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The best in narrative, 2012: Storyboard’s top picks in audio, magazines, newspapers and online

Paige Williams — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:34:08 +0000

Welcome to Storyboard’s first annual year-end roundup of top storytelling: 34 of our favorite pieces in audio, magazines, newspapers and online, with three of the categories guest curated by Mark Armstrong (online), Julia Barton and Julie Shapiro (audio), and Ben Montgomery, Michael Kruse and Thomas Lake (newspapers). This was a strong year for storytelling, and it was hard to choose. You’ll find pieces that perhaps you already know and love alongside, we hope, a few new surprises. Enjoy.

AUDIO

Chosen by radio producer and editor Julia Barton, who writes Storyboard‘s Audio Danger column, and Julie Shapiro, artistic director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

“Poetry, Texas”

Producers: Pejk Malinovski and Falling Tree Productions

Pejk Malinovski is a New York-based, Denmark-born radio producer and poet, and he’s found his ideal subject in Poetry, Texas. His half-hour documentary for the BBC takes a wide-eyed look at a small East Texas community and finds much to wonder at. Malinovski’s narration is sparse but just right, as when he interviews a lonely man outside the town’s only gas station. The man, Malinovski tells us, has been diagnosed with cancer. Soon after we find out the man is clutching a pack of cigarettes. When he says “dime,” it drawls into “dawm.” “I wonder if anyone ever recorded this man’s voice,” Malinovski says. “And I shiver with the thought that this might be the last time that anyone does.” (nominated by Third Coast International Audio Festival artistic director Julie Shapiro)

“Retraction”

Producers: This American Life

This brutal self-takedown on the part of Ira Glass and This American Life also makes for gripping audio. Earlier this year, TAL achieved its most-downloaded episode when it excerpted Mike Daisey’s monologue about working conditions at Chinese plants that manufacture iPhones and iPads. But his story turns out to be conflated or downright false. Glass cedes much of the episode to Marketplace’s China correspondent, Rob Schmitz, as he does the shoe-leather reporting that rapidly takes apart Daisey’s account. It’s brave, truthful, and a model of transparent journalism – though it begs some larger questions about why we fall for fabulous narratives over messy reality time and again.

“Grumpy Old Terrorists”

Producers: Pat Walters and Radiolab

Like This American Life, Radiolab struggled with its own ethics controversy this year: Hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich were excoriated for treatment of a Hmong interviewee in this episode (though to their credit, they did something rare in public radio and aired an interview gone awry). In general, it’s been fascinating to hear the show expand beyond science and take on the wider world with its trademark embrace of risk and ambiguity. Producer Pat Walters’ podcast short “Grumpy Old Terrorists” raises all kinds of questions about how our government, and all of us, respond to people who seem to be planning horrible things. (And for more on host Jad Abumrad’s insistence that the program grow and change, read his manifesto, punks.)

“Pike County, OH – As Black as We Wish to Be”

Producers: Lu Olkowski and State of the Re:Union

Independent producer Lu Olkowski stumbled upon a remarkable story in southern Ohio: a town where most people identify as “black” – and suffer N-word treatment by surrounding communities – although generations of intermarriage have rendered most residents completely “white” looking. Olkowski and State of the Re:Union host Al Letson take what could be just an absurd, uniquely American curiosity and go deep, letting us hear how the residents of Jacksonville, Ohio, have to make tough choices about identity and family.

“Artists Disturbed And Inspired By Syria’s Violence”

Producers: Kelly McEvers and NPR

It’s hard to highlight only one narrative out of Kelly McEvers’ coverage of the Middle East this year. Whether in Bahrain, Yemen, or Syria, she’s able to make us really feel what people are going through in this traumatized part of the world. One piece of hers I can’t get out of my head is a simple report on a performance in Beirut – a late-night, secretive set of monologues based on letters and stories from Syria’s war zones. And don’t miss the accompanying web feature on an artist who satirizes the Assad regime with finger puppets, at huge risk to himself.

MAGAZINES

Chosen by Paige Williams, writer, Storyboard editor, and Nieman Foundation for Journalism narrative writing instructor.

“Animals,” by Chris Jones, Esquire

At last count, journalists had produced four long narratives of the weird news out of Ohio – that a suicidal zookeeper had freed scores of tigers and bears and other animals before shooting himself – but none more poetically, or with more narrative tension, than Jones.

“The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador,” by Karen Russell, GQ

You may know Russell as the author of the short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swampladia!, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, but in her first long magazine narrative she proves herself an equally compelling teller of true stories. She doesn’t gild her sentences; she wires them.

“The Innocent Man,” by Pam Colloff, Texas Monthly

Colloff has become a one-woman justice league with her stories about wrongful imprisonment. With this two-parter, about a man accused of killing his wife, she continues the work, laying out the whole saga in straightforward prose that you can’t put down.

“The Throwaways,” by Sarah Stillman, The New Yorker

It’s impossible to talk about the year’s most important work without including Sarah Stillman’s remarkable piece on the law enforcement community’s growing reliance on young confidential informants. Stillman focuses on the death of a 23-year-old drug informant named Rachel Hoffman (“She had never fired a gun or handled a significant stash of hard drugs. Now she was on her way to conduct a major undercover deal for the Tallahassee Police Department, meeting two convicted felons alone in her car to buy two and a half ounces of cocaine, fifteen hundred Ecstasy pills, and a semi-automatic handgun.”) but covers an entire American subculture of pawns.

“The Yankee Comandante,” by David Grann, The New Yorker

It’s a love story, a war story, an expat story, a mystery, a history lesson, music.

NEWSPAPERS

Chosen by the Tampa Bay Times‘ Ben Montgomery and Michael Kruse and Sports Illustrated’s Thomas Lake.

“Never Let Go,” by Kelley Benham French, the Tampa Bay Times

Not because we know her and love her, but because Kelley Benham French lived an amazing story and had the good sense to recognize that, and to go back and report the hell out of it.

“In Rust Belt, a teenager’s climb from poverty,” by Anne Hull, the Washington Post

Because Anne Hull is back on the Post and we missed her deep and empathetic immersion reporting so much.

“Former Black Panther patches together purpose in Africa exile,” by Christopher Goffard, the Los Angeles Times

Because of Goffard’s very last paragraph and all those that led to it.

“At the Corner of Hope and Worry,” by Dan Barry, New York Times

Because Dan Barry is the Homer of Americana.

“A teacher, a student and a 39-year-long lesson in forgiveness,” by Tom Hallman Jr., the Oregonian

Because a good feature story is about something universal, like an apology, and Hallman knew when to pay attention.

“Caballo Blanco’s Last Run: the Micah True Story,” by Barry Bearak, the New York Times

Because Micah True’s was an almost perfect death, if there is such a thing, and Bearak handled it masterfully, and the New York Times gave it the space it deserved.

“Life of a salesman,” by Eli Saslow, the Washington Post

Because this story about the shifting myth of the American dream made every last one of us wish we had thought of it and done it so well.

“The Princess of Matamoros,” by Mark Collette, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times

Because Collette found a love story, full of change and redemption, in a washed-up hell-raiser and told it with skill.

ONLINE

Chosen by Mark Armstrong, founder of Longreads and editorial director for Pocket.

When I started Longreads in 2009, more than 70 percent of the stories shared in the community were pieces that started out in a print magazine or newspaper. That’s changing, slowly. Print publishers are still responsible for the vast majority of the deeply reported pieces that are online, but it’s heartening to see so many online-only publishers, new and old, embrace in-depth storytelling on the web. Here are a few favorites from this year, in no particular order:

“Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, the Biggest Troll on the Web,” Adrian Chen, Gawker

Chen spent much of 2012 tracking down the real humans behind some of the anonymous and/or despicable characters of the web. And Gawker and sister publications Gizmodo and Deadspin already have an impressive track record with these stories.

“How A Career Ends: Nancy Hogshead-Makar, Olympic Swimming Gold Medalist,” Rob Trucks, Deadspin

The first-person account of an Olympic career, a violent attack, and what happened next.

“The Wedding,” Katherine Goldstein, Slate

The story of Will and Erwynn, the first gay couple to marry on a military base.

“Imagining Myself in Palestine,” Randa Jarrar, Guernica

A Palestinian-American writer attempts to fly to Israel to visit her sister.

“The Glorious Plight of the Buffalo Bills,” Ben Austen, Grantland

A forever disappointed fan base, a team that’s threatening to leave town … and Zubaz.

“Lost in Space,” Mike Albo, Narratively

I have complicated feelings about Kickstarter and journalism – it feels like a sugar high for niche publishers – but I guess it works, because love Narratively, and I loved Mike Albo on navigating the online hookup scene.

“A Mormon Reporter on the Romney Bus,” McKay Coppins, BuzzFeed

This year, the most restrained, thoughtful story about Romney’s religion came from BuzzFeed.

“Grandpa Was a Baller,” Matt Kallman, The Classical

Another Kickstarter-backed publisher, still doing great work after its first year. Kallman digs into his grandfather’s past as a pro basketball player for the Chicago Stags in the 1940s.

Other online publishers I loved this year: The Rumpus, The Hairpin, SB Nation, The Verge, The Awl, The Billfold, The New Inquiry, Splitsider. Looking forward to in 2013: Matter.

Amy Ellis Nutt and the wreck of the Lady Mary, Part 2

Paige Williams — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 15:43:35 +0000

In Part 2 of our annotation of Amy Ellis Nutt‘s Pulitzer-winning “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” Nutt, of the Newark Star-Ledger, explains how the investigative track of her five-chapter narrative unfolded. Yesterday, in Part 1, she walked us through the story conception and first two sections of the series, which chronicled the sinking of an Atlantic scallop boat and the deaths of all but one of the crew, exposing flaws in maritime safety law. The green bits are Paige Williams, the blue bits are Nutt. For more annotations, see the Tampa Bay Times’ Michael Kruse on his story about a woman who disappeared inside her own home, and Jon Franklin‘s classic “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” the inaugural winner of the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.

CHAPTER 3

Edith Jones, longtime partner of Bernie Smith, lies on the couch in her apartment in Wildwood. It is 11 a.m., and Jones is expecting Bernie back the next day. On ABC, Channel 6 in Philadelphia, Rachael Ray has just finished interviewing the latest winner of TV’s “The Biggest Loser” show. Jones is waiting for “The View” to start when Action News breaks in with a special report.

The Lady Mary, a fishing boat out of Cape May, appears to have sunk, the announcer says. One man is reported to be alive, two others are either dead or in very critical condition, and four are still missing.

Jones leaps off the couch and calls her daughter Rebecca.

“Bernie’s boat went down!” she screams into the phone.

Nutt

For 15 years, Jones, now 70, and Bernie, one of Fuzzy’s younger brothers, lived together in a photograph-filled apartment in Wildwood. He was devoted to Jones, and when he wasn’t at sea the two were rarely apart. Bernie, 59, cooked for her, even accompanied her to the laundromat, and when they weren’t watching “Dancing with the Stars” or his favorite show, “Friday Night Smackdown,” they were out dancing in Cape May. She often wore her red chiffon dress, he his red tie and tux. Even when they attended the First Baptist Church in Whitesboro every Sunday, they liked to wear matching outfits. I noticed a photograph on a coffee table – the one of the couple in their matching red outfits – and asked Edith about it./aen

As Bobo did with Stacy, Bernie always called Edith after she dropped him off at the dock for another fishing trip and the boat was pulling out of port. Usually she wasn’t even back home yet when her phone rang.

“I love you, honey” was always the first thing he said. Sure, you wonder. But when someone insists, then you have to go with it. I also figured people would “see” through the statement for what it is – that he surely said it a lot, but “always” when it’s said about anything, is doubtful./aen The two talked for 15 or 20 minutes, past the lighthouse and the Coast Guard buoys, until reception was lost.

In 2007 Jones retired after 27 years as a housekeeper at the Crest Haven Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Cape May Courthouse. Her first husband, Alford, died in her arms when he was just 58. Several years later she met Bernie. The love of her life, Bernie didn’t mind when Edith said he and Alford were so alike they could have been twin brothers.

“Don’t make no plans,” Bernie joked with Edith on the morning of March 18 as the boat steamed east toward the Elephant Trunk. “We’re going to Virginia Beach when I come back.”

“All right,” she said, but the line had already gone dead.

The Lady Mary was out of reach.

A DANGEROUS CALLING

Fuzzy wasn’t expecting his sons back until Wednesday morning. That gave him just enough time to drive home to Bayboro, N.C., run some errands and see his wife, Hazel. A few hours later he’d turn around and be back in Cape May in time for the Lady Mary’s arrival. There would be scallops to weigh and checks to cut for the crew.

The commute was a long one, 12 hours each way, but Fuzzy drove it 40, 50, 60 times every fishing season. He’d grown used to it, prizing the quiet time alone. He ran his Ford Lariat up onto the Cape May ferry, and when the boat hit the shore in Lewes, Del., 90 minutes later, he turned the truck south down the Delmarva Peninsula and across the Chesapeake Bay. Before he reached Bayboro, 200 miles to the south, he would thread his way through dozens of small towns stitched into the Virginia and North Carolina coastline.

The sky was high and cloudless — the kind of day air traffic controllers refer to as “severe clear” — and the good weather put Fuzzy at ease. Bobo and Tim would soon be hauling back and heading home.

Commercial fishermen always have risked life and limb to pursue a profession where a mere change in wind or a minor mechanical malfunction might mean they never get home. Every year throughout the 1800s, the village of Gloucester, Mass., the oldest seaport in the country, lost about 200 fishermen — approximately 4 percent of its population — to weather and accidents.

Advancements in navigational technology and boat design made the occupation safer and the industry profitable, but it also created crowded seas. Overfishing and environmental concerns eventually led to shorter fishing seasons and strict enforcement, all of which meant crews took more chances — going out in bad weather or overloading their boats with too much catch — to meet regulations and make deadlines. Oh, Lord, Paige, we cut out probably another 100 inches of explanatory info because it just bogged the story down so much. In the case of the regulations, they are so complicated that I had to really work to synthesize this. Again, though, this is where we made good use of sidebars and graphics./aen

In August 1985, 20-year-old Yale student Peter Barry died with five other crewmen aboard an Alaskan salmon boat. His parents — his father was a former congressman and a member of the staffs of two U.S. presidents — succeeded in pushing Congress to pass the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act of 1988. Ellen Barry of the NYT. Peggy Barry, who had not yet read my story, only a basic description of it, just wanted to reach out to me with her story. I told her that she and her husband and her late son were part of my series, and so when we met at the luncheon it was very moving for us both./aen

The new law mandated lifesaving and firefighting equipment on all fishing vessels, as well as survival suits and EPIRBs on vessels operating in certain waters.

Deaths declined by more than 30 percent over the next five years. But fishermen, notorious for their fiercely guarded independence, resisted many of the recommendations. Commercial fishing remained — and remains — the most dangerous occupation in America with a fatality rate 30 times that of the average American worker, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Between 1992 and 2007, 1,093 commercial fishing vessels and 934 men and women were lost at sea, the Government Accountability Office reported last year. Fully a third of those deaths were Atlantic Coast fishermen.

In New Jersey alone, more than 100 commercial fishermen have died on the job since reliable records began to be kept in 1931. Last year 11 died, the worst since the winter of 1999 when the same number was lost. In the aftermath of those deaths, a special Coast Guard task force issued a report and made 59 recommendations. More than a decade later, only a handful have been officially adopted.

The 80-page document opens with an 1816 quote from Sir Walter Scott, expressing a reality that is often still true, nearly 200 years later:

“It’s not fish you are buying — it’s men’s lives.”  I almost always over-research my stories and so much of it is eventually left on the cutting room floor, so to speak. For instance, I learned a great deal about the arcane, ancient rules of navigation on the sea, but probably only included a single sentence about them. As for getting back to Fuzzy earlier, I think we probably moved him around quite a bit before he ended up here. And again, sidebars and graphics helped alleviate the need for all the explanatory information in the body of the story, but not completely./aen

‘HAVE YOU HEARD?’

Fuzzy was nearly to the North Carolina border when his cell phone rang. It was Keith Laudeman, owner of the Lobster House.

“Fuzzy, where are you at? Have you heard anything about the Lady Mary sinking?”

“What!? No, no way.”

Fuzzy immediately dialed Bobo’s cell phone, then Tim’s. Both calls went to voice mail. That wasn’t surprising, he realized, they were still too far out. Heck, he talked to Bobo three days earlier and everything was fine. Fuzzy kept driving south toward Bayboro, running names and numbers through his head. Who could he phone to get more information?

A half-hour later, Laudeman called back.

“Fuzzy, you better come on back here,” he said. “Something’s not right.”

Without even thinking, Fuzzy U-turned across two lanes of traffic and gunned his truck north.

Around the same time, Carinna Smith, Tim’s wife, was ironing a blouse for work when her phone rang, too.

“Have you heard from Tim?” Carinna’s friend, Martha Crawley, asked.

“I’ll hear from him soon. He’s due this week.”

“You know a boat went down, don’t you?” Martha asked, gently.

“No, no. I’d hear from his dad if anything was wrong.”

An hour later, at the Woodbine Developmental Center, Carinna’s cell phone rang again. This time it was her pastor, Thomas Dawson, from the First Baptist Church of Woodbine. “Carinna, have you heard from Tim?”

“No, I’m due to hear from him,” she said for the second time that morning.

“A boat went down,” Dawson said. “Do you know the name of Tim’s boat?”

Carinna’s mind raced in a million different directions. Why couldn’t she remember?

“Well, they’re all named after his grandmother, Mary something or something Mary.”

“Lady Mary?” the Rev. Dawson asked.

“That’s one of them.”

Carinna couldn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it. Tim was too good a fisherman, and he was with Bobo and Bernie and Frankie Credle. Together, they were four experienced captains. How could they sink? She remembered when they first met, the movie “The Perfect Storm” had just been released. The story of the six New England fishermen killed when their boat went down in one of the worst storms of the century frightened her, but Tim was reassuring.

“Baby, you know things are in place. I’m always watching the weather. If water gets in, alarms go off.”

And when the weather wasn’t good, he would call her and say, “Baby, I’m laying up.”  She trusted his judgment and several times actually went out with him on the boat when he went fishing. She loved watching him work the winches and steer the boat, bringing in a full load of scallops. She was proud of Tim, and so she learned not to be afraid when he was out.

In fact, she embraced Tim’s love of the sea. Three hundred guests were invited to their wedding, and Carinna did the decorations herself for the reception at the Rio Grande fire hall. She collected hundreds of snail shells, boiled and bleached them, then dipped them in glitter and deposited one at every place setting.

THE TERRIBLE WAIT AT THE DOCK

If the sea was going to be her husband’s life, it would be hers, too. When Carinna hung up with Pastor Dawson, she immediately dialed Fuzzy.

“Dad, they said a boat went down!”

“I know,” Fuzzy said. He was still driving north. “I’m trying to find out now.”

Carinna remembered Tim telling her, “Baby, if I fall overboard this time of the year, it ain’t good.” She couldn’t stay at work and she was too distraught to drive, so Crawley picked her up and drove her to Cape May.

Waiting at the dock was awful, and each new bit of information made it more so: A life raft had been spotted, but no one was inside. Three men had been recovered from the water, but only one was definitively alive.

Carinna kept Fuzzy apprised of all the reports. He was a fisherman, and he knew how bad it was. His sons were dead. Now he dreaded they’d never be found.

When word reached him that two bodies had been recovered, he prayed over and over: “Please God, let them two boys be mine.” is/pw Capt. Fuzzy is an amazing man. He shared his innermost feelings with us, sometimes in just a few words, sometimes reluctantly – there were a lot of long silences after he answered a question, and that’s usually when he would fill in the silence with his sorrow. We have him on the video saying this same thing, his voice cracking./aen In his entire life, he’d never prayed for a single thing.

“I won’t ever ask for nothing else,” he pleaded. “Just let those boys they got out of the water be mine.”

All afternoon, friends, relatives and fishermen gathered on the Cold Spring dock, as if hoping their presence might be enough to will the Lady Mary home safe and sound. Under an excruciatingly blue sky, they huddled and embraced and whispered encouragements to one another. But they all knew. How could they not?

Few survive the total loss of a vessel, especially that far out, and in water that cold. Most fishermen understand and accept this, but not their families, who for centuries have waited on shores for men who never came home.

For the most part, the other fishing vessels out in the Elephant Trunk still didn’t know anything was wrong with one of the boats in their fleet. The Urgent Marine Information Broadcasts coming out of Sector Delaware Bay were sent out only on one frequency, which couldn’t reach more than 20 or 30 miles out, and the rescue helicopter’s few attempts to broadcast were thwarted by having to hover so low over the rough seas.

Not until late in the afternoon of the 24th did any of the other fishing vessels know one of their own had gone down. At 3:40 p.m., some 10 hours after the Lady Mary sank, and more than four hours after the Coast Guard ship Dependable arrived on scene, the cutter issued an urgent radio broadcast for all vessels to be on the lookout for “possible PIW” — “persons in the water.”

Twenty minutes later, the scalloper Kathryn Marie radioed back to report she’d heard a short, frantic call about 5:15 a.m., but nothing else after that.

At 5:47 p.m. the fishing vessel Margaret Rose volunteered to help. Then Jim Taylor aboard the Elise G. offered to assist. Forty minutes after that, the fishing boats Miss Planters and Nancy Elizabeth joined the others in what would prove to be a fruitless search for the missing men of the Lady Mary.  The Coast Guard hearings included a map of the boats that were nearby and I spoke with many of their skippers./aen

At the Coast Guard air station, Lake Downham was back in the hangar’s crew room by noon. High on the room’s back wall are the testaments to the lives he and his fellow rescue swimmers have saved. The dozen or so life preservers and flotation devices bear inscriptions, scribbled in black ink, with the vessel’s name and the date of rescue or the persons on board (POB): “Killing Time,” “Gypsy Blood (Aug. 2004),” “Tapped Out (5-12-08),” “The Chief (7 POB).”  First, it means so much more, and it is that much more effective, after you know that nothing was brought back from the Lady Mary except two bodies. Also, this is where the story gets “quiet,” with Downham back at the hangar with basically nothing to do, after all that tremendous drama, so it seemed appropriate to be more descriptive here, as if the reader is just looking around the inside of the crew room along with Downham./aen

A couple of his colleagues asked Downham if he was okay.

“Yeah, sure,” he answered, although truthfully he wasn’t sure.

Downham unpacked his gear and rinsed his equipment, then joined the co-pilot, Matt Tuohy, to hose down the inside of the helicopter. When someone dies during transport, or a body is recovered at sea, the helicopter must be specially cleansed.

After showering, Downham’s shift was nearly up. Another rescue swimmer offered to take the rest of his watch. Inside his cherry-red Pontiac Grand Am, Downham flipped on the satellite radio and turned to Howard Stern.

Settling back, he stretched his well-muscled arms out toward the steering wheel. Both are covered in tattooed seascapes — violent ones, with skulls, lightning, ominous purple clouds and white-capped waves.  You always want to spread out the details, plus I think it’s more meaningful to describe the tattoos AFTER the reader has gotten to know Downham a bit and after everything he’s been through./aen Downham’s mind wandered. He’d never seen a dead body,  He wondered, in an almost clinical kind of way, whether it was going to affect him. Would he be able to sleep that night? What would he feel like when he woke up the next day?

An hour later he pulled up to the house in Sea Bright he shared with his future wife, Alexis. She was still at school, teaching, so Downham donned his wet suit, grabbed one of his surfboards, and headed to the beach. The wind had changed and the waves weren’t particularly good. Still, he stayed out on the water for two hours.

BEHIND THE DOOR

When the local news reported three fishermen had been taken to the hospital, Carinna and Crawley got back in the car and drove to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in Atlantic City. A nurse told her only one of the men from the Lady Mary was there — José Arias. Two bodies, she said, were taken to Shore Memorial Hospital.

Not until their bodies were being transported from the Coast Guard air station to the hospital were Tim and Bobo Smith declared dead: Tim at 10:01 a.m., Bobo at 10:06. Nine miles from Atlantic City, Shore Memorial’s secondary ambulance entrance doubles as the drop-off for valet parking. This is also where the body bags are delivered, then wheeled down a serpentine series of hallways that dead-ends at the morgue.  Yep./aen The doorknob-less entry is key-card only.

At 4 p.m., Ralph Henkel, from the Atlantic County Medical Examiner’s Office, escorted Carinna, Crawley, Carinna’s mother, Shirly Harris, and Pastor Dawson toward the door of the morgue. Fuzzy, having driven all the way back, joined them, but refused to go any farther. Harris stayed behind as well.

“Are you ready?” Henkel asked Carinna.

She nodded yes.

Inside the morgue, coroner Hadow Park stood between two gurneys. Lying on the one closest to the door was the body of Royal “Bobo” Smith Jr.  I think it emphasizes the finality of death and is actually more respectful./aen and next to it, the remains of Timothy Smith. At first, Carinna could only see Bobo. He looked so peaceful, she thought, not a mark on his face.

When the coroner stepped to the side, Carinna inhaled sharply.  Carinna “re-enacted” the moment for us./aen There he was, her beloved Tim, lying side by side with his older brother. A wail of horror and grief could be heard on the other side of the morgue’s thick wooden door and Fuzzy’s legs buckled.  Well, because I really did “see” this story before I wrote it, and I wanted to “tell” this scene from the perspective of the two most important people to Bobo. Also, it’s to be expected that Carinna would wail. What’s not exactly expected is Fuzzy’s response./aen

Carinna reached toward the body of her husband. His lips were so blue and when she bent to kiss them, so cold.

“I love you, Tim. I love you, baby,” she said over and over. “I’ll see you again. I promise. I’ll see you again.”

Crawley and the Rev. Dawson helped her out into the hallway.

“It’s them!” she cried out to Fuzzy.

The two collapsed in each other’s arms. don’t mean to suggest you made the wrong choice; I’m just saying I’d have encouraged a small discussion about single-sentence grafs in general and certain choices in particular. Sometimes SSGs are great (“SSGs” aren’t a thing; I just made that up), and sometimes I worry they’re overly Writerly/pw I am now officially going to have to think a lot more about the SSG’s (nice acronym). In a lot of instances it really is because our style is not to tack the description onto the end of the quote, and it doesn’t belong with the following graph, so there you have it./aen

An examination of Tim’s body revealed a distended stomach, the result of swallowing large amounts of water, and white, frothy fluid in the trachea, the larynx and the lungs — all consistent with asphyxia due to drowning.  Yes, unless they are part of an open investigation into the cause of the death. … As for reporting challenges, we FOIA’ed the Coast Guard and the NTSB but all our requests were denied due to the “continuing investigation.”/aen

Bobo’s body, the coroner noted, had fully developed rigor mortis, which in cases of recent drowning was evidence of a brief, violent struggle to survive. In all likelihood, when Bobo’s face hit the frigid water he involuntarily gasped, drawing water immediately into his lungs and sending him into a panic from which he couldn’t recover. Cadaveric spasm — the rigidity of the arms and legs — is a kind of flash-freezing that occurs almost instantaneously when a victim drowns this way.  I didn’t know it either, until I started doing the research./aen The more Bobo battled to breathe, the less likely he was to live.

At 7:51 p.m. on Wednesday, nearly 37 hours after the search and rescue was initiated, the Coast Guard suspended the mission. Two helicopters, two cutters and a C-130 long-range surveillance plane had covered some 3,417 square nautical miles, but turned up nothing more than debris.

After his rescue, José Arias spent three hours at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center. The doctors examined him head to toe, checked his temperature and blood pressure, and eventually deemed him well enough to return home. The board he’d clung to all those hours had kept his upper body out of the water, helping him to retain heat longer, thereby slowing the effects of hypothermia.

His problem now was that he was shoeless, and his only clothes — underwear really — had been ripped by the EMTs in the ambulance when they tried to check his body for injuries. From the hospital’s special closet of secondhand clothes, a nurse picked out a pair of pants, T-shirt and sneakers. A young woman with the Coast Guard offered him a sweater and blue jacket, then drove him home to Wildwood.  It was during one of our last interviews when we again went through what happened on the boat that night, and when he said he was wearing his boxers I realized he must have needed clothes in the hospital, and so I asked him./aen

Climbing the rickety staircase We climbed them a number of times./aen on the outside of his second-floor apartment, Arias was hungry and exhausted, his body thoroughly beaten down by the weather, the waves and his desperate struggle to survive. Alone now, the images piled up in his mind — the Lady Mary lurching to port, the helpless look of his friend Frank Reyes, then swimming free of the Lady Mary before she slipped under the waves.

Arias couldn’t eat and he didn’t want to think. He lay down on his bed, just a mattress on the apartment’s small living-room floor, and closed his eyes.  mourning, funerals, etc. – whereas one wonders where a shipwreck survivor goes from here and what happened/pw Exactly. I also wanted to vary my endings, and there has been so much drama to the story this far, that it needed a quiet place, and I wanted to get back to Jose./aen

CHAPTER 4

Just before dawn March 24, 2009, on black, moonless seas, the container ship Cap Beatrice was steaming toward the Delaware breakwater where the bay and the ocean meet.  Oh, boy, I am a classic “over-doer,” but I’ve always had fabulous editors to rein me in./aen  Here, deep-draft vessels like the Cap Beatrice pause and take on a river pilot, who then guides the ship up the Delaware into the Port of Philadelphia. Occasionally a ship will wait at the breakwater if a berth in port is not immediately available, but containers, which often carry food and other perishables, normally do not.

From her position 66 miles off the coast at 5 a.m., the approximate time the Lady Mary sank, the Cap Beatrice needed only about three hours to reach the breakwater. It took her 17, according to the records of the area’s river pilots association, as well as the Maritime Exchange for the Delaware River and Bay, which monitors the area’s river and bay traffic.

“Generally, ships wait one or one and a half hours at the breakwater,” said Capt. Dick Buckaloo, acting president of the Pilots Association for the Bay and River Delaware. “For containers, downtime is lost money for them. So it’s odd when a container waits.”

What the Cap Beatrice was doing remains unclear, even to the Coast Guard, which received no signal for six hours from the ship’s Automatic Identification System, a tracking device that records speed, position and direction. Her last transmission was recorded by the Coast Guard at 35 seconds past the hour, 5 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Because of the missing AIS data, all the Coast Guard could conclude was that the Cap Beatrice “hung” around for seven or eight hours at the breakwater, said communications officer Timothy Marriott, who testified at the marine investigation into the sinking.  This was a very, very frustrating part of the story. The Coast Guard did interview the crew of the Cap B. – albeit two months after the accident – but their responses to questions were not part of the hearings and the C.G.  steadfastly refused to tell us anything./aen

“That’s unusual,” said Capt. John Hagedorn, who teaches in the marine transportation department at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y. “Either there was some problem on the ship or someone shut it off.”

A river pilot boarded the Cap Beatrice after she reached the mouth of the Delaware at 1:11 a.m. March 25, according to Paul Myhre, the director of operations at the maritime exchange, and steered her the final 86 miles up river to the port. She arrived at the Packer Avenue marine terminal at 7:30 a.m., and longshoremen began to unload the ship at 10 a.m.

Technically, the investigation into the sinking of the Lady Mary was already 24 hours old. According to the Code of Federal Regulations, the Coast Guard’s commandant or one of its district commanders, “upon receipt of information of a marine casualty or accident, will immediately cause such investigation as may be necessary,” including taking possession of all voyage data and navigation records of vessels possibly involved in, or witnesses to, the casualty.

The Cap Beatrice left the Port of Philadelphia at 1:34 a.m. Thursday, March 26, 2009, heading south to Savannah, Ga., then back through the Panama Canal and eventually to Australia. Although the Cap Beatrice was docked for nearly 18 hours, no one from the Coast Guard contacted her captain, Vasyl Stenderchuk, the shipping agency that leases her, Hamburg Sud, or the German company that owns her, Reederei Thomas Schulte. In particular, no one from the Coast Guard interviewed Capt. Stenderchuk or requested him to save the information on the ship’s black-box voyage-data recorder, even though it could have filled in the missing AIS record.  A lot of these questions will be answered in the next section, but in short, when I felt we had accumulated enough circumstantial evidence that strongly suggested the Cap B. hit the LM, I emailed and called the shipping company. At first the company was willing to talk a bit, albeit defensively, but then they clammed up. And when we went back to Philly to try and interview the new crew of the Cap B. when she was in port again last summer, we were prevented from getting anywhere near the ship. We also talked about the possibility of going over to Germany and trying to confront them, but it was decided that the expense and the time were probably not worth it./aen

Not until the Cap Beatrice returned from its trip to Australia did officials from the Coast Guard’s marine investigation interview her captain and crew,  The C.G. had no good explanation, except to say that was the earliest they could interview them/aen and New Jersey State Police divers inspect her bulbous bow. By that time, the Lady Mary had been lying on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for two months.

Two days after visiting the Cap Beatrice, the Coast Guard announced it found no evidence of a collision between the Lady Mary and the container ship. direct evidence that the CB caused the LM to sink, or am I missing something?/pw This was bandied about quite a bit. All of the evidence is circumstantial, but it is considerable, and especially after we spoke to the experts – next part – it became increasingly clear that the preponderance of evidence pointed to the Cap. B. That being said, our lawyers wanted us to be careful about making direct accusations./aen

OUTDATED RULES

There are no road signs on the high seas, no speed bumps, traffic lights, cameras or cops. Most coastal countries designate traffic lanes in and out of their ports, and some, like the United States, impose speed restrictions on ships transiting parts of the ocean traveled by endangered whales. Otherwise, the biggest ships — or the fastest ones — usually have the right of way.

If the Lady Mary and Cap Beatrice collided, or came close to colliding, in the early morning hours of March 24, 2009, they were no match for one another. The 728-foot container ship is more than 10 times the size of the 71-foot fishing vessel and was traveling 10 times as fast. Yet both vessels were relying on antiquated rules of navigation pertaining to square-rigged sailing ships first outlined by Great Britain 170 years ago and signed into U.S. law under Abraham Lincoln.  Well, yes, that would have been wonderful, but I’m not sure I thought it was possible. I was happy to learn that a maritime lawyer who read the series is looking to file suit against the shipping company on behalf of the families of the men who died./aen

If one ship is overtaking another it is generally the responsibility of the ship coming up from behind to change course, even if the overtaking vessel is much larger and therefore less maneuverable.

The mammoth ships that today transport 90 percent of the world’s traded goods are far less nimble than even the clipper ships of the 19th century. The largest container ship in the world, Denmark’s Emma Maersk, is 1,302 feet long — 52 feet longer than the Empire State Building is tall. The Cap Beatrice is a medium-size container ship, but her rudder alone contains enough steel — 25 tons — to manufacture 250 automobiles. Just to turn around takes 15 to 20 minutes and more than a mile of sea.  I like drawing analogies and comparisons and they’re so important in order for the reader to visualize scale. It’s amazing to stand next to one of these container ships and see how even the anchor chain is gigantic/aen

Because she was traveling at nearly 20 knots the morning of March 24, the Cap Beatrice — had she come close to or hit the Lady Mary — would have been a mile past the boat in just three minutes,  according to Ron Betancourt, a licensed mariner and maritime lawyer in Red Bank.

A little more than a week after the Lady Mary sank in the Atlantic with four of her crew still missing, a vessel from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration located her. Then, on April 29, the Coast Guard arranged for a small, unmanned submarine to take video of the wreck. The Lady Mary was sitting in 211 feet of water, on the sandy bottom of the ocean, right-side up, leaning slightly to port.  I probably should have mentioned that the visible damage is very localized./aen

On April 14, 2009, the Coast Guard opened an official Marine Board of Investigation. The head of the three-member panel was Cmdr. Kyle McAvoy. The board’s role, as McAvoy made pains to clarify on the first day, was not to assess blame, but rather to determine the causes of the casualties. In his opening statement, McAvoy said it was the job of the board to assess “whether any incompetence, misconduct, lack of skill or willful violation of the law … caused or contributed to the casualty … and to make appropriate recommendations in this regard.”

During a recess in the hearings, a group of seven experienced wreck divers, all of them from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, volunteered to visit the Lady Mary. Their mission was to recover any bodies, but also to take detailed video and photos.

On May 12, 2009, in the chilly, early morning darkness, the divers left Cape May and headed east to the Elephant Trunk with navigation maps, air tanks, scuba gear — and several body bags.

It had been 49 days since the Lady Mary sank, and it took the divers five hours to get out to the site. They descended in teams of two, every 10 minutes. Steve Gatto of Sicklerville videotaped the outside of the wreck. In the ghostly green glow of the diver’s light, the Lady Mary appeared whole, even untouched. With her stern slightly raised, she seemed to hover just above the bottom, as if at any moment she might start her engines and be on her way.  We worked closely with the professional divers who dived on the LM, gratis, and filmed her. They were staunch supporters of the collision theory and were helpful in explaining a lot about boats, sea conditions, other sinkings, etc./aen

Gatto was astonished as he slowly swam down and around the bow. Most of the boat was unscarred. Across the hull he could clearly make out the name “Lady Mary,” painted in neat, white script outlined in black; the windows of the wheelhouse were all intact; the winches wound and ready to dredge.

What could have happened? Gatto wondered.

Peering into the captain’s bridge, he found the first signs of catastrophe: chairs overturned, cups and dishes scattered, a Bible wedged against the wall. Two satellite phones dangled from their cradles, and in the galley, colorful scallop-buckets floated like party balloons along the ceiling.  Yep, you can see these things in the ghostly video footage/aen

The only sounds were the hiss and bubbling of Gatto’s scuba tank, and every now and then the “whoop-whoop, weeeee” of a distant whale.  He had audio attached to the video camera and it actually picked up the sound of the whales./aen

Sliding down from the wheelhouse to the deck, Gatto panned the camera toward the dredge, full of scallops, lying in a heap in the back left corner of the boat. Fuzzy had painted two big white eyes on the metal net, the better to “see” all those scallops on the seafloor.  It was one of the things Fuzzy told us in the course of our many interviews. And in a couple of the photos you can actually just make them out./aen When he swam out and around the corner of the rusty hull, Gatto was taken aback. The Lady Mary’s stern was severely damaged, but locally, on the port side, and just below the waterline.

A ramp off the stern, once used to help haul up the dredge, was ripped and pushed down on the left, and nearly to the transom, the back wall of the boat. One of the thick struts connecting the ramp to the transom was buckled into an “S” shape and had punched through the transom into the stern storage compartment, called the lazarette.

The 6-foot-long rudder was sheared off at the weld and lay flat on the sand, connected only by a safety chain, and the 5-inch-thick, solid steel propeller shaft was bent straight down.

Gatto and the other divers had seen hundreds of wrecks up close, helped raise a couple of them and even recovered the bodies of fishermen from sunken vessels, but none of them had ever seen this kind of destruction.

“It was unreal,” said Harold Moyers, owner of the dive boat Big Mac, “incredibly extensive.” Tom Packer, another volunteer, swam into one of the bunk rooms, lifted the mattresses, then picked through the scattered clothes and other debris. No bodies.

Joe Mazranni, a defense attorney from North Brunswick, was given the job of checking the cut room, where the scallops are removed from their shells. The cut room is accessed from the deck, and when Mazranni swam inside through the double doors he found a survival suit, out of its bag and partly unrolled. It was obvious someone had run out of time and been unable to get into the suit.

Mazranni then squeezed through a small opening and swam down 10 to 12 feet into the fish-hold below the deck. In the darkness all he could see was the small circle of space his flashlight illuminated — just bits and pieces of the room, really — so it was hard to get a sense of the space. He wondered if he was in the engine room by mistake. Then his light picked up a pile of boards. It was the fish-hold, all right. The boards were the removable slats of the storage bins.

Moving a couple of feet at a time, Mazranni next shone his light on what he thought was another survival suit — until he saw a pair of feet and legs. It was one of the missing fishermen and he was buried under the boards. All Mazranni could see of him was from the waist down.  Hard to tell how many drafts. Some parts were more seamless than others. The last two sections, including this, were the most difficult, but mostly in terms of how to stitch everything together. As for revising, I love it. I like to tell people that I’m a pretty good writer, but I’m a fabulous re-writer. I take instruction very well. My editor is also a published poet and so he helps to really fine-tune things – he’ll say “you need another beat here,” and I know exactly what he means./aen

The diver was almost out of oxygen and had to surface. When he came down the second time, however, Mazranni had trouble seeing through the silt he’d stirred up earlier. Like a blind person, he used his one free hand to feel for whatever was directly in front of him.

Suddenly his glove touched something soft. He instinctively recoiled. It was a man’s head.  In retrospect, I think you’re right. I shouldn’t have “told” it, especially since I “show” it in the next sentence. Nice catch./aen Yeah, well, easy to do when there’s no ticking clock/pw Mazranni pushed back a bit and shone his light where his hand had just been — into the lifeless, wide-open eyes of a middle-aged man. Mazranni was relieved to find the flesh of the man’s face relatively intact. Usually fish eat the softest tissue first, the eyes and lips, but the man’s head, with its neatly trimmed white goatee, appeared remarkably unscathed.

‘IT HAPPENS TOO OFTEN’

The Coast Guard keeps many records detailing accidents and deaths at sea, but none specifically related to collisions between fishing boats and deep-draft vessels. Two years ago, when the Coast Guard issued a report on fishing vessel casualties between 1992 and 2007, it cited only four fatalities from all types of collisions, including passenger vessels, cruise ships and sailboats, during that 16-year period.

However, an analysis of 2,548 Coast Guard incident reports, all of them closed cases, in its Maritime Information Exchange, revealed that in just one six-year period between 2002 and 2007 there were at least 70 collisions between U.S. fishing boats and large commercial ships, and six deaths.  I truly love both. All the accident reports – or at least reports from completed investigations – can be found online at the Coast Guard’s website. The problem is they are not categorized by accident type or fatalities, just chronologically listed according to when they happened. So I had to comb through them, something which I found fascinating to do, but which others might consider tedious./aen

“Ships are so large and have so much mass behind them, it’s like a bull swatting a fly,” said Jim Kendall, a longtime fisherman and now executive director of New Bedford Seafood Consulting in Massachusetts. “It happens too often, way too often.”

In the 20 months since the sinking of the Lady Mary, at least two commercial fishing vessels off the mid-Atlantic Coast have been hit by large merchant ships: On April 14, 2009, in heavy rain and fog, the 85-foot scalloper Dictator was hit by the 965-foot container Florida, 21 days after the Lady Mary went down and in the same fishing ground. On July 30 of this year the 72-foot Atlantic Queen, fishing 11 miles off Long Island, was hit by the 625-foot cargo ship Baldor, which sheered off 15 feet of the Atlantic Queen’s bow.

No one was seriously injured in either incident.

Precise numbers on collisions are hard to come by because many fishing vessels are lost at sea with no survivors and no witnesses — just questions. Although at least six fishermen were killed in collisions with cargo ships between 2002 and 2007, another 39 died when 18 fishing boats sank, apparently with little warning, and all hands were lost.

“A lot of times a vessel goes missing and no one knows the cause,” Kendall said. “When you have something that large coming down on you, they can ride right up over you and possibly they don’t even know it.” The Wave, Susan Casey makes a case for linking rogue waves to missing ships at sea. Did that scenario come up in any of your reporting? Just curious/pw Yes, I asked it of several experts, all of whom said it was extremely unlikely, especially since no other boats in the area experienced or reported one. Even the Coast Guard investigators agreed./aen

When collisions do occur between large merchant ships and much smaller fishing vessels, the boats can sink quickly, according to Arn Heggers, former fishing vessel safety coordinator for Maine and New Hampshire and now a civil servant with the Coast Guard, specializing in emergency preparedness. When he instructs commercial fishermen about what to do in collisions, he warns them they will likely have no more than a few minutes to get into a survival suit or life raft, and in the case of a collision with a large merchant ship, “probably a lot less.”

“When a larger vessel collides with a smaller one,” Heggers said, “it pushes the smaller boat right under the water. Imagine you are driving on a highway — a large tanker would go right over the top of you.”

When scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied ship-transit risks more than a decade ago, they found three times as many collisions occurred in darkness as in daytime and the highest percentage — one-third — occurred between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m.

BACK TO LAND

With the help of his fellow divers, Joe Mazranni removed the debris from around the body in the Lady Mary’s fish-hold. The dead man was dressed in sweatpants, a tight-fitting thermal sweater and socks, but no shoes. Mazranni had seen the photographs of the men still missing and believed he’d found Fuzzy’s brother, Bernie. Using ropes, the divers pulled the body from the wreck and, while still underwater, placed it in a body bag, then lifted it to the surface.  Yep./aen

The four-hour ride back to Cape May was quiet. An overcast day turned sunny in the late afternoon, but at night it was a chilly trip in to port. Some of the men ate, others slept. In addition to recovering a body, the divers had taken extensive video and hundreds of photographs and along with written assessments of the damage they observed, turned it all over to the Coast Guard.  Yes, although not through the Coast Guard, but rather the divers who made copies of the reports they made/aen

“Everyone’s reaction was the same,” Moyers said of the other divers. “That boat got hit.” Twenty miles from Cape May, the divers radioed the Coast Guard about the body they’d recovered and arranged to meet officials at the dock.

There was just one more call to make. Five miles from shore, Mazranni took out his cell phone and dialed Fuzzy.

“I think we got Bernie.”  As soon as Mazranni told me what he said, I knew that’s where I wanted to end this chapter of the story./aen

CHAPTER 5

A Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation into the sinking of the Lady Mary convened in April 2009. Several weeks of hearings were held over the next eight months, with testimony from José Arias, the only survivor of a seven-man crew; Fuzzy Smith, the co-owner of the boat; and at least a dozen other witnesses, including Lake Downham, the Coast Guard rescue swimmer who pulled Arias from the water.

More than a year and a half after the accident, the marine board has yet to release its report, although Cmdr. Kyle McAvoy, the chairman of the three-member investigative panel, says it is largely written.

“We’ve worked very hard to address all the possibilities,” he said. “It comes down to a few things: a weather event, some sort of event on the surface with another vessel, or a mechanical problem during the night that led to a slowly evolving problem.” As late as September, McAvoy said the agency was leaning away from the idea that the Lady Mary was the victim of a high-seas hit and run. Instead, the agency was considering the theory that the boat was swamped and the damage to her stern was the result of its impact with the sea floor. It made sense to me early on, but as time went on and we spoke to more and more experts, I felt it was the easy explanation, but probably not the right one./aen He has declined any comment since.

Two sources close to the investigation said the Coast Guard’s final report may suggest several possible scenarios. These sources detailed the Coast Guard’s thinking to The Star-Ledger on the condition they not be named because they are not authorized to speak about the investigation.

The scenarios being explored, according to the two sources, include some combination of human, mechanical and meteorological causes based on last year’s hearing and the Coast Guard’s own investigation. Among the factors:

• The Lady Mary was an old boat, converted between 2001 and 2003 from a shrimper to a scalloper, and was never tested for stability because it was not required by federal law.

• The wind was blowing hard and the waves were 6 to 9 feet the night of March 23 into the early hours of March 24, making conditions difficult for the Lady Mary.

• A hatch on the back deck to the lazarette, a storage area, was always left open, which made the boat vulnerable to swamping in bad weather.

• Blood tests on the bodies of Bobo and Tim Smith revealed marijuana in both men’s blood, possibly impairing their ability to respond to an emergency. (A forensic toxicologist testified at the hearings he was unable to determine when the marijuana was smoked or how much was ingested.) Not really. Both families essentially dismissed it, either by saying they only did it to relax or they didn’t do it very much, that kind of thing. It was clear from the toxicology report that they’d smoked at least two hours before their deaths, and so any effects would have been blunted by that time lag./aen

Some of the possible scenarios would seem to run counter to evidence presented at the Coast Guard’s hearings. Coast Guard reservist Aldo Guerino testified the Lady Mary’s safety equipment was up to code, had passed a voluntary inspection less than a year before she sank, and was well maintained.

Michael Duvall, a former captain on the Lady Mary, also testified “the boat handled great,” even in severe weather.

“I could lay her in a trough, 15-16 foot trough … with my coffee cup sitting right on the dash and never spill the coffee,” Duvall said. “She was a good sea boat. (An) excellent sea boat.”  About one thing there is general agreement among all the experts: The mystery of what sank the Lady Mary lies with a crushed ramp, a broken rudder and a bent propeller. What force could have mangled all that steel? Everyone acknowledges there are only two possibilities: She was either damaged on the surface in a collision, or she was damaged 211 feet down when she hit the sea floor. This seems reasonable, and did to us at first, except that in all likelihood this was a glancing blow, with the bulbous bow of the Cap B. essentially picking up the LM briefly before she slid off. Plus, all you have to do is read one of the reports or stories about a fishing boat that survived a hit with a container ship and realize there are very varying levels of damage that can be sustained depending on how and where and under what conditions a collision occurs. For instance, I mention somewhere about a fishing boat hit just a few months before we published, and all the container ship did was sheer off part of her bow. The fishing boat made it back to port otherwise safe and sound./aen

For seven months The Star-Ledger investigated the wreck of the Lady Mary, examining internal Coast Guard documents and 800 pages of testimony from the Coast Guard hearings, observing fishermen at work on a scalloper similar to the Lady Mary and in similar wind and wave conditions as on the night she sank, and testing the buoyancy of survival suits in cold sea water, especially when they are not worn properly. More than 100 interviews were conducted with some of the country’s foremost naval architects, marine engineers, wreck divers, maritime forensics specialists, fishermen present in the Elephant Trunk when the Lady Mary was lost, mechanics who worked on her engine on land, as well as Coast Guard officials and those involved in the rescue of José Arias.

The Star-Ledger asked more than a dozen maritime experts — among them a fishing boat stability expert, a hydrodynamicist who studies how ships sink, a rudder designer, and one of the few marine forensics specialists to inspect pieces of the Titanic — to examine videos, photos and Coast Guard investigation documents. None of these experts concurred with the theory that the Lady Mary’s stern was bent and crushed by the impact with the sea floor. Only representatives from one company believe this scenario. I was big-time obsessed. It was all I could think, talk, even dream about. I must have read the transcripts from the Coast Guard hearings – about 1,000 pages – at least 10 times, looking for clues or things that might have been missed, or inconsistencies. In fact, it was during one of my readings that I stopped at the statement from Jose about where the dredge was on the deck at the time the boat went down and realized he wouldn’t have been able to see it because the boat was already tipped hard to port and so the net of the dredge would have been underwater. It wasn’t significant, but it’s an instance of how I couldn’t stop thinking about the Lady Mary. The Coast Guard transcripts became my bedtime reading./aen

“It’s garbage for anyone to think the bottom caused all that destruction,” said George Edwards, a naval engineer at CSC Advanced Marine Center in Washington, D.C. “It’s just not possible.”

The preponderance of opinion, and much of the evidence found by the newspaper, point to a collision with another, much larger vessel — something powerful enough to bend and rip thousands of pounds of steel and send the Lady Mary to the bottom of the sea before she could even shoot off a flare. Navigation records from that night show there was only one such merchant ship in the area at the time — the 728-foot-long container ship Cap Beatrice. how much did you waver, or did you never waver?/pw We wavered early on and made a conscious effort to really, really stay objective, but by the end, Andre and I were both convinced the Lady Mary was hit./aen

AN EXPERT’S OPINION

We now have almost parallel narratives – the first was the story of that night and those lives, and now we have the story of an investigation, yet the fishermen are still there in our minds/pw William Garzke is a pioneer in the field of shipwrecks. A long-standing member of the Society for Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, Garzke is also founder and chairman of SNAME’s renowned marine forensics committee, which devotes its time to the scientific investigation of sunken ships. He has consulted on a number of Coast Guard investigations and is probably most well-known for his work analyzing pieces of the Titanic, after which he concluded a flaw in the design of the hull’s joints likely doomed the “unsinkable” ship.

When Garzke and the 14 other members of the forensics committee, at The Star-Ledger’s request, examined the video and photographic evidence of the Lady Mary and analyzed Coast Guard documents and navigational records, they all agreed about the damage to the fishing vessel. They were reluctant at first, but I think because they were involved in maritime accident analysis they couldn’t stop themselves. Yes, I was in Washington, D.C., and met with them to show them the photos and the video./aen

“It’s hard for me to believe it was just the sand that caused it,” Garzke said. “(It) was a collision with another object. That’s the likeliest possibility.”

Alexander Schulte, the head of Reederei Thomas Schulte in Hamburg, Germany, which owns the Cap Beatrice, has repeatedly declined to comment on the Lady Mary tragedy despite numerous calls and e-mails.

Oliver Kautz, the quality manager for OCEAN Shipmanagment, owned by Reederei Thomas Schulte, initially spoke about the incident, but later said he was told by his superiors to say no more. Kautz oversees the parent company’s fleet. In earlier conversations and e-mails he said the company had conducted an “intensive internal investigation” in which it assisted the Coast Guard, but “unfortunately both investigations have not brought the case forward.”

The dockside manager in Philadelphia for Hamburg Sud, the company that leases the Cap Beatrice, allowed The Star-Ledger to board the ship in April when she was in port and sailing under a new captain, but refused a second request in July when the Cap Beatrice returned once again under the command of Capt. Vasyl Stenderchuk, who was in charge the night the Lady Mary sank. Several e-mails sent to Stenderchuk’s Linkedin.com profile also have gone unanswered.  As I note somewhere else, I found a phone number in the Ukraine for Stenderchuk and tried to reach him there but was told he no longer lived there. Not sure if that person was telling the truth or not. The language barrier was considerable. I had a photo of him, from a maritime database, but no other information, except that he had an interest in photography./aen As noted, not all the experts consulted by The Star-Ledger agreed with the collision theory. The professionals in the marine division of Robson Forensic in Lancaster, Pa., which provides investigative and consulting services to lawyers, They had no offical role and there was nothing at stake, except that one of the members of the team was a former NTSB official, and so might have felt some loyalty to the department, although she claimed she was independent. As it turns out we had quite a debate as to how – and how much – to include from Robson. I found them after searching online but we realized later that none of them had nearly the background the D.C. group had in terms of expertise in the mechanics and physics of maritime accidents. And when I asked follow-up questions about specific aspects of their theory, they were less than convincing. But we contacted them, so we could hardly leave them out of the story/aen concluded the Lady Mary was swamped — perhaps by a bow wake from a passing container ship — and that all her stern damage was the result of hitting the sea floor.

“If she develops even a slight port list, which is what we believe happened,” said Bart Eckhardt, president of Robson Forensic, “then the Lady Mary could not shed water. When this happens, and there’s wave action, the water becomes trapped between the bulwark and the house. … The situation becomes catastrophic.”  Eckhardt and his three-member team believe the Lady Mary sank, stern first, at a speed of 4 to 7 meters per second, basing their conclusions on the Coast Guard’s assessment of the Lady Mary’s terminal velocity — the speed she was traveling when she hit bottom. A copy of the assessment was obtained by The Star-Ledger and provided to various experts. Robson says that if the boat did have a port list and was traveling at the speed estimated by the Coast Guard she would have hit the sea floor at a 49 degree angle — which they believe accounts for the damage to the stern.

However, SNAME’s marine forensics committee, which viewed those same Coast Guard calculations, believes they are flawed. ”(They) are very off-the-cuff and can’t stand up to rigorous examination because there are too many vaguely qualified assumptions,” said Sean Avery, a hydrodynamicist who models the various ways ships sink. “If you simulated the free fall through the water column 10 times, you would get 10 different answers. … This is tricky to do right.”

The experts who point to a collision say the following points support their conclusion:

• The severity and direction of the damage, which suggests a sudden and powerful impact from a very large moving object.

• The rudder stock, which appears to have been sheared off in a collision as opposed to breaking due to corrosion and metal fatigue.

• The severely contorted propeller stock, which is bent down, as if from contact with a much heavier object, as opposed to up, which would be expected with a bottom hit.

• The marks on the propeller blades, which indicate they were still turning when the propeller was pushed against the rudder. That scoring could only have happened on the surface, when the Lady Mary’s engine was still engaged, say proponents of the collision theory. When she finally sank she lost all power, which means the propeller was no longer turning when the Lady Mary hit the sea floor.

• The way the port side of the transom is bowed-in, indicating an impact from a rounded object, such as a container ship’s bulbous bow. One of the Coast Guard assumptions in the terminal velocity calculations, according to members of the forensics committee, is that the rudder buckled when the boat hit the bottom.

“I don’t agree with that,” said George Edwards, a committee member and naval engineer at CSC Advanced Marine. “That would only apply if the boat went down on a fairly even keel,” that is, if it sank right-side up, such that the end of the rudder hit first and the rudder was vertical.

The problem with this scenario, he said, is that “sinking on an even keel also results in the lowest possible terminal velocity.” In other words, the slower the sinking, the softer the landing; the softer the landing, the less damage.

Instead, said the forensics committee, to even consider the possibility the Lady Mary crumpled when she hit the sea floor, she would have to sink stern first at a nearly vertical angle. Like the other divers, Steve Gatto, who was in the first group to dive on the wreck of the Lady Mary, believes the vertical-hit scenario is improbable because of the pristine condition of the gallows, a large rectangular frame that supports the dredge. It rises high over the deck and is angled over the stern’s ramp.

“If the Lady Mary sank nearly vertically, the gallows would have hit the bottom first,” he said. “Yet we inspected it carefully and it had no damage whatsoever, not even a scratch.” There were no real differences of opinion, just reminders to stay open to all the possibilities. We went over and over and over again all the scenarios, wrote down the pros and cons, and every time the collision theory came out on top./aen

Gatto has nearly 30 years experience diving on wrecks. He has helped raise sunken fishing boats and assisted in the recovery of bodies. If the Lady Mary struck the bottom either vertically or at a 49 degree angle as Robson suggests, he says, the propeller stock would have bent upward, not downward, as the dive photos and video show.

“With that angle and force, I’d expect to see the (propeller) blades bent back, too, maybe even broken, but they’re not,” he said. “The blow came from behind and pushed the boat down.”

Robson said it used the Coast Guard’s calculations to do a complete reconstruction, and it stands by its analysis, including the 49 degree angle of impact. The SNAME forensics committee counters that a reconstruction entails far too many variables to be accurate and that the only thing that explains the damage done to the Lady Mary is a surface collision.

Another issue, says SNAME’s Avery, is the rudder. If it was damaged when the boat hit the sand, its “shoe,” the bracket underneath the rudder that holds it in place, should still be there, he says.

The divers, however, never found it. The only plausible explanation for the shoe not being in the vicinity of the boat, says SNAME’s marine forensics committee, is that it was knocked loose by impact on the surface.

“I’ve designed rudders for boats that size,” Edwards said. “I’ve done the calculations for that type of rudder. What’s left, where the rudder shoe came off, is consistent with it being hit from above and forced down.”

The conditions out in the Elephant Trunk on the morning of March 24, 2009, were rough, but not excessive as far as commercial fishermen are concerned. According to the nearest offshore buoy, seas were 6 to 9 feet and the winds 25 to 30 mph, from the north by northwest.

What has puzzled many of those involved in the case was how quickly the Lady Mary appeared to sink. In the debris field there were unused survival suits, emergency flares and hand-held distress signals, and no one in the empty life raft.

For this reason, many experts find it hard to believe the Lady Mary simply foundered and sank. A boat without power, even in rough seas they say, does not go down in a matter of minutes.

”You can be dead in the water, it still takes time to sink,” said Bruce Belousofsky, a retired Coast Guard commander, former vessel safety inspector and president of Blancke Marine Services, a naval architecture and engineering firm in Woodbury. “Flooding in those conditions is a process, and there are high-water alarms. It’s hard to be taken by surprise.”

When he heard the Lady Mary went down, he thought it was unusual.

“It had to be something very, very dramatic to sink that vessel without giving those guys much time to get out.”

A CRUCIAL CLUE

If there is a smoking gun in the sinking of the Lady Mary, divers Gatto and Harold Moyers believe they found it.

When they filmed the wreck underwater, each diver said he noticed that the stay wires on the stern ramp, which run from the top of the gallows to the lowest corners of the ramp, were broken at the welds. The port stay wire, encased in a steel sleeve, was tied back with rope, albeit haphazardly, to a cleat on the stern.

Gatto and Moyers believe that in rough seas, after a collision, and with the boat essentially dead in the water, the heavy cable would have been swinging around the deck “like a club.” They theorize a crew member, perhaps Frankie Credle, Because we know basically where nearly everyone else was, and because we know Credle was the one yelling something from that area of the boat when Jose was ascending the ladder to the wheelhouse./aen quickly tied it out of the way.

The broken stay wires, which would have been mended if they had both suddenly broken on their own earlier in the trip, are the key for Gatto. ”You can’t tie back a stay wire on the bottom of the ocean,” he said. “Something happened before it sank.”

Gatto, Moyers, Belousofsky and the SNAME marine forensics committee all believe the Lady Mary was moving — or trying to move — hard to port when she went down, perhaps trying to get out of the way of an approaching ship. Photos of the interior of the Lady Mary’s wheelhouse and control panel, specifically the open throttle and the rudder gauge, said Belousofsky, appear to confirm the boat was turning when she foundered. The slashes in the rudder also seem to confirm this, he and the others say, because the prop had to be turning to gash the rudder in this way.

In a collision, with the boat trying to take evasive action, the rudder could have been pushed up against the propeller by the larger ship’s rounded bulbous bow, according to these experts, at which point it would bend the propeller shaft downward and in the process stove in the transom.

In seas of 6 to 9 feet, say Gatto, Moyers, Belousofsky and the others, a collision with a ship 10 times the size of the Lady Mary could have pushed her stern down so far that her decks were awash in a matter of seconds.

A TWO-MONTH WAIT

In the course of its own investigation, The Star-Ledger also found possible problems with the Coast Guard inquiry.

It was not until Memorial Day 2009 — two months after the Lady Mary sank — that the Coast Guard finally contacted the Cap Beatrice on her way back in to the Port of Philadelphia. The ship anchored at the southern end of Delaware Bay where Coast Guard officials interviewed the crew, and scuba divers from the New Jersey State Police entered the choppy seas to examine the ship’s bulbous bow.

Coast Guard officials offered no explanation To me, and they gave no reason except that was the earliest they could./aen as to why they waited to inspect the Cap Beatrice when she returned to Philadelphia, but 48 hours after the crew was interviewed, the Coast Guard released a statement announcing no evidence of a collision had been uncovered.

A number of people, including Belousofsky and Garzke, are critical of the Coast Guard’s investigation.

In June 2009, Gatto invited Cmdr. McAvoy to a meeting of the SNAME forensic committee in Washington, D.C., which McAvoy accepted. The committee made a number of recommendations, including the necessity of raising the rudder, and also provided McAvoy with a copy of its guide to marine investigations, because, Garzke said, McAvoy seemed “mystified about forensic techniques.” It’s very, very expensive. Fuzzy had no insurance and it would have been his money used to bring it up. It certainly could help in terms of being able to look inside, especially, in the wheelhouse and inside the lazarette and to be able to inspect the pumps./aen

McAvoy says he has spent his entire 20-year Coast Guard career in the field of marine safety, specializing in inspections and marine casualty investigations. He also has two master’s degrees in the field of marine engineering from the University of Michigan.

Much of his experience, he says, has been with large commercial ships, freighters, tankers and passenger vessels. Now based in Washington, D.C., at the Coast Guard’s Office of Traveling Inspections and National Centers of Expertise, McAvoy says he has taken part in 20 to 24 casualty investigations over the past two decades — none involving sunken fishing vessels.

The requirements to become a Coast Guard marine investigator include a three-week course in Yorktown, Va. A number of performance qualification standards must also be met, such as “initiating an investigation” and “generating a timeline.” Oh, yes. I had an extremely detailed timeline that included not only what was happening on the LM, but what was happening on shore, with the satellites overhead, with other boats in the area, etc./aen

A 2008 audit of marine casualty investigations by the Office of the Inspector General found 68 percent of the casualty investigators the panel interviewed and tested were “substandard.” This was from an official, and publicly accessible report/aen McAvoy was interviewed five times by The Star-Ledger. He discussed the process — and progress — of the investigation of the Lady Mary, as well as his background, but would not speak about the specifics of the case. When McAvoy was contacted last week, Lisa Novak from Coast Guard public affairs in Washington, D.C., spoke for him. “We are not giving any interviews until the investigation is over,” she said, but could not predict when that would be. When I called McAvoy to see if he wanted to comment – he did not, and was clearly told by superiors to no longer do so – he said it was “impressive.”/aen

The Star-Ledger also uncovered evidence of problems during the search and rescue mission. Testimony at the hearing suggests the Coast Guard might have been hampered by the fact the helicopter crew was unfamiliar with the use of its new 406 EPIRB direction finder when trying to locate possible survivors. Instead, the crew had to rely on an older device with less range, potentially delaying the first sighting of the life raft.

After then locating José Arias in the water, the helicopter was too low to radio back to land information about how many fishermen were still missing. That meant another delay before the officers at Sector Delaware Bay could send an urgent marine broadcast.

Finally, when a Coast Guard communications officer in Philadelphia eventually did radio all the mariners in the vicinity of the sinking, the officer failed to use the frequency most likely to reach them — a mistake he acknowledged in a Coast Guard report. Sadly, none at all, as far as I know./aen

In addition to the Coast Guard, the National Transportation Safety Board, which assisted in the investigation, has declined further comment until their official reports are made public.

A BODY IN THE NET

When the phone rang inside Coast Guard headquarters in Cape May at 10:35 a.m., Wednesday, May 20, 2009, it was Richard Gibbs, captain of the scalloper John & Nicholas, on the line. He had a grim message. Under a tarp on the back of his boat lay a body.

The John & Nicholas had been fishing in the Elephant Trunk, a few miles from where the Lady Mary sank. When they lifted the dredge after a run they found tangled in the net, among the fish and shells, the partially decomposed body of an African-American male. Gibbs was pretty sure he knew who it was: Frankie Credle.

At age 56, Credle had been fishing for more than 40 years. The 13th of 14 children from Mesic, N.C., he was Fuzzy’s cousin and the two grew up just a couple miles from one another. When he was in his 20s, Frankie helped Elwood Jennett build the Sea Pal, a 50-foot fishing boat, behind the Mesic service station. One day when they were out shrimping in Pamlico Sound in rough weather, the Sea Pal capsized. Credle saved Jennett’s life by helping him swim out from under the boat, and if Frankie hadn’t been such a strong swimmer, both would have died.

With the confirmation the body in the net was Frankie Credle, Dental records, I believe/aen two men from the Lady Mary remain missing: Frank Reyes, so panicked he could not get into an immersion suit before the boat went under, and Jorge Ramos, the youngest fisherman, whom Arias never saw in those last, desperate minutes before the Lady Mary disappeared into the black Atlantic.

In July, however, the John & Nicholas, the same boat that scooped up Frankie Credle’s body from the chilly depths, plucked Reyes’ driver’s license from the sea. Found in the net/aen

The men of the Lady Mary were not the only New Jersey fishermen who died last year. On Nov. 11, 2009, just days after the Coast Guard announced it was stepping up inspections of safety equipment aboard commercial fishing vessels, the 44-foot scalloper Sea Tractor sank in a storm off Cape May. Three men, including a father and son, were lost.

Six weeks later, the 38-foot Alisha Marie went down with two of its three crew. When 2009 finally came to a close, 11 commercial fishermen had lost their lives in the waters off New Jersey. Within months, changes in safety practices in the fishing industry were being considered.

This past March, the NTSB issued a recommendation to the Federal Communications Commission regarding EPIRBs. Although the Lady Mary’s device was incorrectly registered, it also lacked a $100 GPS transmitter, which could have been attached to the EPIRB and would have identified the location of the boat, if not its identity. Currently, the GPS transmitter is not required, but the NTSB cited the Lady Mary as a reason why the law should be changed.

“If a rescue helicopter could have been launched after the first EPIRB signal was received,” the NTSB’s letter reads, “(it) is possible that the two victims found in the water wearing immersion suits would have still been alive when the rescuers arrived.” Yes, the letter was public record. As for confidential sources, we had one very, very close to the Coast Guard investigation and it was difficult because he was a believer in the C.G. theory of a swamping./aen

NOAA also has instructed its contractors when recording EPIRB registration forms to now read the printed code on the manufacturer’s label — if it is provided — not just the handwritten code copied onto the form by the owner of the vessel. NOAA would not release the name. In fact, because it was a contractor, the agency said it wasn’t sure it even had a name./aen

Recently, a bill mandating safety inspections of all commercial fishing boats, and safety training for all vessel operators, passed both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. Last month, President Obama signed the legislation and it became law. I just think it would have taken us too far afield, since there was a lot of explanatory information in this part already./aen

COPING

In the meantime, many of the families of the men who died continue to struggle with their grief. The day before the Smith brothers were buried in North Carolina, Stacy Greene, Bobo’s longtime girlfriend, answered a call from Adele’s Jeweled Treasures in Cape May. The consignment shop wanted her to know it was the last day to reclaim Bobo’s gold chain. Stacy raced down and paid the bill.

Ten-year-old Jonathan, one of Stacy and Bobo’s sons, believes he’s seen his father.

“I was walking around the yard and I looked up above the house and saw my Dad. His arms were spread out and he flew down and hugged me.”  ”The Falling Man,” by Tom Junod – the child of a dead man also claimed to have seen her father; what do you make of it?/pw I have to say this was one of those times when it was hardest not to cry. In fact, I had to keep wiping my eyes. This boy had the most angelic face and spoke with such a quiet, intelligent power for a boy his age. He was very, very earnest, and I believe children, either because their imaginations are still so very fertile, or, because they are more open to things than adults who have become cynical and skeptical about such things, they can sense – or somehow “see” – the dead./aen Carinna Smith, Tim’s wife, still keeps her husband’s truck parked in the driveway and every now and then sneaks out of the house just to sit in the driver’s seat. Tim’s Bible is still there, and the little sea horse he once caught still hangs from the rearview mirror.

Before Bernie’s body was found, Edith Jones would lie in bed every night and call his cell phone just to listen to his voice-mail message from somewhere out in the ether. It was very hard, but I gently probed, asking the same question a few different ways spread out over an interview. She was both shy, and yet incredibly open, wanting to share the relationship and the memories, even the most painful ones./aen

José Arias, the only survivor of the wreck of the Lady Mary, has lost weight since the accident and still needs medication to sleep. The TV at the foot of his bed is always turned to a Spanish-language station, a kind of white noise to distract him from his thoughts.

His eyes pool with sadness when he speaks. You’re welcome!/aen Through an interpreter, he says he has worked a bit on the docks since the accident, but not on a fishing boat, and that he won’t, not ever again.

A NEED TO KEEP MOVING

Fuzzy brought his sons home to Bayboro to be buried in his backyard, and that’s where he finally buried Bernie’s ashes, too. Hazel, his wife, says she’s out there “from sunup to sundown.” She puts fresh flowers on the graves every week and keeps an eye on Bobo and Tim when she’s on her exercise bicycle in the shed next to the graves.

“There’s my babies,” she’ll say. “I love you, babies.” I came close to losing composure a number of times, this being one of them, and often when talking to Fuzzy, who remains so haunted./aen

Sometimes she even hums to them.

For Fuzzy, who lost his only children as well as a brother and a cousin, nothing gives him comfort.

“It’s like somebody punched a hole through me,” he said. “I get up and get ready to go, but instead I look out the window. My energy is like seeping through a crack.”

A descendant of slaves, his ancestry can be traced to Elizabeth Jennett who survived the shipwreck of the English bark Good Intent off Cape Hatteras in 1767. Most of the 300 Africans being brought to America to be sold into slavery perished that day, but Jennett survived.  I wanted to include this information mainly because of the terrible ironies. When I realized the Smiths and Credles had lived in North Carolina for a long time, I researched the genealogies online and confirmed the link through two sources. Fuzzy confirmed a few of his ancestors but was not familiar with the story of Elizabeth Jennett. Fuzzy has not read the series, by the way, and I totally understand why./aen The sea gives and the sea takes.

Fuzzy says he has to keep moving. He drives mile after mile, hour after hour, back and forth between Bayboro, N.C., and Cape May, though none of his remaining fishing boats goes out anymore. On one of those trips home to North Carolina, right after the accident, he pulled off the highway into a Burlington Coat Factory to buy a suit and pair of shoes to bury Bobo in — the socks came two in a pack, he said. The other pair remain in the back seat of the truck. Both, actually./aen He doesn’t have the heart to fish anymore, Fuzzy says, but every couple of weeks he still hits the road in his Ford pickup anyway, just to check in on his other rusting boats.

“It feels like someone pushing at me,” he said. “Doesn’t matter how many trips I take on the ferry and come back, it’s going to be the same. It took me awhile to figure that out. … Now I get to where I don’t want to be neither place.” Fuzzy has always known what to do on the sea. “You work on the boat with the motion of the boat,” he likes to say. It’s how to be on land that’s hard for him to figure out. Because we had many months, we had many, many interviews. All of them were in person, although there were many follow-up conversations on the phone. We probably met with Fuzzy, both in Cape May and in North Carolina, at least a dozen times. He was always remarkably open with us, although sometimes it was a matter of letting him fill in the silence and NOT asking questions, because he was rarely not thinking about his boys. Most of the families were also very open. Only the wife of Jorge Ramos refused to be interviewed./aen

Last summer he bought a new lawn mower and to fill the time spends warm weather weekends cutting his lawn in Bayboro. When he first bought the machine he not only trimmed his own grass, but also the empty lot across the street, then his neighbor’s lawn, then the town square. A few days later he received a letter from the mayor who wanted to thank him for making the town look so much better.

For the most part, though, Fuzzy avoids friends and acquaintances.

“When I go places where I don’t know people, I feel better,” he says. “I quit going to the place where I get my oil changed because he was too nice. … It’s not so much what they say, it’s what they’re thinking.”

For Fuzzy, life now is entwined by the vocabulary of loss. So on many days, in the quiet before dawn, he gets in his truck and heads north again, past Credle’s Salvage, past the Play Boy Barbershop, past the Original Free Will Baptist Church, until all that he’s left behind is swallowed by darkness. Oh boy, I had a huge argument with my editor over the ending. I was even in tears over it. Initially I ended the story at the Fisherman’s Memorial, only because a certain image there seemed to sum up the story. The main metaphor I wanted to end with had to do with the fact that the names of the Lady Mary’s drowned crew were not well etched into the stone of the memorial. Most of the other names were deeply carved, but the six most recent names were very lightly etched, so much so that at least the edge of one of the names was beginning to fade. It was clear to me that within a few years, unless something was done, their names would be gone, and this idea really spoke to me about how easily and quickly we forget, how unkind Time is, and how the elements of sea and air wear away all of us, and yet remain as ever. As soon as I noticed this, I knew that’s where I wanted to end the series, because I also kept thinking about one of my favorite poets, John Keats. When he was dying of “consumption” he asked his friend, the painter Joseph Severn, to make sure that when he died they put these words on his tombstone, “Here lies one who name was writ in water.” (Many people say Keats died of a bad review.) Severn, god bless him, honored his friend’s request, but added a nice little caveat – “This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet who, on his deathbed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraved on his tomb stone: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” My editor’s complaint was that ending the story at the memorial was too cliched, too expected. Ordinarily, I would have agreed with him, but I felt very strongly about ending the story with a kind of philosophical summary. Not heavy, or heavy-handed, but I felt the scope of the story suggested an ending that wasn’t just about one character. Another editor suggested I end with the startling image of Fuzzy mowing all those lawns. I was adamant that was not the right place, but I decided, under pressure from my editor, to end with Fuzzy, who remains, at least for me, the most tragic, most poignant character./aen

Newark Star-Ledger reporter Amy Ellis Nutt won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and was a finalist in that category in 2009, for “The Accidental Artist,” which became the subject of her first book, Shadows Bright As Glass. She is a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Before going to the Star-Ledger she worked as a fact checker, reporter and golf writer at Sports Illustrated, and before that she taught philosophy at Tufts. She is at work on a new book of nonfiction.

Multimedia storytelling at The Atavist: One year in, how’s it going, Evan Ratliff?

Paige Williams — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:35:32 +0000

It’s been a little over a year since The Atavist debuted as a groundbreaking digital platform for long-form multimedia storytelling. Narrative journalists had been bemoaning the shrinking storytelling acreage, so this app-based venue was met with substantial interest. “E-books are more than a publishing platform,” as New York magazine referred to the genre, “they’re a whole new literary form.”

So, is it working?

We asked Evan Ratliff, an Atavist founder, that question the other day when he dropped by the Nieman Foundation for a visit. Here, edited for clarity and length, is some of the conversation between Ratliff and fellows, staff, guests and Paige Williams, who teaches the foundation’s Narrative Writing seminar.

Williams: Let’s start with an explanation of how The Atavist works.

Of the three people who founded it, two of us came from the magazine world, so we have a very magazine-heavy perspective on how we approach things. One of them is myself – I was a freelancer for 10 years – and the other one is Nick Thompson, who’s an editor at the New Yorker and was my editor at Wired. The third guy, Jefferson Rabb, is the most crucial person. He’s the guy who actually builds everything you see. He’s the coder and the designer and he’s the person without whom we couldn’t do any of this because we’d just be assigning stories and not have anywhere to put them.

Our original idea didn’t have that much to do with multimedia. We just wanted to find a place to tell long stories. You’ve all probably experienced or are intimately familiar with the decline of word counts. I’ve only ever worked in magazines. I never worked for a daily newspaper except in college, so I came into journalism wanting to write 10,000-word stories. That’s what I thought everyone got to do when they got to a certain stage of their career. Come to find out that what used to be the 10,000-word story, if it ever existed, was now the 3,500-word story.

Ratliff (photo: Jonathan Seitz)

I had just done (“Vanish”), about when I tried to disappear. It ran at about 14,000 words, and I just felt like this is what I want to be doing. But there was no place to do it. So we thought, “What if we created something online that would allow us to (publish longer stories)?” We started looking at these phones and tablets. I had just moved to New York and I was reading on my phone on the subway. We started saying, “Maybe there’s something we could build for this.” We ended up with (The Atavist).

We assign stories basically just like a magazine. People send us pitches. The outside limits are 5,000 to 35,000 words. Everything is heavily narrative. The multimedia component also grew out of (“Vanish”). Over the course of it I gathered a lot of media, but in the end there was nothing really to do with them because the magazine just didn’t have the resources to build some elaborate construction that included the videos as part of the story. So we had this idea, “What if we took that approach with stories but integrated it into the narrative?”

So what you’re looking at now is our iPad app. The one for iPhone looks the same. We also sell the stories as text-only on Kindle. So we sell them on Kindle, we sell them on Nook, basically as books. “The Kalinka Affair” is our most recent. It looks just like a short book. It’s probably 30 to 50 pages. It’s designed like a book. There are no images in it except for the cover, for a variety of highly technical and financial reasons. The multimedia versions we only sell in our app, or in iBooks we sell a version.

Dina Kraft: So you call it an e-book.

Yes, an e-book.

Carole Osterer: Is the text-only version available in the multimedia version? It wasn’t clear on your website.

Yes and no. This will answer that question. So, “Lifted” is a story that I wrote when we started out. It’s about this robbery in Sweden. These guys stole a helicopter and broke into a cash depot with $150 million in it.

Carlotta Gall: I bought that on my Kindle.

Ah, so you read the text.

Gall: I bought some photos as well.

Early on we were putting photos in the Kindle (version) but we stopped doing that because they were charging us fees for how big the file is, which we didn’t know until we got the (financials) back and said, “Why aren’t we making much money on this?”

So in the Kindle version it would’ve started (with the text-only) Chapter One. In the iPad/iPhone version it starts with the actual surveillance footage from the robbery, which I got from the Swedish prosecutors when I went to report the story. They gave me a DVD with all the footage on it, and I edited it into this sort of condensed version of the guys breaking in. They use a sledgehammer. For some reason the cash depot with $150 million in it has a skylight, which they just smash their way through. And they had a ladder; they had measured it to fit. They’d designed it all based on a heist movie that they’d watched. It’s very dramatic. There were actually cameras inside the cash cages. And so our idea was that this is the real lede to the story, this is the lede as we really want it to be. If you think of this as a lede that’s going to hook somebody and never let them go, it’s hard to do better than this. You can, of course, (do it) with brilliant prose; it’s just a different approach to how to tell the story. (After the video) you’re dropped into Chapter One, where it’s a month before, and two guys are sitting on a bench, plotting this.

To answer your question, (on the iPad/iPhone version) you can get clean text and photos all the way through without links, without any distractions. It’s all about the story. If you see on the side here, there’s a little gray triangle and this thing on the left that says “online extras.” If you tap those you get little bits of text that raise up, which can be anything. Predominantly for us they’re characters, footnotes, maps and timelines.

Anna Griffin: Are you planning that kind of thing as you’re writing or do you think about it afterward?

Generally we do it afterward. Our approach is so new and strange that we have reporters treat it different ways. Some of our writers really get into this stuff, so they’ll show up with everything they want to go into the story, and then other ones could care less.

Griffin: What’s your preference as an editor?

I like it when they care. So I’ll just show you a few other things in different stories. “Piano Demon” is about a jazz musician from the 1920s and ’30s whose name was Teddy Weatherford. He was at one time one of the most famous jazz musicians in the world. And then he was this kind of lost character who went abroad, and he was very famous in China, and then he went to India and he died. This reporter Brendan Koerner had come across him and found all this research on him and spent months and months and months researching, and he also found his music. So his music is laced into the story. It’s the soundtrack, which can play along with the story.

Adam Tanner: Do you have to buy the rights to the various pieces of music?

In some cases yes and in some cases no. These are orphaned works, so for these we’re in some way taking our chances. But because Brendan Koerner probably spent more time trying to track down this guy than any person on earth I’m pretty sure (Weatherford) has no descendants.

Tanner: What about the classical piece (of music) at the start of the heist thing?

That was composed by Jeff, one of my co-founders; he’s trained in music composition. There are audio clips laced into “Piano Demon,” so if you see him talking about ragtime there’s a clip of him playing ragtime. That’s an example of where Brendan was sort of like, No I don’t want that clip there; there’s a better 15-second clip. We had days and days of back-and-forth about what were the appropriate clips.

from "Mother, Stranger," by Cris Beam

Sometimes we’ll do just fun things. “Island of Secrets” is by a writer named Matt Power. He writes for Harper’s and other magazines. This is about – he went to Papua New Guinea to track this guy who was trying to find tree kangaroos on this island in New Britain. We made a kind of in-house animation that’s this sort of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” style. So we try to mix it up. We did a memoir, “Mother, Stranger,” by a writer named Cris Beam. She teaches at Columbia and she’s written about juveniles, and we got her to write about her upbringing, which was very, very dark. Hermother was a prostitute and (Cris) left home when she was 14, never saw her mother again, and she only took a few things with her. One of the things she took with her was her diary from when she was 7 years old. (In the multimedia version) you can flip the pages of it. People are really moved by her talking about the names her mother called her.

We also have audiobooks in every (story), so there’s an actual audio version of the author reading the story. And you can flip back and forth between the audio and the text, and it keeps your place. That’s something you can’t do in print. Book publishers do it, but there’s this sort of legacy thing where book publishers have two revenue streams, the audiobook and the prose book. In (the digital) medium there’s no reason why you shouldn’t put them together and give people the option to do one or the other.

We’re trying to find ways to both integrate the media and to layer in all this other information but also to preserve the power of the story first and also preserve the journalism. Every story is fact-checked, every story is treated like a story at The New Yorker or Harper’s or any other magazine.

In terms of the (fee) model, it’s different than either magazines or books. It’s really like grabbing parts from both. We’ll pay the writer a fee plus 50 percent of the royalties. The royalties come after the platform takes its percentage. Most of these platforms will take 30 percent. After that, whatever we get, we give the author half. Which means that if the story doesn’t do well, the authors end up getting paid maybe what they’d have gotten paid to write for Harper’s. A dollar a word is the standard. But the story also has the possibility to do very well and for the writer to get paid, in some cases, several times what they could’ve gotten even at the highest-end glossy.

Williams: Someone ran a story the other day about what authors were earning. (David) Dobbs was in there, some others.

David Dobbs is a science writer, but the story he wrote for us was this thing called “My Mother’s Lover.” It’s a reported memoir. His mother, on her deathbed, revealed that she’d had this affair 60 years before, during World War II, that had altered her entire life in this very dramatic way. So (Dobbs) spent almost a decade figuring out who the guy was and finding his military records – he disappeared during the war – and contacting his family, and then unspooled this whole narrative.

Williams: What’s the (most recent) story?

It’s by Josh Hammer, who used to be (Africa) bureau chief at Newsweek. It’s a story so well known in France and Germany but less so here. It’s sort of complicated, but this French guy was married. He had a daughter. His wife left him for this German doctor and took the daughter with them. And some years later the daughter suddenly died and it came to light that the doctor had probably raped and killed her. This father then spent three decades trying to bring this guy to justice. The German government wouldn’t deal with him – they basically said there’s not enough evidence – so he essentially hired a kidnapper to go kidnap the guy and – well, I don’t want to spoil the end.

As far as the pay model – David Dobbs pitched his story, actually, to Wired. That’s the way I found out about it. He pitched it as: There are these guys who track down World War II remains all over the world and they use all this high tech. It was a very Wired story but they said no. One of the editors told me about it and a tiny kernel of the pitch was, “This is kind of relevant to me because my mother had this affair in World War II and I contacted these people,” and I said, “Well that sounds like a better story to me than the one you’re trying to pitch.” And if he had gotten it in Wired, he’d have been paid, I’d say, a quarter of what we’ve paid him. And that’s just so far.

Gall: Do you know how many subscribers you have?

We have a weird situation when it comes to subscribers because when we’re selling on Amazon we’re selling single-copy sales. On the iPad, we know how many people have downloaded the app, but it’s very, very difficult to tell who is buying what. We actually don’t even have subscriptions yet. That’s something we’re launching in the next couple of months, where people can subscribe to get 10 of these or 12 of these.

Kraft: Over how long, half a year, a year?

Probably over a year.

Kraft: And there’s no advertising on the pages.

There’s no advertising on the pages.

David Skok: Do you keep data on the users? What they click on and their favorite interactives?

We have analytics on everything that everyone does but it’s fully anonymized. In fact we couldn’t not anonymize it because, as I say, they don’t tell us who the people are. We’ve actually never looked at it.

Skok: Really?

Yeah, and it’s because – it’s experimenting. We’re experimenting with different types of storytelling. It’s entirely possible that nobody watches a video that’s an interstitial chapter, but I’d rather try a larger sample size before I know that. I just feel like we’re putting it all somewhere and building a visualization tool for it, and at some point we’ll go look and see.

Jonathan Blakley: Do you find authors are writing stories with more media in mind?

Now they are. In the beginning it was like pulling teeth to get people to pitch me a story at all because I was saying, “This thing doesn’t exist (but) please pitch me a story.”

(laughter)

But now, yes. At the very least they’ll acknowledge it. They’ll say there’s some great TV footage of the arrest, there’s this, there’s that. We have a guy doing a story in New York who’s a Vietnam vet who’s had a very, very strange life who’s now trying to put on this Shakespeare play. The writer had this whole plan about this video that had been shot and how it will all mix together. I love it when they do it. The rub, though, is they still have to sit down and write a text. They have to be able to write because we have to sell the text version.

The thing I try to stay away from is sending a reporter out who’s sort of juggling all these (multimedia recording) devices and doing everything worse than if they just focused on one thing. I mostly just want them to go report the way they’d normally report. Like when we sent Matt Power to New Guinea, I said, “At some point gather some high-quality digital audio of the jungle.” We already had an idea that we would use that as the soundtrack. So when you start the story, it’s like a 10-minute loop of jungle sounds. You could debate all day whether it adds anything to the story, but I like it. It’s fun.

Williams: What’s also cool is that it’s original to the piece. You didn’t just pipe in some random jungle sounds.

Yeah. Yeah.

Kraft: And in a case like that, the photos are very lush and beautiful. Did (the author) take the photos?

Yeah, but as it turns out there was a guy who was sort of incidental to the expedition – he was a herpetologist who was along – who was a really, really good photographer. So we ended up buying his photos.

Jones: Compared to like Harper’s or The New Yorker, can you describe what’s a story that you’d want that you know they wouldn’t want?

I don’t think there’s that much difference. We get pitched lots of stories that have already been to The New Yorker, have already been to Harper’s.

Jones: I wondered that about Brendan’s.

Brendan’s was different because he wanted to do it as a book. The other type of story we get is one where there’s not enough there for a book, where the agent might say, “You know, it’s a great story but you’re not gonna spend two years on this and write 200 pages.” I mean I don’t care about a news peg at all. We’ll do historical pieces. We’ll do pieces that are sort of newsy but that don’t have a news peg. The one that was a (digital National Magazine Award) finalist for reporting was about the Egyptian revolution, but we sent the author, David Wolman, there a month after everything had happened. It just so happened that he’d done a story a couple of years ago about some of the activists when they were completely unsuccessful. He had been tracking them all this time, so we sent him back to reconstruct their role in all the events. It was too late to do an Egypt story in the magazine sense. But I don’t really care about that. The main difference for us is, it’s always narrative first. It’s never topic first.

James Geary: Do you know anything about your demographics? Who’s buying? Are they hard-core magazine subscribers? Are they lapsed magazine subscribers? Are they book buyers? Are they not book buyers?

I’d say we only know anecdotally because we don’t have data on who they are. The Kindle people, which are the majority of the people who read our things, are book lovers, because up until recently if you had a Kindle you just had it to read books. I mean that’s why it’s so much easier for us to sell on Kindle, because people are buying books and then suddenly there’s this thing called the Kindle Single, which is way cheaper and hopefully of the same quality. We’re very much in this community of – I don’t know if you’re familiar with longform.org or Longreads, which is this hashtag on Twitter. They’ve grown really large followings of people who love long magazine stories. We get a fair portion of those. We try to go after people who love magazines.

Skok: I’m very curious about your actual team on the development/design side of things. Also, are you licensing what you built to other organizations or publishers as an additional revenue stream but also so they can take advantage of the multimedia?

The answer to the second question is yes, which will illuminate the size of our team. Our team for a long time was me and this guy Jefferson, who made all this stuff, and an intern, who was the only paid person for a long time. In fact, when we started the only people who got paid were the writers, the fact checkers and the copy editors. Now we have two editors, myself and a part-time editor named Alissa Quart – she teaches at the Columbia J-school and writes for the New York Times magazine – and we have two producers who are full time. They do all these multimedia things and also run all of our social media, our Facebook, our Tumblr. We do promotion around each one of these stories when it launches. We place excerpts and go to blogs. Our copy chief is the copy chief at Outside magazine, who’s an old friend of mine who lives in Santa Fe. Fact checkers: We have a rotation of freelancers. A lot of them have worked at Harper’s and The New Yorker. And then the rest are contract people that we bring in, like an animator or a radio producer, to do sound.

On the business side, which is related to licensing the platform, we have three full-time programmers, and a business development person who sells the platform. So this guy Jeff that I was saying is such a genius, he didn’t just build the actual app, he built this whole software platform that allows us to do that, which we do indeed license to other organizations. That’s like our version of advertising. That’s what pays everyone’s salary while we get to do the thing that we really want to do, which is create stories.

Skok: Has anybody approached you to buy you?

Yeah, at the very beginning but maybe we gave off strong signals that we were not for sale. We never raised any money at the beginning. We started with our own money, and part of the reason was that we went to see a venture capitalist and showed them this software, the first thing they said was, “Why are you wasting your time on content? Why don’t you sell this (platform) and make a bunch of money and then you can do whatever you want?” And we just thought: We never want to deal with that again.

(laughter)

Williams: The platform allows you to make changes: add pop-up corrections or updates, epilogues.

And it creates these very interesting new-media dilemmas. I don’t know if any of you saw that Jonathan Franzen said e-books were evil, and everybody made fun of him, but actually the thing that he was really talking about was the fidelity of the text and the ability to change it over time. Which we completely have here. We could change anything and just whitewash whatever happened, so we have to have our own editorial standards. If we correct something we put one of those pop-ups in: “This has been corrected for such-and-such.” Not for typos and things like that, but for substantial corrections. We’ve added epilogues, so like in the Swedish heist case some of the guys went to trial and prison, and so I had an epilogue about that. There are all these things you can do. You can have an open-ended ongoing story or book, and some of the people that we license to are looking to do those sorts of things. They also use it for educational textbooks. TED conferences are producing a line of books.

Raquel Rutledge: What sort of volume are you dealing with and where do you anticipate being in the next year with the number of stories?

Right now we have a pretty good pipeline of assignments. We have 12 pieces assigned, I think. Even when we get a bigger pipeline we won’t accelerate too much because we do like to give (each story) a little publicity, a little runway, like they’re small books. I don’t want to start shoveling them out. I’d like to keep it monthly. We don’t want to overdo it. I recently had to justify that we were a magazine because we were submitted for the National Magazine Awards. Nobody said anything. And then we got picked as a finalist and people said, “It’s not even a magazine, they’re like books!” And my argument is, It’s like a magazine where one story has taken over the feature well. Which has happened: Hiroshima and things like that. I think it’s an okay argument.

Tyler Bridges: The different ways you’re bringing in money – can you elaborate on that?

Editorial revenues are predominantly from Kindle and Apple. Nook, they’re not keeping up right now. Kindle launched Kindle Singles, so they’ve really created a forum for this length of work. They’re assigning their own stories and those (writers) are also doing well because they get the whole percentage. So, Kindle and Apple. And then our licensing revenues are probably five or six times the size of our editorial revenue. Most of what we do runs on the licensing revenues, and pays for the editorial. In terms of growing, we’re kind of in the middle of trying to figure out what we’re going to do this year, but we’re really, really conservative. We sold over 100,000 copies last year and it would be nice to double that, and we’d like to double what we do on the licensing side, so that’s kind of our goal this year. We’re doing okay so far.

Williams: Is there editorial quality control with Kindle Singles? Do they fact-check?

I’m pretty sure they don’t fact-check. I actually don’t like to discourage people from doing Kindle Singles, though, because the guy who runs it is a longtime magazine writer, was an editor at the Village Voice, is a good friend of mine, and they do edit and they certainly copyedit. If you go there, you’re getting 70 percent of the royalties. It’s exclusive to Amazon, so you’d have that, and I don’t know what their fee situation is. I don’t think they pay a fee to most (authors), so if you want to cover your reporting costs, then it’s a matter of how much you want to lay out of your own money. Sometimes we’ll cut the royalty and pay a much higher fee. So writing for us is more akin to writing for a magazine whereas Kindle Singles is closer to a book model.

Tanner: We had Gay Talese come to speak some months ago and we did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on his latest New Yorker story as to time invested to the fee he received –

Never do that.

(laughter)

Tanner: – and we concluded he’s better off working at McDonald’s.

I usually say Starbucks.

Tanner: So based on your experience, is it ultimately just a labor of love that never pays off big time?

I mean it just depends on what your standard of living is, I guess.

Tanner: So if you love extreme poverty this is the way to go?

Extreme poverty? I feel like anyone who says, “I want to be guaranteed a six-figure salary,” they probably didn’t get into journalism in the first place. But if you were to do – well let’s take this new story, “The Kalinka Affair.” (Hammer) is an incredibly professional guy. He knocked that thing out, did all the reporting, all these interviews, all these court documents, and turned in a clean copy, and the whole process took probably three months overall. And he was probably working on two other stories at the time. He could make 35 grand off this story. And if he does another four features this year … I think that’s a pretty good salary, for my standard, but that’s not for everyone. And then again we might have (stories) that continue selling for a lifetime. There’s ones now that sell 1,000 copies a month and they’ve been out for six months.

Williams: To me, that’s part of the attractiveness of this: There’s potentially no end point.

I definitely don’t want to make out like I think it’s some panacea for long-form writers to make a living. Hopefully it’s something alongside of – these writers are all writing for Wired and Harper’s or have a book contract, or they’re working for this sort of set of magazines or websites, and (this is) something that fits in with whatever else they do. But it’s always true for these type of reporters, including myself, and including Paige I’m sure, that you end up getting obsessed with it and you end up spending twice the amount of time than you should have, for the amount of money you’re being paid.

Gall: We had some publishers come recently and they said they’ve tried to do the multimedia for their books and so far they’ve found the expense is not worth it. Are you doing it because you think it’s the future or just because you like it, or do you think you can make it pay?

I would say the reason we’re doing it is mostly that we like it. I would also say, though, that we hear publishers say that all the time. The main reason is because when the iPad first came out and when apps first came out publishers were paying 50 to 100 grand or more to people to build an app around a book, and shooting all this video for it and doing interactive games, all these things. You have to sell an incredible amount to make your money back. There was this Al Gore book by this company called Push Pop Press, which was our biggest competitor on the platform licensing side, and it got bought by Facebook after they produced this one book. It must’ve sold 500,000 copies, because it’s really, really, really elegantly done in terms of the interactivity. They spent a lot of money and definitely made it back many times over. So it’s just a matter of how you allocate your resources. If you do it without too much overhead then you don’t have to sell that many to make your money back.

Gall: And then why did you go into this? Is it because you feel magazines were going to finish, or is it because you wanted to be an editor?

Neither of those. I still don’t want to be an editor.

(laughter)

Although maybe it’ll make me less neurotic if I ever were to get back to writing. It was more out of frustration. It wasn’t that doomsday: “Magazines are dead.” I actually don’t think that. I think magazines are viable, partly because a lot of them have gone back to doing longer pieces, in-depth pieces. That’s what they can actually sell. The short stuff is harder to sell because you can get it for free online everywhere. I did it because if you want to pitch a story that’s just a great yarn and you think maybe it should be 10,000 or 15,000 words, there’s five magazines you can pitch it to and, in the case of The New Yorker, there are hundreds of people pitching them every single day, and they take like two freelance stories at best. The web has infinite space.

Osterer: Did you say who’s licensing your platform?

It’s kind of a motley collection. We license it to journalism schools, so Columbia (licenses it), and Dartmouth Business School licenses it to do case studies. Pearson, which is the gigantic textbook maker that owns Penguin, they’re building a big educational thing with it. TED conferences is launching a line of books. And we have some start-up magazines, so people are actually launching a new sports magazine on it.

Kraft: What’s the appeal, do you think, of this specific format, and how many pitches are you getting per month and how many are you taking?

The appeal to me or to the public?

Kraft: To the public.

I think the appeal to the public – it’s like inverting this question that I used to get all the time. People would say, “Well don’t you think attention span has declined and people don’t really want to read this long stuff?” I was always having to say there’s no real evidence that nobody reads anything anymore. Then I realized we could just turn that on its head and say, “They’re short books.” I actually think that is the appeal, especially on Kindle: (stories) at their appropriate length. As a nonfiction writer and as a person who loves nonfiction books (I think) some nonfiction books are too long. A lot of nonfiction books are (published) because (a writer) gets a book contract out of a magazine story and they’ve got to just pump it up.

So the length has a certain appeal. The multimedia is still unclear.

And then pitches: We have a story meeting once a month and generally 40 or 50 (pitches) have come in. We usually talk about 15 or 20 of them at the meeting and then we’ll probably pick two. Sometimes none. Sometimes five. In some ways, as I said, I set this up because I was so frustrated because I was pitching places and it was always like, No, no, no, but we’re so small we’ve created another version of that problem and we have to say, No, no, no.

Other people are also starting similar (platforms). There was another one that started after us, called Byliner. And people out in San Francisco just raised $100,000 on Kickstarter to do a long-form science thing. So I think there’re going to be a lot more of these slightly different models but in the same genre, giving the author a cut of what they sell.

Williams: What do you look for in pitches in terms of the perfect narrative? What elements need to be there for you to say yes?

I feel like after all this time of saying narrative, narrative, narrative, I should be better at articulating what that means, but I’m not, so I come up with tricks for how I describe it. The typical New York Times magazine story, to take an example: They do what people call narrative stories but they’re actually very topic-based. So they’ll pick something like pregnancy, say, and then find a character, and (a reporter) will follow that character, and the lede is about that character and their experience, and then there’s a broader section about science, and then one about policy, and then you get back to the character. That’s not really what I mean by narrative, but a lot of people refer to that as narrative.

Williams: Those are news features.

Yeah. And we get a lot of pitches like that, so I’m always trying to find ways to explain why I said no. The best way I’ve come up with to describe it is: If someone is telling me a story and then they stop in the middle, and I say, “Well, what happens next?” That’s the kind of story we do.

The kind of story where you say, Well, there’s a lot of adoption of Chinese babies in Oklahoma – that’s a really interesting topic, and there’s probably a magazine story in that, but that’s not a narrative the way we want to do it. So we’re always saying characters first, plot first. So, “A” happens, “B” happens, “C” happens.

Jones: And no nut graf.

No nut graph. We don’t want the kind of “Here’s what this story’s about” (graf) but sometimes we’ll have it. Because we can go too far in the other direction, which is just characters doing crazy things. You do want some sort of gravity, significance. We have this story called “Baghdad Country Club,” which was a bar in Baghdad during the war that this British paratrooper opened in the Green Zone. It’s a little bit “M*A*S*H” and a little bit “Casablanca,” in the movie sense, and it’s very light relative to the environment in which it’s set, so we did have to insert these sort of heavier passages about the Green Zone and its relationship to the rest of Baghdad. Otherwise it just read like the writer was ignorant of the significance of the Iraq war.

Alysia Abbott: Have you thought about if a film studio were to say, “We want to make this into a movie?” Has that happened yet?

Yes. We’re actually represented by CAA in L.A. I should’ve said that when we were talking about the author model, because that’s another unique aspect of what we do, which some writers don’t like at all. We split any film and TV options 50-50 should they happen. We have this representation in L.A., so they’d be responsible for shepherding the story in that environment. The good thing for the writer is that they know their story is going to get looked at by some at least marginally powerful person in Hollywood. The downside is, Michael Lewis is never gonna sign up for that, or David Grann. We have one (story) that’s in legal negotiations now and another one that may have some interest. But it’s so random. I know writers who’ve made an excellent, excellent living on top of their journalism by optioning things, and (the films) never get made. It’s something you hope for but don’t really count on.

*Ratliff appeared as part of the Narrative Writing class’ speaker series. A contributing editor at Wired magazine, he also writes for The New Yorker and National Geographic. This conversation was edited for clarity and length. (Disclosure: Williams is an upcoming Atavist author.)

Keeping you up to date on Storyboard

Andrea Pitzer — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:47:50 +0000

You might notice editors switching seats in the days ahead. In the interest of keeping readers in the loop, we want to let you know that Storyboard editor Andrea Pitzer is working on a narrative nonfiction project about Vladimir Nabokov and will be taking a few months to concentrate solely on her book.

In the meantime, Paige Williams will be acting editor of Storyboard beginning April 1. A National Magazine Award winner, Williams also teaches narrative nonfiction writing to the fellows and affiliates of the Nieman Foundation. She has been a Storyboard contributor since 2010 and served on the Editors’ Roundtable in 2011.

We’ll continue to look at nonfiction storytelling in every medium and explore the future of narrative journalism. And you can still reach us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org with information on narrative projects or events you’d like to see covered on Storyboard.

Nieman Storyboard’s top 10 posts for 2011

Andrea Pitzer — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:11:29 +0000

During the last days of December, we’ve been tweeting down Storyboard’s top 10 posts for the year. In case you haven’t been following along, here they are, all in one place (in reverse order):

10. Internet phenom Maud Newton’s “Why’s this so good?”:

“Raymond Chandler sticks it to Hollywood.”

9. Chris Jones, Esquire writer at large, talks with Nieman narrative instructor Paige Williams:

“On reporting for detail, the case against outlining and the power of donuts.”

8. Storyboard editor Andrea Pitzer’s “Why’s this so good?”:

“Gene Weingarten peels the Great Zucchini.”

7. Peter Ginna, publisher and editorial director of Bloomsbury Press, with

“When journalists become authors: a few cautionary tips.”

6. Science and culture writer David Dobbs’ “Why’s this so good?”:

“Michael Lewis’ Greek odyssey.”

5. Atlantic senior editor Alexis Madrigal’s “Why’s this so good?”:

“Truman Capote keeps time with Marlon Brando.”

4. Science writer Carl Zimmer’s “Why’s this so good?”:

“McPhee takes on the Mississippi.”

3. Two celebrated Esquire writers visit Harvard:

“Gay Talese has a Coke: reflections of a narrative legend in conversation with Chris Jones.”

2. Nieman Lab assistant editor Megan Garber’s “Why’s this so good?”:

“David Foster Wallace on the vagaries of cruising.”

1. Pedro Monteiro’s look at storytelling in the tablet and app future:

“Story, interrupted: why we need new approaches to digital narrative.”

Thanks for your support in 2011. We’ve had a banner year here, with a lot of new contributors and record numbers of visitors. We look forward to bringing you even better coverage of new narrative projects and ideas in 2012. Happy New Year!

Gay Talese has a Coke*: reflections of a narrative legend, in conversation with Esquire’s Chris Jones

Paige Williams — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:08:14 +0000

Continuing a Nieman Foundation narrative writing speaker series set up by Paige Williams, journalism legend Gay Talese appeared on campus two weeks ago in conversation with Esquire’s Chris Jones. The Harvard Writers at Work lecture series co-sponsored the standing-room-only event, where Talese and Jones were introduced by current Nieman fellow Adam Tanner of Reuters. What follows is a transcript of the talk, edited for clarity and length:

Adam Tanner: Gay Talese is an especially good choice for those seeking to study great writing. His 1966 story “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” and other stories, are credited in helping create New Journalism: deeply researched literature of fact enlivened with vivid storytelling. He has published 11 books including the 1969 book “The Kingdom and the Power,” about the history of the New York Times, where he was a reporter from 1956 to 1965. Over his career Talese has written for the Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and others, and remains an active writer. He has influenced countless writers and journalists, including quite a number in the hall today.

We’ve paired him with a fine younger narrative writer who has a cult following of his own, Chris Jones, writer at large at Esquire and the new back-page columnist for ESPN The Magazine. He has won two National Magazine Awards for his long-form features and he has traveled from Toronto today to join us.

All of this has come together today in partnership with the Harvard Writers at Work lecture series. The lecture series is co-sponsored by the Harvard College Writing Program, the Harvard Review, Harvard Extension School and the Program in General Education, which brings together distinguished writers throughout the year.

Jones: Thank you very much to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism for having us today. How many of you are either writers or aspiring writers? Wow, there we go. Nonfiction? Fiction? Look at those people. They are not to be trusted.

[laughter]

Jones: We were just having coffee in the cafeteria, and Gay [was telling me he] is working on a piece for the New Yorker on Joe Girardi, the [Yankees’] manager. And I thought this might be an interesting way to talk about the process of writing and how you find stories. You spend so much time on a story. How do you know when an idea is good enough – is it good enough for a short piece, is it good enough for a long piece, is it good enough for a book?

Talese: I don’t think you know almost until the piece is published whether it’s publishable. I’ve been working on and off on this piece for six months for David Remnick of the New Yorker about, as you said, the manager of the Yankees, who by name is Joe Girardi. I think I know where I’m going, but what I do not know is how long I’ll be on the road. What I do now is what I did when I was your age or younger: I’m on the road a lot. I believe you have to be there. I don’t use the technology now any more than I did when I was a young reporter. When I went to the Times, beginning not as a reporter but as a copy boy back in 1953, a year after I got out of college at the University of Alabama, I was told by an old-time reporter who probably joined the paper in the 1920s, he said, Stay away from these telephones, stay away from these telephones, there are telephones all over the room. The telephone was the new technology, in this guy’s head. He said, You have to be there.

And I think that’s Step One in nonfiction reporting, whether it’s book length, magazine length, newspaper length, whatever. You have to be there. You have to see the people. Even if you don’t think you’re getting that much, you’re getting a lot more than you realize.

I had an assignment about a year and a half ago to write about an opera singer, and that involved traveling, being there, going to Moscow, going with this singer to Buenos Aries and Barcelona – Marina Poplavskaya is her name. So I had this woman, very active, very young and obviously very talented, and very difficult, and Remnick said, and [New Yorker articles editor] Susan Morrison said, What is it like to be on the road? Well I’m on the road all the time, and here was a writer talking about a singer on the road. What’s good about it is you get scenes.

I always liked being on the road. I always liked being out there. Parenthetically, I do not like the tape recorder and do not use it. The reason is, it brings you indoors. It promotes the idea of question and answer, question and answer, and it makes you sometimes subject to the easy availability of the spoken word verbatim. You tend to fall prey to the charm of that and the ease of that, the little plastic spinning wheels that give you everything but give you nothing really. Because what they give you is the first thing that comes into a person’s head in response to your questions. And the Q&A also takes away, I think, the largeness of the subject; it becomes narrowly defined by the Q&A, the little plastic thing on the desk or the coffee table. It’s convenient for a publisher who wants to cut costs because if you have a Q&A, a lot is achieved in terms of getting an article done in less time.

Jones: You mean writing [a piece] as a straight Q&A.

Talese: Yeah. The publisher is worried about cost, so you can’t go on the road. And what I do and what any person of my generation – [David] Halberstam and Tom Wolfe, all those people out of the ‘60s and ‘50s as I am – we’re on the road a lot. Of course it’s expensive, and you have to find ways to get people to allow you to go on the road. Back to Girardi. I had this idea. I actually had two ideas. One was easy, one is hard. The easy one, Tony Bennett. I was on the road with him. I went to Las Vegas, I went to Denver, and I went to watch him on the road, and then I came back and wrote a scene of him recording from an album with Lady Gaga of all things. That was not hard. And she’s really nice. I’m telling you, the woman you see photographed in these extravagant outfits that she concocts somehow with the help of some bizarre designer, she is really a very simple girl next door as Hefner would put it.

[laughter]

Talese: But Girardi’s difficult. A man who’s in fear of saying something wrong.

Jones: Very stiff.

Talese: Very stiff. Controlled. I started with Girardi – really it started with the old timers’ game at Yankee Stadium in the middle of July. I went mainly to see some of my old heroes, people I remember as ball players who are my age. [Talese is 79.] But Girardi was there as the manager of the team, [a] man of 46, and as I said, very careful, polite to a fault, but not much in the way that you have an insight into who he is. What interested me, he was a ballplayer, wasn’t a great ballplayer but for 13 years had been a ballplayer, with four different teams: Chicago Cubs two times, New York Yankees, the Saint Louis Cardinals and the Colorado Rockies. Before he became a major league ball player, of course, he was a minor league player, and before that he was a college player. He graduated from Northwestern in engineering. Very few ball players are college graduates. It’s unlike football and basketball; college is not the minor league of the sport. In baseball they start usually after high school and maybe have one year of college. I thought, [Girardi] has an interesting experience because he’s educated to a degree, educated as a ball player, minor league to major league, and never was a star, and played with stars. And I love writing about people who were never stars. I mean I’ve written about stars but usually when I write about a star like Joe DiMaggio, it’s when his era [is] over.

People who teach courses in narrative nonfiction, they often will mention DiMaggio or Frank Sinatra – but that was in the era, they had already been famous or [were] now not so famous, or hoped to be famous again. People I like to write about are people who’ve had a history of ups and downs. And Girardi suited me, I thought, in that way.

But the deal is you have to hang around; the art of hanging out, is the way I phrase what I do. So I started hanging around with Joe Girardi the first time at old timers’ day. Then I started going to games. One of the perks of this profession is you get free tickets to the press box. But what’s in the press box? Fifty-five years ago I was in the press box – when I was 24, 23, 22, I was a sportswriter with the New York Times. That was my first job and I remember how we in the press box used to cover the game, and now I see a whole different world of covering the game. In fact now I see sportswriters not even looking at the game – they’re seeing the game on their laptop and their eyes are not on the field. They’re very focused. I remember when I was in the press box in the 1950s, we would not really see the game; we would see more than the game. The most impressive thing, I remember, being in the press box in the 1950s, was all the drinking that was going on in the press box – it was the era of alcoholism in journalism. You don’t see any drinking going on anymore. You don’t see any smoking. Fornication is out. Everything is out.

Jones: It’s definitely frowned on in the press box.

Talese: One game I saw, I followed the team, 12 games on the road, I remember one time I saw in the middle of the game, some relief pitcher came out of the bull pen, and as he came running out the left fielder of the Yankees, who knew him, they sort of waved. They had been teammates a couple of years before, and I thought, This familiarity, this little gesture – those little things you miss on television. The modern day [sportswriters] see the game on the screen in front of them and they push buttons and they have the histories of the players and everything they want, and they get a lot of information very quickly, but they get it from the narrow [confines] of the laptop screen. I’m off the subject already, but I do think one of the problems of journalism today and maybe the problem of the Nieman Fellows here in this room is how we are narrowing our focus and becoming indoors in terms of internalizing our reporting. The detail is what I think we’re missing. See, the idea is to see all you can see and hang around as much as you can with the people that interest you. Well how do you do that? How do you do that when sometimes people are not interested in you seeing what you want to see and what they don’t want to show?

Jones: Girardi is very difficult because he doesn’t reveal anything. He’s covered by hundreds of people every day –

Talese: He is. And he also has a director of publicity with him at all times.

Jones: – and yet you have somehow wrangled – is this a secret? Gay is going to Peoria to sit with Girardi while he visits his father, who has Alzheimer’s. So how are you the guy in that room when there’s 100 guys –

Talese: Well what it is you develop – from the time you enter into an eye-contact relationship you have to first of all make a pretty good impression, meaning, I always thought, the Italian expression bella figura, making a good impression, a good appearance. You have to sell yourself, and how you do that depends on your personality. I approached Girardi’s press agent first of all, and said I had an assignment from the New Yorker to do a profile and [that] Girardi had never been done anywhere, I don’t think, that I thought presented him as he is. What I wanted to do was answer the question How did Joe Girardi become Joe Girardi? Who is Joe Girardi? What is the inside of this man? What is it about him that made him at age 46 the manager of the Yankees? I said, Can I come to a few games? I said, I’d just like to have the privileges that a sportswriter has. I said, I won’t ask any questions of the players; I don’t want to talk to the players . The players aren’t gonna tell you anything anyway. I said at some time I’d like to talk to Joe Girardi when he has the time, but not now. So they gave me a press pass for every game I wanted to go to. After the game Girardi gave to all the reporters who covered the team about 15 minutes explaining what happened in the game, why he changed pitchers, this and that. I just sat through this. I never asked any questions, and after the game was over I went home to the hotel. Did this for about two months.

Finally when the season was over, the Yankees did not win the World Series. I asked if I could talk to him for an hour or so – he lives in a place called Purchase, about an hour or so outside Manhattan – he said, I come to Yankee Stadium once a week, I can talk to you for an hour maybe, on Mondays I usually come in. So I saw him for three Mondays in a row for one hour. I don’t take notes. I just wanted to ask him some questions. The press agent of the Yankees, who was very careful, says, We’re gonna tape it, is that okay with you? I say, Well sure, you can tape it; in fact why don’t you tape it and let me have a copy and anything he doesn’t want to have said or [wants to] say it better, it’s fine. So we had this tape recorder and I’m talking to Girardi for an hour, did that three times. And what I said, I said, I want to start with who are your parents and who are your grandparents. He didn’t know much about his grandparents. I said, Well is there anybody who knows about your grandparents? He says, I have an older brother, eight years older. I say, Okay fine, what’s his name, what’s his phone number? Lives in Chicago. Fine, I’ll look him up.

I start talking to Girardi the second time and third time about his young days in school and about the days before he went to Northwestern on a baseball scholarship. I finally said, You know, I’d like to see these places – you say you were born in Peoria and you went to Northwestern, but I’d like to see Peoria. He said, Well the only time I’m gonna see my father – he has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t know who I am but because he’s the most influential man of my life, I still like to go see him regularly, and I’m gonna do it Thanksgiving. I said, Well I can’t interfere with your Thanksgiving, but if I went out the day after Thanksgiving would you then show me where you born – the house is still there? He says, Yes it’s still there and the school is still there and he said my parents owned a little restaurant at one time and the building’s still there. I said, Great, I’d like to just see these places. He said, Well, come out to Peoria. I wanted to go out the Friday after Thanksgiving, [but] there’s only one flight and it arrives at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. It’ll be dark by then. So I have to go out on Thanksgiving. My wife wasn’t happy about that but she understands. I’ll be in Peoria Friday morning, so when he arrives, Joe Girardi, he’ll show me around.

Now why is it important? I just feel there might be something in his upbringing – particularly I’m anticipating a scene with his father, who cannot communicate with him. I might be able to find in, just being in that town and seeing places that Joe Girardi will describe, I might be able to have a scene of him driving through Peoria, 46-year-old manager of the Yankees, where he was once a sandlot player, grade school player, a man with a very active father, a father who he told me who used to be a bricklayer. I looked at Joe Girardi and said, Look at those massive arms –

Jones: Yeah he’s got giant hands.

Talese: Giant hands! And those arms. He said, I got them because I helped my father build bricks, lay bricks. So there’s a scene of brick building in the background. I love that.

Jones: That scene with the dad. Do you have an image of that, going into it?

Talese: I don’t want to anticipate too much because – sometimes when you anticipate it doesn’t happen. You just have to be there, and if it happens you see it, and if you see it, remember it. You don’t record it. I don’t take notes in front of people but I do carry shirt boards. The shirt board as you know is in the back of a shirt – I cut it up with a scissor and trim it like this, and I do write little notes on these. Never in front of the person. But I’ll go to this hospital or whatever it is, wherever Joe Girardi’s father is registered, and I might later on write something down. I might write just the order of things: I might say we went from high school to grade school and then we went to that restaurant and then we went to this old age home, whatever it is. Then I’ll go back after I’ve left Girardi, or whoever I’m with, there’s a private time when I’m back at my hotel and I’ll review the day and I’ll write it. If I have a typewriter I’ll type it out. I’ve always typed out my notes before I go to bed, every night, whatever I remember that day: the date, where I was, why I was there, what I saw, what I remember.

Granted, the direct quotes I can’t rely on my memory for that. But what I will do, if there’s something interesting I’ll return to the person the next day and say, for example, Joe, yesterday when we were talking about your father and how you remember helping him lay bricks or driving in the truck when he was listening to the Chicago Cubs and that’s how you became such a fan of Ron Santo or whatever – here’s what I heard you say, or I don’t know what you mean by this. Sometimes people enlarge upon what they said and you get a better quote than the one you missed.

I once interviewed a prizefighter, Floyd Patterson, and I asked him, What’s it like to be knocked out? What’s it really like? In comic strips you have stars over the head. He started telling me and I started writing it down. This was for the magazine Esquire. And I went over it again and again and again, and I’m writing it this time in front of him, and I said, Now Floyd, when you’re first knocked out you don’t feel anything but then you look around the room and the ring and you see people under the ropes and through the ropes – finally I had this long, long quote, and in a way it was something that was almost co-authored between us. I was writing and he became a partner. I think that’s something that is very honorable about nonfiction, where to a degree you affiliate with and you partner with the person you’re interviewing. Not that they ever have any view of what you write or editorship privileges, certainly not. However you can and should build a trusting relationship with the person, and to a point where your confidence in your relationship is so trustworthy and so open, you can actually write in front of them.

Jones: The best interviews are the ones where each person forgets who the other is.

Talese: Yeah.

Jones: That you’re no longer the reporter, and I’m no longer Floyd Patterson, we’re just guys talking about –

Talese: That’s true.

Jones: Is that the goal, though?

Talese: That is the goal. And as I said, every night I type up – in the case of Frank Sinatra, for example, I had 33 days on that story, 33 dates. And each day might have two or three typed pages representing the total experiences of that day for me: what I remember, what I felt, what Sinatra was doing, what he wasn’t doing. I was describing as an observer on the scene, somewhat distant but still on the scene. After I’ve amassed all this material I go over it day by day by day and I summarize everything. So I have 33 summaries of 33 sets of notes from 33 days of being on the road. With those summaries I’m also reviewing once more, and once more, and once more what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard. And out of this becomes a kind of connection between the whole 33-day experience, and I see scenes. We all see scenes. When you’re on the road there are things there that are really scenic, if you’re on the road, if you’re outdoors. Well, sometimes when you write them, when you begin to write them, those scenes take on a sharpness, a focus, a particular specificity.

Jones: You mean as a means to illustrate –

Talese: Yeah. Yeah. Even as a young reporter I would think, Why can’t I do what short-story writers do or as novelists do, which is write scenes? I was thinking scenically because the influence I had was from the great short-story writers that I read in college. When I first came to New York as a copy boy I’d never heard of The New Yorker, but when I came to New York I heard of it and I started reading. I’d read John Cheever and John O’Hara and Irwin Shaw – my favorite writer – I started reading F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, Hemingway stories, Carson McCullers stories, and I started thinking, Why can’t I write a magazine piece like a short story, without changing the names? The short story writer gave me scenes, and I thought, Why can’t I do this in a magazine article? It’s the same length, 4,000 words, 5,000 words. So I want to write short stories with real names. That’s what I want to do. So I’m already thinking, What’s the short story of Joe Girardi? Where do you begin? Well I haven’t gotten there yet, but it may well be this trip to Peoria. Maybe I have within my pile of typed notes back home in New York stuff that will be much more interesting when I review it than it was when I was actually there with it.

Jones: So in retrospect –

Talese: You see the whole picture. And what I like to do in this form of writing that we’ll call short stories with real names, I like to move back and forth in time, and if you do enough research you can go from the boyhood to a time when this guy, this Joe Girardi character, first day in the major leagues, which in this case was the Chicago Cubs, and then he was sent down the next year to the minor leagues, and the distinction between the major leagues and the minor leagues. He’s a perfect case of describing, among other things, perseverance. A sense of failure or demotion. Rising again to the major leagues, hoping you can stay there. All the stuff that all ball players but also all people in all lines of work go through. So these messages or these instances of success or demotion are very relevant to the life of anyone, including writers, who sometimes don’t get assignments or, like in the minors, rejection slips.

All my pieces do deal with the history of the upbringing of the person and how that influences the individual that’s the focus of your story. And after I’ve organized it I actually put on my little corkboard, the Styrofoam board that runs across my desk, I pin these little cards that give me a sense of direction. It’s a form of choreography. It’s step by step by step. The opening scene is this. The second scene is this. Third, fourth, fifth, all the way across. So I have that article gradually taking shape visually. It starts with digging up, excavating, then it’s organizing, then it’s doing the choreographic progress from beginning to middle to end. And then the writing, the opening scene, I rework the sentences and try to make it as clear –

Jones: You write in longhand, right?

Talese: Yeah. On yellow line pads, sometimes in pencil, then I go from yellow line pads to a typewriter. I have an old computer –

Jones: It’s like, this big, right?

Talese: Yeah it’s as big as a Volkswagen – the advantage is I can erase very easily. I’ve succumbed to the technology to that point. I don’t have to get my little crummy eraser that falls down into the typewriter and clogs up the roller. This is better.

Jones: A lot of your process seems to be designed to slow you down. The reporting is intensive, the writing it seems like you give yourself time to think, the longhand forces you to slow down. Do you think that’s important to how your stories come out?

Talese: I think it is. I think it’s necessary. Maybe every writer in this room or aspiring writer wishes we had been more productive, wishes we’d been more prolific. I say that and I’ve said that, but I don’t believe that. So you can’t believe what people say; that’s why the tape recorder’s no good.

Jones: I’m starting my career all over again.

[laughter]

Talese: No, it’s just that we work as best we can. I want to do a couple of things. One, I want to do what the old gents who shaped me up for journalism at the New York Times told me you have to do, those old guys said, You’d better get it right. Get it right. Take the time, get it right. That hammered into me and it’s been there. I’m 79 and I hear it as I did when I was 21. Secondly, after you’ve gotten it right, then how [do] you go about communicating it to the reader? That’s where creativity takes its role in nonfiction: storytelling. We didn’t have terms like “narrative nonfiction” back then or “the New Journalism” or whatever Tom Wolfe called it – it isn’t that, but it is getting [it] right and then being a storyteller. And that means you have to have characters.

When I worked on the New York Times in the old days those guys that got it right weren’t necessarily lyrical figures in the world of literature – they were boring. They got it right but they were the paper-of-record people. And if you weren’t a dazzling stylist it didn’t make a bit of difference; in fact they suspected anything that might be called a stylist in those days. I would read the Herald Tribune in my free time and see the freedom they had – it was a sinking newspaper, I think it went out of business in the mid-‘60s, but Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe and those other guys were really having a lot of fun. I wasn’t having a lot of fun at the Times because there was the pressure of the editors and the tradition of the paper to get it right, and anything that was of a style was suspect: You’re piping it, you’re faking it, you’re writing fiction. And I was accused of writing fiction. I never did write fiction, but I was accused by some people on the New York Times: the old-fashioned traditional guys that I respected but didn’t want to emulate in any way because they were so boring. But I wanted to be a reporter and a story writer like some of those great short stories that I used to read.

I go about it now as I did then, so I haven’t changed. You asked me when we had a cup of coffee, How about your physical bearing, does age, you asked something along the lines of, Does age matter? I don’t think I’ve learned anything in terms of technique; it’s as hard now as it was for me then. The only thing that would matter to me because of my age is if I couldn’t travel.

Jones: If you couldn’t be there.

Talese: If I couldn’t be there. Then I’d have to get a job teaching at the Nieman school or someplace. Will you have me?

[laughter]

Jones: The part of the writing process that no one ever seems to talk about is the release of it. At some point you let it go to your editor and then to readers. A lot of writers – don’t take offense to this but you have received criticism sometimes for your work, even work that later became beloved – obviously you work so hard on something. How do you deal with criticism? I’m thinking with the Internet, it’s a bad time for self-esteem. Like, do you sort of say to yourself, Well I wrote “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” so you can suck it? What’s your defense mechanism?

Talese: I didn’t write for The New Yorker until recent years, but I knew the writers a long time ago. One of them was A.J. Liebling. When I was a sportswriter I’d go to prizefights and I’d meet A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker and I’d meet Norman Mailer and George Plimpton – all those persons that I met [were] not at the PEN Club but at the prizefights. And Irwin Shaw, I got to know him, too. They told me they were rejected often by The New Yorker. So Irwin Shaw would be turned down, and the story would wind up in another magazine. So you have to, as a writer, even if you have a certain stature or familiarity with the people who are your editors or bosses, they may turn you down. And I’ve had that. I’ve had that. That’s one thing you have to deal with.

And of course criticism is very hard, but on the other hand particularly we in journalism are so accustomed to being critical and not at all to being criticized. I mean journalists are too thin-skinned.

I don’t have an agent for magazine pieces because there’s no money in it. So I pitch ideas, and since I used to write for Esquire a lot back in the ‘60s and ‘70s – I had an idea about three or four years ago, when the new guy went in, the guy you work for, David Granger, and I called him up and I said I wanted to know if I could do a piece that I’d written in the 1960s. In the 1960s there was this great movie star, Peter O’Toole. I was sent to London and later to Ireland to follow him around – it was a great experience because he was one of the most intelligent persons I’ve ever met in my life. The most fun I’ve ever had was interviewing Peter O’Toole. I think it was published in ’63. Then around 2003 or ’4 or ’5 O’Toole had been in some minor role – any great actor later on does character roles as his or her time as a superstar as over – and I thought I’d like to go back and do another story on Peter O’Toole.

Here’s Gay Talese 50 years later, and I had saved all my notes. I save my notes for everything – I have them on file – so I could easily go back and get my notes. And I pitched the idea to the editor of Esquire. He wasn’t interested. I thought, That shit, he should’ve given me a chance. The point is, you are never so remote from rejection. And what do you do about it? Well I didn’t do anything about it. Because what can you do? It wasn’t a great idea, but it was a pretty good idea because any serious journalist, whether you’re a magazine writer or a book writer, should know the story never ends. You can always revisit your past work – enrich it, extend it. There might be something interesting to say about that subject, that person.

I’ve revisited many subjects, even the books. I once wrote a book about the building of the Verrazano Bridge. It was published in 1964. Took me three years to do it. I was still working for the Times. Did it in my spare time. Then in 2003 someone wanted to reprint the book, some small publishing company – it wasn’t a bestseller, it was a nice little book about this bridge construction. I said, I want to go back and interview some of the people who might still be alive, those hard-hat-wearing people working at high altitudes to build bridges, swinging from the cables, all that stuff. So I go back in 2003 and there are about 25 people still alive, and a few are still working in high-altitude construction. And a few of them told me, said, After we finished that bridge in ’64 we went and built the World Trade Center. I said, Well Jesus how did you feel when the thing went down in about two hours in 2001? And one guy said, I wasn’t surprised; it was a piece of junk we built. The World Trade Center was constructed, one guy told me in so many words, like a birdcage. What they did, they wanted maximum rentable space in those two buildings, and they didn’t care about solid construction. They said, When we built the bridge those terrorists bombs could hit the bridge and bounce off like butterflies. He said, Even the construction of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, those planes wouldn’t have gone crashing through the Empire State Building, they would’ve hit it but they wouldn’t go through it and knock the thing down. So they were saying. This was interesting. So I wrote about this in this new edition.

Every story you write, you can do that. There’s a new development and sometimes a learning experience as well.

Jones: Something instructive about your work is your touch with minor characters. They’re often the best sources in your material – the wisdom of the flunky or the insight that you get from the guy who just hangs around. Sometimes when you’re writing about someone famous in particular I imagine the best stuff is from the people –

Talese: That absolutely is true, absolutely is true. They’re minor in the sense of [not] being newsworthy – you can’t put them on the cover of a magazine, but they can be – I mean I think most of my work is about minor characters. It’s not about Sinatras but all those other people around them.

Jones: Like DiMaggio’s Lefty O’Doul.

Talese: Yeah Lefty O’Doul. And my whole book on the New York Times, there’s not a major character in that whole book. No such thing as a minor character. That’s what I learned from fiction. These fiction writers are really writing about people you never heard of, that’s what the magic –

Jones: Well because they’re invented, right? They have no history.

Talese: So if you get to know your characters well and introduce them with your writing well enough that the reader will identify with them, or at least have a sense of them through your skill as a writer and a reporter, you’ve achieved much of what a fiction writer does. You’re not creating or imagining anything but you’re getting so deep into the personality of the people you’re writing about that they take on the fictional characteristics, meaning they seem like the work of the imagination of the writer. If you’re a fair-minded journalist, [this] should not be part of anything except your efforts as a researcher and your skill with being descriptive without distorting anything.

[Jones opens it up to questions.]

Q: Can you talk about establishing a level of trust with the people you cover? How do you handle the issue when you have material you know the person will not like?

Talese: If I learn things that might well be embarrassing … I discuss it.

Jones: You mean with the subject.

Talese: Yeah. When I spend so much time with people and this develops into a kind of friendship and they allow me to meet their family or go to their home or in this case go to Peoria with Girardi in mind, and if I learn from them that something in my judgment will bring discredit upon them – while I’m never writing with the endorsement of the people; I keep myself separate but I also know I’m not a separate person in the sense that I have a conscience about other people – I will tell them: This is what I heard. I’ll tell them, It might bring a lot of misunderstanding. So the question is, Did I understand you properly? And do you understand that if we use this there might be people who’ll want you to quit your job or will drive you out of office? I find that is a very good practice. Do I lose wonderful stuff? I don’t think I lose that much stuff. Because you know what you can do often? You can find another way of writing the same thing. And sometimes how well it’s written – whatever it is, however delicate, however potentially offensive it might be, if it’s written carefully, gracefully, that makes it clear without being bombastic, you can get away with it.

I’ll give you one example. When I was interviewing some of the New York Times people for the book “The Kingdom and the Power,” I remember I had an interview with an elderly man who used to be the publisher. His name was Arthur Hays Sulzberger. He is the grandfather of the guy that’s publisher now. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was the publisher when I worked there, had a notorious reputation for being a womanizer. He was married to the boss’ daughter, Iphigene Ochs, who was the daughter of Adolf Ochs, who died in 1935 and left this daughter as the only heir, and she married Arthur Hays Sulzburger, who became the successor to the publisher of the New York Times. And even though he married well and owed his position to that marriage he also had one affair after another, and one was with a famous movie actress, Carole Lombard. Everybody knew it in the office. Well I’m interviewing him about a year before his death. He was in his home. His wife Iphigene wasn’t there, but there was a good-looking nurse that was catering to Mr. Sulzberger. Mr. Sulzberger was in a wheelchair and he had on this very wonderful silk robe, and he’s a handsome guy, looked like Fredric March, if you remember, the stylistic classic matinee idol grown older. And I’m talking to Mr. Sulzberger about the history of the paper and the nurse comes in with a pill. She carries this little tray and she gives him a glass of water and she’s got on a nice starched uniform, with beautiful – nice body, good hair, she’s slender, and young – and as he took the pill he’s looking at her all the way. I thought, That guy doesn’t give up. And I wanted to write that scene. The way I described it was, He had an eye for an ankle. That’s all you have to know. That’s all you need. So underwriting is always a good course to take if you want to do something like that, rather than insult an old letch, which he was.

Q: You mentioned earlier about Esquire in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. I’m curious about what you think of the evolution of Esquire.

Talese: I would like [Chris] to deal with that – I don’t mind talking about it, but I’m an outsider and I wouldn’t know – if you’re sincerely interested in the right answer, this is the better resource than me. What I think happened to magazines – much of society has become just smitten with celebrity, overwhelmingly obsessed with fame and celebrity. At newsstands you see lines of magazines and more than half of them have pictures of people you recognize because they’re all movie stars. So I think it must be very difficult for young people such as those here to write for magazines unless you’re writing about celebrity. I wouldn’t want to really write about these movie stars all the time, although some of them are probably interesting. My one experience was with Peter O’Toole but he was so special in terms of being intelligent, so it was a pleasure, dealing with him. I don’t know. Tell us if there’s any difference.

Jones: No, it’s hard. I wrote a story about Roger Ebert, which I worked really hard on, and we had a very dramatic portrait of Roger – he’d had cancer – I pushed really hard for [the portrait of his face] to be the cover. The hard truth is, if there isn’t a celebrity on the cover no one buys it. And that is just a fact of the business. But you do [celebrity profiles] so that you can do the 8,000-word piece on Roger Ebert. It’s like donuts and broccoli: You put the donuts at the front and the broccoli at the back, and the stuff that you’re really proud of is the stuff that’s at the back of the book. It’s a weird dance. Like Gay’s saying – if you put some of those great covers from the ‘60s, like the black Vietnam war cover or the Andy Warhol –

Talese: Yeah.

Jones: – or Muhammad Ali with arrows, no one’s picking up that magazine. It’s gotta have Lady Gaga on it.

Q: Good short stories with true names involve a lot of investment, and I wonder how you deal with that investment…

Talese: I just become not obsessed with it but very committed to doing all the research at whatever expense of time and travel. And sometimes it’s not worth it. I had an experience where I went to China once to write about a woman who was a soccer player, and I spent six months, and I couldn’t sell it to anybody. I tried sell it to Sports Illustrated because I knew the editor; I knew the owner. I couldn’t sell that story anywhere. I did put it in a book of mine. One thing about books, sometimes you can dump into a book that you couldn’t publish in a magazine. I wrote about that in “A Writer’s Life.”

Sometimes you can’t ever know what is worth what. In one way, years later [an unpublished story] will work out in a different way. I don’t think you’re ever wasting your time when you think you’re wasting your time. In one way I can say I waste a lot of time; it’s part of my occupation; I’m an occupational time waster because so much of what you do doesn’t immediately measure up. There’s a terrible expression: the bottom line. There’s no such thing. First of all you have to have belief that what you’re doing is important. And I thought that when I was a cub reporter. I really thought what I was doing was important. I thought, I am a reporter. And I worked for a very important institution, the New York Times. I’d be interviewing these people and some of them were powerful and famous and rich, and I never felt that what I was doing was inferior to what they were doing – in fact I felt what I was doing was superior because I thought, What I’m doing is trying to get the truth, and I’m talking to a bunch of liars. I mean these people are in professions that tolerate lies much more than journalism does. I’ve said this a dozen times but the pleasure and the honor and respect for the profession of journalism that I always had as a kid and have now even more so is because I was in the only occupation that tried not to lie. If you lie, you get kicked out. And the people who kick you out are your colleagues; it’s not somebody on high. You lie on any newspaper, I don’t care if it’s a great newspaper or a struggling newspaper, you’re probably gonna be thrown out. In the case of the Times when they had the super-liar Jayson Blair five or six years ago, not only does he get thrown out but they [also] threw out the top editors, both of them, and boy if that doesn’t bring pride to a journalist nothing will.

Jones: In journalism school you’re sometimes taught that objectivity is the goal. It’s horsecrap, because when you do the kind of work that Gay does or that I try to do, and you spend weeks or months with someone you’re going to form an opinion. What counts, I think, and I think Gay will agree with me, is not objectivity, it’s truth.

Talese: It’s truth.

Q: I was wondering how you go about determining the structure or organization of a piece, or if you wait till you start writing.

Talese: Sometimes it comes to you right away. For example, I mentioned the opera singer. When I went to Moscow in September of 2010, I think it was, when I went there I was going to see this opera singer so she could show me around her hometown. I had never been to Moscow. The news on the front page of all the newspapers at that particular time was that Moscow and much of Russia was not only experiencing a heat wave but there were [also] a lot of forest fires, and smog all through the city. The day before I was supposed to get on this plane to Moscow from New York the opera singer called and left a message and said, Don’t come, my throat hurts, I’m gonna get out of this town. I didn’t listen; I just went anyway. I wanted to go. When I got there, the plane was landing and I could smell from the altitude, I could smell the smoke. I landed and I had a cab drive me to the hotel, and I made a phone call telling her I’d arrived. She said, I’m sorry you came.

The next day she did come to the hotel and said, I have to get out of here because I’m suffering so much and I collapsed last night – so she started complaining and said she collapsed. And I thought, This is the story. Here it is, the opera singer who is choked by the smog and collapsed. I asked her to describe it and not only describe it, I said, Can I go to your house? So she took me to her mother’s apartment, and I had her go through the whole scene. And she said the night before she’d fallen on the floor and her mother tried to help her and there was no ice because the electricity had gone out in the apartment, and she said she had a chilled bottle of white wine that was still cool. And she said she put this chilled bottle of wine under her neck, and I thought, This is the opening scene, and it was the opening scene.

In the case of the opera singer it’s recreated, but I was at the place where she collapsed, in a bedroom in the central part of Moscow. In the Sinatra case he’s got a cold and is feeling bad and there’s a scene in the pool room where he’s in a confrontation. So getting the idea of how to begin – I’m sure [Chris] could give examples as well, but you’re just there. You have to see it. And you have to think in terms of scenes. It’s just like a film director – when you go to a movie there’s an opening scene and a second scene and a third scene. I once met Francis Coppola when he was doing a film called “Tucker,” about the maker of automobiles. I met Francis Coppola largely through my wife’s familiarity with his wife, Eleanor Coppola, and when I was in California we were guests at Coppola’s house and he was making “Tucker,” and he showed me how he was making this film, with 3-by-5 cards going across his big bulletin boards. And that’s the way I write magazine pieces. But these scenes are something that you have to recognize, as I recognized the pool scene with Sinatra or the collapsed opera singer in Moscow. Those must sometimes be researched – you have to do some work describing the place, describing the situation, asking for a recollection of what was said if you didn’t hear it yourself. I heard it in the case of Sinatra but in the case of Marina Poplavskaya I didn’t hear anything she said. She said she told her mother such and such and her mother said such and such, and she picked up the phone and called her boyfriend. I got it from Maria herself, and I went over it again and again.

Q: On the same note, you don’t outline.

Talese: Is he talking to you?

Jones: He’s talking to me.

Talese: Go ahead.

Jones: Do you want to have a fight?

[laughter]

Talese: No, tell us how you do it. The question is, How do you outline? And you don’t outline. How come?

Jones: In the 70th anniversary of Esquire “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” was named the best story that was in the magazine, ever. Esquire published a little booklet that included the story and also included pictures of your shirt boards with your outline, and if you haven’t seen Gay’s outlines they’re like maps to Narnia – there’s arrows and lists and diagrams. And I remember looking at that and thinking, I’m doing it wrong. Because I don’t outline. I use my memory as my edit. If I remember it then it’s an important scene. And if I remember the details of that scene that’s what counts. I don’t think there’s any one way to do this. I hope there isn’t, because if so one of us is wrong. [But] it can be both ways, [right]?

Talese: It can be.

Jones: It’s whatever process works for you. I just have to ask, when was the first time you wrote on a shirt board?

Talese: When I was a reporter at the New York Times – shirt boards have been around longer than I have, people throw them away – they’re trash in most people’s estimation. When I first started there were no tape recorders and reporters carried rolled up copy paper, and I found the copy papers too floppy. And there were also notepads, but the notepads I didn’t like because they had wire and it would always get caught on the inside of my jacket. So shirt boards were perfect because it slips right out and they’re smaller than a pad, and no little wire to catch. Here [removes shirt boards from breast pocket of suit] I have enough for a magazine piece, at least for one day’s work.

Q: I’m a Nieman fellow, and a number of us in [Williams’ Narrative Writing] class [at the Nieman Foundation] – and I should say I’m a news reporter, so narrative is quite strange to me – we had a big discussion about the very ending of “Frank Sinatra” where you describe Sinatra stopping at a red light and he sees a girl in the sidewalk, and their eyes meet. We wondered how you did that because the whole story is about you looking at him from afar because he didn’t actually agree to be interviewed. So were you in the car with him or were you standing on the sidewalk or did you make it up?

Talese: No, I talked to the woman and she described what she saw. The piece on Joe DiMaggio was the same sort of thing – he looks through a window and sees a blonde outside a fisherman’s wharf. Well I did see that blonde. It was near the restaurant that DiMaggio at that time owned. He’s looking out the window and I saw him and I saw her, and I recreated that. It’s not hard to do.

Q: I was wondering how you decide how much of yourself to put into a story.

Talese: Sometimes I feel you have to put first person because you have to explain – sometimes you’re the only witness to what you’re writing about. The opera singer, I use first person in explaining to the reader how, since I was trying to write about an opera singer on the road and how difficult it is sometimes to get from place to place, going from opera to opera, having to book her own flight and pick up her luggage and get a taxi cab to go here and there, just the general process of being both a performer and a traveler, I felt I had to write about my experience because I was with her, and I was witnessing her growing angry at what was going on around her. She’s not a volatile person but a person who doesn’t suppress her disappointment, if not her anger; she can let you know if things aren’t going well. I had to say what I saw. I remember one time she was so angry at this hotel management that she decided to change hotels, and when the porter wouldn’t take her luggage on a trolley across the street she took the trolley and pushed that damn thing herself across the large boulevard, over the little train tracks. I watched that. I write about that. Other times I think you get in the way. The reader doesn’t want to read about you unless you’re central to the story.

Jones: You also use third person though, right? In DiMaggio you used “the man.”

Talese: That’s right! That’s interesting. DiMaggio threw me out of the restaurant. And I didn’t write “me” because if I had written in first person in the beginning of that article I’d almost be stuck with myself and then I had little [role] to play in that article except in the beginning. What the beginning was about, I had shown up uninvited at the DiMaggio restaurant. I thought I had his okay to talk to him. I wrote to him and I thought he said, Come out. And we had him being offended that I showed up without getting final clearance from him. He wanted me to leave, and I did leave, but I just said “some man from New York” [was asked to leave]. I wanted to be a diminished person. I wanted the eye of the reader, the camera, to be always on him. And I leave, as I’d been told I should. So I left. I go back to the parking lot. I had a rented car. I was going to go back to my hotel and think about what to do, because I’d lost the story. Then I was surprised that a car comes up and stops and the window goes down, and this man that turns out to be Joe DiMaggio, who’d just thrown me out, says, Do you have a car? I said yes. He says, Oh. I would’ve given you a ride. And he drives off. What a stupid comment, Oh yes I have a car; I should’ve said, No I don’t have a car. But that was the end of it. Sometimes the voice that you establish in a piece – and every piece has a voice, every writer has a voice, I have a voice – but sometimes it’s a bit muted and sometimes it’s a little bit bold and – it’s your choice what kind of color you use, what kind of shading you use. What about you?

Jones: I try not to be in stories. I once wrote a story about my dad and tried not to be in it, which is not possible. But I don’t like it as a – Granger sent us an email a couple months ago saying first person was killing narrative and he wanted us not to be in stories anymore. Because it was kind of default – I don’t know if it’s the blogging age or, especially with celebrity stories you think, Well the celebrity’s not interesting so let’s talk about me.

Q: Besides Chris, what other journalists do you get excited reading?

Talese: There’s a wonderful person named Jon Lee Anderson, he writes wonderfully for The New Yorker about foreign affairs.

Q: Are there any mistakes or inaccuracies in your stories that you’d be willing to admit to?

Talese: Let me think. You know, I’ve been lucky. If I made a mistake I caught it in time, or someone caught it for me. When I was working at the New York Times I just lived in fear of making a mistake because there would be a correction. I never had that dubious distinction of being mentioned in the correction column. As I told you, when I first joined the paper those old guys who were my high priests of journalism said, You’ve got to get it right. So what that meant, I was always worried I would get it wrong. I didn’t want to be in a correction column. Sometimes running scared is not a bad thing.

Q: How do you write about someone you just don’t like?

Talese: If you don’t like them or more important if you don’t respect them I don’t write about them. I remember one time I spent a year and a half with a person, Lee Iacocca. He had been fired by Ford and taken on by Chrysler, and was bringing that motor company back from almost bankruptcy – there was a lot of government bailouts back in the 1980s – and I hung out with him from 1981 to 1982. And you know, I just didn’t feel that I wanted after all that time I spent and all the money I spent on travel, I didn’t feel that I could do that job. Because I didn’t feel I could identify with him. I had written about notorious people I respected – I’d hung out with the mafia, killers – and I’d written about all these pornographers in “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” and I respected them on their own terms, and here’s a distinguished man of the business world, the automobile business, and it wasn’t that I disliked him – I admired him – but I felt the story wasn’t something I could get my heart into. And I just dropped out. He went on to write his own book and he made a fortune. Maybe as [Chris] said, maybe I like minor characters better. [Iacocca] was a very compelling and driven and successful person but for some reason there’s something about that character and that situation that I could not identify with.

Jones: If you don’t care about it, you’re not gonna do your best.

Talese: That’s right.

Jones: You have to put so much into it.

Talese: And so you do. It’s so hard.

Jones: You can’t fake heart. It’s either there or it’s not.

Talese: That’s right. That’s right.

Q: You have these extensive files – can you talk about this need that you have to [document] your life and stories?

Talese: The lady refers to how I document the notes from articles and books and all that stuff I saved. I not only save it but I’ve organized it in chronological order from 1945 through 2011, and, if I should live another year, 2012. When I say save, I mean I save everything. I save letters from everybody. I save rejection slips. My wife and I have been married 52 years and I have almost every note she’s every written – it might be Why didn’t you take out the dog earlier? He pooped all over the rug. And I date it, and I know the name of the dog, and I file it. I have a basement, what used to be an old wine cellar, and I have dozens and dozens and dozens of filing cabinets, and it’s all in order, day by day, month by month, year by year, and the years are big signs telling you what year you’re in. About four or five years ago I thought, There is a story. [People often ask],What’s your next book?, and sometimes I know and sometimes I don’t know, and sometimes I start a book like the Chrysler story and I don’t finish it, and now I’m working, and have for the last two or three years, on a book on a 50-year marriage, my own. I was married in 1959. And I have a written record of that. For example when my wife, [Nan], writes a letter of complaint – it might be the dog or something else or You were just awful last night to me and maybe we should stop going out – I not only save that but I answer that letter to myself. I write: This letter was written after we went out to Elaine’s restaurant and one of Nan’s authors was there and Nan will say, How could you have been so disrespectful, and I’ll say, I’m sick and tired of being the husband of this editor. I’m writing to myself but I’m giving background to the letter, and in my mind I’m thinking there’s history in minor characters, and I’m one of them, and my wife’s another one. And I’ve done this all my life. And so now I’m thinking, For half a century these two people have lived in the same building in the middle of Manhattan, and it’s a story. It’s a story of a building, number one, and it’s been the same building from 1959 to 2011, so far. And within this are two people, and these two people have an interaction, have an exchange of letters and exchange of ideas and an exchange of venom, at times, and fury, and yet they remain under the same roof, officially married and technically married and personally married and not always happy about it. This is the story of a marriage.

And it’s not only the story of those two people in that building, wife and husband, but also the people who’ve come in and out of that building, guests who’ve stayed sometimes. For example, much of the time we didn’t have enough money, so much of the time since we had this building that I rented floors in and later became an owner of – in 1972 I bought this building because I had a couple of dollars left over from the bestseller on the New York Times, and I bought the building. But prior to that I rented apartments. One time I rented for two years to William Styron. I had three apartments and I could only afford two, and I sublet to Styron. He’s dead now, you know, but in those days his wife and children lived in Roxbury, Connecticut, but he liked to get away for a couple of days and have a pied-à-terre. My wife worked at Random House, and Styron worked at Random House, and thus we rented the apartment. During that two-year period he was writing “Confessions of Nat Turner,” and at night he would come down and read to us, Nan and myself, and our children were still at the time in the house then. We’d have dinner and sometimes we’d go out. Sometimes [Styron] would give the key to other people. One time he gave the key to the separated wife of Philip Roth, and she had a cat. My dear friend David Halberstam, with whom I had a falling out for 10 years and then we got back to being great friends again, he’s a character. So this building is like a stage, like a theater. Walk-ons, walk-offs, periods, and the Vietnam war, protesting in New York – I remember Halberstam and my wife Nan and myself and our daughter Pamela would be marching on Fifth Avenue in the parade against the war, and I remember Halberstam was still on the Times – he’d yet to win the Pulitzer – I remember he took off his press card when he was in the parade, because he shouldn’t have been. A lot of other people could be in this. So what is it? It’s a chronology, it’s a chronicle, it’s a nonfiction novel, it’s a story. About a building and a marriage.

Jones: I don’t like to judge people, but your file system is strange I think.

[laughter]

Talese: It is strange! But you know what it is? You have a sense of yourself and you have a sense of being someone looking at yourself. And I can’t quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I think he said something to the degree that as a writer he had a sense of where he was and a sense of seeing himself from afar, and seeing himself where he was, this kind of prismatic sense of self: you turn and get different lights, different angles. Maybe sometimes it helps, being a foreigner in a way. My father was a foreigner from Italy, and I was always feeling that I was a half of a foreigner because when I was born World War II was going on and Italy was the enemy. I always felt as if I was divided as a person, and that was the perfect attitude to have as a journalist because you had a sense of being something different than what you were, you weren’t sure who you were. And sometimes through the characters you write or the people you interview you’re always looking for, How am I different from that person? Am I different? There’s always that curiosity being indulged because the curiosity is propelled by being an outsider. If you’re an outsider you’re the perfect journalist. You can’t be an insider. You have to really be an outsider, should be an outsider.

*Thanks to The New Yorker’s Nancy Franklin for her clever caption to a photo of Talese’s visit to Harvard.

For more, see our post of Chris Jones’ talk with this year’s Nieman fellows.

Photo of Gay Talese and Chris Jones by Jonathan Seitz.

Chris Jones on reporting for detail, the case against outlining and the power of donuts

Paige Williams — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:11:57 +0000

Esquire writer at large Chris Jones came to the Nieman Foundation two weeks ago as part of the Narrative Writing speakers series I started at the foundation last year, and spent a couple of hours talking about craft. Jones began his career as a sportswriter for the National Post in Toronto, where he covered boxing, which became the subject of his first book, “Falling Hard: A Rookie’s Year in Boxing.” Without a single magazine byline, and with a whole lot of hubris and a box of donuts, he famously talked his way into Esquire, a legendary home for narrative journalism.

Williams & Jones (photo: Jonathan Seitz)

Now Esquire’s writer at large (as well as ESPN The Magazine’s new back-page columnist), Jones has written about presidential candidates, astronauts, soldiers, movie stars and game shows, and has won two National Magazine Awards, the highest honor in magazine writing. One ASME award was for “The Things That Carried Him,” about the return of a soldier’s body from Iraq, and the other was for “Home,” which became the basis for his nonfiction book “Out of Orbit: The Incredible True Story of Three Astronauts Who Were Hundreds of Miles Above Earth When They Lost Their Ride Home.”

“When you read one of his stories, you’re putting on the Chris Jones suit of clothes and walking through this world, and you’re seeing and feeling things the way he does,” his Esquire editor, Peter Griffin, told me the other day. [Read our 2009 interview with Griffin here, for Jones’ “The End of Mystery.”] “But it’s frictionless. Part of the reason is, he’s obsessive. He works a story until he gets it right.”

On his second day visiting Harvard, Jones appeared with Gay Talese. But his first day on campus he sat down with this year’s Nieman fellows to share details about his career and thoughts on writing. What follows are some excerpts from my conversation with him and the discussion with fellows that followed.

You’ve worked in both newspapers and magazines. What adjustments did you have to make in order to move from newspapers to magazines, from the daily news beat?

When I started at the paper I was a beat guy, so I did the 600-word sports stories, mostly about baseball and boxing. Then I started working in features. The paper I worked at was a paper called the National Post, which at the time Conrad Black had sunk a bajillion dollars into, and [it] had exactly no ads, so you could write a 3,000-word feature, and you could pitch anything. I remember we sent one reporter to Mongolia to watch a meteor shower, and it was cloudy so she got no story. And that was my impression of newspapers; that was my first job ever, so I was like, This is how it is. I just didn’t know any better. So I was a feature writer. But then when I started at Esquire my very first sit-down with my new editor was – and this is no insult to anyone who works in newspapers – he said, I don’t want to read a single sentence in your stories that I could have read in a newspaper.

What did he mean by that?

I think sometimes in newspapers you sort of fall into that, you write a paragraph you put in a quote, you write a paragraph, you put in a quote –

Formula.

– formula kind of template-y stuff, and you also write thinking they might cut the last four inches off the story. With a magazine you probably don’t put that many quotes in, the story has more of a full-circle feeling to it. At Esquire if you get assigned 5,000 words you’re gonna have 5,000 words of space. There’s no cutting for space. So it wasn’t so much a language change, it was more a structural change, how the piece fits together.

And I think what you also get in magazine stories that you don’t always have time to do in newspapers is, the story might be about something on the surface but a great magazine story is also about something beyond that – an idea; there’s a theme to it. The story about Joey Montgomery was about his body coming back, but really that was a story about war, and he was one guy representing everybody who died there. In newspapers you maybe don’t get the time to craft that kind of narrative.

Newspaper writers sometimes think, “Oh if I could only write for a magazine I’d have all this freedom,” but then you get into magazines and –

It’s a different kind of hard.

Yeah.

Newspapers weren’t a great fit for me because I always wanted to spend more time on a story. I hated writing on deadline. I always lay awake at night worried that I’d made a terrible mistake, that I got the score wrong. The nice thing about working at newspapers is the immediacy of it; if you don’t like a story you’re working on you’re done the next day, and you do something else. The other nice thing about newspapers is, if you write five stories a week and one is really good and three are fine and one is kind of crappy, that’s not a bad average. With Esquire my contract is six stories a year; I can’t have a dud.

Six features a year. What sort of average length are we talking about?

Our minimum would be something like 3,000 words. I’d say average real feature is around six. Celebrity profiles are around three, and those count as features.

The longest you’ve written was the war piece, wasn’t it? Like 12,000 words?

It actually ran at 17,000, and was assigned at six. I delivered 22,000.

Did you let them know they were getting 22,000?

Yeah, it was an awkward conversation with Peter, actually, because – that story’s in sections; there’s like 13 sections. I wrote it in the order that I had the material, I didn’t leave it all till the end. So I wrote the first section, which was the section where they fly Joey back from Dover, they fly to Seymour. I wrote that section and it came out at like 2,000 words, and I thought, That math is not good. So I called Peter and said it might be more like 10. I blew past 10 and said, It’s gonna be more than that. He said, Listen, just write it and we’ll figure it out. To Esquire’s credit they just burned that whole issue.

Like Hersey and Hiroshima in The New Yorker.

We had a Jessica Simpson story, [it] was the other story in that issue.

Well, the world thanks you for burning –

Oh no, it got in. It was the cover.

So you cut 5,000 words. Did you cut it or did they?

We cut it together. One of the great things about working there, my editor Peter, we’ve been together for eight years now; you only write for one editor. Like that’s your relationship and no one else touches the story.

It doesn’t go up to [Editor in Chief David] Granger?

Well he’ll read it, but there’s no changes.

[At some other magazines] everybody gets their fingerprints on it.

And stories inevitably suffer. I think that’s a bad process. Peter and I just have this – we know what each other is looking for. If I bumped from editor to editor I’d have a hard time. You just develop a trust that I think is important to doing the best work you can.

What, then, for people who don’t get the pleasure –

Totally screwed.

[laughter]

Newspaper reporters – sometimes you’re working for different sections –

No, it’s hard. I like being edited. In newspapers I was writing sports stories at 11 o’clock at night, it just went in. I never got edited. And I didn’t like it. I know some people think of editors as evil and they’re messing with your art, but for me Peter is – I mean he’s a fantastic editor. I tell students all the time: You’ll never do your best work until you find that editor who is your perfect match. By a series of flukes I got Peter and we work perfectly together. My stuff would not be nearly as good without Peter.

How long did you spend on that [war] piece?

I spent maybe eight months on that story.

Exclusively?

In the middle I did a Scarlett Johansson feature. I flew from the mortuary at Dover to sit with her at a diner [in California]. It was a surreal juxtaposition.

A lot of what makes that story work so well is the detail. Every passage is so tight, every sentence almost seems to be built with a specific mission in mind. How’d you wind it up so much without ruining it?

Once I realized how long it was going to be, my standard for a sentence was it had to have a fact. And the way I structured it in the end – I thought, It’s so long and the material’s so difficult that people wouldn’t read it in one sitting, so every section starts with a different person. It goes from person to person to person, and the last section is Joey. Then I tried to find little details that would help guide you, because it was backward and I was worried about losing people. So there’s things like the girl in the flowered dress, little cues that I hoped would sort of ground people.

But then Peter, when we took those 5,000 words out, really tightened it – I mean we cut a feature. A simple line edit with a story that length, you can lose a thousand or two words. We lost some whole scenes, which at the time was like – there was one scene that I spent months reporting; it was the funeral they held in Iraq. The soldiers have their own memorial service in Iraq. Soldiers are tough interviews and it was a tough scene, you know? It was hard all the way around. It was probably about 1,500 words, and I spent a long time writing it, and we just cut it.

How do you report your scenes? That’s something we talk about in class – when you’re reconstructing scenes and when you’re at the mercy of people’s memories and at the mercy, in this case, of soldiers who are sort of programmed to talk like athletes, who say a lot without saying anything –

Any interview I do for a narrative story, particularly with people who don’t speak to reporters normally, I usually have a preamble where I talk about the questions I’m going to ask. I tell them, A story like this relies on details, I’m going to ask you what might seem like some really strange questions. If you don’t remember, that’s okay, don’t force yourself to remember things; don’t think anything’s stupid, if I ask a question you don’t like, tell me you don’t like it. Like with Joey’s story people were worried that I was gonna do it dirty on him, that I was going to somehow sully his memory. All you can do there is try to convince them you’re a good person. It’s a lot easier if you actually are a good person. I like to think that I’m a good person. So I told them: You can trust me. And when I said it I meant it: I’m not here to mess with Joey. And if you spend enough time with people they get comfortable. And two very important things with that story: I had the time, and I did every interview in person.

Oh wow.

Which I think makes a huge difference.

So do I.

And every interview was often somewhere very awkward. Like Aunt Vicki, I talked to her over lunch at a Cracker Barrel, and so we’re both sitting in this Cracker Barrel, and I was bawling, she was bawling, and everybody in the room going, What the hell? But it was not sitting in a house. It was almost like a date. We met at the restaurant; it was the first time we met. It was just easier that way.

I think the key to reporting a story like that – and I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant – you gotta see when people are giving you little windows. There’s a scene in that story – the girl in the flowered dress, the National Guard people who carried the casket from the plane to the family. There, I interviewed them in a group; there were six of us sitting around a table. My starting question was How do you keep your game face? That’s what they call it when you don’t show emotion. It was a general question, so they gave a general answer, which was, You don’t look at the family, you look at something else. I said, Do any of you happen to remember what you were looking at that day? The first guy, Schnieders, said, I was looking at the logo on the sheriff’s car. Then these two female soldiers started whispering together, and I said, What are you guys talking about? And that was the girl in the flowered dress, where one of them had said, Look at the girl, look at the dress, pick out a flower on the dress.

For me the girl in the flowered dress is my favorite detail. And this started with How do you keep your emotions? and gradually whittled down to this moment. So you’ve got to be aware of when somebody is giving you an opening. And then you winnow it down.

In narrative you have to be on, all the time, because every moment might matter. It’s almost like being hyper-vigilant. You just can’t be asleep.

Yeah and you have to really listen. You know, when I started that story I was worried that I’d be doing so many interviews that I’d forget stuff. But when you’re doing stuff like that, you don’t forget stuff.

But you’re thinking long term too – it’s almost like you can see the story in the making, and how certain details will serve the narrative.

Yeah. You gradually develop an instinct – this is gonna sound crass as hell, but literally I have a cash-register sound that goes off in my head. Like, cha-ching. It’s annoying. Like, the girl in the flowered dress was cha-ching. I knew that was going in. You know, it’s a spidey sense. When I first sit down to write even a story of that length, I figure if I can remember it, then it’s an important detail.

When you’re talking about details [writers] sort of over – “he was wearing a gray sweater” and there were these pants and – those don’t really matter. At Esquire our goal is always to report the story so well we can sit down at a bar and I can just tell you the story. I did 101 interviews for that story and I could go through that story right now and tell you everyone who’s in it. You just remember. You remember the stuff that counts. So a lot of [writers] are like, I’m worried I’m gonna miss something great; well if you’ve forgotten it, it probably wasn’t great. And that’s how you know the details that are great and the details that aren’t. Then you go back to your notes and tapes and make sure you’re right.

The idea of detail that doesn’t move the action forward, that doesn’t advance any ideas – gratuitous detail –

It’s just clutter. The detail has to have some purpose to it, it has to mean something. Even if it doesn’t mean anything right away, it gradually builds some picture in your head gets you where you’re going.

And nothing’s a throwaway, because you might need it. It might come back in some way.

Yeah. This is a very hard thing to explain but – I’m gonna backtrack. I don’t outline. And I know this is a great debate in narrative. Like, Gay Talese, if you come tomorrow, Gay Talese outlines in ridiculous ways, for me. He will have 17 shirt boards with the story mapped out, and for me the risk of outlining is you miss those little connections that you maybe wouldn’t see if you were sitting there thinking, How am I gonna tell this story? I love when you’re writing and you see this little connection that you wouldn’t have seen [otherwise] – little echoes that count again later when you come back to it. Sometimes I’m asked, How did you know – I didn’t know that. It was only once I started writing that I saw it. Sometimes I see Gay Talese’s outlines and I think I’m doing it wrong, but I think what you might lose then is that sort of spontaneous connection.

And you can’t teach that. You can teach people to be aware always, and to look for opportunities, but it’s like teaching an ear – do you think that’s true? You can teach writing, absolutely, but the music, and those ghostly things that happen in Story –

I don’t think you can take a bad writer and make them great. I think you can make a bad writer passable and a passable writer good and a good writer great, but you can’t make massive jumps. It sounds harsh, but, excluding me from the conversation, there’s kind of an “it,” or whatever, that [good writers] just have. Like music. I’m tone deaf. You can never make me a great pianist. It would never happen. Writing is a similar kind of thing.

Okay.

It’s a terrible thing to say.

No it isn’t.

I mean you guys know: This is a tough business and there are a lot of effing good people at it, and there are lots of good people who can’t work. If you’re not good you’ve got no shot. I mean maybe you want this, you want it so bad, but if you’re not good at it, it’s not gonna happen. And you just have to be honest. It sounds brutal as it’s coming out of my mouth.

No it doesn’t.

But I don’t believe in false hope. Or there’s a sweet spot for different [types of writing] – you gotta find that spot. If you want to be a journalist, which is such a huge field, you’ve got to find your sweet spot.

Let’s talk about the origin of stories. You see Story in places where other people don’t see it.

[In magazine writing] you gotta find those stories that don’t change, and yet that no one else has written about. You’re always on the lookout for the stuff that fell through the cracks. If you’re pitching magazines, you can’t pitch a story that’s happened and that everyone’s writing about, or that’s happening in two months. For me, I get most of my ideas from newspapers, where the reporter I used to be – some poor dude only had three hours and 400 words to tell a story and you can see –

The bigger story.

The bigger story. So “Home” was a 400-word story about [the astronauts’] return. The soldier story was a 600-word piece on CNN.com. The Price Is Right was my own obsession. Roger Ebert was, like, his blog, which was just out there. No one had asked Roger Ebert to do a story – it was just sitting there. Those are the things you gotta find when you’re doing magazine stuff.

Yeah.

The great magazine stories you’re like, How the hell did no one else write this story?

That hardly ever happens though.

That hardly ever happens. I’ve been at Esquire for nine years and probably have done five or six stories that I think were good, just because it’s so hard to find that perfect mix of idea, material, your writing was good, everything worked.

It takes a massive amount of organization to keep track of the material for stories like “The Things That Carried Him” because you’re dealing with different characters, different points of view, different time periods, different countries. How do you organize everything and at what point do you write?

Because that story was so big, I wrote it in chunks, and that’s why it almost reads like a collection of little stories. With a regular story I often don’t write it front to back. Usually I know my ending, and often I’ll write my ending first. That’s from school. I had a professor telling me, How do you know how to get there if you don’t know where you’re going? That stuck with me for some reason. I also think endings are the most important part of the story. From my newspaper days I got scarred because all my endings got cut off. But with magazines, for me, it’s your finishing note; it’s how you’re leaving company with people. Ideally your story has built to this sort of crescendo and it’s like, here’s your moment. So I usually know what my ending is, and then I’ll start writing wherever I feel like writing.

But the sheer reporting. What are your tools? I didn’t realize you don’t record anything.

I record sit-down interviews. And in the soldier story I recorded – [at Esquire] it’s the only time they let you use the interns, to transcribe your tapes, but I never do it because I don’t want them to hear me stumbling and bumbling through my crap. The humiliation factor is just like – I don’t want anyone listening to this. It’s like what I do in the bathroom, you know?

Great.

So what I work toward in the reporting – I mean I sort of have two rules. For me writing is pretty hard, so my attitude has always been – my great fear is sitting down to write a 5,000-word story with 3,000 words of material. Like that’s my death. I’m not a very flowery writer. There are a lot of writers who could get away with that but I have no imagination. I think everyone would see this is where he ran out of shit and now he’s lying. I report as hard as I do so I can avoid that oh-crap feeling where you sit down and go I don’t have it. The other thing I sort of work for – Esquire’s fact checkers are beautiful, beautiful people; they are insane. My favorite fact checker story: I was writing about a fight, and I had a little joke, Shaquille O’Neal tripped over some lighting cables. The [fact checker] spent days trying to make sure they were lighting cables and not sound cables. And I was like, Dude, we can just call them cables. And he was like, Well, shit.

[laughter]

Fact checkers also make you feel like the least funny person on earth. Because you have to explain jokes. I had this basketball player who had like 17 different devices on his waistband so I was like: The Motorola fax/pager/copier on his waist – and the fact-checker was like, Well I called Motorola, and they don’t have a fax/copier/pager that goes on the waist – and I’m like Shit, dude, that’s not a real thing.

[laughter]

I love fact checkers; they allow me to sleep at night. But fact checking is torturous, and on a 17,000-word story it is hell. So that story in particular I kept ridiculous notes. I kept every phone number, every name, so they could verify everything easily – you just have to do it –

Well not all writers do it, though. You’re probably beloved for that –

I always warn them when I’m coming: Sorry guys, I’ve got another one coming down the pipe.

Annotating is your friend.

Again, going back to my newspaper days I’d have killed for that. I like that part of the process. So as long as I can get through those two things I’ve done my job and then I can write.

Dina Kraft: I have a question about structure on “The Things That Carried Him.” Were you working with a spokesperson for the Army? Did you think, This is a good possible [story subject] for me, I’ll jump over to Indiana?

Well I saw the story on CNN and that was Joey. Really it was about life at the forward operating base and it included a vignette on carrying the body back, and it turned out to be Joey. I spent probably a couple of weeks – this sounds ghoulish – but looking at other possibilities. And I kept going back to Joey. I liked that he was from a small town in Indiana; I just thought it was better than New York or L.A. And I felt sort of a weird connection – we had similar sort of adolescences. I felt like I kind of understood him. The very first thing I did was call his mom. No matter who we did, I wanted the family’s permission. So I called his mom, and it was terrible. I thought I was calling her at home. I thought, I’ll call her in the middle of the day, I’ll leave a message on her home machine and she’ll call me back if she wants. But the number I’d been given was her work, and she answered.

This is something that’s really hard to explain but, what do you say? So I was like, Hi I’m Chris, I write for Esquire magazine and I really want to write a story about how a soldier is returned from Iraq and I’d really like that soldier to be Joey. And she just started bawling. I felt so bad that I’d ruined her day, but we ended up talking for probably an hour and a half. At the end she said, You can do it, but I want to be [interviewed] last; if this story falls apart anywhere along the way I don’t want to have gone through it for nothing.

At that time there were a lot of stories about how hard it was – you couldn’t take a photo of a flag-draped casket. I thought, This is gonna be really hard. So I called the mortuary in Dover and they said, You need Pentagon approval. I said, Well who is the Pentagon? They gave me a name. I called him up and did the same schpiel. He said okay. I was like, Okay what? He said, You’ve got Pentagon approval. I said, You sure? And that was it. And I never once had a roadblock. Everything just fell into place. It was one of those spooky – I have countless examples of moments where I was like, That’s nuts. When I went to Dover – they pray over every planeload. Chaplain Sparks had done 700 planes and he said, I do a different prayer for every plane. And I said, You have no idea what you’d have said [at Joey’s]? And then he went back to his desk – and this was months later – and sitting on top of his pile was the prayer he said on Joey’s plane. He had the manifest and on the back was the prayer. He came back and looked like he’d been hit by a board. And there was countless moments of stuff like that.

The last thing I did was go to Scottsburg. The other nice thing about doing it that way was, I could tell [Joey’s family] what I knew.

Did they ask?

They asked. And one of the lessons about that story for me was, I was really worried about Gail reading it. She’d lost two husbands, her son, just this litany of tragedy, and I didn’t really want to add to it. And when I wrote the scene in the mortuary the first time I wrote it Peter called and said, You’re hedging, you’re holding back; every other part of the story is so detailed and here you’re kind of skimming it. I was like, Yeah it was really gory and I didn’t know how much detail to go into. He said, You’ve gotta go all the way with it. I was like, Okay.

Gail didn’t know Joey had lost his legs. I called her before the story came out and said, Gail, you might not want to read this, there’s stuff in there you might not want to know. She was like, Give me an example. I said, Joey didn’t have any legs. That was sort of the big – and she was okay. You know? And it’s true about writing about yourself: If you write about yourself you’ve gotta be 100 percent honest; people know if you’re holding back. And with this, Peter picked it out right away: You’re not telling me everything you know. And if you’re gonna write a story like that, you’ve got to go 100 percent.

Carlotta Gall: That’s interesting because that’s the one passage I would have cut if I was your editor.

It’s definitely the most technical. And it’s the least detailed. There you can’t say to the mortician, Do you remember that particular – there’s four morticians who’ve done thousands of bodies. It’s definitely the weakest section, it always was. You just couldn’t get the girl in the flowered dress in the mortuary. It just didn’t exist.

Claudia Mendez Arriaza: What makes Peter a great editor?

I’ll call Peter a lot when I’m reporting, and I’ll tell him I had a cash register moment, or if I’m having a problem. We’ll sort of talk it out. I think a great editor is almost part therapist in some ways. You know, writers spend a lot of time by themselves, and I’m on the road by myself a lot, so he’s just a good guy for me to talk to me about stories. I think my favorite thing that Peter does is his cuts, his actual removal of things. Like Paige was talking about with “The Things That Carried Him,” the tightness of it, that there’s no sentiment in it, that’s because of Peter. The very first section of that story, now it ends with something like, “They spend a lot of time like that.” I talk about Chaz walking out, holding hands, and they’re not talking, they spend a lot of time like that. I had, “They spend a lot of time like that, talking only with their hands.” And just that little cut makes that story better. So he’s like that 10 percent restraint, like a reining in. If I go too far with the sentimentality or the emotion he pulls it back. It’s very nice when people talk about the restraint in my stories, but that’s Peter, that’s not me. Because it’s really hard to know where the line is for the emotional.

Rema Nagarajan: Is there a time when you don’t agree with him and then what happens?

Yeah, you know that old cliché about you read your story and find your favorite line, and that’s the line you should cut? It’s kind of true. Peter has a way of [lots of sound effects here meant to represent Peter cutting, and also the sound Jones likens to being waxed].

You get waxed often then?

Yeah, all the time. It’s better not to be super-hairy.

[laughter]

It goes back to the trust thing. If Peter does it I’m like, well Peter is my swami, and he is totally correct. But yeah, he’s part therapist, part cheerleader and a hard-core ass-kicking editor.

You don’t call in wringing your hands.

I don’t often call him with a problem. I usually call Peter when I’m excited. I usually call Peter when I have that moment where I’m like, Oh this is actually gonna work, especially when it’s a story that I’ve pitched hard and I’m nervous about. The Price Is Right story, I called him after the Drew Carey interview, which was one of the great interviews of my life. We’re backstage and he just went off, like F F F F F. There was this publicist who’d been a pain in my ass – CBS was worse than the Pentagon. She was sitting there and she wouldn’t leave, and she said, You cannot ask about Terry rolling The Price Is Right. So I’m sitting there with Drew, and he kind of brought it up. He says, There’s this guy – I’m like, Yeah, Terry. And I hear behind me like a thunk, and I turn around and her head’s on the table. As soon as I was in the parking lot I called Peter and said, I got it I got it I got it. I don’t call him saying, It’s not working.

He also told me you sometimes call and say, I’m gonna go another way but I can’t tell you what it is. He trusts you to just go do it.

See I’m a writer because I can’t really talk. Like I can’t explain – so something will come up but I can’t –

Articulate it.

So it’s like, Let me try it in words. It’s like instead of me trying to explain this let me just write it. If you don’t like it, fine. Like the Price Is Right we went into it not knowing the twist about Ted, the guy in the audience who was yelling out the numbers. Instead of telling all that to Peter, I just said, Listen there’s a thing, there’s this guy Ted, I’m just gonna write it and you’ll see. That’s how we dealt with that.

No surprises.

I feel like if I’ve sold it as something I’ve gotta – it sounds like I’m bragging about the length of “The Things That Carried Him,” but I felt bad. Usually I’m within 100 words of my assigned length. I try very hard to hit that. People get offside about this, but journalism is a business. You’re expecting people to buy a product. You’re being paid for your work. Your editor is a customer; your readers are customers. So I feel this responsibility – I don’t think of it as I’m conducting my orchestra, and I’m doing my art and blah blah. For me it’s a contract. You’re paying me to do a job. I’m gonna deliver on time, I’m gonna deliver at the length you’re asking for, I’m not gonna be a pain in your ass, if you don’t like something I’ll fix it. I try to be –

Professional.

Is that the word?

I don’t know.

I try to do the job. So the soldier story was a weird – I just can’t see how you’d do it in 6,000 words.

Tyler Bridges: You said earlier that you don’t see yourself as a lyrical writer, and I’m certainly not a lyrical writer either, and if I do something that’s okay, it’s because of the reporting. But you take reporting to an extra level and I’m wondering if you have to constantly remind yourself what the person’s wearing, what the weather’s like – whether you have little tricks or it’s so natural now that you are able to get all these details –

I think it’s gotten more natural. One thing I still do is ask the people, Can I call you back? Like, If I go home and start writing and I need a little spackle can we talk about it? Because sometimes you don’t know until you’re writing it that you need this little bit that gets you from this paragraph to this paragraph. I think it’s okay not to get it all on the first run.

Bridges: Do you have little tricks to make sure you’re attendant to everything that’s going on or is it just natural to do that?

I don’t really know how to talk about this stuff without sounding like a jerk.

Just say it.

Well, I’m mildly autistic. It was a hindrance as a child, but as a reporter it’s kind of helpful because I find myself noticing things. And I think I have a good memory. So things will just sort of jump out sometimes, things I’m maybe not supposed to be looking at.

Bridges: I have trouble describing what someone looks like.

That is hard. That was one of my early lessons, that you always have to include a paragraph of description of the person because you can’t pretend that people know what people look like. In the Scarlett Johansson story I have a paragraph describing her face and it’s easily the most overwritten thing I’ve ever written. Because I mean how the hell do you describe a face? I mean you start with the forehead – I don’t know, big? Nose? It’s nose-like. So you kind of come up with all this language, and that’s when it gets fussy for me. Probably every other writer at Esquire is a much better writer than I am. Tom Junod could write 3,000 words about Scarlet Johansson’s face, but I can’t, so I try to get by with other stuff.

John Diedrich: I covered the military, great job on this piece. I’m curious about when you survey what’s been done on a subject area, and when you detect –

Jim Sheeler.

Diedrich: Jim Sheeler. He was covering it from a different angle. But how far will you read something – do you read everything that’s out there?

No I don’t read everything. I read Sheeler’s piece, and it’s a great piece. I mean it won a Pulitzer, right? It’s the definitive piece about the messengers. For me, it’s not good for me to read other stuff, not so much because I worry I’m gonna steal something but because I’m pretty naturally insecure. Like reading Sheeler’s piece was like, Shit, but it was good because it was a boot in my butt. I was like, Well, if that’s the bar. But no, I won’t sit there and survey the landscape because I don’t know what good could come from it.

Diedrich: So would you stay away from that aspect?

I didn’t purposely stay away from it. It was just different from the start. I mean I included the moment of notification. What was strange in this case is after reading Sheeler’s story I thought, Oh this is what this scene is gonna be like, but it wasn’t like that, because she found out from her sister. So that’s the one part of the process I thought I knew, and it was totally different. I mean if you’re doing certain stories you have to read to get the knowledge. If you’re doing a geology story you have to read about geology.

Samiha Shafy: I would like to hear the story about how you talked your way into Esquire with a box of donuts. The second is, you said you’re writing six stories a year, which doesn’t sound like a big number but considering the effort you put into each story how do you make sure you pick the right stories, and is it like two months per story or four months for one or?

Yeah, it can be six weeks – a celebrity story you might spend three weeks on and another story you might spend six months on. I’ll answer your second question first. So the hardest part of the job is the idea. You can take the best writer in the world and give them a crap idea and they’ll come out with a crap story, and you can take an awesome idea and give it to a not very good writer and they’ll probably come out with a pretty good story. Again this is part of the editorial process – pitching and pitching and pitching. So many stories I really like I had to pitch for a long time. Ebert I pitched for eight or 10 months. The space story I pitched for close to a year. The Price Is Right, I had to make that bet. [[The editors weren’t interested in the Price Is Right story at first. Convinced it was a good story, Jones bet Granger: He’d pay his own expenses and eat them if it turned out to be a non-story, but if Esquire ran the piece the editors had to pay him double his expenses. Which they did./pw]]

I think one of the tests at Esquire is if you can’t let it go, that’s when they’ll finally say yes. Like Ebert happened – I was supposed to write about Taylor Swift. At Esquire – I’m 37, I’m the young guy, so I get Taylor Swift. I’m still 37 trying to write about some 17-year-old girl, so I’m gonna be the pervert in the corner of the room. Luckily she canceled at the last minute. I was like, How about Roger? And that’s when I finally got to do it.

The donut story: So this is because I’m an idiot. I’m not very socially aware. When I was still at the National Post I really wanted to work for Esquire –

Having never written for a magazine before.

Having never written for a magazine. I got my job at the National Post having never written a published story before, so for me this was how it works. Actually I’m gonna tell my National Post story. So when I got my paper job there was a magazine in Canada called Saturday Night. I got my degree in urban planning. I thought it was gonna be like Lego. It’s not. It’s super-bureaucratic and terrible. So I had this headmaster who was a journalist and who set me up with a job interview with this guy named Ken White, who was the editor in chief of Saturday Night, which is like I guess our New Yorker. So I went for a job with Ken White and he kept saying newspaper, and I kept correcting him, saying, This is a magazine. It was like the worst job interview ever. Afterward I called my parents and said, I don’t know what that was but I’m not gonna be a writer.

And then they offered me a job at the paper. The paper was brand new. They stuck anyone with no experience, like me, in this bureau in Toronto, and if you were good enough you got pulled up. I started getting phone calls from the news editor and the sports editor, and in my head I’m like, They’re fighting over me. Meanwhile up at the paper Ken White was going, One of you has to take him. Years later I found this out. Finally I went to Sports because I wouldn’t count against their hiring quota. And I literally sat there for three months doing nothing, just sitting at my table, like ballast.

But the magazine – I walked into the Esquire building –

Wait, you flew to New York?

I was already there anyway, doing a Mets/Blue Jays series. And I walked in the building because I assumed that David Granger, the editor in chief, would want to meet with me. I was like, Clearly he’ll say yes. So the security guard was sitting there at the desk. I said, I’m here to see David Granger. He said, Do you have an appointment? I said, Nope. He said, Well, no. I was like, Can I make an appointment? He said, No, no, I don’t think you can.

So I was leaving and there was a janitor sweeping the lobby and he said, Do you want a job at Esquire? I said, Not as a janitor.

[laughter]

He said, No, no, no, there’s an editor, Andy Ward, young guy, really good guy, loves sports, you need to talk to Andy. So I went back to the security guard and said, Can I call Andy Ward? So I called up Andy, and he answers and I say, Hey I’m Chris, I write for a newspaper, I really want to work for you one day, I wonder if we could meet. He was like, Oh, when are you coming to town? I said, I’m in your lobby, the janitor said to call you.

[laughter]

And Andy said, Well, I’ve got this meeting to go to but come back at two.

And Andy’s the nicest dude on earth.

The janitor was totally right – he knew the guy I needed to talk to. So I got two boxes of donuts. I got one for the janitor, [and] was like, Thank you. I took a box of donuts to Andy, and some clips. [[I later asked Andy about this, and what kind of donuts Jones brought. Andy said Krispy Kreme, because Jones wanted to make a point that Krispy Kremes are better than Dunkin’ Donuts. Which, sorry Boston, they are./pw]] And again going back to the socially awkward thing I’m sitting there with Andy, we’re talking, he’s very nice, and I said, Can you read some of my stuff? He said, Yeah, I’ll read it. And I said, Can you read it now? He was like, While you’re sitting here? I was like, Yeah, I just kind of want to know is this even possible. So he’s reading and he’s like, Yeah, we wouldn’t use so many one-sentence paragraphs but it’s not bad. I said, Okay, great.

So, I kind of forgot about it. I quit my job at the paper, was traveling around. I ran out of money in Arizona, I was in Flagstaff. Got an email from Andy saying, We’ve got a job, 10 guys are gonna write a story, best story gets it. And this is the job I want more than anything. And I was flat broke. I mean I was busted. I had left the paper in a hissy fit, which was a terrible mistake – and I wanted that job so bad, so I wrote my story –

What was the story?

I wrote about Barry Zito, the baseball player –

You could choose any story?

I had to pitch 10 stories – this was specifically to be the sports columnist. That’s how I started at Esquire. And it was only years later that I found out the competition was bullshit. It had never happened. I spent years trying to find out – because the business isn’t that big – who are these other nine people? I was asking around, Are you one of the people? So whenever students ask how to get a job in journalism: Well, you act like an idiot, you go places you’re not supposed to go, you bring donuts, you run out of money and get super lucky.

Jonathan Blakley: With Roger Ebert – I love that story – one of the reasons I really loved it is, I’m a little older than you but I think we both grew up watching him. Suddenly you’re there. Was that one day with him?

No, parts of four days. And Roger was also awesome in the sense that, when I first emailed about doing the story he said, You know, I can’t talk, so we should probably do this by email, and I said, Well it would be better if we actually met. Roger actually started his career as a feature writer, including stuff for Esquire, so once he got past the idea of me coming, which did take some convincing –

Gosh – sorry to interrupt but that surprises me that he wouldn’t get that you needed to be in the room –

He hadn’t really been out at that point. He didn’t want people seeing his face.

Still –

Yeah. Once he got on board he was like, Oh he’s gonna need scenes – we’ll go out for dinner. All I said was, I want to go to the movies with you. Everything else was him. He knew what I needed. It’s funny – we talked afterward, and he had written the story. He was like, I’m surprised you didn’t put this in.

[laughter]

And there was a great moment that I didn’t put in, because in order for it to work I had to be in there, and I didn’t want to be in the story.

What was it?

They were cleaning the house before I got there and Chaz, his wife, had their wedding album out and Roger was like, Why the hell do you have the wedding pictures out? And she put it away. And after I’d been there maybe 15 minutes he was like, Chaz, bring out the wedding pictures! Anyway, he was like, I would’ve led with that, and …

[laughter]

I tell you the hot-sweat moment – he was mad about the picture. He was like, I’m kind of surprised you did the full face, like a whole page –

Bridges: Oh, but it’s such an amazing photo, though.

But all he sees is the damage, right? And it was a full page in the magazine. And he said, I’m surprised you spent so much time on my sickness.

Really?

And I was like, Oh shit. I said, Listen, if we don’t have the photo people are gonna spend the whole story wondering what you look like and they’re not gonna read the story. So you get that right out of the way. And with your sickness, nobody knows about this stuff. It’s important to establish why you can’t talk.

Bridges: Do you read stuff to Roger Ebert or whoever?

Oh no, no. This is always a tricky situation. I wanted Roger to love the story. I really like Roger. For me that was – I’ll never be able to relate what it was like to be sitting there pulling Post-It notes off his fingers. Like, I went there – I’d had this waffly kind of bad-head period where I was depressed or whatever, and I left there and thought, What the hell. I’m gonna leave here and I’m gonna have a root beer, and that moment on its own – it was a transformative experience, doing that story. I wanted him to like it, but you have to play this game where, I hope he likes it but I can’t be writing it for him.

And the fact checking – oh God I had this awful moment where I described the hole in his face. Originally I had it as the size of a small fist. And the fact checker called him and said, Roger do you have a hole the size of a small fist? And he immediately emailed me going, What are you talking about, this hole? I said, You have this hole, it’s there. I made it a plum, I think, in the end. But he was upset, and that kind of stuff bothered me. The reaction to the story was so positive he got on board.

Diedrich: The headline for “The Things That Carried Him” is clearly a nod to “The Things They Carried” – how aware are you when you’re writing that you’re in this legacy of people who’ve written about soldiers?

The title is a funny – I always put a headline on my stories because I find it helps me –

Focus.

If I find myself drifting I can go back to the headline. If it’s hard to write a headline for your story your story is probably unfocused. My headline was “The 3,431st.” I thought it sounded vaguely military, I thought it got across the idea of one of these thousands. Then Peter put that headline on it and I was like, Argh. Like “The Things They Carried” is one of the great pieces of war literature of all time, and when he put that headline on it I thought it sounded like hubris. But again, it was that 75th anniversary year, the original “The Things They Carried,” the short story, was in Esquire. I still never quite loved the headline. I really like headlines like “The Body.” There’s a story in the current issue that’s just called “Hood.” I like headlines like that. Very rarely is the headline that I put on my story the headline. Like this one, Roger Ebert, was [ultimately] called “The Essential Man,” or something. I like having a headline as my compass point.

For more from Chris Jones, check out his conversation with narrative legend Gay Talese.

September Editors’ Roundtable No. 2: The New York Times on facing death

Andrea Pitzer — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 18:59:33 +0000

Our second Roundtable of September examines “The Good Short Life,” by Dudley Clendinen. Diagnosed with ALS, Clendinen reflects on the past suffering of those closest to him and decides that he would prefer to approach death on his own terms, ending his life at a moment of his choosing. His essay ran July 9 in the New York Times.

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

Using juxtaposition to manage tone:

Dudley Clendinen’s essay is about his impending death. Yet the piece is neither depressing nor horrific to read. It is a delight. One of Clendinen’s secrets is the graceful way in which he delivers his message. He is gentle in tone, and he is a master at juxtaposition – pairing something dire with something surprising to temper the grimness and break the tension. Sometimes, even in the midst of such grimness, he makes us laugh.

The lede is a good example.

“We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with.

“Yes, Sweet Thing,” I said, with a smile. “We do.”

I loved him for that.

The smile, the “sweet thing,” the love – all are unexpected. They tell us that he’s going to have a very different take on all of this than we expect. And it offers us a little breath of relief.

Or look at this paragraph, in which he does it twice:

At the moment, for 66, I look pretty good. I’ve lost 20 pounds. My face is thinner. I even get some “Hey, there, Big Boy,” looks, which I like. I think of it as my cosmetic phase. But it’s hard to smile, and chew. I’m short of breath. I choke a lot. I sound like a wheezy, lisping drunk. For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying.

He shows you the ravages of his disease – he’s wasting away, losing weight, can barely eat, can barely breathe. And yet two short sentences – “I think of it as my cosmetic phase” and “For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying” – are funny and filled with character. They make it impossible for you to feel sorry for him, though you do feel great empathy.

In the body of the piece, he stays serious. He recounts the early days of his illness – how he coped, or how he watched relatives linger far beyond their time. It’s tough reading, but he has already charmed us, and so we keep going. And then he gives us another little gift, two surprising sentences placed right up against terribly bleak ones. After listing the many ways he could commit suicide (which makes it clear that he has thought this through), he writes of helium that it “would give me a really funny voice at the end.”

And, in the next graf, he assures us: He no longer has to be careful about what he eats or having enough money. And as we realize the enormity of what he is saying, he reassures us: “I am having a wonderful time.”

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On short sentences:

I first suggested to Andrea that I write about Clendinen’s simple sentences, but as I looked again and again at the material I realized what I meant was short sentences. The power of this piece rests upon the poetry of Clendinen’s sentence-level brevity.

The result easily could have felt choppy or self-indulgent. Some writers prune their sentences in an effort to mimic Hemingway (“For sale: baby shoes, never used.”), with the sole result of showing all the puppet strings. The stripped-down approach often grates – we see the underdeveloped writer, focused more on Self than Story, sweating all over the page in an attempt to impress and manipulate. Which is why it’s so remarkable that every one of Clendinen’s sentences is full of the personal yet devoid of writerly ego. The collective rhythm and unpretentious sentence structures suggest he sees no point in adornment, no time for fat. The subject matter and line-by-line delivery remind me of Beckett (“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”).

In his book on sentence craft, “How to Write A Sentence,” Stanley Fish asks writers (and readers) to first consider form. “The form is more important than the content, and if you master the form and understand what it’s doing and what can be done with it, then you can produce content endlessly,” he recently said on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

Clendinen’s piece beautifully represents that idea. If you data-crunch this story in terms of sentence structure you find, by my rough count, that 116 of the 124 sentences contain fewer than 20 words. The four-word sentence appears most frequently (18 times), followed by the seven-word sentence (13), the five- or 12-word sentence (nine each), and the eight-word sentence (eight). The longest sentence contains 51 words; the shortest, one (“Why?”).

All 28 of his paragraphs obey the Writing 101 rule to vary one’s sentence lengths whenever possible. In paragraph one: 4 words in the first sentence followed by 9, 8, 10, 4, 12, 21, 7. In paragraph 17: 12, 6, 36. Paragraph 12: 9, 28 (“I began to slur and mumble in May 2010. When the neurologist gave me the diagnosis that November, he shook my hand with a cracked smile and released me to the chill, empty gray parking lot below.”).

Overall, the predominance of short sentences serves the story because:

The good short sentence is a coiled rattlesnake. It does not mess around.

The pacing reflects the subject matter. Together the sentences behave almost like a fusillade, imparting urgency.

The reader doesn’t get lost. Committing to a long sentence can be like entering a maze – we run the risk of forgetting where we are. Unless you’re the next Dickens or Faulkner, step away, por favor, from the steroidal word count.

I wondered whether Clendinen speaks the way he writes, so I listened to some of the wonderful interviews he mentioned, from the “Maryland Morning” program on Baltimore’s main NPR station. Listen to this: “The first thing I notice every morning is the voice,” Clendinen said on March 7, referring to his illness’ effect on his enunciation. “Some mornings it’s better. Some mornings it’s sloppier and slurpier, and I think this morning it’s a little sloppy.” [And that changes day to day?] “It does. Two hours from now it may be better. Tomorrow it may be better. Having a progressive total disease is a little bit like playing chess with a computer: You know the computer’s always thinking, it’s always advancing, it’s gonna make some move – it may be a little one, it may tease you and be good to you one day and then trick you the next, but it’s always moving.”

Clarity and power begin in the mind. Even when Clendinen speaks, one never feels him straining to write (and certainly not to pose) but rather to reveal. The man is dying of ALS and he wants us to know what that’s like. His shrine to this impulse is a simple one but, like a good pine coffin, strong.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On attention to universal theme:

In his essay, Dudley Clendinen goes beyond the traditional nut graf, hitting upon a universal theme.

Facing death can be a freeing experience.

I think it’s important to say that. We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative – not governing – in order to be free.

And that’s the point. This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating.

While a traditional nut graf tells the reader what the news in the story is, the universal theme graf (or grafs) tells the reader the broader meaning of the story – or at least hints at it. The graf gives the reader what I call a glimpse of wisdom.

You’re not necessarily going to need a universal theme graf for a straightforward news story; the report’s main purpose is to convey information. But a universal theme graf can strengthen the setup of a narrative, essay or feature story – it signals that your piece is going to be about a larger idea, one that will hopefully resonate with readers.

Chip Scanlan, a longtime mentor of mine, provided a road map for crafting a theme graf in his classic 2003 Poynter column, “Selling the Power of Focus.”

Inspired by journalist David Von Drehle, Chip described a set of five questions that can help writers determine the focus – and theme – of their stories: Why does the story matter? What’s the point? Why is the story being told? What does the story say about life, the world and the times we live in? What’s the story really about – in one word?

Chip argued that readers, overwhelmed by information, are hungry for meaning.

He quoted Jack Fuller, the former Chicago Tribune editor and publisher who wrote in News Values: “People come to a newspaper craving a unifying human presence – the narrator in a piece of fiction, the guide who knows the way, or the colleague whose view one values. Readers don’t just want random snatches of information flying at them from out of the ether. They want information that hangs together, makes sense, has some degree of order to it. They want knowledge rather than facts, perhaps even a little wisdom.”

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On the power of the personal essay:

Many reporters would rather eat nails than write about themselves. It’s ironic, really, because we’re happy to intrude on other people’s lives and ask personal questions and hope for dramatic insight. But exposing yourself – figuratively – can be terrifying.

In this case, Dudley Clendinen is up against something even more frightening – ALS – so maybe it’s not so hard to open up. I’d argue that more writers should give it a try. Readers need to be reminded that we are, despite what they may think, human.

Of course, a gifted storyteller can relate any experience better than most. But consider the biggest advantage of the personal essay – you’ve already done a lot of the reporting. After all, it’s your life, your experiences, your take.

In this case, Clendinen got to choose from everything – his past, what he’s facing now, what he’s been thinking about, what people have done for him, what he’s done for others, conversations he’s had, how he looks, what he’s learned about the disease, what choices he’s made, what regrets he has, what he’s happy about. You’d be lucky to have that much material on any story.

Then you have to have the courage to share. Remember, we ask people to do this all the time. To lay bare their worst moments. We try to pull out of them what it’s like to learn that you’re going to die. How do you make peace with that? What are you scared of?

Do we get honest and/or complete answers? I suspect that it rarely happens, because most folks will only go so far with total strangers.

But Clendinen took us right up to the crossroad we’re all going to reach someday. He wrote with personality and humor, so it wasn’t a downer, despite the topic. And writing about himself allowed Clendinen to make a convincing argument for why we should think more about death than we do. Because it was his story, the message also carried more weight: “Lingering would be a colossal waste of love and money.”

For more on Dudley Clendinen, read the Storyboard Q-and-A with him. For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? If so, you can send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

August Editors’ Roundtable No. 1: GQ ponders truth, lies and mystery

Andrea Pitzer — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:38:52 +0000

Our first Roundtable of August considers “Blindsided: The Jerry Joseph Basketball Scandal,” by Michael Mooney. The story spotlights a high school basketball player who stirred up questions about truth and identity that the town of Odessa, Texas, is still struggling to answer. “Blindsided” ran in the July issue of GQ and was edited by Michael Benoist.

For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

On the importance of the setup and kicker:

This story reminded me of the French film “The Return of Martin Guerre,” in which a character who appears out of nowhere might or might not be who he says he is. Like the movie, the lede of “Blindsided” both makes you care about Jerry Joseph – an overgrown child of misfortune longing for a home and a family – and plants seeds of doubt about him. The supposed facts of his life are carefully attributed: “He said he didn’t really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said. . . . Jerry Joseph’s birth certificate read January 1.” The attributions indicate that we don’t know these things to be true. Jerry’s life, another character guesses, might be a dream.

Even Jerry’s feelings at his birthday party are either reported or imagined by others. This deftly tells us that this story will be substantially about the way people reacted to Jerry and that we may never hear the truth from him. We will learn it, though: A line about Jerry’s foster father, Danny Wright, hints that the mystery has been solved (“It’s a moment Wright keeps coming back to”). It’s logical to imagine right away that Jerry Joseph will turn out to be a fraud (especially if you’ve been reminded of “The Return of Martin Guerre”), but as a reader you’re in the same position as the people around Jerry, and you won’t know for sure until they do. You have to read on.

Even after the mystery is solved, the story’s final section keeps it alive. We know Jerry Joseph’s real name is Guerdwich Montimere, but we really don’t know who he is. We only know who he wants to be, perhaps even believes he is. The author repeats the theme of the story, which he stated once before, well into the narrative: “Every man dreams about it. … How much fun it’d be to replay the game of life if given a second chance.” We finally meet Guerdwich, and he says his name is Jerry.

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On suspense:

This is worth repeating: We’re often too quick to refer to any long feature story as a narrative. Just because a piece is long doesn’t make it a narrative, and just because a piece is short doesn’t not make it a narrative. One of my favorite narratives is an 835-word story by the wonderful Larry Bingham, about a Texas man who, at age 98, learned how to read.

A narrative contains arc, character development (doable even in a straightjacket, as Bingham proves), nuance and, to some degree, suspense. By suspense I don’t mean sounding the Here’s Some Drama! gong via strained writing and an authorial desire to make structure do the hard work of reporting/writing; I mean perfuming the air with an intriguing question or two. A mystery on any scale keeps us turning pages.

Mooney’s piece lent itself to a slow tell because the story itself is a mystery – that always helps – but he easily could’ve ruined the thing by overwriting, which tends to happen when you’ve underreported or when you’re stumped by the mechanics of a story that’s missing some of its natural parts. The development of suspense started not with the writing but rather with the reporting. In keeping key questions in mind as the investigator/writer, he nurtured them on the page: Is Jerry a fraud? Who the hell is Jerry? If he isn’t who he says he is, why all the fakery? How will Coach Wright, and Odessa, handle the revelation?

Those answers are the destination; Mooney seeds the story with foreshadowing details that move us there. Details about trust. Details about warning pings that sounded when Jerry first took off his shirt. Think of these as Chekhov’s firecrackers.

Also, as crucial as it is to work toward a killer kicker, it’s just as important in a story of this length to hone section kickers. Individually, Mooney’s section kickers keep you reading; collectively they’re the dovetail joints holding the whole cabinet together.

Examples:

“Who were we to question his story,” Anders says. “He was the first Haitian most of us had ever met.”

Just when you knew where Jerry was going, he went in a completely new direction.

He needed to know one thing: Was there a girl?

“Where’s Jerry, Daddy? Where’s Jerry?”

His ultimate kicker is powerful in its simplicity and also in its complex message about human identity. Plus, it leaves us in a moment of currency and forward spin.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

On the art of withholding and revealing:

A lot of writing involves deciding how to release information, what to reveal now, and what to conceal for later. The idea is both to make a complex set of facts painless for the reader to absorb by managing the download of information, and (as Paige notes) to create suspense. Michael Mooney proves to be a master of both in this piece, a mastery he demonstrates before you even get beyond the lede. In the very first paragraph, he jumps right in to the literal middle of the story, but by careful selection of what facts he presents, he manages to make a complicated story comprehensible.

He economically conveys, in this order; 1) the mystery, 2) the unusual circumstances, and 3) the foreshadowing that something is wrong with this picture.

The mystery is conveyed directly, but with sparse information: “He said he didn’t really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said, and he’d never celebrated a birthday in his life.”

The unusual circumstances: “But Jerry Joseph’s birth certificate read January 1, so on New Year’s Day 2010, his family gathered around him. It would be a new year, a new decade, a celebration of Jerry’s brand-new life.”

The incongruity is the cherry on top: “There were flimsy cardboard hats and streamers and wrapped gifts. Jerry, who at six feet five and 220 pounds was several inches taller than anyone else in his adoptive family, was presented a white cake adorned with candles in the shape of a 1 and a 6.”

Note how he chooses to never actually say the age “16.” Allowing the reader to pick this up only by indirection ironically manages to magnify its significance. Without ever saying it directly, he’s assured that every reader will emerge from the lede knowing that the mystery of Jerry’s origins and his age will be the most discordant issues in what otherwise might just be a feel-good story about a privileged family adopting an underprivileged boy.

Two paragraphs in, readers are already far more involved and curious than if the writer had simply explained what the story would be about in a traditional nut graf. He has delivered a keen intuitive sense of what will make this story worth reading, and a sense of delight in anticipation of a story told in a dramatic, rather than pedantic way.

He keeps his narration steadfastly nonjudgmental by taking Jerry’s increasingly implausible claim that he is not a fraud at face value – a stance that pays wonderful dividends at the end, when we discover that Jerry’s insistence that “I am not that person” has taken on more than a literal meaning, that Jerry’s lie has become, on some level his truth.

The overall principle here is one of respect for the readers, and an understanding that the more you enable readers to divine for themselves, using expertly arranged clues, the more they will get out of the reading experience. Of course, this is a risky strategy, because it requires unerring judgment to prevent the sense of enlightenment a reader experiences from degrading into mere confusion. Mooney’s sure hand here removes any threat that will happen.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On developing character without the character’s help:

The question that drives this story, of course, is “Who is this guy?” and not “Is he Jerry Joseph or Guerdwich Montimere?” Who was it that the people in Odessa met and became attached to – a decent person or a fraud? Or possibly both?

The writer here has to reveal character, and has to do it without the character’s help.

That’s a dilemma we find ourselves in from time to time. Sometimes, a person is reluctant to share his story. Or he clearly wants to embellish his tale, to make himself come across in a stronger light. Occasionally, we’re writing about someone who has disappeared or passed away.

It’s not impossible to succeed in those circumstances, but it is challenging.

A reporter is forced to ask people who crossed paths with the character to help provide the telling details.

Michael Mooney does a lot of work here. He shows us what they saw:

Danny Wright … noticed the kid get misty-eyed, just as he had at his first Christmas a week earlier.

Lots of people saw him out there in the hot August sun. Three miles each way, jogging through the streets like he was Rocky or something.

He skipped down the halls when he thought nobody was watching.

He tells us what Joseph told townspeople:

He said he didn’t really know what day he was born.

He’d been homeless in Haiti, he said.

He said that most of his life was spent herding goats.

He gives us physical description, mannerisms:

The kid had all sorts of tattoos, inflated pecs, and shoulders like a racehorse.

Jerry had a beautiful wide smile and what nearly everyone describes as an exotic “swagger.”

Fans remarked that with his flat-top haircut and the way he always seemed drenched in sweat, Jerry looked a little like Boobie Miles, the star-crossed running back from the Friday Night Lights season.

He shares what people were thinking about this guy:

A few of the teachers joked that Jerry was secretly an adult.

Anders wondered if maybe the kid wasn’t some kind of prodigy.

“He knew the game like a coach.”

And the nicknames they gave him:

They called him Grandpa and the Haitian Sensation.

He describes Joseph’s actions:

Jerry was popular with the teenage girls, a good employee – never late, never snapped at anyone, never had any money missing from his register.

Just seconds into the first quarter, he snatched the ball and drove the length of the court, throwing down what several teammates describe as a “gorilla slam.”

If he thought he’d miss church, he made sure to e-mail Pastor Skelton saying he’d be thinking of them.

Imagine the litany of questions Mooney had to ask – what did Joseph do and say? What did you notice about him? What were you thinking each time you were with him? What were your conversations like? How did you react to him? Why didn’t anyone challenge his account of his past?

All those answers built this story.

At the end, readers are left much like the townspeople, holding out hope that it wasn’t a total betrayal. But if it was, at least we can understand how a stranger managed to win this town over.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On finding the emotional core of the story:

(Full disclosure: I was Mike Mooney’s editor when he was an intern at The Dallas Morning News in 2007.)

While the character of Jerry Joseph stands at the center of “Blindsided” – he is the reason for the story, after all – Mike Mooney develops the emotional heart of his story through another central character: Danny Wright.

As Maria Carrillo notes, Mooney paints the portrait of Joseph through the perspectives of people whose lives he touched. Still, Joseph remains an enigma. Is he the ultimate con man, or is he psychologically damaged, or is he both? We may never know, and that’s where Danny Wright comes in.

Most stories need a central character that readers can identify with, and it helps if the character faces a dilemma.

Wright is a good man. He’s the 50-year-old basketball coach who used to direct the local Boys & Girls Club. He’s known as “Dad” or “Pops” around town, and he and his wife have taken in as many as 18 kids over the years. “The oldest of five in a single-mother household, Wright has been taking care of kids his whole life,” Mike writes. “It’s why God put him on this earth.”

Wright always sees the good in people. The dilemma he faces is that, while he can see a lot of good in Jerry, he can’t decipher what’s truth and what’s fiction in Jerry’s story. His faith in people is shaken.

Mooney’s storytelling benefits from Wright’s ability to observe what’s around him and reflect upon it. For example, the first scene – of the birthday party – is based largely on Wright’s memory. And the question Wright asks in hindsight launches the story. “It’s a moment Wright keeps coming back to, when Jerry closed his bright brown eyes. What could the boy have wished for? he wonders.”

Like Wright, we are driven to ask this question throughout the story as we learn more about Jerry’s fabrications. When Wright finally learns the truth about Jerry Joseph, we feel his heart breaking – our hearts break, too – even as his anger rises.

“This is you,” Coach Wright said, barely able to contain his anger.

“That ain’t me,” Jerry said.

“Look,” Wright said, leaning in, “I’m not asking for confirmation. I’m telling you. I don’t know what you’re pulling, but you need to get your things and be on your way.”

By the end of the story, Wright’s family is torn – his wife and kids still love Joseph, but the coach has his doubts. And he’s no longer sure whether he can still help needy kids.

Mooney’s story, then, is not only about the mystery of Jerry Joseph. It also follows the emotional journey of Danny Wright, from faith through betrayal to doubt.

For more, read our interview with Michael Mooney about his story, or take a look at our previous Editors’ Roundtables.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? If so, you can send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

July Editors’ Roundtable No. 2: The New York Times probes a murder in South Africa

Andrea Pitzer — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:57:20 +0000

For the second Roundtable of July, our editors looked at “Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man” by Barry Bearak of the New York Times. Bearak has spent the last three years as co-bureau chief of the Times’ Johannesburg outpost, and his June 5 story investigates the death of a young man at the hands of a mob in the beleaguered settlement of Diepsloot.

Our editors didn’t read each other’s comments as they wrote or see the email conversation between Storyboard and Bearak about his narrative.

For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On using the first person:

Journalists tend to have strong opinions about whether we should put ourselves in stories. Some support first-person reportage depending on the circumstances; others suggest they’d rather dine on dung than appear anywhere in a piece of work, despite the fact that first-person presence has a solid history and an important place within the craft. Whenever I give a little quiz asking students to match short first-person passages to the author, even practiced journalists are surprised to find the writers are Dickens, Orwell, Gellhorn, Didion…

In the right situation, readers connect powerfully to story via the personal pronoun “I.” A writer should deploy the “I” as carefully as a surgeon chooses a scalpel. The device itself lends nothing without legitimate intent. To me, first person works in Barry’s piece for three reasons:

It isn’t gratuitous. The narrative/personal quest depends upon use of the first person and especially upon the author’s relationship with Golden, a trusted source and keeper of the pivotal crime-scene video.

It allows for authoritative class contrast. By revealing details about his own lifestyle Bearak puts less fortunate residents’ economic circumstances – and the larger societal issues of law and order/mob justice – into a more intimate context than readers would’ve read in a depersonalized account.

He keeps the spotlight on others by remaining a minor character and keeping a respectful distance. While the author’s journalistic quest clearly drives the narrative, being present in the story allows him to bear witness in a quiet but powerful way and to authenticate what otherwise would have been a secondhand account of a horrific event.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

On structure:

Structure is one of the peskiest challenges facing writers. Once you move past the basic (and backwards) logic of the inverted pyramid, questions of order and placement plague rookie and veteran alike. What stays in? What comes out? What goes where? Constructing a complex story can be like building a jigsaw puzzle of multiple dimensions, with images on all sides, ill-fitting tabs, no edge pieces and no box cover picture to follow.

In “Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man,” Barry Bearak does the most sophisticated thing a writer can do when confronted with that complex puzzle: He gets simple. Not that his story is simple. Far from it. Bearak leads us through more than 7,500 words, takes us deep into several distinct and difficult subcultures, introduces us to more than a dozen characters, weaves between present and past, and includes both intimately detailed narrative and sweeping social context.

It would be instructive (and fun, in a word-nerdy way) to diagram Bearak’s entire piece. Lacking time and space for that, I’ll note these points:

Chronology is the core. That’s what I mean when I say Bearak gets simple. He starts in a searing moment that puts us in the scene and sets the stage for everything to come. After two paragraphs of narrative he pulls out into some establishing context. Then he quickly returns to the narrative through the first long scene, ending with a cliffhanger. But after that, the piece builds along a fairly straight chronology. We are pulled into the story in the same way Bearak was – through the video of the murder – and then follow him step by step as he tries to untangle the thicket of questions and characters he confronts. Pay attention to the places where Bearak uses a fairly direct time stamp to hold the story together: “… each day, widening the arc of our meander.“ “Within a week, Golden and I had become a marked pair.” “One recent Sunday afternoon…”

A quest drives the story forward. That’s true of any gripping narrative: The writer sets up a core question, then spends the rest of the story answering that question. (This is different than a story’s core meaning, or theme.) What makes Bearak’s story a bit different is that the quest is his. We are taken along on his search for answers. (A literary friend once told me there are only two storylines in all of human history: A stranger comes to town, and a man takes a journey. Bearak’s story encompasses both, and he is both the stranger and the man on the journey.)

Narrative is woven rather than broken. In complex pieces such as this, one successful approach can be a “broken narrative”– a structure that goes back and forth between narrative or action scenes and contextual or expository scenes. Bearak takes that foundation and makes it more elegant by weaving context directly into the narrative. He slips a line or two of geography or history into the running story. As I read, I imagined a French braid with strands constantly being worked over, under and through. If you re-read the piece just to see how characters and their backstories are introduced, you’ll see that braid. Bearak is able to pull off that intricate weave because the core chronology is straightfoward and strong.

Characters are clearly identified. It’s tough for readers to follow this many characters in a piece. Yet we never lose track here because Bearak remembers to provide some brief reminder of who each person is. That’s just one of the ways Bearak answers the readers’ question when the reader needs the answer.

The story comes full circle. The chronology drives relentlessly forward, following Bearak’s quest. It ties together – is made whole – by ending where it began, with the boy who fingered the murder victim. This is also a tried-and-true structural device. But what makes Bearak’s use of it so stunning is that he comes back to Siphiwe not where the story started, but where the story took Sipihwe – to a place of defiant and inevitable despair. As such, Siphiwe was able to speak for the much larger defiance and despair of a country and a culture.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On a sense of place:

Barry Bearak knows that evoking a sense of place isn’t just a matter of presenting a background landscape. He uses carefully selected sensory details – sights, sounds, smells – and movement to transport readers to South Africa.

“Put me there,” is a simple way an editor can encourage writers to think about the sense of place. The writer can provide context to the story by showing, rather than telling. She can also create a mood that permeates the story – anger, joy, sadness.

Bearak does this sparingly in his murder story. That’s important, because, at least in this story, we don’t want the plot to slow down and linger too long. Let’s pay attention to Bearak’s sketch of the South African township. We hear music; we watch women pinning laundry and storekeepers brushing away flies; we smell garbage and sewage; we learn that some of these areas have bureaucratic names like Extension 1 and Extension 2.

The road abounded with township life: good music playing over bad radios, women pinning laundry to droopy clotheslines, storekeepers brushing aside plump flies in the butchery. People were curious about the mob’s intentions, and some followed along as if dutifully joining a militia. In a few blocks, the pavement of Thubelihle gave way to hard-packed dirt and stones. A busted pipe had gone unrepaired for months, and the escaping water cut a trough in the ground that now carried a stream of garbage and sewage. The odor was bracing, but there was open air ahead, a large, marshy field that separated Extension 1 from the squatter camp in Extension 2…

What we see is that life goes on under some outrageous conditions. And we get a hint about why these conditions are a factor in the violence. People are curious. They don’t see things getting any better. They start to follow a mob. Who knows how ordinary people will act as the mob grows violent?

Bearak uses a second sketch to show the economic disparity in South Africa, the wide gap between the townships and the gated communities with beautiful names.

I live in much different circumstances, renting a house in the Dainfern Golf and Residential Estate, one of dozens of gated communities built in a city overwrought about crime. The perimeter is fortified with high walls topped by electrified wire; guards patrol the landscaped roadways and roundabouts. Houses are large, and many front entranceways are ornamented with waterfalls and fish ponds…

He’s also showing us this place because he wants to be honest about his comparatively (and understandably) sheltered life in South Africa. He may not be able to fully understand what life is like in the townships, and he’s being straight with us about that. He uses a sense of place not just to set a scene but to help define and explain the dynamics of his story.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

On keeping the reader engaged in a depressing story:

Everything about the subject of this piece – a mob in a crime-ridden squatter’s village randomly settling on an innocent man to vent their rage – screamed “Don’t go there,” and yet, go I did. Why?

Or to rephrase the question: When a writer wants to explore unremittingly depressing material, how can he keep the reader’s attention and deliver something that feels like enlightenment rather than a fist to the face?

Bearak accomplishes that here, through what I would call “elevation.”

I mean this almost literally. The reader is raised to a great, almost godlike height and allowed to view these hideous events as if from a mountaintop. Every piece can be seen in its relation to other pieces. What seems nasty and brutish on ground level is still nasty and brutish, but from the mountaintop it plays out on a scale so grand that the meaningless becomes meaningful, and the horrific becomes tragic. It’s the difference between watching a slasher film and Macbeth.

A word of caution for those of you who may want to try this at home: It is impossible to make a reader feel as if she is getting the Big Picture unless the writer has gotten there first, with full focus and resolution. It requires a mastery of the subject so complete that every detail, every factoid and quote, snaps into place.

But even that’s not enough. The writer has to find the right voice, the voice that communicates a buffering distance without sacrificing any of the intense reality. This is what Bearak does superbly here.

From the very start, he speaks in sweeping statements that never stray into overgeneralization. The central antagonist is “a bad boy wanting to become a worse boy,” and “an unlikely guide to lead [the growing mob] into their dark work.” These sentences are simultaneously simple and mythic, like those in a fable.

That same calm certainty continues throughout the piece, making the tale unfolding seem like the most natural course of events in the world, instead of a living nightmare. That works because, seen from the mountaintop, evil IS a natural part of our world; it has prime causes and immediate causes, and it flows downhill like a creek becoming a river. Consider this introducing paragraph that stays focused on the flow, even as it elevates to get the longer view:

A few men lifted him onto their shoulders so that the crowd, already in the hundreds, could see him better. Then an older man, wiser about these things, said to put the boy down. More than likely, they were about to kill someone. No one in the mob ought to be too conspicuous.

Elevation is again expressed by the impressionist dabs of paint with which the context is painted:

The road abounded with township life: good music playing over bad radios, women pinning laundry to droopy clotheslines, storekeepers brushing aside plump flies in the butchery. People were curious about the mob’s intentions, and some followed along as if dutifully joining a militia.

“Good music playing over bad radios” is classic, an observation wrapped in a description, and like any precise yet poetic observation, it becomes a metaphor for the larger reality. The elevated distance in the perspective is expressed time and again in word choice. When the mob emerges into a field with a busted sewer pipe, the odor is described as “bracing,” an obvious understatement that communicates the idea that living with filth is simply something to be endured.

Bearak is constantly choosing precise understatement over hyperbole. Notice the low temperature of the language when he places the immediate in the context of the general:

Mob justice is not uncommon in Diepsloot, and most often it involves the swift capture of a supposed criminal, the villain there to beat up, to stone, perhaps even to wrap in a petrol-soaked shroud. But this undertaking was something entirely different. The vigilantes had walked a long distance on a hot day in the uncertain pursuit of unspecified thugs — all on the word of this talkative boy.

The elevated view allows us to watch these horrors unfold and see for ourselves how a quest for vengeance and some kind of justice so effortlessly turns into simple thuggery. Note how Bearak refrains from labeling this transition point, but lets our Olympian ability to see inside the perspective of the participants do the work. Pay attention especially to his use of the word “despicable” in the following:

Siphiwe led the way, back along the dusty paths between the shacks to the edge of the marshy field. The spaza shop was locked, and though empty of people, it was actually well supplied with soft drinks, biscuits, beer, toiletries and paraffin. The mob nevertheless busted through the walls, and Siphiwe rooted around in a back room, collecting for himself two pairs of sneakers, a Nike track suit and a nylon jacket. The shop was set ablaze, again to the noisy approval of the crowd, though this, too, seemed scant retaliation against murderous thugs. Where were those despicable people?

“Elevation” does not mean glossing anything over. To the contrary, it means being able to look at things with the unflinching, unblinking acuity of an eagle’s eye. Note the calm tone, the accumulation of simple words and sentences that seduce us into watching, instead of turning away, as a very uncomfortable truth about the nature of human beings plays out before our eyes:

The video shows Farai already on the ground, using his left leg to try to block the blows of a man swinging a heavy piece of wood. Others are pelting him with rocks from behind and hitting him with sticks. At this point, it is still possible to imagine the young man’s escape. He can speak; his movements are spry; there is barely a smudge on the lilac of the shirt. But by the next scene, he is sapped of strength and badly injured. His frantic efforts to get away have failed, and he has landed in a filthy, water-filled ditch. As he crawls out, his hands groping at the dirt, a man in blue pants kicks him in the chest, and Farai flops backward with a splash. Some in the crowd, including children, scoot around to get a better look.

The video then jumps ahead. Farai is again on dry ground, lying on his back, seemingly near death but still breathing. Blood is leaking from his head. He barely raises his left hand, and this trivial movement somehow becomes a cue for the beating to resume. A man wearing a white cap wallops him seven times in the face and neck with a plank, the assailant’s arms reaching high to amplify the force of his swing.

—-

For more, read our interview with Barry Bearak, or take a look at some of our previous Editors’ Roundtables.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? If so, you can send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

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Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

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Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

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Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com