Nieman Storyboard - A project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard » Madeleine Blais

“What’s on your syllabus?”

Paige Williams — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 14:35:59 +0000

Every narrative journalist can point to a story or a book, or two, that changed their lives, and that made them want to tell true stories. What story does it for you? Where was your love born? When we asked about influential writing via Twitter, answers came in a flurry. Wright Thompson said North Toward Home, by Willie Morris; Mara Grunbaum said, “Up and Then Down: The Lives of Elevators,” by Nick Paumgarten; Will Hobson said Friday Night Lights, by Buzz Bissinger, and “Tonight On Dateline, This Man Will Die,” by Luke Dittrich; Jordan Conn said “The Last Shot,” by Darcy Frey; Andy Pantazi said “Pearls before Breakfast,” by Gene Weingarten; William Browning said Larry L. King’s Texas Monthly profile of Willie Morris; Tom Junod said the “holy trinity” of Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway; Diane Shipley said Zoe Heller’s Sunday Times columns and Nora Ephron’s breasts (“so to speak”). And on it went.

We wondered what’s on college reading lists these days and asked some distinguished writer/professors of narrative what stories or books they assign — but also why. Stand by for Jacqui Banaszynski, Mark Bowden, Madeleine Blais, Rob Boynton, Jeff Sharlet and Rebecca Skloot.

Jacqui Banaszynski, University of Missouri

The course is Intermediate Writing. I have students in my writing class pick most of what we read and discuss. That allows them to explore and discover what they respond to, which gives them more ownership of the techniques at work in effective writing and keeps the class varied and fresh. Their choices range from narrative to investigative pieces to sports columns. Along the way, I have a handful of standards (some book chapters and magazine pieces, but mostly newspaper stories) that I pull out to emphasize the components of the craft:

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. This has become my irreverent bible. It offers an array of solid lessons on writing, but mostly makes struggling writers feel a little less alone and a lot less crazy. It lets them in on two necessary secrets: Writing is damn hard work, and all writers feel like fakes.

The Things They Carried, a novel, by Tim O’Brien. I start my in-depth writing class with the first chapter. That means I reread it twice a year, and it always reveals something new and fairly astonishing. It is a masterpiece of foreshadowing, building tension, revelatory detail, character development, pacing, wordplay, metaphor and layered meaning. Students then write personal essays built around a similar prompt: The things I carried, wore, ate, lost, etc.

Hiroshima, by John Hersey. I have found nothing that better demonstrates the reporting that is both required and possible for powerful literary nonfiction. We analyze what Hersey would have had to notice and ask to reconstruct such precise, vivid and credible scenes. As for the writing, it is a study in simplicity. Hersey uses verbs that are strong but seldom flashy, sentences that are tight and direct, and a minimum of embellishment to let the raw drama of the narrative come through.

“A Boy of Unusual Vision,” by Alice Steinbach (Baltimore Sun). A great example of a rich story told entirely through a series of tight, focused scenes. Also demonstrates the kind of reporting evident in Hiroshima. Steinbach is fearless and compassionate in talking to Calvin about his blindness.

“From ordinary girl to international icon” (Terry Schiavo’s obituary), by Kelley Benham (St. Petersburg Times, now Tampa Bay Times). The first paragraph is a study in the use of parallel construction and pacing. Benham controls both throughout the piece, showing how structure itself can carry readers along. She also demonstrates the power of selection – choosing just the details that reveal the core of the story being told.

“The Girl in the Mirror,” by Julia Sommerfeld (Seattle Times). A long, complex story made readable through tight, focused and purposeful scenes. Strong example of immersion reporting, rather than reconstruction; Sommerfeld witnessed much of the action. Great use of analogy to help readers see and understand the inaccessible (facial deformation and surgery).

“Richard Nixon’s Long Journey Ends,” by David Von Drehle (Washington Post). I use this to demonstrate a writer’s voice and authority. It dares to have a strong point of view. It’s also a study in word selection and in essay-like structure.

“Digging JFK Grave Was His Honor,” by Jimmy Breslin (New York Herald Tribune). Another study in point of view, but this one demonstrates that classic lesson of “zig, don’t zag.” Breslin goes where no one else thought to, and finds a story all can relate to.

“What a Day!” by Ken Fuson (Des Moines Register). This shows how a mundane assignment can be turned into art in the hands of a creative and bold writer. The single long, breathless sentence echoes the feeling of the day itself.

“Old ladies ‘do what we can,’ ” by Alex Tizon (Seattle Times). This is one of 14 short dispatches that were part of “Crossing America,” filed on the road from Seattle to New York City immediately after the 9/11 attacks. All are great examples of “place profiles,” but this one stands out as a study in character development.

Jacqui Banaszynski (@jacquib) is the Knight Chair in Editing professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, senior collaborations editor for the Public Insight Network of American Public Media and a faculty fellow at the Poynter Institute. She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for “AIDS in the Heartland,” a series about a gay farm couple facing AIDS.

Madeleine Blais, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

For a class entitled Diaries, Memoirs and Journals, I require a shifting list of full-length books as well as articles and essays. This fall’s assigned books include:

This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff. I find this book a pitch-perfect evocation of the powerlessness of being a child — and of the power that ensues when an adult retaliates with his version of events. This memoir is widely considered one of the finest exemplars of the genre.

Father’s Day, by Buzz Bissinger. This new work by the author of the acclaimed nonfiction narrative Friday Night Lights and other books uses the journey motif to move back and forth in time, and possesses a candor that becomes its own armor in the service of revealing some of life’s less appealing truths about oneself.

Name All the Animals, by Alison Smith. Alison Smith experienced the loss of her idolized teenaged brother while still a child, and her memoir is both healing and devastating.

Brother, I Am Dying, by Edwidge Danticat. The author’s elderly uncle from Haiti enters several circles of hell when he is detained at the infamous Krome Avenue Detention Center in Miami while trying to enter the United States legally. A sad story ennobled by the quiet grace with which it is told.

Madeleine Blais won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing while at the Miami Herald. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has written for newspapers including the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe. She is the author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in nonfiction and named one of the Top 100 sports books of the 20th Century by ESPN; The Heart Is an Instrument; Portraits in Journalism; and Uphill Walkers: Memoir of a Family, which won a Massachusetts Book Award.

Mark Bowden, University of Delaware

The course is called Masterpieces of Nonfiction.

“The American Male at Age Ten,” a short piece by Susan Orlean which she undertook after being approached to write a profile of Macauley Culkin, then the most famous 10-year-old in the world. Orlean wasn’t that interested in the actor, but was interested in studying a typical 10-year-old boy in hopes of better understanding men. She fails, but succeeds brilliantly in an essay that is sweet, funny and memorable. I love to assign this story because it shows that writing great nonfiction does not require dramatic subject matter, foreign travel or even huge amounts of time.

Hiroshima, by John Hersey, because of its historical importance in the genre of literary nonfiction, because of its relative simplicity as a piece of reporting and writing, and because it is a powerful and compelling read. Hersey illustrates the importance of asking, “Who and what, at the most basic level, is this story about?” In the case of the atom bomb, it was the one piece of the story that had not been reported — and which was the most important.

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, because every time I assign it my students love it. I enjoy pointing out Capote’s careful attention to craft. It also prompts interesting conversations about choosing subject matter, immersion in reporting and how the values and experiences of the writer shape the best nonfiction in the same way they shape fiction. There are also four films it has inspired – I usually choose one – so it’s fun to see how story is translated to the screen.

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, because it is such a joy to read, and it illustrates how a great reporter and writer can make something entirely new out of material that has supposedly been reported to death. The book is essentially an extended essay, or argument, as nearly all of Wolfe’s stories are. It is also useful to get students thinking about the importance of voice.

The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer. I consider it to be one of the classics of American literature, and Mailer’s best work. The book is really two for the price of one, not just because of its length (I give my students plenty of time to read it), but because Mailer shifts gears so dramatically in the middle, first telling the story of Gary Gilmore as he imagines it really was, and then adopting a completely different style, telling how the same story was transformed by TV and the press into a bizarre media event.

The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger, because it is a wonderful example of how a skillful writer can conjure a “true” story by cleverly reporting around the edges of that which he cannot know. Junger could not, of course, interview the doomed fishermen aboard the Andrea Gale, but that doesn’t stop him from writing a thrilling account of their final moments in the storm. I love going through the book chapter by chapter, and showing how he does it.

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, because it lets me introduce the memoir and because Didion was so ruthlessly honest in writing about herself. It demonstrates how rigorous self-examination must be to rise above self-indulgence, a threshold very few memoirs achieve.

“Urban Cowboy,” by Aaron Latham, both the original article and the movie. The article cleverly ridicules the faux cowboys of modern Houston, who work on oilrigs and dress up in boots, buckles, and 10-gallon hats to go dancing with the gals. Turns out the gals ride the mechanical bulls better than they do, which leads to heartbreak. The movie (which Latham co-wrote) dispenses with the wit entirely, and turns these wannabe cowpokes into romantic heroes.

“The String Theory,” David Foster Wallace‘s amazing essay about what it takes to be the best in the world at anything, in this case, tennis. He examines the question not by studying the best tennis player in the world – he does that in a later, more famous piece called “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” – but by profiling Michael Joyce, an unknown second-tier tennis pro who, as talented and hard-working as he is, will never reach the topmost ranks of the game. Why? The story illustrates how a writer can elevate something as mundane as a sports story into something truly memorable by asking the right questions — not of the subject alone but of himself.

I also throw in some of my own work – this semester Black Hawk Down and a few shorter ones – to give students a chance to pick my brain about how they were reported and written.

Mark Bowden is a best-selling author and journalist. His book Black Hawk Down, a finalist for the National Book Award, was the basis of the film of the same name. His book Killing Pablo won the Overseas Press Club’s 2001 Cornelius Ryan Award as the book of the year. His book Guests of the Ayatollah, an account of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, was listed by Newsweek as one of the 50 “books of our times.” His most recent books are The Best Game Ever, the story of the 1958 NFL championship game; Worm, which tells the story of the Conficker computer worm; and The Finish, an account of the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, to be published in October. Bowden is a Vanity Fair contributing editor and a national correspondent for The Atlantic.

Rob Boynton, New York University

Boynton’s excerpted reading list for his Literary Reportage class at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, sans liner notes:

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, by Joan Didion

Up in the Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell

Fame and Obscurity, by Gay Talese

Iphigenia in Forest Hills, by Janet Malcolm

“Introduction,” by John Carey, The Faber Book of Reportage

Herodotus and the Art of Noticing, by Ryszard Kapuscinski

“Why I Write,” by George Orwell

Hospital Sketches, by Louisa May Alcott

“The Dream Factory,” by Clive Thompson (Wired)

“The Hand-Off,” by Ted Conover (New York Times magazine)

“How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” by Lillian Ross

“Ingrid Sichy, Girl of the Zeitgeist,” Janet Malcolm (New Yorker)

“The American Male at Age Ten,” by Susan Orlean (Esquire)

“Church and State” memo from Harold Ross to Raul Fleischmann

“Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” by Norman Mailer (Esquire)

“Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” by Ron Rosenbaum (Esquire)

“A Few Words about Breasts,” by Nora Ephron (Esquire)

“Nickel and Dimed,” by Barbara Ehrenreich

“Tilting at Tree Bags,” by Ian Frazier (Mother Jones)

“Out of Iraq,” by Adam Davidson (Harper’s)

Robert S. Boynton is the author of The New New Journalism and director of the magazine journalism program at New York University.

Jeff Sharlet, Dartmouth

The course is called Whose Story Is It?, borrowed from Jane Kramer’s great little book Whose Art Is It?

“In the Current,” from Boys of My Youth, by Jo Ann Beard. A portrait of the artist-to-be as a bored little girl, grasping metaphor for the first time. We read this to think about how we start to become writers.

“The Cross and the Color Line,” from Blood Done Sign My Name, by Timothy B. Tyson. Tyson remembers what he understood of the murder of MLK when he was a boy. We read this to think about the intersection between the personal and the public.

“Mic Checked,” by Rachel Signer, from KillingTheBuddha.com. I thought this was the best piece I read on the experience of the Occupy movement. I like it because it’s more or less topical, by a writer breaking radically from her usual style, and because it’s in the second person. I normally forbid the second person for the duration of the term, but I start with this piece to remind students to break my rules when they need to.

“Artists in Uniform,” by Mary McCarthy. One of my favorite descriptions of a conversation, between McCarthy and an anti-Semitic colonel she meets (and despite herself, flirts with) on a train. It’s good early in the term because it invites close reading and because the setup is so simple: a conversation, unplanned. There’s a companion piece by McCarthy, about writing it, called “Settling the Colonel’s Hash,” and a much later scholarly analysis of that essay called “Unsettling the Colonel’s Hash,” that I don’t assign but make available.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion. I assign it for the same reason most people assign it: because it’s one of the books that made me want to be a writer. That may have been generational, though. My students like it, but they don’t love it. None come to class wearing oversized sunglasses.

“Professor Seagull,” by Joseph Mitchell. I have them buy Up in the Old Hotel, but all we read at the beginning is “Seagull,” set up for a slow reveal. Meantime, the lesson is about voices.

“Animal Show,” by Rosemary Mahoney, from Whoredom in Kimmage. “Writer walks into a bar” is an old story. Mahoney makes it fresh by finding the right voices and giving them to us true.

Specimen Days excerpts, by Walt Whitman. I use Whitman to talk about the term “literary journalism.” It’s not a term he used, but exemplified the paradox inherent in the term through his love of literature past – piety – and fundamentally democratic impulse of journalism.

“Breathing In,” from Dispatches, by Michael Herr. An immersion in deep subjectivity. Also, a reminder that prose should move.

Safe Area Gorazde, by Joe Sacco. I taught Sacco’s Footnotes from Gaza to a big class last term, and it was one of the best teaching experiences I’ve had. I taught this earlier book of comics journalism, from Bosnia, to grad students at NYU years ago, and while they loved it, they couldn’t connect it to their own work. Turns out undergrads are more agile about moving between image and text.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo. This replaces Melissa Faye Green‘s great Praying for Sheetrock as my excursion into the full potential of third person.

“Down at the Cross,” by James Baldwin. This one’s been on and off my syllabus, but it’s going back on here because Baldwin moves between memoir and reportage and essay. I don’t want students to think they must choose.

“Slaughterhouse,” from The Forbidden Zone, by Michael Lesy. By this point in the term, I want students to be venturing further off campus. “Slaughterhouse,” a minor masterpiece, is great because it gives them license to just write down what happened. Everything that happened.

“Needle and Thread,” in Number Our Days, by Barbara Myerhoff. To help students be aware of their role in an interview. They’re part of the story whether they want to be or not.

The Convert, by Deborah Baker. I can’t explain, without giving away the ending, why I assign this innovative book. It’s a very fine book and a great exposure to a different kind of immersion, that of the archive. It’s also ideal for the kind of debates students are ready for by the end of the term.

“Joe Gould’s Secret,” by Joseph Mitchell. Another one I can’t explain without a spoiler. After its companion piece, “Professor Seagull,” early in the term, “Joe Gould’s Secret” breaks the smart students’ hearts. It makes them decide to become writers or to never write again. Both honorable paths.

Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) is the nationally bestselling author of The Family, C Street, and Sweet Heaven When I Die. He’s coauthor, with Peter Manseau, of Killing the Buddha, and co-editor, with Manseau, of Believer, Beware, both derived from KillingTheBuddha.com, the online literary magazine they founded in 2000. Sharlet is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Harper’s, and the Mellon Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Rebecca Skloot, most recently of the University of Memphis

As a text, I’m a big fan of Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (and I’m not just saying that because it’s a Nieman Foundation book and I’m doing this for a Nieman Foundation blog). It’s a wonderful collection of great writers talking about the essentials of nonfiction writing.

Structure: As for specific stories, structure is one of the most essential tools for writers to understand, so I absolutely harp on it in the classroom. We read and discuss a wide range of structures to really tease apart what structure is, how it’s held together, how it impacts the reading of a story. I always start teaching structure with something very basic, but still creative. One example: “How to Get Out of a Locked Trunk,” by Philip Weiss, which has a straightforward chronological structure (guy goes on a quest to figure out how to get out of a locked trunk). But of course the essay isn’t about getting out of a locked trunk – it’s about marriage, commitment, fear. Pieces like that are a good starting place to lay the groundwork and vocabulary for talking about more complicated structures. As a next step, “Travels in Georgia,” by John McPhee, is one of my essential go-to pieces for teaching structure because it’s brilliantly built. I talked a bit about that piece and why I use it here. Once we’ve covered that, I like to use a wide range of pieces with unusual or surprising structures, like Dinty Moore’s wonderful “Son of Mr. Green Jeans,” which uses the alphabet to organize short vignette-like paragraphs that collectively tell a story of fatherhood. Also Randy Shilts’ “Talking AIDS to Death,” and Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s “The Gangster We Are All Looking For.” (As an aside, I just finished reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which would be a fun one to teach structure-wise. I find that reading fiction for structure can be very helpful for nonfiction writers, to help get them thinking about story, narrative drive, etc.)

Voice: I find that students often have a hard time pinpointing exactly what voice is, which is an essential first step toward helping them develop their own. I like to use collections of pieces by particularly voicey writers. Two of my favorite authors to do this with are Jeanne Marie Laskas and Susan Orlean. With Jeanne Marie, I start with “Enlightened Man,” her wonderful profile of Korey Stringer, the Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman who died of heat stroke during practice when he was 27. Jeanne Marie often does what she calls a “chameleon voice” – she spends a lot of time with the people she’s writing about, listening to their voices, so she can essentially channel their voices onto paper. In the Stringer profile, she is writing as Jeanne Marie but adopting Korey’s voice. For contrast, to illustrate how she changes her voice at will, I assign that profile alongside several other pieces of her writing: A few of her short personal “Significant Others” columns about living on a farm (one of my favorites was about planting a tree), plus some excerpts from her first book, The Balloon Lady And Other People I Know, which was (at least in part) written as her MFA thesis when she was a grad student. Some of those pieces have chameleon-type voices; others have Jeanne Marie’s very personal voice. So we look at all of those together, in chronological order starting from her earliest work to her latest, to look at what stays the same in her voice, what changes, what is “her voice” vs. the voices of those she’s writing about. After establishing what voice is, and how writers can alter their voice depending on what they’re writing, I like to look at how writers develop a personal and recognizable voice. Anyone who’s read a lot of Susan Orlean knows you can read a paragraph of her stuff without looking at the byline and know it’s Susan. But what does that mean? How does she do this? I assign students a big chunk of her stuff, starting back during her early days at an alternative weekly news paper, plus excerpts from her first book, Red Sox and Bluefish and Other Things That Make New England New England, her second book, Saturday Night, several of her New Yorker pieces, and The Orchid Thief. We discuss them generally as pieces of writing (structure, reporting, etc.), but the main goal is to specifically look at her voice throughout. In her early writing it changed a bit over time, becoming more honed, more Susan, but it’s still always distinctly Susan.

Rebecca Skloot (@RebeccaSkloot) is an award-winning science writer and the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is being translated into more than 25 languages, adapted into a young-reader edition and made into an HBO movie produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball. She has taught in the MFA and journalism programs at the University of Memphis, New York University and the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned her MFA. She is at work on a new book, about the human-animal bond.

Buzz Bissinger on heart, luck, honesty, critics and the importance of switching things up

Paige Williams — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:33:11 +0000

When Buzz Bissinger visited the Nieman Foundation last week, in some ways he was coming home. Twenty-six years ago, he finished his Nieman year inspired to do new and different work. He’d made his career in newspapers, most recently at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he, Rick Tulsky and Dan Biddle, also former Niemans, had just written a series that would win the 1987 Pulitzer for investigative reporting. He then lit upon a narrative nonfiction book idea, out of a town called Odessa, Texas.

Friday Night Lights, Bissinger’s iconic story about high school football and race and class, was born there in Odessa and laid the foundation for the rest of his career. His books have covered a failing Philadelphia (A Prayer for the City, about then-Mayor Ed Rendell’s rescue attempt), the St. Louis Cardinals (Three Nights in August, about the Cards’ three-game series against the rival Chicago Cubs), and, now, the relationship between father and son.

In Father’s Day, published last week by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Bissinger chronicles a cross-country drive with one of his twin sons, Zach, a 24-year-old savant. The trip is the narrative spine, interwoven with the story of Bissinger’s career and family, and laced with the history of the treatment of premature infants in this country. The narrative heart is disillusionment, loss, pride, fear, wonder and straightforward, angry reckoning with reality:

Like everyone else, I will one day become too old and sick for my own good or anyone else’s. I think it’s a pretty good guess I will be a cranky son of a bitch. Lisa has told me several times that she is determined to die first to avoid the misery of taking care of me. Like my father before me, I will be terrified. Like my father before me, I will know that I am dying. Like my father before me, I will lie awake thinking about what I did in my life and think about the terrible mistakes I made. But unlike my father, I will also think about what will forever reside in my heart. It won’t be the sweet but ephemeral irrelevance of the Pulitzer and Friday Night Lights. It will be the times I broke through to a place I never knew existed. My beautiful Gerry and Caleb will be with me. So will my beautiful Zach. He will take my hand in his. His grip will be gentle. Neither of us will ever want to let go.

Today we bring you Bissinger’s conversation with Nieman fellows, staff and curator Ann Marie Lipinski, who happens to have been Bissinger’s editor at the Chicago Tribune. This talk is a long one – pace yourself, people! – but we wanted it to run as one piece.

The conversation came on a bittersweet afternoon for the fellows – it was their last scheduled day as Niemans. After their year studying at Harvard, some were planning to go back to their former journalism jobs and others were heading off into the unknown. We’ll start there, with Bissinger talking about his own Nieman experience, and about how the fellowship year helped enable him to embrace the unexpected, and to go on to produce some of the world’s most widely acclaimed works of narrative nonfiction.

Ann Marie Lipinski and Buzz Bissinger (photo: Jonathan Seitz)

Bissinger: The Nieman year was probably the most special year of my life. The intimacy, the stimulation. The stimulation was powerful and intoxicating both in the classroom and out of the classroom, in seminars. The people I met, particularly the foreign Niemans – they knew much more about the United States than we did – it was fun. People say, “Why’d you begin to write books?” The reason I really began to write books is that after my Nieman year I felt I owed it to myself to go and do something out of the box, and really, really do something different, not simply go back to my paper with the sort of glow of a great year. So that’s what I did. I think if I had not been a Nieman I’d either still be at the Philadelphia Inquirer, probably laid off from the Philadelphia Inquirer. I was lucky enough to get the idea for Friday Night Lights and everything broke perfectly. Without the Nieman I really think I would’ve just stayed where I was.

Lipinski: I met you during my Nieman year.

This is true. And you still like me.

(laughter)

Lipinski: Maddy Blais, Madeleine Blais, who had won a Pulitzer for feature writing at the Miami Herald, was teaching at, and may still be teaching at –

She is.

Lipinski: U Mass, at Amherst. And she had a conference and a bunch of the Niemans went up for it. She had a reception at her house afterward, and that’s where I met you. You had a galley of what would become Friday Night Lights. And you said that you were living in Milwaukee; your then wife was doing a medical residency I think –

She was going to med school.

Lipinski: And I said, “What do you want to do?” You said you wanted to go back to writing for a paper because you didn’t know what would happen with the book. So I said, “Oh, so you want to go work for the Milwaukee Journal,” and you said “Well, I’d actually like to work at the (Chicago) Tribune.” I said, “But you live in Milwaukee.” And you said, “I’ll commute.” And you did, for a year or two.

I think I was there for about two years.

Lipinski: So we worked together. I met your boys then because they were around the office a lot. But the book took off in such an extraordinary way, which I think you’ve regarded as both a blessing and a curse. But before we talk about that – you talk about launching out of Lippmann House feeling this need to do more or different. Can you just go through the process of how you alight on Odessa, Texas, and those kids in that season?

Literally – like you guys – the last day of the Nieman program I got into a car with a fellow Nieman who lived in Seattle and drove across country with her. We took the southern route, so we went through a lot of small towns, small places – Main Street was obliterated then. JC Penney (had been) there and that was gone, Sears was gone. We went through Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and then Texas. You would come upon high school football stadiums and they were gorgeous. A lot of them had been built in the 1930s and literally even if there was a drought they would water the fields and they’d be glistening green. They were painted. They were shrines. They were shrines in these small towns, these isolated places, and I just had the sense that this was where people came. I had read about high school football in Texas and it just stayed with me. I like sports, but I really thought of this (idea) in much more sociological terms: Why do (sports) have the impact that they have and what would it be like, then, to live in that town for a year and simply use the team and the season as the glue to write about all sorts of different things? So the genesis of the idea came literally two weeks after I was done with the Nieman.

Now what I do is, I get excited about a lot of ideas and I just let them sit. I’m sure most of you do that too. You let them sit for a week, months, three months. For me I can really sort of feel it in my heart – I get a sort of pulsating feeling in my heart, my chest, this excitement, and if the excitement lingered that meant I was onto something. Because I only do books that I feel – well that’s not true, one book I did, which was a piece of shit, I did for money –

Lipinski: Which one, LeBron?

We don’t want to talk about it.

Lipinski: I saw you trash your book on Twitter.

I did. Because it was terrible. And I felt like a sellout, because I was a sellout. But the money was really good, so. You know, you have to live. But I was ashamed of it. Anyway. We hate that book. So I went back to the paper and I covered different things. I covered politics. I had done a lot of investigative reporting so I was trying to do a lot of different things at the paper and then I became an editor – they had Neighbors sections back then. And that I really hated.

Lipinski: Because you’re not a neighborly guy.

I was actually a good editor but it was like taking D’s and trying to make them into B’s or A’s, and then the reporter gets all the credit. I mean who needs that shit?

(laughter)

I mean seriously. I mean they prance around: ‘Hey, look at this great story.’ If everyone only knew how fucking bad it was before.

Lipinski: Some of us actually enjoy that work.

You did. You were good at it.

Lipinski: Your copy was at least B, B-plus, when you turned it in.

Yeah right.

(laughter)

Lipinski: It wasn’t the editing, Buzz, that was the challenge. It was the sitting next to you.

You liked that!

Lipinski: I did. It was perverse.

(laughter)

And we could smoke back then. Those were the good old days when you could smoke in newsrooms and drink and fuck and all that. Now they’re like insurance companies. Anyway, I found the town of Odessa. It’s not a quintessentially small town – it’s about 100,000 – but it felt like a small town because it was so isolated. It also was big enough that I hoped there would be themes that I could grab onto, whether it was race or educational priorities or the boom and bust economy, and it was a matter of getting permission from the town and the team to spend a year there. And off I went. I ended up quitting my job at the Inquirer.

At that point in time they were giving decent advances, so I got a good enough advance – it wasn’t as much as I was making at the Inquirer but it was enough to live on. But I would’ve done that book for nothing. I just had a passion and a feeling in my heart that this was the right book for me to do. And then I got lucky. As my father says, “You have to be close to be lucky.” But everything felt right. Everything. If you were writing fiction you could not have made up a better season. The characters were distinct, there was tremendous tragedy with Boobie Miles, the black player (at the center of the story). Some people said, “Did you really feel you had to stay there a year?” The answer was yes because it gave me the ability to write with much more authority when I finally sat down to write. I really knew that town. It wasn’t a matter of spending every day reporting – when you write a book a lot of it is the feel of what the town is like, because you’re living there, and your kids are going to school there, and you’re really a part of the fabric of the place.

Lipinski: A lot of people know this (book) from the television show or the movie. What gets lost in that is this extraordinary reporting and writing that birthed the movie and television show. I thought it would be good for you to read something from it. It’s a section about when Boobie Miles, around whom much of the action for the season and book evolves, is injured. Do you want to set it up and give a little context about how you covered racism in this book and the use of these young kids as athletes – the promise unrealized, most of them, for a pro career?

My background was as a reporter. I had worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer at a time when it was an exciting newspaper. It wasn’t perfect but it had great talent, and it really did teach you how to report. So I went down (to Texas) as a reporter. I never went down there as a sports man, and I never saw it as a sports story. To this day I’m called a sportswriter but I’m not. There’s a difference between writing sports and writing about sports. I always saw (the story) as much more sociological. In any book or any story you write you’re looking for narrative glue. You’re looking for a narrative skeleton. In this case it was easy: It was the season. Now the problem was, what if they go 4-6? What if they go 3-7 and I don’t have a season? So one of the reasons I picked Odessa was because they then were the most successful team in Texas history. They had made the playoffs nine or 10 years in a row, they had great players coming back, one of whom was Boobie Miles, the black running back.

But it wasn’t just a matter of – you’ve seen movies about this: You’re a rock star at 17 and you’re washed up at 18. I was there in 1988 and they’d built a stadium in 1985 that cost $5.6 million – it’s the only bond issue the town ever passed. They flew to several away games by charter jet, which cost them $70,000. But it also became apparent they only cared about these kids for as long as they played football. College, or taking the SAT, was not encouraged. The academic lives of these kids was a joke. They were treated as gods. At school they basically had these geisha girls who’d bring them cakes and cookies and beer every Friday. But you could smell tragedy. One of the neat things about writing is the stuff you don’t put in, the stuff that you remember that informs what you write, and I would watch some of the kids who had played the year before and they would come back to the locker room, and you could see the misty look in their eye. They were has-beens. They really were in effect dead.

In the case of Boobie, the racism of the town became very, very apparent. This was a town that had not integrated its school system until 1982. It had been forced by court order. Then when it did integrate, football was such a priority in this town they drew this really weird sort of square (boundary that included) the black housing project, because that’s where the good football players were.

(Bissinger reads from Friday Night Lights.)

Well, the saga of the story is that he tore his anterior cruciate ligament, which is a very serious injury. To recover from it takes tremendous willpower, which Boobie never had. His career as a football player basically ended. It particularly ended in terms of the coaches when they found another running back who was almost as good. Boobie came back for a little bit, which was ridiculous, because he still had not had his knee repaired – he couldn’t cut. It was wincing, to watch him. So he quit the team, and when he quit the team he started flunking every course. As I (wrote), the coach called him a “big dumb ol’ nigger.” I remember the boosters hanging out one day and laughing and joking around and them saying, “You know, maybe Boobie should do what you do to a horse that’s pulled up lame. He should take out a gun and shoot himself.” They thought that was funny.

He fell apart, but he really had fallen apart before, and this is why the town I guess hated me, but that’s OK. I saw what happens: He was treated as a football animal. That’s what they felt he was. They felt he was a dumb-nigger football animal who had no use in life except to play football. He could not be educated; he was not worth educating. Nothing was demanded of him. He had a tutor who would give him the (answers) to all the tests beforehand. He was actually getting paid to play by an unnamed booster – he would get as many dollars as yards that he carried. This was a poor black kid from the bad side of the tracks and he gained 1,500 yards or 1,200 yards, which was 1,200 bucks, which was a lot. So there was no incentive to get an education. He was encouraged not to. But the problem with football animals is that when the football ends, you have nothing. Nothing.

Now, he wasn’t meant to be a physicist, he wasn’t meant to be a journalist. He wasn’t meant to be a lot of things, but he was not stupid. He had a certain intuition. But when you have no education – I knew when he got hurt, because obviously you can tell I was right there – I looked into his eyes and I knew that his life would be nothing but tragedy. I knew. And that’s what it has turned out to be. I’ve stayed in touch with him.

Lipinski: Can you talk about that a little bit? You write about that in the new book, which we’re also going to get to. We had Alex Kotlowitz here recently. There Are No Children Here is a book in which the author develops very intense relationships over an intense period of time with the central subjects of the work, then the book is published, the book is very successful, the writer goes on to do great work and these kids are left in a different place than they would’ve been had the writer never met them. Paths diverge and a lot of these relationships end, and for you and Alex it’s been different. You write about it very openly – not just the emotional aspects of your relationship with Boobie but the financial aspects of your relationship with Boobie. I wonder if you can talk about how you made decisions about what kind of relationship that would be.

I’ve given Boobie a lot of money over the years – not that that makes me a hero or a good man or a bad man. I think he needed it, although sometimes I think he was just playing me. I never paid him during the season. I never paid him when the book came out, because I felt that would be unethical. But as he began to disintegrate and to sell drugs and to not hold a job he began to call me. I knew that he was drowning: “Buzz, I can’t pay the rent, if you could just help me out, I’m about to get evicted.” I would call the landlord and he’d say, “Yeah, he hasn’t paid rent in two months” so I’d send it to them. Over the years, I don’t know, I gave him 50, 60, 70,000 dollars. I think I did it initially out of guilt out of a large degree or some degree. The subject-journalist relationship is, for me, made complex – Boobie’s argument was, “Well, if none of this ever happened to me there wouldn’t be a book.”

Boobie has the worst kind of American celebrity that you can possibly have, which is very typical now in the American culture. People may not know his name but they know his story. In the TV show he’s Smash Williams and he’s had T-shirts emblazoned with his name, he recently had a rap song that was named after him. He got fucked by the movie people. What they do is, they invite you to the set and you hobnob with Billy Bob Thornton and you touch Tim McGraw’s hat and they put you in a scene. Meanwhile at night Boobie was slinging drugs to try and take care of his twins, and he loves those kids. He had no job but he was a celebrity. He’d go to the mall and it would be, “Boobie, can I have your autograph?” But it was bringing him nothing.

Part of it was his difficulty in accepting responsibility. The other thing that happened is – you gotta remember: He’d been robbed of his dream when he was 18. He’d always had this vision of himself: I’m gonna be a pro football player. It was hard to get that stardust out of his eyes, and it was only enhanced after the movie. Double whammy. But what happens is, they don’t give a fuck. They get up and leave and go make other movies, and there he was.

But (our relationship) evolved from guilt into really caring. I was concerned. I would get phone calls where he was not only desperate for money, but desperate: “I got no place to run, my wife’s in prison, I’ve got these kids and I love them but I don’t know how to support them, I’ve even thought of suicide.” I did dread getting a phone call one day where he’d gotten shot or killed because he committed some type of serious crime. And what After Friday Night Lights is about – it’s a short e-book – it’s about my relationship with him, which I think has developed into one of love. It’s a complicated kind of love, because there were moments when I felt played, and there were moments when I was so eager to help him that I did no due diligence.

I saw him recently and he was doing better. He was working. He’s been in and out of all types of jobs. Every shit job there is, he’s done. He has no education. Now he has a felony conviction, for (aggravated) assault, because he does have an impulse issue; he gets angry very easily. There’s a limit to what I can do because I’m 2,000 miles away. I tell him, “Boobie, you gotta just suck it in, stop fighting.” But I do love him and I think he loves me. We’re splitting the proceeds of the e-book, so he’s gonna actually get some decent money. And it’s his. I’m not gonna tell him how to use it. Why are we sharing the proceeds? Because, once again, without his story there would be no e-book. And I could argue just as vociferously that without me there would be no e-book, without the reputation of Friday Night Lights. So you could play this game back and forth. I would love to see him make it. I hope he doesn’t spend it all at once. I’m not gonna put it in trust because it’s just too complicated. I don’t want to be the administrator of it. I do tell him, “You’re getting a lot of money. Do not spend it all at once. You need a cushion.” I’d like to see him have some stability in his life.

Lipinski: So after Friday Night Lights there were a number of things. There’s A Prayer for the City, which is your immersion examination of Ed Rendell’s term as mayor in Philadelphia. There’s the LeBron book, and some other things. But I want to touch on the new book and then open it up to fellows. I want to talk about Father’s Day not just because it’s the new book but because it’s the work in which I think you are the most raw, the most personal, the most revealing, in some cases in sort of embarrassing ways. You talk about your psychoses, you talk about your divorces, you talk about really rough moments in your relationship with your parents, but the central story, of course, is your relationship with Zach. So, Buzz and his wife had twin boys who were born – was it 13 weeks?

Thirteen and a half.

Lipinski: Thirteen and a half weeks prematurely, and both of them weighing under 2 pounds

And this was in 1983 –

Lipinski: Can I just – just stop for a minute –

(laughter)

She like this all the time?

Lipinski: I usually get a few more words in –

She’s gotten much more sassy –

(laughter)

Lipinski: But the fundamental difference is three minutes. Gerry is born and yes he’s small and yes he’s early but he goes on to graduate school at Penn, to become a teacher. Zach is born three minutes later and it’s three minutes that cost him a lot, and cost you and your wife a lot. There’s been oxygen deprivation and he is born with a lot of serious burdens, which will define the rest of his life and change your life and your wife’s life and his twin’s life, and everybody who knows you, their lives, in very profound ways. So Father’s Day really is a book about a road trip. It’s the trip you and Zach take to kind of rediscover each other and for you to try to understand your son. The best way (to convey this), really, is for you to read this conversation that the two of you have, and it’s one of many conversations you recount quite literally in the book. You are with your son as you are with the world: You are volatile, you are loving, you are profane, you are difficult, you are supportive, you’re all these things, and you’re very open about it in this account, which I think must have been very hard to do. So maybe just set up where we are at this point in the trip and then read that conversation, where you’re speaking very directly to Zach about what happened to him. He knows his birth story, so this isn’t a surprise to him by any means, but it’s a tough conversation.

I just wanted to do something different with him. I got this idea to drive across country, which I thought was great until he told me that he hated being in the car and wanted to fly. But we did it and the first half was pretty rocky. I was pretty stressed. And I say this – he was not the child that I ever imagined having and he’s not the child that I wanted. I sort of cringe when I say that, but it was true. He had trace brain damage so his disability is particularly in the area of comprehension. He’s very verbal, he’s social, he loves people. He’s a savant. But his comprehension is limited. But not only did I really want to discover or rediscover him, I felt I had to tell him what he was like. I could no longer hide it. I didn’t want to hide it. First of all, I felt he had the right to know. Second of all, I’m not an outsider. I’m his father, and I’ve always believed in openness with my kids. And I didn’t want this thing where I’m gonna treat Gerry this way and Caleb this way and Zach’s over here.

I also wanted to know, because it would inform our relationship in the future, how much did he really know about himself? So this a moment and – and I’ve been criticized for it by critics, who are fucking assholes –

(laughter)

Lipinski: You’re on the Indiana Skyway or –

On the Indiana Skyway. It’s pretty early in the trip, and I am trying to find a moment – it was hard: How do I bring this up and where do I bring this up? So this is where we are. I think it was the second day of the trip:

Some people said, “How could you ask your son a question like that?” I wanted to know who he was, and I also wanted to converse with him as I conversed with my other children. Part of the problem with a child like Zach is that as wonderful as he can be, you have this constant sense of being stuck: We’re playing the same games, the same routines, that we’ve played for 15 years. As a parent it drives you crazy because you don’t want your children to become stuck. We all have hopes and dreams for our kids; we all have aspirations.

As a journalist, all I ever do is try to get people to be honest about themselves and open up. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don’t. I felt, well if I’m gonna turn the light on myself I have to be honest, because I think there’s purity in honesty. I think that’s where you learn. This wasn’t some conceit, some attempt to draw negative attention to myself. Because the way I am informs me as a father, as a parent and as a man. If I was more cheerful, if I was more optimistic, I probably would’ve thought of Zach very differently. If I wasn’t impulsively volatile I would’ve thought of Zach very differently. So I put that in. Because I thought it was important. Some reviewers have understood that and some reviewers have said, you know, that I’m dysfunctional, a basket case or cruel. And that killed me. Because I’m many things, but I’ve never ever intentionally been cruel to my son. Ever.

I knew that that (reaction) was the risk. But to me, what’s the point of writing a memoir – and I’d never written one before and I’m not gonna write one again; my life is not that interesting – what is the point if you’re not honest? I think most memoirs are not honest. I think too many memoirs are piped. I think they make up shit to make themselves look better and to give it more narrative drive. I didn’t want to do that. Ninety percent of the conversations in (the book) are taped. They’re real. They happened. There’s many people who say Zach is wonderful and his father is cruel and spouts a lot of profanity and treats him terribly, but that was not the intent; I felt I had to show myself as I was, just as I was showing my son as he was.

Lipinski: So let’s open it up to the fellows.

Dina Kraft: I wondered what you learned about Zach and what surprised you.

It’s a good question and some people – you know, “I’ve learned this,” “I’ve learned that,” and it’s a contrivance, because you want some moral purpose to the book, but I did learn a lot about Zach. I learned many things. First of all, his ability for empathy, which I had never really seen. He’s very kind. He’s very ebullient. It is true that he was constantly steadying me, and he had an intuition for when I was getting upset just beyond getting lost and swearing. He just knew and he would put his hand on my back, or put his hand on my shoulder and basically say, “Dad, it’s gonna be all right.” He had never shown that.

But it was more than empathy. He knew: My father is upset, maybe there is something I can do to calm him down. As opposed to getting freaked out himself. He’s very, very steady, and I had never known that about him. Because he’s funny – like, he goes to a funeral – he loves wakes because he loves seeing people he knows. The death of a person doesn’t mean anything to him, really. He’s very observant, much more observant than I ever thought because half the time I don’t think he’s paying attention, and then something pops out where he’s paying close attention. I’ve found, too, that he has more than a yearning for independence. One of my goals as a parent within the limits of what we can do is to encourage that independence. He needs it. He wants it. Oliver Sacks says that within all of us, whatever the impairment, or not, resides this need to be whole. And that’s true. Part of Zach’s wholeness is that he’s mature. He doesn’t want parents hovering over him all the time. Now we’re not gonna be irresponsible about it – he’s not gonna live alone – but he really showed a responsibility. It excited him. It made him feel proud. It made him feel: I have an identity that’s my own.

So I learned that. I also saw the ways in which – he’s stuck in some areas and always will be, but he’s also maturing. His vernacular has gotten better, particularly in the Epilogue, as I get people up to speed. The book took so long to write – his vocabulary is better now, his conversational ability is better. Normally it’s kind of a rote routine of what are you wearing, where do you live, what’s your birthday, and then he’ll remember it for the rest of his life. He’s trying to negotiate more how to insert himself into conversations. Someone will mention a movie and he’ll mention a movie that he’s seen.

Did the book change me? Did the trip change me? I don’t think it did. I’m still ambitious. I’m still frantic the book will be a failure and if it’s a success it won’t be as big a success as I anticipated, and all that shit that I go through. But it did make me feel closer to Zach. We’re much closer. I once moved away to California to write for NYPD Blue for a year, and he didn’t care. It was about 10 years ago. Then at one point we were thinking of moving to New York, and it’s not that away from Philadelphia, and I said, “Zach, how would you feel?” He said, “I don’t want you to go.” I said, “Well, how long can I go for?” He said, “You can go for a weekend.”

(laughter)

And he meant it: I’ll never see you. I said, “I’m not going anywhere.” I love all my boys – Gerry is amazing, Caleb, the youngest, he’s at Kenyon, he’s beautiful, fantastic. He was on an exchange program to Cape Town University, so we were all gonna go see him. And Zach for the first time with legitimacy said, “I want to go.” Flying is really hard for him; he gets very antsy. I said, “Zach are you just saying that because we’re going or do you really want to go?” “No, I really want to go.” We figured out strategies for him to – you know, it’s a 14-hour flight – strategies – he loves Pee Wee’s Playhouse – it’s the only movie he’s ever liked. And he likes Angry Birds, which he can play on the iPad. We did pop him with a little Ambien, which certainly helped. And he was very reassured, sitting next to Gerry. He did great. Well, I think he did great. I was in business class and they were in economy –

(laughter)

So I don’t really know how he did. But Zach said he did great –

(laughter)

Gerry’s take is slightly different. He said Zach asked every two minutes, “Are we there yet?”

(laughter)

But you know, he made it. And I went back there occasionally.

(laughter)

Gerry had a really glum look on his face. I slept well.

(laughter)

But we got to South Africa and I have to say, it was like boys’ weekend. To have all three of them together, and for Zach to make that trip, was a big, big step for him. It was great.

Hope Reese: Was your family with you in Texas (for the Friday Night Lights research) –

Yeah.

Reese: — I wonder what that was like, and I wonder what it was like for the town to have you and your family.

They liked it. They – when you do books like this they’re looking for commitment. That’s one of the reasons – look, I was there to get people to open up. You want people to trust you, and they loved the fact that I wasn’t parachuting in and out. I’ve seen people try to do books like that and they really don’t work. (If you’re on the ground people say): This guy’s committed; this guy lives here; this guy’s gonna rent an apartment and live in this shithole for a year and his kids are gonna go to school. We were part of the fabric of the community and that meant a lot to the town. We had fun. Because there are a lot of good people in Odessa. You know, newsrooms are hard for me. Because I get jealous and I get petty and I hate it when someone else is getting attention.

Lipinski: Buzz, have you stopped not reading the New York Times book review section or can you read it again? He’s not read it in years because he cannot tolerate happy reviews about other people’s books.

(laughter)

No, I can’t. I just looked at the best-seller list to see if my little book was on it, which it was, for one week. I have not read – it’s pathetic. I haven’t read it in more than five years. My shrink told me to stop reading it so I stopped reading it.

Jonathan Blakley: Where would (Boobie Miles) be right now, had you not helped him?

I think he would be in prison. He thinks he would be in prison. I think he would have committed — out of desperation or taking too many drugs — an armed robbery. Or killed himself. So he does know that when push comes to shove – we’ve had a lot of fights, a lot of hang-ups, a lot of fuck-you’s but sort of like husband and wife we then reunite. It makes me feel that life is cool. Our backgrounds could not be more different. I grew up in a life of obscene privilege on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I never went to public school a day in my life. So I just think it’s serendipity, and cool, that you can love someone who came from totally, totally opposite conditions. People say, “What do you get from him?” Well, he’s funny, he’s sweet, he loves kids. Yeah, it makes me feel I’ve done something good. But then I get worried that – sometimes I do feel I’m aiding and abetting. He knows he can get money from me, he knows he can guilt me and that that’s gonna make him less responsible. It does make me feel good that maybe I’m really helping someone who I felt would always need help.

Tyler Bridges: I’m always interested in the question, as a journalist, when you get so close to people and you want to get the truth then you have to take a step back and potentially hurt people that you’ve gotten to know and like. How did you handle that issue? Obviously you wrote things in Friday Night Lights that pissed off people, but did you also find that – were you just cold-blooded about it and could do that?

It was hard. I began writing the book in Odessa, which was a huge mistake because I needed distance, I needed separation. They were hard decisions because the good thing about access is that when it works it works; the difficult thing about access is, you develop relationships, you make friendships. There are certain people who will never forgive me and never talk to me again. But other people knew I was there as a journalist. Then the question is: Saying a town is racist, is that gratuitous or is there real evidence? To me it was not simply the evidence of the word “nigger” – you go through the lawsuit that was filed to have them desegregate the schools in 1982 and it’s terrible, really terrifying. And as I say, I didn’t intend this to be a sensational expose but I did intend it to be an expose of a town that had become totally carried away by football, where it had become the reason to be.

Bissinger was a 1986 Nieman (photo: Jonathan Seitz)

The kids themselves, that I focused on, all supported me, which was very, very important. The older people, some of the coaches, you know, never forgave me. But one thing I did in After Friday Night Lights – (earlier) I did give people some passes. I never named the assistant coach who called (Boobie) a big dumb old nigger – I’d let it pass and that had bothered me for 20 years. And it bothered me because I remember talking to Boobie at one point and Boobie saying: Do you have any idea what it’s like to have someone call you that in a book, something that’ll be in there forever? And I’d never thought of it that way. The intent was not to shine on Boobie; the intent was that this was the racism. I thought, “If I’m not protecting Boobie, why am I protecting this coach?” So in After Friday Night Lights, which came out about a month ago, I named him.

David Skok: You wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about the Philadelphia Inquirer, about the (Ed) Rendell leadership group stepping in, and I’m just curious about what compelled you to take that stand and what the reaction has been. And how do you feel about the Inquirer today?

I felt compelled to take a stand because I knew Rendell and I knew the team he had put together. I thought it would be a blithering disaster, far beyond what other papers have had to do. I mean I understand that developers have bought papers, and Warren Buffet bought a paper, but I don’t know another paper in which you had a former governor, mayor, arguably the most powerful person in the state, running a paper, making editorial policy. Not only that – it wasn’t just simply a matter of what Ed might decide to do; it would be the thousands of people who would call Ed every fucking day because they would hear a rumor. And I know Ed – he would be very susceptible – sometimes out of kindness, sometimes out of whatever – to protecting someone. And I felt the influence he would have, that it would be a disaster, that it would be the worst-case scenario of a paper being taken over.

The reaction was predictable. I actually do think it did have something to do with (the fact that there was) increasing pressure and criticism and Rendell dropped out. I think he realized this was gonna be a can of worms that he didn’t want to get involved in. The consortium that bought it does include George Norcross, who’s a very powerful politician, and Lewis Katz, who I never really trusted. Norcross did actually do something that I did admire; he wrote a public letter and said, I will not in any way influence coverage in the paper when it involves me, any of my companies or any of my family. And if he sticks to that, that’s good.

Right now you can’t really tell. They brought back Bill Marimow as editor. Bill is a wonderful editor. Whether or not Bill is right – because Bill is very old-fashioned and papers are changing and papers need to change, and whether that type of old-fashioned editor is good for the paper, I don’t know. It’s bizarre – he was there and then got fired by the publisher and now he’s back and they fired the publisher. So.

To me the hope is – for these (owners) it’s a toy. They don’t really care about making money; they’ve made a ton of money in their lives. They do seem cognizant of not wanting to interfere. For now. The paper still does good journalism. But I don’t know what the future holds. Nobody does.

Anna Griffin: You mentioned that the Inquirer, when you were there, was a place that taught you how to report. Talk about what that means. Do you think newsrooms still do that?

What was great about journalism when I entered it, which was right after Watergate, in 1976, papers were hot, papers were making money, but beyond that they all wanted investigative reporting, they all wanted long-form reporting. So when I was at the Norfolk Ledger-Star I was doing 125-inch stories as a kid reporter. So even there you began to learn narrative – how to tell a story. When I went to the St. Paul Pioneer Press I wrote a 35,000-word story, seven full pages in the paper. So even before the Inquirer, the tools of interviewing, the tools of developing characters, the tools of telling a story, the tools of drawing a reader in were things I had already learned, and they were certainly honed at the Inquirer, which gave tremendous amount of time to stories. The stimulation for me was good and bad, being around other reporters who were superb. Gene Roberts is a complex man and he was great at the Inquirer – it’s a nice aphorism but it’s true: The key to reporting is to zig while everyone else zags. And I did remember that as I was in Odessa. The chips fell where they may. People accused me of betraying them but I had no idea Boobie was gonna get hurt, I had no idea what would happen. But I went in wanting to write a book that was simply more than rah-rah football. I knew that I wanted it to have weight, to take a subject and really try to elevate it to something special, something unexpected.

Do I think that can be done today? I think certain papers still do it, still try to do it. This is a generalization but I think the writing is just not very good. There’s fewer copyeditors, fewer editors; the 24-hour cycle, which I never had to deal with – you’re writing for the web, you’re writing for this, you’re writing for that, you’re updating here, you’re updating there. The writing has really gone down, and that was the one thing that was really coveted at the Inquirer. Some papers are still doing some good investigative reporting. But papers don’t have the same relevance. Of course neither do books. Neither do magazines. I don’t know where we’re headed. Every portion of the printed word is in turmoil. News holes are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. But you know what? A lot of good things are still done. One of the things that I don’t miss about papers is the constant − you guys know − it goes up the food chain, one editor after another after another after another, and what I think happens is I think it loses its voice. Everyone takes a shot at it. It’s like making a bad movie. It’s better if you stick with one editor.

(To Lipinski): Do you know Larry Kramer, the guy who just took over at USA Today?

Lipinski: No.

He any good?

Lipinski: I don’t know.

I do think, whether he’s good or not, I do think that was an interesting choice, and a good choice, them picking someone who had not been in the news business since 1991. Papers have to think out of the box. It’s hard for journalists to think out of the box. One of the reasons I left print journalism was because I got a little bit bored of being reined in. But they have to (think out of the box). And they still may fail. What I worry about the most is that − there’s been so much negative written that readers may have said, “Well fuck it, they’re dead.” And if they die we’ll have these little websites but we’ll have no news. We’ll have no vigilance; we’ll have no reporting of any kind. And it’ll be fucking chaos. That’s more than a tragedy; that’s a social disaster.

Carole Osterer: Can you talk about what you’re working on next?

Sure. Nothing. I mean, I’ll do magazine pieces. (Bissinger writes for Vanity Fair.) I may do something entirely different. I actually may do radio. I’ve done it before. I like talking, as you can tell. I have a lot of opinions. This book took a lot out of me. I get too wrapped up – this is the way I am, and I’m being honest: I am very, very negative, and I’m very, very hard on myself, and I’m sort of tired of beating myself up for nine-tenths of the book and then thinking, “Oh, maybe it has some potential.” And I’m lonely. Writing books is great, but I’m tired of just looking at the computer. I’ve done it by myself for, what, close to 25 years. And I love new challenges. That’s why I wrote this. I had never written a memoir. I mean, I just like new challenges. And I think it’s good to step away for a while. It’s not that I’m necessarily burnt out but I’d like to do something different for a while and then recharge. It always takes me a long time between books. For me, the older you get the less you feel that little palpitation in your heart. I’m not like David Halberstam, who said, “The first one I wrote for love, everything else I wrote for money.” It’s hard enough to write a book when you love the subject, and it’s impossible when you don’t.

Lipinski: Do you remember your last Nieman day? How you felt?

I mean, you feel tremendously sad, and you feel you’ve been through something incredibly special. I didn’t feel that sad. I felt excited. I felt like I’d been through an experience unlike anything I’d had in my life. And I was revved up. I didn’t know when it would come or how it would come or why it would come, but I was revved up that I was gonna do something different. So I don’t think there really were a lot of tears that day. Everyone said, “We’ve been through something magnificent and we’re lucky to have had the privilege of being through something magnificent, so there’s no reason for tears.” There was reason to say, “We are very lucky because we are very good” – as you guys are – “and we’ve had a magnificent time, and now we have to take those moments and what we had.” You owe it to yourself to do something different. Because you’ve had such a marvelous year of stimulation – intellectually, socially – that’s what these things are about, getting away from it all. Even if you’re going back to your own paper, do something different. Do a beat. Write a book. Whatever. Just do something different.

“Why’s this so good?” No. 38: Walt Harrington deconstructs Rita Dove

Anna Griffin — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:01:26 +0000

Writing about the writing process isn’t easy, for good reason. Turning words into sentences and sentences into scenes is at heart a craft, yet there’s still a certain amount of magic involved. Synapses fire. Muses play.

That magic, which manifests itself in unique ways for each of us, is what makes Walt Harrington’s Washington Post Magazine profile of Rita Dove, “The Shape of Her Dreaming,” one of those stories I reach for whenever I need inspiration. Harrington captures one poet’s creative process in such detail that it’s often hard to tell whose voice you’re hearing − his or hers.

Harrington initially set out to write something less ambitious. In 1995, the Post magazine was in the midst of a series of short front-of-the-book pieces about how to do various odd tasks. Harrington wanted to explain how to write a poem. Dove, then the U.S. poet laureate, promised to contact him the next time she had a finished work to share.

Three months later, Harrington reported to Dove’s backyard writing cabin in Charlottesville, Va. He discovered that, in addition to writing the poem “Sic Itur ad Astra,” she had taken meticulous notes for him − pages and pages detailing the changes she made with each version. Dove recently had begun using a computer, so each version carried a time stamp. She also handed over her journal of the six-week creative period, then spent six hours answering questions about every decision she’d made in her writing.

“She basically gave me a master class,” Harrington, now a journalism professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said recently when I called to talk about the story. “I don’t like to say a story writes itself, but she gave me a huge head start.”

Dove’s notes gave Harrington his structure: a chronological narrative starting at 5:35 p.m. on Feb. 5, when she printed out the first draft, and ending on March 26 at 1:43 a.m., when she finished the final version. That overarching simplicity − beginning, middle and end with a few quick digressions for background − allowed Harrington to get complicated elsewhere. That basic structure let him take his time talking about the meaning of poetry, the reason certain words and lines didn’t work and why something as seemingly concrete as written language can prove so tricky and abstract when put to creative use.

The lines make Rita shiver in the way she once shivered when she wrote, “He used to sleep like a glass of water/held up in the hand of a very young girl.” That feeling. So much of writing a poem is less like saying a prayer than it is putting together the weekly shopping list. Then comes a sacred moment … For Rita, these lines are a fish to keep − a rare poet’s epiphany in the muck of craft: “I don’t know where it came from. It just came.”

Harrington’s paragraphs are dense − skim, and you’ll miss something important. His prose is light on florid touches but does mimic a poet in the use of cadence. His tone is exactly right for the subject matter − conversational and slightly awed − yet he’s also ready to acknowledge that there’s something slightly wacky about the whole endeavor. He worked hard on that voice. He’d recently read Alan Lightman’s novel “Einstein’s Dreams,” an account of Einstein’s struggles to complete the theory of relativity. Harrington appreciated the novel’s light but reverent touch, and sought something similar:

It is 6:20 now, sundown out the cabin window. Rita takes up a new pen and writes: “Now we’ll see how this pen works. Sungown. Dundown. The light quenched. Oh, fennel bloom. Another ladybug − perennially cute, ladybug, body and name. Too many make a plague of luck. Ah shame on you, duckie: You’ve lost your quack. For an ounce of your prattle I’d hang up my traveling shoes.”

What does it mean? Who knows.

Gone fishing.

Narrative requires dialogue. But what happens when your major scenes consist of a woman sitting alone in a cabin, staring out the window or humming along to the classical music she plays as she works? Once again, Harrington turned elsewhere for inspiration. He’d recently read Madeleine Blais’ book “In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle,” an account of a high school basketball team that includes almost no “‘Blah, blah, blah,’ said so-and-so.” Newspaper-style attribution establishes an institutional voice and pulls readers away from the subject. Harrington wanted his audience as close to Dove as possible. So he stole Blais’ use of colons to mark off quotes, those that Dove gave directly and those he took from her journals. The result is internal dialogue that places the reader inside Dove’s cabin, and often all the way inside her head as she argues with and edits herself. This passage is like a miniature writing workshop:

“I’m a child again.” Too explanatory. The poem should have the feeling of childhood without needing to announce it.

“Catching my death of cold.” It goes on too long. This poem must be a collage of fleeting images, as in a dream. But Rita likes the line and would like to find a way to keep it.

“Moonlight cool as peaches.” She likes that line, too, may use it someday in another poem, but to mention food while in flight is too corporeal, too earthly. Still, she’ll leave it for now.

“In a nightshirt I’ve never seen before.” The image is too surreal, gives the sensation that the poem is a real dream rather than the sensation that it is like a dream.

“I won’t look below.” Not believable. Her poem’s character wouldn’t need to remind herself not to look below at the world. She’s yearning to leave it behind − for a ride to the stars.

“Come here bed, I need you!” Wait, the poem is talking to Rita again: Its traveler is ambivalent about her journey. She craves the stars but, like a child, also the comfort of her bed.

“I don’t know my way back.” The word “back” is too narrow, too referential to the world. This traveler isn’t worried about the way “back,” but the way to the stars, the future, immorality.

“Garden of dreams,” “purple petals,” “Happy landings.” “Yech!” “Awful!” “Disgusting!” But Rita doesn’t stop to change them. They are place holders for the poem’s cadence. New words will come.

Dove trusted that a combination of her own creativity and hard work − that line-by-line evisceration, performed again and again − would yield results, in this case 23 lines or 96 words of quiet beauty.

Harrington showed the same trust in his own process. He leaves Dove sitting in her cabin. She hears a dog bark, feels a breeze through the cabin window and enjoys another burst of inspiration, in this case the memory of a wisecrack her father once made to a gas station attendant.

Young Rita never forgot the baffled look on the attendant’s face.

Where are those few words she jotted? Ah, here they are:

Meek, this fallen leaf

reminds me of a word

my father used to say −

zephyr, tilting back to

gaze up under his brimmed fedora

as if to coax the air along

his brow: “What a lovely zephyr

today.” And the gas station

attendant scratched himself,

instantly ashamed

And once again, Rita steps out onto the lines …

You don’t have to love poetry to appreciate that.

Anna Griffin (@annargriff) is a columnist at The Oregonian and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

For more from our 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.

Gene Weingarten on “the god of journalism,” compulsive editing and “The Peekaboo Paradox”

Andrea Pitzer — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:33:41 +0000

After some months spent planning to write about Gene Weingarten’s story “The Peekaboo Paradox” for this site, I caught up with the two-time Pulitzer winner in Texas this summer at the Mayborn Conference. And when I say caught, I mean caught. I had never met Weingarten before, but I saw the highly recognizable, highly mustachioed former Nieman Fellow sneaking out of the hall halfway through the Saturday night awards banquet. I slipped out myself and followed him to the lobby, where he was kind enough to sit down with me for a few minutes.

We ended up running a post on the story as part of our “Why’s this so good?” series. But I also wanted to share these excerpts from the conversation, in which Weingarten talks about the writing/editing process, being a reluctant character in his own stories, and how he built his profile of the Great Zucchini.

Give me a little background on the story.

I had spent a week in New York at the U.N., because [my editors] had asked me to do a story about how the U.N. was funny.

How the U.N. was funny?

I was going to do a piece on the hilarity of the United Nations, and after a week I had nothing. I got a phone call from David Von Drehle, who was a writer at the Post. He said, “OK, there’s this guy we’ve hired.” David has four kids, ranging at that time from 6 to 1. He said, “We’ve hired him to do birthday parties successively for three of our four kids. With each party, he seemed to have deteriorated a bit in terms of his personal habits, how he looked, how he dressed, and I’m thinking that there’s a drug problem here.”

As he was talking to me, I was leaving the U.N. and going to La Guardia to return to Washington to do this story. I had decided, “Fuck the U.N. This sounds interesting.’’ It was somehow the nexus of childhood and humor and darkness. I didn’t know if it was about drugs or what, but it seemed perfect.

Do you still know that piece well enough for me to ask you some really specific questions about it?

I’m sorry, but I do.

Of course you start it at a party – it’s about a performer. But when did you find the woman who asks why you want to write about this guy? Did you go to 15 parties before she handed you this line, or was this early on?

That was not the first party I went to. Look – I don’t believe in God. I don’t think there’s a god. I’m an atheist, but I do believe there’s a god of journalism. I believe this because – I’m an old man. I’m 59 years old. I’ve been doing this for many years. And it seems to me that every time I’ve done an extra thing, every time I’ve made the extra call, gone on the extra assignment after I thought everything was done, and I didn’t really need to do it, but I say, “Oh, what the fuck,” and do it anyway – every time it results in the best thing in the story.

And that happened here. There was a final day, and I had done all my reporting. And Zucchini called and said, “I’m going out for one more Saturday. You want to come?” I didn’t need to do it, but that Saturday wound up being the opening party and the kicker party.

The special needs kids’ party was the same day?

Yes. Both of them the same day. And there are a few other unusual things about this story.

In general, my rule is that you don’t make yourself a part of the story unless you have to. The default is to keep yourself out of the story if you can. Midway through this story, I realized I had to be part of it, because virtually all the important moments of this story happened during my confronting him – the Gene-and-Zucchini moments. Not all, but many of them. The single most important moment in the story happened as a dialogue between us.

So I realized that to take myself out of the story, to pretend I wasn’t there, No. 1, would have been a lie, and No. 2, would have been really awkward. I would have somehow had to write around the fact that the person asking the question was me. So, Tom Shroder, my editor, and I decided that I have to be in this story. And we looked at each other and realized at that point, “This can never win a Pulitzer Prize, because we’re breaking the most basic rule. However good this story winds up, it’s not going to win the Pulitzer because I have to be a character in it.”

Now why do I have to be a character? What is this story ultimately about? It’s ultimately about the fact that life is terrifying, and humor is the way we tame that terror. That’s what the story is about on its highest level. Given that fact, what is the key moment in the story? It’s the point at which I sit across the table from the Great Zucchini and confront him with the thing he saw as a 12-year-old boy.

What his mother has told you.

Yes. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s in denial about it. “What happened?” “I don’t remember what happened.” “Yes, you do remember what happened.” “Well, there were shots. Maybe it was the Superbowl.” “No, it wasn’t the Superbowl.” “I don’t remember the boy.” “Yes, you do, you remember every child.”

“They’re all the same.”

Exactly. He has to get rid of me. So what does he do?

He makes a joke.

He makes a joke. That was the moment when I felt this could be a great story. How do you tell that moment without it being a conversation between the two of us? You can’t! So that was the point we realized, OK, I have to be a character. At whatever cost, I have to be a character.

By the way, the conversation about the Pulitzer was sort of a joke.

It may have been then, but you’ve won two since you wrote “The Peekaboo Paradox.”

I should just say this for the record: Winning the Pulitzer Prize is a crapshoot. It is not a validation of the story. If you think otherwise, you’re fooling yourself.

Does this story feel different in some way from other stories you’ve written?

I felt when it was done that it was the best thing I’d written, and I still feel that way. It’s not that I did it so great. It’s that everything worked out perfectly. He didn’t have to have that in his background.

And it still would have been a good story.

But things worked out. He might not have deflected my questions with a joke. Things worked out beautifully.

I wrote to you the weekend that story came out in 2006 – a critical email praising the story but asking how you decided it was OK to drive him to Atlantic City.

He was going anyway. He would have gone with other friends. We thought about this, and I talked to my editor about this. I remember your email now, because you were talking about it as an addiction.

Yes.

You asked how was it different than buying a drunk a drink. If I were writing a story about an alcoholic, and he said, “Let’s go to the bar,” and he goes to the bar every night, I’m not going to feel like I’m being an evil person by joining him in what’s killing him. The only difference here is that I physically drove him to Atlantic City.

Which was why I wrote you.

At the time, it was true that he didn’t know I knew that he couldn’t drive. But a friend would have taken him, or he would have gotten there some other way. I didn’t feel bad about that decision then, and I don’t today.

One of the things I find interesting is that so many of the things that the Great Zucchini does in the course of the story are things that bring you to mind. He is very much like you.

He has a central dysfunction that is not entirely dissimilar from my own dysfunctions.

The way he deals with his terrors and anxieties, which are both the same as and different than yours: the flirting with addiction, the –

The humor.

The humor. For you, it’s making poop jokes, for him it’s using a dirty diaper as a prop.

I hadn’t thought of it quite that way.

Taking a deliberately juvenile approach as a way to manage –

You could argue that the only thing distinguishing him from me is that I married an adult who in some ways saved my life. Not from addiction, but from this central dysfunction. I am married to a woman who is the adult in my life, who makes sure that our rent is paid.

But he’s alone. He doesn’t have that. Would I be homeless without my wife? No, but I would live much more marginally, more the way he does.

Are you writing about yourself in writing about him?

I think that the fact that at our core we’re kind of similar helped inform my understanding of him. I don’t really feel in writing this story that I was writing about myself. That is more true in the story about the dead babies. There I felt I was writing about myself.

As you were writing it or revising it, how did you think about the movement from the ridiculous to the very serious – to go from the guy wiping a dirty diaper on his face to pondering the terror of death?

I pretend I’m directing a movie. This is the best way I can explain this. You can’t bore the reader. And the same way a good director knows to intersperse scenes of action with scenes of reflection, if you look at my stories, they tend to have a rolling topography.

You’ll see that in this story, too. There will be a scene filled with presence and action, and then we’ll come off and think a little bit about what this means. That I do deliberately.

Do you write a lot and then cut it down?

I’m an editor. I edit as I go. I don’t write longer than the story winds up being. Sometimes Tom will cut something out, but rarely. Most of my life, I’ve been an editor. So I compulsively edit myself. The most galling part of that is that as I’m writing, every time I go back into the story, every new day, I start from the beginning, and I word edit from the beginning.

It will be the ninth day of writing. I will have written 118 inches for a story that’s going to be 180 inches, and I can’t boot up the computer and go to inch 118 and start writing. I start with the first word of the story. It’s horrifying.

So do you end up happier with your ledes than your kickers?

That’s a funny question, but yes, it’s true. The tops of my story become so much better because they’ve been gone through so many times.

The first great writer I edited was Madeleine Blais at The Miami Herald – a former Nieman. She would write the kicker of the story first. I don’t have that kind of discipline. She would literally write the last paragraph and then build the whole story to deliver on that. I’m not that good.

[For more on Gene Weingarten and “The Peekaboo Paradox,” read our “Why's this so good?” post about the story. For more on Weingarten and ethics, read our transcript of his talk at the Mayborn Conference about two moments in his career when he struggled with journalistic ethics.]

David Finkel on The Good Soldiers: “I’m not obligated to these men, but I do want to tell a story that they recognize”

Andrea Pitzer — Mon, 03 May 2010 20:35:44 +0000

Tomorrow, Washington Post national enterprise editor David Finkel will receive the 2010 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for The Good Soldiers, a bruising account of a U.S. Army battalion’s service in Iraq during 2007 and 2008. The $10,000 prize, announced by the Nieman Foundation and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, is given for excellence in nonfiction writing that exemplifies literary grace and commitment to serious research. We wanted to take advantage of the moment to talk with Finkel about his ideas on writing and the narrative approach he chose for his story.

Finkel covered the 2-16 battalion for more than a year, eight months of which he spent embedded with the soldiers. Acknowledging the personal nature of storytelling, he says,

You could have given another journalist the same access I had during the same time period with the same battalion with the same series of events, and that journalist would have written a story just as true but very different from mine.

So what happens? You go over with a certain amount of curiosity, and things start to take shape, and patterns emerge. You find yourself moved by certain things and paying more and more attention. A story develops from that. You spend enough time, and eventually you gain some confidence in the notion that what you’re paying attention to is the thing worth writing about.

Published in 2009, his book was hailed for its intimate look at war. Finkel re-entered the spotlight last month with the April release of a Wikileaks video showing American forces shooting two Reuters journalists and several Iraqis in a suburb of Baghdad—an incident he had described in The Good Soldiers.

During a WashingtonPost.com chat about the video, Finkel offered context he felt was missing from the edited Wikileaks video He later described his disappointment about the use of a George Orwell quote at the beginning of the video, as well as his issues with how the piece was edited:

I might have said this in the chat, but I’ve certainly said it to friends: “That was a bad day for Americans, it was a bad day for Iraqis. It was a bad day in a bad war.” One of the guys involved that day, Josh Stieber, who got out as a CO, says about the video, “It’s pretty awful, and if people think it’s awful, they ought to think about policies that put Americans in situations like this again and again.” That’s pretty provocative.

I’m glad the video is out there for people to look at. I just wish the people putting it out there were a bit more old school in their journalism. It’s not like you can put the thing out there with no context—it needs context. But the context ought to come from reporting, not from something pulled out of another time and place.

(For Wikileaks editor Julian Assange’s thoughts on the video, see his April interview with Stephen Colbert.)

Finkel won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2006 after being a three-time finalist, and has reported from most continents and many war zones during his 20 years with the Post. His long commitment to narrative journalism has been featured in the Narrative Digest, which previously highlighted a 2007 Post piece that became part of The Good Soldiers, as well as “The Meaning of Work” from 2006.

In the following Q&A, taken from an April 30 interview, Finkel talks about the pros and cons of first-person journalism, the obligations of journalists and storytellers, and the line he almost didn’t include in his book.

There have already been a lot of books written about soldiers and war. What made you want to write one?

Well, I read a lot of them, and they affected me growing up. And this is a big war in my lifetime, an important one and a consequential one. By the time I went overseas in 2007, there had been so much literature on this war already, great policy books that had had an effect on the war, memoirs that were coming out. But other than Dexter Filkins’ book, really, I had not seen an on-the-ground account by a journalist. So I decided to try to do it.

Did you know when you went in what story you wanted to tell?

I had no idea what was going to happen—it’s the journalism I’ve always done, where you just show up and stay. At least so far in my career, a story seems to occur eventually. But I didn’t know what it would be, except that I was interested in seeing the far end of policy.

The other thing about early 2007—it was an interesting moment for a writer, because the war seemed all but lost. As I said in the book, the tragic moment seemed to be at hand. That’s a pretty inviting moment to go into as a writer.

In the end, you cut it down to a book with a tight focus. Was there a point at which you said, “I can’t possibly write about all of this” and realized you had to leave some things out?

In the beginning, you’re just writing everything down and looking for clues, for anything anywhere that begins to take on a narrative frame—a constant searching and vacuuming up of everything.

I went over there after promising the commander of the battalion that I had no agenda in mind. I wasn’t writing a polemic. This was not a first-person book. My intent was not to pronounce the surge a success or a failure, or to declare the war won or lost. The idea was to use the book to write about the experience of a battalion of infantry soldiers, to write intimately about character in this seemingly lost moment.

The guy said, “If that’s your promise, no agenda, then come on over, and I’ll give you access.” Still, just because he said that didn’t mean that I dropped into the middle of this thing knowing what I was doing and having the trust and cooperation of soldiers. They were quite suspicious of my motives for a long time.

How did you deal with that?

I guess I expected it somewhat. In many ways, that seems to be almost what any story involves now. Every year there seems to be more distrust of a journalist’s motives. These were kids that not only did they not know what war was, but they also didn’t know what journalism was or what it could be. They expected me to have an agenda, which was to paint them as war criminals or whatever.

It just took a lot of time. The more bad things that happened that I was in the midst of as a reporter, and I didn’t become a problem for them—I think trust developed from that. So, number one, I didn’t become a problem. And number two, I stayed. I didn’t come in pretending to know anything and then stick around a couple of days and take off and write a story declaring this or that.

I reported on their entire deployment of 15 months, and I was in Baghdad with them for about eight months, through some of their best days and their very worst days. So trust develops.

How do you gain confidence in the story you decide to tell? For me it’s showing up with a question in mind that I want to answer: “What is this thing?” And then thinking, “Well, I’m going to stay around long enough until I have what seems an authentic answer.”

You noted it’s not a first-person book, but you seem to have kept yourself pretty relentlessly out of the story, even at one point when it seems like you’re in the middle of a conversation with a soldier. There, it felt like you went beyond not making yourself the center of the book—it seemed like a deliberate strategy of keeping yourself out.

I don’t want to say I don’t like first person—I really like Dexter Filkins’ book, for instance, as a recent example of first-person journalism. I’m just not good at that. I would read Dexter’s stuff and say, “I was there. He just said that perfectly and beautifully. I wish I could do that.”

I’ve always written third person. At this point, I’m a pretty old dog. That’s just the approach I brought to this as well. I’m not terribly interested in what I’m doing there. What I’m doing is pretty easy. I’m just going there to see the thing and try to write it.

The main character is the war, the soldiers. It was their transformation, their degradation in many respects—that’s the thing, and I didn’t want to do anything to take away from that.

People who cover subjects for this long tend to identify with their subjects, sometimes in a deliberate way, to be able to tell their stories. Did you ever feel like that was happening?

Well, I guess it could be a worry. Everything was ramped up in this case, because everything was so extreme from the weather to the consequences to what a day entailed. It was the most extreme experience I’ve been a part of.

With every story, I always start my stories the same way. Part of narrative is getting to know someone, so they get past their stereotype of you and they begin to relax enough to move past answering questions and entering a period where there’s a conversation. I explain to people, “I’m thinking about writing this story, and I’m interested in writing about you. You have to understand for one thing that you’re not going to see the story until it appears. If it’s a story in the Post, for instance, and it comes out on a Sunday, you’re going to see it the same day that a million subscribers see the story. And you have to think about that.

“You have to understand that my obligation isn’t to you. It’s not a story for you, it’s a story about you. You need to think about that as well. Here are a few examples of my work. Think it over. If you feel like being part of the story, that’s terrific, and we’ll go from there.”

I did the same thing here. But again, it’s a more extreme version, because I’m sure there were days when soldiers were acting in a way that may have saved me from some harm. So who is my obligation to—is it to the soldiers who may have saved my life? Well, yes and no. The obligation is to the story that they’re part of. And if the day comes that a soldier who did something to help me on a particular day turns out to be a terrible person, a criminal, then that’s where the story goes and that’s what the story is.

Whenever I work, I make sure there’s some clear visual signal I’m there as a reporter. There’s always either a tape recorder in sight, or I have a notebook out and I’m taking notes. I always want people to remember I’m there to do a specific job as a reporter.

On a related note, I read your WashingtonPost.com chat about the Wikileaks video when it came out.

That was a terrible chat. I was hoping to clear something up, and I think I just became part of it in a way that day.

You covered the same incident in your book, and it seems like you had seen the video back then. Is that true?

I never said in the book what my sources were. Not to be coy here, but if you read the book, it certainly tracks what the video shows. All my stuff was unclassified—I do need to point that out. The main source of information that day was that I was there. I was present.

It was interesting to me that as the chat developed, you began posting the comments that other people were sending in, sharing them with the whole audience.

That’s because I had no idea how to respond. And I just thought, “Different people are writing with different opinions. Let’s just post them and get the discussion out there.” I didn’t like that chat very much.

It was an interesting position to be in, because what I wanted to do was say, “There’s a larger context here.” If you saw the video, and you’re one of the six or seven million people who clicked on the 17-minute version, the context for that video was a great George Orwell quote. And editing done by someone who basically told The New York Times, “I’m a journalist and an advocate, and if I have to choose one over the other, I’m an advocate.”

So here came this video of this day that I was intimately aware of. And people were willing to judge so much by this edited 17-minute clip that was preceded by an Orwell quote. There was other context for that day, and I just wanted to get that across—that there was an operation going on, that there was a reason for the operation, that the area this was in had been a tough area all morning long.

But it became clear that the more I tried to explain the context, the more I was being seen as an apologist. And so I just decided, “There’s no ‘win’ here.” Let the book speak for itself. If people want to take shots, let ‘em take shots. I’m not going to do any better at explaining it than I did in the book.

You pointed out some things that had not been included in the edited video.

I told that story in the context of what the soldiers went through that day, because that’s the book I was writing. For a book that’s a narrative, that’s a soldier’s story—these soldiers’ story—then let’s explain that day and what happened to the Reuters guys in the context of what went on that morning and what preceded it and how they felt afterward. They went to dinner. That’s just the way it was for them. That’s a different world than the world of Wikileaks.

Let’s imagine something between the two worlds. If you were there reporting the story—you had been somewhere nearby, and the Post sent you to find out what happened, and you had no role or history with these guys, would you have reported it differently?

Let’s see. It depends what info was available to me. I would assume if I were on site, and some people from Reuters were killed, I would write that story. I would also write it in the context that it was part of an operation that was begun to calm down an area that in the previous weeks had been especially vicious and had caused a lot of injuries. I’d like to think if I had all the material, the way I wrote it in the book would be the way I would write a newspaper story.

What is a newspaper story? At least as a narrative, you tend to start at the very last moment before transformation begins, before action begins, you set the stage, and then chronologically, you go through what happened next, based on the information you can get your hands on when you write.

I guess if I were doing for the newspaper, then I would have contacted Reuters, I would have tried to get on-the-record reaction from them. I would have tried to find the family. I would have done the whole thing.

This gets back to my earlier point. With the same set of facts and a different journalist, you get a different story. For the book, since the story I was telling was the soldiers’ story, I wrote something that I think is an honest piece of journalism that fits in the framework of the story I was telling, which was the soldiers’ experience that day.

If I were just over there as an embedded reporter, and this happened, and I was writing the story that day, I’m sure then I’d track it down, go to the far end to find the families, to try to find the kids, and the rest of it.

Let me make one last point, even if I’m repeating. To me the context for a responsible news story is the actual context. It’s not a selective quotation by somebody from another time or place that sets the framework for what you’re about to see.

In your book, you use George Bush’s statements to launch each chapter. Can you talk about choosing that particular context for your story?

Those were directly relevant statements by a main character in the story—it was his war. I’m saying that’s what the war was to him on a particular day, and here’s what it was to these guys.

You chose a chronological structure, linking the end of one chapter in clever ways with the beginning of another. Was there anything you struggled with structurally in putting the story together?

Well, coming up with the structure. There’s a piece of old advice—I always say Maddy Blais said this, and I hope I’m right: It’s helpful to choose a simple structure to tell a story. If you’re trying to show off by choosing a complicated structure, you’re going to spend most of your time just trying to get yourself out of corners. If you choose a simple structure, you can do the most within it, and sometimes you can be the most honest to the story. I thought that was great advice.

So this was in many ways a very simple structure. Some guys left, things happened to them, and they came home.

Did you commit pretty early on to that structure?

Fairly early. I think that’s done in tandem with deciding the story you want to tell and then deciding on the structure you want to tell it in. In this case, when things began to happen and I saw the soldiers changing, that become important to me.

So, if what I’m going to see is a transformation of character, and that transformation takes place because of certain events and takes place over a period of time, then maybe the best way to tell the story is the simple time-honored way of saying who they were, what happened to them, and then who they became.

But it’s not like I went over with that in mind. I went over with the idea of chronicling what happened to them, but I didn’t know if anything would happen to them. And then it began happening.

But even along the way, I would take breaks once in a while. I think I was out at Stanford doing a week-long fellowship, and I did a talk out there, and I sort of previewed my thinking on the book. It was the first time I’d really talked about it out loud to anyone. And one guy in the audience said, “I have a son over there, and he’s building schools. Why aren’t you focusing on the positive things? Why are you writing about so many bad things that have happened?”

That pierced me a little bit. “Am I tilting the story unfairly to something? Am I just taking the easy way out by concentrating on injuries and tragedies rather than the other things going on?” But the fact is that what his kid was going through wasn’t happening where I was. There were versions of it, but they never went very well.

The other thing that happened is that I began gaining the trust of the soldiers. They began coming over and confiding in me and saying things like, “The true story of what’s going on is how hard this has turned out to be and the way we’re getting torn up. if you’re going to spend all this time, and you’re going to tell a story, I hope the story you’re going to tell gets to the truth of that and doesn’t gloss over it.”

In some ways, that was helpful to hear, but I still had my doubts. And then interviewing Kauzlarich, the main character, I said, “Tell me about your worst day here, so far.” And we had a long conversation about that. And I said, “Now tell me your best day so far.” And he said, “There isn’t one. It’s not about the best days. It’s about these worst days.” And that was very interesting to hear from this incredibly, ceaselessly optimistic man.

I’m not obligated to these men, but I do want to tell a story that they recognize. I don’t want to be accused of being a downer and only concentrating on the stuff that translates well to narrative, the tragedies. But that seemed to be the story that developed in the end—not only to me but to the characters themselves.

What has their response been?

There are two parts to it. It’s not like every email I’ve gotten has been “Thank you for writing this book.” But almost every email, especially from soldiers and soldiers’ families has a version of that. The typical email basically says, “Mr. Finkel, I was over there. I came home. Everyone wanted to know what it was like. I can’t talk about it, and I don’t talk about it. Now I give people your book and say, ‘Read the book, and you’ll understand what it was like and why I can’t talk about it.’” That’s not just this battalion. It’s soldiers from all over the place who have written to me with the same version of that email. So that says something.

And then the other part of it is that there’s a part of the book that’s so intimate in the way it chronicles the death of a soldier. At one point, there’s a frantic effort to keep this guy alive in the aid station, and they’re performing CPR on him. And basically every time they push on his chest, pieces of him drop to the floor. Then a nurse inadvertently kicks something on the floor while she’s moving about, and this thing skids across the floor and it comes to rest against my boot. And the soldier next to me looks down and he says, “That’s a toe.”

Of all the lines in the book, that’s the one I hesitated the most to include, because you want to include details, but you don’t want to include needless details that degenerate into war porn. I went back and forth on it. The way I was thinking about it was, “This is a good soldier who was survived by loving parents and a loving wife who knew that he was dead but didn’t know any of the details. If they’re going to pick up this book and suddenly they’re going to be reading about the death of this man that they loved, and they get to this line, “That’s a toe,” is that just too much? It gets back to our obligation. In the end, I thought that line needed to go in the book. So I put it in.

A couple months later, after the book came out, I got an email from that soldier’s father. It was an amazing email, very heartfelt and long, and somewhere in there, he was talking about that and he said, “I want to thank you for writing about what happened to my son. Because of it, we got to spend the last few hours of his life with him, and our family’s grateful to you for that.”

That’s the response I got, but it certainly could have gone the other way from another family. In intimate narratives, those are the moments, aren’t they? Where you know you have something on your hands that you want to include, but you really have to explore your motives for doing it.

Were there things you decided to leave out of the book on that basis?

As far as details like the one I just described, no, I didn’t leave any out. The question became how to use them properly, so they wouldn’t come across as “Look what I saw! Look what I saw!” but would fit in and be as intimate as possible while still falling on the correct side of the line of dignity.

It’s a judgment call. That was the thinking behind a lot of sentences that I wrote, but it’s a pretty brutal book.

It’s a hard book to read. It’s in some ways harder because you’re not giving the reader the relief of a direct argument. There are undertones, of course, like the part with the spaghetti factory, where the story almost descends into farce and becomes more horrific. We get a sense of how awful you think it is.

I go back and look at certain lines—it’s so evident that I was angry about something when I wrote the line. There’s a bit at the end, when everything falls apart, when the last two soldiers are about to die, and a great guy named Patrick Hanley was about to be grievously injured. I think I say something like “who was about to give part of his brain to the cause of freedom” or something like that—I can’t remember the exact line. When I wrote that, I thought, “Is this over the top? Am I going past my promised agenda?” By then, it was the end of the book, and I thought the case had been made to let something like that in, to let that come through without betraying the rest of the book.

I remember very clearly writing this book, where I got hung up and the decisions I made. Every word in there was a deliberate choice.

Are there any regrets now that it’s out? Something you wish you had put in or wish you’d left out?

There are certain sentences that are just godawful pieces of writing. I regret them, but I had a deadline—I guess we always have that excuse.

But it’s the story you wanted to tell?

It is. It’s an honest piece of journalism. I think I got it right.

That sounds so self-serving; I’m sorry about that. I don’t want to boast about it. The book is what it is. I think it’s correct. It’s not the only way it could have been written. Somebody else could have done the same everything and written a different book that would have been just as true. But for what I saw, for what I felt, for the conclusions I came to, I wrote a piece of journalism that I think is authentic and honest.

Nieman Storyboard - A project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard » Madeleine Blais

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