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NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling on golden radio, Yoda parallels and the Robert Krulwich moment

[The third installment in an ongoing series of posts by Julia Barton about audio narratives. –Ed.]

A ghostly crowd of voices parades across the public radio airwaves every day: politicians and hosts, foreign correspondents, callers, singers. Sometimes they catch our interest, but as soon as one voice is gone and replaced by the next, it’s usually forgotten.

Not so the voices in Daniel Zwerdling’s stories. They persist. They are not especially remarkable people: a veteran’s wife who insists on huge holiday displays although her family is poor; a military doctor giving a dull PowerPoint demonstration. You may not remember their names, but you have imagined them – their voices stay alive in your mind.

This is because of something we call, in the business, “good tape.” Good tape is the golden currency of audio stories. Without it, they are just another forgettable drop in the day’s torrent of sound.

Zwerdling, who started out as a staff writer at The New Republic, is now part of NPR’s special investigative unit. Zwerdling’s reports on topics as diverse as NASA, pesticides and the Department of Homeland Security have won nearly every broadcast prize, including the DuPont, Peabody, Polk and IRE awards. Maybe it’s just the result of more than three decades in the field, but he seems to get great tape no matter what he puts on the air. So I called him to see if I could glean the Yoda-like secret of his craft.

Turns out, the Yoda thing is not exactly a joke.

“I’m short, and I have short, stubby arms,” Zwerdling admits in his trademark amiable voice. “And in order to mic (interview subjects) closely – because I always mic closely to get very clean sound – I sit right, like, almost on their laps. Big, burly generals will literally grab my arm and start pushing me away and say, ‘Do you have to do this?’ and I’ll say, ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, but it’ll make you sound better!’ I’ll sit right next to them, as close as I have to, to hold the microphone right at the side of their mouths. So it’s very intimate.”

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by Julia Barton | Mar 2, 2012 | posted in audio narratives | comments (2)
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Which CRMA finalists will win big in Vegas?

The City and Regional Magazine Association and the Missouri School of Journalism recently announced the finalists for the 2012 National City and Regional Magazine Awards. Racking up the most nominations (more than 10 each) were Texas Monthly, Los Angeles Magazine, Philadelphia Magazine, Atlanta Magazine, Chicago Magazine and 5280 Magazine (Denver’s city mag).

Winners will be announced at the CRMA conference to be held May 19-21 in Las Vegas. Categories include everything from food writing to photography and design, but we were most interested in the feature, profile and reporting categories. Several people are finalists for stories we’ve already highlighted on the site, such as Pamela Colloff’s “Church Burners,” Justin Heckert’s “The Town That Blew Away” and Robert Sanchez’s “The Fire Next Door,” but there are also some nice entries from people we hadn’t noticed before.

You can see the full list of finalists for yourself, but there are no links in the press release, so we thought we’d provide a few for you. Here’s a taste of a single story from each finalist in CRMA’s “Writer of the Year” category. Happy reading!

Justin Heckert of Atlanta Magazine. Here’s a passage from “Her Own Flesh and Blood”:

The congregation read the letter, heard what the pastor had to say. Hebron Christian decided to support the Monfortis, even though AIDS was such a frightening word.

Of course, everyone wondered how they got it. Everyone asked. Their friends asked, the doctors asked; her parents were incessant in their asking. For a while they told a fib, just to quiet everyone down, to keep up some kind of normal-family facade; she said that she probably got a needle stick somewhere along the line, being a nurse, but she didn’t believe that. When Jeff was in New York, before they were married, he’d lived another life; he’d slept with men. This was something he’d told her, but he’d also told her he stopped when he found God. But then he’d confided to her, and to the men in the church, that he still had a lot of conflicting feelings, and that while she was pregnant with Jonathan, he’d been unfaithful with another man. It made sense; Jonathan was the only one who tested negative. She loved Jeff and had decided to stay with him when he told her all this.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Mar 1, 2012 | posted in narrative news | comments (0)
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“Why’s this so good?” No. 32: Darcy Frey on the brink

by Laurie Hertzel | February 28, 2012

It’s been 16 years since I first read Darcy Frey’s piece about the overwhelming, stressful job of being an air traffic controller – 16 years since I first swore never to fly into Newark. Frey’s powerful narrative scarred me for life.

“Something’s Got To Give” ran in The New York Times Magazine in 1996, 15 years after President Ronald Reagan broke the PATCO union and fired more than 11,000 controllers. Frey made it clear that things had not recovered. He concentrated on Newark, the busiest air traffic control room in the country, where he found aging, unreliable computers; mandatory overtime to the point of exhaustion; steadily increasing air traffic; and so much stress that controllers sometimes went bonkers. It happened so often that they had a term for it: “going down the pipes.” The driving theme of the piece is staving off disaster.

I re-read the story this week, and even if the facts no longer hold up (I have no idea how much has changed in the industry), the power of the piece certainly does. I got scared all over again and have renewed my vow to stay out of New Jersey.

How did he do it?

It’s all about control. Frey has control over his material, his tone, his voice, his characters and his structure. As you read the piece – which follows a couple of men managing a whole lot of airplanes on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the busiest air travel day of the year – you know instantly that you are in capable hands.

In this piece, as in others of his that I have read (“Does Anyone Here Think This Baby Can Live?” and his book, “The Last Shot”), Frey is a master at what some writers call the pivot and some call the swoop and at least one (Alex Tizon) calls “blobs.” That is, he gets you going down the line of the story until you are so captivated you can’t turn away, and then he turns away, away from the narrative line and into facts and background and information (blobs) that you need to know in order to understand what is going on. And you do not get impatient with him because he tells it so cleanly and engagingly, and because he knows exactly the moment at which you will get annoyed or impatient, and it is right before then that he pivots (or swoops) back into the story.

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Turning a newspaper project into a book: Christopher Goffard on “You Will See Fire”

We recently noticed that Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard had expanded a series he had done for the paper into the book “You Will See Fire.” We’ve talked with other narrative journalists who have done a similar thing (David Finkel, Tom French), but in this case, we thought it would be interesting to focus specifically on that transition.

Goffard has been at the L.A. Times for six years. Before that he worked at the St. Petersburg Times, where he was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. He has also written a novel called “Snitch Jacket.” His current book explores the complicated life and death of John Kaiser, an American Catholic priest in Kenya, and Charles Gathenji, the Kenyan lawyer who befriended Kaiser. In these excerpts from our phone conversation this week, Goffard talks with us about finding the ideal length for a story, blowing deadlines and dealing with ambiguity.

Your book started out as a 2009 newspaper project for the L.A. Times. What was the extent of the newspaper piece? I’m remembering three installments.

Yes, it was 11,000 words, three installments, and that was a mighty act of compression, because I had many boxes of material and much more material that went unused.

A lot of stuff was edited out of the series when it ran in the paper. It seemed like the book was the natural place for all that extra material.

When did that idea first occur to you?

I suppose when I was writing the series. It seemed like there were a lot of avenues to explore that you just didn’t have room for in the newspaper. Like Gathenji in the series is reduced, if I remember correctly, to the last installment. He becomes the vehicle through which you understand how the mystery unfolds.

But in the book he’s central from the very beginning. It becomes a story of two men – that’s the key structural difference between the series and the book.

Can you talk a little bit more about that? Did you at some point consider having the story center more exclusively on Kaiser? At what point did you decide to weave the two together?

The first draft of the book was – it resembled a biography of Kaiser much more than the final draft. The editor, Alane Mason at Norton, said, “This is not a biography of Kaiser. It’s the story of his life as it intersects with Kenyan history, and I want more of Gathenji in the story.”

I went back and interviewed Gathenji for hours more. I put in a lot of material about his childhood, which wound up being fascinating to me. He grew up in colonial Kenya in what they called a protected village during the Mau Mau uprising.

So I think it’s as much about Gathenji as it is about Kaiser, in the final analysis. They really have a lot in common; they’re reflections of each other. They’re both extremely brave men who are daring in their own ways to stand up to a police state when a lot of other people are silent.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Feb 24, 2012 | posted in words | comments (0)
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Chris Jones on life and death in Zanesville

Our latest Notable Narrative is “Animals,” Chris Jones’ account of the creatures set loose from a private menagerie last fall in Zanesville, Ohio.

The Esquire story works in part because Jones plays its two tones so sharply against each other – small-town mundane reality is upended by sudden drama. But Jones’ writing really pops because of its tight focus and discipline. He doesn’t bother establishing the daily rhythms that are upset by what follows – he just opens with the animals’ release, or at least as close as he can get to it: nervous horses in flight before the predators appear.

A retired schoolteacher in the neighborhood is not surprised to see horses running the fields. Even when he sees a bear chasing them moments later, he is alarmed but not shocked – everyone knew that Terry Thompson kept bears and other wild animals on his property. But when a full-grown lion stalks him from a few feet away, we go down the rabbit hole of fear with him. How many animals are loose?

The police, too, take the 911 reports in stride until the number of escaped predators continues to grow. A wolf is killed, a bear is shot, a lioness tracked and executed under a porch farther down the road. And then they run into the tigers. Jones plays out the revelation of just how bad the situation is bit by bit, putting us on the ground with those deputized to contain the problem as they realize what they’re facing.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Feb 23, 2012 | posted in notable narratives | comments (0)

All the narrative edification you need: our 2012 conference roundup

It’s time for our annual almost-spring listing of 2012 writing events and conferences. From California to Texas and Boston, there are options to work on your writing or storytelling skills coast to coast. Whether you want to sharpen up your scene-setting, peek into the world of multimedia, or just network with others who are devoted to narrative, we bet you can find what you’re looking for here.

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.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Feb 21, 2012 | posted in narrative news | comments (1)
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“Why’s this so good?” No. 31: Susan Orlean maps obsession

by Andrea Pitzer | February 17, 2012

Susan Orlean’s “Orchid Fever” first ran in The New Yorker on January 23, 1995. It had a second life as a book, and a third as a movie, in which adapting the latter from the former drives a screenwriter to madness, ruin and redemption.

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.

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What we’re reading: kung-fu college, the new immortals, and life in isolation

Reflections on Tiananmen Square 20 years on. A look at the use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons today. A father rolling through an infantile old age as part of a new generation of “Immortals.”

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.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Feb 16, 2012 | posted in words | comments (0)
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The essence of story, in a 358-word song

by Tommy Tomlinson | February 14, 2012

When I was little, my mama worked the early shift at the seafood plant. She’d drop me off at my Aunt Janice’s house before dawn and they’d lay me down on a pallet in the living room. Country music played low on the stereo. I knew Charley Pride and Loretta Lynn before I knew words.

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.

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Meg Kissinger on writing the tough stories

Our February Editors’ Roundtable tackled “The law creates barriers to getting care for the mentally ill,” a story by Meg Kissinger of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Addressing the difficult question of “imminent danger” and the mentally ill, Kissinger looked at a recent murder by a schizophrenic man whose parents had tried, unsuccessfully, to get him committed. Her story also introduced readers to Alberta Lessard, a local woman whose legal battle reset the standards for commitment decades ago.

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.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Feb 8, 2012 | posted in editors' roundtable | comments (2)
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