But be sure to watch for dates and early bird registrations – one of these conferences has already filled! Here they are in chronological order:

The 2012 AWP Conference in Chicago, an offering of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, will take place next week, Feb. 29-March 3, but is completely sold out. Look for online updates on talks from Dagoberto Gilb, Margaret Atwood, Luis Rodriguez, Rebecca Skloot and Marilynne Robinson.

“The Narrative Arc: storytelling journalism goes digital,” a production of the Boston University College of Communication, will take place March 23-25 on the BU campus. Highlights include Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Director Jon Sawyer, audio storytellers Jay Allison and Maria Balinska, New York Times reporter Amy O’Leary, The Atavist’s Evan Ratliff, and journalists-turned-authors Adam Hochschild and Tom French.

The Muse and the Marketplace 2012, put on by Grub Street, will run May 5 and 6 in downtown Boston. Highlights for nonfiction writers include Jerald Walker on suspending disbelief, Seth Mnookin on choosing topics, and Wendy Call (co-editor of the Nieman Foundation’s own “Telling True Stories” and winner of this year’s Grub Street nonfiction prize) on writing scenes.

The American Society of Journalists and Authors 2012 Writers Conference will take place April 27 and 28 (with sessions on the 26th for members) in New York City. Highlights include science writer Dan Ferber, nonfiction author Janine Latus and New York Times columnist Samuel Freedman.

The Compleat Biographer Conference, run by the Biographers International Organization, will take place May 18-20 on the campus of the University of Southern California. Highlights include Jack El-Hai on narrative suspense, Kathleen Sharp on interviewing techniques and Tracy Daugherty on choosing a subject.

The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference will take place July 20-22 in Grapevine, Texas (outside Dallas). Highlights include Pulitzer winners Richard Rhodes, Isabel Wilkerson, and Amy Harmon; Esquire writers Chris Jones and Tom Junod; memoirist and nonfiction author Luis Alberto Urrea; and GQ’s Jeanne Marie Laskas.

And no wonder: Orlean’s most famous article is, in fact, not much of a story – in the sense that not much happens in it. But neither is the piece really a profile of John Laroche, the off-kilter orchid thief at the heart of the tale. “Orchid Fever” is, at root, a portrait of desire, a tribute to and cautionary tale of infatuation.

Orlean includes enough information about orchids to fascinate and educate. (They have a single fertile stamen! Some are shaped like insects! The Victorians were consumed with orchidelirium!) She also puts up a good front that the orchids matter as flowers instead of symbols. And she even gives obsession a shot at slaying her when she treks off into a swamp in an attempt to find the elusive ghost orchid in bloom.

But throughout the piece, it is Laroche, the collector, who serves as the pivot from which everything swings, and it is the force of Orlean’s reactions to Laroche that provides the story’s momentum.

We meet him right at the beginning, in a lede it is possible I have read enough times to memorize:

John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. He is thirty-four years old, and works for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, setting up a plant nursery on the tribal reservation near Miami. The Seminole nicknames for Laroche are Crazy White Man and Troublemaker.

Laroche, it is mentioned in passing, lost those front teeth in a car accident that put his wife in a coma and killed his mother and uncle. If Orlean had been going for pity, she could have leaned harder on these losses, or indicated whether and how they helped deliver him into the mess that is his life.

But Orlean is not holding Laroche up as a figure of sympathy or someone to pity, because Laroche has done something most of us never will, at least on a grand scale: He has surrendered his life to obsession. He accidentally poisons himself with pesticide then writes an article titled “Would You Die for Your Plants?” In his third or fourth decade as a serial obsessive – before orchids, it was turtles, Ice-Age fossils, lapidary, then mirrors – Laroche is as caught up in the torture of compulsion as he is with the plants themselves.

This willingness to chase desire preserves his charisma, for all his dental disarray. He is cocksure, possibly brilliant and intermittently ignorant, the boyfriend every father is terrified his child will bring home. He is also, Orlean notes, “the most moral amoral person” she has ever known.

Through her proximity to Laroche, she manages to catch orchid fever, a little. But her mild case only underlines the distinction between her curiosity and the real thing. Here she is tramping through the ghost orchid’s home territory, a swamp Laroche loves:

The Fakahatchee has a certain strange, wild beauty. It is also an aggressively inhospitable place. In fact, the hours I spent retracing Laroche’s footsteps were probably the most miserable I have spent in my entire life. The swampy part of the Fakahatchee is hot and wet and buggy, and full of cottonmouth snakes and diamondback rattlers and alligators and snapping turtles and poisonous plants and wild hogs and things that stick into you and on you and fly into your nose and eyes. Crossing the swamp is a battle. You can walk through about as calmly as you would walk through a car wash. In the middle of the swamp, the sinkholes are filled with as much as seven feet of standing water, and the air has the slack, drapey weight of wet velvet. Sides of trees look sweaty. Leaves are slick from the humidity. The mud sucks your feet and tries to keep a hold of them; failing that, it settles for your shoes. The water in the swamp is stained black with tannin from the cypress trees, which is so corrosive that it can cure leather.

Orlean builds her study of obsession out of a vocabulary of desire and devastation, ranging from the apocalyptic to the sexually charged. Laroche’s own “passions boil up quickly and end abruptly, like tornadoes.” In the Fakahatchee, the rocks have crevices, the trees have crotches, and the orchids invite erotic speculation. Mere friction is enough to ignite the grass, literally setting cars on fire, leaving behind “pan-fried tourists” and the carcasses of burned-out Model Ts.

This landscape of desire – with its friction, pyrotechnics, snakes and wetness – is a dangerous place. To visit it is one thing; to live inside it is another. Anyone fully at home in this swamp is not operating with the same mindset that Orlean or her readers bring to the piece.

It takes a brave writer to underline the distance between reader and subject this way. The risk is that in some kind of false alliance with the reader, you freakify your subject. But Orlean manages to weave in the universal allure of passion, nodding at how easily and unpredictably the gap can be bridged: “Many seemingly normal people, once smitten with orchids, become less like normal people and more like John Laroche.”

Orlean never gets to see the elusive ghost orchid flower, which is probably just as well – surely she would only be disappointed. What she delivers instead is just a little taste of delirium, letting us feel the fever without ending up toothless, broke and in court.

She goes out to the swamp and even finds the plants. But they weren’t blooming, she tells Laroche later over the phone – though he doesn’t believe her. Her guide to the otherworld of obsession knows what was missing: “You should have gone with me.”

Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer) is the editor of Nieman Storyboard. She is also working on a book about Vladimir Nabokov and his century.

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every wee

Here is a handful of narrative and narrative-ish pieces we think are worth your time, written by some of the usual suspects and a few writers we’ve never spotlighted before.

“How To Officially Forget” by Jonathan Gourlay for The Morning News (via @brainpicker).

To sit in Xiao Ying’s room in the hutong was to inhabit a space that was first occupied 3,000 years ago in the Zhou Dynasty. Was the uneven brick in the entrance originally part of the courtyard of some ancient official? To get to her room, I remember stepping through an impressive gate, about ten feet high and topped with a curved tile roof. The ever-open gate included a brass knocker in the shape of a dragon, turned black with coal grime. Didn’t it? Memory plays tricks, and I think I may be incorporating a childhood image of Scrooge’s strange door-knocker in an old version of A Christmas Carol into my memories of Xiao Ying. To find her was impossible without seeming to turn left 20 times before turning right. Wandering roads that become alleys that become nothing more than a wobbly cement path between two high brick walls topped with broken glass. The paths were barely large enough to squeeze past the gawkers who looked aghast at the sight of a foreigner in such a place—a mile and a millennium away from Tiananmen Square.

“The Long Goodbye” by Doug Monroe for Atlanta magazine.

A few days later, Daddy fell at the mailbox, bounced his head on the pavement, and crawled up the driveway, scraping the skin off his knees before collapsing on the front steps. Mama sat in her recliner in front of the TV, worried and clueless, until a neighbor called an ambulance. The EMTs got Daddy propped up in his recliner. He refused to go with them. When I arrived, Daddy was gulping down whiskey. I called the ambulance back, and they took him to DeKalb Medical. Doctors found prostate cancer and operated. My sister and I cried, sure Daddy was in his last days.

That was eleven years ago.

“The Gray Box: An investigative look at solitary confinement” by Susan Greene for The Dart Society (via @itsjina).

Among the misperceptions about solitary confinement is that it’s used only on the most violent inmates, and only for a few weeks or months. In fact, an estimated 80,000 Americans — many with no record of violence either inside or outside prison — are living in seclusion. They stay there for years, even decades. What this means, generally, is 23 hours a day in a cell the size of two queen-sized mattresses, with a single hour in an exercise cage, also alone.

“Dr. Yang’s Fight Club” by Oliver Broudy for Tin House (via @utnereader).

Dr. Yang had by this point been training with his white crane master for 13 years. When he learned of the scholarship, Cheng put all his cards on the table: If Dr. Yang stayed in Taiwan, he’d teach him everything he knew—a compelling offer, given the zealotry with which most masters guard the secrets of their craft. Still, Dr. Yang declined, preferring a more marketable degree in advanced physics to the antiquated teachings of the white crane.

In 1976 Cheng fell gravely ill, but Dr. Yang’s mother, rightly guessing he’d abandon his studies if he knew, never mentioned it. By the time Dr. Yang found out, it was too late. Standing before his master’s grave three years later, he realized he had failed him in the worst way possible. By his own account, he had picked up only half of his master’s knowledge. The rest was lost forever.

Now Dr. Yang recalled once asking his white crane master how much he had learned from his own master. Wordlessly, Cheng held up the back of his farmer’s hand and blew off an imaginary puff of dust. That image still resonates with Dr. Yang. Every year he visits his master’s grave in Taiwan, by way of penance. The shame has long since become a part of him, he said. It is his goad, his motivator. His whip.

“Mississippi River town of Pinhook struggles to reclaim its community after levee break” by Anthony Schick from the Missourian.

The people in Pinhook knew when a flood was coming. There were signs. Deer stopped wandering out of nearby woods. Water started creeping through the cornfields.

When a flood came from the west, as it started to before this year’s devastating flood, the water rose high and fast.

“The Living Nightmare: Quanitta Underwood, A Contender for Olympic Gold and a Survivor” by Barry Bearak for The New York Times (via @longreads).

Underwood, of course, covets a gold medal and the fame that would come with it. “I want to take that ride,” she says. “I want to be a household name.”

But beyond that, she wants to be a symbol of hope to anyone who has ever been sexually abused, though to do so requires something harder for her than a thousand hours of hitting the heavy bag. She has to talk about what happened.

One of the first stories I ever learned by heart was “Ode To Billie Joe.” It’s not a true story. But it sure does feel like one.

We don’t study fiction much here at the Storyboard. But every writer can learn from music – not just rhythm and pacing and mood, but the poet’s efficiency a songwriter needs to tell a story in the short span of a song. Bobbie Gentry wrote a textbook here in 358 words.

Go listen to the thing first. Then think about all the narrative skills Gentry uses:

Concrete detail. It’s not just summer; it’s the third of June. (Technically still spring, but in Mississippi, trust me, June is summer.) The narrator’s brother doesn’t just remember teasing her; he remembers a frog down her back at the Carroll County picture show. And the key action in the story doesn’t just happen down by the river; it’s up on Choctaw Ridge, on the Tallahatchie Bridge.

One perk of being a songwriter: You can make up details that rhyme. But any reporter can become more convincing by nailing down particulars.

Dialog. Most of the details unfold in a conversation around the dinner table. Mama talks, then Papa, then Mama again, then Brother, then Mama one last time.

When you get people talking together, reacting to one another, coming from different angles, that’s closer to real life than you, the interviewer, asking questions.

Suspense. The nut graf comes at the end of the first verse: Billie Joe jumped off the bridge. But it’s not until the fourth verse (Child, what’s happened to your appetite?) that you start to understand how much Billie Joe means to the narrator. And then you learn they threw something off the bridge together.

Gentry chooses to leave the mystery unsolved – you never learn what they threw off the bridge, and why Billie Joe jumped. But that’s not so different than most of the narratives we have to write. Even in long stories, big questions often linger. We have to figure out how to write an unsatisfying ending in a satisfying way.

(For many, many theories on why Billie Joe jumped, go here.)

Imagery. If you’re looking to portray loss of innocence, your character dropping flowers into a muddy river ain’t a bad metaphor. Build scenes out of the small gestures that echo the big themes of your narrative.

Meaning. The story of “Ode to Billie Joe” is a suicide and the mystery that remains. At the beginning, the narrator sits down to a meal with her family. At the end, she’s on the bridge, alone. The song is really about secrets, how they isolate you, and how they can bend or break you.

Every narrative has a plot. Great narratives reach higher to make a point. The best let you in to work out their meaning for yourself.

“Ode To Billie Joe” came out in 1967. Since then it’s been covered time and time and time again. At least two movies have been made about it. The real Tallahatchie Bridge – the one Gentry seems to have been thinking about – collapsed decades ago.

So go ahead – steal some of Gentry’s tricks, even if you’re sticking to the nonfiction side of the river. Bridges fall. Great stories last.

Tommy Tomlinson (@tommytomlinson) is a storyteller for The Charlotte Observer, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a former Nieman Fellow. He presented on songwriting and reporting at the 2009 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism.

In 2009, Kissinger and fellow Journal Sentinel reporter Susanne Rust were Pulitzer finalists for investigative reporting with their stories on the failures of the federal government to regulate household chemicals. Their work won the Polk Award, the Oakes Award and two National Journalism Awards.

Kissinger talked with us by phone last week about reporting on highly contested issues, getting readers to care, and the haunting events that became a key part of her story. The following are excerpts from our conversation.

You address the sweep of involuntary treatment or commitment for the mentally ill across more than 40 years. And then there’s the rest of the project: graphics, other print pieces, video. What was the paper hoping to do with this project?

It was biting off quite a lot. The assignment came from the managing editor, George Stanley. It was right after the shooting in Tucson, when Gabby Giffords and the others were shot.

Just to backtrack a bit, I’ve written about mental health issues for the paper for a long time. This has been something that we have heard repeatedly: “Why aren’t we better able to predict who is in trouble, who is dangerous to himself or to others, identify them and get them into help before tragedy ensues?”

The night that President Obama gave his compelling speech in Tucson, I got an email from George Stanley saying, “Let’s take a look at this.” I already knew that the Alberta Lessard decision was the benchmark, that it was the pivotal court case that led to sweeping reform in commitment laws all over the country. So that’s how it got started.

One of our editors noted how vital it was for your story that you found Lessard. How did you locate her? Had you already been in touch with her?

I had, so that was the easy part. Again, because I’ve written about mental health issues for so many years, I was familiar with her. She is going strong at 91, and is a fascinating person. I’m in her debt for her being so generous with her time. And believe me, we spent many, many hours talking about all kinds of things. That was, I think, critical. But in terms of putting together the story, this was not so much a focus on the Alberta Lessard case. It was a happy coincidence that it was the 40-year anniversary, but that was not the incentive for doing the story.

We spent many hours at her house, the video/photo guy, Gary Porter, and me. She makes for compelling footage, as well as being a human quote machine. What a treat in every way, especially journalistically, to be able to have access to this historical figure. I kind of likened her, in my mind, to the Rosa Parks of the mental health system.

But it’s complicated. You’re trying to address the issue of protecting patients’ rights and also the challenge of protecting society from the violently mentally ill. How did you approach balancing the very graphic nature of the murders that make these headlines and this other fact, which you carefully note, that only a tiny percentage of mentally ill people ever commit this kind of violence?

It was the most challenging assignment that I’ve had in my 31 years as a reporter. You probably hear that from everyone you talk to! (Laughs.) It was daunting. I was very, very concerned that we not overstate anything, both with the regard to the issue of dangerousness and mental illness and the Lessard decision legacy. I had in my mind every day that we had to give this the exact right emphasis – I was very aware of the sensitivities around this issue. I worked on this thing for many months and was really careful.

Did you have any rules for yourself, ways of checking yourself?

The short answer to that is yes, because I had background enough to know about the different poles or camps, the ideological ground that people come from. It’s a lot like the abortion issue, or even the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There are very passionate opinions on what is the best way to care for people with mental illness.

There were a number of challenges: not playing into stereotypes, not sensationalizing something or overstating it. Also in terms of telling a story, not devolving into a he-said-she-said kind of thing. I didn’t want it to be a quote-’em-up about what’s the best way to identify somebody with mental illness. I wanted to go beyond that.

We started by going right to the people on the polar ends of this argument. I began with the Bazelon Law Center in Washington, D.C., and the Treatment Advocacy Center in Virginia, because those two organizations represent really opposite thinking in many ways on the question of commitment.

What about somebody asked to tackle this kind of story without your experience? This story has to balance a lot of ambiguity. Can you offer any strategies for how to approach the Middle East, Northern Ireland and mental health issues?

In some ways, that’s almost an advantage. I felt that I had those people in my head the whole time. It was a good thing, but it also slowed me down a lot. I was nervous – not that I wanted to please them, that was not the purpose of the story – but I’m acutely aware of the sensitivities.

The advice to people 5 or 10 years in … Just assume that people don’t have a big background. You can see pretty quickly where people fall. And so I kind of had a twin narrative in this story that I tried to maintain: Alberta Lessard and the Richard Wilson case. And it’s really interesting about how that came to pass.

In Richard’s case, the current case, (there’s) a young man, obviously dangerous, and the mother – both parents really – grasping for any help they could get. In Alberta’s case, she’s literally 91 years old, not a harm to anybody, and she keeps getting arrested and thrown into mental health complex. How ironic and what different circumstances. I thought that it made for a very interesting contrast. Younger reporters or reporters with less experience, I think they could still tease that out, that there are very different points of view that represent the tension in the overall argument.

I guess this is kind of hokey, but I always think, “What would you be talking about over the fence?” That’s the cliché in reporting, of course. If you were talking over the fence to a neighbor, how would you frame it?

So how did the Wilson case come to you?

It’s one of those things that happen every once in a while that give you chills. I know Martha Wilson, the mother in this really sad story. She, among other things, taught my kids. She’s a schoolteacher, and she grew up next door to my cousin. She was not a friend, but an acquaintance, somebody I would know to say hello to on the street.

So there I was one morning, two or three months after getting this assignment. I had told my cousin that I was working on this, traveling around the country to talk about this really tough issue. I’m out walking my beagle one morning, and there’s Martha out walking her dog, and she came up to me and said, “Meg, I understand you’re working on this story. You know, we’re having a really hard time with our son Richard. We can’t get him to take his medication. What are you finding out in your reporting?” I said, “Oh, it’s just a mess. It’s really a challenge. I’m so sorry you’re going through this.” She said, “I’m going to call you sometime, and maybe we can talk about this some more.” Two weeks later, her son kills her father with an ax.

It was just haunting. There wasn’t a day after that that I didn’t see Martha Wilson’s face when I sat down to write this story or to report it. That was so chilling to me, and it kind of put the story in my lap. That was a good thing and a bad thing. It made it even more challenging, but it also made it more searing.

When it came to putting the stories together, some of our editors liked the braided narrative that moved in and out of the different stories, and some wanted it more pared down. Was that a discussion that took place at the Journal Sentinel, too?

We didn’t really debate it, but we talked about it. You know, the challenge of it, of course, is that you don’t want to confuse the reader. You also don’t want to make it too tidy, or to be hokey or forced. But it did provide the continuum. You could see the vast difference, the conditions Alberta faced in 1971 that led to her challenge of these laws, and then fast forward to 2011 and the practical implications.

But then again, I was quite concerned about not wanting to oversimplify that so as to say that the Lessard decision was responsible for the Richard Wilson murder – that would really be a stretch. But certainly the Lessard decision informed or provided the atmosphere or the legal environment for how he was ultimately treated. He had pulled a knife on his mom and dad, and they had called the police, and the police took him out to the mental health complex. It was these doctors, using that litmus test that was established in the Lessard case, who concluded that he was not an imminent danger. And so they didn’t commit him. And months later, this happened. It just makes you wonder, what would have happened if the laws were different?

What did you see as the main storytelling challenges when you were writing the piece?

I always approach stories about mental health stuff with the concern that readers identify with the people in the story as people. I know how marginalized people with mental illness are in our society. You’ve got to get them to care, No. 1, and that’s a huge challenge. And then the next challenge is to keep them invested in the story. And this is a really long story, and as you noted, really complicated. And so the next challenge was to keep them engaged and make sure that all points of view were represented as best as you can – and then to answer the question: “Why aren’t we doing a better job?”

I don’t know that we answered that, but I think that we gave readers a lot to think about. I learned a lot in doing this, and I think readers got a historical sense of events.

What has reaction been to the piece?

It’s been really mixed. Some in the mental health community were upset, especially at the layout, the fact that we would feature Jared Loughner’s face and (Seung-Hui) Cho’s face in there, that we were highlighting the issue of dangerousness. That’s a really sensitive topic in the mental health community. They’ve fought against the stereotype of the crazed lunatic. They were upset that there was that emphasis given to the front page and a big chunk of the newspaper that day to that issue. That’s one camp.

But families of people who have been in this situation were very grateful, I would say, and I think in a way relieved that what they go through all the time was validated in a newspaper article. And then others found it an interesting part of history that they didn’t know about.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

On stories that teach and reach:

A cornerstone of effective narrative is to invite empathy through the capture of universal emotion and authentic drama. Meg Kissinger does that here, and with one of the toughest of subjects. Mental illness isn’t something that is easy to relate to for those who don’t suffer from it or aren’t intimately connected to it.

But the real genius of Kissinger’s piece lies in how she uses the narrative not just to evoke emotion, but to teach. Her deep reporting and deft weave of story and context takes readers through an important tour of the history, law, politics, policy and economics of society’s attempts to deal with the mentally ill. It’s a classic example of “teachable moment” journalism – Kissinger uses a compelling storyline to crack open understanding of shared systems. She lays out that aspect of her package with the simplicity that only comes from bulletproof reporting.

I was lured into Kissinger’s piece with the heartbreaking introduction to the Wilson family and the quick reminders of the horrors that played out at Virginia Tech and a Tucson shopping center. Spare use of the right numbers highlighted the enormity of this issue. Then the grabber – a tight but sophisticated “nut” section where Kissinger lays out the contrast between our reactions to physical and mental illness, and delivers a quick litany of “whys” – sets up that perfect hook:

The answer begins 40 years ago on the second-story window sill of Alberta Lessard’s West Allis apartment.

From there I am not just being taken into the tragic story of one family, I’m on a quest – almost an archeological dig through courtrooms and records and memories. Kissinger doesn’t leave us with the frustration of where we are, but helps us understand how we got here. Along the way, she reveals how the best of social intentions that drove the civil liberties movements of the 1960s and ’70s set the table for unintended consequences today. This is the stuff of elite, book-length journalism. Bless her heart, Kissinger gives it to us in the daily fishwrap.

That approach reminded me of two other remarkable works that used intimate stories to teach bigger social truths:

• In “And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic,” published in 1987, Randy Shilts went on a hunt for “Patient Zero.” He reported around the world to try to track down the origin of HIV’s sudden spread. (Shilts died of HIV/AIDS in 1994. His book is a movie of the same name.) Alberta Lessard is the “patient zero” in Kissinger’s story, and helps us track the origins of decisions that determine how we deal with the mentally ill.

• In 1996, The Oregonian’s Tom Hallman Jr. wrote “Children of a Lesser Hope,” a groundbreaking piece on children being raised by developmentally disabled parents. Hallman found a small program for normal-intelligence children who, often by the age of 5, had surpassed their parents’ ability to read, make change and navigate society. This was a subset of children born after society banned the forced sterilization of those deemed incompetent, including those long called mentally retarded. As with Kissinger’s piece, it was a glimpse at the unforeseen consequences of a good social intention.

I could cite other examples. For my lights, this is the best use of narrative journalism. It doesn’t just engage – it educates and enlightens. In terms of service and relevance, it runs parallel to the best of investigative journalism. No matter the story, certain elements are always present:

• Deep, layered reporting. The sourcing box to Kissinger’s story shows how far she went to get it right.
• A clear, tight focus. Kissinger doesn’t try to tell it all. Instead, she layers information in support of a primary question.
• A view of history. Kissinger doesn’t just look at the moment in front of her, but wonders what led up to that moment, and where it might go next.
• The right, relatable characters. The reader has to feel some genuine connection to the people who shine light on the bigger issue. Kissinger found that in the Wilson family.
• A disciplined story structure and writing. Kissinger didn’t rely on tricks and flourishes; her elegance is in her simplicity. Not easy to do, but so easy to read.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

I’m a big admirer of Meg Kissinger’s story on mental illness and the law. It’s a complex and controversial topic, one that can provoke a highly charged debate, especially in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech and Tucson, Ariz., shootings.

Meg tackles the subject with authority, sensitivity and balance. She is an ambitious storyteller, using what I call a “braiding” technique – weaving several storylines together, shifting time frames and moving from one perspective to another.

In my view, this braided approach is not entirely successful, so let me dive into the issues of structure and sequence a bit more.

In “Sequencing: Text as Line,” an essay in “Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide,” Tom French urges writers to report and write along a clear, simple line.

“The act of narrative writing is arranging the elements of each sentence, each paragraph, each section, along a line,” French writes. “The skillful writer arranges a line that the reader can follow easily.”

French is not arguing that writers should restrict themselves only to chronological storytelling. But he says that every time a writer diverges from the simple line, there’s the potential for confusing the reader – a new character is introduced, the scene and time frame are different. French asks the writer to think hard before he or she chooses to break the narrative line.

There are often good reasons to break that line, especially in explanatory stories like Meg’s. In “Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies For Every Writer,” Roy Peter Clark explains: “The writer tells us a story, then stops the story to tell us about the story, but then returns to the story… Wonderful insights and explanations are hung like pearls on a strong narrative string.”

I don’t think that Meg could have told her story in one simple line. But I do think the story could have been even more powerful by weaving together only the strongest narrative threads. The other material – the other perspectives and anecdotes – could make strong secondary stories or sidebars.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will outline the sequence of Meg’s story here:

• Introducing Martha Wilson (April 2011)
• Passage providing context to violence and mental illness, plus details on Virginia Tech and Tucson shootings (April 2007, June 2010)
• Psychiatrist Jon Lehrmann speaks about tendency for public to look the other way when confronted with mental illness
• Framing question: Why can’t the public and families do more to make sure the mentally ill get the care that they need and help them and others stay safe?
• Introducing Alberta Lessard (October 1971)
• Martha Wilson looks for help for her son Richard (April 2011)
• Sam Hengel’s story – boy who held teacher and students hostage (November 2010)
• Alberta Lessard’s court case (Fall 1971)
• Lessard’s lawyers’ legal strategy and U.S. Supreme Court ruling (1971-1972)
• Background on anosognosia
• Aftermath of the Lessard ruling, including Milwaukee County Court Commissioner Rosemary Thornton’s experience
• The pace of public mental hospitals emptying out accelerates after the Lessard ruling
• Alberta Lessard’s experience after the court ruling
• How mental health care is different today, including debate over court-ordered outpatient treatment
• The experience of several people who survived the Virginia Tech and Tucson shootings, or whose loved ones were killed in the shootings (2011)
• Pat Spoerl’s story – she has struggled for 35 years to keep her son safe (2011)
• E. Fuller Torrey’s registry of violent crimes committed against and by people with mental illness
• Richard Wilson’s violent act (May 2011)
• Alberta Lessard reacts (May 2011)
• Lessard’s continuing problems and arrests (Sept. 2011)
• Martha and Jeff Wilson attend Richard’s court hearing (June 2011)

The strongest narrative threads are the stories of the Wilson family and of Alberta Lessard. (I include Lessard’s court case and the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling as part of Lessard’s narrative thread.)

Each would be a powerful story in its own right. But the two stories also play well off each other – they show how complicated and painful the issues are. And they get to the heart of the central question: Why can’t the public and families do more to make sure the mentally ill get the care that they need and help them and others stay safe?

I would have advocated braiding these two narrative threads together, and interrupting the story, as sparingly as possible, whenever greater context and explanation is necessary.

While there’s value in the passages on Sam Hengel, Pat Spoerl and Rosemary Thornton, I probably would have moved them into sidebars. This would allow the reader to focus on the Wilson and Lessard stories, and move with more velocity toward Richard Wilson’s violent act.

There’s a strong argument for including the voices of the Virginia Tech and Tucson shooting survivors and families of the victims in the main story. Here’s another approach, though: Write a story based on their experience, and then run it prominently alongside the main story.

Some general takeaways for narrative writers, then (in addition to all the things Kissinger pulls off here): Use clean, simple lines whenever possible. Braid fewer narrative threads, not more. Introduce fewer characters and voices, not more. And stop to provide context and explanation, but only when necessary.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

This story could have been written as a straight chronology, beginning in the past, with a woman who thought Richard Nixon was out to get her.

It could have then moved to the present with the story of two mass murderers and why a young man named Richard Wilson didn’t get the help he needed before he turned into a killer.

But the story was infinitely more effective because Meg Kissinger started in the present, bounced back in time, then toggled back and forth.

Normally, I’m hesitant to jump around that much. As Tom points out, readers can get lost, and the writer can, too. He’s right, also, that the story could have been more tightly focused around the two strongest narratives.

But what I most liked here was that story within the story. It actually kept you focused and eager to read on.

Why didn’t people around Cho or Loughner do more to make sure these obviously ill men got care and that others around them were safe? Why couldn’t Martha and Jeff Wilson force their troubled son to take the medicine that might make him well?

The answer begins 40 years ago on the second-story window sill of Alberta Lessard’s West Allis apartment.

Who could stop there?

Kissinger did several things effectively to weave Lessard’s tale into the larger story.

First, she recognized that Lessard’s case was not only pivotal, but inherently compelling and ironic. Readers would want to follow it through. It was the perfect way to illustrate how difficult it is for even the well-meaning to address the issue of mental illness. Lessard is crazy, sure, and also – at times – perfectly rational.

She took her time. This is a difficult subject, for society to address and a reporter to tackle within the constraints of a newspaper article, even a long piece like this one. So Kissinger told a little at a time, giving you the opportunity to get to know Lessard and become invested in her circumstances.

She made Lessard familiar. So often, particularly with the coverage of mass murders, the deranged killers are little understood. This woman didn’t pick up a gun or a knife, but it wasn’t a stretch to imagine that her paranoia could have fueled something deadly.

She didn’t wait to point out why the old story is so relevant today. Notice that Kissinger doesn’t expect you to read to the end to understand the ramifications of Lessard’s battle. She stops to make sure you take in just how important this case was.

For instance:

Her persistence would change mental health care across America.

And then later:

The standard of imminent danger set by Lessard’s case would prove to be a tragically inaccurate measure for who was mentally ill and in need of being kept safe. … In time, even Lessard would be denied protection she desperately sought. By correcting one outrage, her case had created others.

Again, who could stop there?

————

For more on this story, check back tomorrow for our Q-and-A with Meg Kissinger. For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? Send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

The title of this series, “Audio danger,” is mostly tongue-in-cheek. But not in the case of Kelly McEvers. McEvers now works as one of NPR’s correspondents in the Middle East, and she’s opened the network’s first bureau in Beirut. But I first ran across her name in 2006, when she was a freelance journalist in Russia on an International Reporting Project fellowship. McEvers had been detained in Dagestan, a rough part of the North Caucasus along the Caspian Sea. Local officials with the FSB, the federal security services, accused her of traveling in neighboring Chechnya.

“They interrogated me for like 14 hours a day, and then at night they’d say, ‘You’re free to go,’ but they had my passport. And then they would follow me home. The car would stay parked out front for a few hours, and then they would call the next morning and say, ‘It’s time to go.’ ”

McEvers didn’t suffer any violence during the four-day ordeal, but the threat of it was very real. (She also had to surrender all of her notes and equipment before she was allowed to leave Dagestan).

These days, McEvers interviews many people who’ve been through horrible experiences: child brides who’ve survived rape in Yemen; protesters tortured in Syria. McEvers lets their stories unfold with an understanding of the way real danger – unlike the kind we often see in the movies – has deep effects that can make it hard to talk about.

“I can see when someone has experienced trauma,” McEvers says. “I think I’m able to empathize a lot more with people because I have been through some of this stuff.  Nothing like what they’ve been through – I mean, people aren’t cutting my relatives into pieces. But I know what it’s like to just be numb, or to blame yourself.”

McEvers’ patience paid off last year with this feature she pursued for months in Iraq. It introduces us to Uhud, a 19-year-old woman from a tribal area of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad. Uhud fell prey to a sex-trafficking scam, the details of which we will never figure out. That confusion, in fact, is central to the story.

“Some of what we’re about to tell you might not actually be true,” McEvers says at the very top of the piece. “The reasons for this will become clear as the story unfolds.”

According to Uhud’s convoluted account, she was kidnapped at gunpoint while out shopping, then beaten and later taken to Irbil, in Kurdistan. There she says she worked in a Christian-owned café somehow affiliated with a brothel. A famous soccer player later rescued her, Uhud says, and a few months later she ended up back home in Diyala.

“When she first came, the whole family had one thing in mind: We assumed she had been raped. So we thought of killing her,” one male relative tells McEvers in a matter-of-fact way, via an interpreter. “She has a brother who would kill her as easily as drinking a glass of water. But then we calmed things down.”

Sort of. When we revisit Uhud a few months later, she’s basically living under family house arrest. She says an uncle spits on her whenever he sees her and threatens to slit her throat if her story doesn’t check out. As McEvers leaves Uhud, she’s up on the roof setting pet pigeons free. “They fly in the sky for a while, then they come back home,” McEvers translates for Uhud over the sound of flapping wings.

We’ll never know Uhud’s real story, but of course that’s not the point: By living with her for seven minutes, we viscerally feel the way shame and sex-trafficking thrive off one another.

Foreign correspondents for radio face special hurdles. The people they interview often don’t speak English, so we lose the direct narrative force that propels so many audio stories. And most of us have never been to places like war-torn Iraq, so even with great descriptive copy, our minds still tend to fill in the background with stereotypical images from TV news or “National Geographic”: deserts, burqas, bullet-pocked walls.

Of course, correspondents can’t only focus on personal narratives, and McEvers does her share of big-picture, geopolitical reporting. But stories like Uhud’s are one way to slice through the obstacle of listener confusion (and, let’s face it, indifference) when it comes to reports from abroad.

“I try to make those personal stories have a larger point, but just to reach that point through personal narratives. People in Dubuque are going to remember that more than a talking head,” McEvers says.

And radio has one major advantage when it comes to McEvers’ frequent focus on the plight of women in the Middle East.

“A microphone is so much easier than a camera,” she says. “You never get to take pictures of these women. Never. Especially those women with a shameful story.” McEvers sometimes spends a lot of time explaining to her sources how they will sound on the other end in America. “You know, ‘It’s just your voice – it’s going to be dubbed into English.’ I draw pictures of what it’s going to sound like, (their voices) fading under (the translation).”  Sometimes reluctant sources will agree to whisper, or speak broken English, to hide their identities further.

But especially as the Arab world changes so rapidly, McEvers says she can face a different problem – people so desperate for someone to hear their stories, they won’t let her leave. “In Iraq, there are so many widows, or mothers who’ve lost children. No one’s listening to them.”

These days McEvers’ own personal narrative is affecting the way she thinks about trauma and danger in her profession. She now has a 2-year-old daughter. Questions about her ordeal seven years ago in Dagestan elicit a snort.

“It should’ve been instructive, but it’s not. I didn’t learn my lesson,” she says. “But none of us do.” It’s something few foreign correspondents talk about openly, McEvers says: Simply put, editors – and by proxy, the rest of us – too often reward them for putting their lives at risk in pursuit of the story.

“When you have little children, you think a lot about positive and negative reinforcement,” she says. “And we foreign correspondents are positively reinforced for bad behavior.”

Julia Barton (@bartona104) is an editor, media trainer, producer and writer who spearheads the “Audio danger” series on Storyboard.

The story, which ran in the January 16 issue of Sports Illustrated, breaks down the legend of Herring eliminating Jordan from the team during his sophomore year. It turns out that events may not have unfolded in quite the way that Jordan came to recount them in the decades that followed.

The most surprising thing about Lake’s narrative is not that Jordan has misremembered or exploited a minor high school trauma, but what has happened in his life – and Herring’s life – since. Lake uses counterpoint beautifully, and the degree of Herring’s suffering and decline seems to parallel the degree to which Jordan’s star rises.

As he is inaugurated into the Basketball Hall of Fame, Jordan surrounds himself with coaching legends, friends and associates, whom Lake contrasts with the homeless derelicts who make up Herring’s social set these days.

We pull up at the ramshackle house and step into a blinding afternoon, 97º, vibrating with the song of cicadas. Pop carries the pizza box in one hand and the bag of King Cobra and cigarettes in the other. We walk toward the picnic table under the spreading oak, where several ragged men cool their heels in the fine gray sand. Collectively they are known as the Oak Tree Boys. They are here morning and night. Some are homeless. One has a wild shock of white hair and another is missing his middle lower teeth, so he seems to have fangs. They have nowhere else to go. Pop lets them stay here. He still gives what he can.

Pop opens the pizza box. The fanged man takes two pieces. The third goes to the wild-haired man, who gobbles most of it and flings the crust in the street. Two seagulls swoop in and finish it off. Pop opens the King Cobra and takes a long pull. He hands the sweating bottle to his adopted brother and roommate, Bob Wells, who takes his own gulp.

We get Pop Herring as a schizophrenic post-millennial Jesus, still out there feeding the multitude, even if it’s just with leftover pizza and malt liquor from a shared bottle. Lake’s layered scenes are full of moments like these that make the piece sing.

But why, in the end, does his story matter? Is he just calling out Michael Jordan for ingratitude? I don’t think that’s all there is to it, but, boy, does the story do that. Is it to show how far a man can fall, despite all the good he does in the world? Maybe. But it seems to me that in telling this story, Lake is going for something bigger, reminding us of the negligence that accounts for too much of human traffic. It’s never said explicitly on the page, but all the same, I get the feeling that Lake is wondering what we’ve done lately for our own Pop Herrings.

For more about this story, read Brandon Sneed’s interview with Thomas Lake.

By April 2002, the end of Brown’s rookie season with the Washington Wizards, dozens of reporters had dutifully written profiles about the teenager from rural Georgia. The first wave of stories focused on his size (6 feet 11 inches, 235 pounds) and speed and aggressiveness on the basketball court.

As he struggled over the course of the season (he averaged just 4.5 points per game that year), the tone of the coverage changed. Journalists increasingly asked skeptical questions about his age, his confidence level, his will to win. The kid had been dissected endlessly. What more was there to say? Why would someone assign an 8,000-word profile of Kwame Brown to run the week after the end of the regular season?

Well, because someone was Tom Shroder, then editor of The Washington Post Magazine. Shroder had the foresight to realize that a story from Post sport columnist Sally Jenkins about Brown’s first year in the NBA would transcend all the well-worn tropes about the most-scrutinized man in sports and become “Growing Pains,” one of the most revealing sports profiles ever written. Jenkins and Shroder understood that every other story about Brown had focused on what he had done (which, after all, any casual follower of professional basketball already knew), while she would write about who he was. Striving to explain how the Wizards overestimated Brown so badly, she writes,

What they couldn’t see was the inside of him.

What she doesn’t have to say is that at that point, she was the only one who had.

One paragraph in, a die-hard Wizards fan may have learned more about Brown than he did from dozens of profiles combined.

Kwame Brown knows more than he should about some things, such as certain aspects of human nature, and less than he should about others, such as nutrition, how to treat a good suit, and when to throw the lob pass. What Brown knows and what he doesn’t is a consequence of his age, newly 20, and where he’s from, the saw grass lowlands of Georgia, where crook-armed silhouettes of shrimp boats move against the horizon and misshapen oaks draped with gothic-gray moss line the melting tar streets, so sticky-hot that the children, Brown until recently one of them, hitch up their pants and hop from patch of grass to patch of grass.

Each of the three details about the gaps in Brown’s knowledge hint at an anecdote that will come to define him among engaged fans and legions of sportswriters. He ate Popeye’s chicken for every meal and brought a bottle of store-bought French dressing every time he went to a sit-down restaurant. He wadded up his fancy new suits and threw them in the corner because he didn’t know how to take them to the dry cleaners. He couldn’t follow simple instructions on the basketball court and made embarrassing mistakes that cost his team points and wins.

Tellingly, the basketball example comes last of the three, more than halfway through the story. Kwame Brown’s problems with the lob pass aren’t significant because the Wizards didn’t make the playoffs in 2002, but because they contribute to an indictment of an NBA system that put the weight of a team on a 19-year-old “baby-man” who was scared to sleep alone.

The Kwame Brown story is a sad one – from his abusive father to his troubled siblings to his fear of the world even after making so many millions he could afford any life he dreamed of – and many of Jenkins’ lyrical turns of phrase evoke the heartbreak of being so lost in the world.

Where Brown is from, religion can be a fairly desperate matter, a begging for some explanation and improbable rescue from the unpayable bills and empty refrigerators and the illnesses that come from living in stagnation and deprivation – in the case of Joyce Brown, the gnarling arthritis, or the kidney disease that left her with just one, or the degenerative disc in her back from cleaning under all those beds at the local Holiday Inn.

But Jenkins also acknowledges that it’s hard to feel too sorry for a man who was being paid millions to watch NBA games from the bench, who goofed off and slacked off and mouthed off. And so she doesn’t go easy on Brown, including cutting, funny lines among the more somber ones. Her eye for detail allows her to subtly critique every character in the story without ever veering into takedown. After quoting Joyce Brown asserting that God Himself made her son the No. 1 pick, Jenkins offers an elegant, understated rebuttal.

The Wizards, on the other hand, wanted to see less of God’s work, and more work from Kwame Brown himself.

Superlative narrative journalism is often compared to fiction, but these moments of fast-paced back-and-forth in “Growing Pains” – between Brown and the people around him and between author and subject – is more reminiscent of theater, even in the long stretches of the piece that have no dialogue. You can’t help but turn the (digital) page, whether you’ve followed Brown’s entire career or don’t know a thing about basketball.

But compelling narrative is not enough to make a piece, of course, especially when it’s about a topic as niche as a bench-warmer for a mediocre basketball team. What makes Jenkins’ article so good – what makes it one of those pieces I turn to for inspiration when I’m trying to string words together in the magic combination that will make people care about a topic they otherwise wouldn’t – is that there is no break between narrative and “issue-speak.” It would have been easy for Jenkins to settle for a conventional structure: anecdote –> quote –> framing question –> analysis, rinse and repeat. Instead, she mixes it all together into a rich stew no lover of words could resist. Only a master can make her nut graphs as riveting as her comic anecdotes.

Brown’s naivete poses the question once again: Is it wise for the NBA to make a foray into surrogate parenting of kids fresh from high school? What’s to be done with a Kwame Brown? What is the nature of the league’s responsibility to such a tender rookie? No one is quite sure.

Those three questions foreshadow the real-world consequences of Brown’s failure to thrive as an NBA center or even a functioning adult. They would reverberate for years after the piece went to press, and Jenkins’ article surely contributed to NBA Commissioner David Stern’s 2005 decision to seek a minimum age for players entering the draft.

Hard-hitting journalism doesn’t always mean exposing corruption or abuse of power. Elegant narrative does not always stop at story-as-art. Sometimes, a simple profile lays bare a radically new vision of a person you thought you knew, distilling the subject’s essence so cleanly it carries the weight of a major scoop. Sometimes, 8,000 words reveals an entire world you’d somehow missed, even though it had been sitting there the whole time, right before your eyes.

Megan Greenwell (@megreenwell) is managing editor at GOOD Magazine, where she writes a weekly column about sports and society.

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

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.

You were trying to get different sides of Sword’s character from family members who are estranged from each other. Have you ever had to deal with that before?

I don’t think so. It was to the point that one family member would tell me not to talk to another one because they had already asked, and that person didn’t want to talk to me. But I would call to confirm it, because I needed to hear it from them, and they would say, “No, I want to talk to you.”

The deeper I dug, the sadder it got. Then you think, “Is it worth it as a story?” You want to inform the public, but are you stirring up too much pain?

The story has a classic narrative structure: You start in the present to let people know there was a shootout, then you cycle back through Sword’s life, bit by bit to the tragedy and then the present again. Was that the structure you always had for the piece?

I knew the whole thing was building up to the really intense shooting scene. So much of my reporting had to focus on that. A lot of those details hadn’t been reported before, because the police were really shut down about what they’d give out.

The first thing I did was to file an FOI request. I asked for everything and got an official form letter back, citing this clause saying, “We’re not going to give you anything, because it’s ‘still under investigation’ ” – even though it wasn’t. It was just this clause they were using. I checked with FOI officials statewide, and they really can say that – even though the subject is dead, even though it’s clearly not under investigation. It’s a loophole.

But the nice thing was that the police said, “We don’t want to be jerks about this. We’ll meet with you.” I met with them four times. Each time, the main policeman would have his laptop there, with all the information on it. He would stop and consult with the PR person and say, “Can I tell her this?” They gave me a few details that weren’t released at the time.

Then through reporting, I would go back in and say, “Well, I learned this.” And they would say, “We forgot to tell you that.” Once I said, “Why didn’t you tell me this?” and the police officer said, “Well, you didn’t ask.” So I told him that story about Edna Buchanan, and I said, “I don’t know exactly what I want to know. But I want details that will allow me to build a really rich narrative.”

They kept talking about “the loud music, the loud music.” I said, “What kind of music? Was it heavy metal?” This guy says, “I don’t know. It was just really loud and horrible music, but they left it on for a long time because it was crime scene.” I said, “But what was it?” One of the policemen said, “No, it wasn’t heavy metal, it was hard rock.” When I finally got the cop who fired the fatal shot, he said, “I’ll never forget that song. It was Buckcherry’s ‘Crazy Bitch.’ ”

That policeman was another person – almost nobody wanted to talk to me for this story, which makes you feel bad. But this policeman had initially agreed to “work with me.” I said, “What do you mean by that?” He said, “I’ll talk to you, but I don’t know if I want you to use everything. I’ll work with you.” The idea was that I would go over with him what I was going to use ahead of time, but we didn’t get into specifics about on the record/off the record on the phone, because I was going to do that when we met.

And then he kept cancelling. And then we were Facebook friends, and he would contact me that way. Then he unfriended me and cut off all connection. And then as I was getting ready to polish up the draft, I just wrote to him on Facebook, I sent him a message, which you can still do if you’re not friends.

I said, “Per our initial agreement that I would work with you, I’d like to talk to you about what I’m going to use from you for our first couple of phone conversations.” I kind of acted like I had forgotten that he had unfriended me, but that got his attention. Once he called me and we started talking, he was just full of questions about what this guy was like. Then he spelled out everything the other police wouldn’t tell me: just exactly how it went, exactly where the cars were located. He was very open, as if he had really needed to talk about it.

In the end, he thanked me and said it had really helped him process what was going on with him, but he said, “All my friends told me not to talk with you.”

Since this was part of a larger multimedia project that the paper did, how much background about PTSD did you feel you needed to include? How did you think about it?

Well, I knew Sarah (Bruyn Jones) was writing about the science of PTSD, and I knew she was also looking at specific changes at the Salem VA. I talked to the people at the VA several times. They’re not very media friendly. I have an old friend who’s the director of mental health there, and he wants to help, but he’s like, “We’re just not allowed to talk to you unless a PR person is here with us. We can’t send a vet to you, even if they want to talk.”

It’s really hard to get in there. So I did a lot of hanging out at the VA. There’s a plant nursery there, where the veterans, as part of their therapy, work on growing plants, and they sell them. And I’m a huge gardener. So a lot of times, when I’m looking for a story or I need to write something about the vets, I just go hang out at the nursery, and I meet people. And one thing will lead to another. And I actually ended up contributing some of the reporting to her story based on conversations I had with vets I met at the nursery. It’s a huge complex – just giant.

One time some guy was supposed to meet me, and I got out there to find a note posted on a picnic shelter, just a piece of white paper with handwriting, “Dear lady at The Roanoke Times. I’m sorry I can’t meet you today.” I didn’t have his phone number, but he was in treatment there, and he said, “Call me back at this number at such and such a time.” He didn’t have my number either.

That informed my work with my story, but I was also helping her out a little bit too. I was casting my net wide, especially at the beginning. I did a lot of interviews in February, when I thought I was writing about the other vet.

I don’t know that very much of what I learned (about PTSD) is actually in this story. Knowing that she was writing the bulk of what was going on with the science and at the VA allowed me to concentrate on the narrative instead.

You raise some questions early on that in the end can’t be resolved, because Mike Sword is dead. Can you talk about how you decided to navigate that in terms of your storytelling?

It was disappointing that I couldn’t know, but I think I was also pretty careful not to act like I was going to answer the questions at the end. There’s nothing more frustrating than that – you’re sort of robbing the reader. The question to me is, what should we have done differently? That to me was something the family of a veteran would take away from it. I had to deal with the facts I had. It’s still really, really sad.

It’s not like you’re promising something that isn’t delivered. It’s like you’re leaving it for the rest of us to determine if we need to be doing more. Is there something that could have stopped this?

I got to watch the father come to that realization. At the end, he said, “We should have been circling the wagons.” I had been hanging out with him off and on for a couple months by the time he came to that realization. He lives in Virginia Beach, so I didn’t actually hang out with him, but we would meet every couple of weeks to go over what I had learned.

He had the motivation that he wanted a reporter to do this big investigation and find out that the police improperly shot his son. When I finally was able to see the video of what happened, it was not a good video, because it was from the car farthest away.

The police finally let me see it the fourth time I asked, and only because through reporting, I learned that what they had told me in my initial meeting with them didn’t jibe with what family lawyers told me. The policeman, trying to be helpful, said, “When you watch the video, you can see Mike getting out of the truck and shooting at the officers.” He was really specific about that. I recorded all the interviews, because I knew it could all be contentious. So I knew he had said that.

But everybody else specifically remembered that you couldn’t see that. I said, “Chuck, you’ve got to let me watch that video. I don’t want this to be some kind of problem in the story: ‘So and so says this’ and ‘so and so says that,’ but I can’t see the video, so there’s just one big other mystery that I can’t answer.” He said, “Okay,” and he went down and watched it in the basement archives.

He came back and said, “I am so sorry. They are right. I was wrong. I was misremembering.” It had been a couple years. And he said, “We’re going to let you watch it.” Once I saw it – and they let me watch it as many times as I wanted – you don’t actually see Mike, because it’s dark and he’s too far away. But what you do see is the police officers walking. They’ve got their hands on their guns, they don’t have their guns drawn yet. And all of the sudden sparks are flying. You know they’re being shot at before they even had their weapons drawn.

To me that kind of answered the major question, because once you open fire like that, they have to shoot you. So I called Mr. Sword’s dad and said, “I know this isn’t what you want to hear. But I saw the video, and to me it’s really clear.”

What I think the story suffers from the most is that it doesn’t feel very intimate. To me, it doesn’t sound like me, the way I write. There’s too much attribution in it. I got one conversation with the wife, who spent more time with him than anyone. Of course I never got to talk to him. I talked to as many people as I could who would talk to me about him. I’m not sure you have a huge sense of who he is. Some of this stuff about their relationship – I had some stuff on the record, a lot of stuff off the record, but some stuff I had was just too painful to put it in. The last conversation they had, I chose not to put it in. I just thought it was too painful. The reader didn’t need to read it, and the widow didn’t need to read it.

Do you have any advice for anyone else trying to tackle a story like this?

I don’t want to do another story like this for the rest of my career. It’s an honest and true story. It’s not a complete story, because of not being able to talk to some people. I think the complete story would probably be even harder to tell.

Talking to that policeman, I could tell the first time I talked to him that he really wanted to talk … but that was months of trying to coax him and being pushier than I’m normally comfortable being. Still, I think it added a lot to the story to have his point of view.

Every detail just makes it a little bit richer. It was copyedited a lot with the idea that “this is a controversial thing” and “you’ve got to say where you got all your information.” I wanted to make sure I wasn’t relying on just one family member. Because of the dispute about the police, I had to say exactly where I got my information, which I felt made it more awkward and less conversational. When I read it again the other day, it didn’t sound like the way I normally write. So it leaves me a little cold, but I guess the whole thing leaves me cold because every little piece of it was emotionally draining to do.

Is there anything else you’d like people to know?

I guess just the thing about going back to people. When I first talked to the sister, she wasn’t interested. She said the whole family wasn’t interested. It came like a gift when the dad got in touch. By then the sister was willing to talk. And the soldier who canceled on me – by the time the series ran six months later, he was willing to talk to us again. He’s included in a couple of the other installments.

People change their minds, and it’s worth going back to them gently, respectfully, saying, “How are you doing? Would you be willing to talk to me?” It’s not a comfortable thing, but what you’re doing you hope is for the greater good.