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“How’d you find that ‘invisible army’ story, Sarah Stillman?”

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Sarah Stillman’s “The Invisible Army” (The New Yorker, June 2011) told the stunning and deeply reported tale of the 70,000 “third-country nationals” who work on U.S. military bases in war zones:

Stillman

Stillman

Filipinos launder soldiers’ uniforms, Kenyans truck frozen steaks and inflatable tents, Bosnians repair electrical grids, and Indians provide iced mocha lattes. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) is behind most of the commercial “tastes of home” that can be found on major U.S. bases, which include jewelry stores, souvenir shops filled with carved camels and Taliban chess sets, beauty salons where soldiers can receive massages and pedicures, and fast-food courts featuring Taco Bell, Subway, Pizza Hut, and Cinnabon. (AAFES’s motto: “We go where you go.”)

The expansion of private-security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is well known. But armed security personnel account for only about sixteen per cent of the over-all contracting force. The vast majority—more than sixty per cent of the total in Iraq—aren’t hired guns but hired hands. These workers, primarily from South Asia and Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases, eat at meagre chow halls, and host dance parties featuring Nepalese romance ballads and Ugandan church songs. A large number are employed by fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer but who often operate outside the law.

The wars’ foreign workers are known, in military parlance, as “third-country nationals,” or T.C.N.s. Many of them recount having been robbed of wages, injured without compensation, subjected to sexual assault, and held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by their subcontractor bosses. Previously unreleased contractor memos, hundreds of interviews, and government documents I obtained during a yearlong investigation confirm many of these claims and reveal other grounds for concern. Widespread mistreatment even led to a series of food riots in Pentagon subcontractor camps, some involving more than a thousand workers.

Stillman’s piece won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Public Interest and the Sidney Hillman Foundation prize, for excellence in reporting for the public good. (And her recent story “The Throwaways,” about young informants being used to a deadly degree in the nation’s criminal justice system, is up, tonight, for a National Magazine Award. Our Annotation Tuesday! series will carry a line by line on the piece soon, so check back for that.)

When accepting the Hillman prize, Stillman recounted how she found the “invisible army.” Her acceptance speech comes in at the three-minute mark, but here’s the first of it:

“It began when I was at an Indian restaurant in Oxford, England, a few years ago, oddly enough, and I had a waiter—a young man, Tony, came up to me. He was giving me dinner and he heard my American accent and he said, ‘Oh, you’re an American! I used to work on a U.S. military base, feeding soldiers.’ And he whipped out his cellphone and started showing me these pictures of Jessica Simpson on her U.S.O. tour, like in a tank top. He had these funny, interesting stories but then he began to tell me about some of his friends, also from Goa, India, who had been promised great jobs in Dubai and Jordan and instead were taken to a war zone, to a U.S. military base. Other workers had been hit by rockets and lost eyes or limbs and had been sent home to their countries with no insurance. So this was on my radar when I first went to to Iraq in 2008. I thought I was going to have to work hard to dig up these stories and just find these people. And I arrived on the base and lo and behold one of the first things I saw was a Burger King staffed by Indian workers. One of the second things I saw was a Pizza Hut staffed by Bangladeshis, and a Cinnabon. And then a beauty salon where you could actually get $7 manicures and pedicures from a group of Fiji women who ultimately became the subjects of my story. … I learned that they had been promised lavish jobs and a nice hotel in Dubai, and instead were taken to Iraq. I got to know them over a period of years and was there on the day that one was sexually assaulted by her supervisor. When I called the emergency sexual assault hotline on her behalf I found only a phone that rang and rang, and no answer.”

You can find Stillman’s full talk here:

And for more installments of “How’d you find that story?” go here.

by Paige Williams | May 2, 2013 | posted in how'd you find that story? | comments (1)
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Annotation Tuesday! Eli Saslow and the family con

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A top reporter and storyteller, Eli Saslow was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing two weeks ago for his story about a struggling swimming pool salesman.Today, in the latest installment of our Annotation Tuesday! series, we’re looking at another of Saslow’s pieces, one that he wrote for ESPN The Magazine, about Rumeal Robinson, a former University of Michigan and pro basketball player serving time for basically conning his mother out of her own house. Storyboard’s questions and remarks are in green, Saslow’s in red. A few questions, to start:

Storyboard: How did you come upon this story and why did you want to tell it?

saslow-eSaslow: This idea actually came from a very good editor who I work with at the magazine, Paul Kix. When he started explaining the story to me, I knew right away that I wanted to write it. It is surprising and tragic, with loads of tension. So all of that was appealing. Also, it was a chance to write a little bit more of a reconstructed narrative, which I hadn’t done in a while.

You’ve been writing about politics and the economy a good bit lately. What is it like to switch over to sports? Is a narrative a narrative?

I started as a sports writer at The Washington Post, and then I switched to politics/economy/etc., so it is fun to occasionally write about sports again. The truth is, I think it is all pretty much the same. Good narratives are mostly about people, and what they do is pretty secondary. Athletes, politicians, anonymous people—if you can get to a level of intimacy, they are all equally good, worthy topics. I was terrified when I first switched from writing about sports to politics in 2007, but about a year in, I realized the two topics were much of the same: people who were hard to access, and who cared a lot about winning.

What are you reading these days? And what, if anything, do you read to get you in the zone to write?

I’ve been trying to read a lot more fiction lately—a New Year’s resolution, since I’m usually bad at it. My wife reads a ton, so mostly I’m reading whatever she passes my way when she’s done. Lately that’s been The Burgess Boys, the new book by Elizabeth Strout (great characters, so sad); Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (vivid and awesome); Prep (I’m about five years late); and Gone Girl (yes, again, from my wife—and also super entertaining). To get into the mood to write, I go back to some of the same people whose narrative work I admire, and many of whom work or worked at the Washington Post: David Finkel, Anne Hull, Kate Boo, etc. So many great writers to choose from.

What’s the best narrative advice anyone ever gave you?

Stay until you have the story. Good narratives are all about reporting—about observation and detail, and reporting long enough to watch a story play out.

What, if anything, did you learn from doing this story?

I knew this in some ways before, but the court records were a narrative treasure trove for this story. I called down to the court in Iowa, and a few weeks later I had boxes and boxes of transcripts. All of the primary characters in the story had testified, and the details and the dialogue in that box did more to help tell this story than any other method of reporting.

 

“Bringing Down the House”
August 13, 2012
ESPN The Magazine
By Eli Saslow 

HELEN FORD DRIVES to the house from memory, parks along the curb and idles in her car.<Past or present tense are always a choice for the narrative writer, as are first, second (risky!) and third person. How did you decide to tell this in the present tense?/pw It is weird, and probably stereotypical, but I tend to default to past tense for newspaper stories at the Post and present tense in magazine stories for ESPN. Not sure why, really. A good friend told me recently, though, that present tense can make a story feel a little more alive. I think that’s right. Also, in this story, starting in present tense helped distinguish reporting done in the present moment, versus all the reconstruction to come./es This three-story duplex in Cambridge, Mass., had been her home for 40 years, but now she wonders whether she has the courage to enter. She turns on the radio and takes out a crossword puzzle. “I don’t know if I’m ready to do this,” she says.<You’re with Ford, in the car, right? Her return is key to the whole piece, so it’s huge that you were present. How did you make sure that happened?/pw Yes, I was in the car. I timed my trip around her return to the house. She knew she was going to go see it with the lawyer in a few weeks, so I waited until she was going on her own and went with her then. If she hadn’t been going on her own, I would not have taken her there. I feel pretty strongly that you can’t manufacture scene in a narrative story and pass it off as genuine observation. That’s a lie. It’s a little like narrative plagiarism. So, I waited until she was going on her own, and I planned my trip around that./es

It has been more than two years since she was last here – two years since her famous son betrayed her and the foreclosure specialists arrived with moving trucks. She fixates on the house during the long nights alone in her one-bedroom apartment, dreaming about all the good memories and waking every few hours because of the bad.

“I have to see it,” she says now. Helen turns off the radio and walks to the house. “The only way I’ll ever move on is by getting back in there.” A blue padlock is on the front door that she had once been too trusting to lock.<This sentence says much with little./pw A sign that reads “Danger: No Playing” is planted in the front yard, where she had hosted graduation parties for her children — four of her own, four adopted and at least 30 foster kids. Cigarette butts and half-empty beer cans litter the makeshift basketball court, where one of those children had turned into a star.<You delay identifying the son gone bad. Why? Talk, if you would, about how withholding information can serve narrative./pw I think sometimes holding back on information for a few beats can help build tension, especially by foreshadowing that “one of those children turned into a star.” Now, I hope, a reader is wondering: Who? Why? What happened? And they are making an investment in reading the next paragraph, and then the next./es

Helen’s lawyer, Dennis Benzan, stands on the front steps, waiting to greet her. The house belongs to the bank now, and Helen doesn’t have the authority to enter alone. Benzan punches numbers into the padlock, then turns toward his client.

“Technically, I should tell you that we are going to be trespassing,” he says.<Interesting! What qualms did you have about this?/pw I didn’t, really. We were with the lawyer. It had been her house. It felt like a minor offense, but it was interesting to me because it reinforced how much Helen had lost, and how infuriating that must be for her./es He asks Helen if she’d wear a mask to protect herself from dust and mold, but she waves him off.

“This is my house,” she says. “I can handle it.”

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by Paige Williams | Apr 30, 2013 | posted in #longreads, annotation tuesday! | comments (0)
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Prize storytelling: The 2013 Pulitzers

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At some point, we’ll round up some of the better deadline storytelling from the past two weeks’ historic news out of Boston and Texas and Washington, D.C., and Mississippi and Cambridge and Watertown, but let’s end the week on a positive note, by remembering the great work of this year’s recently announced Pulitzer winner and finalists. In the features category, John Branch of the New York Times won for his narrative in the widely admired celebrated package “Snow Fall,” about a deadly avalanche in Washington State and the science behind such disasters. A passage:

Unknown4Saugstad was mummified. She was on her back, her head pointed downhill. Her goggles were off. Her nose ring had been ripped away. She felt the crushing weight of snow on her chest. She could not move her legs. One boot still had a ski attached to it. She could not lift her head because it was locked into the ice.

But she could see the sky. Her face was covered only with loose snow. Her hands, too, stuck out of the snow, one still covered by a pink mitten. Using her hands like windshield wipers, she tried to flick snow away from her mouth. When she clawed at her chest and neck, the crumbs maddeningly slid back onto her face. She grew claustrophobic.

Breathe easy, she told herself. Do not panic. Help will come. She stared at the low, gray clouds. She had not noticed the noise as she hurtled down the mountain. Now, she was suddenly struck by the silence.

The two finalists were Kelley Benham, of the Tampa Bay Times, for “Never Let Go,” an elegant narrative series about her “micro-preemie” daughter, and the Washington Post’s Eli Saslow, author of “Life of a salesman,” a beautifully done piece about a swimming pool salesman struggling in a debilitating economy. For the stories behind the stories: Branch walked a University of Georgia and Twitter audience through “Snow Fall” recently; Benham’s colleague Ben Montgomery talked to her about “Never Let Go” for Storyboard; and Storyboard spoke with Saslow in detail about his salesman piece and more.

For the full list of Pulitzer winners and finalists, go here. Warm congrats to all, and thank you for your work.

by Paige Williams | Apr 26, 2013 | posted in narrative news | comments (1)
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The story of a moment

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When the bombs went off, we were talking about Miranda. Specifically, we* were talking about David Simon’s treatment of the Miranda warning in his book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. The passage opens this way:

You are a citizen of a free nation, having lived your adult life in a land of guaranteed civil liberties, and you commit a crime of violence, whereupon you are jacked up, hauled down to a police station, and deposited in a claustrophobic anteroom with three chairs, a table, and no windows. There you sit for a half hour or so until a police detective—a man you have never met before, a man who can in no way be mistaken for a friend—enters the room with a thin stack of lined notepaper and a ball-point pen.

The detective offers a cigarette, not your brand, and begins an uninterrupted monologue that wanders back and forth for a half hour more, eventually coming to rest in a familiar place: “You have the absolute right to remain silent.”

The chapter unpacks the rights line by line in a voice-driven hypothetical that functions as narrative exposition, revealing how this aspect of the U.S. criminal justice system works from the perspective of the accused—

You sign your name and the monologue resumes. The detective assures you that he has informed you of these rights because he wants you to be protected, because there is nothing that concerns him more than giving you every possible assistance in this very confusing and stressful moment in your life. If you don’t want to talk, he tells you, that’s fine. And if you want a lawyer, that’s fine, too, because first of all, he’s no relation to the guy you cut up, and second, he’s gonna get six hours overtime no matter what you do. But he wants you to know—and he’s been doing this a lot longer than you, so take his word for it—that your rights to remain silent and obtain qualified counsel aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Look at it this way, he says, leaning back in his chair. Once you up and call for that lawyer, son, we can’t do a damn thing for you.

—and of law enforcement—

A good interrogator controls the physical environment from the moment a suspect or reluctant witness is dumped in the small cubicle, left alone to stew in soundproof isolation. The law says that a man can’t be held against his will unless he’s to be charged with a crime, yet the men and women tossed into the interrogation room rarely ponder their legal status. They light cigarettes and wait, staring abstractedly at four yellow cinderblock walls, a dirty tin ashtray on a plain table, a small mirrored window, and a series of stained acoustic tiles on the ceiling. Those few with heart enough to ask whether they are under arrest are often answered with a question:

“Why? Do you want to be?”

“No.”

“Then sit the fuck down.”—

—and of society—

…The Miranda warning becomes a psychological hurdle, a pregnant moment that must be slipped carefully into the back-and-forth of the interrogation. For witnesses, the warning is not required and a detective can question those knowledgeable about a crime for hours without ever advising them of their rights. But should a witness suddenly say something that indicates involvement in a criminal act, he becomes—by the Supreme Court’s definition—a suspect, at which point he must be advised of his rights. In practice, a line between a potential suspect and a suspect can be thin, and a common sight in any American homicide unit is a handful of detectives standing outside an interrogation room, debating whether or not a Miranda warning is yet necessary.

Crafty, engaging, the passage is vegetables disguised as candy, and anyway, that’s what we were talking about when the bombs went off 3.6 miles away, at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

The discussion was dropped; laptops and Twitter feeds were opened. Brent McDonald, a video journalist for the New York Times, studied his screen for a minute or so before quietly getting up and leaving. Out came cell phones; into the classroom came curator Ann Marie Lipinski. Various fellows and their spouses had planned to watch, or report on, the marathon. Where was Borja? Ah, good, here he was, on the phone with Paula. Where was Nathalie? Ah, good, home. This went on for a few minutes, one name after another. The only person unaccounted for was David Abel, of the Globe. He had missed class to shoot a video follow-up to his feature about marathon runner Juli Windsor. Early on, he had worked from Heartbreak Hill, the final climb in the race, but was believed to have relocated to the finish line, in Back Bay. He had indeed been at the finish, we soon learned, and now, like everyone else, was working the most unthinkable of stories.

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by Paige Williams | Apr 25, 2013 | posted in narrative news | comments (0)
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“Why’s this so good?” No. 76: William Nack and “Pure Heart”

by Don Van Natta Jr. | April 23, 2013
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I still remember where I was—sitting in a dive bar in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., trying to tune out the noise from the beach bums and a jukebox blaring Madonna and the Bangles—when I read these words:

Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stallion barn, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his jugular….

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Van Natta

And I still remember how I felt as I read the words—exhilarated and chastened. At the time, I was a 25-year-old reporter doing grunt work for little pay in the Broward bureau of the Miami Herald, writing about fires, Medicare scams and city commission meetings.

….Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion collapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Kentucky, where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse’s vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.

Perfect. After reading that opening paragraph—and the entire piece, “Pure Heart,” published in the June 4, 1990, edition of Sports Illustrated—I knew two things: I’d never in my life write anything that spectacular. And I wanted to spend the rest of my life trying.

William Nack’s remarkable story affirmed not only my career choice but also, at the time, my favorite hobby. Back then, I was a weekend horseplayer or, more precisely, a fool that the horses usually played. In a manic manner with a few equally manic pals, I blew too many paychecks and sun-washed weekend afternoons at Gulfstream Park and Calder Race Course, pushing the few dollars I had through tellers’ betting windows. I was chasing what then seemed to be a mid-sized fortune, a cashed trifecta ticket that’d pay a few hundred bucks. Looking back on those days, there were many torn tickets, hurled programs, broken dates and heartbreaking photo finishes. At least the beer was always cold.

Back then, whenever I saw Nack’s byline in Sports Illustrated, I knew what followed would be special, maybe even monumental. From the age of 8, I have been a faithful reader of SI. When my first book was excerpted in its pages on March 23, 2003, it was one of the best days of my life. My all-time SI lineup is Frank Deford, Mark Kram, Franz Lidz, Richard Hoffer, Leigh Montville, Rick Reilly, Gary Smith and S.L. Price.

Batting cleanup is William Nack.

He’s an ex-Newsday reporter who jumped to sports—turf writing, first—after standing on a desk during a boozy office Christmas party in 1971 and impressing an editor by ticking off the name of every Kentucky Derby winner from 1875. As a party trick, he’d recite every golden word of the last page of The Great Gatsby (in Spanish, too). After joining SI in 1978, he wrote revealing profiles of boxers like Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston, Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran. Nack was the rare poet with an investigative reporter’s zeal for digging; his work told you things you didn’t know, written in a humane and graceful way. He wrote about the hard subjects with a light touch. He’s now 72 years old, lives in Washington, D.C., and writes, on occasion, for ESPN, where I also work (technically, we’re colleagues—imagine that).

A writer needs a lot of confidence and discipline to begin a story the way Nack begins “Pure Heart.” It isn’t even until the fourth paragraph that Nack identifies the horse as Secretariat, “Bold Ruler’s greatest son.”

The opening paragraph is so detached and clinical that I caught myself wondering whether Nack had witnessed the things he describes or whether he even cared much about them. The nameless horse is led by an unidentified person (a groom? a veterinarian? we can only guess) “haltingly” into a van. There, an unnamed person injects a needle into the horse’s jugular. Writers are taught very early on to fortify their first few sentences with names, details, voice, color, especially if we want any chance to win over the reader. Details are gold and the better the details, the better the story. Good writers also try not to lean on adverbs; they’re often a sentence’s crutches. Nack ignores both maxims here.

The aural description of the stallion’s collapse—“there was a crash”—is the hint that the scene was described to Nack by someone who had only heard it. An anonymous driver “trucks” the horse’s body from this unnamed place. Nack is simultaneously vague and exacting, creating an uneasy vibe of tension and mystery. The anonymity is done on purpose; it doesn’t really matter who is doing these things. More important is what is being done to that horse. The van ends up in Lexington, Ky., where, finally, a man with a name—Dr. Thomas Swerczek—awaits. He has a job to do, a necropsy to conduct. Dr. Swerczek is hardly a household name so Nack drops the doctor’s bio, like a boulder, on the back end of a sentence.

No matter. The payoff is the opening paragraph’s perfectly crafted final sentence: All of the horse’s vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.

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Liner notes: Storytelling with Gordon Lightfoot (yep, that’s right)

by Tommy Tomlinson | April 12, 2013
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Sometimes short nonfiction pays. Today we’re going to talk about a (mostly) nonfiction narrative of 457 words that made it to No. 2 on the pop charts.

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Tomlinson

In 1975, a freighter named the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a brutal storm on Lake Superior. All 29 crew members died. It was a major news story, especially in the Midwest and Canada, and one of the people who read the accounts was Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot. He sat down soon after the shipwreck to write about it. In later interviews, he said he wanted the entire song to be factually accurate. To make it work in a song structure, he had to hedge a little. But not much.

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was a sea chantey, plopped into the disco era, and it was more than six minutes long while pop hits tended to top out at three. As the great professor Conrad Fink used to say about any storytelling oddity, “Never do that—unless it works.”

To show why “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” works, I’ve written it out as if it were a news story. The parentheticals are mine. If you want, listen to the song as you go.

***

The legend lives on, from the Chippewa on down, of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee. The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead when the skies of November turn gloomy.

(Right away you get sweep and scope. Lightfoot plants the story in history. And when it comes to a literary hook, “The legend lives on” is right up there with “Once upon a time.”)

With a load of iron ore 26,000 tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty, that good ship and true was a bone to be chewed when the gales of November came early.

(He even has a nut graf! It’s not explicit, but you know the gales of November did something bad to a very big ship. That’s enough—and better than revealing everything up top.)

The ship was the pride of the American side, coming back from some mill in Wisconsin. As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most, with a crew and good captain well-seasoned, concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms when they left fully loaded for Cleveland.

And later that night when the ship’s bell rang, could it be the north wind they’d been feeling? 

(Building tension. If this were a TV episode, the bell would clang just as the show went to commercial.)

The wind in the wires made a tattletale sound and a wave broke over the railing. And every man knew, as the captain did too, t’was the witch of November come stealing. The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait when the gales of November came slashing. When afternoon came it was freezing rain in the face of a hurricane west wind.

(This section is loaded with sensory detail—the sound of the wind in the wires, the darkness when it’s supposed to be dawn, the tastes and smells that fill your mind just from reading the word “breakfast.” I love the “tattletale sound” of the wind, like a Shakespearean chorus foreshadowing the terror to come.)

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Notable Narrative: Dan Barry and the happy-ending kidnapping

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Screen Shot 2013-01-08 at 10.57.53 AMThe New York Times’ Dan Barry wrote himself onto 1A the other day with a story about an 89-year-old woman who spent two days locked in the trunk of her own car and then crawled to safety after being dumped in a cemetery. Barry’s rendering of Margaret Smith’s ordeal was “as close to poetry as journalism gets,” Wired investigative reporter Steve Silberman posted on Facebook, echoing widespread admiration. We’ve chosen the story as our latest Notable Narrative for its restrained lyricism (“It is a cemetery for the poor, all sand and weeds, with many graves marked by pressed metal instead of stone”), details (an “overfed” cat) and relative brevity (1,239 words). Barry launched directly into narrative action with verbs that ground the reader and push the story forward (sat, appeared, directed, snatched, locked, roared) and ended with—well, just read it. In tone, the piece is reminiscent of Rick Bragg’s moving Pulitzer-winning features for the Times, particularly the one about Oseola McCarty, a laundry worker who donated her life’s savings, $150,000, to the University of Southern Mississippi. Barry, who writes the consistently strong “This Land” column for the Times, opened his story about Margaret Smith this way:

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 …

 

 

by Paige Williams | Apr 11, 2013 | posted in notable narratives | comments (0)

“Why’s this so good?” No. 75: Dan P. Lee and the father who lost everything

by Joe Keohane | April 9, 2013
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My estimable friend and former colleague Paul Kix recently wrote a column in this space on John Jeremiah Sullivan. In it he cited an essay Sullivan wrote about the art of writing:

A fundamental law of storytelling is: withhold information. As the writer Paul Metcalf put it, “The only real work in creative endeavor is to keep things from falling together too soon.”

Keohane

Keohane

I thought of that line while revisiting Dan Lee’s devastating New York magazine feature, “4:52 on Christmas Morning,” about a Connecticut house fire that killed all three of a man’s young daughters. Particularly the lead:

Matt Badger believes that what happened happened for a reason. That his children were born in order to live in order to die the way they did, that out of it something meaningful must come. If at any point it becomes clear to him that he is wrong, that what happened is instead an anecdote of the universe’s brutal indifference, then he will kill himself.

The beauty of this passage is that there is nothing withheld, there’s no writerly misdirection, no trapdoor or blind hairpin turn. The impulse for many here would be to open with some lovely, sunny little scene from the past—preferably ending with a big-eyed child saying, “I wub you Daddy!”—to underscore the darkness to come.

But here, in this story about a whole family perishing in a wholly preventable Christmas morning fire, the darkness has already overtaken the story. No point in being cute about it. When we meet Matt Badger, the divorced father, who lives, as all of his children died, we meet a man in hell. Hell is where we begin, and, as it’s suggested in this lead—we can’t expect the universe to become less indifferent—hell is likely where it will end.

From there, Lee settles in to tell you the story of that night, a story so brutal that it barely needs to be written, it just spreads. For 678 words, he tells it slowly and carefully:

Inside 2267 Shippan, a 116-year-old Victorian house, three girls—Lily, 9, and her 7-year-old twin sisters, Sarah and Grace—had wanted to make a fire on Christmas Eve… 

The fire was warming the newly opened-up first floor by the time Madonna’s parents, Lomer and Pauline Johnson, arrived from Lomer’s final shift playing Santa Claus at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The artificial tree was lit; the stockings were hung. Earlier in the day, the girls had played outside, riding their bikes in the street… 

Grace lit electric candles. Madonna cooked a ham dinner. She was, at 47, among the most successful advertising executives in New York City; she had recently divorced her husband and had bought the house the previous December…

At 10 p.m., the girls were herded up the stairs to their pink-and-white bedrooms on the third floor. They believed that Santa Claus was nearing the air above Connecticut. It was difficult to get them to sleep… 

Lily was, despite being the oldest, always the most sensitive, and she made a fuss about not wanting to sleep alone; she and Sarah fell asleep together, in the twins’ turreted room. Grace ended up in bed with her grandparents…

It’s hard not to feel a chill reading that.

Throughout this passage, Lee’s tone appears on its surface to be cold and reportorial, but look closely enough and you can see it’s trembling. Like the 116-year-old Victorian, there is fire in the walls. The result is more effective at building tension than it would be had Lee spent the same amount of time rolling the drums and summoning the gods of thunder. Tragedy of this dimension doesn’t like to announce itself. It prefers to just slide in.

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“How’d you find that secret-compartments story, Brendan Koerner?”

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Brendan Koerner’s recent Wired piece about Alfred Anaya, a “genius at installing secret compartments in cars,” was nothing short of delicious as a piece of storytelling and discovery. Sure, someone’s out there fabricating automotive hidey-holes for smuggled drugs and other contraband, but how often do readers get to put a face and a backstory to that niche subculture? Anaya’s situation came to light after a certain customer brought in his outfitted truck, saying his “trap” (as it turns out a stash spot is known) was stuck—and that he wanted it unstuck:

Anaya was unsettled by this request, for he had suspicions about the nature of Esteban’s work. There is nothing intrinsically illegal about building traps, which are commonly used to hide everything from pricey jewelry to legal handguns. But the activity runs afoul of California law if an installer knows for certain that his compartment will be used to transport drugs. The maximum penalty is three years in prison. Anaya thus thought it wise to deviate from his standard no-questions-asked policy before agreeing to honor his warranty. “There’s nothing in there I shouldn’t know about, is there?” he asked. Esteban assured him that he needn’t worry.

Koerner

Koerner

Voilà, a narrative turning point. Koerner’s tale involves subwoofers, snitchery, pro ballers, cocaine, the DEA, foreclosure, prison. Listen to Koerner—whose new book, The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking, will be published in June—explain how he found this marvelous yarn and what he (and every good narrative writer) looks for in Story:

Journalists are conditioned to dismiss press releases as inbox-clogging irritants, and for good reason: 99.8 percent of them contain nothing more than vapid boasts about trivial events. As a general rule, there are no great stories to be found in blindly disseminated documents that describe mundane news in the most hyperbolic terms possible. (“A revolutionary new [X] that will break new ground!”)

But when I’m scouting for new stories to pursue, I do pay close attention to the press releases issued by the various United States Attorneys’ Offices—particularly the offices located in parts of the country that receive too little attention from New York-based reporters such as myself. Sifting through those releases once helped me find a tale I wrote back in 2011, about a Cuban-Latvian slot-machine hacker who ran afoul of the law. And so in January 2012, I went hunting for another true-crime yarn amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the U.S. Attorneys’ press-release archives.

I spent hours reading about scores of cases that, while salacious in some respects, offered little in the way of narrative arc: felons convicted of possessing handguns, bank robbers who foolishly crossed state lines, drug addicts who used counterfeit bills. I was close to giving up the search when I came across a press release dated February 18, 2011, from the District of Kansas. It announced that three participants in a drug-trafficking ring had been found guilty of conspiring to distribute large quantities of cocaine and meth. The paragraph that jumped out at me was this one, concerning the crimes of a defendant named Alfred Anaya:

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by Paige Williams | Apr 5, 2013 | posted in how'd you find that story? | comments (0)
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7 great reads: this year’s ASME finalists in feature/profile writing

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Awards season continues with the announcement of the American Society of Magazine Editors’ finalists for the National Magazine Award. The organization this week honored 62 publications in 23 categories, with winners to be revealed in New York on May 2. The National Magazine Awards have long honored the best of narrative journalism, especially in the Feature Writing category. This year, ASME combined the features bracket with the Profile category. Here are short excerpts from each of the seven finalists in “Feature Writing Incorporating Profile Writing:”

20101107_pam_colloff-9895Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly, for “The Innocent Man: Part I” and “The Innocent Man: Part II,” about the wrongful incarceration of a man believed to have killed his wife. (Colloff recently annotated the project in Storyboard’s Annotation Tuesday! series.)

The stack of old documents contained critical clues that might have helped identify Christine’s killer had they ever been followed up on. Michael learned from a 1986 sheriff’s deputy’s report that several of his neighbors had seen a green van parked by the vacant, wooded lot behind his home around the time of the murder and had observed its driver walking into the overgrown area that extended up to his privacy fence. He read an internal memo to Wood about a call received from one of Christine’s relatives in Phoenix who reported that a check his father-in-law had made out to her had been cashed after her death with what appeared to be a forged signature. (On later inspection, Michael would realize the signature was actually his own.) The internal memo, which was unsigned, included a telling note to Wood: “They seem to think that Chris’ purse was stolen, course, we know better than that.” Though Christine’s purse was missing from the crime scene, Anderson had brushed aside this detail by telling the jury that Michael had staged a burglary to deflect attention away from himself. 

dexterDexter Filkins, The New Yorker, for “Atonement,” about an Iraq veteran’s attempt to make amends for one family’s suffering:

In the early hours one morning last September, Lu Lobello rose from his bed, switched on a light, and stared into the video camera on his computer. It was two-thirty. The light cast a yellow pall on Lobello’s unshaven face. Almost every night was like this. Lobello couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop thinking about his time in Iraq. Around San Diego, he’d see a baby—in a grocery store, in a parking lot—and the image would come back to him: the blood-soaked Iraqi infant, his mother holding him aloft by one foot. “Why did you shoot us?’’ the woman demanded over and over. Other times, Lobello would see a Mercedes—a blue or white one, especially—and he’d recall the bullet-riddled sedan in the Baghdad intersection, the dead man alongside it in the street, the elderly woman crying in broken English, “We are the peace people! We are the peace people!” He’d remember that the barrel of his machine gun was hot to the touch.

graeberCharles Graeber, Wired, for “Inside the Mansion—and the Mind—of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Internet,” about the federal case against the controversial mastermind of the Internet storage behemoth Megaupload:

The DOJ maintains that the legitimate storage business was only a front, like a Mafia pork store; the real money was made out back, where Megaupload was a mega-swapmeet for some $500 million worth of pirated material, including movies, TV shows, music, books, videogames, and software. Kim, they contend, was the Jabba the Hutt-like presence running this grand bazaar of copyright criminality with impunity from his Kiwi Tatooine, protected by laser break beams and guards and guns, CCTV and infrared and even escape pods—including a helicopter and high-performance sports cars. The FBI also believed Kim possessed a special portable device that would wipe his servers all across the globe, destroying the evidence. They called this his doomsday button.

Operation Takedown was carried out by armed New Zealand special police and monitored by the FBI via video link. Descriptions of the raid varied from one news outlet to another, but most included the cops’ dramatic helicopter arrival on the expansive Dotcom Mansion lawn and their struggles with a security system fit for a Mafia don.

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by Paige Williams | Apr 4, 2013 | posted in #longreads, narrative news | comments (0)
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