David Grann believes that scouting an idea for a book or magazine article should be more than an intellectual exercise. The right story, he says, “gets its hooks into you.”

The tales that grip Grann, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and the bestselling author of seven books, are often those that history has deliberately buried — with a good measure of adventure thrown in.

His latest book, “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder,” is a captivating account of the ill-fated voyage of an 18th-century British warship that wrecked off the coast of Patagonia. Years after it disappeared, two separate groups of survivors made it to safety, each offering a starkly different narrative about what happened in the wilderness.

Grann’s previous book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” delved into a conspiracy to murder members of the wealthy Osage Nation in Oklahoma and gain access to their oil rights. A film based on the book, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, premiered this fall. (Scorcese and DiCaprio have already signed on for an adaptation of “The Wager.”)

Below, Grann shares his method for appraising story ideas, his revision process and advice for journalists who want to follow in his footsteps. (In a companion piece , we delve into how he approached reporting and writing “The Wager.”) Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve found so many stories of the kind many writers hope to come across once or twice in a lifetime. What separates the good ideas from the truly great ones?
Coming up with the right idea is the hardest part. First, you try to find a story that grips you and has subjects that are fascinating. Then, you ask: Are there underlying materials to tell that story? Once in a while, I come across a rich story, but the records are classified, or nobody’s alive, and nobody left any records behind. The third level of interrogation is: Does the story have another dimension, richer themes or trap doors that lead you places? It should tell us something larger about the human condition, the mystery of our existence, systems of injustice or power, or the nature of truth. Another factor is: Has this been done, and when? If someone once wrote about this, that doesn’t mean most readers have seen it. But there are stories that are so masterfully done and authoritative, there’s no reason to revisit them. The question to ask is: Why should I tell this story? Am I going to be adding anything — new information, a new perspective?

After that analytical process, there’s still something irrational: A story gets its hooks into you, and you can’t let go. A story is only really going to work if you are completely passionate about it, because there are going to be so many challenges and hurdles.

I spend a preliminary period ruthlessly interrogating ideas as I come across them, even though it’s time-consuming and a bit frustrating. I don’t want to wake up two years into a book project saying, “This isn’t going anywhere.”

Are there projects you thought might sustain a book that you ultimately abandoned?
When I was working on “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I began to look into the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. One figure who had been a private eye on the Osage murder cases had also been involved in the massacre as a corrupt police officer. I spent three months researching it and realized it was a separate book. When I finished “Killers of the Flower Moon,” several people already had written books about Tulsa and others were coming out, which I was very happy about. You have a little disappointment, but when something’s been done well and is important, you think, “Maybe these people were better to tell that story.”

When you’re actually working on something, you hate being scooped — that’s certainly happened to me as a magazine writer. There’s a reason certain stories hold fascination, and there are a lot of us out there looking to tell stories.

You’re hunting for your next book idea now. What’s this phase like for you?
It’s a privileged life to be a writer, so I don’t want to inflate or mythologize our suffering. But writing isn’t easy for me, and research is time-consuming. The first year is leisurely: “I’ll read this, I’ll read that.” At some point you wake up, and you’re like, “Oh my God, I only have a third of the manuscript, and my contract is due in a couple years.” Then you’re always behind and white knuckling it. So sometimes when I finish these books, I’m really burned out. And I’m like, “Oh God, what’s going to be next? Can I do this again? Is any story going to grab me?” I’m now at the point again where I’m hungry for something.

I’m envious of friends who finish something and know exactly what the next book or magazine story will be. That’s just not me; I’m so mono-obsessed that I lose track of other things. It’s a hard period to some degree because I’m not on a beat. I want to find a new world or subculture or place or time.

There’s no secret to it: You’re just reading newspapers, magazines, books, texts; you’re looking at endnotes; you’re searching archives with digital databases; you’re interviewing people you know or people in random fields that interest you. You have nothing, and then suddenly you have it. You never know exactly when you’re going to strike — that’s the serendipity.

You’ve said that a lot of your writing gets done in revision. What does that process look like?
I think of all writing as just rewriting. I do several rounds of revision myself. My next reader is always my wife, Kyra Darnton, who is a great journalist and reader. She’s got an eye for structure and the movement of a story. I’ll take her suggestions and do more revisions, then show that chapter to a friend or colleague I trust. If I have half or one-third of a manuscript, I might show it to my book editor or agent for another round of revisions. When the manuscript is done, I write to my friends and say, “I know you’re very busy, but could you read this?” And I have two foundational editors: Daniel Zalewski, who has been my editor at The New Yorker since 2003 and is brilliant, and Bill Thomas, who has been the editor for all my books and is a terrific reader.

You want to be open to suggestions, because it’s hard to see your work objectively — and I hate criticism.

How do you juggle being both a book author and a staff writer at The New Yorker?
I have very patient editors. For most of my career, I was a magazine writer. Some of my New Yorker pieces — the 20,000-word stories — probably could’ve been books. Eventually, I became a magazine writer who wrote a book, then I went back to the magazine.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” was the first thing I did that could never have been a magazine story because of the sprawling nature of the history; it just fit a different medium. In the past, I was under contract to write a certain number of pieces a year. Now, I’m more of a book author who, when I have time, does a magazine piece. I still think of The New Yorker as my work home, in part because that’s where so many of my friends and colleagues are.

You mentioned spending weeks or months looking into stories that may not pan out. Can you share how you make that work logistically? Did you reach a certain point in your career where that became possible to do full time?
Totally fair question.

Part of writing and journalism is the infrastructure that lets you do things. For most of my career, financially things could be hard, because I was always behind schedule. Spending a year on a story is not a lucrative way to make a living. It could be stressful, especially when you have kids. I was a freelancer for many years, and I’ve always gotten health insurance through my wife. That process of searching for ideas had to be done under much tighter constraints. I was up a lot of nights. The financial pressures weigh on you and, in some ways, motivate you.

The change in the last few years is that I feel fortunate enough to have had some success. The pressures never go away; I’m still under contract and have deadlines. But if I spend several weeks looking into something that doesn’t work out, I don’t have the same level of terror.

What advice do you have for journalists who want to do the kind of writing you do?
The media ecosystem I grew up in is so different from the one that exists today. I freelanced for small local newspapers, then I worked for The Hill in Washington, D.C., then I tried to get into the little magazines. My path was very circuitous, and it took forever until I got a full-time journalism job — I was 27 or 28. But there was a certain kind of path.

Now, there are a lot more publications, but some of those paths are gone. Media is a struggling business that doesn’t have resources to pay all these talented people the wages they deserve to let them do the kind of reporting they’re capable of. The path still exists, because I see a new generation of journalists doing unbelievably great work, but I don’t know as much about it.

If you want to report and write, you just have to find ways to report and write. I did it any way I could when I was young: cover a high-school graduation, write an obituary. I lived in Mexico and freelanced for an English-language magazine that paid me a dollar or two per piece. I wanted to get my clips and learn by doing. That is still the most important thing: Just keep trying to do it.

If you were a freelancer trying to break into The New Yorker today, what kind of story would you pitch?
When I was a freelancer, I was terrified to pitch The New Yorker. It took me years and years to work up the courage. I was like, “Oh, I’m not good enough.”

Try to find a story that is so damn good they can’t say no. And also a story that not everybody on staff is doing, like a presidential campaign or impeachment. The first story I pitched The New Yorker that they went for was about a bank robber who kept serially robbing banks into his seventies; his hearing aid was a police scanner. He also was arguably the greatest prison escape artist in American history: He broke out of San Quentin in a kayak on which he’d painted on the side, “Rub a dub dub.” I thought, “Well, I can’t mess up that story.” When he got arrested, everybody wanted the story, but he wouldn’t talk. I spent two years writing to him until he finally agreed. They knew I could write magazine pieces, because I’d written for other publications, so they weren’t totally rolling the dice.

Once you’re on staff, it’s easier to get stories approved.

Who are your literary heroes?
So many of my colleagues. And there are people who are kind of obvious but are touchstones: I’ll pick up a collection of Gay Talese’s stories, or I’ll reread Joan Didion for the cadence of her sentences. I’ll revisit Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild.” When I first decided to write historical narratives, I read Erik Larson to see how he does it. For pleasure, I read mostly fiction: Willa Cather, Cormac McCarthy. When I was working on “The Wager,” I read a lot of Melville, and when I was working on “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I read Faulkner. It gets you in that world and gives you some inspiration.

Because writing is a struggle for me, I love reading writers who can transport you with their language.

Several of your books have been made into films. What involvement have you had on that side of things?
I love movies, but I don’t want to write screenplays or make movies. I prefer to do what I do. My relationship is always to be a resource and help them in any which way: information and documents and questions about the subjects. When you’re an author, you have very limited control over the development of a film project. So ideally, you want to get it into the hands of people who know what they’re doing and share your commitment to and passion for that story. I’ve been really lucky in that way. “Killers of the Flower Moon” was about a part of our history that had largely been excised from our conscience.  The idea that there is a movie that will further bring people into the story and hopefully lead them to visit the Osage Nation Museum or read about other parts of Native American history. To me that’s the best part of it all.

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Katia Savchuk is a freelance magazine journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The post David Grann Part 2: Craft wisdom and breaking into narrative nonfiction appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Seven years ago, David Grann found himself staring at a faded journal in a digital archive. It belonged to John Byron, grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, and documented his journey as a midshipman on The Wager, a British warship that set sail in 1740 on a secret mission to capture a Spanish galleon.

The archaic syntax was hard to decipher, and Grann started to get bored. Then he came across passages that caught his attention: vivid descriptions of scurvy and typhoons, cannibalism and mutiny. This was the inspiration for Grann’s latest book, “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder” (2023), which chronicles the disastrous voyage from the perspectives of Byron; the ship’s captain, David Cheap; and its gunner, John Bulkeley. After the vessel sinks off the coast of Patagonia, a group of survivors stranded on a remote island descend into what Grann has called a “real-life ‘Lord of the Flies.’” When some men make it back to England against the odds, they bear profoundly different accounts of what transpired.

Grann has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003 and is the bestselling author of seven books, including “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” and “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.”

“The Wager” is not only an enthralling tale of survival, but also an exploration of how certain narratives prevail while competing versions of the truth are suppressed. Grann spoke with Nieman Storyboard about organizing his research, deciding where to begin and end, and recreating historical events. (EDITOR’S NOTE: In Part 2 of our interview, Grann offers general craft and career advice.) Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Is perusing archives a common pastime for you? Were you searching for something in particular?
I always find there’s a kind of serendipity to research. I’m a generalist, so one of the things that compels me to a story is addressing my own ignorance. The subject of mutinies in literature and film had always caught my interest. I started to get some books on mutinies and do online searches. You go from one article to another, then maybe there’s a link or reference. Suddenly, I found myself linked to a digital scan of John Byron’s account. That was just the spark, and many more months went by before I decided this was going to be my next book.

You’ve noted that you knew very little about British naval history when you started this project. Where do you start in a situation like that, and how does your research progress?
I didn’t know anything! I embark on two paths of research simultaneously: A survey, so that you become more familiar with the subject, and primary materials specific to your story.

In this case, I first found some general histories of the British Navy and of that period. I’m an obsessive reader of endnotes, which hold clues to archives and other books and manuscripts. Each document leads to another. If I’m reading a very good book on a certain subject, I track the author down, and hopefully they’re patient enough to chat with me. It took a year until I felt I had facility in the maritime world I was writing about. These were floating civilizations with different mores and customs and their own coded language. You’re not going to be able to write with fluidity or recreate a world unless you understand it.

I also needed that background just to read the documents. For example, I pulled muster books, which recorded your name, rank and the date you boarded a ship. First, I thought these documents didn’t tell me much. But there was a column filled with abbreviations, and I kept seeing “DD.” I learned that “DD” stood for “Discharged Dead,” so these documents told a really important story about the horrific toll this expedition took. Documents can speak in unexpected and startling ways.

How do you organize these voluminous materials and your notes on them?
My office looks like a shipwreck! I read through all written materials — whether a history book, diary or “Moby Dick” — and highlight passages of interest. Then I undertake the long, cumbersome process of typing all that up in a Word document to create a kind of central database. That allows me to make the information more searchable and to extract information when I need it.

Typing up the material forces you to become steeped in it, which gives me a general sense of an outline. Then for each chapter, I create a detailed outline by extracting relevant material from that larger database and moving it into a new file with a citation. It’s tedious, but then I have everything I need in front of me and don’t have to interrupt moments of flow in the writing process. This also makes me aware of any holes in my research.  

You open the prologue and first chapter of “The Wager” with these sentences:

The only impartial witness was the sun.

And …

Each man in the squadron carried, along with a sea chest, his own burdensome story.

I found these beautiful the first time I read them and later realized they also perfectly capture the main theme of the book. How conscious a move was that on your part, and when did you shape those sentences?
I always find the prologue of a book the hardest to write, because it’s teasing so much. Some people write the book and then do the prologue, but I’m a person who never writes the end before I write the beginning. When I sketched out the prologue, I had the idea of ships arriving, but I didn’t have that first sentence. At the end, I revisited it and realized I wanted a beginning that did justice to all the themes of the book. I remember struggling to come up with that image. I think I had the metaphor in different ways and eventually settled on that construct.

In the first chapter, I did have that line early on in some form. I decided to structure the book in a way that underscored the central themes of the nature of storytelling and truth. Because it was going to be told from the warring perspectives of three people on the ship, the idea that they’re carrying their own burdens and ambitions and stories felt right to me.

When you described the sun as a witness, how did you know that it was sunny and not cloudy? I’m always curious about that when you’re writing a historical piece.
I always go back to interrogate something I’ve written and make sure it withstands scrutiny. If you said, “It was a brilliantly sunny day,” you’d be like, “I don’t know, was it?” In this case, you had log books, which often describe the weather. And the passage is covering a larger span of time — days upon days — not saying, “It was 3 o’clock.”

Sometimes the interrogation can lead you to a humorous place. For “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I had a report describing that two detectives interviewed somebody at their house. When I first wrote the sentence, I said they showed up on the stoop and went inside. When I went back, I was like, “Did the house have a stoop?” I looked up the definition of “stoop” and called the local historical society to ask if they had photographs of the area. I wasted a good couple of weeks trying to figure out whether this house had a stoop. Finally, I just rewrote it without “stoop.” Often, you just have to change a word or cut an adjective.

In the prologue, you write the following:

While stranded on the island the Wager’s officers and crew…tried to re-create naval order. But as their situation deteriorated…[they] descended into a Hobbesian state of depravity. There were warring factions and marauders and abandonments and murders. A few of the men succumbed to cannibalism.

Can you tell me about the choice to give so much away up front?
It was tricky — I went back and forth. I felt like it was going to be such a long journey I take you on, and the first couple of chapters do a fair amount of setup. I thought it was important to hook the reader the same way the story hooked me, so I had to give you enough of the tantalizing elements.

But there are key things I leave out: You don’t know who survived, so you have enough, hopefully, to wonder about. I also thought it was important to tease some of the themes of the story. It’s inherently gripping, but part of the reason I decided to tell it was because it has these other themes about the nature of truth and storytelling.

A lot of your chapters end on a suspenseful note:

There seemed to be no escape.

They were themselves being hunted.

The Wager was alone at sea, left to its own destiny.

How do you think about where to begin and end chapters?
I don’t always know the ends of the chapters until I’m writing them, and I don’t even often know the beginning. I have a basic structure in mind. In this case, the voyage has a certain momentum and motion, and I knew I was going to be telling the story from these three perspectives. So for Chapter One, it’s going to be David Cheap’s story, but they also have to get the ships off. And since this is a story about the disintegration of a floating civilization, first I needed to establish what that world was like before it collapsed. For the second chapter, I needed to establish what life was like on the ship, and I knew I was going to be telling that from John Byron’s point of view, because he’s just a boy learning this bewildering world.

Because I’m trying to tell these stories as vivid scenes, I’m looking for underlying material that offers a scene. And each chapter is part of a larger story but also has its own story: Cheap is desperate to get to sea and finally goes off to sea. Cheap finally becomes captain of a ship. The chapter has its own arc and completeness.

You have many beautiful descriptions in the book. Just one example:

Snow began to fall, swirling with the winds and piling in great drifts on Mount Misery and across the shore. Everything seemed whited out, as if being erased.

It can be hard to make descriptions poetic without overwriting. Do you have any tips?
To be honest, good editors. Writing is a solitary practice, and I’m not the most natural writer — it’s a real struggle for me. Sometimes I have a tendency to overwrite, so I’m conscious of that. I have readers I really trust who will take out an adverb or push me back where needed.

I used to write in a very similar style, but now more and more I try to find a voice and style that is appropriate to the material. In “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I wanted to be restrained, spare and very factual — I didn’t want my own ornateness taking away from what was happening. “The Wager” also deals with serious themes, but large sections are a swashbuckling sea tale, so I felt I could have a little more indulgence. But I still wanted to be precise and certainly not overwrought.

Usually, you write it the first time and inevitably go too far. Then you go through the process of paring it back, interrogating it, making sure the image is original.

The last line of the book comes from your own visit to Wager Island, where the men were marooned:

Nothing else remains of the ferocious struggle that once took place there, or of the ravaging dreams of empires.

Can you tell me about writing that?
The whole time I was writing this book, I had a last line in mind: “All that remained was the eternal hush of the sea.” But when I got to the end, I felt that it was poetry over meaning. The line I ended with was a little less lovely but has more meaning. I had to sacrifice the gem that I had basically been chasing for five years.

* * *

Katia Savchuk is a freelance magazine journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The post David Grann Part 1: A deep-dive into “The Wager” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When Elizabeth Weil thought of profiling Max Harris, one of two people facing criminal charges for Oakland's deadly Ghost Ship fire, she figured another reporter must already be on the story. The fire, which took 36 lives when it swept through the artists' collective in December 2016, had received extensive press coverage. The East Bay Times had won a Pulitzer for its reporting on the tragedy in 2017.

Derick Almena, who ran the overstuffed warehouse that some visitors called a “tinder box,” had given several tone-deaf media interviews. But no one had taken a deep look at Harris, the mild-mannered 29-year-old who worked at Ghost Ship in exchange for free rent and cut a more ambiguous figure. Both men are facing 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter in a trial currently under way in Alameda County Superior Court. (The defendants previously accepted a plea bargain sentencing Almena to nine years and Harris to six years in county jail, but a judge threw out the agreement last August.)

Weil, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, reached out to Harris through his lawyer and learned no other magazine writer had beat her to it. “I was totally surprised,” she said. The same thing had happened in 2015 when she decided to profile Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, a notorious character in the underworld of San Francisco's Chinatown.

“There are pieces hiding in plain sight,” says Weil, who is based in San Francisco. “They seem too obvious to you, but some aren't — particularly if you're not in New York, where these local stories aren't on every editor's mind.”

Too often writers make assumptions that dissuade them from pursuing a prominent story: Someone else must be working on this already. He's about to go to trial, so his lawyer will never let him talk. This has been covered widely — what else is there to say?

Luckily, Weil didn't fall into those traps with Harris. "In the Ashes of Ghost Ship," published Dec. 12, 2018, in The New York Times Magazine, is a deeply reported and moving profile that is sure to make most readers rethink how they see the defendant. I talked to Weil about how she got access to her subject, her jailhouse interview process, and how she dealt with an overabundance of material. We also annotated her cover story to delve more deeply into her reporting techniques and writing decisions. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you go about getting access to Harris?

I knew his lawyer, who was one of the attorneys for Shrimp Boy, whom I had profiled earlier. I think it helped that the lawyer knew and trusted me. From the beginning, he was supportive and didn't get in my way or feel like he had to be there all the time. And frankly it's not hard to go visit someone in Santa Rita Jail. You can set up an appointment online and show up.

Lawyers often don't want defendants speaking to the press during a trial. Why do you think he and Harris agreed?

I think the lawyer thought Max was smart, articulate and gentle, that he had a good case, and that he'd been misrepresented in the press. There's a narrative that's been out there in the press since the beginning that Max blocked a staircase (thus preventing people from escaping the building), but court records show that he didn't. The lawyer also knew what kind of writer I am and had a comfort level with me. I told him from the beginning that I wanted to write a profile of Max, not reinvestigate the case. As for Max, I think he was happy to have someone who wanted to hear about his life. When people are incarcerated, it's easy to feel forgotten and like nobody cares.

 As a contributing writer to the Times Magazine, do you secure access first or gauge your editor's interest first?

I originally thought I might want to write a book about this, but I decided it would be too depressing. So by the time I pitched the article, I had done a lot of thinking about it. I knew I wanted to write about Max and had been in touch with the lawyer. I had not yet visited Max, but I knew he would talk to me. If I had pitched the story without doing that, I would've gotten a call saying, “This is great, but to get the assignment, you need to get the access.” If I was pitching somewhere I didn't already have a relationship, I would've definitely started interviewing Max first — because you may not even get as polite a response.

How many times did you interview Harris, and what was your reporting strategy? How did you gain his trust?

I interviewed Max at the jail 10 or 12 times. The first few times, I came as a regular visitor, and I couldn't bring a notebook or pen. I knew I needed him to feel comfortable with me if the story was going to be any good, so I just tried to be a person and establish a real relationship. I let him talk and tried not interrupt too much, and to be genuinely interested and sympathetic. I'd also ask him to call me when he could. If he had said something interesting in person, I asked him to tell me again over the phone so I could record it. After that, I went through official channels to meet with him as a journalist and could interview him for two hours at a time with a tape recorder. My strategy was to have him tell me the whole narrative in broad brush strokes, then go back and ask him to talk about certain things in more detail. In the third round, once I started to draft things, I'd ask much more specific questions.

Did you feel the need to ensure you had an exclusive?

I asked whether anyone else was doing a magazine feature about him and said, “Will you not do another one while I'm doing this?” I do think there is always a risk of losing an exclusive, but you have to have some trust with sources. I would hope to at least be at the point with people where they'd tell me if they're working on another piece or someone else called.

Why did you decide to write about Harris as opposed to Almena, who appeared most responsible for conditions in the warehouse? Would it have been possible to focus a story on Almena, or would it have been too difficult to build empathy for him?

There are a million stories you could write about the Ghost Ship fire, but I only ever really wanted to write about Max. I found his predicament so compelling — being charged with killing your friends. In some ways, Almena is the more compelling character, and you definitely could've centered a story on him. He's flamboyant and charismatic, and it was his place. But Almena is kind of a known character: the evil guru. It's not easy, but if you're committed to digging deep enough, I think everybody deserves empathy.

But Max is such a tragic character in a complicated, interesting way. I felt maternal toward him (one of the kids who died in the fire went to the same high school as my daughter).

You had so much potential material to work with — as you said, it could've been a book. Did you have a central question that framed your reporting?

I felt like I had to cast a wide net in the beginning in terms of who I talked to. What I included wound up being directly about Max's story: How did this young man end up in this situation? An investigative piece would've been 10 times more overwhelming, because then everything is relevant. Still, when I started I thought, “This is too much.” The reporting was emotionally overwhelming, and it was also a slog going through lots of documents. I actually hired a journalism graduate student to help me do some research, find people and documents, and set up some interviews.

Did the magazine pay for that?

 No. I just do that sometimes when I'm worried I'm going to short-circuit.

The judge in the trial approved a gag order about a month after your story came out. Was that unusual, and do you see a connection?

It’s unusual, and I think the story was definitely a piece of it. The Times is a big bullhorn, and it was not the story the prosecution wanted out there.

The annotation of Weil's story is below. Storyboard’s questions are in red; Weil's responses in blue. To read the story without annotations, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button, which you will find just below the social media buttons in the top right-hand menu, or at the top of your mobile screen.

In the Ashes of Ghost Ship

Max Harris did chores and collected rent at the artists’ warehouse where he lived. Now he faces trial for the deaths at a concert there — including some of his close friends.

By Elizabeth Weil

The New York Times Magazine

December 12, 2018

[annotation q="There's no nut graf early in the piece about the Ghost Ship fire and Harris's connection to it. Do you think that would've been necessary if this subhead had not appeared? Do you feel the subhead gives too much away, or is it necessary to set up the piece?" a="You know, it’s funny that that’s your first question. During the edit of the top of the piece, I was asked to put in a couple sentences telling readers that there had been a horrible fire and 36 people died — so not a nut graf exactly but pretty much what you’re talking about here. I argued against it and won precisely because the subhead does that job. I like the idea of the reader going in blind. But I didn’t argue against the subhead. I knew I was never going to win that one."]

Once a week, Max Harris is allowed to leave his 6-by-12-foot cell to go outside. The first thing he does, before the other inmates arrive in the small cement yard in Santa Rita Jail, is run around and yell, “Safari!” as he picks up all the bugs — the furry moths with leopard spots, the grasshoppers in jade armor. He wants to move them out of harm’s way before other men in red-and-white-striped jumpsuits start playing basketball. Sometimes he’ll find a honey bee in distress, lost and spinning in a circle, and he’ll give it a little water, or water mixed with apple jelly, if he can find a half-eaten packet. “It nourishes it,” he says. Or, he’ll see a moth with cobweb stuck on its antenna, and he’ll calmly, lovingly remove it. Each life is precious. Each life is beautiful. Harris, a vegetarian since age 14, believes this to his core. To Harris, even a fruit fly pirouetting in his cell is a miracle. “It’s like a dog,” he told me. “A little Labrador or something. It’s different, but it’s still this little shard of life. It’s still this spark of divinity in this moving work of art.” [annotation q="Presumably, you weren't out in the yard with Harris. How did your interviews lead you to unearth this, and how did you elicit these specific details (the fact that he yells “Safari,” the types of bugs, the spinning honeybee, etc.)?" a="That’s true — I was never out in the yard. But I did spend a lot of time talking to Harris and a lot of it was about his daily life and how he was getting through his time in jail. He told me the safari story first, in the context of talking about his relationships with the other inmates. After I turned in a first draft, Jake (Silverstein, editor of the Times Magazine) suggested that I try leading with the bugs. In that first draft, the story started with the fire. I already had talked to Harris about spiders and bees, but then I went back and we talked about bugs more and he told me about the praying mantis."]

Harris has lived in this jail in Dublin, Calif., for 18 months now. Before his arrest, he lived in Oakland, in a 10,000-square-foot warehouse filled with artists. There, near his bed, in his live-work space, a spider built a nest. He named the spider Norbit, and when Norbit’s eggs hatched he named the babies Hexbit, Drillbit, Babybit and so on, and he let them stay too. [annotation q="More great details! Do you always “get the dog's name,” as the wisdom goes, or in this case the spider's?" a="I try to get the dog’s name, yes. It can feel silly in the moment, but it’s so useful. And if I didn’t get the dog’s name in the first go-round, I call back and ask. I often have a laundry list of specific details I fish for near the end: What were you wearing? What was the room like? At the start of reporting, you can’t know what scenes you’re going to use, so you can’t ask everything. But once a piece is near closing, you know exactly what material you’re using so (to me, at least) it makes sense to go back."] In the warehouse, Harris believed that he found, for the first time, a true home for his artistic dreams, a place that sanctified creativity as he felt it should be sanctified. And he did find beauty there. But he also found a darkness blacker than anything he could ever have imagined. When I met him, last spring, his long face looked drawn, the moon tattoo on his left cheek distorted under the gravity of his sadness. His limbs drooped off his 6-foot-3 frame like the branches of a willow tree. Plugs, made from the tops of hot-sauce bottles, filled the sagging, hollowed-out lobes of his ears. He is 29, but his hair, once blue, once mohawked, once dreadlocked, is streaked with gray. [annotation q="Many writers find it challenging to describe people without it sounding generic or cliché. Any tips on coming up with a description like this, which is anything but?" a="I always think about what I’m hoping to convey in terms of emotion and character with the physical description, with place description, with dialogue, with everything. That gets you to a pretty specific place. So in terms of describing a person, I think: How is this story written into the character’s body and face?"]

In the heavy months awaiting trial, Harris has been trying to hang on to his gentleness. He has been trying to grow his compassion, so that something, anything, positive might come of all this grief. He studies Zen Buddhism. He keeps the Jewish Sabbath. He prays to his Christian God. He switches the TV from Fox News or football to Animal Planet when the other inmates, who tell him he’s like a butterfly, can tolerate it. Yet life can be cruel, and even a person striving toward right thought can set off cascades of events that go incomprehensibly awry. One day in September, Harris told me that a fellow inmate found a praying mantis in the yard. The inmate cupped it in his hands, this bright green marvel. Harris thought it was one of the most spectacular things he’d ever seen. The inmate who found the insect wanted to take it to his cell to keep as a pet. Harris intervened. “No, man,” he said, “how could you bring someone else into incarceration?” [annotation q="Here again, how did your interviews lead you to discover the praying mantis?" a="See above … I just went in one day and said, Can we talk more about bugs? It felt like a sort of weird question but in reality, for Harris, it’s not. He cares deeply about living things and (along with the other people) that’s what’s living in a jail."]

The inmate returned the praying mantis to the ground. “Two days later we went out to the yard and the thing was completely flat,” Harris said, shocked by the destruction. “It’s like, How do you miss that? It’s beautiful.” [annotation q="This is such a poignant metaphor for his role in the Ghost Ship tragedy. Did you immediately see it that way and go, “This is my lede!”?" a="Yeah, I sort of couldn’t believe it when I was sitting in Santa Rita Jail and Harris told me the praying mantis story. It was the whole piece, this huge unthinkable saga, on the tiniest possible scale. I knew, as soon as he told me the story, that I wanted to use it to end the first section. It took me a little while to get the whole lede working though."] [annotation q="What challenges did you run up against, and how did you solve them?" a="Basically, I got tripped up over the fact that I didn’t have 1,000 words of bug content! A lot of the sections are pretty long in this story and I tied myself in a knot over the idea that the first section had to match. Then I just let go of all that and it worked better."]

[annotation q="Did you think about starting with a scene of him during the fire or another alternative opening? If so, why did this work better?" a="Yes, the first draft did start with the fire. That’s how fire stories start, right? And that version worked fine, but this lede made the story much better. The truth is, I never really wanted to write a fire story. I wanted to write a character story. This is the character story lede."][annotation q="What wasn't working about the fire lede?" a="The fire lede worked okay as a stand-alone lede but it was then creating problems by making the story feel like it was looping. To write the fire lede, I had to introduce the warehouse, the stairs, the community, Harris at the point in his life …. In some ways the fire is the obvious start to give the story propulsion but it created this trade-off with sucking energy out the story later. I also think, for people who already knew about it fire (it got a ton of local press), that lede may have created a sense that they already knew what story I was going to tell."]

The night before Harris graduated from college, in May 2012, he shaved the left side of his head and gave himself his first face tattoo: the letters M A X, extending from the crown of his head to his left eyebrow. This was a “job stopper,” he told me, a branding of sorts, a vow to remain exiled from the mundane world of workaday jobs and devoted to a life of art. [annotation q="The rest of this section is chronological, starting with Harris's early childhood. Why did you decide to open it with this paragraph, which is outside of the timeline?" a="I had a short phase of having the whole piece start with the tattoo! Sheesh. (That was in the version with the fire lede.) Obviously, there was a bunch of trial and error. Here, it felt a little abrupt to just go to his childhood right out of the praying mantis. I wasn’t sure I’d earned enough of the reader's trust just to go back to Harris’s start. I felt like I needed to convey that the story was under control, that I knew what I was doing, that all these small facts I’m about to tell you are in the service of character. I think the tattoo does a lot of work. It sets up Harris as an idealistic young man who makes principled, well-intended but questionable decisions."]

Harris grew up in Enfield, Conn., an only child in a modest condo complex with few other children. He sneaked out as often as he could to play with the kids on a neighboring street where, he said, there were “actually houses, and they had yards.” Louise Harris, Max’s mother, was employed, on and off, as a goldsmith or a salesperson in jewelry shops. Harris’s father worked as a diesel mechanic, but he had a hard time holding down jobs because he struggled with reading, many basic tasks and his temper. Harris’s relationship with both his parents was always upside down. When Harris was 5, his parents got into a heated fight, and his mother came to Harris to seek advice. She marveled at the brilliance of his counsel. “I wasn’t just born to make you happy,” Harris, the kindergartner, said. “I was born to give you wisdom.” Five years later, Harris’s mother lost a pregnancy at six months, and she leaned on Max for comfort. “With Max,” Louise told me, “it was more a matter of me following him than me leading him.” [annotation q="When it came to Harris's biography, how did you decide what to include or leave out?" a="To me, a major part of this story is the theme of parental love — how a certain kind of love can be protective and how its absence can be dangerous. So in writing about Harris’s childhood I really wanted to focus on details that illustrate the ways in which his relationship with his parents was “upside down,” as he put it."]

At 13, Harris started wearing his hair in a mohawk. At 14, his parents divorced, and his father became addicted to drugs and alcohol. At 16, a junior in high school, Harris took his first studio art class and, like a cure in epoxy, it transformed and gave solidity to his life. His art teacher soon told his mother that her son “had greatness.” At night, in his carpeted basement bedroom, alongside the cats’ litter box and a TV he refused to watch, Harris painted utntil sunrise. He didn’t view art as an interest or something he was good at. He defined it as “a state of being.” [annotation a="This is sort of parallel to the graf above, but setting up his relationship to art."]

At Massachusetts College of Art and Design, he studied everything: painting, photography, sculpture, metalsmithing, video art. Outside class, he played and composed music: industrial jazz, future classical and surreal glockenspiel. Along with technique, his professors taught him what would prove to be their most indelible lesson: the value of living in collaborative, creative spaces. In a contemporary-art-history class, he studied Andy Warhol’s Factory, John Cage’s early happenings. He seized on the importance of artists inspiring one another, cross-pollinating and fueling their ideas by living under one roof.

After graduating, Harris moved to the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, into a $450-a-month, shower-with-a-watering-can live-work space in an old schoolhouse. He thought of himself “as a kind of character,” he says, an artistic monk. For a few months, through the end of 2012, Harris paid his rent by working as a tattoo artist and by selling (while dressed as outlandishly as possible) gemstone-on-hemp-string necklaces in Union Square. [annotation q="You use several long strings of hyphenated words in the previous few sentences. When and why do you think that's effective?" a="This is sort of pathetic, but I didn’t even think about it! I just wanted to describe him precisely, and I guess that led me into a hyphen explosion."] Then the schoolhouse was sold, and he had to move out. He bought a copy of “Art/Work: Everything You Need to Know (and Do) as You Pursue Your Art Career.” Right there on Page 22 it said: “While artist loft sometimes means ‘expensive condo,’ there are still warehouses full of artists’ studios across the country. If you don’t have a studio building in your area, take matters into your own hands and create one.”

In the summer of 2012, three “hippie-yoga-craftspeople friends” told Harris that they could all get jobs in a cafe in Golden, Colo. Harris threw a couple of duffel bags in their van to join their road trip. But when they arrived in Colorado, the guy who was supposed to employ them was not even at the cafe, which itself didn’t really exist. So they kept meandering west. Harris imagined the road trip would be easier; his co-travelers argued over things he thought should be peaceful, like arcana about the Grateful Dead. Finally, the next summer, they arrived in Humboldt County, Calif., and found work on a pot farm. After a few months, he took a bus to Oakland to visit a friend.

The day Harris arrived happened to be First Friday, Oakland’s monthly art crawl down Telegraph Avenue. Harris’s friend took him to a warehouse in West Oakland that was built out like a maze, a toy. This, he told me, was exactly the “sort of utopian artist collective dream think tank” he’d been taught was ideal. As Harris crawled through the secret passages, he thought, If my professors could see me now! In the backyard of that warehouse was the most fantastic thing Harris had ever seen: a bicycle-powered Ferris wheel, with lights up the spokes and real old carnival carriages. Harris decided he had to stay. [annotation q="In this section on Harris's background, it sounds like you spoke with at least him and his mother. Did you do anything else to verify what he was saying?" a="I spoke with some of Harris’s friends, his aunt, his mother, and some teachers. Then, of course, the fact-checker talked to all of them again. There were also letters from friends/family/teachers in court documents testifying to Harris’s character."]

Harris spent the next year living with his friend, sometimes sleeping on the floor. Housing in Oakland was cheaper than in San Francisco, which had grown preposterously expensive: The part of the city that had once housed techno raves and all the wondrous weirdness that spawned Burning Man itself was now home to tech titans like Dropbox, Reddit and Airbnb. The creative community remained important to Oakland’s self-conception. In October 2014 the Oakland rental market was the 21st-most-expensive in the country. (By December 2015, it had leapt to fourth.) An average one-bedroom then cost $1,900 a month. One day, Harris was cruising for affordable housing when he saw a long craigslist post. A similar listing appeared on Facebook:

“Seeking all shamanic rattlesnake sexy jungle jazz hobo gunslingers looking for a space to house gear, use studio, develop next level Shaolin discipline after driving your taxi cab late at night, build fusion earth home bomb bunker spelunker shelters, and plant herbaceous colonies in the open sun & air.”

The author was a 44-year-old artist named Derick Ion Almena, and the place for rent turned out to be a couple of blocks away from the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland, near the corner of 31st Avenue and International Boulevard, across from a Wendy’s. Almena was the master tenant of a big unheated industrial warehouse, but the space he offered Harris was two doors down in the same building, a storage space subleased from Custom O’s auto body shop. The rent was $750 a month. Harris took it. He hung a sign on the wall that read “Call Mom ASAP” and started cleaning out the stuff that Almena was storing there: sheet metal, an old dentist’s chair, a sawed-in-half pickup truck filled with wood. [annotation q="Where did these details come from?" a="They came from conversations with Harris and Almena."] Almena was a scrapper. He collected almost anything somebody else wasn’t using: bongos, plywood, fence pickets, bulletin boards, mirrors, hubcaps, plastic carousel horses.

Almena wore low-rider fedoras and spoke in a slow weed-smoker’s bedroom voice. He was handsome, a dark mustache and goatee on his butterscotch skin, lithe, even leonine, sexy in a way that makes you worry about the human race and its cross-wiring of attractiveness and danger. [annotation q="This is another evocative description. One thing that makes it compelling, I think, is that it boldly comes from a certain perspective (yours). It can be daunting to offer an assessment of someone's appearance like that, rather than sticking to the facts of hair and eye color. Did you always feel comfortable doing this? Do you have any tips on how to do it well?" a="Nope — I didn’t always feel as confident being overt about my own perspective, though I wish I had. Tips? Try to take off the filter while you’re drafting and say the thing that is close to unsayable, the thing that makes a reader go, “Did she really say that?” You can always edit out later. Emotion is a plus, in my view. It’s another layer, not a flaw. And you have more access to your own emotions than you will ever have to anybody else’s."] He had worked as a concert promoter; he had traveled the world; and his photography had hung in San Francisco’s prestigious Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Almena took out the lease for the warehouse in 2013 for an artist collective called Satya Yuga. He saw the warehouse, he told me when I met him in November, as “a pirate ship washed up on shore, and the pirates are all insane, like after they’ve gotten drunk and eaten a bunch of mushrooms and killed the captain. I was like the new captain, the crazy captain.” Almena subletted out spaces to artists. He intended to hold classes and art shows at the warehouse and rent it out for events. [annotation q="You don't have too many quotes from Almena in the piece. Was that by choice or because you only spoke to him briefly?" a="Almena didn’t agree to talk to me until a couple weeks before the piece started closing. And even then, he declined to meet with me at length. Santa Rita Jail allowed me to meet with Harris for two hours at a time, in the same kind of setup that inmates use to meet with lawyers (small conference room, no guards present, no glass separating us, no shackles). This option was available to Almena — and I would have vastly preferred to talk to him that way. But he declined. So we talked on the phone several times, and I visited Almena as a regular visitor, meaning we talked for 30 minutes through thick glass."]

Almena lived by what he considered to be the wisdom of the ancients: a stew of religious iconography, trance music, free love, psychedelics, archery in the Oakland hills, plus operas staged at Burning Man, an event he loved until it became, as he posted in capital letters on Facebook, a “village of hungry ghosts. The capitalistic driven over-ticketing, pompous catering of favors and privileges,” a “crotchless dot com midlife crisis.” He had a fondness for the Hindu goddess Kali, who wears a skirt of dismembered arms and wields a bloody sword in one hand, a severed head in the other.

The warehouse, once part of a milk-bottling plant, was later named Ghost Ship, and those words were graffitied in huge pink block letters on the building’s facade. [annotation q="Where did you learn it had been a milk-bottling plant?" a="I believe from the East Bay Times. They did an incredible amount of reporting."] Inside, Almena started building his dream world. He and the other artists subdivided the space with walls hodgepodged together out of amps, bits of bookcase, faded hanging rugs and carved Balinese wood panels. Almena lined a hallway on both sides with pianos facing each other, so people walking through could stretch out their arms and run their fingers over both sets of keys. [annotation q="This is a great detail. Where did it come from?" a="Almena told me this."]

Harris had taken a seasonal job color-correcting greeting cards. Each weekday morning he put on a dorky shirt and rode BART into San Francisco where, he told me, nobody talked about anything more interesting than which food truck they would go to for lunch.

A week or so after Harris moved into his sublet, he was commuting home from work when his cellphone rang. “You need to get back right now,” Almena said. “I have something, a present for you.”

Harris said, “O.K., great.”

“But it’s going to cost you,” Almena said.

“Oh,” Harris replied.

“But you definitely want it. You need to cough up $500.”

He had drained almost all of his savings to pay his initial rent and “buy-in” fee to Almena, but he withdrew $500 from an A.T.M. and returned to 31st Avenue to find a giant pirate ship on a trailer, likely someone’s creation for Burning Man. [annotation q="Did you fact-check this incident and the dialogue with Almena?" a="Yes."]

Harris felt manipulated by the gift; saying no had not felt like an option. But the pirate ship was fabulous, and Harris started staying up nights refinishing it. Almena seemed able to tap straight into Harris’s desires — even those of which Harris himself was only dimly aware. “I didn’t even know that I wanted it,” Harris said of the pirate ship on the trailer. But then he did. “I’m like, This is totally what my heart is yearning for.” [annotation q="Why was this a good place to end the section?" a="I wanted to end with Harris feeling really up. All this — Almena, the warehouse — felt like a beautiful dream for a while. That has to be established."]

Satya Yuga had its own logic. You had to tolerate people playing music at all hours of the night. You had to not use your toaster and your teakettle at the same time because the electricity was channeled from Custom O’s auto shop to the warehouse and then dispersed through a complex river system of wiring and extension cords. You had to work on your own art, collaborate with the other members of the collective and also help build the living, breathing art installation that was the warehouse itself. The mock contract people signed upon joining the collective had only one condition: “Be Unconditionally Awesome.” [annotation q="Why did you start this section with an overview of Satya Yuga, rather than with the first sentence of the next paragraph (Harris's chronology)?" a="I really didn’t want the story to read like “and then and then and then.” I think stories start to feel that way if every section starts with a date."]

In December 2014, Harris left Custom O’s and moved into Ghost Ship. By that point, the 10,000-square-foot space had become deliriously maximalist: drums everywhere, chandeliers everywhere, vintage typewriters, Indonesian antiques, Afghan rugs, early 20th-century shipping trunks, dozens of pianos and organs. Just inside the front door was a 10-foot-tall wooden Garuda statue surrounded by a sprawling montage of flea-market paintings, hand tools like you might find in a long-lost grandfather’s workshop, parasols, fertility-goddess statues, plastic mannequins and nostalgic family photos of God knows who. The staircase leading to the second floor, set back 12 feet from the entrance on the right side of the building, was a campy surrealist take on a Louise Nevelson collage or a post-apocalyptic disaster, depending on your point of view. The bottom third of the staircase consisted of wooden palettes; the middle third was a section of a prefab staircase; the top third was a ramp, a single plank of wood, with small wooden slats nailed across it so your feet didn’t slip as you made your way up. [annotation q="Is describing the staircase in such detail a conscious bit of foreshadowing? Is foreshadowing something you do naturally or add in later?" a="I always knew that I had to describe the staircase in detail, so I think I wrote this early in the drafting process. It was actually a much longer description for a while, but it was sort of boring and confusing. It wasn’t easy to get right."] The building had no heat. There were no fire alarms, no sprinklers, no emergency or exit lighting. [annotation q="What were your sources for all the description in this paragraph?" a="Oh lord, so many different places. I had transcripts of all the preliminary hearings, and there was a lot of talk in those about the environment inside the warehouse. I interviewed Harris, Almena, Micah Allison (Almena’s wife), and a bunch of other people who lived at the warehouse. I had old photos. I also visited the warehouse while reporting, and you could still see burned remains of parts of the staircase, among other things."]

Almena, who considered himself to be the father of the space, lived upstairs with his family: his wife, Micah Allison, and three dreamy, free-range hippie kids: Bolonik, Shai and Surya, then ages 11, 5 and 3. Allison, trained in dance, was serenely beautiful: raven-haired, tawny-skinned, a true testament to fertility, pulling off the title she gave herself — Mother Superior — and tribal belly dancing to the drum beats the collective made. The family had a proper kitchen, a big family bed topped with a canopy of sequined wedding shawls and a bathtub ringed with plants. The kids rode bikes and scooters around their loftlike lounge, which doubled as an event space. [annotation q="Where did you source the description of their space?" a="This is from (Amena’s wife) Allison."]

Harris had a live-work studio on the first floor, as did most of 15 or 20 other residents — the number varied over time. Many of the artists teetered on the edge of homelessness; one moved into the warehouse after living in her car. Down the hall from Harris was Peter Wadsworth, who was 36, the resident genius, a Reed College graduate who built drones and replicas of ancient Egyptian sculptures and who one member of the collective referred to as “our Dumbledore — our wise wizard.” Farther down lived Carmen Brito, then 27, a substitute teacher, poet and ceramist, into archery, survival skills and primitive arts. José Avalos, then 36, worked outside the warehouse as a carpenter and then returned to make theatrical Latin-Kabuki style masks and Polynesian-inflected papier-mâché figurines. Anthony Perrault, then 25, another resident, was a seamstress and fashion designer with dreads. He and Almena’s wife, Allison, liked to watch the documentary “Paris Is Burning” while he colored her hair. Several evenings a month, musicians from greater Oakland would show up to jam as well, bringing with them their marimbas and African clay drums. One man played a Rajasthani ravanhatta, a string instrument that was hung with sleigh bells.

Andrew Ruiz, now 27, a musician who also lived at Ghost Ship, spent his afternoons teaching art in elementary-school aftercare programs. He described the Satya Yuga aesthetic as what would happen “if the Brothers Grimm made a trailer park.” Ruiz grew up a weird kid in San Diego. “You’re just you,” he wanted to tell the popular crowd that rejected him. “You have such a problem with me being me.” Like Harris, he took a bildungsroman road trip before ending up in Oakland, and like Harris, he had a hard time affording somewhere to live. For a while, he crashed in a friend’s parents’ damp garage. He thought he finally found a place, only to be told that the landlord found another tenant who could pay six months in cash up front. On the night after Thanksgiving 2015, he tagged along with friends to a party at Ghost Ship. As soon as he walked in, he said, “my jaw dropped, my heart sang, my gut tingled.” [annotation q="How many former Ghost Ship residents did you talk to? How did you decide who and what made it into the piece?" a="The attorney in the civil case has tried to scare everyone who lived at Ghost Ship out of talking to the press. Still, I talked to eight people who lived there, though many did not want to be on the record."]

Six weeks later, Satya Yuga was his home. Ruiz didn’t object to being awakened at 3 in the morning by warehouse mates drumming or thrashing about in their studios — creativity was more important than sleep. He fed off the shared spirit of artistic struggle, the sense that Satya Yuga was a surrogate family. “You could always cook for yourself, but rarely would you need to,” he said. “People would find food outside the bakeries or stores. It was perfectly great food, and they’d be like, ‘This is for my brothers and my sisters,’ and we would be so happy because we had food to share.” [annotation q="Why did you think it was important to describe what life was like there from the perspectives of people other than Harris?" a="My editor, Ilena Silverman, really encouraged me to put more of this in. I spent four hours interviewing Ruiz but didn’t include any of it in my first draft."]

One day not long after moving in, Harris was scanning the free section of craigslist when he saw a listing for trees — whole trees! [annotation q="Was this exclamation you capturing Harris's voice?" a="Sort of? It’s more my attempt to capture his sensibility — his amazement and wonder. Which I guess is his voice, so yeah."] Harris had a trunk cut into six-foot-long columns and delivered to the warehouse. He used them to build a large box with his bed inside and a platform above, for tattooing clients. To the box, he attached a huge redwood branch, and he and Almena’s son, Surya, spent several mornings threading little plastic flowers to its smaller branches. “When I showed Derick, I remember him being so happy that I involved his son in the project,” Harris said. Almena often gave tours of Satya Yuga to friends and always took them to Harris’s studio. “Max,” Almena told me, “was my showpiece.” [annotation q="What did you make of this quote?" a=" Almena was genuinely proud of Harris, I think. He (Almena) is just truly a mess. And he was even more of mess during the years at the warehouse when residents said he was using meth. He also cannot see the world outside himself. So Harris is his creation, not his own, independent person."]

After his seasonal greeting-card gig ended in early January 2015, Harris was broke but happy. He hoped to devote himself full time to his art practice. But mostly he got pulled into Almena’s vortex. Almena, so monomaniacally obsessed with his warehouse that he missed his brother’s funeral, flew into rages and ripped down people’s studio walls if they didn’t conform to his aesthetic. He held autocratic meetings of the collective, dispensing wrath and love. [annotation q="How did you fact-check the previous two sentences?" a="Almena wrote a very long history of his time at the warehouse that he gave to some reporters, including me. The detail about missing his brother’s funeral is from that history. The details about Almena’s behaviors in the warehouse came from interviews with many people who lived there."] “There is something about him that can make you feel special,” Danielle Boudreaux, then a friend of Almena’s, said, describing his power. “You are the most important person at this party right now. You have my back. You are my right hand. All this is because of us, me and you — we did this.” Then he would yank his affections away. He broke you down and filled you up — often in public. “His working behavioral model for keeping control of the collective seemed to be: ‘If you step out of line in front of 15 people, and I make you feel stupid, you’re going to be quiet, you’re going to be shut down and then maybe in a couple hours, I’m going to make you feel like the most important person in the room, so everybody brings you back into the fold,’” Boudreaux said.

The older and more stable Satya Yugans resisted Almena’s mind games. Next door to Harris lived Nikki Kelber, now 46, who made luscious feather earrings and leather jewelry and whom Harris referred to as Martha Yuga, a riff on Martha Stewart, because her space was always so nice. She had a cabinet full of glassware. She hung her pots from the wall. She also had boundaries. “I just tried to keep to myself and do my own thing,” she said.

Yet Harris was a willing acolyte. Soon Almena — who saw part of his job as inspiring others to create, with a firm hand if necessary — started making up elaborate projects with ludicrous deadlines and demanding that Harris work all night to get them done. Lay these bricks in the garden. Pick these bricks up. Take all the spindles off the backs of all these wooden chairs. According to several residents, Almena’s dedication to building and rebuilding his ever-more-layered I Spy pastiche was increasingly fueled by drugs. “Derick and I got into some unhealthy practices,” Allison said. “At first it was like, ‘Let’s get this done,’ and then it got out of control.” [annotation q="How extensively did you talk to Allison? Was it hard to get her to talk to you, and why do you think she agreed?" a="Like Almena, Allison agreed to talk to me near the end of the reporting process. We talked on the phone quite a bit for a few weeks. I think she wanted to be heard, and I think she also believed talking to me was in her best interest. We discussed the value of her talking to me explicitly. Addiction doesn’t make anything excusable, but it does make it easier to understand."]

If Harris resisted Almena’s commands to work through the night, Almena berated him, calling Harris degrading names. Occasionally, people who lived at Satya Yuga told me, Almena spoke to Harris in a sharp German accent, pretending that Harris, whose mother was Jewish, was his Jew, his slave. Harris insisted to me that Almena meant this as a joke. But others in the community, observing how Almena humiliated Harris, did not find it funny. “It got to the point,” Harris said, “where some people had even thrown around the words Stockholm syndrome.”

In early 2015, Allison’s mother called the Department of Children and Family Services at the Alameda County Social Services Agency. Several months earlier, she was contacted by Boudreaux, whose son attended school with Almena’s children. Boudreaux had noticed that some days those children weren’t being picked up from school; other days they didn’t show up at all or they showed up hungry, their heads crawling with lice. That March, the agency removed Bolonik, Shai and Surya from the warehouse and sent them to live with Almena’s mother and sister, who lived in Los Angeles.

Harris first considered leaving the collective in the fall of 2015, when they attended a music festival called Symbiosis Gathering. That year, the event took place at a reservoir in the high-desert foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Shortly after the Satya Yugans arrived, Almena set them to work constructing an ornate Balinese templelike structure, from which they were to sell chai tea. His mood was horrible. Children and Family Services still had his children. In the desert, he erupted in violent outbursts over things no one could control, like the wind knocking over the temple walls. Harris said to himself, “I’m done with this guy.”

But after Harris returned to Oakland, he became more enmeshed than ever as Harris and Almena agreed that Harris would live at Satya Yuga rent-free in exchange for helping out. From then on, at Ghost Ship, Harris was on call 24 hours a day unclogging toilets, mopping, mediating tenant disputes, collecting rent money (and then taking that rent to the bank so that Almena didn’t blow it). He also communicated with the building’s landlords, Chor and Kai Ng, who owned some 10 buildings in Oakland, including a Vietnamese restaurant, a bakery and a grocery. Still, Almena’s verbal abuse continued and, Harris says, “I would just kind of keep my mouth shut and take it.”

He believed this was the path of deepest compassion. Anger, destruction and addiction came from pain — a dynamic Harris understood well from his own father, who turned up with no place to go at Harris’s first college apartment. In the warehouse, if Almena was acting paranoid and fuming, Harris just dropped whatever he was doing to carry some ridiculous pile of junk from Almena’s van to the yard or carry that same ridiculous pile of junk from the yard to the dumpster. [annotation q="To what extent do you try to capture the character's voice outside of quotations when you write?" a="Weirdly, this is sort of the main thing I’m interested in these days. How do you infuse the whole story with character, not just the quotes?"] He figured, if he just did what Almena said, maybe Almena would calm down, find his banjo, settle into one of the many threadbare couches upstairs and fall asleep for the first time in days. When Almena was really bad off, gnashing and foaming at the mouth, Harris told me, he would cook for him, bring him cigarettes and speak to him sweetly.

The year 2016 appeared to be the start of a brighter future. Almena had his kids back. Harris says that Almena bestowed on him the title of “creative director,” which Harris liked. Still, in mid-November, Harris flew to New York to explore “doing the bicoastal thing.” Some part of him knew that he needed to leave. Yet while in Brooklyn, for the first time in his life, Harris felt homesick — homesick for Satya Yuga. “I had a nest, a place to go back to,” he said. “As far as stability goes, I hadn’t really had that.”

At the warehouse, on Thanksgiving, Almena roasted a couple of turkeys. Harris cooked vegan dumplings. Kelber contributed cranberry sauce. A handful of stragglers from the greater Oakland underground art scene showed up uninvited — they knew they would feel welcome there. In the big open room on the second floor, “we gathered as many chairs as we could,” Harris said. A drum circle formed. Part of the hope on offer in the warehouse, as Swan Vega, an events bartender who lived at Ghost Ship, described it, was “that family love can unite people where you don’t actually need to be punitive. Doesn’t that sound like a pipe dream?”

The next day Harris started cleaning. A few weeks earlier, a music promoter reached out to Harris to see if Ghost Ship was available to host a show on Dec. 2. The lineup would be a bunch of aggressively out-there electronic music acts, headlined by the pulsing, psychedelic synth sounds of Golden Donna. In preparation for the show, Harris scrubbed the overused bathrooms. He shoved the couches to the perimeter of Almena’s living room. He placed the cowboy hat on the Garuda’s head in the way he knew Almena liked. Then on the Friday night of the party, Harris showered, pulled on a black sweater, bought a burrito and sat on a stool inside the warehouse’s front door. [annotation q="What questions did you ask to elicit all of these specific details, down to the perfectly angled cowboy hat and the burrito?" a="I spent a really ridiculous amount of time reporting this piece. I talked to Harris many times about that night. As I mentioned earlier, once I know I want to write a specific scene, I’ll often interview someone again and again just to get details for it. It’s a practice that comes from ghost writing and co-writing other people’s stories. Someone will tell you something important that happened to them. To render the scene well, you have to go back and get all the small details."]

Admission was $10 before 11 p.m., $15 after, though given that this was an Oakland warehouse party, it was also Notaflof — no one turned away for lack of funds. Almena was not home. A condition of Almena’s children returning to live with the family, according to Allison, was that they not be at the warehouse during parties, so Almena, Allison and the children had decamped to a hotel. (Children and Family Services declined to comment.) Most of Harris’s fellow Satya Yugans did not attend the show, either. Many were out. Some were in their studios, making art. Others were trying to sleep or flirting with dates. By 11:15 p.m. about 100 guests had arrived and walked up the eclectic art project of a staircase. [annotation q="There's the staircase again. Was this more foreshadowing or incidental?" a="The staircase is so central to everything. It’s like Chekhov's gun."] Harris’s friend Micah Danemayer, 28, an electronic musician, was D.J.-ing images that night onto a large projection screen. Danemayer was another big, tender misfit who had found what he took to calling his “mutant family” in Oakland’s underground art scene. Danemayer had a real family in Boston who loved him: a father who put money in his bank account when his son’s funds ran low, a mother who sent starving-artist care packages consisting of brownies, a grocery-store gift card and a pack of socks. Just the day before, in love for the first time, Danemayer moved in with his girlfriend, Jennifer Mendiola, who was studying for her doctorate in health psychology. His stuff sat in his new home’s hallway in plastic storage crates.

On the second floor, a woman sat at a table offering $5 bang trims. Another woman was painting people’s nails. One guest, Em B, 33, a poet who worked in a coffee shop and traded Kurt Vonnegut quotes with her father, texted her wife back home: “Oh my God, this place is a trip. I can’t wait to tell you about it.” Cash Askew, 22, a much-beloved trans femme guitarist, chatted with Feral Pines, 29, another trans musician who almost always dressed in a tank top, black leather shorts, boots and a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament necklace. Michela Gregory, 20, a San Francisco State University student, stayed close to her boyfriend, Alex Vega, then 22, who earlier that night parked his silver Mazda Miata at the San Bruno BART stop. On the way out of her parents’ house that evening, Gregory told her father, “Dad, I’m going to spend the night with Alex.” “I love you,” her father called out as she stepped through the door. “I love you, too,” Gregory said. [annotation q="Were you consciously trying to build suspense in this section about who came out alive and who didn’t?" a="I was trying to build emotion more that suspense. I wanted this quote here to build toward the ending."]

Around 11:20 p.m., Harris decided to leave his post at the door to go inside Ghost Ship to use the bathroom. As he entered the building, he noticed the light looked strange — a glow on the ceiling. He ran to his studio and grabbed a fire extinguisher. But by the time he returned, eight or 10 seconds later, the fire was out of control. At 11:23 p.m., Carmen Brito, the potter and substitute teacher, who lived in the back of the warehouse, woke up in a room filled with smoke and called 911. Upstairs, as fire rose through the baseboards, people started shrieking, pleading, streaming down the strange staircase. [annotation q="The sequence of these three “ing” verbs is so effective at conveying the terror of the moment. How did you think about describing the experience of the fire — getting across its weight and horror, without going over the top? Were there things you ended up revising or leaving out?" a="There was so much material I could have included here, but I really didn’t want the story to feel sensationalized or macabre. This part used to be somewhat longer, but I never intended to write thousands of words about the fire itself."]

Oakland Fire Department Station 13 was only a block away. The first firefighters arrived at 11:25, but the flames were already out of control. Firefighters crawled into the building with breathing tanks and shot water up toward the inferno on the first-floor ceiling. They hoped to keep the fire contained near its origin in the rear of the warehouse, but as they crept deeper into the building, it jumped over them. The smoke consolidated into a sludge so thick it created a total blackout. After the low-air alarms sounded on the fire crew’s tanks, the chief ordered them to evacuate. They had to follow their hoses, like cave divers with guide wires, to find their way out. [annotation q="That's a memorable image. Where did these details come from?" a="I had just a crazy overabundance of reporting material. This is from the firefighter testimony in the preliminary hearings and from the fire investigation report."]

One attendee, Aaron Marin, who’d stayed at Ghost Ship as a guest, remembered that there was a window on the second floor not visible behind the projection screen. He decided to jump through it and tried to get others to follow him. But it was too loud, too dark, too hot, too terrifying. He used a power cord that was melting to slow his fall and landed uninjured, but no one else jumped out. Inside, a woman in a green dress and a red beanie sat on the first floor in a wicker chair, screaming for those above not to come down, chanting, “This is the will of the spirits of the forest.” [annotation q="Wow. Who told you this?" a="This is in the preliminary hearings, too."]

Once that staircase caught fire — it’s impossible to know the order of events with certainty, though one person who escaped reported that some who started down the stairs came back up, yelling “not good” — people wrapped themselves in rugs. The air in the warehouse grew so hot that, one survivor reported, he felt his skin peeling. Harris held the front door open, yelling: “Follow the sound of my voice! This way!” Michela Gregory and Alex Vega embraced, his body on top of hers to shield her from the flames and heat.

A final text from the building, according to The East Bay Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its Ghost Ship reporting, said: “I love you. I’m going to die, Mom.” [annotation q="When do you think it's important for magazine writers to credit local reporters, and when is it unnecessary?" a="I’m so indebted to the East Bay Times — they definitely needed to be credited. This quote was also reported several different ways in several different places. I decided to go with the East Bay Times version, so fact-checkers wanted me to note where the language came from."]

In the early minutes after the fire, Harris believed that everybody made it out. He saw Carmen Brito. He saw Nikki Kelber with her cat. “Please tell me you’re O.K.,” he texted Danemayer. Then, as he stood in the Wendy’s parking lot, the devastation began to snap into focus. Where were the dozens of others he greeted as they entered the warehouse for the show? The police started compiling a list of the missing. Parents started to show up. Over the next 48 hours, the death toll began to rise: Four confirmed dead. Six confirmed dead. Nine confirmed dead. Danemayer died. Danemayer’s girlfriend, Mendiola, died. Harris’s warehouse mate Peter Wadsworth died after another warehouse mate, Bob Mule, tried and failed to pull Wadsworth out. A high school student in the Pacific Boychoir Academy died. Two Cal undergraduates died. Thirty-six people died that night — the youngest 17, the oldest 61 — in the most deadly structure fire in the United States since 100 people died in the Station nightclub in Rhode Island in 2003. By the next day, news outlets across the country began reporting the same narrative: The building was a deathtrap.

Eyes immediately turned to Almena, who at first seemed not to understand the gravity of the situation. Hours after the tragedy, even before the fire was fully extinguished, Almena posted on Facebook: “Confirmed. Everything I worked so hard for is gone.”

Early Monday morning, he stood in the predawn darkness on the corner of 31st and International for a live interview with the “Today” show. His arty, charismatic guru aesthetic was still intact — his fedora a little too dashing on what should have been a deeply bowed head.

Matt Lauer said good morning, then dispensed with the niceties.

Lauer: “Mr. Almena, let me ask you a couple of questions. Thirty-six lives were lost in that building over the weekend. The family members of those who were lost want answers. ... Are you the man who should be held accountable?”

Almena: “... What am I going to say to that? Should I be held accountable? I can barely stand here right now.”

Lauer: “It’s a fair question, Mr. Almena. Obviously there were some conditions in that building that may have led to a dangerous situation and led to what happened there.”

Almena: “I laid my body down there every night. We laid our bodies down there. We put our children to bed there every night. We made music. We created art. ...”

Lauer: “Are you worried that you will be charged?”

Almena: “I would rather get on the floor and be trampled by the parents! I’d rather let them tear at my flesh than answer these ridiculous questions.”

Lauer: “Mr. Almena —”

Almena: “I’m so sorry. I’m incredibly sorry. What do you want me to say? I’m not going to answer these questions.”

Lauer: “Then we’ll end the interview there, Mr. Almena.” [annotation q="Why did you quote this interview at length?" a="I wanted to quote this entire interview. It was incredible. And I didn’t want to just report on the “Today” show reporting. I wanted it to feel raw."]

The city of Oakland, too, found itself in the cross hairs within a matter of days and weeks. It turned out that city officials had known for well over a year that Ghost Ship was dangerous. More than half a dozen municipal employees had been inside the warehouse, including a fire captain named George Freelen, who claimed that in 2014 he sent a report to the fire marshal’s office (which that office believes it never received), concerned about the “high fire load.” The police knew as well. Body camera footage obtained by The East Bay Times shows two officers inside Ghost Ship on Sept. 8, 2015, in response to a property dispute. One says to the other, “One spark, one spark and it would all be bad. ... It’s like a huge fireplace here. ... I would be so worried about all the electrical wires.” Child and Family Services was concerned, too, and the police went to the building after being contacted by the agency. A neighbor on 31st Avenue called the police dozens of times, according to KQED, concerned about the noise and the endless flow of old junk that arrived at the building, some of which then sat on the sidewalk.

As details began to emerge, the fire was not understood as an isolated, idiosyncratic catastrophe. It was understood as the product of civic and societal failings. In the years leading up to the fire, the Oakland Fire Department had been chronically underfunded, understaffed and mismanaged. Between 2011 and 2015, the department employed neither a fire marshal nor an assistant fire marshal — and it is the fire marshal’s job to ensure that property owners and tenants follow the city’s building code. To deal with the fallout after the tragedy, the fire chief retired. (The fire marshal hired in April 2015 eventually resigned.) The Oakland city attorney’s office signed a $90,000 contract with a San Francisco public-relations firm “for the purpose of managing and minimizing the City of Oakland’s potential exposure to liability for claims and litigation that may arise out of the Incident,” the contract read. The firm’s duties included conducting “scrimmages as needed for the City Attorney and its clients” — that is, coaching Oakland officials how to deflect blame away from themselves.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms worked with the Oakland Fire Department and the Alameda County Arson Task Force on the investigation. The 50-page Origin and Cause Report, released on March 18, 2017, classified the cause of the fire as “undetermined,” although many important details surfaced after that official report, suggesting the fire was electrical. A refrigerator caught fire in the warehouse on the night before the tragedy. The warehouse’s wiring was a known, protracted problem. In 2014, according to The East Bay Times, when the building’s transformer blew, the Ng family replaced it without permits using an unlicensed electrician, who told them at the time that the wiring was “grossly unsafe” and needed another $15,000 in upgrades, which were not performed. (The Ngs, through their lawyer, declined to comment.)

The Pacific Gas and Electric company was named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed in 2017 by the victims’ families for failing in its duty to inspect the warehouse when the utility installed two SmartMeters on the Ghost Ship’s block. The utility “either knew or should have known,” the suit claimed, that Ghost Ship’s egregiously jury-rigged electrical system posed “an imminent threat.” The City of Oakland was named as a defendant in the lawsuit as well. When the city moved to have itself dismissed from the case, a judge refused in November, stating that Oakland had a “mandatory duty” to address known safety concerns. (The civil trial is scheduled for next fall.)

Beyond all this was the feeling that the runaway cost of living in the Bay Area — and its attendant housing crisis — was culpable as well. Artists lived and worked in unfinished, unpermitted, unmaintained warehouses because the traditional rental market had become hopelessly out of reach; squats, in one form or another, were the only places artists could afford. The Oakland mayor, Libby Schaaf, a day after the fire, proclaimed herself to be “passionate about preserving and lifting up the incredible creative community that makes this incredible city what it is.” She also talked about safety at artists’ warehouses. But when she spoke at a vigil in downtown Oakland a few days later, she was booed. The mayor then tried to mend her relationship with her more creative constituents by signing an executive order giving owners of illegally inhabited spaces up to 60 days to come up with plans to bring those properties into compliance with building regulations. But who would pay for all those upgrades: the sprinkler systems, the insulation, the fire doors? Without major subsidies or a housing-market crash, there was no math that made those underground art spaces both affordable and up to code.

[annotation q="How did the story evolve structurally during revisions?" a="The biggest change is that my first draft started with the fire."]

After the fire, Harris stayed with friends for a while, spending whole days talking only to the cat, unsure he wanted to live. Passing the Fruitvale BART stop had become unbearable. Hearing the drum circle at Lake Merritt had become unbearable. Riding his bike across town, seeing friends of friends — it was all too hard. [annotation q="Why did you avoid repeating “unbearable” a third time?" a="I wanted to create a feeling of avoidance. You know, not just say it was unbearable but make the reader feel the deflection."] So in March 2017, he boarded a bus, in a rainstorm, for Los Angeles to try to start again.

In his backpack, he carried all his possessions: a few T-shirts and a pair of too-big jeans he picked out of the piles of clothes people donated to the artists who lost everything in the fire. He had some money in the bank, too, as Harris, like everyone else who had lived at Ghost Ship, except Almena, received funds from charities to help them rebuild their lives. On the trip to Los Angeles, Harris also brought his laptop, a small battery-powered synthesizer and a book on Transcendental Meditation “to put my mind, you know, in a place of holiness and reverence, a place beyond life and death.”

In the Inglewood neighborhood of Los Angeles, Harris rented a loft in a former auto-body shop, across the street from an elementary school. The place had cement floors, a huge roll-up door and natural light, “the most honest” light, in Harris’s view. Harris tried to nest. He built a workbench and furniture out of scrap materials he found in the yard. He painted a couple of walls white and one sky blue. He bought an induction stovetop, which heated food with magnetic energy instead of a coil or open flame. He thought about holding workshops in his studio to teach people how to make their own engagement rings out of cuttlebone. But being awake was excruciating, and being asleep was excruciating.

On the morning of June 5, 2017, he woke up to banging on the metal roll-up door. He slipped on his flip flops and opened his loft to about a dozen law-enforcement officers with guns drawn. He could hear the schoolchildren playing at recess across the street. [annotation q="How did you get this detail? Did you ask him to describe each of his senses at that moment?" a="Yup, I asked Harris to tell me about this day in great detail."] At first he thought it must be a mistake, a big mistake. Maybe his neighbors had done something? The cops cuffed his tattooed wrists and took him down to the station. They handed him several sheets of green paper. The warrant read: [annotation q="Why did you quote from the warrant in such detail?" a="I wanted to use primary documents in this story as much as I could — like the “Today” interview. I had much more of the warrant in the initial drafts, too."]

People of the State of California

v.

Max Cardin Harris

Derick Ion Almena

“The undersigned, being sworn says, on information and belief, that Derick Ion Almena, Max Cardin Harris did, in the County of Alameda, State of California, on or about December 2, 2016, commit a felony, to wit: Involuntary Manslaughter, a violation of section 192(b) of the penal code of California, in that said defendant(s) did unlawfully, and without malice, kill Jason Adrian McCarty and Jason Adrian McCarty, a human being. …

The document felt like a bludgeon, hammering home the loss, each victim’s name stated twice. [annotation q="Was this how it felt to you, or how Harris said it felt?" a="That’s how it felt to me. And of course, almost all readers will have not read that document. So I wanted to relay how it felt to them. In my mind, this is the same issue as the physical description you were asking about earlier. I think adding emotions to descriptions is a plus."]

Cash Askew; Em B; Jonathan Bernbaum; Barrett Clark; David Cline; Micah Danemayer; Billy Dixon; Chelsea Dolan; Alex Ghassan; Nick Gomez-Hall; Michela Gregory; Sara Hoda; Travis Hough; Johnny Igaz; Ara Jo; Donna Kellogg; Amanda Kershaw; Edmond Lapine II; Griffin Madden; Joseph Matlock; Jason McCarty; Draven McGill; Jennifer Mendiola; Jennifer Morris; Feral Pines; Vanessa Plotkin; Wolfgang Renner; Hanna Ruax; Benjamin Runnels; Nicole Siegrist; Michele Sylvan; Jennifer Kiyomi Tanouye; Alex Vega; Peter Wadsworth; Nick Walrath; Brandon Wittenauer.

There were 36. [annotation q="Why did you decide to repeat this number here, even though you mentioned it above?" a="Thirty six is such a big number. I never wanted to lose the weight of that. I also felt very strongly that we needed to include the names of everyone who died. That was a bit of a battle."]

Harris was told he could make three calls. The only number he knew was his mother’s. He didn’t know if she could handle it. Still he dialed, bracing himself, unsure what he was going to say. But before he started speaking his mother said: “I know, I know. The whole world knows.”

“What do you mean?” Harris asked.

“It’s all over the news,” his mother said. “Everyone knows.”

The same day, Almena, too, was arrested at his new home in Lake County, in Northern California. Both men were moved to Santa Rita Jail. Bail for each man was initially set at $1.08 million, $30,000 for every victim — far more than either could post. The landlord, the Ng family, was not charged.

Harris spent eight months in solitary confinement — for his own protection, he says the guards told him. He tried to maintain his sanity by reading through thousands of pages of legal documents from the case, hoping to aid in his own defense. The state claimed that the warehouse was flagrantly, cavalierly dangerous. Almena was responsible as the master tenant. Harris shared culpability as second in command.

On Dec. 6, 2017, a year and four days after the deadly fire, preliminary hearings began. Testimony lasted six days, the last of which was Harris’s 28th birthday. Each morning, Almena and Harris arrived at Superior Court of Alameda County, in downtown Oakland, shackled in their striped prison jumpsuits. On the second day, a young man named Nicholas Bouchard took the stand. He testified that Almena persuaded him to co-sign the Ghost Ship lease. Bouchard said he built festival stages with Almena and lived with him on a pot farm in the Santa Cruz mountains — one of the many young men in Almena’s orbit who “had issues with our father figures or father,” Bouchard recalled. [annotation q="Did you  attend the hearings in person?" a="No, the hearings took place before I started reporting the story."]

A couple of weeks after signing the Ghost Ship lease, Bouchard arrived at the warehouse one day to find a huge hole had been cut in the second-story floor. Concerned, he told his mother, and together they prepared for a meeting with Almena to discuss how to make safe, legal changes to the space. Almena arrived on the appointed day, two hours late; he scoffed at Kathleen Bouchard’s meticulous mind-set and ignored her. She then dedicated herself to maternal arm-twisting until her son cut ties with Almena. “It had a very, very dark side to it,” she said in court about her son’s relationship to Almena, “and my primary concern was to make sure my child was O.K.”

Over the six days of hearings, the state compelled a series of Satya Yugans to testify. Many of them remained so committed to their counterculture ideals that they didn’t really believe in the court system and its method of enacting justice. A gulf in understanding opened in the courtroom. Between the outré artists and the gray-suited custodians of law, there was almost no shared language. What was a family? What was music and what was noise (and was calling your music “noise” an insult)? Was your real name the name your parents gave you or the one bestowed on you by your friends? What qualified as a home? What did it mean to say something was beautiful?

On the stand, José Avalos tried to explain Ghost Ship’s appeal. Most shared living spaces in Oakland, even if you could afford the rent, “they don’t really want to see you,” he said. They don’t love you. They don’t care. “They basically want you to be like an invisible being.” At Satya Yuga, Avalos said, “Derick just told me to just be me.”

“So is it safe to say that it felt like a place that you could be yourself?” a defense lawyer asked on cross-examination.

“Yes.”

“A place you could call home?”

“Yes.”

“A place where you could be an artist?”

“Yes,” he said. “We were, like, caring people.” [annotation q="Why did you decide to include this exchange and not others?" a="Home, art, caring … this place that is awful but also utopia — these are my big themes."]

He, and everyone else who took the stand, conceded that the warehouse seemed far from complying with Oakland’s building code. But the feeling among people who lived there was that arresting Harris made no sense. They found the prosecution’s idea that Harris held what the district attorney described as “a leadership position in the warehouse” manipulative, infuriating and absurd. About Almena, some testified that they were scared of him. Rodney Griffin, an electrician and former friend, called Almena a “narcissist.” Nicholas Bouchard described him as “in very subtle ways extremely emotionally manipulative.”

But they were clear about Harris. “You’re going to try to make him like he’s a commander, and it’s not real,” said Swan Vega (in the transcript, she’s identified by her given name, Leah). [annotation q="How did you decide whether to use people's chosen or given names in the piece?" a="I tried to call people what they called themselves."] “This is just not correct.” Yes, Harris helped get the rent money to the bank. Yes, Harris coordinated with the music promoter. Yes, Harris cleaned the warehouse for the party. But Harris had no power. Everyone who lived in Satya Yuga knew that.

“He was like Cinderella,” Vega said. “Max was a servant’s heart. That’s what he was.”

I talked to Harris a lot in the spring and summer of 2018. He’d been in jail a year. I talked to Harris’s mother on the phone, too. [annotation q="Why do you tell the reader this, and why at this point in the story?" a="This paragraph is the core of the piece to me, in some ways. I needed to bring Max’s mother back here to set up for Kathleen Bouchard (below)."] Her voice sounded like a single thin strand of hard caramelized sugar, sweet but ready to crack. [annotation q="Wow, I love that!"] Part of the magic of parental love — its ballast, its power — is that your family will always be there for you. Their love will build for you a steadfast home in your heart, and the stability of that home will give you the strength and the sense of self required to extract yourself from bad situations when you need to leave. Harris never quite had that. No parent, like Kathleen Bouchard, was determined and able to wrest him away from risk. Instead, even in prison Harris felt a duty to take care of his mother. He worried about not being able to provide for her “on top of all of this.” [annotation q="Why did you think it was important to draw this conclusion for the reader?" a="I made this more explicit at the request of my editor. Kathleen Bouchard is the foil. She’s the highly competent, protective mom Max never had."]

For a while, each time I visited, I found Harris behind the thick glass divider in his red-and-white jail jumpsuit. To talk to me in a visiting slot in his cell block, he had to lean his lanky body over to the side of the cubicle because the cord on the phone attached to the wall was humiliatingly short. He reminded me to clean the mouthpiece of the phone on my side of the glass each time I sat down. [annotation q="Why did you include this detail?" a="He tries so hard to be good and thoughtful of others. And yet …."]

There was no way for Harris to process the situation, no way to assimilate the facts. He always thought that if he moved gently through the world, the world would move gently over him. He thought that if he helped others, good karma or Jesus or both would take care of him. Had he not done enough? Every time he entered the courtroom, he felt the vast weight of the community’s grief and accusation. “It’s just wrong,” he said of the whole situation into the jailhouse phone. He lost friends in the fire. He had his own trauma to work through. How had his life taken him here, with all these bodies laid at his feet?

One day in April when I visited Harris, he told me that the guards had woken him up in the middle of the night and searched his cell. They took his soap and deodorant and left another inmate standing in his boxers in the cold cement yard. The casual cruelty disoriented him. He had nightmares at night. He had nightmares during the day. [annotation q="What does it mean to have nightmares during the day?" a="He sleeps a lot during the day, so."][annotation q="Also, this mirrors a phrase you use above: “Being awake was excruciating, and being asleep was excruciating.” When is this kind of repetition useful?" a="I think it helps a reader feel that it’s unrelenting."] He tried to get himself into a positive mind-set before calling his mother or anyone else, because he felt he shouldn’t drag others down. She hadn’t come to visit — she didn’t have money to fly to California and, anyway, Harris didn’t want to put her through seeing him in jail. Harris’s father, who remarried and had another child, had not visited either.

Almena, too, was in jail and not doing well. Shortly after his arrest, he was moved to the Glenn Dyer jail in downtown Oakland. He’d gained 60 pounds. He spoke in person to a local TV news reporter at KTVU twice, once in November 2017 and again in June 2018. He cried during the second interview when he talked about his children, then he remembered all the children who had died and that it was cosmically unseemly for him to cry in public about his own; his face collapsed as he sunk into the quicksand of his own pain. When his children visited him in jail, he told them he was now on a spaceship. He would be leaving soon, and he didn’t know when he was coming back. He hated for his children to see him locked up like this. He longed to touch their warm, soft skin. No one touched him anymore except to lock him in handcuffs.

If he was lucky, he slept for 18 or 20 hours a day. In his dreams, he visited every studio in the warehouse. He saw Harris making jewelry, Nikki Kelber making feather headdresses, his wife upstairs belly dancing. It was all beautiful again. Then he woke up behind bars. When I visited him in November, he looked defeated, subdued. Up against the glass that divided us, he propped pictures he’d drawn of eyes, wide and wildly searching, on pages he ripped out of “I, Claudius.” [annotation q="Are Harris and Almena in the same jail? Do they communicate?" a="They’re not in the same jail, but they see each other at court dates, as they’re being tried together. It’s still a very, very complicated relationship."]

Harris never wavered in his belief in his own innocence, though he lost faith that he could get a fair trial. He saw himself as a convenient scapegoat, a way for Oakland to deflect blame and scrutiny from its own failings and keep the public’s hunger for justice and punishment trained on Almena and him. In June 2018, after nearly a year in jail, Harris agreed to take a plea deal. He told me that he also hoped he could ease the families’ suffering, to some small degree, by saving them from the horrid spectacle of a trial. Those proceedings, and their inevitably sensationalized news coverage, would “peel off a scab,” he said, for families who had just started to heal. The deal, negotiated by Harris’s and Almena’s lawyers, included them both, as their cases had been joined since the outset, and the district attorney’s office planned to present for each nearly the same set of facts. The deal stipulated that Harris would receive a six-year sentence, while Almena would receive nine. On July 3, 2018, in Oakland Superior Court, his hair pulled back in a respectable bun, Harris sat as the judge read each of the 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter. For each one, Harris replied, almost inaudibly, “No contest.”

“It took over 20 minutes to read the names,” Harris said to me later at Santa Rita Jail. “It was horrible. Every time they read a name, another corner of the courtroom would break out wailing.” Harris, in the courtroom, started weeping, too, and could barely talk. “Every name is like a blow,” he said. “Hearing the names of some of my friends, like Peter, Micah. ...”

The judge accepted each of Harris’s no-contest pleas and found him guilty on all counts. “To have to take that and feel that judgment and have that even be uttered into the universe — that was just a hard, hard thing,” Harris said.

The sentencing hearings were supposed to be a formality. In the month leading up to them, Harris prayed and kept the Sabbath and studied Buddhism. He knew each family would be granted the opportunity to make a victim-impact statement and that those statements would be brutal. “These people are obviously hurting so deeply and they’re transmuting that suffering into anger,” Harris said. He felt it was his duty not just to sit there in the courtroom but to listen with an open heart, let the words in. He didn’t want to be “mentally blocking my ears and trying to shield myself from taking it head on.”

Late on the morning of Aug. 9, the benches of the courtroom filled up with families and friends of the victims, plus a few family and friends of the defendants. The space felt hopelessly small and wrong, but it was inevitably all going to feel small and wrong. This was a criminal-negligence case that was trying to perform the civic emotional work of a mass-murder trial. The community needed the proceedings to do much more than call two human defendants to account for negligence; the community needed catharsis. The trial needed to create monsters, then decree those monsters must be locked away so that the world could be made safe and right again.

Harris, along with Almena, entered from a side door. Harris seemed to be trying to hold on to a bit of himself, the gentle hippie artist, by wearing an undershirt he tie-dyed with jailhouse juice packets and crushed colored pencils. In the gallery, Harris locked his gaze on his mother, whom he hadn’t seen in 14 months, her long face dazed with the impossibility of her task. He mouthed, “I love you,” and he told me that he tried “to transmit as much love as I possibly can with my eyes.” She had come to California to support her son. Her presence, perhaps, would make Harris seem human to all the other parents in the courtroom, many of whom believed Harris was responsible for their children’s deaths.

The second family member to speak was Linda Regan, who lost her 34-year-old daughter, Amanda Kershaw, in the Ghost Ship fire. She had no mechanism to salve her rage. “I am a Christian, and I try to live my life accordingly,” Regan said to Harris and Almena. “I’m supposed to forgive and turn the other cheek.” But she was ruined by her grief, by their warehouse. She could not forgive. “I am not that good of a Christian, and I am not capable of doing that yet,” she said. “What you did was despicable, and you should both pay for that. You took 36 beautiful souls and erased them from all of their loved ones’ lives.”

Family after family wanted Harris and Almena to know that loss did not get easier to bear. The sorrow did not decrease, it radiated. A young woman named Lesley Moran took the stand to talk about her 6-year-old twin daughters whose father, Alex Ghassan, died in the fire. “When they ask me if they can ask Santa to have Daddy come back from the spirit world for even one day, for Christmas, and I have to tell them that they can put it on the list, but it’s not possible. And I have to just watch their faces fall. They talk about death all the time. And that’s not normal.” [annotation q="How did you decide to feature these statements out of all of them?" a="Oh god, some stuff just punches you in the gut."]

The horror followed by sadness followed by horror followed by sadness flowed and overflowed and kept overflowing. There was no way to contain it, nor should it have been contained. Colleen Dolan, who lost her daughter, 33-year-old Chelsea Dolan, described standing out in front of Ghost Ship for hours on that awful night, breathing in the same awful fumes that killed her child, feeling the same awful heat. Sabrina Fox, Chelsea’s sister, stood in front of the burning warehouse with her mother as well. “Days later when we finally received her body, she was like smoked meat, her skin and hair charred from the intense temperatures,” she said.

A series of parents came forward:

My child was “right on the precipice of tumbling into her greatness as an adult human.”

My child was “planning to come home over the weekend so she can study for her finals. She wanted to sleep at home in her comfortable bed.”

“The only positive thing to come out of Nick’s death for me is that I’m no longer afraid of dying. When I’m dead, I will either be with Nick or no longer grieve for him.”

“I used to be a nice person.”

Almost all the parents who addressed the court disapproved of the plea deal. Harris and Almena would very likely be released in two and three and a half years, respectively, given the months off for good conduct and time served. It did not seem enough. “Thirty-six people who you greeted that night and collected money from — I don’t know if you remember my daughter. ...”

“Your Honor, unless you too have lost a child, it is impossible for you to conceive the desperation with which I implore you to reconsider this plea deal. ...”

The presiding judge, James Cramer, who was standing in for Judge Morris Jacobson, who had approved the plea deal but was now on leave, interrupted. “I’m going to stop you,” he said. “I have.” [annotation q="When you report in court, what kinds of things are you looking for and noting down? Do you transcribe in real time, or rely on the court transcript? Did you try to talk to some of the parents?" a="I was away for this hearing, so I just got the transcript."]

The next day Harris took the stand and apologized. He knew words were inadequate and that he would have to use words anyway. “I am so deeply sorry and regret all of my actions, my inactions, my lack of foresight, my lack of awareness that contributed and led to this tragedy,” he said. “I — I never would have begun to imagine that any of my actions over that time could have led to something like this. It’s completely unfathomable. I don’t even really know what words to offer, because words feel hollow; they don’t come close, and I’m sorry.” He continued, “I’m deeply sorry. I don’t expect forgiveness. I wouldn’t ask for that. I know that nothing I can say comes close. It’s incredibly difficult to address everyone, because I know nothing I can say will come close. I’m sorry.”

Almena, too, took the stand, and this went less well. Even now, here, he could not conjure a world that did not revolve around him. “To go back to the day before the fire to say, ‘Derick, do you wish that you didn’t embark on this hard journey, perilous?’ I would have said: ‘No, man, this is what we’re doing. This is so beautiful,’ ” he told the court. “If I could tattoo flames and doves and crows on my body and the names of your children, I would — and I will.” Then Almena read from a statement he prepared. “If I could give each of you my life, if I could give you my children’s life, I would. That’s not the way this is going to work out. I’m sorry.”

After a two-hour recess, everyone returned to the courtroom. Over the two days of hearings, the families of the victims had made it very clear in court that in addition to being wrecked by loss, they felt legally aggrieved. They were angry that the landlord had not been charged. They were angry that the city of Oakland had not been charged. They were angry that P.G.& E. had not been charged. And then there was Almena’s performance at the hearing — his apparent lack of contrition, his offer to sacrifice the lives of his own son and daughters and the thought that he would tattoo their dead children’s names on his skin.

To the great surprise of everybody present, the judge threw out the plea deal. “I am expressly rejecting the plea bargain as to Mr. Almena,” Cramer said. He added: “Mr. Harris has expressed from the outset, unconditional remorse. He was at the scene, he stayed at the scene, met with the officials, has done so from the outset.” But Harris and Almena had a package deal; either both defendants pleas were granted or neither was. So Harris’s plea, along with Almena’s, was thrown out.

“I do not know that it will do any of these victims any good,” Cramer said of forcing the case to go to trial. A trial was no guarantee of justice. A trial would certainly not bring justice with regard to the city of Oakland, P.G.& E. or the landlords. But the judge would let a jury decide the fates of Almena and Harris.

Harris remains in Santa Rita Jail and most likely will until his trial, which is scheduled to begin next April. [annotation q="Why did you decide to publish the story when you did, rather than following it through the trial?" a="Covering the trial was never the plan. The timing was not my choice. I turned in a draft in July and wanted it to run sooner. But things can be slow, and they didn't have a slot."] Some days it’s hard, and he cannot tell the prison psychologists he’s depressed or they will take away his socks — in theory so he doesn’t use them to harm himself. (Officials at Santa Rita Jail declined to comment.) “I mean, just the overwhelmingness of this whole experience,” he said. “It’s like being a survivor of war and then someone telling you that the whole war was your fault.”

Each morning he reads the daily spiritual parable from “The Book of Awakening.” He relaxes if the guards decide to handcuff him when they take him out of his cell — “if it makes you feel more comfortable,” is how he sees it. “If there’s less of a chance that you’ll be jumpy and Tase me for scratching my nose, then great.” He has read the Bible three times since he entered Santa Rita. He studies Buddhism and looks for ways to model equanimity and grace. When a wildflower seed blows into the yard, he says, “I have to take that as pure poetry.” He tries to call his mother every day. He forgives his father for his absence and wishes he could be a better brother to his father’s other son, who is now 8.

It strains the human heart — and all the wisdom of the great books of the world — to hold all this suffering. Thirty-six families learned their children died. [annotation q="Why did you want to repeat this fact here, close to the end?" a="This is a fact that is never allowed to go away — for the families, for the readers, for Max, for me."] Each story is a complete universe of pain. In none of those stories does the child come back. Each of those children was loved.

Harris tries to sit with it all, to let the unfathomable in, but a person can only absorb so much sadness at one time before the mind breaks down or deflects. So Harris takes in this swollen, shattered world in the ways he can. [annotation q="Love that phrase: “swollen, shattered world.”" a="Thank you. The truth is, I was kind of insecure about this phrase. And I still am. :)"] Recently, in his cell, Harris read a story in National Geographic about Alex, an African gray parrot who could count and identify colors like a small child. He cried when he told me about the bird. Alex had worked with the same trainer his whole life, Harris said, and his trainer cared deeply for him. The last thing Alex said to his trainer, on the night before he died, was: “I love you.” [annotation q="Why did you decide to end this way? Was it a purposeful choice to bookend the story with anecdotes about animals?" a="I knew I wanted to end with the parrot before I decided to put the bugs at the beginning. But yes, I liked the bookending. I also wanted the resonance with the young people telling their parents goodbye. God, I might cry again just typing this."]

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the college that Peter Wadsworth attended. He graduated from Reed College, not Reed University.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified a woman who gave a statement at a sentencing hearing and misidentified the victim she spoke of. She is Linda Regan, who spoke about her daughter, Amanda Kershaw, not Susan Slocum, who spoke about her daughter Donna Kellogg.

The post On trial for the Ghost Ship warehouse fire: Was an accused villain miscast as the bad guy? appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Maria Streshinsky, executive editor of Wired, wouldn’t say the magazine has grown skeptical about the promise of technology. But compared to the optimism of past editorial regimes, she and editor-in-chief Nick Thompson, who took their posts in 2017, have brought in a healthy dose of scrutiny. In the past year, the magazine has covered crippling cyberattacks, the sometimes deadly practice of swatting, and the inside story of Facebook’s struggles with its potential to cause harm.

“We love technology, but we have to be sure to examine the harms it can do,” Streshinsky says. “It’s important to probe and ask the right questions.”

Yet Streshinsky is equally interested in pieces that explore how technology can solve societal challenges, from activists in Syria using sensors to warn residents about bombs, to a startup tackling the impending shortage of caretakers for the elderly. And she’s hungry for more stories that amuse and entertain.

“Every once in a while, you want readers to have a lot of fun and be delighted,” she says. “I think we could all use that.”

I spoke with Streshinsky about what makes a good Wired story, what she looks for in pitches, and how writers can build effective relationships with editors. We also took apart freelancer Eva Holland’s pitch for a feature on neonatal medicine and one family’s battle to keep their premature baby alive, which appeared in the April 2018 “Life” Issue. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Besides the obvious stuff, like Silicon Valley or gaming, what makes good fodder for a Wired story?

There are universal answers when it comes to magazine features. First, you have to have a story. We get a lot of pitches on topics, but they don’t have characters who will drive the narrative. Scenes are really important to meet the reader where they are and help them relate to the story.

For Wired specifically, the story has to be about something that is shaping the future and is driven by technology or science. Last year, Brendan Koerner wrote a story about a group called Xbox Underground that was doing more and more hacking that was less and less OK. It was a very Wired story because it was about young, brilliant hackers and told us something about the future and the world of video game creation. Wired also has a wonderfully nerdy history of being interested in science fiction, and we’re trying to build more around Internet culture.

Some stories that you’ve published, like Elizabeth Weil’s “The Curse of the Bahia Emerald,” don’t have a strong connection to science or technology. Is that an anomaly?

An editor once told me that 80 to 90 percent of what you publish should be squarely within your mission, and the rest should just be really good story. We also have this history of doing great capers: Was “Argo” a Wired story? The Bahia emerald story is a great caper with a touch of science.

What would you like to receive more pitches about?

We want more stories that go deep inside companies and really tell us how things happened and how systems work, so we can better understand our society. Places like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple shape our world. I think there are a lot of important stories to be done about artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Both have enormous consequences that could be good or bad. I know it sounds odd at this moment, but I think the Internet is not always a terrible place and has actually done a lot of good — I’d like to do more stories about that.

How original does a topic need to be?

It depends on the topic, and it matters that you have something new to add. There are topics we’ll keep coming back to. We’re not going to do another Xbox Underground story, but we’re going to do more stories on Facebook, Twitter, and emerging technologies having good and bad consequences. Anything shaping society through technology is important to us.

What kinds of international stories work for Wired?

We’re happy to have an international story if it informs where all of society is going and matters to a U.S. reader. We recently did a story on China’s social credit system, which is a possible harbinger of things to come elsewhere. We try to focus on stories that add forward motion.

How often does Wired work with freelancers, and what is the pitching process like?

We have a handful of contributors who each work with an editor on staff to develop stories. But we work with a lot of freelancers, and I’m always looking for more diverse voices. Writers should pitch a specific editor directly. If someone pitches a good enough topic, we’ll push her to find the story, the character, the arc, the scenes. That back-and-forth process can take a couple of weeks. Other pitches are already in good shape.

Once a month, we have formal meeting where editors review five to 10 pitches as a group. When an editor brings a pitch to that meeting, he or she is arguing for the story and believes the writer has done the due diligence and has the skills to make it happen. I realize it’s a tough process for the writers because they’re not getting paid, but it helps us know it’s going to be a successful story. I hope freelancers know that 70 percent of why pitches don’t work has nothing to do with the writer — it’s just too close to something else, or we can’t do it right now, etc.

How long should pitches be?

Pitches should be no longer than one-and-a-half pages, or two if they’re really dynamic.

How does someone become a contributor?

We have some writers on contract who contribute a certain number of stories per year. We add those by building relationships with writers who fit squarely in the Wired world and who we keep going back to. I’d like to continue to make that list more diverse. It’s also a budget question each year.

How often do you run stories based on cold pitches?

It’s hard to say. Writers we know tend to know the process a bit better and get what a Wired story is. But we’re very open to new writers and always looking for more women and more diversity. We’re always looking for writers who have a good voice. Writers have been forced to move so fast these days, so we’re always taken by someone whose writing is lovely even in a short email.

What are some ways that writers who don’t know you well can effectively go about building a relationship?

The ideal version of me would want to meet someone for coffee. The realistic version of me right now can’t do that as much. What I would like is for someone to email a good idea with a clear sense of what a Wired story is and what the magazine has done lately. You need to look at what we’ve run in the last five print issues. It doesn’t have to be a full pitch, but maybe an interesting idea in two paragraphs. If someone writes me a smart-enough email that shows they’re a clear writer, has a good sense of story, has a good idea, and shows us some strong clips, then I will certainly make time to meet. But don’t be offended if I can’t.

How often should a writer follow up on a pitch, and when should she move on?

We try really hard to answer everybody, but I apologize in advance if we don’t. If you don’t hear back, follow up two weeks later. Sometimes I miss emails, and it’s not personal. If someone still doesn’t respond, say, “Thank you, I wanted to let you know I’m taking this somewhere else.” Make sure your email isn’t too long and is well-written. We’re also getting inundated with PR pitches that look more and more like story pitches.

How do you feel about simultaneous submissions?

Quite honestly, it’s hard. I’m 100% sympathetic to the fact that if you’re waiting for Wired to respond to you for over a month, that means you’re not getting a pitch in front of someone else. That’s where we need to be better at just giving a quick response: “Yes, we might be interested; let’s keep working on it.” A young writer recently mentioned in the pitch that he was also sending it to another publication, and I was frustrated. We already have a relationship, so at least give me a moment. If you know an editor, don’t pitch simultaneously. If you don’t, try one pitch at a time if at all possible. It feels a little less like you’re interested in Wired if you’re also taking it three other places.

What are your rates?

We generally pay $2 a word in print.

The Pitch: Wired editor Maria Streshinsky worked with us to annotate the pitch by freelancer Eva Holland that led to “Saving Baby Boy Green,” which was one of the stories in the April 2018 “Life” issue. Storyboard’s questions are in red; Streshinsky’s responses in blue.

[annotation q="Had you worked with Eva before, or had she written for the magazine? Was there a backstory to this pitch?" a="She had not written for Wired, but I’d been wanting her to. I met her through friends of friends. She had pitched us before, but for one reason or another it didn’t work out. I sent her and a group of other writers I work with a prompt for a themed issue that was going to grapple with how technology and science affects every stage of life, from birth to death. Eva came back with two or three ideas, each three-to-four paragraphs long, and this was one of them."] [annotation q="What stood out about it?" a="It’s well-written, it’s emotional, it’s got characters. It touches on something deeply important. I don’t even have children, and I could get swept up into the emotion and stress of the situation. We also needed to fill out the issue, and this fit squarely into the theme."]

For babies born before full term, there can be a terrifyingly fine line between birth and death. It’s a line that has been pushed back steadily over the years with advances in neonatal medicine, and today, that line lies around 24 weeks. [annotation q="The pitch opens with general background on the topic, rather than a specific character or scene. How did that work for you?" a="I actually love it, because she goes right to the heart of what we asked for in the call for pitches: how technology and science shapes stages of life. The first line is powerful and well-written, and it establishes the stakes right away. Then she tells us where the line is. She’s saying, “I’ve done a little bit of work to understand what the situation is today.”"]

A baby born that early can weigh less than a pound. It will appear to be fully formed, an infant in miniature, but on the inside its tiny lungs will not yet be functional. It cannot breathe on its own, and if it is going to survive it will need to spend weeks in a top-of-the-line incubator, hooked up to machines that keep oxygen flowing to its tiny brain. It will face high odds of blindness, cerebral palsy, physical disabilities and learning delays. It will be immunocompromised, and its parents may not know whether it will live or die for several months after it is born. Every cold, every flu, will be a potentially deadly threat. The full extent of the damage done by its early arrival may not be known for years. [annotation a="This paragraph has nice quick lines. It’s dramatic and visual. “An infant in miniature”—what a lovely turn of phrase."]

I know all this because two members of my social circle, newlyweds, recently brought their son into the world at just 24 weeks. Owen is a miracle baby, born at the furthest limit of doctors’ ability to save him, kept alive in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in Vancouver for five months before he was permitted to go home. His bare survival was in question for nearly three months of that time. His longterm impairments are unknown. His twin, Maia, didn’t make it. [annotation q="When does it make sense to have a personal perspective in a pitch, and when is it extraneous or a conflict of interest?" a="I often want there to be a personal side to a story. When I was at Pacific Standard, I worked with Amanda Hess on her piece “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet,” which won a National Magazine Award. The fact that it was about her personal experience being harassed and stalked on Twitter really advanced the story. For our story on Kim Wall — the journalist murdered in Copenhagen while reporting on a submarine inventor — it really mattered to us that someone who knew Kim tell the story. For many stories, the personal is not appropriate. It can’t be someone trying to work out a grudge. And the personal story has to have national importance. Eva didn’t put herself in the story—she made it about the couple and helped the reader understand their experience."]

The interventions required to keep him alive were extreme. At times, especially early on, his mother wondered if she was being cruel or selfish, subjecting him to it all, leveraging all the expertise and technology of modern medicine to force his tiny body to breathe – almost, it seemed, against his will. She lived in a dorm on the hospital grounds, learned to speak the language of the NICU, learned the routines of rounds and tests and levels in his blood, waited in line to see a postpartum counsellor. She’s a bit of a granola type – eats organic, practices acupuncture, doesn’t like what you might call the hospital industrial complex. But her months in the NICU changed her views. She left there grateful for the extraordinary care she and Owen had received. She has agreed to speak on the record about her experience. [annotation q="Does this pitch represent the level of pre-reporting you’d like to see?" a="I think it’s great. She had the advantage of knowing this couple, so we already know she is going to have an emotional connection to them and they’re willing to talk. She lives in the same small town as these people, and they’re in her social circle, so she’s going to be able to lay the groundwork and set the scenes—she’s not helicoptering in. And she’d approached the hospital about access."]

I’d like to write about the science of saving extremely premature babies for WIRED. Owen and his parents would be a way into the story, providing some scenes, emotional weight, and a potential narrative framework, but the meat of it would be the how. What goes into keeping such a drastically premature baby alive? How do doctors decide who can be saved, and who is past saving? How did we come as far as we have – and are there hard limits on how much further back we could push that line? [annotation q="The writer asks questions in this paragraph but doesn’t answer them. How do you feel about that?" a="We often say that we don’t assign questions—we assign answers. But that’s not always true, and there are shades of gray. Here, she’s asking questions but has already established that she’s done some work, like knowing the line has been pushed back to 24 weeks. In the next paragraph, she shows us where she’s going to get these answers. After getting the pitch, we asked her to find historians of neonatal medicine and top researchers in this field to explain more about why the line has shifted and whether it could change again. We sometimes get the kind of pitch that says, “I want to find out how the Twitter algorithm works.” That’s not a story pitch. Instead, you’d need to say “I know that the Twitter algorithm works in these ways, and I have access to this person who can help me fill it out.” We’re not going to assign questions unless we feel the writer has a sense of the answer or knows where to get it."] [annotation q="The pitch doesn’t really include a “why now.” Was that less important because of the themed issue?" a="Yes, you’re totally right about that. For a regular issue, it would’ve been really important to have a team of scientists about to change things or another “why.” But it was a good emotional story and did well on its own, even online outside the context of the print issue. I like getting pitches on things that happen every day and I never think about, if someone has something new and thoughtful to say. Amy Wallace and Virginia Heffernan do this well."]

I have approached the hospital where Owen was born about access – my goal would be to interview NICU medical staff and researchers, and if at all possible, to spend time on the ward itself. If the Vancouver hospital isn’t willing to grant that access, I’ll search for another that will. I’m confident that I will be able to find a facility that is willing to shed some light on the science of the NICU. She mentions that she has approached the ward for access but not confirmed it. [annotation q="What kind of access is needed at the time of the pitch? Also, she doesn’t mention whether this ward is special or cutting-edge in any way. Was that important?" a="Doing the story was contingent on getting access. Sometimes having a conditional green light from a publication can help you get the access. This ward happened to be the most advanced in Canada, and women like her friend were flown there from all around the country."]

The post Wired’s executive editor seeks stories that reveal all faces of technology appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When I first saw Pop-Up Magazine in San Francisco a couple of years ago, I struggled to describe the experience to friends. What do you call a show where you might watch a singer in drag pull a golf club from his cleavage, view the animated history of a man who helped pass a constitutional amendment, or hear how the bald eagle went from symbol to pest?

“We like to tell people it’s like a podcast, documentary film, comedy show, play and concert all wrapped up into one,” says Anita Badejo, Pop-Up’s executive editor and co-host. “When you just say it’s a live magazine, people aren’t quite sure what to imagine.”

The show shares a sensibility, and an editor-in-chief, with its award-winning sister publication, The California Sunday Magazine. Pop-Up is similarly focused on telling true stories in the form of shorts and features and assigns pieces to departments like “business,” “technology” or “relationships.” Like the magazine, the show doesn’t do much history or memoir, and first-person narrative is limited in favor of reported pieces.

But with Pop-Up, the audience experiences the stories live and together, with sounds and sights that make full use of the theater environment. Pieces are set all over the world, not just the regions that California Sunday covers. And the stories are ephemeral – nothing is recorded or shared.

The show has toured in more than a dozen cities since premiering in 2009 at San Francisco’s Brava Theater, with seats often selling out in minutes. Tickets for the 2019 Winter Issue—which will travel to Los Angeles, Oakland, New York, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Austin — go on sale today (Dec. 18). The show plans to expand to new audiences and formats after its publisher was acquired last month by Emerson Collective, the organization run by Laurene Powell Jobs that also owns a majority stake in The Atlantic.

Badejo and I chatted about how to pitch stories for this unique medium and reviewed two successful pitches, from This American Life producer Stephanie Foo and from Helen Rosner, food correspondent for The New Yorker. Pop-Up takes pitches at stories@popupmagazine.com and has a contributor guide. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What kinds of contributors are you looking for?

In every show, we want a mix of writers, filmmakers, radio and audio producers and photographers on stage telling stories. Sometimes we’ll have contributors who are artists, designers, actors, or comedians, and occasionally we’ll have folks who hadn’t considered themselves storytellers at all. We work with people who are green and those who are established and well-known. We don’t care where a story comes from – we just care about it being a good story and having a range of backgrounds professionally and personally.

Given that you’re a unique outlet, what are you looking for in pitches?

The first thing we look for is whether the story lends itself to being multimedia in some way. You don’t have to have thought through ahead of time how to make it multimedia. If you have a great story, please err on the side of pitching it, and the onus is on us to think about how it fits in to the show. But if you come up with ideas that could be enhanced with photographs, animations, audio, video, an original score, or a theatrical performance, it’s helpful to flag that for us.

Every successful Pop-Up story has at least two of these four elements:

1. It’s informative. The show is meant to highlight works of journalism.
2. It’s emotional. We like to make people laugh, and when productive and appropriate, we like to make them cry.
3. It’s beautiful. So much of the stage is taken up by a giant screen, so it’s really helpful if a story lends itself to an amazing visual treatment.
4. It’s surprising. This can be a cinematic story that takes a dramatic turn, or taking something ubiquitous that people think they know everything about and turning it on its head.

Are storytellers responsible for arranging or supplying the multimedia component, or do you take care of that?

You certainly don’t have to do those things yourself if it’s not in your skill set. There’s a whole production team on our end that can help, and we work with freelance producers in various markets. We expect people to pitch us in their mediums. With writers, we mostly get written pitches. With audio and radio producers, we expect them to send a little tape if they’ve started reporting. With filmmakers, we’d like to see some film, and with photographers to see photos. A helpful way for writers to think about multimedia elements is the same way they might approach a question of access to information or sources. Is there an archive where we can pull visuals for a story? Do you see potential for audio in some way? Do you have access to a character or place but lack the skills to gather that material?

Iknow Pop-Up looks for stories that are fresh and original. Can the material ever have been published in any form? Is it OK to present a work-in-progress commissioned by someone else?

Stories should be new or not yet widely published or released before the show. If filmmakers have screened something at one festival, that’s OK; if they’ve released a documentary on Netflix, that wouldn’t work. If writers publish a piece on a smaller website or personal blog, we’ll consider it, but if it’s already been in a national publication with a big audience, that would put it  out of the running. We want to ensure that when people walk into our show, there’s very little likelihood they would’ve heard the stories before. It’s common for people to do a story for Pop-Up they’re already working on for another outlet, or that’s part of a bigger project, and for it to be published after the show tours.

Are there topics you’ve gotten too many pitches about, or not enough?

We’re saturated with family histories. In general, we get too many personal stories and historical stories. We always need more shorts, which are 4-6 minutes long and top out at 1,000 words. A lot of people pitch features, which end up at 7-12 minutes on stage and top out at 2,000 words. Our shorts are often structured as lists or a how-to or a piece of advice or criticism, and there’s a lot of room for them to be playful or more of a riff on something. Our features are classically narrative with characters, scenes, and an arc. We want more humor in the show, including things that start funny and end serious. We tend to get a lot of long, dark, serious stories, but we can’t make a 90-minute show that’s only that. I would love to see more stories on sports, lifestyle, architecture, design, or style, and I’d love to be doing more interesting and creative politics stories. Stories that are purely idea-driven, like a meditative essay, can be hard to translate into Pop-Up. It helps to have a character or place to hold onto. People certainly get bonus points if they can pitch stories that take place in the cities we tour in, and we’re adding new ones all the time.

How often are stories pitched versus assigned?

The vast majority are based on pitches. Assigning can be tricky for Pop-Up because stories have to be far enough along in their development or clearly there and accessible. We don’t have room to kill stories, because we work on a tight production timeline capped at 10 stories. We know that people are committing their time not only to report a story but also to go on a multi-city tour, and we’d never want to ask people to do that if there was a chance their story might not be in the show. That’s why there’s a little more pre-reporting involved in our pitching process than with an outlet that can take on more risk.

When should people pitch you in light of your tour schedule?

We tour three times a year: winter (February), spring (May) and fall (September/October). We’re always assigning on a rolling basis. We like to have stories assigned for the next tour at least three months out, but in many cases we’ll assign earlier than that. Sometimes we’ll assign later if we hope to get something in the show that’s particularly timely. Many of our stories are akin to features in that they need a long lead time. It’s not too early right now to think about pitching for the spring or fall of 2019. We confirm tour dates about six months ahead of time and release them to the public about six weeks in advance.

What’s the story development process like once someone gets an assignment?

We like to say we’re a magazine, until a month before the show we become a theater production. The early stages mimic a magazine draft process: We’ll send you to report the story if needed, and you’ll file a first draft. We ask you to write it in a slightly more conversational tone than you might be used to, like you’d tell the story to a friend. You’ll go through multiple rounds of edits with a producer. All the stories are fact checked. Then, we’ll add other elements. If your piece is getting scored, we’ll ask you to record the story and send it to the composer. We’ll send it to our art department, which will want photos of the subjects if they’re animating them. As we get closer to the show, we spend time refining the piece so it’s ready for the stage. Contributors fly in the day before the first show and practice several times in the office before a full rehearsal in the theater. We give people pointers on how to present their stories live, where the mic should go, how to project. And no, you don’t have to stand there with a clicker – there’s a team of people cuing those things for you, and the script tells you when to pause if something is coming on screen.

Why have you chosen not to record the shows and share them more widely?

It’s been part of Pop-Up’s ethos from the beginning. We want to make sure we’re creating a special and unique experience that the audience feels really present for. We want it to feel of a moment. We also don’t record the show because we’d have to stage it completely differently. We’d need multiple cameras in the room, which would affect the experience of the people in the audience.

How do you decide which contributors travel to which cities on a given tour?

We try to keep shows fairly consistent, but availability is one factor. We also want our shows to feel of the places that we take them, so we want to have some local representation as well. It can also depend on whether a story makes sense for a single city or region or a national audience. Occasionally, we bring back stories from previous tours to cities they’ve never been seen in before.

What are your rates?

We pay a flat rate of $500 for shorts and $750 for features. If someone is on a six-city tour, the honorarium is $3,000. On top of that, we pay a per diem for all show and travel days and for travel and lodging. We cover all the expenses if the story needs audio production and you haven’t already taped the interviews, or if you need to get stuff from an archive. We also cover travel costs, but those stories have to rise to a certain bar: We need a clear sense that the story and access are there, and that the writer is the right person to pull it off.

Pop-Up shared two pitches with us: One that a contributor wrote and submitted, and another typed up by a producer based on a phone call. My questions are in red, Badejo’s responses in blue. To read the pitch without annotations, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button which can be found below the contributors list on the right-hand side of the web page, or at top of your mobile screen.

[annotation q="Both of these contributors are pretty well-known. Does that matter for you?" a="Not at all. We have people who are super early-career, and people who are super experienced. Some of our greatest hits are by folks that are really green."]

Pitch 1

Written by This American Life producer Stephanie Foo, premiered in Fall 2016

So in my early, broke twenties, I used to love this whiskey called Ancient Age. It was $3 for an entire flask from my corner store in San Francisco, and I remember it being deliciously solid for its ludicrous price. The company that makes it, Buffalo Trace, has a bunch of its fancier whiskeys online, featuring elaborate, rave reviews from many whiskey critics and magazines, talking about delicious caramel noses, toasted oak, deep flavors. Ancient Age has one review too. It’s pretty short. [annotation q="What appealed to you about the opening?" a="The story started out when she was still in San Francisco, which is our hometown. It’s always helpful for a story to take place at least in part in the cities we’re in. One thing she did that is risky for us is to start out personal. In this case it worked, because it went through the anecdote pretty quickly and moved on."]

“Recommended.” – Paul Pacult. [annotation a="This is such an obvious laugh line. You could already see the beats of the story in your head and the places where the audience was going to react."]

Anyway, point is, I LOVED ANCIENT AGE and drank a whole lot of it. And one night, carrying around my flask at 2am, I noticed there was a phone number on the back of the bottle. I called it, got directed to a voicemail, and I left an impassioned tribute to Ancient Age’s drinkability. I then forgot all about it until recently, when I was going through my friend’s liquor cabinet and noticed most of his bottles had a phone number on the back. [annotation q="This pitch is quite conversational. Is that what you’re looking for?" a="It was right for this story, especially because it’s really funny, which we are always looking for. It helps if people write their pitches the way they’d tell the story to a friend, because that’s most similar to how they’d tell it on stage. Stephanie is a radio producer, so she’s used to writing for audio. John Jeremiah Sullivan, when he was on the show, wasn’t writing in a light, breezy way, but he still wrote in a way that worked for the stage and was true to his voice."]

I decided to call a bunch of the numbers – from small distilleries to Coors to Bacardi – to see if anybody else did what I did that night. As it turns out, customer service reps at almost every company walk in on Monday mornings to a treasure trove of hilarious, inebriated 2 a.m. voicemails like the one I left years ago.  And I got a few organizations to send me selections from their treasure troves. [annotation q="Do you expect contributors to have done this much pre-reporting? What’s the minimum she could’ve done?" a="We needed to know she was going to be able to access the voicemails and one of the customer service reps. If she’d had one preliminary call with a rep where he’d anecdotally described a lot of things in the voicemails, guaranteed access to them, and agreed to the interview, that wouldn’t have been enough. She didn’t necessarily need to have listened to them all herself. But the fact that she already had access and mentioned that in the pitch was helpful because the story hinges on it. If it was just, “There are numbers on the back of liquor bottles and people call them and I did it once,” that wouldn’t be a story for us."]

One person called Buffalo Trace and sang them a song he’d composed, complete with a mournful buffalo wail at the end. There are a lot of people telling stories about what the liquor made them do. A group of fishermen in Alaska called one company promising they’d send a box of wild Alaskan salmon to the distillery in exchange for some whiskey. Different alcohols get different sorts of calls. People drinking whiskey are often hammered, some of them angry because they’ve drank all their whiskey or dropped it on the pavement. If people are drinking Fireball, they’re always with other people – nobody sips Fireball by themselves. People drinking wine are often housewives at book clubs, giggling about chardonnay. Weirdly, lots of people affect fake British accents when they call drinking wine. People drinking Lagunitas are often crossfaded and start going on rants about the universe and what everything really means. [annotation q="What was effective about going through these examples?" a="It was really helpful because she was outlining the beats of the story. When people pitch Pop-Up, they often have an idea or a topic and start riffing on it. But it’s another thing to have a clear sense of what the beats are going to be and what you’re going to say. If you get on stage and don’t have that, the story is going to fall apart really quickly."]

I’ve also interviewed customer service representatives about what it’s like to get these calls. And the delightful part is – if you are ever a customer service rep – you want to be one for booze. First of all, unlike basically any other product, there are very, very few disgruntled customers when you have people who are tanked. Regardless of how the liquor tastes, it’s always, always effective. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do. [annotation q="This topic is quite quirky. Do Pop-Up pitches need a “so what” like most magazine stories do?" a="This is definitely on the lighter side of the stories we tend to do. One of the things that was really successful about it is that it’s pretty surprising. Drinking is ubiquitous, but how often do people think about the number on a liquor bottle and the person on the other end? And this is one type of customer service where you’re not just being berated constantly but have people calling in to celebrate your product. It took something people are familiar with and turned it on its head. Even though it was light, it was informative – people walked away seeing something in a new light. This whole pitch was just really crowd-pleasing. Not every story needs to be riotous with laughter, but we need one or two every show and are always looking for good openers."]

And second, it’s kind of delightful to be able to party with people while being totally sober at your desk. If you offer a coupon or a t-shirt to a drunk, enthusiastic customer, you will make their entire night. One guy said that compared to his previous job doing customer service for printers, this was an absolute dream. [annotation q="Was this a short or a feature?" a="It was assigned as a short but got longer throughout the process, partly because she had such a treasure trove of material. The nature of voicemails is also that they’re rambling and long. Her piece ended up about 8 minutes long with the laughter. The audience reaction can definitely change the timing and pacing."]

There are a couple other angles to go about this, and it could just be a fun little mashup too, but –  let me know if this sounds like something that might be a good fit for you guys!

[annotation q="What did the piece end up being like on stage?" a="There were three elements: Stephanie’s narration, the voicemails, and animations on screen. In this case, the animations did double duty: In some pieces of audio, people weren’t very comprehensible, so the visuals served as subtitles as well as an accompaniment to the piece. We worked with an amazing design firm that gave the subtitles cool effects, like blurring them and making them move in interesting ways."]

Pitch 2

From The New Yorker food correspondent Helen Rosner, discussed via phone and typed up for Pop-Up producers, premiered in Spring 2018

[annotation q="This piece was pitched over the phone. Is that what you prefer? Can people cold-call you?" a="I would definitely advise people not to cold-call us. If you’re interested in pitching, email stories@popupmagazine.com or us individually, and we can always set up a call. As much as possible, it’s great to get pitches in writing."]

A few months ago, Helen began trying to catalogue everything Trump eats, since he has a very limited and eccentric diet. (His standard McDonald’s dinner order: Two Big Macs and two Filet-O-Fish, no buns.) One thing especially stood out to her: wedge salad, which is famously made of iceberg lettuce. It is Trump’s favorite salad, and more than that, the only salad he has been documented eating. “Now, I find this interesting, because I love iceberg lettuce salad,” Helen said. (A bit different from many food writers, Helen isn’t narrowly focused on fancy food. She actually won a James Beard Award for an ode to the chicken tender.) Then she started to talk about iceberg lettuce. [annotation q="Did the fact that this pitch was about Donald Trump harm or hurt its chances?" a="In some ways, it had an uphill battle to climb, since we were getting a lot of pitches explicitly tied to the current administration. Trump is the most covered figure in the world, and how to write a unique story about him is a real question. How do we make sure we’re not just adding to the noise? A lot of the reporting falls into two buckets: his eccentricities or major political issues with massive stakes. Most stories don’t connect the two. Helen’s piece did that successfully by taking part of his limited diet and showing how it ties to a host of political issues: His beloved salad is in jeopardy because of the policies he himself is enacting. That was really exciting to us."]

Iceberg lettuce used to be the dominant lettuce in American salads. That is, until the 1970s, when because of Cesar Chavez and labor politics (complicated), as well as the arrival of new kinds of greens from Europe, American salads rapidly increased in diversity. Arugula, romaine, etc. were introduced to American diets, and sales of iceberg lettuce collapsed. Iceberg lettuce essentially became a meme, a vegetable ridiculed as having “no nutritional value.”

The one place that iceberg lettuce held ground, however, was the steak house, where wedge salad reigned supreme. (It’s still the only salad you can get in most steak houses.) The iceberg lettuce industry noticed this, and in 2000, launched a (failed) campaign to try and market iceberg lettuce as manly lettuce. One initiative tried to position it as “the official salad of Father’s Day.” Helen mentions a few interesting side details about iceberg lettuce, like the fact that it’s so porous, and has such high water content, you have to use very low levels of pesticide, so most iceberg lettuce fields are patrolled by birds of prey, to hunt pests. [annotation q="What stood out to you about the pitch?" a="It starts out light and a bit silly, about this relatively frivolous vegetable that everyone is familiar with and mostly has a not great opinion about. Then it takes a turn and becomes a serious, reported story about immigration policy, labor and the president’s agenda. A lot of our successful stories have that pivot. The specificity of the piece helps it a lot, too. And it was really memorable. It took something you interacted with in the world all the time – lettuce – and made you look at it differently."]

Then the story takes a turn. Yuma County, where half of all our iceberg lettuce comes from, has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. It also has the most patrolled, most militarized section of US-Mexico border in the country. It is a major crossing point for undocumented laborers. And a lot of those laborers work in the lettuce fields. Beyond that, 40,000-50,000 guest workers enter the country every day from Mexico to work for iceberg lettuce farmers. Those farmers tend to be highly conservative. But when it comes to immigration politics, they’re hostile to Trump, not just because of their work force, but because many of them are large landowners and their holdings include lettuce fields across the border. So stepped-up border enforcement puts a wall in the middle of their operations. [annotation q="Was this turn necessary for selling the story? What if it was just about Trump and the history of iceberg lettuce?" a="It really hinged on the Yuma County reporting and the fact that it started with lettuce but became a story about the border. Just a story about Trump loving wedge salads and the quirky history of iceberg lettuce wouldn’t have made the cut for us. In the live version, there was a complete tonal shift. That’s something we’re thinking about a lot when reading pitches. A lot of our most successful stories have cinematic qualities and clear opportunities for shifts in music and visuals."]

There’s more, but that’s enough to understand what Helen is proposing to do: A topical, funny-pivoting-to-serious, reported deconstruction of Donald Trump’s favorite salad (with reporting from Yuma County). [annotation q="What were the multimedia elements for this story?" a="We weren’t able to negotiate access for a photographer, and Helen is an amateur photographer herself. The first part of the piece, where it appeared light and fun, included silly illustrations by an animator. When the story took a turn, we went into Helen’s photography, and our art director illustrated on top of them. Our music director, Minna Choi, scored the story with original music. Why didn’t it include audio? Pieces don’t always need it. There were quotes from farmers and laborers, but none of them were so long that they merited audio. That requires you to set up and introduce the character in a more serious way, and she was getting perspectives from a lot of different people. Also, getting quality audio would’ve been a challenge because of the nature of their work."] [annotation q="Did you assign the story immediately?" a="Helen hadn’t done the reporting yet, so it ultimately hinged on her gaining access to the farmers and laborers in Yuma County. The Pop-Up version ended up being weighted far more toward that: how the people producing the president’s favorite salad are going to do it now that their jobs are in jeopardy thanks to his policies."]

The post How to crack the code of live storytelling with Pop-Up Magazine appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Editor Kayla Webley Adler is a freelancer’s dream. She’s willing to gamble on unknown writers if they bring her a great idea. She’s written a detailed guide to pitching that she’ll share with anyone who asks. And she responds to every pitch she gets — usually within 48 hours.

“I’m told that’s rare,” she says. “I find it pretty quick and painless to respond, and I would rather let people know than letting emails sit in my inbox and getting four follow-ups.”

That’s not to say it’s easy to land a story with Marie Claire, the women’s glossy that mixes lifestyle advice with tough topics and international stories. Adler, who edits feature-well stories and shorter articles for the magazine’s News Feed section, has herself written about everything from sex trafficking in North Dakota to a Cleveland fertility clinic that destroyed thousands of eggs and embryos, and has edited stories on the wives of ISIS fighters and girls fleeing Boko Haram.

Below, Adler shares her approach with Storyboard. That is followed by the annotation of a pitch from freelancer Sarah Stankorb that led to “The Daughters’ Great Escape,” a feature about women freeing themselves from Christian patriarchy. As you’ll see, the pitch evolved through a series of email exchanges as Adler helped shape and sharpen the focus.

Fingers crossed that she can keep up her response rate once these tips get out! Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Storyboard: What differentiates Marie Claire from other women’s magazines, like Cosmopolitan, Elle and Glamour?

Adler: Marie Claire was been around for more than 100 years worldwide. When it was founded in the U.S. 24 years ago, its mission was to be a fashion and beauty title that also does serious, hard-hitting and often international features. We joke internally that our readers like their spinach with their swimsuit coverage. Every year, there’s an article about how women’s magazines are now doing politics. We’re thinking, “OK, but we’ve always done this.”

What kinds of stories are you looking for in the News Feed section?

This section is a challenge, because we always want stories to feel compelling and urgent, but we have a long lead time. As a result, it’s helpful to hear from writers before the news has happened. For example, maybe a women’s organization has gotten a law passed in a certain country, but it hasn’t been enacted yet and isn’t news here.

Every month we open with a Q&A of 750-1,000 words, usually with newsmakers or women who’ve found themselves at the center of a news storm. Our conversations have included the ex-wife of the Orlando gay nightclub shooter to conservative radio host Tomi Lahren when she was fired for her pro-choice stance to (Illinois Sen.) Tammy Duckworth when she returned to office full-time with her infant in arms. We’re looking for “gets” and trying to lock people into somewhat exclusive interviews, which is a challenge since we’re asking them not to talk for four months in a 24/7 news cycle. So when you pitch, don’t just say you’re interested in interviewing someone; explain how you would approach her and why you might stand a better chance at access.

The rest of the section is small items (200-300 words) from all over the world, with a mix of geographic diversity and subject matter. The Genius column, which is 150 words, has the tagline, “One woman, one brilliant idea.” It breaks down her inspiration, compelling statistics, her idea and measurable results.

What makes a good Marie Claire feature? Walk me through some of the archetypes and some examples of each.

There’s no topic I think wouldn’t work, as long as it pertains to and includes women in their 20s, 30s and early 40s. It doesn’t have to be newsy. A lot of stories have this model: Here’s a problem that affects women, and here are the women doing something about it. You have the big serious thing you should care about, but also an element of hope. Keep in mind that our lead time is four months. Our features are 2000-2,500 words, but they often run longer.

Here are some of the archetypes:

• International features. Sometimes they’re grim, like war accounts or a story about women imprisoned in El Salvador for getting abortions. We also look for fun, positive things or social trends in other countries. An example is “The Tanzanian Wives Club,” about a tribe that allowed platonic female friends to get married in order to have the same property rights as men.
• Investigative stories cover big, meaty topics, like breast cancer charity scams, the rape kit backlog (which won an ASME), or gender bias in medicine.
• Social trend stories tap into what you, the writer, are talking about with your girlfriends. We’ve done stories on Silicon Valley micro-dosing and “Are Girlfriends the New Husbands?”
• Fun stories for a bit of balance, like the sex toy revolution or  the “Kardashians of the Middle East,” which took the angle of how social media celebrities in the region were inadvertently pushing social change.
• We’re not doing as many confessional stories as we used to, but we’re open to the right one.

When you get a pitch, how do you factor in existing coverage of the topic?

We pay very close attention to our direct competition: women’s magazines and digital-only women’s sites.  Sometimes we can do the same topic with different characters, but there would have to be a distinct angle as well. If the big national publications do a really big story on a topic, it’s hard to follow that, but there is some wiggle room. For example, if The New York Times does a big story about all sides of an issue, we can focus on how it specifically impacts women.

How extensive do you want an initial pitch to be?

I’m always happy if a writer comes to me with, “Would you be interested in this?” before chasing it. It obviously helps if you have an in, and it would be weird for someone to pitch me just one line. But for writers I know or have worked with in the past, I tell them not to waste their time building out a whole pitch because then I can direct them. For new writers, I also don’t need a richly reported, crazy-long pitch. I’m going to have questions regardless. It’s fine to gauge interest, but you might want to include more than one idea.

The length of the pitch is pretty directly correlated to how long takes me to read and respond. So many people attach the full article instead of a pitch. Please don’t do that!

You respond to every pitch quickly, you’re editing the news section plus most features in the magazine, and you write a few features every year yourself. What can other editors learn from your time management skills?

I work from 10 to 6, but when I’m at work, I’m very productive. I don’t work weekends or evenings. The fact that I only work on the print side is helpful – breaking news online can disrupt your life more. I’m a big planner and very organized. There are always so many things I hypothetically could be working on, but I pick the things that need my attention most right then. I’m a compulsive archiver: Right now, my work and personal inboxes have a total of six messages. If I’m not doing anything else, I’ll respond to a pitch right away. But I tend to reply first thing in the morning, or at the end of the day, sometimes on the train. I have everything in folders so I can immediately take action and get it out of there.

What does Marie Claire pay in print?

The standard rate is $2 a word. There are some exceptions where we pay a flat rate.

How do you feel about simultaneous submissions?

I get it, but I think it’s a bit suspect if it’s not a time-sensitive story, especially since I get back to people within 24-48 hours. It wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for me, but the writer should definitely disclose that.

A SERIES OF EMAILS between Marie Claire editor Kayla Webley Adler and freelancer Sarah Stankorb reveals what Adler needed from Stankorb’s pitch, and how she helped guide the story.

Storyboard’s questions are in red; Adler’s responses are in blue. To read the pitches without the annotations, click the “Hide all annotations” button which is at the bottom of  the right hand menu on this page, or in the top menu of your mobile screen.

Email 1: Sarah Stankorb (writer) to Kayla Webley Adler (editor)

November 23, 2015

Had you worked with this writer before? She'd written a small item for News Feed, but hadn't done a feature before.

I have been researching the Stay-at-Home Daughters movement and women who are leading the charge to break away. It's a strain within evangelical Christianity that encourages girls to stay home, forego college education, devote themselves to their fathers (until they are ready for husbands). It involves homeschooling and "advanced homemaking" training, as well as total deference to one's father (until marriage). I stumbled upon the SAHD while writing this article on the Quiverfull movement. Bitch covered the growth of Stay-at-Home Daughters about five years ago, but in the interim there have been women like Samantha Field who have broken ranks with the movement and now advocate for other young women; there are others who consider themselves survivors of spiritual abuse and have helped build online support networks. The Bitch story was more of a here's what is happening article, but in the time since, these daughters have started growing up and their rejection of the Christian Patriarchy Movement is powerful. The movement is obviously culturally retrograde, and interesting, but what compels me are women who are raised to believe and act in submission to the men in their lives, who reach a point where that no longer makes sense to them. It would be about that process of finding self-worth in the face of a faith and family that has trained these women to believe their role is "helpmeet," in service to men.

What appealed to you about this idea?I was intrigued by the whole theology, to begin with. A lot of times when we think of religious extremists, they're so “otherized.” The fact that this was fairly mainstream Christians in the U.S. was intriguing. The phrase “advanced homemaking” caught my eye – what the hell is that? The fact that women were helping others get out was a very Marie Claire angle on the story. There was a problem, and women were doing something about it.

This initial query is just one paragraph long, and she hasn't secured access. Why does that work? It's short, but it covers a lot of ground, which is pretty ideal. This meaty paragraph covers what the thing is, what types of people we might be able to feature, what else has been written about it, and how the story will build on what else is out there.

Email 2: REPLY: Editor to writer

November 23, 2015

This is super fascinating (and disturbing!). Just to clarify: this is something you’d like to pitch as a MC feature? I could see my EIC going for it... Some questions, though: How often do you respond to a pitch with questions? Probably 99 percent of the time. Most of the time, the first question is, “What's the peg for this?” That's not always the case for features, but is crucial for News Feed. We're always thinking ahead to when we can run the story, so some sense of timing is important. I'm also often asking for more information on characters and their willingness to talk, as well as where else it's been written about.

Is the movement gaining steam? If so, how could we demonstrate that?

Is there any way to quantify the number of SAHDs? (the Bitch article says low thousands, which seems *so* low it may not even make sense to write about them, but that was 5 years ago...) Does something have to be a widespread trend for you to cover it? I don't think there's a rule on that. I wanted to make sure it wasn't just a few families. I know three makes a trend, but we're a national magazine, so there should be a somewhat large scope.

Seems similar to other fundamentalist/extremist/uber-conservative religions, so why would we do a feature on this one specifically? And, importantly, why now? (And I say that as someone who is very interested in this—I’m just curious to see what you’ll say about this since I may get this question from the higher ups. I suspect I could make the case by saying, look, we expect stuff like this from extremists in the middle east or whatever, but this is Christianity and right in our own country, but again, curious what you have to say about this...)

Would Samantha Field talk to you?

Could you find 3 or so other women like her who have led semi-recently, who haven’t told their stories, and are still in their 20s, 30s? Do all characters have to be in their 20s and 30s? For stories that are character-centric and include a personal anecdotal lede, yes. When stories are more about a topic or issue, we have experts of all ages and genders quoted. (Bonus points for them being willing to use their real names and be photographed) When are you willing to offer anonymity? It's never ideal or our first choice. If the main source you had won't use her name, who else can you find? There's usually not just one source for a story. But there are obviously reasons that women ask for privacy, and it's a big deal to have something live on Google for the rest of their lives. Sometimes we obscure names not because the women ask for it, but because our legal department does. We use real first names as a second choice and go to pseudonyms only if we have to.

Is there a group like No Longer Quivering for women who have fled SAHD? Why did you ask this? Because sometimes a group can be a good narrative vehicle for the story.

Email 3: RESPONSE: Writer to editor

December 8, 2015

Sorry for the delay. I've been researching this a bit more, but was also on multiple deadlines, hence the delay in putting it all together.

First, Samantha Field is on-board for an interview/photo. She's very open and smart, and I think would make a for a great source. I have had trouble tracking down others who will talk on record about having been raised as a SAHD. I'll keep at it. I think I might be able to get an inroad from No Longer Quivering and convince one of the former SAHD that I'd handle the story sensitively. Were you willing to assign the story with only one character secured?Generally, we aim for at least three when it's a story about a movement or issue. That’s not something that has to be in place when a pitch happens, but is something I ask for.

This is definitely a timely story, and there is certainly reason right now for believers to question Christian patriarchy. In very recent years, some of the major male patriarchy leaders have fallen: Doug Phillips of Vision Forum (he had to withdraw from his ministry and from the biggest Christian film festival); Bill Gothard (kicked off the board of his own ministry and banned from counseling); and of course, Josh Duggar (not a leader necessarily, but among the most public faces of the movement). I checked in with Christy Winckles, a scholar who researches the Christian patriarchy movement (which advocates for SAHD), and she mentioned that she is just finishing a study on the Duggar family and the transference of Christian patriarchy culture from one generation to the next. I think once that's complete, it might also add something to the article. What did you make of her response to the “why now” question? It helped a lot. It happened after the story was sold, but another big selling point for the timing of story was Trump's election and the fact that people who think this way now have more access to the highest ranks of government.

I wonder if it would make more sense to talk to women who abandoned Christian patriarchy generally, which often includes the SAHD teachings and talk about those experiences among others for young women in the movement, because that would be so obviously timely and the number of women impacted would be more numerous. The thrust could be about recovering from spiritual abuse and how these women now help others. And I think it would be easier for me to find women to participate in the story if the scope were just a touch broader.

As for numbers, Winckles said that as far as she knows (and if anyone would know, it would probably be her), none of the few studies on Christian patriarchy have quantified the movement. She did suggest looking at the Gothard Biblical Institute Training Conferences (popular with the Duggars and how many in the movement who are homeschooled, including many of the Duggar kids, meet their spouses). The Institute in Basic Life Principles claims 2.5 million people have attended their seminars since 1964. That's obviously not a number I would trust (who knows how many times the same person has been counted over multiple seminars, etc.), but it's a start. From the blog, I see their week-long family conferences have an attendance of around 550-650 people. By my count there were 16 family conferences in 2015. These are week-long conferences that the entire family can attend, so I'm sure these represent a smaller subset of the total number of people in the movement, but I can't say what that total would be. (There are also loads of other seminars and conferences, but I can't get a headcount on these.) How did you read her response about the scope of the movement?There has to be something to quantify. If there are hard numbers that's great, but with theology, that's not always possible.  I thought this was a smart way of seeking their influence.

Let me know what you think, and I can keep digging!

Email 4: REPLY editor back to writer

December 8, 2015

Thanks for this, Sarah. I hear you on it being hard to find SAHD women to talk to, but I think that is really key to this story. I’m not interested in a broader story on Christian women abandoning the patriarchy. Maybe Samantha Field could connect you to other women like her? Stay on it, and let me know if/when you’re able to find 3 former SAHD (in 20s/30s) willing to speak out. Why weren't you interested in a broader angle? That felt like a topic, not a story. I liked the idea of women helping women get out; I wasn't looking for the general, loose notion of women escaping patriarchy.

Email 5: RESPONSE writer to editor, clarifying story idea

December 9, 2015

Got it. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about the system of patriarchy that spans the history of Christianity generally, but an actual movement referred to as "Christian Patriarchy," also known as Biblical Patriarchy. It's the school of thought that teaches rearing SAHD, birthing according to Quiverfull practices, living in submission to one's husband, etc. It's the umbrella term for all these related teachings, but since there is no single person preaching this (rather many charismatic leaders who refer to one another's teachings) there isn't a single doctrine to point to, like you would have in a specific denomination. (This ideology spans denominations/churches.) It's a collection of ideas that describe the manner in which women must live in Biblical submission to the men in their lives.

But it's a school of thought that has been adopted by families throughout the country to slightly different degrees. Some only homeschool and live in submission to their husbands and are spiritually manipulative of their kids, but might not insist the girls only train for domestic duties as SAHD. Others do all of it and raise their girls as SAHD. From what I've read, it's a pretty screwed up ideology to grow up with all around, particularly for girls, because whether or not you are strictly speaking raised as a SAHD, your duty is as a "help mete" to the men in your life, and your authority (from interpreting scripture to making life decisions) must be your father, and eventually your husband. I only considered expanding beyond SADH in my hunt because I thought I might also be able to find a woman in her 20s or 30s who could reflect upon this system from the viewpoint of a young married woman, not just a daughter.

Sorry for all the choppiness. Once I find the right sources, I'll put it together in a nice, clear pitch.

Email 6: QUICK REPLY editor to writer, with directive

December 9, 2015

Got it, but I think the whole insisting girls only train for domestic duties is the key thing here. Just homeschooling and living in submission to their husbands is sadly not surprising. I think our sources have to be ex-SAHDs specifically since that would be the thing we say they are in the dek. See who you can track down!

Email 7: RESPONSE writer to editor, offering update

(Nieman Storyboard note: The actual names of the three women referred to as Jane Does below were in the email pitch to Marie Claire but have been taken out because those sources did not want their identities made public.)

January 8, 2016

First, I wanted to make sure that you saw a lawsuit was filed this week, with ten more women accusing Bill Gothard of sexual abuse. Gothard's Institute is the one I mentioned before that hosts the conferences so many of these families attend and from which a generation of them got their homeschooling curriculum (he was the source of education and theology for many). It's more timely than ever to look at all the structures of control here, especially because it so often breeds abuse that is just starting to gather public attention. It's tragic, but maybe showing how these women got out (and are helping other women) could do some good. How important was the lawsuit in your sense that the story was timely? Not at all—that was just a nice-to-have.

It took a bit, and was complicated by the holidays, but I now have a good list of former SAHD who are willing to be part of an article. Samantha Field is definitely still interested, and I'll put her description at the end as a reminder. Also:

Jane Doe 1: She has spent the past six years helping other SAHD “escape,” (and mentioned one heartbreaking story of a girl she once helped get out, who then was diagnosed with a terminal disease and had to go back to her family for care until she dies). She is still suffering a few chronic health problems herself which are a result of abuse and neglect she experienced during her years as a SAHD. But she's set on never returning to her family.

Jane Doe 2: Was a SAHD until 35, which might make her a touch too old for Marie Claire as she's now 42, but her story is interesting in that her parents attended a Gothard seminar when her mom was pregnant with her, but despite ongoing participation with the movement, remained rather moderate until she was 12. That's when they joined the Advanced Training Institute, and from that point on she “drank the koolaid” and believed all the teachings, even when her parents began having doubts. Now he entire family is out of the movement.

Jane Doe 3: She was the oldest of 12 but didn't leave until she was 23. Throughout her teens she began to resent the notion that she was expected to live with her parents until she married, but she believed it, and so stayed. When she did leave, her parents cut her off completely. It's been five years since she has spoken to them or ten of her remaining siblings. She heard from one brother by text and expressed how much she still loves and misses the family; he flatly rejected her.

Eleanor Skelton: She is among my favorites because she's so feisty, and I was really hoping she'd agree to the story. She's an absolute activist, even a tax extreme in the language she uses (but it's totally understandable once you hear how these women are treated by their families).

Ashley Schnarr-Easter: She was for a time the blogger behind www.stayathomedaughter.com (with about 3,500 followers), but is now an abuse victim advocate and Christian feminist, and she is developing a ministry to assist church leaders to spot and stop abuse (which she feels SAHDs are particularly vulnerable to). She appears to also be taking steps toward the ministry herself, so she is still quite faithful, just taking on a role that would have been unthinkable in the circumstances in which she was raised.

Samantha Field: She's smart and open, and has quite a tale describing her fight to dictate a career path for herself (other than keeper of the home). She's also openly bisexual, which coming from her religious upbringing would offer some new dimensions for discussing sexual repression among these girls and women.

That's it for now. Let me know what I should do in terms of next steps!

What were your thoughts about this list of sources? I liked that there were so many of them. She found many options for women who were willing to talk, most of them were willing to use their names, and they had good connections to their issues. It was nice to see that they weren’t just random women, but also thought leaders.

What happened next? She started reporting!

The post Can’t wait? A Marie Claire editor tries to answer pitches within 48 hours appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Erika Hayasaki was an award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times when she left the relative security of the newsroom for the feast-or-famine world of freelancing. She has since made her way into some of the nation’s top magazines, authored a book and has another in the works, teaches literary journalism at the University of California at Irvine and, with her husband, is raising three children.

Last week, in How to leave the newsroom and kill it as a freelancer, she traced her start-over journey. Her secrets speak more to realism than romance: persistence, patience, perspective and a reliable paycheck from another job. A great family helps, too.

That approach is evident in today’s piece, which is an annotation of two extensive pitches Hayasaki reported and wrote to land the cover of Wired magazine with “End Pain Forever: How a Single Gene Could Become a Volume Knob for Pain.” 

Hayasaki’s first pitch was built around the gripping story of a woman and her two children who all suffered from congenital insensitivity to pain – with tragic and life-threatening consequences. The editor liked the topic, but he wanted the story to explore the science of pain through a broader lens that also highlighted the leading current research on the subject. Undeterred, Hayasaki did another round of deep-dive reporting and resubmitted a substantially new pitch that focused on different characters and a genetic mutation that could hold the key to new ways of treating chronic pain.

The annotated pitches: The drafts of Hayasaki’s pitches are as she sent them, so not edited for fly-speck points of punctuation or style. Storyboard’s questions are in red; Hayasaki’s responses in blue. To read the pitches without the annotations, click the “Hide all annotations” button, which you’ll find just below the social media buttons in the top right-hand menu, or at the top of your mobile screen.

VERSION 1: The Family That Can't Feel Pain

Will their genes unlock the mysteries of pain—and future treatments—for the rest of us? Do you always include a headline and subhead? I don't always, but I try to. I think it helps because you have to grab an editor's attention and ask them to read a long pitch with everything else they're doing.

At this point, how often do you send full pitches as opposed to chatting about ideas with editors or dashing off a quick paragraph?I still do full pitches for the most part. I find editors still want them because they have to sell the editors above them. A pitch should include storytelling elements and explain why the story is important, why you're the person to tell it, and what access you have.

In 1983, an 8-year-old girl named Melissa was admitted to a Tulsa, Oklahoma, psychiatric clinic for self-mutilation. She had ripped away her own flesh on her arms and legs, sometimes to the bone. The psychiatrists were puzzled by her case. Melissa’s behavior didn’t seem to fit the psychological pattern of children who mutilate themselves. She wasn’t depressed, agitated, or obsessive compulsive. She just seemed to have, well, an itch that she couldn’t seem to scratch right, according to her. A local pediatrician, Dr. James Coldwell, was called in to treat her. Coldwell decided to run a few tests—skin and nerve biopsies, and he studied her amino acid levels, radiological scans and cells. Digging into her medical history, he discovered that she had broken her right foot at 2. Her mother remembered that incident. Melissa had not seemed too bothered by the injury. At 7, Melissa fractured her left tibia and fibula after falling off a grocery cart. Again, she showed no evidence of feeling pain and no indication that she was overly bothered by the break. Coldwell thought this girl’s medical problems didn’t seem as much psychiatric, as physical. He continued to treat her for the next decade. At 10, she came in to the emergency room again. This time, she had literally scratched the right side of her nose off. How did you find this story? I was searching through a database of academic papers for the condition of congenital insensitivity. This was the most recent study, there was no coverage of it, and it was super fascinating. I wanted to initially write about one family, but it morphed into something different. What jumped out me were the pictures. You rarely see photos like that in a medical journal, and it put a face to it and the fact that it had gone on for generations.Why did you decide to include photos?I don't think I'd ever done that before, but in this case the photos are what grabbed me and humanized the study for me. The image of someone scratching off her own nose is pretty fascinating.

A pitch should include storytelling elements and explain why the story is important, why you're the person to tell it, and what access you have.

Even with a half-missing nose, Melissa still felt no pain. Instead, she felt “electrical stimulations” throughout her body. Or other times she felt random itching, along with the electrical stimulations, which led her to scratch violently. She didn’t know when to stop. Her body just didn’t send her warnings like that.

“You know if something irritates your nose and you just have to get something to wipe your nose? You have this irresistible urge to sneeze?” Dr. Coldwell tells me. “For her, it’s like a tickle…not an intense pain. If you broke a bone it would hurt you so bad you couldn't walk on it. When Melissa broke her leg, she continued to walk on it, didn't cry or anything. It’s very puzzling.”

Dr. Coldwell sent her case to doctors at the Center for Metabolic Bone Disease and Molecular Research in St. Louis, Missouri. They came up with a diagnosis. She had a rare genetic disorder called congenital insensitivity to pain, characterized by the inability to feel pain. About two-dozen people around the world are known to have the disorder, which is caused by a gene mutation in either SCN9A or SCN11A encoding. Melissa’s mutation was in her SCN11A gene. Congenital insensitivity to pain is a heritable disorder.

Melissa grew up. She had a son, born at only 33 weeks gestation following a car accident. He was 4 pounds, 10 ounces. Her son remained healthy, until he turned 1. He got a spider bite, and scratched it on his neck to the point of ripping his skin off. At 2, he fell from a dresser and fractured his right arm. Like his mom, he didn’t seem to feel pain. This made him, of course, more susceptible to accidents. Also like his mom, he didn’t know when to stop doing something because something might hurt him. He would sustain 12 more fractures in the next nine years. Doctors ran tests. He also had a mutation in his SCN11A gene. Where did all these details come from? They came from the study and from the pediatrician who treated them.

I wanted to show that there were characters—interesting people who could carry a complicated story. For a longform story, you need to get inside the house and see their day-to-day lives.

Melissa also had a daughter, this time by a different man. Her first child had been born by C-section, but this time she had a natural birth. Melissa says it was her first time feeling something close to pain—but it was nothing like a normal woman’s birth experience. She hoped she would not pass on this disorder to another child, but soon realized her daughter would not be so lucky. As a baby, the girl destroyed parts of her lips, fingers, and toes by chewing them off. By 1 1/2 years old, her daughter had sustained five fractures. By 7, she had three more fractures. Like her brother, her inability to feel pain also provided her with an impressive ability to twist her body into contorted positions. Why did you decide to spend so many paragraphs describing Melissa and her children?I wanted to show that there were characters—interesting people who could carry a complicated story. For a longform story, you need to get inside the house and see their day-to-day lives. I hadn't flown there yet, but I had done enough pre-reporting over the phone and based on the study to pull out key details that prove to an editor that there's enough there.

The family became a kind of local freak show in their small town. Mom with a part-missing nose. And her bendy kids who also had awful scars. Dr. Coldwell even helped Melissa get plastic surgery to repair her nose (he worked with the family even though they did not have much money). But Melissa scratched her surgically enhanced nose off, too.

They continue to their lives quietly in rural Oklahoma. Melissa is a stay-at-home mom. Both children are now in their 20s. Her son has a full-time job. Her daughter, however, is too impaired to work. She is homebound. “The story is not finished, of course,” Dr. Coldwell says. Melissa’s kids could soon have their own kids, and the cycle of a pain-free life, that has actually been quite emotionally painful for all of them, will continue. What research had you done by the time you pitched?I'd read the journal article and gotten access to the doctor. He'd agreed to bring me to the family and had asked whether they were comfortable with that. I had also reached out to some of the pharmaceutical companies to find out about the science they were doing.

There has to be a universal issue that we're all trying to figure out. Without that, the kind of work we do would be very voyeuristic.

The study of people with genes like theirs, however, is anything but quiet in the medical and pharmaceutical research communities. Drug companies in particular believe that the genes of people like Melissa and her two children might help revolutionize the future of pain prevention for all of us. There have been scientific studies of two families in Pakistan, a man in Oregon, and a girl in Georgia who also have this rare painless disorder. There is a multibillion dollar painkiller industry just waiting to unlock the secret drug to end aches, cramps and physical torment, and they are hoping people like Melissa will hold the key. One company, Xenon Pharmaceuticals, is already investing heavily in studying individuals with congenital insensitivity to pain, and is already working toward developing drugs based on such research. Was this part crucial for making the story go beyond just a curiosity? Would it have worked if the pitch was just about this family? It's usually not enough for a magazine to have a strictly character-driven story—their lives have to speak to something larger. Otherwise why should I care? That's what takes narrative writing out of the realm of narrative television, which is just about watching people's crazy lives unfold. There has to be a universal issue that we're all trying to figure out. Without that, the kind of work we do would be very voyeuristic. This piece goes into questions about the nature of pain in our lives. We're looking for pain management in ways that aren't dependent on drugs and that's more important now than ever, but there's also actual research happening around these conditions. As a journalist, I don't think you can say you're going to solve the world's problems. But one editor told me early on in my career that we're trying to part the curtain on humanity. That's part of our fundamental responsibility.

Pain, however uncomfortable or awful, is necessary for our survival. It warns us and protects us. Studies show people with congenital insensitivity to pain face shortened life spans, and the clock is ticking for Melissa and her family. It’s not that they might die too early from a disease like cancer or a heart attack. It’s more like that wouldn’t even notice the pain signals warning them of such dangers in the first place.

Dr. Coldwell is now 85 years old, still practicing as a pediatrician in Oklahoma, still very close to this family (he’s now been a part of their lives for three decades). He has agreed to meet with me in person and take me to Melissa’s home to meet her family. He is available to do this in the next month or so. Why didn't you talk to the family beforehand? What kind of access had you confirmed?The doctor wanted to be there when I met them for the first time. They were his patients, and he wanted to protect them. He had gotten their approval but wasn't going to unleash me on them until he'd felt me out in person. I have also been in touch with the various genetic, molecular and skeletal scientists who have been working with this family over the last two decades. How many had you talked to?I had emailed all eight scientists on the paper, in addition to others. They didn't all reply, but I definitely reached at least half a dozen.Their paper on Melissa and her kids, “Congenital insensitivity to pain: Fracturing without apparent skeletal pathobiology caused by an autosomal dominant, second mutation in SCN11A encoding voltage-gated sodium channel,” appeared in the issue of Bone in March.

I think this would be a fascinating story for Wired, one that merges narrative storytelling around this family and these doctors with current science surrounding pain, genes, drug companies and technology. How did you know this was a good story for Wired? Wired does good science coverage, and the genetic research part fit that. I also had a good relationship with the editor. I'd just written a story for him that was pretty well received, about a woman who had no access to her episodic memory.

Is this how long your pitches usually are? My longform pitches tend to be long, probably too long. But I have to show that there are characters and enough there for longform. Wired at the time enforced a shorter pitch length, which is probably good practice for me.

What happened after you sent the pitch? My editor was interested in the topic of pain, but he thought the story went beyond this one family. He suggested I widen the lens to “the future of pain” and look at other research going on in the space of pain treatment. He also wanted to report from a pharmaceutical company doing promising R&D. I was discouraged, because I thought this family would be such a good story, but I wanted to find a way to explore the topic. I ended up finding two people who lived close to each other but were on opposite ends of the pain spectrum. It ended up being a good piece, but it started somewhere else entirely.

VERSION 2: Future of Pain

What was the main shift that happened with this version of the pitch?I had to figure out the most important research going on around pain right now, and it happened to be around a different genetic mutation than the one relevant to the initial family. People who had a lack and abundance of pain shared mutations in this same gene, so you could link people on the extremes. It was a more important story scientifically, but personally I still think Melissa and her family would be a fascinating story.

On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain? Why start with this question addressing the reader directly? That was sort of how I was addressing the editors. It was getting at the question of: Why does this matter for all of us? Yes, there's a person who has extreme pain and one who has none and it's connected, but it's still not enough if you don't have way to connect it to everyone else who has experienced pain. In my initial draft, I think I started with a character, but this gets to the point quicker.

Every day of her life, Pamela Costa feels like her body is on fire. So call that a constant six to ten. The 50-year-old drives her car with piles of ice cubes around her feet. She can’t wear socks, sweaters, or long pants, because the slightest sensation of heat burns like hot coals. She has a rare condition called erythromelalgia, or “man-on-fire” disorder. Costa has taken morphine for the last 20 years. She can’t function without it, but it doesn’t cure the pain. 25 members of her family over three generations have also had man-on-fire syndrome. Two cousins overdosed on pain medications; the family figures it was intentional.

It was getting at the question of: Why does this matter for all of us?

Steven Pete lives just an hour and a half from Costa’s in Washington State, but on the very far side of the pain scale—at somewhere near constant zero. As a baby, Pete chewed off his tongue while teething because he didn’t feel the pain signals telling him to stop. He has an equally rare condition called congenital insensitivity to pain. You can hammer a nail into his palm and he won’t flinch. The damage from a life of injuries has left him with severe arthritis and worn joints and bones. Steven’s brother Chris had the same condition, and ended up partially paralyzed from back, bone and joint problems. After doctors told Chris that he would probably spend his life in a wheelchair, he killed himself in 2008. What were the reporting steps you took to develop this second pitch? Stephen Waxman, a scientist at Yale, explained everything to me and connected me to one of the subjects. I was able to connect with other subjects on my own. I had also been arranging interviews with the pharmaceutical company. And I had reached out to the characters: Waxman, Pam and Steven.

In the early 2000s, scientists launched a worldwide search for people like Costa and people like Pete. Researchers had long suspected that sodium channels—pathways inside of cell membranes that allow messages in and out—are involved in pain. But they didn’t know which of the body’s nine sodium channels to implicate. In 2004, a team of geneticists in Beijing discovered that patients with man-on-fire syndrome have a mutation in a gene called SCN9A, which regulates a particular sodium channel, Nav 1.7. Two years later, a different group of researchers found that people with congenital insensitivity to pain have a mutation on the same gene, affecting the same sodium channel. For scientists, it was an incredibly rare finding—a clear link between loss and gain of function within one gene. The mutations were on the same pathway. People with man-on-fire syndrome have amped-up pain signaling. The volume is always on full blast, and can’t be turned down. For people with congenital insensitivity to pain, the system is on mute. Had Pam and Steven been written about before? And what were you hoping to add to existing stories about the topic of pain? Steven and Pam had both been in the media before. The painlessness and the pain had also been written about, but I was able to draw a connection between the two by talking to Waxman. Both stories had been told separately, but no one had told them together as a connected arc. When stories have been done, I always ask: How can you do it in a way that's different or better or brings in research years later that updates things?

For the rest of us, the huge implication of these findings is that it might be possible to stick a volume dial on the human pain scale. Right now, pharmaceutical companies are racing to develop safe drugs that would mimic congenital insensitivity to pain—true pain blockers. These would not dull the pain of inflammation the way current pain medications like ibuprofen or codeine do; or TKTKTK the way addictive opioids do. Is it OK to include a TK in a pitch?I definitely filled in the TK on the draft I sent in! I wouldn't send a TK in a pitch. Last week, Pfizer announced the first results in humans on a new class of pain medications that selectively target the sodium channel Nav1.7, and do not have central side effects. The Pfizer studies were performed on patients with erythromelalgia. Xenon Pharmaceuticals, which has been studying patients with congenital insensitivity to pain, has also reported pain reduction in erythromelalgia patients in clinical trials. But both are banking on the possibility that these drugs will eventually target other kinds of pain as well. “There’s no question about it,” says Dr. Paul Goldberg, the scientist working on the drugs at Xenon. “We know with zero doubt that when you lose function on 1.7, you lose the ability to perceive pain. It makes sense this is the way the whole industry is going.” Had you confirmed access with Xenon? Yes, the initial person I talked to ended up leaving, but I had gotten the OK to come in.

When stories have been done, I always ask: How can you do it in a way that's different or better or brings in research years later that updates things?

Just to bracket the stakes here: Physical pain is pretty much one of the chief downsides of the human condition, and its treatment is an epic public health nightmare that layers pathology on top of pathology (see: opiate addiction, epidemic of; rampant under-treatment of chronic pain; the observed culture-wide tendency to underrate the pain of women and minorities). It’s also an immense business ($TK a year). Researchers have been searching for alternatives to pain treatment forever; this is the most promising new avenue yet—and the story of its discovery naturally lends itself to the kind of extreme-case portrait. How important was this zooming out?With most magazines, the nutgraf is so important. Some places you can write for digitally like really good narratives and don't have to have a nutgraf, but magazines usually need the hook.

How long did the whole process take, from your initial pitch to a green light? Is it common to have to revise a pitch so drastically? Probably three months from the time I sent the first pitch to the editor to the time it was approved at an editorial meeting. The whole process to publication took about a year. I normally do not have to re-report a whole pitch. Sometimes you have to rework it a bit or answer questions from editors, but this was abnormal. I did it because I thought it was an interesting story, and I wanted to explore it more.

The post Erika Hayasaki on the reality of landing a big freelance story appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Erika Hayasaki’s conversation with Storyboard contributor Katia Savchuk explores what it took to earn a regular byline in magazines. She also shared the two separate pitches she wrote to land “End Pain Forever” as a cover piece in Wired. Check back next week (Aug. 28) in Annotation Tuesday! to find out why her first pitch was rejected and how she revised it.

Erika Hayasaki spent nine years as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times before leaving in 2009 to teach, write a book (The Death Class: A True Story About Life) and freelance for magazines. She soon realized that her experience as an award-winning feature writer at the newspaper didn’t translate seamlessly into the magazine world. “I didn’t know how to write a pitch or who to pitch, and I would never get a reply,” she says. “I had to start from scratch.”

So Hayasaki worked her way up, first writing for digital publications, including Narratively, the Big Roundtable and now-defunct Matter. In 2014, she published “Drowned by Corn,” as a Kindle Single, about a group of boys who died in a grain bin in Illinois. Getting longform pieces published online eventually raised Hayasaki’s profile among editors at established magazines.

“You have to hit a couple of home runs, show the world that you can do this, and eventually editors will find you,” she says. “It might take a couple of years, but people will start to reach out, and doors will open.”

Hayasaki now writes for publications such as Wired, The Atlantic, Glamour and others, mostly about science. She’s working on her second nonfiction book, which tells the story of Vietnamese twins separated at birth and later reunited; one was raised by a rich family in the Midwest, the other in a Vietnamese village. Hayasaki also teaches literary journalism at UC Irvine; she and her husband have a 4-year-old daughter and 1-year-old twin sons.

We chatted about finding story ideas, navigating the emotional ups and downs of freelancing, and juggling it all with marriage and motherhood. Our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Where do you find story ideas?

I often start with a question or world that interests me. For example, my Kindle Single started when I was looking up news about avalanches and found a headline about boys who drowned in corn. It sounded insane and was a way to explore our dependence on corn.

Once you have a world that fascinates you, you have to get access to people who can carry a feature story. With the corn story, I showed up in the community and found survivors. In a science story, you might begin with a study and find the people involved in the research or affected by it. The characters have to be willing to open up and spend time with you and must have a compelling story that is a microcosm of a bigger issue. (Hayasaki shares more thoughts on finding ideas in a 2015 blog post.)

I’ll give you an example of starting with a question. I stumbled across a study about frontotemporal dementia, which is a condition that affects moral decision-making and behavior. I learned that a lot of these individuals end up breaking the law more than people with other neurological conditions. I put that term into Nexis to look for court cases where the condition had come up, and stumbled across a guy in California who’d gone to federal prison. I looked up the court transcripts in PACER, then used Intelius to track down his family. I found the guy in prison through an app called JPay, and the next thing I know I was able to visit the prison. I wrote the piece, “A Criminal Mind,” for The California Sunday Magazine.

We all know that “nothing is original,” but how do you decide if an idea that’s already been written about is still ripe?

Some of the best longform articles or books started out as something else – the person who wrote the one you remember just did it longer and better. Truman Capote saw a brief newspaper article and turned it into In Cold Blood. Longform writers are at an advantage today because so much work regurgitates the same thing. There are opportunities all over the place to go deeper, whether it’s a science journal headline or a newspaper article. You can go back a week later, or a year later, to a story you think can be bigger and better. Sometimes things have changed dramatically, and you’re the only one who will have the whole story.

How do you know when you have a book idea on your hands, rather than a magazine article? Have your books grown out of articles?

A book has to be something you’re willing to commit yourself to for three or four years, or beyond. Do you

love it enough to keep talking and thinking about it? Is there more to the story than you could get into a magazine article, even if you had 20,000 words? Does it open up a world and have fascinating characters whose lives and experiences tell us about that world? With an article, you need one to three central characters; with a book, ask yourself if there are potentially five characters you can go deep with. You’re also going to be around for a really long time—are they open to giving you that kind of access? I’ve had ideas that I thought would’ve been good books, but they haven’t sold. The book industry is very market-driven, always trying to find the next bestseller.

My first book was based on a newspaper article that got a lot of attention. I had already developed a relationship with an agent and told her about it in conversation. She encouraged me to write a proposal, which is basically like a magazine article plus marketing document. A good agent will work with you on a proposal like an editor works with you on a story. My second book (on the reunited Vietnamese twins) came out of my own interest and research – it hasn’t been written about anywhere yet.

Communicating with editors can be challenging for freelancers, who are met with plenty of silence, rejection and ghosting. What’s your approach?

I’ve definitely been ghosted. Sometimes editors have pursued me, gotten pitches out of me, responded and then fell off the map. They probably took it to someone above them who didn’t approve. Because I’ve done stints as an editor, I understand they’re doing so much these days: getting dozens of pitches a week, editing stories and often writing, too. I try to keep in mind how busy they are and give them a couple of weeks or longer, but I don’t feel guilty about following up. If there’s no response after the first follow-up, I usually go elsewhere. When I find editors I really like who are open to my ideas, I keep those relationships going, even if the publications aren’t as high-profile or well-paying.

Do you think it’s possible financially to be a full-time freelancer for magazines?

 I honestly don’t know how people do it these days. I teach and currently have support from (the Alicia Patterson Foundation) fellowship. When I ask people how they do it, many explain that they’ve had to diversify their careers. They might have one writing gig with steady pay, even if it’s not a dream job, and then pursue a couple of ambitious longform pieces a year. If they’re younger, maybe they work for Uber or Starbucks. Content marketing has also opened a lot of doors for writers. With straight magazine writing, it sometimes takes a year to get a piece in because it sits around, and you might get paid three months later. You can’t depend on that—you have to find a regular source of income so you can pursue your passion projects.

You’ve written about the relationship between motherhood and creativity. Tell me a bit about how you juggle your writing with parenting three small children and teaching.

I’m probably overambitious with reporting and writing since it’s very fulfilling to me. Right now, I have two other magazine pieces in the works that I’ll submit in the next six months, one piece in the approval process, and a bunch of ideas in the early stages. So I’m working on about five in-depth stories at a time, plus I have other ideas forming but not yet pitched. And I’m working on my book project. I’m a little crazy, but luckily teaching affords me stretches of time in which I’m supposed to be doing my own writing.

When I had the twins, I thought, “I don’t know how I’ll write again.” But a year later, my mind started jumping on all these new ideas. I don’t think being a parent kills your magazine career. You become more efficient with your time. Before I had kids, I could write into the night uninterrupted. Now, I have to stop at a certain time and pick back up when I can. I have to be very strict with myself to use those windows fully. Sometimes the writing just doesn’t come to you in that period, and that’s frustrating.

It’s harder to take off traveling, but that doesn’t mean you can never do it. When I had just one kid, she would often travel with me, and I arranged childcare while doing interviews. This year, I’ll do some overseas reporting for my book. My daughter is 4, and the other night we had a discussion about what passion is. I wanted her to understand why I’d be gone for a week. I’m passionate about my kids and passionate about my work, and that makes me a better mother. I also have a great husband and family.

Freelancing for magazines can involve so many factors outside of your control, from sources backing out, to getting scooped, to editorial changes at a publication. What’s your advice for dealing with the emotional rollercoaster?

When I started at the Los Angeles Times, I was surrounded by superstars and always had Imposter Syndrome. My response was to work really hard and try to get to their level. When I left newspapers, I had to start all over, and it was a great lesson. I was getting rejections, people weren’t responding, I was getting screwed in so many ways. There were mean comments and shitty book reviews.

You develop a thicker skin as the years go on. What I’ve come to tell myself is: I’m not just one story, or even one book. It’s not going to be an overnight success story. It’s a long journey, and I’m committed to putting in the work, but I don’t define myself by that work. I’m trying to do the best I can with my writing career with the time and energy I have. I remember that I’m not just a writer, but also a mother, a teacher, etc. If you get a rejection, you can hang out with your friends or go to a concert or play with your kids or spend time with your husband. You can separate yourself from it and recognize that it’s all part of the up-and-down struggle facing everyone who is in a creative field.

I’m also part of a group of longform writers in L.A. who meet every month to check in about rejections, go over drafts and pitches, share contacts and encourage each other. It helps us realize that we’re all going through the same thing. It’s easy to quit, since nobody is out there waiting for your next longform story. You have to drive yourself.

Coming next week: See Annotation Tuesday! for an analysis of two pitches – the original rejected, the rewrite accepted – that landed “End Pain Forever” as a cover story in Wired.

The post Erika Hayasaki on how to leave the newsroom and kill it as a freelancer appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Sex robots, violence in Mosul and the plan for Queen Elizabeth’s inevitable death. Those were among the subjects of the best stories last year on The Guardian’s eclectic longform site, The Long Read.

“We don’t have a simple formula,” says commissioning editor David Wolf. “But we’re always looking for great stories — particularly those that take place in the world of ideas.”

The Long Read’s appetite for articles that illuminate debates often relegated to academia sets it apart from many publishers of narrative journalism. Editors’ favorite stories from 2017, for example, included think pieces on neoliberalism, statistics and “the age of banter.” But even idea-driven articles should rest on solid reporting and storytelling, Wolf says.

The Guardian has always published features off the news, but The Long Read was founded in 2014 to provide a dedicated home for magazine-length narratives. “As articles were getting shorter and the news was getting faster, there was in parallel a greater hunger for pieces that told the full story,” Wolf says.

Helmed by Jonathan Shainin, formerly the online news editor for The New Yorker, the London-based site publishes three pieces a week that run  between 4,000 and 6,000 words. Around 20 percent or so are set in the U.K. Otherwise, any topic anywhere in the world is fair game. And if there is any one secret to breaking in, Wolf says, it’s writing well: “If we receive a pitch that’s arresting from the first sentence and feels like the writer has real control over the material, that overrules everything.”

Wolf shares other tips for pitching The Long Read below. We also take a close look at a pitch he received from Alex Blasdel for a profile of Timothy Morton a.k.a. “the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Is there much of a longform tradition in the U.K. compared to the U.S.?

The U.S. longform tradition is pretty unique, but there certainly has been a history of these kinds of pieces in the U.K. An example is Granta when edited by Ian Jack. The Independent newspaper also produced a lot of great feature writers who went on to cointribute to The New Yorker, like Ian Parker and Zöe Heller. Much of this “secret” U.K. longform tradition is either not archived or locked behind a paywall. Places like the London Review of Books publish longform today. But it’s much more marginal than in the U.S.

Do you see The Long Read as a British publication?

We cover the world, but we do want to encourage people to think of the U.K. as a rich subject for longform stories. We’ve tried to profile British institutions in a way they haven’t necessarily been written about before. One of my favorites was about a pub fighting back against developers trying to close it down; it contained the history and philosophy of the British pub. But The Guardian is a properly global publication: Our traffic is usually one-third British, one-third American and one-third rest of the world. So we try to find ways of telling stories, even about British subjects, that will be interesting and accessible everywhere. We apply the same rule to a pitch from Texas or Bolivia.

Looking at your roundup of favorite stories from 2017, what stood out about some of these?

 The piece about the death of the Queen has an incredible sense of tone and atmosphere. It proceeds in a stately, calm way — the language is perfectly chosen for the subject matter. That genre — describing a thing that hasn’t happened — is one of the hardest things to pull off. In Dina Nayeri’s “The Ungrateful Refugee,” which is a mixture of memoir and argument, the writing is spectacular and there’s a controlled passion that’s immediately powerful. Stephen Buranyi’s piece about scientific publishing takes a subject that sounds unbelievably dull and makes it into an amazing business story with incredible characters. If you can convince us that something that doesn’t seem interesting at first is actually a wild world, that’s great for us.

Are there parts of the world or subjects you’d like to see more pitches about?

We rarely get pitches from Latin America. Surprisingly, we get few pitches from Europe, aside from Spain and Russia. In the U.S., if a great story appears in The New York Times, three reporters are going to look into it.

In Europe, you have standard news and political reporting, but because there isn’t a culture of longform, there must be tons of great narrative stories that aren’t being told. One example is a story by our Spain correspondent, Giles Tremlett, about parents who adopted a Chinese girl then murdered her. The case was incredibly famous in Spain but unknown otherwise.

We rarely get pitches for business stories or company profiles. We’d love to do more stories like one we ran in March about the luxury stroller market.

How often do you work with freelancers?

Guardian writers do about one-third of the pieces, and the rest are written by freelancers.

How often do you assign stories based on cold pitches?

Assigning stories based on cold pitches is relatively rare, partly because they’re often not well tailored to our needs.  Two that did work resulted in a story about a fake embassy in Ghana and one about a chef who was one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy and killed himself at age 28. A lot of stories come out of chats with writers we have relationships with or who we got in touch with after reading something they wrote. But if we get a pitch that’s promising, we often stay in touch with the writer. It’s worth sending a pitch even if you’re not sure it’s spot on.

What are common missteps you see in pitches?

 The most common is not having enough familiarity with what we’ve published. Just mentioning a couple of pieces we’ve done immediately makes me think that this person has put some thought into why this story works for us. We also sometimes get pitches that say, “I’m from X country and this thing is happening. Would you like a report on it?” The best pitches are cognizant of the fact that the rest of the paper does news stories and short features, and a Long Read piece has to be distinct. We’re looking for big stories that unfold over time, rather than a report from a place. When it comes to pitching on subjects that have already received a lot of media coverage, it’s always a good sign if the writer can show how this particular story is different from the others. It’s surprisingly rare for writers to do this, and it helps the pitch stand out.

What’s your take on simultaneous submissions?

 I’m definitely OK with it. That said, sometimes it might suggest you haven’t thought carefully enough about whether it’s a fit for us.

How much do you pay?

It varies quite a lot, but I will say it’s competitive.

Do you have a travel budget?

Yes, but we’ll only do a piece that requires extensive travel with a writer we’ve worked with before or who is experienced.

What are your preferences for writers corresponding with you?

We get about 50 pitches a week, and there are only three of us – me, Jonathan Shainin and Clare Longrigg. We try to respond to every pitch, but I’m sure there are times we’ve missed. If a writer hasn’t heard from us in a week, they should definitely follow up. I always ask people to email rather than phoning.

***

My questions are in red, Wolf’s responses in blue.

Did you know this writer, or was it a cold pitch?He had worked with Jonathan Shainin a few years earlier as an editor in India, so we knew him more as an editor than a writer.

Do you run profiles often? What makes for a good subject? No, probably six or 10 pieces out of 150 a year. But we're happy to receive profile pitches. There are roughly two kinds of profiles: One is of the person you've already heard of, like our profiles of France's president, Emmanuel Macron, or scientist Richard Dawkins. The other is a person you don't necessarily know already. The person should be personally fascinating and have an interesting story, but also illuminate a world. There has to be a reason beyond the extraordinary details of someone's life story. In this case, the central figure was not only vivid and charismatic, but was also a way into the idea of the Anthropocene.

The environmental philosopher Timothy Morton wants us all to “fucking chill.” Was this in-your-face opening an effective way to catch your attention? You don't expect a sentence that starts with “environmental philosopher” to end with “fucking chill.” This sentence immediately suggests that the writer knows what he's doing: He's got your interest and surprised you. If he'd started off with the idea of the Anthropocene right away, it could feel plodding. But the shock of the first sentence and scope of the second gives you a great one-two punch.It’s not what you might expect from a thinker whose increasingly influential work grapples with the cataclysmic forces – extreme weather, submerged cities, acute resource shortages, nuclear fallout – unleashed in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which human beings are dramatically reshaping the planet. Had you heard of this philosopher? I was familiar with his name, but hadn't read his work and didn’t really know what he was all about.

But the man who says that the arrival of the Anthropocene means realizing “there’s no exit” from the “charnel ground” we inhabit also finds in this predicament a carnivalesque liberation. “You think ecologically tuned life means being all efficient and pure,” Morton recently tweeted. “Wrong. It means you can have a disco in every room of your house.” What did you think of including these quotes near the top? It suggests that the writer has already done quite a bit of work and is thinking about how to make the piece interesting to someone who isn't already familiar with the subject. They also give you a glimpse of Morton's personality.

That tweet was characteristic of Morton’s philosophy, which sets out from the self-evident, but then veers wildly off the beaten track. His idiosyncratic body of thought – devouring everything from Romantic poetry and cutting-edge sound art, to superdeep boreholes and Blade Runner – is now breaking into the mainstream. Morton was recently named one of the fifty most influential living philosophers. His work has been reviewed at length in the US edition of Newsweek and cited in the New York Times. The co-director of the Serpentine, Hans Ulrich Obrist, recently told readers of Vogue that Morton’s books were the most important cultural works out there. Did this external affirmation of his importance sway you? How important is a timely hook? The writer is obviously conscious here that this guy isn’t a household name. Obviously, reviews in Newsweek and Obrist's comment help answer the “why this guy” question. We work on fairly long lead times, at least a month but usually two to four months, we’re not generally looking for hooks per se. We want everything we publish to have a feeling of urgency—this is something that matters now—without necessarily being pegged to something. This list of the ways in which he’s percolating in more mainstream culture felt like a good way of saying, “This person is current and matters.” But if someone is appearing in a movie coming out next week, that wouldn't work for our timing. When I spoke to Morton about the possibility of profiling him, I asked which songs would be in heavy rotation at the hypothetical disco in his house. Is it important or necessary to secure access in advance? It depends, but I wouldn't say it’s essential. If it’s an academic who isn't constantly barraged, it's worth seeing if you can give them a call and schedule reporting opportunities, but it's certainly not the case that we'd expect you to. If you're pitching a profile of a well-known person or someone at the center of a news story, it's not essential, but it's worth considering if you're likely to get access. There are many things we'd go for in principle, but if you want to profile Beyoncé, you have to show us you're likely to spend quality time with her. At the top of his set-list was “Hyperballad” – he specified the Subtle Abuse mix – by Björk, with whom he shares a long correspondence and a co-author credit. Although he’s currently writing a scholarly work attempting to fuse Marxism and dark ecology, he also has a book forthcoming from Penguin, Being Ecological, which is meant to enchant the general public. The first sentence, he told me, is: “This book contains no ecological facts whatsoever.” Why was it effective to include these details? This tells you exactly what kind of nerdy music guy this is. It reassures me that the writer will get the character element of the profile. He's got to be able to not only animate his ideas, but make me come away feeling like I've spent time with this person and seen the world through their eyes. This aside makes me think the writer is good at noticing little things.

In many ways, the development of Morton’s thought has tracked his own personal story. Born into a family of English bohemians, Morton went on to do a PhD in Romantic poetry. At some point, he was diagnosed with depression. Trying to cope opened Morton to a range of experiences, from psychoanalysis to Buddhist meditation, and his writing began to range more widely. He compares living with depression to living with the tragic knowledge of the ecological catastrophe we have created: you have to admit “that you’re malfunctioning, and this malfunctioning doesn’t go away, because malfunctioning is actually part of how things are.” After that acceptance, Morton says, you can move, on occasion, to something that looks more like play. Why was it important to include some of Morton's personal story, and was this a good spot for that background?Structurally, this comes at a nice moment. The pitch started off by grabbing your attention and giving a sense of this guy's big ideas and why he matters, and now it tells his story. The writer also does a good job of connecting this guy’s ideas with his personal life. In the best profiles, someone’s ideas and life story often go hand in hand without the connection feeling overdetermined or clunky.

Morton’s position – that the ecological catastrophe many of us fear has “already occurred” and that flourishing in the anthropocene era means accepting the limits of our capacity to control the world – sets itself against virtually every other environmental approach going. This has not made him popular with his fellow scholars. Some professional philosophers see him as a curiosity at best, and a fraud at worst. One scholarly review pointed to something “of the snake oil salesman in Morton’s prose.” Another thinker has claimed that Morton and his small cohort of philosophical confreres, who are active bloggers, have only succeeded in generating “an online orgy of stupidity.” Others argue he is fatally out of touch with the environmental catastrophes facing the global south: it’s all well and good for an Oxford-educated, university-tenured middle-aged white man to advocate wind-powered discos and buddy up to Björk – but how the hell is play going to help farmers in the world’s new dust bowls? Why was including the voices of critics important? There's a tendency when pitching profiles to hype up the figure a bit. This paragraph immediately signals that the writer has a critical eye and is looking at this guy in a removed way. He's aware of the criticism, and the piece isn’t going to call this guy the best thing since sliced bread and swallow all his bullshit. I feel like I'm in safe hands. This also brings in conflict: Some people are saying this guy is a brilliant thinker and illuminating problems of our age, and others are saying he's an idiot and fraud—this sounds interesting.

Ultimately, though, I see this profile as a chance to profile a thinker whose ideas reflect and shape how the culture at large thinks about the current state of the world, and to tell the story of an idea – the anthropocene – which captures the precariousness, scariness and weirdness of what it’s like to be alive right now. What did you think of this closer? After a few paragraphs about his life story and critics, it's helpful to have a reminder of the bigger picture and the idea of the Anthropocene. It reminds me that it's about more than just this one guy.

What happens after you get a strong pitch like this? We usually have a phone call or meeting with the writer and send logistical questions. Then we'll either say yes or we'll ask the writer to sketch a plan of the story as they see it.

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Mother Jones is known for its hard-hitting investigations, like Shane Bauer’s 35,000-word undercover account of working as a private prison guard in Louisiana, which won a National Magazine Award for reporting last year.

That doesn’t mean editors at the San Francisco-based magazine, which was also honored as Magazine of the Year in 2017, only want to publish pieces about criminal justice. “Shane’s amazing story has led to a boomlet of pitches about the topic,” says managing editor Ian Gordon. “It’s not a bad problem to have, but we have a lot of people on staff that like writing about it.”

Gordon would love to see more ideas about subjects people don’t always associate with the Mother Jones name: culture, technology, sports. He’s looking for more queries for profiles and essays. And a little humor goes a long way: “We write so much about bad actors that we’re always looking for people to bring some levity to leaven the mix,” he says.

Below, Gordon shares his tips about pitching Mother Jones, which was named after a 20th-century labor organizer. We also discuss Michael Sokolove’s (very long) pitch for his story “What Does It Take to Convict a Cop?” about the police shooting of Walter Scott. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How would you describe stories that are right for Mother Jones?

Everything we do is in the public interest. We write about national politics, environmental issues, corporate wrongdoing in all forms, crime and justice, human rights, political influence and power in different spheres. Deep reporting is the hallmark of what we do, whether that’s unearthing data or documents others don’t have, getting access to people or just being a bulldog and reporting the hell out of something. We’re looking for what magazine editors everywhere want: stories that are compelling narratives, have characters and aren’t exactly what you’d expect.

How much freelance work does MoJo take?

Unlike a lot of publications these days, we’ve really committed to having full-time reporters. We’re also taking advantage of our great fellowship program and promoting people up the ranks. We don’t do much freelance stuff on the web, since our staffers do a lot of that work.

That said, we take quite a bit of freelance for the magazine, including the front-of-book section, the feature well, the culture section and even the health and wellness column. The magazine comes out six times a year, and each issue has five or six features. Because we have a full staff of reporters writing about stuff in the news, the pitch should demonstrate why it’s worth using a freelancer. Sometimes the person has a good perspective, has connections we don’t have or is an expert in some way.

Do you commission international freelance pieces?

We do, but it has to be the right piece and in some way reference discussions we’re having in the U.S. If someone doesn’t have funding from a fellowship, it’s harder to send them abroad. Part of the reality of being a nonprofit shop is that we don’t have a ton of money to send people all over the world.

What are the most common pitching mistakes you see?

We often see stories that are missing a character. Or it’s a really good anecdote or interesting case, but it doesn’t necessarily connect to larger themes or trends. It’s hard to say yes to a pitch that’s just about one bad actor. For something to carry 4,000 words, it needs to have real weight and consequences. Often that means the story needs to be broadened out a bit: Is this part of a larger problem? Are there statistics? How does it go beyond this one anecdote? We also get a lot of pitches that are equally as long or twice as long as the story would be. If you’re pitching a 1,000-word front-of-book piece, you probably shouldn’t write 1,800 words.

To pitch a feature, you have to do quite a bit of pre-reporting, and that’s a calculation that’s complicated for a freelancer. But it’s a risk for editors to assign stories with a limited freelance budget, so they have to feel confident the reporter can do what he or she is proposing. That’s often based on the pitch: Are they showing the reporting and writing chops to do it? Is the pitch written in the way the story would be? If a pitch feels flat at 1,000 words, what’s the motivation to give someone another 4,000?

Especially if you’re less experienced, it’s important to explain why you’re the person to do this story. Is it that you have great access? You have a trove of documents? You have special knowledge of the subject? That helps sell the editor on the risk. A reporting plan is also an important part of any pitch: “I’m going to go here and see this, interview these people, FOIA these documents.” Anticipate the questions that the editors are going to ask. That shows maturity and the ability to think through a project.

Walk me through how the pitching process works at MoJo.

A freelancer can go to our staff page, read editors’ bios to learn what they’re interested in and email them directly. When there’s a pitch we’re interested in, we usually go back and forth with the person a couple of times. Then we put all the pitches in a Google Doc and discuss them in a story meeting that happens every six weeks. In each meeting, we have about five to 10 freelance pitches out of 15 to 20 total. Then we go back to the writer and say what we’re thinking: an enthusiastic yes, sorry but no, or we have a lot of questions we want you to answer first.

How much does the magazine pay?

Generally $1.50 to $2 a word. Occasionally less, usually based on the writer’s experience.

What’s your take on simultaneous submissions?

It’s a bit of a tricky position to put an editor in. If someone told us they were going to submit a pitch to two places, I’d say, “Can you give us a couple of days, and we’ll let you know?” If we’re interested, we might make a decision outside of our normal process. But if the editor getting the pitch isn’t totally sold on it, we’d just let it go because we know we can’t turn things around that quickly. I’d prefer someone to just pitch it to us or pitch it somewhere else if they want and then come back if it’s not accepted.

How long should writers expect to wait to hear from you? How often are you OK with them following up?

I’m very sympathetic to freelance writers and conscious of their time. I’m pretty good about getting back to people in a couple of days. But sometimes you are just putting out fires all day, and responding to a freelancer does fall lower on the priority list, which is regrettable. I’ve heard Jason Fagone talk about moving on after 48 hours. I don’t begrudge anyone that attitude, as long as you’re upfront with editors at the start. Unfortunately, with the long lead time of a bimonthly magazine, our process is slower. If I get a pitch the day after a story meeting, the next one isn’t for six weeks. I try to update writers right after the meeting. If you want to follow up after two days, great. After five days, fine. Editors need a kick in the ass. We’re adults — we can handle it.

My questions are in red, his responses in blue.

[annotation q="This pitch is extremely long. Did it need to be this extensive? What length generally works best?" a="I know it’s long, but it was a good pitch and a good story. Is this going to get us lots of 2,000-word pitches? I hope not. In this case, the writer was planning to write a book about the topic and had written a proposal. It’s like the extreme version of the reporting you can do ahead of time. I know Jennifer Kahn has written about the five-paragraph pitch. In general, that’s a great idea, but I would say if the pitch is good, it doesn’t have to be just one page. If you write an 800-word pitch for a feature, we’ll probably ask a ton of questions."] [annotation q="Was the writer a known quantity?" a="The editor who assigned this story, Mike Mechanic, had been in touch with him for a while."]

Walter Scott’s cell phone bill was current. In that small but not unimportant aspect of life, he was on solid ground. He had checked in with his elderly parents, called and texted friends. Easter was around the corner. He would wear his good suit, match it with a crisply ironed shirt and a colorful tie. Scott, at fifty years old, was a forklift driver, a dominos aficionado, an extrovert with a buttery voice who sang soul music at social gatherings and spirituals on Sunday mornings at his church. He was an Everyman, but a distinctly black Everyman. Every time he made a mistake, he paid a price. As a young man, he served in the Coast Guard before being discharged for a drug-related offense. He had four children from two past relationships. He lost some years to drinking, drifted between jobs, sobered up and earned a two-year degree at a technical college, where he sang America’s national anthem at his commencement ceremony. [annotation q="This is more or less verbatim how the published piece begins. When does it work to open with a detailed scene that could be the story lede?" a="This has the sensibility of a magazine story right away. It has good cadence and rhythm, and you can tell he’s done his homework. An anecdotal lede works when it helps set the tone and situate you in time and place, when the scene is directly related to a theme of the piece, or when you really need it to establish what the piece is about and be on the same terms about facts. If you are going to write a scene, make sure it’s very tight. If you’re writing a six-paragraph pitch, it shouldn’t take up three."]

On the morning of April 4, 2015, Scott was behind the wheel of a 1990 Mercedes sedan which he had agreed to purchase from a neighbor, though the paperwork was not yet squared away. He was less than a mile from the home he shared with his girlfriend and her two children in North Charleston, South Carolina—his hometown and neighboring Charleston’s poor cousin. Tourists don’t come to North Charleston and most wouldn’t know it even exists. A little farther to the east, out in the water, was Sullivan’s Island, America’s primary slave port, now a vacation paradise dotted with million-dollar homes, where survivors of the Middle Passage were deloused and quarantined before being sold off to their plantation masters. [annotation q="Why was weaving in this historical note effective?" a="It shows that he’s thinking about this piece in a broader way. He’s thinking about what these places mean and how they can be characters in the story to a certain extent. In many pitches, the place just fades away, and there’s no sense that where this happened even matters. But where this happened did matter."]

A police patrol car pulled up behind Scott, lights flashing. He made an immediate right turn, then came to a stop in the parking lot of an auto parts store and watched through the rearview mirror as an officer, dressed just in shirt sleeves on a warm spring day, slowly walked toward him. Patrolman Michael Slager, thirty-three years old, had his hands on his hips—the right one close to his gun. “The reason for the stop is your brake light is out,” he said through the driver’s side window.

It was the classic DWB (driving while black) rationale for a car stop, but Scott already knew he had a problem bigger than his brake light being out. (If that were even the case.) There was a warrant for his arrest dating back to 2013 for failure to pay child support. He was a cornered man. Paying support, and his failure and at times inability to pay it, had been the burden of his adult life. In 2000, his former wife wrote to a judge, “My husband bears no responsibility for his family.” [annotation a="These details signal that the writer didn’t have an agenda. He was going to give us the full story — both of these guys had faults, and they came together in this tragic moment."]

Scott had been to jail in the past for failure to pay support, which caused him to lose jobs and made the sum he owed ever larger and harder to pay. He was $18,104 in arrears. If he went back to jail, his bosses at the warehouse would find a new forklift driver and the job might not be waiting for him when he got out, even if he was behind bars just a day or two. He handed over his license and told the officer he planned to complete the purchase of the car in a couple of days.

“So you don’t have any paperwork in the glove box? No registration, no insurance?”

“No sir, I’m sorry about that.”

“Ok, but you’re buying the car?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Alright, I’ll be right back with you.” [annotation q="Do you like when pitches include dialogue?" a="Getting that in is smart. It’s a question of doing some homework, and it shows that he has a sense that magazine stories need dialogue and people interacting."]

What happened next was that Walter Scott got out of the car and fled, and Slager ran him down and and Tasered him. When Scott staggered to his feet and ran again, Slager did not give chase, even for one step, even though Scott did not look like a man who could run very fast or for very long. Instead, the officer unholstered his .45-caliber Glock with his right hand, took a stance, and put his left hand underneath to steady the weapon. The form was perfect. It looked like a training video. The only thing wrong was that he was taking aim at the back of an unarmed man.

Slager squeezed off eight quick shots, and Scott fell by the side of a tree. The officer walked 20 unhurried steps until he reached Scott’s motionless body, at which point he arranged Scott’s arms behind his back and handcuffed a dead or dying man. [annotation q="The Walter Scott shooting, and the subject of police shootings generally, was covered widely. What made this pitch stand out despite that?" a="Everything has been done. There’s no such thing as a brand-new story. The level of pre-reporting and the writing in the pitch sold it. A pitch should help the editor say, “This is what this story could look like in the best-case scenario. This is how he’s going to complicate the story we think we all know.” He had obvious curiosity about the two men involved, had done some of the work and was able to connect it to larger thematic issues."]

*******************

[annotation q="How do you feel about section breaks in a pitch?" a="It’s pretty unusual, and I wouldn’t necessarily suggest it. But in some ways it’s helpful here: He basically showed us he had the top section of the story figured out and now steps back to give us context and the bigger picture."]

I include the details above because they so vividly raise the question: What kind of person hunts downs down another human being in this manner? Pumps multiple bullets into him, casually approaches to inspect the carnage and seems in no hurry to summon medical help? Where did he come from? What made him want to become a cop? How did he get the job and what was his training? [annotation q="I’ve heard one shouldn’t ask questions in pitches but rather provide answers. What do you think?" a="It does aggravate editors when pitches end up being a bunch of questions that aren’t answered or can’t be answered. A pitch is not the place for rhetorical questions. If it’s more of a thematic question, what’s the thought process? If it’s a reporting question, answer it or tell us how you’re going to figure it out. He didn’t need to include the questions, but he did answer them."]

Each of the contested police shootings of black men by white officers over the last two years is a collision of two lives, two life histories. It is a first and final meeting of two men who would seem to have no other point of intersection. What transpires between them can seem like an accident of fate — wrong place, wrong time — or fate itself. Predestined by societal forces and racial currents and confirmed by the inarguable nature of cell phone video.

Like all law enforcement officers, Michael Slager represented the ideals of order and stability, but on a personal level he had spent a considerable portion of his life drifting from place to place trying to find a purpose and somewhere to belong. The community where he became a cop was not one he had any ties to, and he was not the type to leave a footprint. After his move to South Carolina, he started out living in one house — on a treeless lot in a new subdivision — then bought a different one in a similar-looking subdivision without his old neighbors knowing where he went. For whatever reason, they seemed to think he had moved for a job on the West Coast. He didn’t coach Little League teams, sing at church or have fraternal hobbies like golf or bowling. If there was any tribe he belonged to, it was martial in nature. Uniforms, guns, authority. [annotation q="The writer doesn’t really cite any sources. Are you looking for that?" a="It depends on what the story is. There’s no harm in citing sources, and we definitely get pitches where it’s not clear where things are coming from. When you’re talking about data, make clear where it’s coming from so we know it would stand up to our rigorous fact checking. If you’ve interviewed people, make that clear — that’s showing your pre-reporting."]

Slager’s childhood in a comfortable New Jersey town came apart in his teens when a business venture of his father’s failed and his parents divorced. He moved in with his father in Florida, where he received some academic tutoring and his father ended up involved with the tutor — whom he would soon marry, then divorce. After about a year, Michael Slager moved back in with his mother and two sisters in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. He was shy to the point of withdrawn. He liked helping his mother with chores. He volunteered with a local ambulance service and took courses in first aid and emergency medical care. [annotation q="Why was it effective to go into Slager’s background?" a="It’s one of the things that made this pitch interesting to us. There are a lot of stories that humanize and bring richness of detail to the victim, and few stories that bring that to both the victim and officer. He was very thoughtful about how he did this. He wasn’t glorifying Slager in any way. He did a great job reporting out his history and laying that bare on the page."]

After high school he worked as a waiter, and then, like Walter Scott, enlisted in the Coast Guard, where he served six years without apparent distinction. In fact, it’s possible that he ran afoul of rules, just like Scott. Slager was honorably discharged after six years at the same rank he entered — a rarity, and an indication either that he never received a promotion or, perhaps, was busted back down to his initial rank of “unrated fireman” after a disciplinary lapse. [annotation q="It feels like he’s basically writing a chunk of the story. Does that get annoying to editors with limited time?" a="There’s no one answer. It would be annoying if it was aimless and had no real polish. Getting a long pitch that’s not well-reported and well-crafted is annoying. This didn’t feel like that at all; it felt like a preview to a story."]

**********************

We have had an extended season of highly questionable (at best) and highly publicized killings of black men by police. I’m not setting out to write a story that lectures on how awful this is. We already know that. One hundred and fifty years since the end of the Civil War, and nearly eight years since the election of the nation’s first black president, America breeds white grievance and aggression at the same rate, or perhaps a greater rate, than it creates opportunity for those left behind or newly arrived. This is part of the larger story I want to tell, but I’ll find my way there through immersive reporting into the slaying of Walter Scott and a full exploration of all that his life and death connects to. [annotation a="Here’s where he’s predicting the editor’s question: Why now? Why is this a good case to focus on? It’s not only about what’s going on in the world at the time, but also that there’s a case coming up and it’s an obvious place for him to go report."]

I want to tell the story of this police shooting, and to an extent, all of them, by examining the lives of the two men involved. Walter Scott had some obvious strengths, most notably, a deep humanity that caused his loved ones to forgive or at least abide his many weaknesses and failings. Michael Slager is not a victim, and I would never portray him as such, but he is someone who demands our understanding. He is a distinct product of America: disconnected, a loner, a military vet, an armed white man empowered to patrol unfamiliar black streets. A third character is the man who captured the shooting on his cell phone: Feidin Santana, a barber and an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, where he developed both a healthy fear and a distrust of authority. He saw the confrontation unfolding on a scrubby expanse of open ground and was afraid at first to document it, but would later come to believe that God put him there for a reason—to serve as a witness, a stand-in for us all.

Slager was quickly disavowed by his own police union, another rarity. He is being represented by a renowned Charleston lawyer, one who also represents some of the families whose kin were murdered at the Emanuel African Methodist Church three months after Scott was gunned down. The two trials — Slager’s and that of church shooter Dylann Roof — may overlap in Charleston, in late October.

Here is how I propose to do this story. I would attend the trial. I know it will be covered by the national media, but not mined for material in the way I would go about it. I want to do a deep dive into Slager’s persona and past, through whatever comes out in trial (and if he is convicted, through his pre-sentencing reports) as well as through interviews with his friends and family. I’d have to spend time in Charleston as well as in New Jersey, and possibly Florida, where Slager’s father lives. [annotation q="He didn’t seem to have access beyond other reporters covering the trial. What made you confident he’d do something original?" a="He’s very specific about, “Here’s how I propose to do this story.” He lays out a plan, which is really smart. He’s anticipating what we would ask."]

Some of what I hope to discover is part of the missing piece of these police shootings: They offer relatively unskilled and uneducated men — the Charleston force required a high school diploma or GED — steady wages along with decent benefits and pensions. Who becomes a cop in the Fergusons and North Charlestons of America? If they are white, and they usually are, what are they bringing to the job? What disappointments, what resentments, what fears, what human qualities that might possibly equip them to effectively and humanely carry out their duties? [annotation a="This was something different and smart about his approach. He gets at the fact that these people are not highly educated or compensated, and that these jobs are difficult, unpleasant and often dangerous."]

This story requires deep reporting as well as a high degree of thinking and writing. I’d be eager to take it on. [annotation q="Was this self-assured phrasing effective or off-putting?" a="I feel like that’s a line that works maybe when you’re more experienced and have a rapport with the editor. Depending on who you are, it might sound weird. A lot of writers who pitch me are definitely far less experienced and don’t write cover stories for The New York Times Magazine all the time. There are lots of different ways to connect with an editor. Persistence is one way. Great writing is another way. Great reporting and scene-setting is another way. Editors want to work with great writers who think differently than them and are skilled reporters and craftspeople. As Jennifer Sahn said, we’re just looking for magical moment."]

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