What’s the place of imagination in literary journalism?

The panic of a drowning person is mixed with an odd incredulity that this is actually happening. Having never done it before, the body—and the mind—do not know how to die gracefully. The process is filled with desperation and awkwardness. “So this is drowning,” a drowning person might think. “So this is how my life finally ends.”

Excerpt from Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, in which he pretty much recreated scenes of a sinking ship, from which no one survived.

In memoriam

This time last year, I was just starting to get to know Anthony. Even then, he was already a troubled man.

Now, he’s dead.

When I first met him, Anthony had only been out of prison for a week. I had guessed that he was in his late 40s (he was actually 50); there were strands of gray in his hair. He was clean-shaven, sporting a cream-colored three-piece suit, freshly pressed. In his tattooed left hand, Anthony held a bible. I remember him smiling as he greeted me with his throaty, hoarse voice, sounding as if he just woke up from a night of chain smoking.

He had his three children with him that rainy Sunday morning: a 5-year-old boy, a 7-year-old boy, and an 11-year-old girl. They were shy, like most children are at first. We were at the Imani Mission Center; I was there to observe their weekly Sunday gatherings. I was writing a story about redemption; I had been interested in how former convicts think about and conceptualize their turning points, the moments they decided they want to be ‘good.’

I interviewed Anthony a few times, spending a few hours for a few consecutive Saturdays at his body shop in north Columbia. I’d call him and tell him I was coming over to hang out, and he’d be disappointed whenever I’d pull out my yellow legal pad and begin to take notes. “I thought we were just hangin’ out!”

Still, he good-naturedly answered my incessant questions, let me watch as he and his adult sons fixed cars. I hung out with his three younger children, too, a couple of times. They were good kids, I knew, like little talkative angels, but you could tell they were also sad. With a father in and out of prison, they had seen too much.

Anthony keeps his Bible in his briefcase, which he said he takes everywhere. Also tucked in the briefcase is a copy of the exit speech he wrote a week before he was released from his latest bid in prison. He titled it “Finding Myself.”

I read some were that prisions are like giant dumpsters were society throws people defined as social trash. They are truly filthy, hurtful, places where life is sick,twisted and unseakably sad. Were I have learned that survival is based on the strength of my mind and I do have a choice to change myself. Facing that force me to make a firm commitment to myself and my intentions to bulding a positive future.

“My spelling isn’t so good,” he had told me apologetically. He had learned to type on a computer, he said, and is used to the easy spelling fix. The speech had been typed on the prison’s old typewriter.“See, I used to not know much about addiction, criminal behavior, criminal thinking,” Anthony told me. “And prison — prison is what you make of it. That’s where I learned about all those things. That’s why I titled my speech ‘Finding Myself.’ In prison, you’re stripped off everything you have. Clothes, accessories, pride. They take it away. You have nothing. You do what they say, when they say. But we were there for a reason.”

I grew to really like Anthony, and grew to look forward to seeing him and his three young children on Sundays at the Center.  Still, he would give me vague answers whenever I asked him what he went to prison for. Too many DWIs, he would say, but wouldn’t tell me how many. Someone screwed me over in a contract, he told me at another time. Listening back to some old tapes and looking at some old notes now, I found that I didn’t press him nearly hard enough to tell me the truth. I liked him too much, failing miserably at the supposedly objective journalist point of view. I didn’t want to know things that would make me dislike him.

Ted Conover’s submersion journalism

Journalist Ted Conover in his correctional officer uniform at Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, NY. Photo by Jennifer Klein/TedConover.com

I have probably seen The Shawshank Redemption (1994) too many times. I’m not sure which viewing set my mind on the topic of prison guards — probably the first one — but I’ve come to expect all of them to be a little dumb and very abusive. The inmates? Largely victimized. The warden? The devil personified. Prisons are such mysteries, and The Shawshank Redemption confirmed my preconceived notions about what’s behind the ominous walls. (I suspect perhaps that’s also what listening to a Morgan Freeman narration for hours can do to a person. His voice just becomes the truth.)

Ted Conover, a veteran journalist much more curious and much less impressionable than yours truly, has always been fascinated with prisons. Taxpayers pour so much money to the Department of Correctional Services, Conover thinks, but they never really get to see the inner workings of its prisons. He also saw a gap in the media coverage: the inmates are covered, but what about the correctional officers? He set out to interview the department’s workers. He scheduled visits to prisons around New York state.  But officers mysteriously canceled interviews. On a prison tour, he noticed guards would stop talking when he entered the room. When he asked officers questions, they would trade glances with their supervisors before answering. Conover knew he was never going to get the real truth the conventional way.

Conover's graduating class at the Albany Training Academy. Photo courtesy of TedConover.com

Things I learned from John McPhee’s “A Fleet of One”

John McPhee. Photo by Candace Braun/Town Topics

Click here for the story, originally published in The New Yorker on Feb. 17, 2003.

Off the top of my head:

1. Dry humor is the bomb. Especially if you’re John McPhee.

Observe:

After trucks use a bed, it has to be re-groomed. The state charges grooming fees. Some drivers, brakeless and out of control, stay on the highway and keep on plunging because they don’t want to pay the grooming fees. Ainsworth said, “Would you worry about your life or the Goddamned grooming fee?”

He was asking the wrong person.

2.  Channel your curiosity. I don’t know how McPhee does it. Even when he writes about things that are ordinary, his tone somehow sounds curious and fascinated, and I remain curious and fascinated.

Before the liquid fish guts, his load had been soap. Generally, the separation is distinct between food-grade and chemical tankers. You haul chemicals or you haul food. The vessels are different, the specs are different—mainly in protective devices against the aftermath of rollovers. Ainsworth used to haul wine, orange juice, and chocolate.

3. Truckers take their hats real seriously.

Currently reading:

Ted Conover’s Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2000). It’s sort of wonderful.

Things I learned from In Cold Blood

Top: Perry Smith. Bottom: Dick Hickock. Killed four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kan., on Nov. 15, 1959.

Off the top of my head:

1. Immerse yourself in your subjects. Then immerse yourself some more.

2. Don’t be afraid of your own inferences. Write them down; acknowledge them as inferences. Don’t mistake them as facts.

3. Don’t underestimate the power of foreshadowing. Please, do it. Stay subtle, stay delicate. But do it.

4. Don’t be afraid to empathize — it would complicate the issue you’re writing about, which in turn would most likely help you uncover the oft ‘excluded middle.’ Every story has more than two sides. Just be aware of your empathy, and know when you’re empathizing. (Did Capote know? At times it feels like it’s subconscious, but nothing in In Cold Blood can possibly be subconscious. Every word selected carefully, every frame built since the first few pages. Oh, Capote was smart enough to know he felt sorry for Smith.)

5. You will probably never be as awesome as Truman Capote, but don’t let that stop you from trying.

Flea case scenario

The setting: The kitchen of a house in Jackson, Mississippi.

The people: Three nonprofit interns.

The time: 10:07pm.

The story: I was sitting in our kitchen, still wearing the clothes I wore to work today. I was concentrating on ignoring the itches and bumps on my ankles and arms, and the especially annoying one on my left palm, when I notice Jon, my roommate, ceasing to type on his laptop.

I looked up. He stood up.

He unbuckled his pants and I didn’t even try to look away. We’re way past looking away. Our level of roommateness have reached levels I never even imagined.

With his pants around his ankle, Jon has now started to jerk his legs wildly, yelling “I FELT ONE! I FELT ONE!”

And I watched him hop up and down in place, his yarmulke slipping, now sitting lopsided on his head, his legs still jerking in a wild attempt to dismount an unseen parasite. I started to snicker.

Disgruntled and yelling expletives, he pulled his pants back up. “That was not funny. I felt one on me, man, I felt one on me.”

I would have laughed again if I didn’t detect the sheer desperation in his voice. It was all too familiar. I caught his eyes and notice the familiarly wild expression I saw mine in the mirror this morning.

Fleas have attacked our house.

You see, Jon never signed up for a flea attack. Jon is a nice, college-aged Jewish boy from Massachusetts who only deserves good things to happen to him. He is in Jackson, Mississippi to serve as an intern at a local nonprofit organization. He came here to do honest work. He is here to help perserve Jewish history in the southern United States. He loves Bruce Springsteen, only eats fair trade bananas, and has cooked dinner for his Jackson roommates at least once.  He lets us borrow his copy of “The Confederacy of Dunces” and always reminds us that every time we listen to T-Pain, somewhere a kitten dies. Jon is a wonderful, thoughtful person.

Does Jon deserve having to suffer through unbuckling his pants and dancing his funny dance in front of the roommate he’s known for two months, simply because he thought he felt a flea on him?

Chorus: No.

But danced his funny dance, Jon did. As he and I looked into each other’s wild, tired eyes in our flea-infested kitchen, I realized I’ve never understood him better. You see, on top of the general itchiness and grossness that comes with a flea attack, there’s also that indignation that stupid little insects have invaded your personal territory. That’s why, without hesitation, Jon unbuckled his pants in his effort to thwart that phantom flea. That’s why, as I put on my sock this morning and noticed a flea on it, I shrieked expletives that I would personally find very offensive on an ordinary day and felt like I needed to learn how to shoot a gun so I could kill! kill! killllll! the fleas.

—

Anyway, none of us in this house know how to deal with fleas. We’re renting this duplex for the summer, and the owners of the house (who have since left Mississippi for Colorado, after living with us for about two weeks at the beginning of the summer) have an adorable, 12-year-old female yellow lab and Husky mix named Caedie.

That bitch.

We loved the dog, but had we known she would leave a nation of angry fleas in her wake, I probably would have welcomed her in my bedroom a little less. But we’re dealing with our little problem now–we sprinkled the house with diatomaceous earth, which is supposed to dehydrate the fleas and kill them. I’ve never felt so much joy out of the prospective death of another living being, but I think the constant itchiness have driven me slightly mad.

Wish us luck.

Are we capable of redemption?

I’m taking a little class called Intermediate Writing with the wonderful Mary Kay Blakely this semester. It’s one of those classes where you actually read every reading material the professor assigns you — because they’re written by Katherine Boo and Gay Talese and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and you’d be a fool not to.

This semester, the students in our class will learn how to practice native immersion journalism. So, we will stay and get intimate with one topic for an entire semester.

My topic is turning points in the lives of ex-convicts who are trying to make good. What does it take to truly change? Are we capable of making an 180 degree turn? How do we maintain that change, after we’ve decided we’re on a turning point?

I’ll leave you, blog readers, with a nice little snippet from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago because I like me some interesting quotes. Especially ones said by Soviet political dissidents who Josef Stalin sent to concentration camps. Ha!

Solzhenitsyn spent some time with some really hardcore criminals during his time at the camps, and here’s what he has to say about good and bad:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a part of his own heart?

Journalist Wisdom of the Day, Part 3.

I’m currently reading a couple of books where some of the best narrative journalists of our time talk about their writing and reporting techniques.

I like to pull out some interesting sentences from these books, just as something to hold on to. Hey, some people like Proverbs, I like my Tom Wolfe quotes when it comes to my work. I’ve posted some of them, in the form of A Journalist’s Wisdom of the Day. I figured I would try such posts a more regular part of this blog.

Today’s quote came from Adam Hochschild, who’s the co-founder of Mother Jones, and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation, among others. Personally, wouldn’t mind to have written for those three magazines.

Here’s what he has to say about ‘travel writing’:

The problem is that advertisers dictate the contents of newspapers’ travel articles. Cruise lines, restaurants, travel agencies, and airlines determine what we read. I’m all for vacation traveling, but the most interesting travel has nothing to do with cruise lines or restaurants. It involves entry into worlds other than your own. You don’t have to go very far to do that. For most people living in Manhattan, the world of the south Bronx is frather away — by every measure but geography — than much of Paris or London.

(Published in Telling True Stories.)

Journalist Wisdom of the Day: Read.

Read good detective fiction. I don’t think anybody does narrative structure better than good detective writers.

— David Halberstam, author of The Best and the Brightest (1972). From “The Narrative Idea,” in Telling True Stories (1972).