How did you first hear about the Henderson girls’ story?

Three reporters and an editor were going to do a project on physical abuse. We’ve had a lot of dead babies in Wichita – like eight murdered babies in two years – and we’d written dailies and little weekend follows about that. But we decided we really needed to figure out what was going on and whether the state social services were doing their jobs.

As part of that, I talked us into the detective unit that investigates child abuse, all forms of child abuse. They’d never talked to us before; they’re very secretive, confidential, and very good at what they do. They work in teams with the social workers, and they run in pairs, a cop and a social worker, and talk to families. The social worker is there not only to investigate, but they’re plugged in with all the aid you can bring to families, teaching them not to do this, or “Here’s where you can find free counseling” – that sort of thing.

They also investigate all the child abuse in the area, and they were the primary agency. They’ve never talked to us before. But they finally warmed up enough to talk to us, and they said, “You know, more than 50 percent of what we do involves sexual abuse. You ought to look at that.” And at first, I was like, “God. We’ve got so much to do with this other thing. This is going to take forever.”

I had done a lot of child abuse stories, because I started out as a police reporter at the Kansas City Star years ago, with police and courts. So I had actually done takeouts on child abuse. I knew how complex and complicated it was. And so I said, “Give me something. I know there’s lot of commonalities with these cases that people don’t realize.” And they said, “Yeah, there are.” For example, the public almost assumes it’s the stranger in the trench coat, and it’s almost always someone you know doing the sexual abuse – the boyfriend of the mom, the granddad, somebody.

I said, “Do you have a representative case I could do a takeout on?” I was thinking we could do that and then move on to do the giant physical abuse project with the eight homicides. And they gave me this one. At the time, I thought “Well, this will be a weekend toss-off.” But I kept backing it up. Where did the call come from? Well, it came from this detective on adult sex crimes. He was the moving force that got us involved. I asked him, “Who called you?” He gave me the neighbors’, the Vaseys’, number. And they said, “I don’t know if I want to talk with you.” The rescue family was very nervous. Then, I realized they were still in touch with the girls. I’m thinking, “I’m really going to push this and see how far we can go,” knowing as I did that hardly anyone ever writes about sexual abuse from the inside out, and especially incest. Everybody just gets creeped out.

The editors were nervous, but I knew how this stuff worked. I knew we were never going to be able to write a story about incest and put in the details, so I just decided there were lot of other things we could do with this, especially once I learned that the girls wanted to talk.

When did the idea of them being identified – the use of their names, their pictures, their retelling of events, their writing – come up?

The moment I asked the rescue family, “Could I talk to the girls?” they said, “Yeah, in fact, Kellie’s been saying for a couple years she wants to come out publicly.” She’s a kid but she wants to help victims and tell them, “It’s OK.” And so I was all over that. We talked with her, and she was all for it. And she was spilling the details, everything: how it affected her, how it screwed up her life, how it screwed up her relations with men after the rescue. I didn’t ask her anything about the sex, but she volunteered things. She was so totally fearless that I just thought, “You know, I bet she’ll pull along everybody else.” So I said, “Can I talk to your twin?” She said, “I don’t know if she’s going to want to do it.” But she did.

By then I’m going back to the cops and the social workers and saying, “Here’s what I’m doing with this.” And they’re freaking out: “We didn’t realize this was going to go this far.” They’re very worried and legitimately so, because the 15-year-old is still in the system. If I’m publicly identifying the two girls, what does that mean for the 15-year-old with his schoolmates, with neighbors, with his own feelings?

Stirring something up again, even after five years, is a trigger for everything, emotional trauma, that kind of thing. I had a lot of meetings with the police, with the head of social services in Wichita, and they finally got to the point that if everybody is so OK with this, nobody knows anything about sexual abuse, so the flip side is that if these girls really want to talk, and this is such a representative case, this could do a huge amount of good. I ended up talking with everybody in that family except two of the three imprisoned characters. The 15-year-old and I had a couple of long conversations.

I talked with the mother. That was just really hard, because she knew she was going to be once again identified as the person who let this happen for a decade. And the third sister decided finally she didn’t want to be named, but she was glad the sisters were doing it. We had to make that adjustment. The more the family was so for it, the less worried the police and social workers were about having tipped me off to the thing. And so everybody right up to publication was on the same page: “Yeah, we’re going to do this.”

The editors were nervous all the way through until maybe a month before, and I kept telling them, “I’m going to write it so it can be read from the pulpit in church. I don’t need to go into the details. The details are implied. This is a story about how these things operate. This is a story that if we write it, readers are going to measure themselves against it, the way they always do with narrative: ‘How would I act if I was faced with similar circumstances? Would I rise to the occasion? Would I temporize? Would I delay?’ ”

When everybody realized that the cops and the social workers and the family were on the same page about doing this so openly, with names and faces, then it became, “OK, let’s get it together and do it.”

You got everybody on the same page, and you’re imagining that the story could be read from the pulpit. How did you approach the construction of the piece to make this something different from what everybody’s seeing all the time?

The other thing I knew from having done narrative for a few years, and from having done child abuse stories in the past as a reporter and an editor, the way that the media often does these stories is that they write about them in the abstract – your typical weekender, with an anecdotal lede followed by summary news nut graf, followed by fact, followed by fact. And they’re facts that are just facts. When you write about things in the abstract, it’s very difficult for readers to get engaged with it. “OK, there’s this massive problem, and there’s very little I as a reader or as a citizen can do with it, so I’m just not going to engage.”

But when you turn it completely on its head, the real theme of this story, the real unstated but obvious theme, is that this is how this stuff actually plays out in secret. When you’re hinting to the reader that this is how all these cases go – yet you wrap it around these central characters of the two girls and a hero once in a while, either the rescue woman or the detectives – it’s almost irresistible. People are just pulled along. They want to know what happened next to the girls. Which meant that I had to write it from the inside, so the reader was right there. I had to reconstruct scenes. I had to write an umbrella top, an all-encompassing top of whatever it was – 8 or 9 inches: “Here’s what’s happening. Here’s why we’re doing this.”

And then the second part of the story with the Vaseys, we first meet these little kids coming across the street. And then it carries through chronologically scene after scene, with cross-cutting. First they’re at the Vaseys’, and everybody’s happy, and the next scene is they’re home and getting molested. And then they’re back at the Vaseys’ on the trampoline. Contrasting the horror of what these girls are going through with the joy and peace when they went to play with toys at Shelly’s house. The whole idea is “What’s going to happen in the next scene?” So, you’re pulling people along.

Almost by default you’re giving people a little bit of an education, where with the traditional nut graf, weekender news takeout, you’re just telling everybody what happened, you’re not showing, and you’re telling them in larger numbers: “There are 6 zillion child abuse cases in Sedgwick County,” blah, blah. I’ve done those kinds of pieces before in that way, writing about them in the abstract, and nothing ever happened. Nobody ever called, nobody wrote, no laws were examined or changed.

This one, the comments are up to 650 comments now on the story, we’re well past 400,000 page views on the story – in Wichita.* When you write about people, and you write about them in a way where every sentence hints to you that you need to find out what happens next, you’re pulled along in this current, even if you’re not particularly interested in this topic, and you’re learning things about child abuse and sexual abuse and incest while wondering what’s going to happen to these two girls and how it’s going to turn out.

By the way, I haven’t done a search on the three stories, but I wrote it with the idea that I wouldn’t even use the word incest, and I don’t think I did. A whole story about incest without using the word at all.

You mentioned the response the paper’s been getting. Could you talk a little about the response the Henderson girls have been getting?

With all the problems that my editors and I had to solve with this, the one I was worried about the most was how the girls were going to take this. As everyone pointed out, including my editors, who are very smart people, these are rape victims that we’re dealing with, and just the act of interviewing them is possibly going to be disturbing to them – even though the twins are saying emphatically, “We want to do this. We want to go there. We want you to take us there.”

But I couldn’t just worry about them. There’s their 18-year-old sister, who’s less willing so far to come out. There’s the 15-year-old boy who was beaten up repeatedly. These are four kids, 19, 18 and 15. They’re not only rape victims, or in the case of the boy, beating victims, physical abuse victims, they’re teenagers. They’re tough and hard because of what they went through, but they’re also vulnerable and have felt betrayed by the key people in their lives for most of their lives.

I’m a dad and a grandfather myself, and I was really worried about how they were going to cope. If there was public fallout, how were they going to handle this? What if a whole bunch of people donate to them? Is that going to go to their heads? All of these things are triggers for emotional responses, and they’re very fragile beings.

My way of dealing with that was early on, I was cluing them in about what I was doing and why I was doing it. Early on, I tracked down the younger sister and walked her through what I was going to do. And when I had early drafts done, which was about a month and a half ago, I started reading sections, big sections, to the kids. Not only as a way for them to fact-check, but as a way to get them so used to this damn story so that publication would be anti-climatic in a way, not entirely, but I wanted to deaden the impact and remove the suspense.

You were inoculating them.

That idea is not original to me – Roy Peter Clark taught me to do that 10 years ago, when he was coaching me on my first serial narrative. Get them on board, deaden the suspense. I did the same thing with the detectives, who were very protective of the girls.

So when I read these big chunks and sections, everybody realized not only that there wasn’t going to be a screw-up, but it gave them a sense of empowerment. They could give tweaks to fix minor factual things. It also became old hat. “Oh, I know what it says.” They liked what they were hearing, hearing me read aloud to them. They all did. They were kind of looking forward to the thing, even though it’s got to be a horrific experience.

I’m still worried. We’re not going to know for a while. I was confident enough and my editors were confident enough that we weren’t going to mess these girls up, or the young man involved, but I’m still checking in with them.

You mentioned that they’ve been getting direct response, too. Can you talk a little about that?

People are reaching out to them. They’re on Facebook, so people are contacting them that way. Friends are expressing shock. “I knew you, and I knew Andrew. I had no idea this was going on. I’m so sorry.” People are using the word hero and the word courageous frequently. They’re OK with that; they’re fine with that. And adults on the blogs are calling them heroes for speaking out.

I’ve got a follow story for this weekend, and it’s about all these people, some of them in their 70s, writing me or writing the Vaseys, talking about what happened to them, and that it’s the same thing that happened to them, and that they’ll never get over it. This one woman said she made a point of spitting in her stepfather’s casket after he died, decades after he abused her. That she showed up and made sure she got her spittle on him.

Going to dramatic scenes, there’s the scene with the mom in the story.

I read it to her, too.

Could you talk a little about that? You mentioned elsewhere that you did meet with the mom, and that was hard. In reading that scene, it feels like a scene that is ramped up in power by the fact that it’s so restrained.

Yeah, I used to really throw in exclamation marks in stories and italicize sentences. This one, it started with “I don’t even want to use the word incest,” and “I don’t want to say specific sex acts.” The older I get, and the more I do this sort of thing, the more I strip my stories down. That’s what older reporters do when they get more experience. You really try to strip all the artifice out and imply things. You try to write things in such a sequence and a position that things are implied, and you don’t have to use ramped-up language.

Starkness actually works to give it more punch and more power, especially when you’ve got a horror story like this. You want to create the effect in the reader that, “My God, did I just read what I read?” With a story like this, you just need to say what happened.

*In the 10 days since the first installment of the serial was posted, the Wichita Eagle has had more than 600,000 page views on the story.

While narratives about family tragedy are legion, Roy Wenzl’s project in The Wichita Eagle differentiates itself in two ways. The first is that the story moves from recounting victimization to providing some sense of empowerment. It is the twin girls themselves, now 19, who take the lead in telling their stories. They are far from healed – such a word seems insufficient to describe whatever it is they will need to do in the long run. However, their willingness to talk – with the goal of helping others who are currently suffering – shows a kind of sufficiency, a possible future, that makes Wenzl’s story, if not redemptive, at least a vehicle for hope.

Kellie and Kathie Henderson in November 2010 (Photo: Travis Heying/The Wichita Eagle)

The story’s other strength lies in its restraint. Though Wenzl doesn’t flinch from the facts at hand, he skips the word incest. He avoids the kind of graphic description he worried might make readers put the paper down.

Yet he finds telling details other places. One twin remembers her head hitting each step as she was dragged to the basement bedroom of her older brother. The scene in which the girls are rescued is agonizing, as the twins deny their abuse to investigators again and again, until their mother steps in. And even though we have already been told the mother knew, seeing her feign ignorance and then retrieve some vestige of her responsibility at the crucial moment is a triumph for the scene and a small blow for humanity in the midst of so much monstrosity.

When Storyboard spoke with Wenzl last week, the project was nearing 600,000 hits, with many responses sent directly to the girls and hundreds of comments posted on the site. The Wichita Eagle, whose multimedia project on a local priest we highlighted previously, once again makes use of video and photos. Such images make the story both more powerful and more mundane, in a good way, as if to remind readers that if it could happen to these girls, it could happen anywhere, to anyone.

[For more on this story, read our interview with Roy Wenzl on how the project came to be, his worst fears for it, and what he hopes it will accomplish.]

In August, you introduced a storytelling experiment that you’re heading up from your perch at The (Charlotte) Observer. For people who haven’t already seen your column on it, describe what you’re doing.

What I’m going to try to do is three things. The thing that I’ve been doing so far, the main thing, is collaborating with readers with interactive projects, where I will throw out a topic or an idea that’s designed for people to build their own story. For example, I started out with this project – I’m trying to give them names – called “One Good Thing.” I wanted people to say one good thing about some group that they’re normally opposed to.

The idea is to get people to tell stories or to say things that can be gathered together and aggregated into something maybe a little bigger, to get an idea how people react to certain things and see what stories people tell around certain topics, and then to put that together. It makes for an interesting group of little mini narratives. I’m also going to be doing a lot of my regular writing on my blog, some of which may end up looking more like the regular columns that I had been doing for the paper, with some shorter and some longer.

And then down the road a little bit, I want to do some longer feature story-type things with an eye on trying to figure out ways to make those more presentable, especially online. I think we worry that people won’t read longer pieces there. I’m trying to figure out how to make those stories more enticing to readers online and in print.

You’ve launched a few project topics already: “Scars,” “One Good Thing,” “12 to 1.” What’s gotten the biggest response so far?

For “12 to 1,” I’ve gotten somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 responses from school kids all over Charlotte. I think a couple of teachers have assigned it in their classes, but we’ve also gotten a bunch from other folks. I’m now in the process of gathering that stuff together and trying to put a little bit of design to it, to make it flow in an interesting way. We’ll be putting it all online at some point, and we’ll be culling the best of those and putting that in print in some way, too.

The “Scars” stories came right before that, and that was one that I just threw out on a whim, without really thinking much about what people might say. That one turned out to be the most interesting one so far, I think, because of the way people reacted to it, and because there was a dramatic change in it part of the way through. What happened was that people had told fairly straightforward – I wouldn’t say lighthearted, but at least interesting – stories: one woman had been bitten by a rattlesnake, and then someone else had been fighting with her sister. And then about two-thirds of the way through, this person posted at like 1:30 in the morning that she had a mastectomy because of breast cancer. She talked about how she felt untouchable, and that this was something she was going to live with for the rest of her life. The end of the thing was “And that’s my happy, uplifting scar story,” written kind of sarcastically.

What I thought was interesting was that the very next post was from somebody reacting to that one. And that person, I believe it was his stepmother, had had something similar, but it had been years ago, and she had really struggled but she had come to terms with it, and she was living a full life now and was not feeling untouchable. I just thought it was interesting how because of the way we’re doing it, people could not just tell stories but also react to each other’s stories and add something meaningful to make a little narrative out of it.

So you introduce an idea and call for people’s stories. You get a bunch of comments and reactions or mini-narratives. And then you turn it into something larger for the paper. Will that be a more traditional long-form-style piece?

I think they may be the stories that we’ve always told in the newspaper and in the business, though part of it is multimedia — to add video and audio and slide shows and things. We’re doing some of that already. I also want to figure out whether there are ways to break the stories up, ways to make them serials, which we have done in our business some but not to any great extent. I want to experiment with those things, too. Are there ways to get people to follow along with a story for a couple weeks or a month?

I think of a Roy Peter Clark story he did several years ago called “Three Little Words” as a kind of a model, in my mind, for how to do these things. I believe he did it for 30 days in small pieces. We ran it in our paper and got a very good response, I believe. In some ways, when we do these long stories now, they tend to end up in the Sunday paper with a lot of gray type, and people who feel pressed for time or intimidated by those things just don’t pick them up. The bottom line for me is that I want people to pick up my stuff and read it, so it may mean breaking it up in smaller parts, it may mean mixing it in with multimedia components. I’m just trying to think of some ways to do longer stories that we feel will grab a larger audience.

You mentioned Roy Peter Clark. Do you have any other role models for the project, or do you feel like you’re coming up with this from scratch?

No, I’m not inventing it from scratch at all. I’m stealing from lots of people.

Drop names.

What got me thinking about this years ago, the first thing I remember seeing that made me think about new ways we could gather information and present it in stories was PostSecret, where people send in postcards telling secrets about their lives. I could read and have read that for hours at a time. It’s amazing to me, the little mini-stories, obviously the size of a postcard – you’re talking many times about no more than 10 or 15 words. But by being well-edited, curated and given a flow, it’s fascinating to me.

More recently, in the last year or two, I’ve been fascinated with this guy Ze Frank and the stuff he’s doing. He does games and video work, but the stuff of his that I’ve really become attached to is little reader projects very much like the one I’m talking about. The one I linked early on my blog as an example is what I think he called the 52to48 project, around the time of the election, where the split in the eletion was 52 to 48. What he asked people to do was if you voted red to say something nice about people who were blue, and if you voted blue, to say something nice about people who were red, with the idea that we really do have more commonalities than differences. It was done through photos. And the photos are great. There’s a couple kissing, and one says on the cheek, “I voted red,” and one says “I voted blue.”

That made me think. People are creative. If you give them an interesting idea and let people riff on it, there’s the possibility of getting some really interesting material out of it. So those were a couple role models for me. And then more things that have been more long-term or are more traditional stories, things like “This American Life” and StoryCorps, which is a really great audio series doing something similar to what I’m doing.

So there are a lot of great things that I’ve been looking at over the last three or so years that coalesced. The only thing I’m doing different is that I’m doing it in the framework of a newspaper. I’m taking from all these good things and trying to do it in a newspaper setting.

How long have you been given to make this work?

Well, I haven’t been given any particular time. I’ve been given plenty of rope to hang myself with. My bosses here at The Observer have been bold and generous in letting me do this. I know full well the difficulty there is in taking a columnist – I’ve been doing this for 13 years, and in that time you build up a following – to take me off the board as a columnist and let me try this new thing. I’m very grateful to them for doing that.

We agreed early on when we talked about it that it’s an experiment. I keep saying “Six months,” but nobody has put a timeline on me at all. What I’ve told everybody is six months down the road, let’s reevaluate. If it’s working real well, we’ll keep going, and if it’s a disaster, we’ll do something else.

I think the other part that’s interesting about all this is that at the paper, when we’ve done something like this in the past, we’ve planned it pretty thoroughly. We’ve done a lot of research and held a lot of meetings about how we want to do it, how we want to design it, and how we want to frame it. We didn’t do that as much with this idea. In sort of a Web way, we’ve thrown it out there. I hope and believe we’ll be enhancing it as we go along, making it a little easier to look at, refining some of the ways we reach out to people. But we didn’t answer all the questions before we started.

That’s sort of terrifying, but it’s also kind of cool, that we’re just going to try something, see if it works, and try to make it better as we go along.

If everything goes really well, what will this look like in a year?

Well, my hope is a couple of things. We talk about communities a lot now, especially on the Web, building a community, a readership that stays with you. We’ve been really good so far on the Web and in print in building communities around news topics. We have a community of people who are interested in crime news, we have a community of people who are interested in politics, and we have a community that’s interested in sports – all of which are subdivided in certain ways. We really have not – I’m talking about the newspaper business in general and maybe the larger media business in general, too – we have not thought about building a community around stories. That is what I think “This American Life,” PostSecret and Ze Frank have done. They’ve shown that you can build a community around good storytelling, stories that people are really interested in, stores that people want to be a part of.

So I guess a year from now, what I’d like to be able to see is a good, solid community that we’ve built here around the storytelling that I’m trying to do, that we’re trying to do. I think it’s out there, and part of what this next year is going to be about is figuring out how to reach those folks and what they respond to – to ring some bells with the larger community out there.

That’s not just from a journalistic standpoint; it’s from a practical standpoint. I need an audience, or it doesn’t make sense to keep doing this. So I want to try to find that audience that responds to those things. I don’t know if it needs to be gigantic, but it’s got to be more than 20 people. I hope you can build a pretty big audience by talking about these things and doing it in a way that brings people back. A year from now, I’d like to see that we have a community.

Back in the 19th century, Dickens wrote these serialized novels, and I’m sure everyone who knows about his books has heard the stories of how people were waiting on the docks for the latest installment to come out. I hope that I can build a community that’s waiting on the docks, so that when we get ready to do something new, there’s a ready-made group of people who are excited about and interested in what comes next.

If you want to pass along stories you think we should include in future lists, please don’t hesitate to send them along via email or Twitter.

SPORTS

“In search of the perfect round rolling object” by Ian Jack from The Guardian online (via TheBrowser.com). Jack looks at the evolution of the soccer ball in international affairs from Kashmir in the 1890s to this year’s World Cup in South Africa.

The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series – The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, by Joe Posnanski (via Tommy Tomlinson).

Tony Perez was standing at home plate, ready to hit. They called him the Big Dog, or Doggie for short. Doggie had grown up in Cuba, before Castro’s men came rushing down from the mountains. He had been raised to spend his life lugging bags of sugar at the refinery near his home. That’s what his father did, that’s what his brothers did, and when he turned 14, that’s what he did too. He would never forget the way his body felt at the end of those days. And he would always tell his mother that he wanted something more, he wanted to play baseball in the United States under the bright lights. She told him to grow up and stop dreaming about nonsense.”You will work in the factory just like everyone else in this family,” she told him.

THE BP OIL SLICK

Not surprisingly, now that the oil has begun to come ashore in the Gulf states, classic storytelling about human-petroleum encounters have begun to appear.

“Oil blankets Pensacola Beach,” by Ben Montgomery from the St. Petersburg Times, with a nod toward the Book of Revelation.

The tide came in Tuesday night, under a moon almost full, and when the sun came up and the water retreated there it was: a broken band of oil about 5 feet wide and 8 miles long. It looked like tobacco spit and smelled foreign, and it pooled in yesterday’s footprints as far as you could see.

“Seven Days in the Life Of A Catastrophe,” by Gary Smith from Sports Illustrated. The svengali of sports profiles looks at the Gulf spill up close for a week, from the God’s-eye view to the perspective from the ground, and tries to figure out what it has to do with athletics.

PARENTAL LEGACIES

“Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure” by Thomas Goetz from Wired. Goetz looks at Google co-founder Sergei Brin’s odds of getting Parkinson’s, the $50 million he’s plowed into research and the ways in which the flood of data made possible by technology will change the way medical research will be done.

“A love of story was my Dad’s gift to me,” a Father’s Day remembrance by Roy Wenzl from The Wichita Eagle (via Gangrey.com).

Dad grinned a half-grin. He was dressed in the grease-stained denim jacket he wore to drive the tractor in winter. “Why is Achilles interesting?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Because he is great?”

Dad frowned, and opened the door to walk outside.

“Achilles is interesting because Achilles is flawed.”

“What flaw?” I asked. “WHAT FLAW?”

“Figure it out,” he said.

“Where I Was,” a blog entry from Laura Zigman on HearLauraBrant.com (via @susanorlean).

Everyone has had a phone call, or a moment, like that — one that divides the present and the future: who you’ve been and who you suddenly become. My phone call came on a cold quiet day in early January. It was from my mother telling me she’d gotten her CAT scan results back and that there was a growth on her pancreas.

THE WAR

“From Vietnam to Afghanistan: Not winning hearts and minds,” from former Washington Post editor Henry Allen.

I’d done some counterinsurgency work as a corporal in the Marine Corps. This was in 1966, three years earlier. I was at Chu Lai, south of Danang. We gave away truckloads of flour, cement and roofing tin. The Vietnamese were cool with their thanks, but that was understandable. We’d gotten a warm response from one village chief we worked with until the Viet Cong worked with him too, by cutting off his head. I think of him when I read of Taliban reprisals against Afghans who work with Americans.

One day our 105mm howitzer battery was particularly noisy, taking out a Viet Cong hamlet. Then came a cease-fire order. It seemed it wasn’t a Viet Cong but a friendly hamlet. We’d leveled it.

The project, “The Miracle of Father Kapaun,” centers on a U.S. Army chaplain ordained in Wichita and reported to have performed extraordinary actions on the battlefield in Korea. More recently, a local man made a startling recovery after organized prayers were held asking for Kapaun’s intercession, which drew the Vatican to investigate.

It’s a perfect narrative storm, an inspirational religious story assembled for the holiday season, with two fresh news hooks: the possibility of sainthood for Kapaun and the Army decision over whether or not to posthumously award him the Medal of Honor. The paper had gotten strong response from a Kapaun article earlier in the year, which gave them a hint that a bigger project would interest readers.

Still, that kind of narrative space is unusual at a mid-size newspaper these days. Reporter Roy Wenzl, who wrote the print portion of the Kapaun project, praises the paper’s leadership. “When we find good stories, they try to give us the opportunity to work on them,” he says. “They’re gutsy, daring people.”

The 8-part print serial runs more than 17,000 words in all. The first parts of the serial are currently online with embedded video clips. That might have been more than enough for most papers the size of the Eagle, which Wenzl says now has less than half the staff it had when he arrived over a decade ago. But Eagle photojournalist Travis Heying has also put together a 45-minute DVD. Local PBS station KPTS will air the documentary in December, and the paper is offering copies for sale online now.

Wenzl and Heying made a conscious decision not only to give Kapaun full narrative treatment but take a step back and tell as big a story as possible, with the goal of being the narrative of record in the likely event that Kapaun receives the medal of honor, and the less certain possibility of his ordination as a saint further down the road.

Heying was clear about covering different ground with the video. The print serial and the video “really are two different stories,” he says. “Roy’s story focuses on the events in Korea—and that’s the dramatic stuff. What I wanted to do with the video was to tell the more complete story about his life. Why do we care about this now? Where did Kapaun come from? And then what did he do that made people in Kansas pray to him today?”

We’ll have to see the whole project to get a sense of whether the material stands up under the weight of 17,000 words (though Wenzl proved himself a skillful hand with short narrative in an earlier Notable Narrative on the Digest). There are compelling moments in the first installments—primarily battle reconstructions recounting the account of a former POW saved by Kapaun. And the serial has begun to gently examine the question of what exactly is a miracle—I hope Wenzl follows that thread through the rest of his story.

I’m intrigued by the idea of a newspaper doing a hyperlocal multimedia narrative for its own readers with an eye on exporting it to specific communities elsewhere. Religion and military service are two slots for this kind of storytelling, but I could see this concept working for a lot of topics. Larger newspapers have already taken a similar approach to special sports event and inauguration editions. It may be a way to keep doing classic print narratives while simultaneously taking advantage of other storytelling forms on television or online.

We’ll check back in 2010 to see how it all plays out, but in the meantime, Wenzl reports that video pre-orders have covered costs for four trips across a dozen states to talk to people for the project.

Wenzl evokes the place well, in particular with his recurring use of the phrase “sunlight and grass and water.” He structures the piece handily: He begins at the moment when the bitter son returns home, setting up the complication. Then Wenzl steps back 150 years, to the beginning of the family legend. He alternates between that history and the more recent story until the two threads merge in the final installment. It’s “a structural architecture I borrowed from John McPhee’s ‘Rising from the Plains,’ ” Wenzl wrote in an e-mail to us.

In that last installment, the estranged son returns to the ranch and helps make repairs. He appears to readers to have reconciled, at least to a degree, with his family. His family “looked at what he did with surprise and relief, and even a small measure of hope.” We were gladdened by this next writerly aside: “False hope, maybe. Americans are suckers for happy endings.” Wenzl shows some narrative resolution but leaves room for the complicated plots of real life and good fiction.