traditional reporting, with just one interview generating the only direct, “live” quotes used in the article.

And in my mind, in fact, even when I went to write, coming from a reporting background I just thought: Maybe there is not enough reporting in here; maybe I should be in a room with Obama Administration officials. Because the problem with hanging it on what you think, even what you feel, and the problem with going with something a little essayistic, even though there is reporting in there, is maybe you are just full of yourself. Like maybe you think you are insightful and you are really not. Maybe what you think is actually – you know, what you see isn’t actually that profound.

So when you go – it is like you put all your chips on yourself, and you just hope it is right. You really, really hope it is right.

And the other part of that is, just being an African-American. So, you know, there are probably at this point three or four magazines that can sort of land with the force of The Atlantic. Definitely The New Yorker; I guess the Times magazine; I think the New York Review of Books — not a magazine (but), they still land with some impact.

But you look at those publications there are very few, on balance, African-American writers. I think there are three at The New Yorker. Hilton (Als), obviously Malcolm Gladwell, Kelefa (Sanneh). But I don’t think that they were going to do something like this. There was no one that was really going to do it.

And so knowing that there are so few African-Americans with access to that sort of space actually kind of puts a burden, because then it really has to be good.

The process of getting to “good” did not begin particularly well. Coates told me he started by reading everything he could, with Randall Kennedy’s The Persistence of the Color Line and William Jelani Cobb’s The Substance of Hope framing his thinking. But both the form and the actual material of the piece eluded him, even after a reporting trip to Chicago in February that was, he said, “a bust.” At that point, “I was convinced that I had totally, royally screwed up and no piece would be there.”

And then:

I knew, for a reason I couldn’t even name that I really wanted to talk to Shirley Sherrod. And I knew because what occurred to me very, very early was that everything that was wrong was symbolized in what happened to her. I knew that there was some great symbolism in what had happened and her being so totally screwed over. But I didn’t know how to connect. I couldn’t – the connections weren’t there. It was just a theory in my mind.

I don’t know if scientists ever work strictly from intuition – something is there and part of it is trying to get the math and prove that it is there. That’s sort of how it was: You know, I think this is connected, I’m not exactly sure how. And I went there, and then there it was.

After I saw her, everything connected, because the fact of the matter was Shirley Sherrod lived her life as a twice-as-good. I had known black people who had lived by that ethic all my life.

So this tax of having to be better than the law that Obama lived under, (and what) ultimately got (Sherrod) dismissed were one and the same.

This figure, “twice as good” runs through the piece, taking on the role of necessity and burden and constraint. Coates introduces the term this way: “Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye. Hence the old admonishments to be “twice as good.” The phrase recurs, and as its setting changes so does its impact on the reader’s emotional response. There is a musical quality throughout the article, and part of that comes from Coates’ use of the theme-and-variation trick, to add layers of meaning and feeling to what starts out as a simple and seemingly straightforward trope.

Back to the conception of the work:

That was probably the first breakthrough. Well, that was actually the second breakthrough. The first breakthrough was realizing that the country had, indeed, sent an African-American to the White House but it could not have a black president. That was actually the first breakthrough. The Sherrod thing was another breakthrough. The reaction to Trayvon Martin – I wrote at the time that I really didn’t want Barack Obama to address that killing at all. Because I thought the minute that he addressed it, it would become politicized and, you know, just remembering what had happened with (Henry Louis) Gates. Then he addressed it.

I thought his statement was really, really modest, in depth. But what followed was worse than what I thought was going to follow. And it was really, really horrifying. And it was really like at that moment that you realize that here this man makes the most modest statement you could ever make about the death of a child. And now people are hacking this kid’s Twitter feed. Like, my God! What are we to see in that?

With those three strands in hand, the task became one of execution. At that moment, there is a catechism writers utter, the one Anne Lamott expressed most simply: “Shitty First Drafts.” In our conversation, at first, Coates seemed to be wholly orthodox on this point:

Once I had some vague notion of where I was going, I sat down to write. And, you know, it’s funny – I was just talking about this for class. Here at MIT and at any college, I’m trying to get my students to understand that great writing, good writing definitely, often starts off as a D. It is very rare that you sit down and you write an A. You know, you begin a D and you have to accept that what you do at first is probably not going to be very good. And you just have to accept that.

So I really tried to cut off my editing sense. I really tried to cut off my sort of disappointment in whatever I wrote and just get a draft done. Get a draft done. Above all, get a draft done. And that initial draft, it probably had like “TK’s” in it. And not just “TK’s” like this person’s name but like section “TK’s,” like, “you need to write a paragraph about this.”

The hard thing about that is I find the structure and the literary devices often clarify a point, and by clarifying a point or by clarifying a section, maybe it doesn’t belong where you think it did. Maybe something should happen differently.

I guess in my mind, I think in a lot of our minds, we figure, okay, we get all the actual information down. And then we will go and polish it and make it sound beautiful. And then everything will be okay. But I think the act of trying to make it, quote-unquote literary is actually – I don’t know how to say this. It’s part of the substance of it. It’s not icing on top. It’s the sugar in the cake, too.

It’s actually part of – if you are going to think about making people feel something then you’ve got to think about, OK, when do I want to make you feel this? When do I not? How do I do that? And that is largely about how you write it. A lot of that literary stuff is not done for the reader. It’s done for me. It clarifies it for me. I can feel it better when it’s there. I understand better when it’s written like that.

There’s an old line thrown around in military circles: “Amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics.” For writers, the problem is to get beyond the bare incidents that provide a starting point for a story and come to grips with the interplay between plot or narrative content, and the structure, the organization needed to lead the reader to meanings behind the facts of the matter.

As I wrote, the part about Trayvon Martin was at the top always. But initially my friend Prince was at the top, too. (In the piece, Coates tells the story of Prince Jones, killed by a police officer in Virginia in 2000.) And so I was comparing and contrasting those two together.

But I love when the real, emotional power is at the back. We had debates about this during the editing process, about where to put the most emotionally moving stuff.  You know, there is a theory now (and this was not what my editor said) that it should be at the top because you got to pull people in. But I really felt like the story should pull people in. There should be an effect on the reader where it’s like, okay, I read this first section; yeah, I could kind of see how race is a factor. But by the end it is like, “Oh, wow! This is how it feels. This is how it actually feels, you know.”

The piece was very depressing for me. And when I was finished, it was deeply depressing. And my hope was that that depression could be passed on to the reader. That was really what I wanted.

Coates touched on one of the key messages that, as teacher of writing, I try to pass on to students: intentionality. The idea is to know as much as possible about what you want your work to do to somebody, the reader. Knowing what you want to say and to what end makes writing choices explicit, and hence do-able. But thinking that way raises the question of audience. “Are you writing to or for someone?”

It’s always just me. It’s always, what would I like to read?

And, you know, a lot of people think about the whole race thing, but it’s like if you’re black and you are going to be in the literature, you are going to spend some time catching up. White people have different things that they refer to that won’t be what you do. So you spend time catching up.

With this piece, Coates turned that expectation around, asking his readership to enter into a black perspective on America’s reaction to the first African-American president. If that involved asking readers to confront experience and particular knowledge that might be unfamiliar to many … well:

I saw no problem asking other people to catch up for once.

One the most obvious features of “Fear of a Black President” is that it is long – roughly 10,000 words, or about 40 manuscript pages. It is rare to get that much space in a magazine – especially one that still goes out in hard copy – and, Coates told me, this piece wasn’t supposed to occupy as much territory as it did:

The other thing that is important to know, too, this did not get turned in any longer than what it was. It got turned in at 6,000 words.

What happened?

Scott (Stossel) said, “This is really good but I think you have more. And you should go get more.” And we ended up with almost 10,000 words.

What wasn’t there?

The big thing that was not there is what I think is often absent from journalism, period, and that is, there is a long section on history in there. There is a long section that talks about this notion of denying Barack Obama the benefits of citizenship, you know, the right to be president. It actually connects to a long history of denying citizenship rights to African-American.

Also, if you read that section, it’s not just that it is history. There are  long block quotes, which we don’t really get to do in magazines.

Andrew Johnson’s speech, I mean the speech is quoted at length. And I would argue for quoting it because I think you need to see the whole thing in context. There is something about seeing all of that that really just hits you, as opposed to quoting a few words and then paraphrasing. You really need to see the guy actually saying it.

When you allow people to talk like that, they do become characters. They don’t just become a quick quote. They don’t just become a paraphrase. In that section specifically it was very important – I wanted people to know that the past isn’t dead. You know, that history actually exerts influence, that you can actually see long traditions extending way back to the 1790s, all the way up to today.

I want Shirley Sherrod not to be just some old, black lady who got screwed over but somebody who had actually helped in some profound way to make not just (Obama’s) presidency possible, but people like him, their lives legally possible. I wanted that to come across. You know, racism can be very clinical when we talk about it. There are clinical discussions in there but I wanted people to understand that there are actually individuals with hopes and dreams who are impacted by this.

This piece was, Coates told me, supposed to land with impact: to alter not just what its readers knew but what they felt. That begged a question: What did writing the piece do to its author?

My editor, Scott, he said, “Well, this is an angry piece.” And I said, “Well, I was angry.” I was angry. I was. It was depressing. Yes. I was very depressed. I didn’t expect to be so depressed. The sadness of the piece at the end was not something that I went into. And I think the sadness emanates from the fact – like everybody says, “So what’s your solution?” I think the sadness emanates from the fact that this is the actual solution. That what’s going on is the solution.

And that path, the twice as good….

Right. I was on the radio. Somebody was saying yesterday on the radio, “Well, you know, Jackie Robinson did this.” And I told him, “You got to remember Jackie Robinson died young. Don’t ever forget that, every time you say that. Remember that.” You know, it wasn’t just a matter of being better. This actually costs. It costs. Any black person who has ever worked in any sort of corporate job can tell you about coming home and needing to have an extra drink, about the anger they feel.

I was having a conversation with some friends a few years ago and we were talking about the subject of interracial marriage. And one of the points that one of them made was, “You know, I don’t think I could do this because when this sort of thing happens at my job and I come home and I need to be able to talk about it, who am I going to talk to? You know, who really knows how that really, really feels deep down inside?” So it throws up barriers and even (in) really sort of weird, unpredictable places. I really wanted people who may not come from that world to get some insight into how that might feel.

As we talked, though, his argument shifted. “Fear of a Black President” clearly documents how race impinges on Obama’s every word and deed. At the same time, it locates his story within history: This is not a new kind of racism directed at the president but rather a late, perhaps even last, flare up of the old. We digressed briefly into the fact that one year after the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” there’s little public interest in the question; and as Coates pointed out, when the GOP platform called for action it only demanded a return to DADT, not back to the pre-1992 throw-’em-all-out policy.

Hence:

I didn’t really get to stress this enough in the piece but progress is never a straight line. The example I always use is: Look, at the end of the Civil War the labor situation for African-Americans in the South, many people could argue, was not terribly different than slavery, the labor situation. Nevertheless, it was now illegal to take someone’s 5-year-old kid and put them on an auction block. That’s an actual difference. That’s an actual thing. I mean that’s a real, real thing.

That was one of the worst things about slavery. And it was gone. At the same time it was not total and unilateral progress. I don’t know that progress ever is that way. That’s the same thing with this. You know, is electing a black president a step forward? Yes! Huge, huge, gigantic step forward. But it is not total and complete progress, you know?

I like that tension and I like, you know, sort of living there. You don’t have to believe that we would be better off if Barack Obama had never been elected to outline the sacrifices in the situation; historians do that all the time. And I think you can do it without the kind of, “on the other hand-ism” that journalists often sort of resort to. I don’t think anybody would have thought if Hillary Clinton won, that that would be the end of sexism. I don’t think there would be any sort of discussion like that. But the election of Barack Obama was just so unexpected; it became weighted with all these other things.

And the other thing is – this is a great picture, I guess (a few) days ago. Barack Obama goes into this pizzeria and the guy bear-hugs him and picks him up. And the guy – I guess he is a Republican. He voted for Obama and he is going to vote for him again this year. And, like, you have to balance that. You know, this white guy is doing that and clearly does not care. You know what I mean? Like five different things that seem to be contradictory can be true at the same time.

Is there another country in the Western world with an African descendent president? America is obviously not a European country but, you know, a country of European lineage. I don’t think there is. And I don’t think there is going to be one for a long time. There might be another one in America before there’s –

A French president.

Before there is a French black president. You know, there may well be. At the same time, other really, really unfortunate things are true, too.

Obama – this is not a small thing. This is a huge thing. And (it) does say something about our promise as a country. The fact that this is the burning embers (of racism) and not, you know, some new flare – I think it says quite a bit. The bigotry that Jackie Robinson faced when he was integrating baseball, it was real but that was embers, too. I mean that turned out to be the embers. And that turned out to be the end of the story of racism in baseball.

Tom Levenson teaches in the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT. He is the author of four books and has executive produced, produced, directed and/or written more than a dozen feature science documentaries, broadcast on PBS, Discovery and internationally. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of a memoir, Beautiful Struggle, teaches at MIT as a visiting Martin Luther King Jr. scholar.

For the others, he speaks of what haunts him, how he and his colleagues went to the window after the first building was hit, a ring of fire and smoke, and watched people jump to their deaths. The first man, he said, was so calm. Even though Charlie was far up, he could see them hit the ground, terrible red blossoms. There was a woman who wore a beige dress that fluttered as she fell and her horrified, panicked, desperate eyes locked onto Charlie’s as she passed his window. The image of her will be with Charlie until he dies. At the window, Charlie kept thinking that minutes earlier, those people were just like him, settling in for a day of work, wondering what they wanted for lunch.

From his desk, he grabbed a set of pens Catherine had given him and one cigarette, a Nat Sherman, the last in the pack. He had quit smoking almost a year earlier and saved it. He left everything else and raced for the exit. The building wobbled. It was early so his office had been fairly empty. Charlie was alone in the stairwell for about 20 stories until he saw life, other people going down, rescuers headed up. There were piles of high heels in the stairway tossed aside by fleeing women. The path moved slowly. An announcement on the speaker system told everyone the building was safe and there was no need to panic. Charlie thought he was going to die.

Check back tomorrow for our chat with Sullivan about this story and other work.