[dc]I[/dc]n late August, Jim Tankersley, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, learned he was going to be the pool reporter following President Biden to Dover Air Force Base for the arrival of the bodies of 13 service members, the last to die in a 20-year war with Afghanistan.

Tankersley typically covers economic policy for The Times and has primarily covered politics and economics in Washington. This was a daunting descriptive and emotional assignment, one he wasn’t entirely sure he could handle. So he grabbed his phone texted Jim Sheeler.

Tankersley and Sheeler worked together at the Rocky Mountain News in the early 2000s. They didn’t overlap in the newsroom for long: Tankersley took his reporting career to Vox, the Chicago Tribune and the Toledo Blade before landing at The Times. Sheeler stayed at the Rocky, where his project on following the homecoming of those killed in battle won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The Rocky closed in 2009; not long before, Sheeler had moved into academia, teaching at the University of Colorado before becoming the Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism and Media Writing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

But the two stayed in touch, through emails, text messages and phone.

When Tankersley texted Sheeler and told him about the Dover assignment, Sheeler responded immediately.

“Call me,” Sheeler texted.

They didn’t talk for long, but Tankersley said his friend immediately understood the anxiety of writing a story that needed to respect the fallen service members, but also their survivors, the larger military, and the nation. Sheeler sketched out everything that would happen in the field. By the end of the short call, Tankersley felt calmer.

The next day, he was at the White House by 5 a.m. and then on Air Force One, flying to Dover.

“I spent a lot of that time thinking about how Jim had watched so many of these,” he said. “So many families seeing the return of their fallen heroes. It's draining.”

After the ceremony, Tankersley found himself back on Air Force One scrambling to file a worthy piece on deadline. He had excellent editors at the Times and valued what they said about his first draft. But for this story, he cared most about what Sheeler thought. He sent it to him and got another quick response.

“The writing is simple and wrenching,” Sheeler wrote to Tankersley. “I hate that you had to be there, that any of us did. But glad you were there. Sheeler.”

“He mostly gave me validation that it’s how he would have handled it,” Tankersley said. “In the midst of all that chaos, to know that Jim was there with me, helping me with this piece, even though I hadn’t seen him in more than a decade — that is exactly the presence he was in my life and in other people’s lives.”

Tankersley’s story ran Aug. 29, 2021. Less than four weeks later, news spread on social media that Sheeler died at his home. He was 53 years old.

From workshop to friendship

I met Jim Sheeler in July 2007 at a week-long seminar on narrative at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. I was a reporter at the Columbus Dispatch at the time. The session was run by Thomas French, and we spent the week talking about how to report and tell compelling stories on deadline. I was hooked by Jim’s presentation on narrative obituaries more than anything, and when I got back to Columbus, I drafted off Sheeler’s “A Colorado Life” series name and created “An Ohio Life” for the Dispatch.

We both left newspapers for academia in August 2008. Two years later, he called my office at Ohio’s Ashland University and said he’d been offered a tenured position at Case Western Reserve University and wanted my advice. I was on a tenure-track and knew exactly what that process was like. I told him to take the job. I felt it was a smart move. But selfishly, I also knew it would put him just an hour north of me.

He invited me up to his classes when he had in star-power guests like Lane DeGregory and Justin Heckert. I did the same when Ben Montgomery came to Ashland to read from “Grandma Gatewood’s Walk.” I moved to Connecticut in 2016 to teach at Fairfield University, but we stayed in touch, talking and emailing occasionally.

In 2017, my memoir on surviving childhood cancer was published. I used a line from Tim O’Brien’s epic Vietnam War book, “The Things They Carried,” as the epigraph:

“But this too is true: Stories can save us.”

That’s the line from the last chapter of the book, a chapter titled “The Lives of the Dead.” I used the lessons I learned from Jim at Poynter 10 years earlier to shape my book — to realize that it needed to be about those I knew who didn’t survive their own cancers as much as it was about me.

This is the significant thing Jim did throughout his reporting career and too-brief life: He kept the dead alive through stories.

I’ve never felt a person’s life needed to be kept alive through stories more than Jim’s.

Decency, integrity and humility

Thomas French first came across “Final Salute” when he was asked to write an essay on lessons gleaned from the 2006 non-deadline writing winners of American Society of Newspaper Editors’ award. He didn’t know Sheeler at the time, but as soon as he read the first sentence of the story that ran in the Rocky Mountain News on November 9, 2005, he felt he knew the essence of Sheeler.

The opening scene of “Final Salute,” the newspaper story, is set in a limousine parked on an airport tarmac. Inside that limo, a young woman, pregnant, waits for her husband’s remains to be brought off a jet that has just landed. It was the start of the story of  Lt. James J. Cathey, and his wife Katherine, and Marine Major Steve Beck.

“You read these amazing scenes, where you can’t imagine how any reporter could gain that kind of access,” French said. “When you meet Jim in person, you understand it in a second. He emanated and radiated this inherent ocean of decency and integrity.”

French, who won the 1998 Pulitzer in feature writing for his St. Petersburg Times series “Angels and Demons,” invited Sheeler to join his narrative writing seminars at Poynter.

“He was a walking, breathing argument for a different approach from gotcha journalism,” said French, who now teaches at Indiana University. “What you got from Jim’s work was that people deserve was to be understood in a deeper way. He did that, and he encouraged me to do that. Every move that he had taught me something more about that basic goal that we all have in reporting.”

Another Pulitzer Prize winner said he also was learning from Sheeler before the two ever met. Wesley Lowery was in college at Ohio University when he read “Final Salute,” the book that grew from Sheeler’s newspaper project. Reading it, he said, showed how a great writer keeps a reader engaged even though the reader already knows the biggest plot elements. At the start of the book, the service members he features are already dead. Then Sheeler goes back in time to write about their lives and loved ones. He makes us care about them. We know their deaths are coming, but when it does, it hits us even harder.

“This is a book about dead soldiers,” Lowery said. “We know the soldiers are dead, and yet, there  was still a way through the tension, through the storytelling, through the pacing, to create a sense of suspense and a sense of emotional payoff that keeps you in the story and helps you experience the story. It takes a really talented writer to do that in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative.”

Now at CBS News, Lowery was a lead reporter on the Washington Post’s project “Fatal Force,” which won the 2016 Pulitzer for National Reporting. Not long after, Sheeler contacted him. He wanted Lowery to talk with his students about how they should cover the Black Lives Matter movement and issues of race and diversity and violence, especially in Cleveland, Lowery’s hometown and a place where residents were dealing with those very issues.

Lowery was impressed with Sheeler’s humility and hunger to learn.

“Here’s someone who’s done some of the best and most evocative feature writing, some of the most empathetic writing that’s been done in modern journalism, and yet he was still a student of the craft,” Lowery said. “He was pouring his mind and his remarkable God-given talents into the lives and careers of the next generation storytellers.”

Learning to listen

Lane DeGregory frequently intersected with Sheeler on the journalism conference circuit. It was early in those interactions that DeGregory, a feature writer at the Tampa Bay Times, learned approaches from Jim that ultimately helped her when she reported her 2009 Pulitzer-winning story, “The Girl in the Window.”

DeGregory said she has always been outgoing and quick to speak. She would ask questions and then, as a person was answering, be thinking three more questions ahead. But when it came to reporting about Danielle, a young, nonverbal girl who often didn’t even realize that DeGregory was present, she knew that wouldn’t work. That’s when she thought about the things she had heard from Sheeler, like reporting through observation — just being able to sit and quietly watch things unfold.

“He was probably the best listener I’ve ever been around,” DeGregory said. “He made you feel like everything you said was so important and interesting.”

In 2014, Sheeler invited DeGregory to Case Western to talk with students about her work. While there, she said, she took note of how patient he was with his students.

“He didn’t just know the stories that they were working on for class assignments,” DeGregory said. “He knew where they came from and what they were dealing with and what their motivations were and what their weaknesses were and what their goals were. Jim took his students just like he took his subjects: He wanted to know everything about them.”

Two of Sheeler’s students at the time were Anne Nickoloff and Mike McKenna. Nickoloff went on to a reporting career at Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer. McKenna, who then was the editor-in-chief of The Observer at Case Western, is now a clinical psychology graduate student in his fourth year at Ohio State University.

McKenna and Nickoloff both said that Sheeler was a lifeline for the student newspaper. But more than that, he was a lifeline to students. Nickoloff came to Case Western knowing that she wanted to do creative writing, but thinking that eliminated journalism. Sheeler helped her realize that wasn’t true.

“The greatest thing I learned from Jim was that creative writing is journalism,” she said. “It’s telling someone else’s story instead of coming up with one out of thin air.”

McKenna is still using what he learned from Sheeler in his studies of neuropsychology.

“We do a lot of clinical interviewing and a lot of taking people’s history,” he said. “Then try to figure out how we can help them. I really enjoy that process because it’s an opportunity to get to know somebody, to get to know their story. I don’t think I was as patient or as skilled at doing that before meeting Jim or going through his work.”

Nickoloff also carries wisdom from Sheeler’s teaching that reaches beyond journalism. That lesson: Everybody has a story that deserves to be shared. But even more, everybody has a story that deserves to be listened to with care.

“That’s something I try to keep in my mind every day,” she said. “Jim, through his life and through the way he approached people and the relationships he kept, reminds me that everybody is going through something. Everybody’s living through their story, and it’s always great to hear those stories.”

Not a final salute

In the Introduction to “Obit,” Sheeler’s collection of feature obituaries, he mentions that he always asked this question when talking with friends and relatives of someone who had died: “What did you learn from this person’s life?”

From Jim, we learned compassion and kindness. We learned that reporting should often be more about listening than asking questions. We learned that we should never stop being students of our craft.

We learned that everyone has a story worth telling, over and over and over again, and those stories will keep memories alive forever.

[caption id="attachment_166752" align="aligncenter" width="650"] Jim Sheeler places flowers on the grave of a fallen service member at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver, Colorodo.[/caption]

***

Matt Tullis is director of Digital Journalism and an assistant professor of English at Fairfield University. He produces and hosts "Gangrey: The Podcast."

The post Jim Sheeler’s legacy to journalism: Empathy, decency and stories that last appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The competition to prove — or disprove — claims that former President Donald Trump made about his wealth was fierce. Of special interest were Trump’s long-denied tax returns, something all modern presidents before him released.

In the midst of that flurry, David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post calmly turned story after story, biting off bit by bit of the truth of the Trump financial empire. His efforts scored early in the administration; Fahrenthold won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for a collection of pieces that disrobed Trump’s claims about his charitable giving. During that same year, he famously broke the story about the “Access Hollywood” tapes, which recorded Trump’s lewd brags about women.

Fahrenthold’s groundbreaking work continued throughout and beyond Trump’s time in office, creating a model for transparent reporting. Those methods were shared again at the recent Power of Narrative conference, hosted by Boston University, in a keynote: “What to do when nobody’s talking: Lessons covering secretive organizations, learned over five years writing about President Trump’s business.”

Fahrenthold joined the Post in 2000, covering beats that ranged from the Capitol police to Congress to the environment. He’s also an on-air contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.

In his virtual conference keynote, he spoke about how he uses data and social media to enhance his reporting. Ultimately, Fahrenthold came away with three lessons for any reporter looking to build stories about powerful figures who prefer to spin their own narratives.

Lesson No. 1: Get in the habit of making lists

If you do this type of reporting, you have to make long lists of names, including anybody who might have even the tiniest bit of information about the subject you’re probing. Fahrenthold’s reporting on Trump’s finances started with gathering names of anyone who had any connection with the Trump organization. He created spreadsheets with those names and then reached out by email to thousands of people.

“The conversion rate was pretty low,” he said. “We started to get some replies. Those people, their information, as small as it was, every bit of it was stuff that you couldn’t get any other way. They had something that was unique, that was unusual, that hadn’t been revealed before.”

Lesson No. 2: When information comes in, catalog it immediately

Information from FOIA requests and sources will come in when you least expect it. You may not need that information for the story you’re working on at the moment. But you need to take to catalog the information as soon as you receive it.

“It’s sort of building in this sea of lies and misinformation, building little islands of fact, one rock at a time,” he said. “It gets above the waterline. Once it's built, it stays built. If I don't catalog that information, put the context into it right away, I lose it. It goes back in the ocean.”

Lesson No. 3: Be aggressive in your reporting, but humble in your conclusions

This type of reporting means you will never know the complete story. As an aggressive reporter, you are constantly getting snapshots, little pieces of information that give you glimpses of what is happening, but never the full picture. Fahrenthold said it’s important to never fill in blind spots with assumptions.

“Tell your readers what you know and what you don't know,” he said, “so you avoid misleading them or steering them in a direction based on nothing.”

You can watch a recording of Fahrenthold's keynote session here:

***

Matt Tullis is director of Digital Journalism and an assistant professor of English at Fairfield University. He produces and hosts Gangrey: The Podcast.

The post Chipping away at the opacity of power with David Fahrenthold appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The "Voices from the Pandemic" series has been awarded a 2020 George Polk Award in Oral Histories.

[dc]E[/dc]li Saslow of The Washington Post has made a name for himself as one of the best narrative journalists in the country. His signature approach is to embed himself with a person or a family for an extended amount of time. Through patience, intimate interviews and keen observation, he comes away with emotional but authentic stories that reveal how real people are affected by the issues facing us as a nation — things like poverty, racial injustice and gun violence. He won the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting in 2014 for a series on food stamps in post-recession America and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer in feature writing three times.

[caption id="attachment_162404" align="alignleft" width="300"] Eli Saslow[/caption]

But as the coronavirus pandemic exploded around the world in March 2020, Saslow realized he wasn’t going to be able to rely on his usual reporting techniques, at least for a while. He didn’t want to be traveling around the country, possibly picking up the infection on a jet and then passing it on to those whose stories he wanted to tell.

He and his editor, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Finkel, had to figure out another way for Saslow to tell intimate stories that illustrate how people’s lives were affected by COVID. They landed on the idea of oral histories: as-told-to, first-person stories that come from those experiencing the pandemic first-hand.

The result? “Voices from the Pandemic.”

“As time went on, we both discovered that it was a form of storytelling that could really work for this moment,” Saslow said. “Because an oral history feels worthwhile when the moment is so clearly historic, it felt like an important way to document a really unprecedented year.”

As the country’s death toll topped 500,000, Saslow has reported nearly 30 oral histories, all carried on the front page of the Washington Post. He’s told the stories of doctors and nurses and coroners, retail workers and restaurant owners, educators, older adults who find themselves isolated and alone, and younger adults who can’t shake the virus. One of his voices was a woman who likely passed the virus on to her mother, only to watch her die.

“This form of storytelling offered me more than I thought it possibly could,” Saslow said. “These conversations with people were restorative for me.”

I talked with Saslow about the series — how the project came about, how he does the reporting, and what it’s been like to stop writing in his own words.

[dc small]W[/dc]here did the idea originate?
I've always been interested in oral histories. I admired this book about the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl called “Voices from Chernobyl.” It's a beautiful oral history book. But I never thought that I would do anything like that. Because what I like about my job is going places — not only getting to talk to people, but using my eyes and all of my other senses as a reporter. I like being on the scene and doing stories that are scene and dialogue.

But early in the pandemic, it became clear that that was going to be a pretty massive ethical and logistical challenge. To do that kind of embedded work, I would be getting on a plane and then landing hot and putting the people that I was writing about at some measure of risk. So this project began with wondering how I could continue to tell intimate, personal, urgent narrative stories. In our very early conversations, my editor, David Finkel, and I went back to the idea of these oral histories and decided, let's try it, without necessarily knowing how many there would be or if it would be a thing I would do for a few weeks or, as it’s turned out, almost a year. 

How do you find your subjects for the “Voices” series?
It's pretty similar to how I search for stories normally. I think about the current pressure point in the pandemic, what would I want to explore and hear about. Maybe one week, I'm seeing that in the news there are fights about masks breaking out in retail stores, and realizing that the people who are most often having to police masking in the country are essential workers retail clerks who make 10 or 12 bucks an hour. That's a character I want to know. I want to hear from someone who is doing this all day.

Then I’ll search around and talk to five or 10 people in that situation. I'll go through news clips and see who was working at this Walmart when a mask blow-up happened and I'll cold call. I'll have maybe a half dozen initial conversations, and in those conversations, I'm deciding who I'm going to feature — but I'm also learning a lot more about what it's like to work a retail job in a pandemic. So once I decide who I'm writing about, I'm more prepared for those conversations.

The next few days of the week, typically, are having hours and hours of conversation. I would say typically, in this series, it has meant being on the phone with somebody for a total of five to 10 hours.

Then I turn that into a 1,500-word piece.

 Have you had to interview differently than how you interview for a more traditional on-the-scene narrative?
I've learned a lot about interviewing this year because I don't have my other reporting tools. I don't have my eyes. I don't have my sense of place. I'm really reliant on conversation. Because of the format of the stories, it's really important for me to capture a sense of voice and perspective on the world, and to bring out what it is that makes a voice authentic and personal and true.

One thing that's led me to do is to be much less directive in interviewing, and more patient. I need clay for my stories, and these conversations are the clay. The more somebody talks to me, the longer those conversations go, the more I have to use. If somebody wants to keep talking, we keep talking because that's clay for me. I learned to take less control, to be more comfortable with letting things wander.

Do you do any other reporting on these pieces, or are they simply long conversations with the subject?
I was doing one about this guy Burnell Cotlon, who owned a grocery store in the Lower Ninth Ward. As he was telling me about the store, the customers were coming in. So I said, “Hey, Burnell, can I just FaceTime you and you can put me up on the register and I can get a feel for the store?” Also, in between conversations with a main character, I would talk to people around that person so that I could come back to our next conversation with more information. That  would help refresh the person's memory.

Do you miss the other type of interviewing and reporting that you've done?
Definitely. And I'll go back to that. I've loved this, and I've learned a lot from it. I'll bring some of these lessons back to my narrative reporting. For me, meeting people and talking to people, and building trust and confidence over the phone is great.

But it only approximates what reporting is like in person. And for me, the heart of this job is getting to go and be in places when I feel like something important is happening in people's lives.

How do you take extensive transcripts and turn them into a 1,500-word story? Is it different from going through notes from your more traditionally reported narratives?
What's different is the word choice and sentence level; I have much less control. But in terms of going through notes and deciding what's important, and then finding the structure, it's pretty similar. On Wednesday or Thursday night, I print out the transcripts of these conversations and highlight things that stick out to me. Then, with everything that's highlighted, I start thinking about what's the engine of the story. Francine Bailey worked at a nursing home and caught this virus there and then brought it home, and despite her best attempts to isolate, she gave it to her mom. Then her mom died. That was going to be a story about guilt and about the cruel fact that this virus doesn't just come from nowhere — it comes from somebody. In this case, she was sure it had come from her.

What I ask myself in every one of these is am I being accurate? Are these the words the person used? But also am I being fair? Am I telling the story in a way that is authentic to this person's experience? I want these to feel true to them. It's making sure that I'm being fair in reflecting the totality of those conversations, while still giving myself permission to make the journalistic choices that we always do about what things are important to include and what things that I can leave out.

So every sentence in these pieces is a direct quote, something that was said at one point during the interviews?
Exactly, but piecemeal. That's the thing that's hard about it, right? I can't change the clay. The transcripts are the transcripts, and in order for this to be a faithful work of journalism, I have to stick to that, with very mild editing for clarity. I can't put words into somebody's mouth that they didn't say. But what I can do is to Storify it.

You're a sculptor, right? The subjects give you the clay, and now you've got to sculpt it.
That's part of the fun of it. It's easy when you're writing a story to obsess over, as I do all the time, writing one sentence 17 different ways. I can obsess over the structure and the pacing and how long do I want this paragraph to be versus the next paragraph, and are we beginning and landing at the right places. But when it comes down to the sentence-to-sentence level? This was something that my editor and I laughed about a lot — talk about a great way to disempower an editor from messing with your sentences. If he felt like some sentence would have been better said another way, there's nothing we can do. There was some freedom in letting go of that.

Did the subjects get to see the pieces before they published?
One of our conversations early on was whether subjects would get to sign off before a piece was published. We both pretty quickly landed on the idea that no, that would be giving up too much journalistic control. Like in all of our stories, when we talk to somebody and we decide what parts we're going to quote, and what parts are not going to be quoted, I needed to have the power to make those decisions.

What has it been like for you, mentally and emotionally, to spend so much time talking to people who have experienced the worst of the pandemic?
It can be draining. I spent a lot of the year talking to people who were really having a hard time and suffering. I sometimes hang up the phone and just feel wiped out. But the bigger truth is that, for me, these are their stories and I hang up the phone from those conversations and I come back to my very fortunate, lucky, little pandemic life, where I have three kids who are happy and healthy and a strong marriage and nobody's sick and we have our house in a safe neighborhood. My interview subjects — they go back to the traumas that don't end when I stop talking to them. And the real courage in any act of journalism is always on their end. They're the people who have more to lose in this exchange.

The bigger thing I've figured out as my career has gone on is that although sometimes these stories can take something out of me, they give me so much more. So many of the major themes I’ve spent my career writing about — rising inequities and vulnerabilities in the country, and also personal suffering and courage — if I hadn't been doing work that felt meaningful to me during this past year, I would have felt really down about that.

***

Matt Tullis is director of Digital Journalism and an assistant professor of English at Fairfield University. He produces and hosts Gangrey: The Podcast.

The post What narrative master Eli Saslow learned about intimacy interviewing by phone appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]T[/dc]wo-time National Magazine Award winner Tom Junod often writes from home. But not always, and especially not on deadline. In a recent Facebook post, he mentioned that when he is on deadline, he seeks refuge, places where he can’t procrastinate. He has often found that refuge in a couple of Starbucks’ cafes near his home, or at the public library.

Junod is on deadline now, for a book about his father. But under the pall of the coronavirus pandemic, his usual places of refuge are not available. In his Facebook post, Junod described what he’s ended up doing to find some quiet solitude:

“I go to church. No, don't worry — I haven't gone the way of those convinced that the pandemic heralds the fulfillment of the latest apocalyptic fantasy. But there's a Baptist megachurch a mile-and-a-half from my house. It has parking lots — vast, plentiful and mostly empty. I drive there with a lap top and a bottle of water, climb into the backseat of the car, and, with the windows open, write.”

[caption id="attachment_155837" align="alignleft" width="254"] Tom Junod[/caption]

His post went on to describe an encounter he had with a police officer who wanted to know why he was hanging out in the backseat of his car in a mega-church parking lot. (No spoiler here, but it ended well.)

After reading Junod’s delightful little narrative, I was left with another question: How are other reporters and writers are finding the needed time and right space to write when so much has changed.

I reached out to several to see how they are making do in face of a wrecked routine. The solutions vary, but all have had to adjust. Those adjustments depend on the type of projects they are working on, whether they freelance or work on staff, whether they have young children at home, even the layout of their houses.

Pamela Colloff: From long stretches to 30-minute bursts

[caption id="attachment_155833" align="alignright" width="217"] Pam Colloff[/caption]

Throughout her career, Pamela Colloff (formerly Texas Monthly, now ProPublica and New York Times Magazine) has done everything she could to separate work time from family time. When she's deep into a writing project, she structured that part of her life so there was as much uninterrupted time as possible:

“With few exceptions, I didn’t meet friends for coffee or lunch during the work day. I tried to make every minute count because I had a hard stop at the end of the afternoon, when I had to pick up my kids from school. I worked at my office in downtown Austin, and I didn’t maintain a work space at home; I liked having two separate places for work and family.”

No more. Colloff now shares a home office with her husband, and is learning how to work in 30-minute increments that happen between parenting duties: helping the kids with homework, taking them on walks, organizing off-screen activities.

“It requires an entirely different way of thinking that is not conducive — for me, at least, — to immersive writing. So now I’m focusing on reporting that I can do in small chunks; phone interviews, archival research, and that sort of thing.”

Even so, Colloff counts her blessings.

“I never, ever lose sight of how fortunate I am simply to have work, and to have the opportunity to keep reporting and writing. Not having enough hours in the day for my work is a luxurious problem.”

Sam Borden: Elsa and Anna in the background

[caption id="attachment_155831" align="alignright" width="213"] Sam Borden[/caption]

There have been several changes that Sam Borden of ESPN has made when it comes to his signature in-depth features. But the biggest challenge has been location. He is used to writing in hotel rooms when he’s on a road trip for work. There, he was alone and could give his full attention to a story.

Now?

“I work in an office in my house, which is very near the kitchen and the kids’ play room. During the day when they’re at school, that’s fine. But now it’s taken on a different tenor in terms of volume and distraction. I’ve gotten very adept at being able to write while hearing music from ‘Frozen 2’ and ‘The Descendants.’” (Borden’s daughters are 6 and 9.)

His writing schedule also has also changed. Instead of blocking off extended hours of writing time and refusing to move on to a new section of a story until he is perfectly happy with the previous one, Borden finds himself working on multiple sections of stories in short bursts throughout the day.

“The opportunities to really fit in writing are much shorter than I have when the kids are in school. Now I’m really spending time, when I’m out for a walk or in the shower, outlining whatever the section is, and then immediately going in and writing that down somewhere with paper and then forcing myself to just write that section.”

Janet Reitman: A window over a garden

[caption id="attachment_155838" align="alignright" width="183"] Janet Reitman[/caption]

Author, profiler and justice reporter Janet Reitman thinks she is pretty lucky when it comes to changes that COVID-19 has forced in her work. For one, she still has projects to work on; she just finished an oral history, focused on the first fatal outbreak of the coronavirus in a federal prison, for the New York Times, and she is at work at another book.

So, as with the others, the biggest change for her is where she writes.

“I have, for years, worked at a different place because I like to go off to work. So I was renting space in a kind of co-working space. Now I’m working in a little home office. I close the door. My dog hangs out in the office with me all day. It’s a little bit of an adjustment. But I have a window. I’m looking out the window and there’s a beautiful garden and birds are chirping.”

Bradford Pearson: The race to make the 5 a.m. feeding

When magazine writer and author Bradford Pearson was writing his book, “The Eagles of Heart Mountain,” (due to be published early next year by Atria) he did the vast majority of his writing at the Athenaeum, a 175-year-old private library in Philadelphia that rented working space to young writers.

“It’s this beautiful old room that nobody really knows about. And it was cheaper than a co-working space, and there’s nobody ever there.”

[caption id="attachment_155839" align="alignright" width="300"] Bradford Pearson[/caption]

Pearson finished all of the writing on his book before the pandemic hit. Now he’s working on edits, and trying to get future freelance assignments lined up. He does that from his kitchen table, often while watching his 3-year-old and 8-month-old. His wife, an attorney, also is working from home now.

They both work whenever they can. Their older child still spends three hours in her room for quiet time during the day, and if they can get the baby to take a nap during that time, well, that’s golden.

"We can kind of sit there and furiously work or do whatever. It’s definitely hard trying to get into an actual groove.”

If Pearson has to really sit and write, he does so at night, after everyone has gone to bed. That usually starts around 10 p.m.:

“You’re still sitting at a small table in a communal area trying to write.”

But he pushes through, while simultaneously hoping it’s not his turn to get up for the baby's 5 a.m. feeding.

Michael Graff: An office in search of  a door

[caption id="attachment_155840" align="alignright" width="210"] Michael Graff[/caption]

More has changed in Michael Graff’'s life in recent months than just the disruptions of the pandemic. After running Charlotte Magazine in 2017, he freelanced for a couple of years. Last year, he became editor of the daily newsletter, Charlotte Agenda. Then, in early March, he signed a contract on a co-authored book, about election fraud in North Carolina; He and his writing partner signed a lease for a small co-working space on March 1, and had to pay the first two months’ rent up front. They’ve not been in the office space since.

And on March 6, Graff’s first child was born.

“I used to write at the dining room table, but I’m pretty much exclusively in my office now. One of the things I’m looking for is a door so that I can close it when I need to work.”

One of the pieces he wrote in that space was this essay on bringing a child into this chaotic world.

Justin Heckert: Clearing through the clutter of the guest room/office

[caption id="attachment_155841" align="alignright" width="246"] Justin Heckert[/caption]

Justin Heckert's freelance career includes a rich in publications and awards (he was named CRMA Writer of the Year in 2012). Unless he's on the road reporting, he's almost always written from home, which these days is in Charleston, S.C.  But when got back from a reporting trip to Los Angeles and Tampa just before Charleston shut down, he took a look at his home office and realized he had some work to do.

His home office has been in a guest bedroom on the second floor. It has a wood floor and lots of windows and natural light. But over the last couple of years, Heckert has let it go.

“I’d gotten kinda lazy, dumping magazines and books on the floor, I'd left transcription pages and lots of notebooks stacked on the floor, receipts from reporting trips on the floor and on my desk and used as bookmarks, video-game cords and other stuff on the floor — a bunch of crap that anyone else would consider junk.”

He knew he’d now be spending a lot of time there. Luckily for Heckert, his wife Amanda Heckert, the deputy editor at Garden & Gun magazine, was also working from home. About a week into their self-quarantine, she helped Justin cull and file and clean.

“It took a whole weekend. I've worked from home since 2006, but never in a space like this, and Amanda has been working from home, now, too. I love having her at home, even though it sucks she has to be; and she lent some of her time and decided to help me when I threw my arms up about my office, not knowing where to begin.”

Having a clean office has been a comfort, Heckert said: .

“And almost, like, inspirational, just to spend time in here writing, not tripping over stuff.”

Rachel Monroe: Obsessing over plants instead of words

[caption id="attachment_155835" align="alignright" width="250"] Rachel Monroe[/caption]

Rachel Monroe spends more time in her garden than at her writing desk these days. She's a freelancer, author  (“Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession,” volunteer firefighter — and, by her own description, a deadline driven writer. Right now, she doesn’t have a lot of deadlines.

“I coped by planting a big garden and some fruit trees, and in the morning, when I would typically be writing, I instead obsessed over my plants.”

She’s doing a lot of reading and research for stories that she hopes to one day report and write. As for writing, she is pretty much limited to her journal and a new book proposal.

“Like everyone. I’m having to adjust my expectations for myself — which is painful, but really important.”

Robert Sanchez: Forced to find a new routine

[caption id="attachment_155834" align="alignright" width="225"] Robert Sanchez[/caption]

Robert Sanchez, a senior staff writer at Denver’s 5280 magazine and a contributor to ESPN The Magazine, Esquire, and Men’s Health, generally writes his stories in libraries. A creature of habit, he’s written at least 30 stories from the same three tables at the University of Denver library. Now he’s working on a big piece for 5280 that he knows he is going to have to write from home.

“Honestly, the idea scares me. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’m going to put together 5,000 words with a wife, two teenagers and a golden retriever puppy within close proximity.”

While the Colorado stay-at-home order might ease soon, Sanchez is unsure what that will look like — or if he would be willing to go where large groups of people might gather. That means he has to develop a new plan for his writing.

“That will probably mean very early mornings and very late nights, when the house is quiet. I’ll have to adjust my schedule, and I might go with less sleep for a couple weeks. If that helps my process, those changes will be worth it. I just hope this isn’t my new normal.”

 

The post Where writers write when they can’t write where they like to write appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]J[/dc]eré Longman has almost always been a sports reporter. Aside from a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he covered Dallas Public Schools for the Dallas Times Herald, he’s been writing about both the sports we watch and the sports we play.

He covered high school and college sports in Jackson, Miss., in the 1970s, and after Dallas, he moved on to the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he covered the Eagles and the 76ers.

[caption id="attachment_150209" align="alignright" width="160"] Jere Longman[/caption]

In 1993, Longman joined The New York Times, where he has followed sports that take him around the world. He primarily covers the the Olympics, but also running (he’s been reporting on Caster Semenya and attempts to force her to take hormone treatments to lower her testosterone levels), women’s soccer, figure skating and more. He’s currently in France, covering the Women’s World Cup.

“I always describe my career as a kind of extension of fourth-grade geography,” Longman says. “I just always wanted to see the world, and The New York Times and to some extent previously, the Philadelphia Inquirer, allowed me to do that. I’ve reported from approximately 65 countries, and that’s my main interest. Seeing the world.”

That wanderlust recently took Longman to the Sahara Desert in Morocco, to cover the Marathon des Sables, a 140.7-mile ultramarathon stretched out over six stages. It was there that he reported and wrote about Amy Palmiero-Winters, a 46-year-old woman from Hicksville, N.Y., who was the first female amputee to even attempt the grueling race, let alone finish it. His 3,300-word story, "Am Amputee's Toughest Challenge Yet," ran April 26 — less than two weeks after the race was done.

As a passionate runner myself, I was fascinated by the subject. As a writer, reader and teacher of long-form, I wanted to know how Longman covered such an arduous and remote race, turning it fairly quickly into a compelling narrative that takes you through a dramatic event without overplaying the drama. I talked with Longman by phone the day before he left for the World Cup. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

[caption id="attachment_150202" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Amy Palmiero-Winters washes her foot after finishing day three of the Marathon des Sables, a 140-mile, six day ultramarathon through the Sahara Desert in Morocco.[/caption]

[dc small]H[/dc]ow did you happen upon this story?

I've been very fortunate to travel to a number of exotic places to write about track and field and distance running. I was in East Germany a year before the Berlin Wall fell. I've been 13,000 feet atop a volcano in Mexico. I've been a mile underground in an old mine in South Africa. I've been in Kenya and Ethiopia, and ran a marathon in North Korea, so I've always wanted to go to these places I haven't been, to write about running.

This (the Marathon des Sables) is one of the world's best-known ultra-marathons. I'd been to Morocco before but had never seen the Sahara, so I thought "I've run seven marathons, how could somebody run six of them in six days?" Finally this year I had an opening, and I thought "Okay, this is the year," so I just applied for credentials and got them.

[dc small]D[/dc]id you know about Palmiero-Winters before or after you applied for credentials?

After. The idea for the story was to use the race to tell someone's story — not to put it entirely on the race itself. I was emailing the organizers, just asking them to send me the names of all the Americans who were participating, because I thought that one of the key things would be to get to know some of the athletes beforehand so they would be comfortable with me and they wouldn't mind my being along every step of the way. I got a list of the American participants, and then I spoke to a guy named Jake Battchin. He essentially coordinates the American entrants. He knew all the Americans' stories. That's where I learned about Amy.

[dc small]W[/dc]hat did you do when you first heard about her?

I called Amy and had a long talk with her. She was very forthcoming. I thought she would make a good subject. Then she had a public appearance in in Manhattan so I met with her and interviewed her for a couple of hours. Then Brian Jones, the photographer, and Bidel Saget, our graphics editor, and I spent most of the day with her in Hicksville, on Long Island, at the prosthetic company where she worked, and we saw her train. By the time we got to the actual race, I knew a lot about her story, and I had enough rapport with her that she didn't mind us being around. It was important to have someone who would be comfortable with us being at almost every checkpoint on the course.

[dc small]R[/dc]eporting this story forced you to go point-to-point, to essentially follow Amy through the desert. What was the biggest challenge for you?

I actually think the biggest challenge was just getting to know Amy beforehand, and making sure she was okay with us being around. We had a driver, an SUV — it’s a movable production. There was like a tent city, and each media group had its tent, and from place-to-place you had the same tent number every day. You knew exactly where your tent would be —where the bathroom, the shower, the cafeteria tent, the media tent would be every day.

That wasn't so difficult, but it was hot. It would get to 98 degrees or so — the ground temperature seemed to be much hotter — but it wasn't humid. I'm from Louisiana so I'm accustomed to heat, so that wasn't so bad. I guess the most difficult thing was just planning where you're going to be from moment to moment, but I'll be honest with you, we didn't have to worry about being stranded somewhere. It's a very organized race, so it wasn't grueling. The hours are very long, but you knew where everything would be every day, you didn't have to scramble every day to find a place to stay or eat.

[dc small]Y[/dc]ou’re a runner yourself. Were there ever times you were on the ground, running or walking with Palmiero-Winters?

The last days, the charity days, we walked whatever it was, 28 kilometers. We actually walked that stage with her in the desert. We were always on the ground, every day. Sometimes we would generally see her at the checkpoints every 10 kilometers or 12 kilometers. We were always on the course, in a car or sometimes we walked briefly with her. I didn't run any of the race, but I did walk that last day. Really there was nothing else to do, you had to be there.

[dc small]T[/dc]here’s a time in the first stage of the race when Palmiero-Winters had an allergic reaction and was having trouble breathing. You even have some mini-dialogue from her. How did you get that?

When Amy thought she was going into anaphylactic shock, we were right there, waiting on the field for her to come up to this hill. She got to the top of it and was all "I can't breathe, I can't —" Literally we were waiting under a rocky line. Our driver knew that that would be a good place to wait for them, so we were just standing there and she came up and said that to us. She was hesitant to use her epi-pen because she didn't know whether she'd need it a second time or whether they would provide that medical assistance to her because the whole idea of the race is self-sufficiency. There was nobody around to make that decision. She hung in there. That was a scary moment for her, generally, but it was for us, too, because if she had dropped out I'm not sure what we would have done.

[dc small]T[/dc]here is also the scene that you lead the story with, when Palmiero-Winters is having trouble getting her prosthetic leg over a rock. How did you get that information?

We were there when she was climbing this very steep, rocky outcropping. We couldn't get to the top; we were standing below her so we couldn't see exactly what was going on. She described that piece of getting her foot stuck. You couldn't see it with your naked eye — it was just too far away. Because you're there, you get to know a lot of runners, you see them at these checkpoints, so that's a good way to get reconnaissance on what's happening. People would ask me how (Amy) was doing, and you would talk to people about what conditions are like, so you ended up seeing people several times so they would know who you were, they would know you're New York Times, and they were willing to talk. That was very helpful — just talking to as many people as you could at each of these checkpoints, either to catch up on Amy or learn about the conditions, what the terrain was like.

[dc small]H[/dc]ow do you take notes for a story like this?

I had my notebook with me and just took notes. I had done long tape-recorded interviews with her beforehand, and again a couple of days after she finished. I had long talks with her during the race; we would sit down or go for a walk or something, and I used my tape recorder then. During the actual stages, I just used my notebook.

[dc small]D[/dc]id you have to turn in copy on a daily basis?

No, we decided to write one long story. I sort of wrote it as I went along, most of it. I knew her life story so I knew I could write that section even before it started. I was in Morocco before it started and I would write, and I tried to write a little bit every day, stage by stage, just so I wouldn't forget anything. And then after the race finished I went back and tried to make a coherent story, because we wanted to run it the following week, a week after the race.

[dc small]I[/dc] noticed that the headline and the lead into the story actually states that she finished the race. Was there ever any discussion to not state that out-right, to try and create some narrative tension, to make readers wonder if she was going to finish it?

It's the No. 1 structural question I wrestled with. I often think that we don't use enough narrative tension in sports writing. By my way of thinking, only half-jokingly, the score should be in the last paragraph, not the first, so readers will remain with a game story until the end.

Keeping the readers wondering might have been the better way to go in the Marathon des Sables piece. If I had to do it over again, I would have at least tried it in a draft. But, in this case, I self-edited for pragmatism.

The race ended on April 13 and I had to finish a draft on the 14th, so I could fly home on the 15th. The original plan was to put the story online on the 18th or so and run it in the paper on the 21st. So I decided to state upfront that Amy finished the race. My thinking was this: If I withheld the outcome until the end, and my editors felt that approach did not work, I risked having to do a significant rewrite at the last minute on a 3,300-word story. This, I feared, might also disrupt the completion of the graphics and photo layouts of the story and could delay publication.

In the end, the story was held for a week, so my concerns were unfounded. In retrospect, the piece might have benefited by trying the other approach.

[dc small]Y[/dc]ou did one other story while you there, one that was kind of on deadline, right?

Yeah, there was a dog who entered the race on the second day and then completed the course. I don't think it ever appeared in the print paper, but there was a lot of attention online about this fantastic nomad dog who had joined the race.

[dc small]W[/dc]as there anything you saw or experienced that was really interesting but for some reason didn’t make it into the story?

I'm sure in a desert you see things which would be funny or odd, but you just couldn't get those details in. In general I think most of it was in there. There are always some details you couldn't fit in, but not anything very important that got left out.

[dc small]I[/dc]t sounds like a fun story to cover. Was it?

I enjoyed covering it, but to be honest with you, and I think I wrote this in that little piece about how I reported it, I didn't quite see why anybody would want to push themselves that hard. I didn't quite see the attraction or point of doing it. For me, it's hard enough to run one marathon, much less the equivalent of six in a row. But it was fascinating to write about. I really liked the people. There's a lot of ribald humor, and some of that just wasn't printable, but was very funny, so I guess some of that stuff didn't get in. I liked hearing the runners’ motivation as to why they did this, and because I'm a runner I guess I like to hear how people are doing during the race, what's going right and what's going wrong, I liked how they were portioning their meals — how things like that work. Just that general bit of granular interest that a runner would have in other runners and how they're doing something like that. While I didn't quite see the point of it, I was fascinated by their stories and how they actually did it.

[caption id="attachment_150203" align="aligncenter" width="750"] Amy Palmiero-Winters has doctors look at her leg after she finished the Marathon des Sables, a 140-mile, six day ultramarathon through the Sahara Desert in Morocco, April 12, 2019.[/caption]

The post An amputee runs a grueling ultra-marathon in the desert; a reporting team chases along appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR'S NOTE:  Mass shootings have become a tragic American story. School shootings are an especially searing chapter in that narrative. This week marks the 20th anniversary of Columbine, a high school in Colorado where 13 students were shot to death. Also this week, the South Florida Sun Sentinel won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service — considered the gold medal of the Pulitzers — for its extended coverage of last year's shootings at a high school in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed. Journalist and teacher Matt Tullis went back to a page in that chapter to hear from the parents who get caught in the glare of news coverage even as they are dealing with unimaginable loss.

As host of Gangrey: The Podcast, I’ve interviewed scores of reporters who have covered events so tragic as to be unimaginable. Among them: John Woodrow Cox about his deadline story for the Tampa Bay Times about an infant who drowned in the family swimming pool; Kim Cross about her book “What Stands in the Storm,” based on interviews with families who lost loved ones in the 2011 tornadoes that devastated Alabama; and Pulitzer winner Lane DeGregory, who has a portfolio of heartbreaking stories under her byline, including that of 5-year-old Phoebe Jonchuck, whose father dropped her from the Sunshine Skyway Bridge into Tampa Bay.

In those conversations, I get to ask what all journalists wonder: How do reporters get access to reluctant subjects? How do they get people to talk about such intimate and painful events? And how do they weave that material into compelling, relatable stories?

Three years ago, I moved to Newtown, Connecticut, for a teaching job at Fairfield University. Newtown, in case you don’t remember, is home to Sandy Hook Elementary School, which is home to the December 2012 shootings that left 20 children and six adult staff members dead.

Every year since the shootings, I have made it a ritual to read “Into the Lonely Quiet,” the elegiac piece Eli Saslow wrote for the Washington Post six months after the tragedy. But after landing in Newtown — I actually have a Sandy Hook address — I found myself reading Saslow’s piece differently than I had in the past. Before, I always wondered how Saslow, the journalist, did what he did. Now I wondered how the Bardens, one of the families devastated that day, did what they did: Allow Saslow into their lives so he could then relay their pain to the world.

I’ve spent much of my career as a journalist and journalism educator thinking about the reporter. Now I find myself thinking about the subjects. What is the story process like for them, and what can they tell us to make that process better for everyone involved?

That interest was already keen, but intensified last month when news broke of the suicide of Jeremy Richman, father of Sandy Hook first-grader Avielle Richman. Another tragic death. Another event that set off a new flood of TV cameras, ringing phones and unimaginable questions.

So I reached out to Saslow to talk about his reporting process again, and also to Newtown parents Mark Barden and Nicole Hockley to hear their side of the story. All were generous with their time and candor — especially Barden and Hockley, since I had to request a second interview after my recorder failed during the first. I also included parts of the interviews in a Gangrey podcast.

Mark Barden doesn’t recall a lot about the days Saslow spent with his family. That was in late spring of 2013, when Newton residents were approaching the six-month anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings. Mark’s son, Daniel, was among the 20 first-graders killed.

“I remember feeling very comfortable with him,” Barden said of Saslow. “He was approachable and accessible. He managed to take that very deep and personal dive to get that compelling story he did without seeming to be prying or getting all into our private business.”

In the immediate wake of the shootings, the Bardens and other grieving parents had been pressed for interviews on a near-daily basis. Some reporters hid outside the victims’ homes, waiting for a change in police shifts so they could charge forward to ring doorbells in quest of a comment. When parents did agree to talk, the interviews were often one-and-done: the reporter showed up — with notebook, microphone, camera or all three — then quickly left to file a story.

That wasn’t the case with Saslow. The Bardens, because of their own reporting process, knew that going in.

“The reporting is different, but our motivation to do it has been the same in that we understood the value in telling the story,” Barden told me. “So we approached every media request with the same vetting process.”

That process involved the family exploring two key questions: Is this person going to do justice to the story? And will the story motivate people to take next steps, in whatever ways that means to them?

Saslow was vouched for by a public relations official from Washington, D.C. who had been working with Sandy Hook families, and by the strength of his previous work. So the Bardens agreed to provide him access in a way they hadn’t before, allowing Saslow to be with them 12 hours a day for as long as a week, or more if needed.

“We felt this was certainly an opportunity for average Americans to have a window into the devastation and how this impacts a family,” Barden said. “We just felt there was such important value in that.”

But this is where it gets tricky. The Bardens and other Sandy Hook families who have spoken publicly have their own agenda; they want to inspire action in a variety of areas, including the failures in America’s policies towards responsible gun use and how mental health issues are connected with mass shootings. So they open their lives to journalists, knowing that they won’t have a say in the final story. And the reporters — the good ones — approach those families respectfully and with an open mind, but with the knowledge that they write not for the story subjects, but for a broad audience.

That dilemma, said Saslow, is one of the most challenging things about the kind of journalism he does. He’s not only written about the Barden family, but profiled the veteran security guard at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who was vilified for not rushing into the school as 17 were shot to death. He wrote the aftermath of a block that ended in the death of a high school football player. And he wrote about a struggling survivor of the 2015 shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.

“One of the things that’s most difficult for me as a reporter, and I think for a lot of us, is recognizing who we’re writing for, even in these really intimate, messy, difficult stories,” Saslow told me. “We are not writing the stories for the people that they’re about. And if, in the end, we begin writing them for the people that they’re about, that corrupts the journalism.”

This awareness is what makes “Into the Lonely Quiet” such an amazing work of narrative journalism, and what makes Saslow’s work worth studying. The story is devastating, and doesn’t shy from the harsh reality of lives ripped apart by such loss. Consider this paragraph that captures collective and individual grief:

There were 26 of them in all — 26 victims, which meant 26 families left adrift, grasping for a way to continue on. Some found it in church, returning to the pews every Wednesday and Sunday with a Sandy Hook Bible group, lighting 26 candles each time they went. Others found it in the spiritual medium that contacted victims’ families on Facebook, offering to facilitate a private seance and “connect them with the other side.” Some started nonprofit foundations in their child’s name or escaped back into jobs in Manhattan or ordered wine by the case or planted 26 trees or considered moving out of state or installed blackout curtains for privacy. One mother took a job sorting corporate donations to the Newtown community fund, organizing 26,000 bottles of “Sandy Hook Green” nail polish and 2,600 wool blankets, because the magnitude of the donations helped reaffirm the magnitude of her loss.

Despite Barden’s complimentary words about Saslow, that rawness is what he and some other Sandy Hook families found discomfiting about his piece.

“I just felt it didn’t depict Mark and his family and the loving and supporting network that they had,” Nicole Hockley told me. “It didn’t give a sense of hope.”

Hockley’s son, Dylan, was killed in the shootings. She and Barden are both founders and managing directors of Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit created to protect children from gun violence and support gun safety reforms. She also appears in “Into the Lonely Quiet,” as Saslow accompanied her, the Bardens and another parent on a trip to Delaware, where the parents spoke with legislators about gun laws.

Sandy Hook families had been schooled by professionals and experience on how to deliver effective messages. Never show rage or brokenness, but express grief in ways that were “resolute, polite, purposeful and factual.” Never argue for "gun control," but for “gun responsibility.” During the visit, the parents were introduced for a moment of silence, then watched as lawmakers passed motion after motion, including one recognizing the winner of the state peach pie eating context. Saslow was able to show that disconnect between realities — that of the families and that of public policy — and how stark it was to the Hockley and the Bardens:

How was it, they wondered, that government could roll through its inconsequential daily agenda but then stall for months on an issue like gun control?

And in another passage:

The uncertain path between a raw, four-minute massacre and U.S. policy was a months-long grind that consisted of marketing campaigns, fundraisers and public relations consultants.

The depth of loss and discouragement is woven throughout Saslow’s piece. And true as it is, it is something Hockley, and perhaps some others, wished had been less prominent.

“It was a very sad piece,” Hockley said. “I had wanted something that pulls people through that loop of despair, but then brings them out the other side. For me, it just kind of left people hanging. It was beautifully, beautifully written, but I thought it was very depressing.”

(Full disclosure: I’ve gotten to know Hockley over the last year, as I’ve done some fundraising for Dylan’s Wings of Change, a foundation created in memory of her son.)

Hockley even said she prefers doing live broadcast interviews, where she can control the point of the story.

The story is, indeed, sad. My own children were starting elementary school when Sandy Hook was attacked, and I couldn’t read the coverage at first. Even Saslow, who has three children said that if it were about his children, he “couldn’t bear to read it.”

He starts with Daniel Barden searching boxes for the right photo of Daniel to be put in Mother’s Day cards and sent to politicians across the country. When his wife asks if he thinks it will make a difference, he says simply: “I don’t know.” The piece ends in “the worst hour of the day,” which Mark and Jackie had once spent alone with Daniel after the older children had left for school and he waited to race to his own school bus.

The school bus came. The school bus went.

“What do you want to do?” Mark asked, and in that moment, the answer to both of them was clear.

“What can we do?” Jackie said.

“Nothing,” Mark said, and he sank down next to her on the couch.

And yet Barden and Hockley consider Saslow as one of the good journalists they’ve dealt with in the last six years. The Sandy Hook parents keep a list of journalists to whom they won’t talk with because of how they’ve been treated, and a list of those they will. Saslow is on the latter list. He’s the kind, they said, who comes in not with his own agenda, and not with a goal of simply asking questions that will make them cry, but who wants to do his best to understand their reality.

Saslow spent about a week with the Bardens in 2013. He showed up at their house early in the morning, just as the family’s two older children were getting ready for school. He stayed all day long, not leaving until the Bardens were going to bed.

Mark Barden remembers Saslow hanging out at the end of the driveway with his daughter Natalie and her friends, where the girls had set up a lemonade stand. He remembers Saslow being with him and his wife Jackie at a diner in what, to me, is the most heartbreaking scene in Saslow’s narrative. The Bardens had made the rare decision to go out for breakfast, and so they drove to a restaurant nine miles out of town because, as Saslow writes: “There were no memories here.” All was good until another family walked in, there to celebrate the 7^th birthday of their son, who went to Sandy Hook Elementary but had survived the shooting because he was assigned to the other of two first-grade classrooms. The two sets of parents exchanged awkward greetings, then turned back to their own lives.

“Should we leave?” Jackie said, whispering to Mark, once the mother was out of earshot. “Would it be easier?”

“It might be,” Mark said.

But instead they sat at the table and watched as the waiter brought the boy a gigantic waffle covered in powdered sugar, berries and whipped cream. They watched as the waiter stuck a candle into the center of that waffle, and as the mother sang “Happy Birthday” and took a picture with her phone. They watched as the boy swept his fingers through the whipped cream, smearing it across his mouth and face while his mother laughed. “You’re so silly,” she said.

Barden knew he and his family were making a sacrifice by letting the Washington Post into their home for such an extended period of time. They were lucky that the reporter who was there knew they were making that sacrifice.

“The real risks and the real sacrifices are taken by the people we’re writing about,” Saslow said. “It’s a super scary thing to allow a reporter into your life, knowing that you are going to have no say over the outcome. And I would guess that the reason that most people do it is because they also understand that what they’re dealing with, what they’re going through, is important in some way and is worthy of being seen and felt by people outside the house.”

“But,” Saslow continued, “to be willing to make yourself that vulnerable and to bear that pain and that hurt to a stranger who’s going to be in your house for 12 hours a day, that’s a really courageous thing to do. That’s not easy.”

No, it’s not easy. Barden will tell you that. But in the end, the Bardens and Saslow all had the same goal: To show the world what it’s like to lose a young child to a mass shooter. Saslow’s observations on that dark reality just ended up being even darker than some had hoped.

“How does an ordinary American family who has been visited by such horrible tragedy manage this and cope with this on a regular day-to-day that people can relate to?” Barden said of what his family wanted to get across. “And that’s where we saw the real value. It’s kind of this unsaid message of, ‘Here it is. This could be you. This is what it looks like.’”

The post Insight from the other side of the notebook appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Editor's note: We have written about Tom Junod's 1998 Esquire profile of Mister Rogers before. The release of the documentary film, and the climate of the times, prompted us to revisit a piece that has now become a classic.

I first saw “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” — the Fred Rogers documentary — on a Tuesday afternoon a couple weeks ago. I’d been waiting to see it ever since a trailer left me in tears, and because Tom Junod’s “Can You Say… Hero?” published in Esquire in November 1998, has become one of my all-time favorite magazine stories, one that I teach in my feature writing and literary journalism courses.

There were about 15 of us in the theater. As the end credits rolled, I was wiping back tears and could hear sobbing around me. No one rose. We just sat there, all 15 of us, and listened to Mister Rogers sing “You Are Special.” Then the screen went black. Still no one rose. We continued to sit, submerged in a world we had almost forgotten. Only when a theater employee turned on the overhead lights did we stand and drift out of the theater, our eyes red and puffy.

On my drive home, I found myself thinking about the connection between the movie and Junod’s foundational story. Not just because Junod is in the movie. But because that story, now 20 years old, is timeless. As timeless to me as Mister Rogers himself.

First, the movie: I was struck by the prevalence of Mister Rogers’ voice. He is the narrator of this documentary. He transitions us from scene to scene. He lets us into his thoughts and hopes and dreams. At times he speaks in the voice of Daniel the Striped Tiger, but more often he speaks with his own voice.

The movie opens with a black-and-white video of a young Fred Rogers — filmed in 1967, one year before his show hit the airwaves — talking about the idea of modulation and how that would be a good theme for a children’s show. It ends with a university commencement address, when he urges graduates to spend one minute of silence thinking about those who have had a huge impact on their lives. Now, almost 50 years later, that same directive is urged on moviegoers.

It had me thinking about Dr. Alex Koufos, the pediatric oncologist who saved my life when I had leukemia as a teenager, and who himself died of cancer in 1998; of my mom, who took care of me when I was sick and, fortunately, is still alive; and, yes, of Mister Rogers.

Reach back to Junod’s story: In it, the reader feels as though Mister Rogers has been speaking to them for more than 8,000 words. But while the movie drew on hundreds of hours of archival audio — Mister Rogers’ actual voice — Junod had to recreate it in the soundlessness of the written word. To do so, he creates a connection between Mister Rogers and himself; as a reporter, he dares get close enough to serve as a stand-in for the reader. Weaving that subject-reporter-reader connection has become a signature in Junod’s profiles (read the lead to his ESPN: The Magazine piece, “Eugene Monroe Has a Football Problem” for another example), and one of the reasons he is considered one of the great magazine writers of his generation (or, in my estimation, any generation).

In the Mister Rogers profile, Junod’s first name appears in direct quotes from Mister Rogers 17 times. Throughout the story, the reader sees “Tom.” But it’s not hard to feel that Mister Rogers is talking directly to you, that the word he speaks spell the letters of your name. I had gone to the movie a second time, and was so taken that I called him to talk about the connection between it and his story.

“I definitely tried to capture his voice, and that personalization of his voice is very much a part of how he spoke,” Junod told me. “When you spend time with somebody, especially when that person is as extraordinary as Fred, you want to somehow not fail the extraordinary nature of those transactions, the extraordinary nature of that person. You don’t want to destroy it, to do this sort of conventional thing if the person is extraordinary.”

The Esquire profiles starts with Junod reminiscing ­– in the cadence of Mister Rogers, of course –about Old Rabbit, a raggedy stuffed animal he had as a kid. In the third section of the story, we get more of Junod as he meets Fred Rogers for the first time. As the piece goes on, he shows up again and again – in the locker room as Mister Rogers strips down for a swim (this is where 143 – Mister Rogers code for “I love you,” comes up, something that is also part of the movie), on the subway, in Penn Station, and finally, in a prayer circle with Mister Rogers and a woman named Deb, who was a minister in his church. The latter is a scene that ends the story.

Establishing oneself as a major character is something most journalists are loath to do, but Junod thinks it’s integral to his stories. And, at least in the case of “Can You Say… Hero?,” it’s one reason we are still reading the story 20 years after it was first published.

“I think that is the challenge of, not all journalism, but all longform journalism,” he said when I interviewed him last December for an episode of Gangrey: The Podcast. “You are writing those stories as a testament to the voices of the people that you’re writing about, but you’re also challenging those voices over time and over the length of the story, challenging those voices with your own voice. The stories that interest me are often wrestling matches between writer and subject.”

Junod’s piece is structured primarily around the days that he spent with Mister Rogers. The only glimpses of Mister Rogers’ childhood come through a trip to Latrobe, Pa., when Junod joins Mister Rogers on a visit to his childhood home and then to the cemetery where Mister Rogers’ parents are buried. The structure of the piece, then, is entirely centered around the relationship between Junod and his subject, and Junod’s understanding of how he is being affected by those interactions. Seeing those changes in Junod shows the reader what makes Mister Rogers the person he is known to be.

In the movie, we see how Mister Rogers affected the lives of everyone who came into contact with him, especially those interviewed for the documentary. That includes Junod; François Scarborough Clemmons, who played the Neighborhood cop, Officer Clemmons; David Newell, who played Mr. McFeely the mailman; Fred Rogers’ wife Joann Rogers, and their sons, John and James. They all spend time talking about their relationship to the movie’s subject and how he changed their lives.

While Junod’s piece jumps around in time (yet constrained to the days that he is visiting), the movie moves pretty much chronologically, with Mister Rogers leading the way and so many people he worked with and touched reinforcing his lessons and memories. Just about every person who sees the movie has a different part that moves them to tears or, at the very least, makes them start thinking deeply about someone or something in their life.

For me, it was the scene of students from teacher/astronaut Christa McAuliffe’s school watching the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. I was a fourth-grader when the Challenger team was killed, and remember sitting in my science class in Ohio watching the explosion over and over and over again. Immediately after, Mister Rogers spent an entire week in the Neighborhood talking our nation’s children through dealing with death and grief. I was also moved by the scene of Koko the gorilla cuddling up in Mister Rogers lap, perhaps because I once spent some time with Colo the gorilla, when I profiled her for the Columbus Dispatch just before her 50^th birthday; and that final scene, where moviegoers are guided to think about people who have shaped their lives.

Junod has seen the movie twice; first at the premier in Pittsburgh and then again with family in Atlanta. The first time he saw it, he said, he, too, was touched by the Koko scene and by the footage of Mister Rogers singing the song “It’s You I Like” with Jeff Erlanger, a quadriplegic, 10-year-old boy.

But the second time he saw the movie, he was moved when Daniel the Striped Tiger, long considered the puppet that most showed Fred Rogers’ true personality, asks, “Am I a mistake?” It was a moment from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood that focused on all of the self-doubt every child has as they are growing up.

“That just killed me,” Junod said. “It was the vulnerability of children. It was the vulnerability of us all. He really just put his finger on what to me is the unmentionable, unsayable concern, which is not just why am I here, but am I here for the wrong reasons.”

Junod then told me he had been asking himself those same questions 20 years ago when he was reporting the Mister Rogers piece. He had been at Esquire a little more than a year and was struggling with a big question: Who was he as a magazine writer? And with a more immediate one, about a story that was eluding him, a deadline profile of then-Oakland Raiders quarterback Jeff George.

“I couldn’t write it because I was coming from such a bad place in regard to what I was trying to do as a writer at that time,” he said. “I was trying to take Jeff George down. I was trying to use Jeff George as a symbol for everything that was wrong with the NFL. It was brutal.”

But then Mister Rogers happened, and the floodgates opened. He wrote the George piece (“It wasn’t a story I was particularly proud of, but I did do it, and I didn’t disgrace myself doing it.”), and then he wrote “Can You Say… Hero?” and found a way to connect the voices he was always experimenting with to an entire generation of people, so much so that his story helped inspire a documentary, and come next summer, a feature film starring Tom Hanks.

“What Fred taught me is you can be a good writer and an effective writer and a penetrating writer, and you didn’t have to be an asshole,” Junod said. “I think that was really the most important thing. You could revere somebody, and yet you could honor yourself.”

That, ultimately, is what the movie does, and what Junod’s story continues to do. Both revere Mister Rogers, but in doing so, they ask the audiences to do what Mister Rogers asked his audiences to do: look inside themselves, see the value there, and then to walk out into the bright sunshine and carry it forth.

The post Can you say … Thanks, and we miss you? appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When Jeanne Marie Laskas set out to write about guns for GQ magazine in 2012, she knew it would be difficult but she didn't expect it would become the story that, as she puts it, "nearly ate me alive." She quickly found herself navigating a minefield of preconceptions and prejudices on both sides of the issue. Her ability to gracefully and candidly negotiate this tricky path is an important element of the story’s success, as is her hands-on approach, as she puts herself behind the counter at an Arizona gun shop.

Laskas is a correspondent for GQ and the author of six books. Her work has been included in a number of anthologies, including "Best American Magazine Writing" and "Best American Sports Writing." She is also the director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Laskas and I talked over the phone. My questions are in red; her responses in blue. To read the story without annotations first, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button to the right. Let’s start with some questions: 

There are so many ways to tell the story of guns in America and they are all fraught with peril—why this story?

 It wasn’t a topic I had been stewing on, any more than a regular person might be. It was born of the event of the Tucson shooting, and that moment that I write about, the Walmart clerk who turned back [shooter Jared] Loughner, who apparently said, “I won’t sell you any ammunition.” And I just never realized, I never thought of the human transaction that was involved in all of this. It might have been born of a conversation of that moment: who is that guy and who makes these decisions? And it might have been one of my GQ editors who said, “You should go work in a gun shop and find out.” 

Something else that strikes me about this story is that you focus on a very ground-level issue in this debate: the exchange between customer and clerk. Most stories on this topic look at legislation or judicial rulings or other broad-based, complex aspects of this debate.  You picked the simplest, most direct point: the moment when someone buys a gun. How did you settle on this approach?

It was definitely the most interesting piece of it. I was working on this book called “Hidden America,” where I was doing that kind of view of America over and over again, so when I wrote about immigration, I didn’t start broad. I started tiny with someone picking blueberries in a field. Those little tiny moments-- we rarely start from them. We start broad and then go small. I wanted to start small and go broad. That was just in general my way of thinking about any issue. The issue is not as interesting as the people and the transaction.

Can you talk about the early discussions with your editors and how you settled on exactly what you would do?

The one thing that really came through clear to me when we talked about guns, they thought it was really hilarious for someone like me to go work in a gun store, or someone like them, someone from the world I inhabit. That was their assumption. There are these two distinct sides of America, and they thought it would be funny almost to send someone in, who came from a non-gun world, into a gun world. It would be shocking. The thing that struck me is that shouldn’t be that weird. That shouldn’t be shocking. You guys are presuming so much about who I am. Maybe I like guns. Maybe it will be fun. They thought that was hilarious.

You told me earlier that this story nearly ate you alive. How so?

It was really hard to not do the expected joke, the one I was just talking about. I really wanted to understand the other side. I really and truly did. I didn’t want to get into a debate about gun rights. It was a cultural question: what is your mindset that you really truly believe in what you believe? It was really hard to find a way of doing that that wasn’t judgmental, that wasn’t silly. It was really hard for me to even talk about. Everyone I was writing back to, texting pictures of my guns that I bought, that I was really interested in, they all thought that was so funny. It is crazy that you can walk in and buy something like that, but these people [gun owners] really have a point.

Guns 'R Us
By Jeanne Marie Laskas
GQ Magazine
September 2012

Out-of-state residents can purchase firearms in Arizona read the sign behind the counter at Sprague's Sports in Yuma. ASK US HOW. I asked a clerk named Ron for details. Right off the bat, you are in the story. Why? I hate doing it. I didn’t want to do it. I thought it made me a character, but I had to, the story needed a vehicle. I was keenly aware of my audience. My audience is not going to be reading this story unless I was starting where they were starting. I am a character in that story. That’s not me. I am writing for this audience of people who do not understand why America needs guns. I need to know how to be one of them. The story needed that tour guide. Did you know, going to Arizona, that you were going to use first person, or was that something that came up in the writing process? That came later. I never know. I just go. It was like, let’s find a gun store that will let me come in and hang out and let me work behind the counter as much as I could. They were great. He was short, packed solid as a ham, with a crew cut and a genial demeanor. He pointed to the cavalcade of hunting rifles lined up on the long wall behind him. "Any of these you can get today—or these over here," he said, leading me to a corner of the store where two young men in ball caps and a woman with a sparkly purse were admiring a selection of AK-47's. When did you identify yourself as a reporter during your conversations with the store owners and customers? I would have done that all up front. I wasn’t in a spy mission or investigating. It would have been talking to the store owner first, "Here is what I want to do, here is what I am, here is where I come from, I want to write a story that bridges the two cultures." I wanted to be a bridge between the two cultures. That was my ambition. And it genuinely was. I feel like it was impossible to become that. There is no bridge. I tried to find it, and I failed. I ended up just going and shooting zombies. That is literally what happened. How did people typically react when you told them you were a reporter? They were fine. They were happy. They were like, "That is so nice that you’re interested in guns." It felt like you could be at any sporting good store. "Oh, you like volleyball too? You’re here to learn about volleyball? I love volleyball!" I had that part in the story where I say to Richard, he asked me what is the most surprising thing, and I said how normal it is.

"You have to admit this is pretty badass," the one man was saying. He had a carbine shorty I’m guessing you didn’t know this lingo right away. How did you find out what he was holding and when? In that case, I had to ask. I am not reporting on the asking. You don’t get to see that. I would have had to say, what kind of gun is that? The lingo is important, so I was curious how long you let it go, if you let it play out. I would let it play out a while, then say, "What is it you have there?" I wouldn’t disrupt the scene. perched on his hip, Stallone-style.

"I don't know," the woman said. "To me, it looks mean."

"It's supposed to look mean."

"They should make it in pink," she said. "Wouldn't that be cute?"

"You're shitting me."Why did you decide to lead with this bit of dialogue? It is just a glimpse of a moment. I’m writing about a shopping experience, and here is a glimpse of the shopper. Probably 15 of them happened, but here is a funny one. The idea would be to provide a quick moment. It’s not loaded, to use a pun here, but I don’t have a point. This is not a polemic. Almost trying to show that.

"They should make it in Hello Kitty!" she said. "I would totally buy it if it was Hello Kitty."

"Sweet holy crap," the other man said. "That would be the worst possible death. Can you imagine? Shot dead by a Hello Kitty semiauto."

It was difficult to tell if Ron was listening in on any of this; both of us had our lips pulled back in pretend smiles. "Now, what can I show you?" he asked me while the one guy went on faking his bad death and the woman continued her torture with something about rainbow-colored bullets.

I didn't really want to buy an assault rifle, or even a handgun, but I was curious to know what buying one felt like, how the purchase worked, what-all was involved. Nobody in my circle back east There’s a distinct voice you’re establishing here: ‘what-all’ ‘back east.’ It’s a little country, almost. Is this you? Is it a character you’re creating for this story? You know, I have no idea. I guess maybe it’s a tone I’m trying to establish there, this character that I am is friendly and not snobby. Probably folksy. I’m creating a folksy character you would want to hang out with. I don’t think it’s me, though. had guns, nobody wanted them, and if anybody talked about them, it was in cartoon terms: Guns are bad things owned by bad people who want to do bad things. About the only time the people where I come from thought about guns was when something terrible happened. A lunatic sprays into a crowd and we have the same conversation we always have: those damn guns and those damn people who insist on having them. This is such an important paragraph because it lays out your views going in. Was there ever discussion as to where this paragraph should be, or how detailed it should be? Did you worry that anyone who didn’t agree with you would stop reading right here, give up? It’s such an important moment, and it has to happen right there. It has to happen early up because you have to establish a starting point and be honest with the starting point. It needs to have a definitive point of view. This is something like an experiment, and I feel like I need to be really clear about that, even though it’s exaggerated, even if it’s the point of view of my editors. I have a more nuanced view personally because I live in Pennsylvania, where deer hunting happens in my backyard. But I’m starting where my audience is.

I had come to Arizona, the most gun-friendly state, How did you determine what is the most gun-friendly state? Were there other states you considered?I think Utah and Arizona are the top, because of just how easy it is to get a gun, and the carry laws. But Arizona was a natural fit because Tucson shooting had just happened. It was kind of like a ground zero for that kind of thing anyway. What I didn’t understand until I was there is that since it borders California, people come from California to buy guns. There was a lot of talk about that, how weird (Californians) were, and so that was nice too, to have that influence. They were getting people who were desperate because they couldn’t get guns in California. to listen to the conversation the rest of America was apparently having. One in three Americans owns a gun. About 59 million handguns, 46 million rifles, and 28 million shotguns—nearly 135 million new firearms for sale in the U.S. since 1986. We are the most heavily armed society in the world. If an armed citizenry is a piece of our national identity, how is it that I'd never even met it?

In Arizona, anyone over 18 can buy an assault rifle, at 21 you can get a pistol, and you can carry your gun, loaded or unloaded, concealed or openly, just about anywhere. The IHOP was said to be the only restaurant in Yuma that prohibited you from bringing your gun in. "Needless to say, most of us won't eat there," Ron said. On the rack behind him, assault rifles stood stupid as pool cues, black and blocky, with long magazines protruding erotically this way and that. What were your thoughts the first time you walked into the store? I was really surprised by the assault rifle section. That was startling. But the rest just seemed like a pretty good store, like going into Dick’s Sporting Goods except everything was guns. But the assault rifle section was really, wow, and it literally did happen that way. I walked right back, and said, "I can just buy one of these?" And I knew nothing. They were like, "Just pick one, okay that one." That is how simple it is. That to me was startling. Also, you’re using language here in a very provocative way—‘stupid as pool cues,’ the reference to the magazines being phallic and a substitute for masculinity. This must be deliberate. Why did you make this choice? Truthfully, I was just having fun there. I think it’s more to take the pressure off instead of being like I’m about to get into an argument.

"I'm kind of surprised you carry assault rifles," I said to Ron.

"There's no such thing as an assault rifle," he said. "These are 'military-style rifles' or 'modern sporting rifles.' "

"But they're assault rifles," I noted. I knew that much from TV.

"Assault is one of the worst things the media has ever done to us," he said. "Have any of these rifles ever assaulted anyone?" I’m curious here… We know you were up front with everyone you talked to, so Ron knows you’re a reporter. Still, how did you set everything up with the store? I think it was just a real honest approach. It helped that I came from Pennsylvania and I have hunters in my background. They were so proud of the store, so it wasn’t hard to get them to agree. The only time they had any publicity was the stuff from running guns into Mexico, and I dug into that and realized they really did get a raw deal. That was a trumped-up charge, it really was. That seemed to be unfair, and that was the publicity. They were attacked and it was unfair, and so I think I was just really straightforward. I want to learn about this culture that I don’t understand and just come and hang out and work behind the counter. 

He went on to say I could buy as many of them as I wanted and walk out with my arsenal today. "These guns have helped our industry tremendously," he said. "They've attracted a whole new generation.... Is there one you want to try?" He brought down a Colt AR15-A3 tactical carbine, slammed in an empty magazine, and handed it to me. It felt disappointingly fake, an awesome water pistol, perhaps, or a Halloween prop. Was this the first time you had held a gun? A gun like that. I had held revolver types. What was it like? Enticing. It was easy to get into the toy thoughts of it all, the gadgetry. It was fun. I got it. The lethal part doesn’t enter your mind in that moment. But then it wasn’t as heavy as I thought it would be, and I was kind of disappointed. I thought, "This is kind of cheap." I asked if I would need to tell him why I wanted to buy a gun like that or what I intended to do with it. He squinted and smiled and appeared politely speechless. "Would you have to do what, now?" he asked.

It was difficult for us to find a comfortable, common starting place, but the reach was certainly genuine. Among the things I wanted to talk to Ron and the people at Sprague's about were killing sprees. America has had a bad run of large-scale gun violence, including the theater shootings in Aurora, Colorado, and, closer to home, Arizona's infamous 2011 Tucson massacre. I wondered when would be an appropriate time to bring up the subject; a massacre is, well, a massacre, and I feared it would dampen the mood. As I read this story, I kept thinking about all the massacres that have occurred since it ran, including most notably, Sandy Hook. Do you think about that?  All the time. Do you think the story had any impact on the issue at all? Was that even a goal? I don’t think my goal would have been to change minds. My goal was to try and be a translator between the two cultures. Both sides think the other side is crazy. I did not understand that. At the end of the story, I talk about the crazy neighbor, and that metaphor is exactly it. It’s almost like it takes great courage to go down to that crazy neighbor’s house and you’re prepared to forgive and have this moment of reckoning only to find out that they think you’re the crazy one. I was blown away by that notion.

A few reported details from the Tucson incident always stuck with me. Before Jared Loughner shot Gabby Giffords, he ran some errands first. He stopped at the Circle K on Ina Road to get something to eat. He went down to the Walgreens to pick up some photos he'd gotten developed. Then he went to the Walmart Supercenter at the Foothills Mall to buy some ammo for his Glock. Something happened there. A snag in the plan. The clerk at the register, who was never identified and whom Walmart officials refused to talk about, said no. He, or she, denied the sale to Loughner, who left and went to a different Walmart six miles away, where he bought enough ammunition to fill two fifteen-round magazines and the thirty-three-round extended magazine he would unload a few hours later into the crowd over at Safeway, killing six and injuring another thirteen, including Giffords. Why do you think these details have stuck with you for so long? Is this what made you want to tackle this story? That one was fresh in my mind because it was the most recent. I get angry at this issue. Get rid of guns! Just get rid of guns! What is going on? Look what happens in Canada. Nothing like this! But I really felt that people in the store would be embarrassed or have some kind of moment of "Oooh boy, that was a terrible thing that happened, those people are right." But I didn’t find that at all.

Why did the first Walmart clerk refuse the sale, and how? Did you try to find this clerk, and if so, when did you give up?  We did, and Walmart would not cooperate. I did go to that Walmart, and just kind of walked around there and their ammo section. I would have loved to have found that person, even just a clerk who is ringing someone up. Oh, there’s bananas, shirts, there’s some bullets. What did that person see in Loughner, and where does a private citizen get the authority, or the gumption, to refuse to sell ammo to someone? These questions were never answered, if they were even asked by media providing day and night coverage in the bloody aftermath. The mysterious clerk at the Foothills Mall Walmart dropped out of the headlines almost as soon as he, or she, appeared. What may have lingered then for some, or at least it did for me, was a nagging sense of unfinished business. So these are the people who stand at the front lines, guarding America against its lunatic mass murderers? Clerks at Walmart. Clerks at sporting-goods stores. Minimum-wage cashiers busily scanning soccer balls, fishing tackle, and boxes of Tide. This ends the first section of the story. Can you talk about why you wanted to end here, with these anonymous cashiers? I always like ending a section with something you’ll think about. It’s a great place to plant whatever the lingering thoughts are that you’re having, almost like the echo that you’re looking for in a story.

···

Ron grew up in Yuma and had worked at Sprague's for twenty-seven years; several of his co-workers had put in at least twenty. That’s an amazing longevity for retail. Were you surprised at that?  Yes. That went with the whole general notion that they were all so proud of that place that they created. They will not leave! When you found that out, did it change any preconceived thoughts about who these people are? Definitely. It made me like them. Was that a bad thing? It was confusing; it was a really freaking confusing story. Why was it hard? It’s all of these things you’re talking about. I like Ron, who is working there all these years with his name on his shirt, but he’s telling you to buy horrible things that you can go kill people with. It’s really confusing. All the clerks milling about the store were clean-cut, dressed in crisp button-down shirts with their names embroidered on the pockets, and the respect they showed the merchandise reminded me of department-store shoe salesmen in the old days who wore suits and used shoehorns.This is a really interesting comparison. That popped into my head while I was there. It was one of the phrases I used when I called my editors. While I’m reporting this thing, I went there for a week twice, and while I was there, I was calling back, and we would have these conversations. Here is what is going well. I’m really confused. It’s like a shoe store, but it’s guns! They thought I was so crazy that this is what was bothering me. The store was brightly lit and impeccably clean—no dust or cobwebs on the hundreds of bobcat, coyote, elk, and other taxidermy mounted on high. Stray scraps of paper were instantly swept up, Disneyland-style. The merchandise was arranged in boutique fashion: colorful boxes of ammo stacked like candy by the register, a library of gun books and magazines near the restrooms. There was a holster department, a gun-safe department, and an optical-equipment department—OVER 75 MODELS of Binoculars in stock. OVER 100 MODELS of Rifle Scopes in stock. The guns were in the back of the store, and this is where most of the customers hung out. How much time did you ultimately spend in the store? Two trips of approximately a week each. It wouldn’t be a full week because I would get sick of it before that. But a long time. I would spend a long time at these things.

"I have six handguns—bought five of them here," an old man said to me. I was waiting for Ron, who'd gone to the back room to find a gun he thought I might like. "I have five rifles, got all of them here," the man said. "I spend most of my time reloading shells. All my friends are dead." I don’t think there are any customer names in this piece. Did you go into the reporting knowing you would probably not use some people’s names? I don’t think I needed them. I just tell the story. I needed the names of the clerks. That one guy telling me his whole violent fantasies while he is buying his new gun, I knew I would have to blur his identification, but I probably got his name in my notebook. I’m usually pretty frank. In some ways, I think it works because these people could be stand-ins for any gun owner. I think once you make it specific and you get, "Here is Charlie Smith, 53, who lives in a town you’ve never heard of," it’s distracting to a story like this. You want your characters to stand for something.

He had thin white hair and a long, sagging face dotted with age spots. "Do you know what the biggest problem with divorce is? It's the bedroom. And a lot of it's the man's fault. Like a damn rabbit, on and off." Why do you include this last quote, given that it doesn’t really have anything to do with guns? Because my larger point there is I am trying to demonstrate this general store feel and that is how it felt. That conversation lasted probably 20 minutes. That is what you do. You start talking about guns but then you’re talking about marriage and wife, the old bag. I was just showing that.

It felt like we should have had rocking chairs, perhaps a set of checkers between us. This was one of the things I liked most about Sprague's: the general-store feel. Groups would form, strangers becoming neighbors, sharing stories. "I lost my wife in November," the man said. "Sixty years. Now my kids keep trying to get me to go live with them in California. My doctor said, 'What's your lifestyle?' I told him guns. He said, 'Stay in Yuma.' " There are moments of humor throughout the story. Why did you want some humor in here, and how did you go about setting it up? I think this kind of story needs humor. There is so much at stake, really, but I’m not presenting an argument. It’s a cultural study, almost anthropological. If it’s all of us, we need to laugh at ourselves. We’re not laughing at our neighbors, but we’re laughing all together that our neighbors are pretty wacky.  And you know that is just where we come from. That is our culture looking at that culture. You need humor in that kind of story, if it is not at the expense of somebody.

Ron came back carrying two assault rifles. "Hey there," he said, greeting the old man. "What brings you in today?"

"Same as yesterday."

Gently, Ron placed the rifles on the counter. He told me one was a Smith & Wesson M&P15 and the other a Heckler & Koch 416. They looked every bit as formidable as the first one I held, but these were .22s, and Ron said they'd be easier to shoot.

"So more like beginner assault rifles?" I asked. Was it a conscious effort on your part to keep referring to them as assault rifles? Oh yeah, because I let him make his point, and that is actually truly his point and he gets so mad at me for not accepting it, and I’m not going to accept it. But I am going to remind the reader that he is still making his point. For me to accept his terminology without making fun of my own refusal to accept it would be missing a whole little spin.

"There-is-no-such-thing-as-an-assault-rifle," Ron said.

The Smith M&P15 sold for $425 and had a snazzy bright orange cardboard wrapper on its fat barrel that read "Kick Brass." "I'll go with this one," I said. How did you choose? That orange label on it was very exciting. I wanted it to look rough and mean but to be easy to learn on. But that is how confusing this story is, because when I found out that that guy bought it for his six-year-old, I was both horrified and embarrassed by my choice. I had both of those reactions. That is how confusing this story is. Did you go out knowing that you would buy a gun, or is that something that evolved while you were there? Most definitely that evolved. It was all the better for it. I didn’t want to write that story; here I am a character, naïve East Coast girl going to buy a gun, but that is what turned out to happen. But it happened because of being there and actually wanting one. I wanted one. I wanted to see what it was like. You called your editors and said, “I’m going to buy a gun?” Yes. I told them I’m buying this Glock, and is it okay if Conde Nast buys me a Glock? I just really need one. They’re like, "What’s happening to you, what’s happening?" And you asked if the magazine would pay for it? It’s expensive! I’m like, “I’m going to have to expense this. What do you think they’ll say?" They said, “I don’t know, just put it through.” Did it go through? I think it did.

"Okay, you'll need to fill this out." He handed me a six-page government-issued form, told me not to make any mistakes or else I'd have to start all over. "No cross-outs," he said.

Anyone in America who wants to buy a gun has to fill out ATF Form 4473, with thirty-six questions in all, and hand it in to the dealer selling the gun. [How much of this stuff did you already know going in? How much research did you do before heading to Arizona? I knew that there is something called a background check, and that this is our safeguard. I wanted to walk deliberately through that. I had never read one of those forms before, but once I’m in the store I have every reason to. I wanted to be like, slow down everybody, this is what actually happens. I am pretty much learning that live. I’m learning what the process is, and that it’s a kind of a bogus situation.The clerk takes the form and contacts NICS, the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (open every day of the year except Christmas), where an examiner runs your answers through a series of databases to make sure you haven't lied and, within minutes, tells the clerk what to do: proceed with the sale, deny it, or delay it for three days while NICS does some deeper digging and decides later.

PLEASE PRINT.

Are you a fugitive from justice?

Have you ever been adjudicated mentally defective?

Are you subject to a court order restraining you from harassing, stalking, or threatening your child or an intimate partner or child of such partner? How did you decide which questions to include in the piece? I imagine there were so many to choose from. I chose the most ridiculous sounding ones. Some of them were boring. Are you a citizen of the United States? I think at that point, just in general in America, it was all about the mental health issues and how someone could get hold of a gun if you’ve got problems, so I probably focused on those types of questions.

I stood there puzzling through the form when a guy walked up, replacing the old man beside me, and he, too, struck up a conversation. He was a man of some heft in a red T-shirt and sunglasses wrapped behind his neck, as was the fashion in Yuma. "You say you're just starting out?" he said. "You picked a good one. With the HK, you would have just been paying for extra steel you don't need."

"That's sort of what I thought," I lied.

"I just got that same Smith for my kid," he said.

I looked at him. He appeared far too young to have a grown son.

"Wait, how old is your kid?" I asked.

"Six," he said. Were you taking notes at the time or did you reconstruct later? I do notes while I’m there. I tape record a lot and I take notes at the same time. I’ve got things pretty well documented. I depend on my notes more than my tape but I have it there in case I need it.

···

Richard Sprague, the owner of Sprague's Sports, is a slender man in his fifties with a tapered face, coarse graying hair, and an easy smile. Other Arizona gun stores would not even entertain my request to visit and ask questions about selling guns and ammunition, but Richard without hesitation invited me to spend as much time as I wanted at Sprague's—behind the counter, in the back room, at the shooting range, anywhere I wished. How many stores did you approach? Maybe two or three. We wanted big ones, legitimate ones. There are lots of shady places and we were turned down by a few. Why place this information here, fairly far down in the story?It’s a way of helping you know Richard a bit, knowing he is the kind of guy who would say yes. I thought it a somewhat courageous offer, especially given that a 2010 Washington Post investigation spectacularly put Sprague's eleventh on a list of top U.S. stores that sold guns traced to crime scenes in Mexico. Attempts to stem the flow of arms south of the border began intensifying during the last Bush administration and have continued with the ATF's infamous Fast and Furious operation.

In response to the hoopla about his store, Richard said that he and his employees were always on the lookout for straw purchasers: a person buying a gun for someone who hadn't passed the background check. "Unfortunately," he said, "some people do break the law once they leave our store." The Mexican border was just eight miles away, and so proximity, rather than reckless selling, was the truer though far less titillating explanation of the ranking. And the number-crunching behind the headline was misleading: The actual number traced to Sprague's was just fifty-five out of a spectacular 60,000 guns smuggled to Mexico. Again, I’m curious. Did you know this information before you went to Sprague’s, or is this something you found out while there? I knew that that stuff was reported but I don’t think I learned the reasons why it was unfair as I illustrate in the story until I got there. How did it change your perspective on the store? A lot. It was like, "Wait a minute." It made me think about how quick we are to attack on our side and to find it was really an unfair claim, and an easy brushstroke, making this guy sound like he was some bad guy. And you get there and he is some shoe salesman, and it’s like how can that shoe salesman have been a bad guy and you dig a bit further and you go, "Oh, he really is just a shoe salesman who sells guns."

Richard was a busy man, with quick eyes, and he spoke of "firearms" and "the industry" in the dry, responsible way a man might discuss flood insurance. Still, he talked more about his family than he did guns. He spoke proudly of the long line of Spragues (his father opened the store in 1956), and the raw weirdness of being the last of his generation left. He toured me around Yuma, a cozy town of 93,000 with parks stretching along the river where families picnicked under the ironwood trees. He took me to the Yuma county fair. He was proud of Yuma and wanted me to like it, and I told him I did. How much time did you spend with Richard? Quite a bit. I liked him. I went to his house and met his wife. We went to the fair together. He very, very accommodating, and they love Yuma so much, I would go on a tour with them. I loved his wife. She was great, and we went shooting together. I think that got cut. He was proud of the firearms industry and wanted me to like that, too, and I was working on it. This is one of the places where you are attempting to signal your open-mindedness on this issue (the implied critique of the Post piece above is another, I think.) I would love to know your thinking on this and why you made it an element of the story. I wish I made that more of an element of the story, frankly. I wouldn’t get to know this world if I stayed an outsider looking in and judging. It was almost a conceit that I had for the world for my audience. I don’t think they would have been with me if I didn’t enter with that cynical way, but I feel like I did change and I needed the reader to watch me change, if ever so slightly. It’s not a big change. I’m not going to be a gun owner, but it definitely changed. Maybe that is the arc of the story.

"What's the most surprising thing about your trip so far?" Richard asked me one morning. We were driving back from a daybreak session at the outdoor range where he had given me some lessons on my new M&P15. Learning to shoot it wasn't hard. Virtually no recoil, just as Ron had promised, and while in that way I was satisfied with my purchase, I found that I could not let go of a feeling of disappointment, of some kind of tangled shame that had nothing to do with shooting guns, or gun ownership, but that somehow I had wimped out and bought an assault rifle a 6-year-old could use. Are you indicating here that you’re starting, at least a tiny bit, to adopt the mindset of the people you’re writing about? One thing that got cut, but it’s in the book version, is a whole sequence where I go toddling off with my guns to the airport, driving around with it in the car, to the airport. I confront the US Air people and say I have a gun. It’s about what that experience was like, and how I feel judged and how I’m just a regular person and it’s not fair. I’m trying on what it’s like for [gun owners]. Was that cut for space? Yeah. And also it was too much me. My character was starting to take over.

"The most surprising thing?" I said to Richard. He was backlit against a morning sky exploding with red and pink and orange. "That's going to be hard to summarize."

"There must be something," he said.

"I guess the most surprising thing is that everyone thinks guns are so normal," I said. I told him it wasn't like that where I come from, not like that at all.

He nodded in consideration, and I wondered if he understood. I offered him a piece of gum, and he took it, and for a while we just chewed and admired the passing mesquite. "Think of just the hunters," he said. "Thirteen million in this country. That's 13 million Americans trained with firearms—the equivalent of the largest army in the world." He flipped his visor down to cut the sky. "Anyone thinking of invading this country has to take that into consideration."

Well, wow. Hunters? Hunters rising up? It took me a moment to conjure the image. I wondered whom Richard imagined an army of guys dressed in orange rising up against. Al Qaeda? The Chinese?

I asked him who. Who?

He shrugged, said it could be anyone, another country, anyone. He said the whole point of guns was personal responsibility: taking care of yourself, your family, your neighborhood, your country. The more people there are with guns, the safer the society. "That's part of what has made this country great," he said. "That we have the freedom to make sure we're safe, that we have the means to protect ourselves, to be ready for the occasional wackos out there." Given that this piece starts with your curiosity about Jared Loughner, it strikes me that Richard is saying the guns keep us safe because they protect us from occasional wackos. But aren’t the occasional wackos people like Loughner and James Holmes and even Adam Lanza, who attacked Sandy Hook just four months after this story ran? Did you push Richard on that? I tried. I tried to push all of them, not push, but question that perspective, and didn’t get anywhere with it. You get a lot of the same argument that you hear all of the time, if we had been here with our guns, that wouldn’t have happened. To them, they can use that as an argument for more guns.

I hadn't come here to discuss the Second Amendment, but it kept coming up, as pervasive as the constant hot sunshine. People wanted to talk about it, explain it. Is this something that really changed the way you reported and ultimately wrote the story? I’m glad you bring that up, because that was a masterstroke by my editor, that line, "I didn’t come there to talk about the Second Amendment," because that was another problem with the piece. I kept getting sidetracked by digging through the Second Amendment and arguing that in the story. This story was a gazillion pages long and I couldn’t stop myself. It got me going. And I had to figure out where I landed until my editor [said], "You‘re not writing about that and that’s not your point; you have to get rid of it." I thought, "How can I get rid of it, how can I avoid it?" And she said, "That is not why you went. Just say it." We got rid of five pages of my rant with that single stroke. It was the right choice, totally.

"The largest army in the world," Richard said again. "Bigger than China's. And if you think Afghanistan and their populace is well armed, wait till they try to come into this country. It should give you some cause for comfort."

He looked at me. I had my head jutted forward, my thumbnail between my teeth.

"That's just how I look at it," he said, and continued driving. The heat on the horizon was already visible in wobbles and waves. How much did the story change in the editing process? Oh my God, I’m telling you, it was really unusual how much it changed and how many versions we ran through. Probably a dozen actual final drafts of that thing before we were satisfied, and that’s a lot. I do drafts. I’ve had a dozen unfinished drafts to get to it, but that’s not what I’m talking about. A dozen finished drafts, where we think we have it and then no. What was the thing that kept pushing it into another direction?The distraction of the Second Amendment definitely, and the fact that I changed, so that if I am starting the story as an already changed person, I can’t get my audience, so I had to unpack, wind back time. I had to be two people in the story. You had to walk through my change. That’s a good question about the ‘why me’ in the story. Because my character has to undergo a kind of reckoning. And that, that is really hard for me to mentally get. I kept getting really defensive about the fact that I got a gun and it’s okay, and I’m trying to justify that and everybody back at the office is laughing at me, like something is wrong with me now.

···

Nearly all the shoppers I met at Sprague's came in asking for something for self-protection. They wanted guns for their nightstands, guns for their purses, guns for their pickups, guns for holsters on waistbands, ankles, and bras.

"The people I hang out with back east don't talk about shooting bad guys as much as you folks do," I said one day to a gathering of customers and clerks.

"You depend on the government to protect you," said a middle-aged woman dry-firing a Ruger. She was admiring the smooth trigger action and regretting her clunkier Glock. "We depend on ourselves."

"It's an entirely different mind-set back east," said Kevin, a slim clerk with thinning black hair who had sold me a ticket for the Yuma Catholic High School 125 Gun Raffle. This is amazing, a school raffling off guns (of course, the Fraternal Order of Police in my town raffles off an assault rifle every year to raise money). What’s interesting to me here and at several other points in the story is how you drop this detail in without comment, without blowing it out and making a big deal of it. Why did you handle it this way? I’m laying detail down, peppering it with detail. It’s a cumulative effect of those observations. "You can get a permit in New York City to own a gun," he said. "That's the thing. They'll permit you. In Arizona we don't care. Our government doesn't allow us; our government stays out of our ability to protect ourselves."

But—from what? I'd never been attacked by anyone; I hardly know anyone who has been attacked. I follow the news, of course, and I see violence enacted all the time on TV. But I didn't walk around in fear of getting mugged or worse. Was this simply naive? The people shopping at Sprague's were saying yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Anyone without a gun was inviting disaster. At this point, how much time had you spent in the store? Did you find that you had the same conversations every day? Did it get tiring? Eventually. That is when you know you’re done, when everything starts repeating. When I can predict what people are going to say, then I’m done. Did it happen faster or slower than you would have expected? Slower in that one. It starts repeating but my reaction changes, so it’s repeating but I’m hearing it differently.

Standing at the counter with Kevin, I asked him to show me something small, for my purse. It is difficult for me to say what exactly was prompting me, or what kind of corner I was turning. Perhaps buying an assault rifle—even as a joke or an experiment—puts you over some sort of threshold. Or it could be something about anyone's capacity to get caught up in a shopping frenzy: Hang around people buying stuff long enough and pretty soon you want to buy the stuff, too. I do know the gadgetry of guns appealed to me. The clicking and the clacking, the feel of steel so expertly shaped to fit a human grip. Did you ever find yourself thinking that maybe you had been missing something in your life, with regards to guns, after these discussions? In that moment when I’m trying to buy a .22, and he’s telling me to get something stronger, more powerful, and he’s saying, "The guy’s on meth, the guy’s on meth, and your kids are sleeping, and you’re going to be poking holes," at that moment, I was like, "Holy crap he’s right. I’m really going to die. I have to save my children." Those kind of moments, when the fear was really revved up.

"Women always come in saying they want something small," he said. "Then they find out how much harder a small gun is to shoot. Save yourself the time and get something big."

He unfolded a felt pad and put it on top of the glass case, then brought out a Glock nine-millimeter semiauto. It felt solid and serious. I asked to see an alloy Smith & Wesson on the top shelf of the case. It was wearing a little tag about being featherlight. Kevin said it was too small for me and the caliber was worthless.

"You're not going to stop anybody with a .22. It's going to poke little holes in the guy." I’m curious… Did you ever start to feel the paranoia that so many of the people buying those guns felt, that not having a gun meant you were in mortal danger?  I got it. Here is also how you get it: It’s really a rural-urban split. Where I live, 911 doesn’t mean much. It’s going to be a long time before anyone gets there. And when you’re driving through Arizona with an assault rifle in the back seat, there is nobody, no cars, nothing but desert. You can pull over on the side of road and load that thing and aim at some brush and you realize it’s just no big deal. It really would hurt no one. It couldn’t possibly hurt anyone. But you know, you can’t have that thought if you’re driving through suburban anywhere. It’s just a different conversation.

"He'll run off after that," I said. "Anybody would."

"He's on meth," Kevin said. "He's got your kid by the throat. It's the middle of the night, and he's going to take your whole family out. He's coming after you. He's dragging your kid. He's on meth! He's not feeling your little .22s hitting him, I promise you. Those bullets are going right through him, and the ones that miss are going through the drywall right into the baby's room—" This seems like a sales pitch to me. Was it? A story created to generate fear in the customer so they will buy the more powerful (and probably more expensive) gun? It was. Oh, it was. It got at it. It got me.  Fear is a great motivator. I don’t think it was cynically for him. I think he believed it. It was completely honest. I don’t think it was just to make any money. They needed to help me. In their minds.

I put the Smith down on the counter and shifted my weight in consideration. If anything like that happened to me or my kid, I definitely would want something capable of blowing a guy's face off.

I paid $450 for the Glock, a used one—a bargain. Normally a gun like that would go for $100 more. Kevin said he would ship it to a licensed dealer near my home in Pennsylvania, in accordance with federal law, and that I could pick it up there. I could then go to my local sheriff's office, and in the time it would take to snap my picture, print it out, and laminate it, I would be able to get a license to carry my new Glock concealed.Why did you feel like you needed to buy a second gun? That just sounds so preposterous. Well, it was clear to me that the assault rifle wasn’t practical. I didn’t know what I was going to gain from that. I decided to get what they said I needed for protection. Did you keep the guns? For a while. But then I really truly didn’t know what to do with them. There’s another whole section, I think I cut it from the story, about living with a Glock. I wanted to then go experience that. What would I feel like with a Glock in my purse. And going to the pool with my children and your purse has a gun in it. It really affects how you go about your life. There’s a whole sequence in there that I did end up cutting, but I did use in the book version. They’re in my brother’s gun cabinet. I didn’t know what to do with them. I’ve just sort of ignored it to this point.

All of it was so easy, and that really was the only confusing part about buying guns. So easy. And yet why should it be difficult? I wasn't a criminal. I wasn't going to commit a heinous act—not unless I had to defend myself or my family. Defending yourself and your family is what good people do. Getting a gun should be easy for good people and impossible for bad people. The only trick is telling the difference. This harkens back to that unknown Walmart clerk and all the other clerks who stand in the way between the good and the bad, who have to be able to tell the difference, which seems an impossible task. I agree. I love that Sergio the gun clerk was able to speak to that: "I don’t wear a badge. I don’t have any authority. And yet I’m making these decisions." These are some of the practical matters as to having a society where you’re allowed to buy guns.

···

Working in a gun store is hard on your feet and your back. There was a stool behind the counter at Sprague's, and I was trying not to hog it. I sat and watched customer after customer feel and fondle and dry-fire guns, and I thought about the burden on the clerks whose job it was to dole out firepower. Why did you want to work in the store? I just wanted to get as close as I could to the action of the transaction. It’s just a matter of perspective, which side of the counter you’re on, and I didn’t want to be a customer the whole time.  I wanted to see what that experience is like, just as close as I could get to that experience, even though it’s a made-up experiment, really. I don’t work at a gun store, but you get as close as you can.

I saw customers get turned down, most commonly teenagers getting carded when they tried to buy bullets. You have to be at least 18 to buy rifle or shotgun ammo, 21 to buy rounds for a handgun. "Sorry, man," the cashier would say. Had you ever worked retail before? I worked at a drug store. When you were much younger? Yes. First Drugs. Loved it. But it’s not the same. How did it compare with working in a gun store? Well, you still had to deal with the public, but nothing like this.

Sergio, one of the clerks, had some thoughts about what it felt like to work behind the counter and size up people like Jared Loughner. Sergio was quiet, small, with a broad swarthy face and a big, rugged nose. He'd been in the business for twenty-five years, and he often sat on the stool.

"You get suspicious," he said. "A woman yesterday. She was with a guy holding a baby. She said she wanted three guns, but he did all the talking. He kept saying 'me' and 'mine' and 'my money.' They were just bad actors. I don't mean bad people. I mean they couldn't act. I said to the guy, 'I think you're trying to get her to buy guns for you,' and he said, 'Oh, er, ehhh,' and he shoved the baby back at her and flew out the door."

Looking out for Loughners and other lunatics was part of the job, he said, and he didn't like that part of the job. "I remember years ago going to an ATF seminar. The agent was talking to us, the counter people, and he said, 'I need you as a front line of defense. To watch out for criminals.' And I remember thinking he was out of his mind. How can I tell who's a criminal? And I don't have any rights as far as enforcing anything, I don't have a badge, you know, what can I do?"

He could refuse a sale. That's what he's supposed to do, according to the ATF agents I spoke to, and according to the YouTube "ATF Channel," where you can watch informational skits featuring clerks doing the right thing. If a clerk feels iffy about selling a gun to someone, he or she should simply say, "No." You write that you only saw a clerk reject customers when they were underage. Did that surprise you? Not given what I saw except for that one guy that truly struck me as someone who may not be thoroughly stable, but that is only because he was standing there telling me about his life and his rage and his hospitalization. That is just not on a questionnaire. We were just chatting.

The ATF has little else to say on the matter, because the ATF is busy. A network of twenty-five ATF field divisions, essentially one for every two states, oversees America's 57,500 licensed dealers. About 650 inspectors monitor how the large-scale gun stores, like Sprague's and Walmart, conduct business. Inspectors are supposed to go into each store once every three years but are lucky if they make the rounds in six or seven, given the paltry manpower (thanks at least in part to gun lobbyists, who have worked hard to keep the ATF small). I like how you take short sections like this and work in factual details. How did you decide where to sprinkle information like this?  Sprinkle is a really good word. I don’t tend to do long fact-heavy sections. You only need them when you need them. You need the knowledge when you need the knowledge. If you get it too soon, you forget it. If you get it too late, it’s irrelevant. It’s a whole timing thing. Yet you need it. I didn’t know anything about the ATF until I started this story, but once I got it, I really got it. It’s important for the reader to have that background.

Meanwhile, NICS, the FBI's background check, is designed to weed out the criminals and the wackos. I wonder if “wackos” was used on purpose, to echo what Richard said earlier in the story? I think I’m echoing and being colloquial so we’re all in this, almost like code, you know what I’m talking about. so the clerks don't have to. In 2010, NICS did not flag Jared Loughner's application to buy a gun: He'd never been legally declared mentally ill, and so there was no official record of his lunacy. Nor did NICS object to the paperwork submitted by Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter. He had been ordered by a court to receive involuntary outpatient treatment in 2005, and yet there was not an official record of his lunacy, either. The Commonwealth of Virginia didn't report it to NICS because, at the time, Virginia only flagged inpatient treatment, and anyway, nobody really has to report anything to anybody, because NICS is a voluntary system.

The system is only as good as its databases. And critics say the databases suck.Did you ever try and talk to the NRA for this story? Not for this story. I had thought maybe I would, but frankly being in the store talking to all these people was the NRA. I didn’t need [NRA executive vice president and CEO] Wayne LaPierre to offer thoughts on top of what these people were saying. They represented the NRA thoroughly. Similarly, you don’t include any voices from the gun regulation/control movement either. Why? I wasn’t even tempted to have that voice in there. It wasn’t my point. It was not a story that was going to further an argument. I didn’t want to debate. I had to keep pulling out the Second Amendment bit. It was crowding the … experiment of doing a cultural study.

Beyond NICS, and discounting an impotent ATF, refusing a sale was typically an in-house matter, according to Richard: "It's not unheard-of for a salesperson to come upstairs and talk to management. We'll take a look at it, and we can refuse the sale—and we do. I don't know if it happens more than a few times a year, but it does happen."

I asked him if there was any specific training regimen for his clerks, teaching them how to spot people with bad intentions. What would the threatening person look like? Was there some manual or something somewhere with pictures?

"We deal with a lot of people who would scare you," Richard said. "They're tatted up, they wear their hair different than you do, they dress different than you. It's quite a responsibility to see through that. Because you know, they could be good people."

I spent the better part of the day with Sergio, offering him the stool, him giving it back, both of us sharing sore-feet stories. I saw a guy checking out an AK-47 who had a tattoo that said there is only one god and his name is death, and I wondered if I should say something. Did you feel like you stood out, like you didn’t belong behind the counter and customers could tell?  Internally, I did, but everybody treated me like I was one of them. I felt like a stranger in a strange land. Most definitely, to me, but I don’t know that anyone understood that. Could customers tell that you were not a normal salesperson? They could tell that I was obviously naïve, but they would see that as someone in training. And it wasn’t that I was trying to pretend. And to the clerks themselves, I was trying to get their point of view. It wasn’t to fool customers. They knew who I was and they were training me.

Later, when I got up to stretch my legs, a guy walked up to me. He had a military haircut and a wrestler's build, and he showed me the SIG Sauer P226 nine-millimeter, a tactical semiauto he was buying. "Finally," he said. "Do you know how long I've been wanting a good practice gun?" He brought the gun up to one eye and aimed it at the wall behind me. Did you find that people wanted to come up and talk to you? Did they ask you any questions you couldn’t answer? Oh, sure. I couldn’t answer most of the stuff, because it was very technical stuff about guns. But I would have my buddy with me.  Everybody wanted to talk. It wasn’t like most people were there to buy. It was really a general store feel, like they were visitors. Kinda browsing and wanting to talk about what was going on in town. 

"I don't know if you ever heard of the term pressure cooker?" he asked. "I'm one of those people. I help everyone else. Never help myself. I don't know why I do that, because then I get mad at everyone." He put the gun down and went on to recall a time when he got handcuffed in a hospital after hurling a nurse who had tried to sedate him. He told that story in a gun store? I know. And it was not with any apologies, let me tell you. And I’m only giving you a sliver of it. How long did he go on? Oh, gosh. He had me, at least a half-hour. He was one of those people where you’re thinking, Okay, I’m going to have a hard time getting away from this conversation. That was the one creepy moment.

"But the SIG is just for practice," he said. "I have a .380 auto at home. That's a sexy gun. I wanted a body stopper, so I got a Smith & Wesson 1911 .45-caliber. I'm a pretty good shot. I can empty an entire clip into six inches. Consecutively. Head, throat, heart, gut. If you're within fifty feet of me, I'm going to take you out." How do you even respond to a conversation like this? There is the one time when you feel like you’re not being honest, because what I really want to say is wait a second, you shouldn’t be having a gun, but that is a really judgmental thing to say, and it’s not my place and I don’t want to insert myself in the story, as a reporter. I don’t want to nudge the story along or interrupt. And did you find it gave you any insight into how difficult it might be for a clerk to say no—could you have said no to this man?  Is that your purpose here—to show how impossible it is to make that call and if you do, to actually refuse a purchase? Yes. It gave me insight into that. I don’t know if I pull that off in the section or not. But most definitely, it gave me insight. It feels rude (to say he can’t have a gun). But I’m seeing it everywhere. I’m seeing red flags everywhere. The tattoos I mention. Stuff like that. These guys, though, they’re eh, not red flags really. It’s me being a scaredy cat, coming from another land that doesn’t know this culture.

He gave me a little salute, and then he went up to the front register to pay for his new SIG, and he was out the door.

···

One day I got into a productive discussion with some clerks and customers about shooting sprees. We were gathered on a quiet Thursday, chatting beneath the $4,500 Barrett Model 99 "Big Shot" sniper rifle.

It was the most powerful gun in the store, capable of firing .50-caliber armor-piercing rounds—gigantic bullets as long as a human hand. The gun was perched on a display stand so you could walk all the way around and admire it, like any work of art.

"So how about the Tucson shootings?" I asked our little group, two clerks and four shoppers, all male. "I imagine that was a difficult day around here." I thought it an obvious statement that translated roughly to: Surely Loughner's killing spree must have given you pause and forced you to face the dark side of an America that allows its citizens to own guns. But that's not what anybody heard. Can you talk a little bit about your reporting approach for this story? It seems like it would be very difficult to talk about this topic without it turning ugly fast. What tactics did you use throughout the reporting? I waited until people really knew me and I really knew them. That was the thing I’m walking in with, how am I going to break this to everybody, be a Debbie Downer in this happy land of guns. I really thought it was going to be a very difficult moment, so I waited and I watched and I broached it very carefully, which was just completely naïve. They would love to talk about it, it’s just that they had a completely different perspective on it. It was nothing like what I thought. Nothing. That totally surprised me.

"The lines were out the door."

"Well, not out the door, but I remember this place was packed."

"Not as bad as the day after the election."

"Oh God, no!"

"Ha, ha, ha!"

"Ha, ha, ha!"

In fact, one-day sales of handguns in Arizona jumped 60 percent on the day after the Tucson shootings. It was not a time to reevaluate a blithe attitude toward anything, but rather a time to hurry and stock up in case the government made its next move to take privately owned firearms away, leaving law-abiding citizens defenseless against the criminals and the lunatics.

"Mostly it was people wanting Glocks. The 19, like Loughner had, but really all the Glocks."

"A story like that just gives the liberals more fuel."

"The problem is, liberals are more feel than think. They don't understand logic, and so what the hell can you even do with that?" Do they see you as a stupid, scary liberal? Yes, if I brought my own thoughts into it, and to the degree that I did, yes. They would talk about people like me.

"It's so ridiculous. It's sad, really."

"It's so scary." This is an interesting bit of dialogue, in that it starts to get to the point I mentioned earlier, about how you can’t even really talk about this. You can’t change minds. Definitely. And nor would I even at that point begin to even try. What really got me, as soon as I got home, I happened to have people who were more anti-gun than I was over, and I was trying to explain that perspective to them and it was even harder. They were mean. They were angry. They were yelling at me, whereas the other side wasn’t like that. I’m left with that kind of frustration in the story. There are these two conversations and I couldn’t be the bridge.

Everyone in the group agreed on the stupid, scary liberals in the most casual and obvious way, like people at a grocery store railing about the rising price of beef. I asked them about a more recent event, right there in Yuma, when Carey Dyess, 73, drove his silver Mazda to the home of his ex-wife's best friend and shot her in the face. Then he killed his ex-wife at her home. Then he drove over to some other houses and shot three more of her friends. Then he drove into downtown Yuma, where he walked into his ex-wife's attorney's office, shot him dead. Then he drove off to the desert and killed himself.

"Oh man, that guy was running around and I didn't even have a gun in my shop!" someone said. "I got so scared I went home and got my Judge. A .410 pistol. It was all so unexpected. He didn't announce himself. Walked in, shot people, walked out. He must have had tiny bullets—did you see her neck?" Did you ever feel like you were able to understand the people you were hanging out with when they start talking about stuff like this? I had heard enough of that version that it was almost expected of me. It’s almost like when you’re writing a character, you know your character so well, you know what they’re going to think, and it’s not that I sympathized with it. The thing I really couldn’t sympathize with was when Richard went off on people attacking America and we’re all going to be armed. That stuff really surprised me. I never understood that. Were you surprised by what you were able to relate to? Yes. And I think that was part of the trouble I had coming back to my regular life. My editors were making fun of me. They were like, "She’ll get over that."

"Had to be a .380."

Nobody talked about the shooting victims, and the only mention of the neighbors shot by Dyess was the size of the bullet holes in a woman's neck. If there were any victims at all to be singled out in the discussion, it was these people here, threatened by tighter gun laws and a government determined to impose them. This is a tough sentence. Did you get flack for it afterward? Not specifically related to that sentence. It’s an observation. In the moment, do you point that out? What about these people’s lives?
"Everywhere now, it's all an anti-gun maneuver. These liberals think, 'Well, if we get all the guns away, there will be no crime, no one will get shot, everybody will live in harmony.' That's how stupid they are."

"It's so scary."

I was surprised to hear them use the word scary to describe those who, back home, tend to describe them as "scary."This is a really interesting observation. Did you point this out to the people you were talking to? I would say by that point we were all getting to know each other well enough, I would be like, "Oh my gosh, you think we’re scary, well I think you’re scary." That way. But in a kind of aliens and earthlings finally got a chance to speak the same language and they’re laughing almost. Like wow, we really don’t understand each other. But that is as far as it goes. That’s right, we don’t, let’s agree to disagree and move on. It doesn’t go that one extra step, to let’s try to figure out how to not see each other as scary. I guess that’s the next round on this kind of story. I don’t know how you get there.

The conversation was interrupted when a young guy in Bermuda shorts walked up and said he was interested in the Barrett.

"The Barrett!" one of the clerks said, while the rest fell silent as if to take in the words, and we all looked up at the magnificent black sniper rifle.

···

In the end, I went over to the indoor range to blow off some steam and to release my mind from the endless loop of stupid-scary.  I see so many people who say shooting at a range helps them blow off steam. Was that the case for you? Why do you think it helps release stress? Oh yeah. I really liked it. And that was good too, to experience that. I kind of got to see the fun part. It’s fun. I get why if I were a regular, if I grew up with guns and enjoyed target shooting and stuff like that, and someone was saying, "You can’t do that, it’s against the law," I would be like, "What are you talking about? This is fun. I’m not hurting anybody. I’m responsible. I’m normal." Or they would say to me, "You can have guns, but you can’t have a clip with more than 12 rounds." I get it. I remember saying something to Richard, I wish I could just have a giant clip so I could do this at night in front of the TV and it would be done. I just have to keep stopping and loading the clip and that was annoying. That would be a moment when he would say, “Yes, exactly.” We should be able to sit in front of the TV and load our clips as much as we want because we’re not bad people out there hurting anybody. That is the point. That is one of those moments when I got it.

The range was sort of like a bowling alley, only instead of renting shoes you rented a gun. You had to have a friend with you. This was a precaution against suicide, the thinking being a friend would talk you out of it. You could also bring your own gun, no friend required. Whole families came to shoot, Friday night was ladies' night, and people had birthday parties here.

A young guy came out of the lanes, carrying the target he had just shot up. "Ahhh, that feels better," he said, taking off his ear-and-eye protection. "Whew! Re-lax-ing!" He had sweat on his brow, and he grinned up at the zombie targets hanging on the wall that I was quietly admiring. You could buy one of those targets to shoot at instead of the same old boring concentric circles or classic bad-guy silhouettes. Was there any one person who really stood out to you in this entire reporting trip? One person who you still think about?I would say I have them blurred, a combination of Ron and Sergio and the guys that are there day after day after day doing what they believe is a good job, solid citizens, no one could dispute it. I really liked them. I had a fondness for them, which surprised me.

"Oh God, aren't those awesome?" the guy said. "Me and my boys came and shot the hell out of the Paris Hilton zombie." Paris was wearing big pink sunglasses and a pink miniskirt and was carrying a zombie Chihuahua. "We just have fun with it. Shoot out her earrings. Take out her dog. Me and my boys having a good time."

"Boys?" I said. "You have boys?" He did not look old enough to have any sons at all, and I was not prepared to handle the image of one more armed 6-year-old.

"My boys!" he said. "My friends."

"Oh, okay," I said. Why include this little bit of dialogue with this guy? The point of that whole scene was me enjoying a gun. And those guys to me are in the background, the people I’m with in the moment.

I kept thinking about neighbors. You have this crazy family living next door. One day you go over with a pie, figuring if you just confronted the crazy, you'd understand it and find acceptance. Then you discover that all this time they think you're the crazy family. The more you try to explain yourself, the crazier you sound, and if you stay long enough, you probably will be. This is such a great way to describe the discussion over guns. How long did it take you to come up with this analogy? That was one of those ones that was percolating during the research, maybe not articulating that way but percolating. I still remember it, that moment of thinking that way. It was articulated in the writing. As I’m writing, I’m wondering, how do I get at that? I need a metaphor. I need an analogy. I need an image to connote that weird feeling.

These were burdensome thoughts, and I wanted to get rid of them. I rented an Uzi, fully automatic. Why the Uzi? It was the star performer for everybody. It was an automatic as opposed to a semi-automatic which is a big deal, It was the most powerful, dramatic thing there. It seemed famous to me, like a movie. If you were going to do the most famous gun thing you could do, it would be shoot an Uzi.

I chose the male zombie. I think he was supposed to be a lawyer. He had a briefcase. I aimed for his left eyeball and pulled the trigger. The patter of thirty-two bullets lasted maybe three seconds, and then the eyeball was gone. The release felt like one gorgeous, fantastic sneeze, and the satisfaction reminded me of cold beer. This is a really interesting ending, given at the beginning of the piece, you are a complete novice when it comes to guns. Why end here, with you shooting an Uzi? Well, it’s a really honest ending. It’s my surrender. Where I am not going to figure this out. I am not going to solve this. And I am really frustrated by that fact, and I need to just let it go. I don’t think I’ve ever done that kind of ending before. Where I am just saying, if you unpack that, it’s saying, “Sorry reader, I know I set you up for this thing I’m going to figure out. Well, guess what? I can’t. It’s not figure-outable. And I gotta go.” I don’t know that I’ve ever ended a story like that.It’s a good ending because it’s the end of your transition. You go from being someone who knows very little about guns to somebody who goes to a shooting range and shoots an Uzi.And who genuinely enjoys it. I am doing that because in that moment, I need that like I need a beer.

What kind of feedback did you receive on this story? I found all these links, people on the other side talking about me. There’s one where they really made fun of me, "Oh wow, places in Arizona where anybody could buy a gun, imagine that!" I think it was a good reaction in that it was surprising to my audience, the audience who would read GQ. The response was that it was thought-provoking. That to me would be a success.

Did you hear from Ron or Richard or anyone at the store? They were thankful. I think they thought it was edgier than they wanted, but people always do. They want you to basically tell the story they want you to tell, but it was pretty good.

What did your friends back east think about the piece? A lot of them just didn’t believe me. Really. That is the hardest group I had. What happened to you? That was partly why the writing was so difficult and important. I felt like I really needed to explain myself. But I’m not done. That’s one of those stories where you leave and you’re not done.

Do you think you’ll write something else on this topic? I wanted to as soon as I was done. I thought, I’m going to stick with this topic because it is so rich. I thought of different ways of doing a book. I just haven’t cracked it. It doesn’t mean I won’t.

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Justin Heckert has taken to his adopted home of Indianapolis, where his wife, Amanda, is the editor of Indianapolis Monthly. Heckert, who started making a name for himself as a magazine writer to be reckoned with at Atlanta Magazine, is now working as a freelancer out of the Midwest.

[caption id="attachment_118295" align="alignleft" width="150"] Justin Heckert[/caption]

Heckert has written for The New York Times Magazine, ESPN: The Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Atlanta Magazine and Indianapolis Monthly, among other publications, and most recently profiled comedian Kyle Kinane for Grantland. He’s twice been named the City and Regional Magazine Association's writer of the year.

We met at the Red Key Tavern near downtown Indy, a bar with a jukebox that plays Benny Goodman and Bing Crosby, and has been written about in Esquire. It was a fitting place, given that Esquire was where he first pitched the idea for “Lost in the Waves.” The story, which ultimately ran in Men's Journal, has been anthologized in “Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.”

My comments are in red; Heckert’s responses are in blue. If you'd like to read the story without annotations first, click the 'Hide all annotations' button to the right. Let's start with a few questions: 

Can you talk about how you first heard about this story?

Amanda, my wife, is always sort of looking for stuff that I can do. This was back in 2008, so she would have been my fiancée, and I was working at ESPN: The Magazine and she was looking for story ideas for me both for them and because I was trying to freelance too, and she sent me a link on CNN.com, a blurb, and it was about how this guy and his autistic son survived for an extraordinary length of time in the ocean. I Googled it and I started reading some newspaper stories about it and I don’t think there was a story in a big newspaper about it, and I thought that’s a great story. I would love to do that.

How did you pitch it? To who? What was the initial reaction?

I spent a while, a couple days on Nexis. Some little papers in Florida had stories about this, and I believe he had been on "Good Morning America." These articles made Walt out to be a hero, this heroic dad jumping in the ocean to go find his kid, and I thought, what an amazing story. I wondered, what’s it like to be a dad to this kid and what their relationship is like. And so I pitched it to Esquire. At that point in time, I had only ever written for a couple other national magazines. I had a contact at Esquire, so I pitched it to an editor there and he really liked the idea, but it never gained any traction. So then a guy named Terry Noland reached out to me out of the blue. I didn’t pitch it to Men’s Journal, but he emailed me and asked if I had any ideas,  and I thought this is like an outdoor story. This is how that started.

I think I remember hearing or reading that this was originally supposed to be just 2,000 words. It ended up just a shade over 6,000. What was the reaction at Men’s Journal?

I turned it in at 10,000 words. And honestly, the story I pitched was, 'Look at this amazing event and I wonder what their relationship is like,' and in the course of my reporting it turned into something much more interesting to me, so I just tried to write it for all it was worth. To Terry’s credit, I turned it in at 10,000 words and he trimmed the fat into what it is now. He didn’t ever scold me or chastise me and they paid me a lot more than they said they were going to. I knew from having been working professionally for five years that this was an amazing story.

"Lost in the Waves"
By Justin Heckert
Men's Journal
November 2009

The ocean at night is a terrible dream. This is like a line from Hemingway. How did you arrive at this single sentence being the one that kicked the whole story off? Plenty of people have written about the ocean and in beautiful ways, and I wanted to try to throw my penny in and add something to that. I spent a lot of time on the beginning. I think the beginning is the most important part of the story. Do you honestly expect someone to read all the way to the end? You have to get them to read. I wanted it to be memorable. I sat there for a long time, and I had some time. I didn’t have a deadline at that point. And I just sat there and took what I had and thought about it for a long time and tried to come up with phrasing and words. I knew where I wanted to start, and I was thinking about how I could incorporate the idea of it being scary and ominous. Is that the first sentence of the draft that you turned in to the magazine? Yes. And I will say that Terry Noland saved the beginning of the story because the editorial director of Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone wanted to start with me having Walt Marino floating in the ocean. I told Terry ‘I’m going to take the story back. Those two sentences, this is me, I created that.’ And he was like settle down and fought for those first sentences.There is nothing beyond the water except the profound discouragement of the sky, every black wave another singular misfortune. Walt Marino has been floating on his back for hours, the ocean on his skin, his mouth, soaking the curls of his graying hair. The water has cracked his lips, has formed a slippery glaze on his shoulders and arms. The salt has stuck to his contact lenses, burning the edges of his eyes. A small silver pendant of the Virgin Mary sticks to his collarbone on a link chain. He can no longer see the car key floating below his stomach, tied to the string of his floral swim trunks. The water licks against his ears. Every familiar sound is gone. There are some great details in that first paragraph, how did you get all of these minute details? I interviewed Walt. That was the first thing I did. I went up to Vancouver, Washington, and I stayed with him for a week. He had a contract job and was living out of a hotel so I got a room in the hotel. The first night I took him out for a steak dinner. I didn’t record, but I asked him about life. We got to know each other a little bit, and the entire week all I talked about with him was that one night in the ocean. The first couple of days we talked very broadly. But then I went back into that broad sort of question and I was like details, what were you wearing? What did it smell like? What did it feel like? Oh, you were wearing a necklace? What did it feel like? When you were in the water, what was happening to the key? Could you see it if you looked down in the water? That is where I got those details.Were you confident they were all 100 percent accurate?He turns out to be a decently unreliable narrator, but he is the only person who this happened to who can communicate. Eventually, I used documents from the Coast Guard, witnesses, people, his daughter. You have to sort of do your best to try and check everything that he says with other sources. I didn’t just take him at everything, face value. I did my damnedest to not just completely take his word for everything. When you are interviewing somebody, and you’re asking those specific questions, did he ever wonder, that is a really weird question. Why would you ask that?Not so much. I think that I told him, I just want to know what it was like. I just want to know what this felt like, so can you tell me? This was a very exhausting process for him. We would get a sandwich and go back to his suite, and I would ask questions, questions, questions, and two or three hours later, he would be like, 'Man I’ve got to stop.' When he would get tired, I would just leave him be. But he was never, 'This is strange.'

He arches his neck, contemplates again how far of a swim it might be to shore. He can't know how many miles. He tries to convince himself he might be able to make it back to the beach, to the rock jetty from which he was swept out to sea.This is the first instance where we really, truly know something bad has happened, although we don’t yet know exactly how bad. There are so many moments of tension in this story. How did you choose to start here? I think my goal was that you already know something bad has happened by that point, because of word choice. The first sentence, terrible. I wanted, before I let you know what happened, I wanted you to know something ominous happened through my word choices. I’m trying to write for how I would read a story, and I don’t need for someone to treat me like I’m dumb. I don’t know where that comes from, if it’s a newspaper thing, but I hear people, even at conferences who are good at this, say I have to spell it out. Well fuck that. That is what I was going for.  He starts dog-paddling, but after about 30 minutes his arms give out, his back tires, and he decides that he'll die if he tries.

In the dark, he can make out only the outline of his hands. He can see a faint glow in the distance, orange and premonitory, like a small fire, what he guesses to be the hotels and condos of Florida's northern coast. He wonders if someone in a living room watching TV could look out far past the shore and see him floating here.

No, he decides. That's crazy. Even if they were looking through binoculars, they could probably see only the water, and maybe the ripples beneath the stars. Even the rescue helicopter hadn't been able to spot his head sticking above the surface, as it traced a search grid just beyond where the tide of Ponce de Leon Inlet empties into the Atlantic. Below the helicopter, patrol boats and Jet Skis had gone back and forth like sharks in the distance. He had waved his arms and screamed until his throat cracked, until the blue search signal and the light of the beam had thinned and disappeared. He now wonders if he'll ever need his voice again.

That was hours ago. When Christopher was floating beside him. Christopher, his little boy. When the two of them, father and son, were still together in the waves. This is the first we know of Christopher. Why here? The main play was to build up what happens to him. I introduced him at the end of the first section. Something bad has happened, and now you introduce him and it ups the ante. What the hell happened to him? That is the way to set the whole other thing up. Honestly, I knew that the entire story, I didn’t want people to know that he had lived. That is a device. Cinematic thing. I can purposely make you not know that he is alive even to the minute that he is discovered.

The ocean was always one of Christopher's favorite places. The shallow water near the jetty rocks of Ponce Inlet, pale and green at the curve of the beach – Walt took him there as much as he could. Like a lot of autistic children, Christopher was drawn to water. Did you have to do a lot of research into autism for this piece? I did some. There is whole section of the story that didn’t run that is about autism and more about something called the 'dignity of risk.' One of my best friends in the entire world was working at a home in St. Louis where he was a mentor, a father-figure who oversaw this house full of autistic men. I learned a lot from him because he had been doing that job for a while. I was telling him how Walt did things and how Robyn and Ed did things. I could see both sides. He told me about the 'dignity of risk,' and it was about how an autistic person should be able to experience the world and have a chance to make a mistake, and there is a dignity in letting them go outside, go into the ocean, take a walk, so I tried to incorporate that into the piece. It just didn’t make it in. I talked to his teachers, read the DSM IV. I did enough to write about it in this piece.
By the sensation of it, by its sounds, its placidity – Walt could only guess. Christopher could never explain the ocean's hold on him, could only put on his swim trunks and stand barefoot on the wooden floor of the house, or find the car keys from the table and try to place them in Walt's hand, or just wait impatiently at the door of his convertible. As his son grew up, his main communication turned out to be the sounds of his laughter, his hands slapping at the tide foam, his giddy squeal as he climbed onto his father's back, swimming for hours until it was time for them to go home.

On September 6, 2008, a Saturday, Walt took him to Ponce Inlet late in the afternoon. It was his weekend with the kids. As he did every two weeks, he picked up Christopher from the group home where he lived, then picked up Angela, his 14-year-old daughter, at her mom's house in Oviedo. Christopher sat next to Dad in the front seat of Walt's red Celica, the top folded back, wind running through Christopher's short dark-brown hair. Angela sat squished along with two of her friends in the back. It was a perfect day to go to the beach. They stopped at McDonald's, Christopher's favorite, on the way.

Christopher ate his double cheeseburgers slowly, maddeningly, the exact same way he did every time. Since you’ve already said that Christopher lives, I’m going to go ahead and ask if you got a chance to spend time with Christopher for this story? I spent a week with Walt or maybe even more in Washington state, and then I went to Florida and I spent another week with him and Christopher, so I went to the Y and I went to the beach with them. I spent a lot of time with them. He took off the top bun, held it in his hand, and ate the pickles. Then he ate the lettuce. Then the top bun. Then he ate the meat. Then the bottom bun, then each french fry, one at a time. Did you ever get to watch him eat a double cheeseburger this way? I saw him eat other things. I did not see him eat that. But I saw him eat Doritos, and stuff. I asked Walt to describe it to me. It was very frustrating for Walt. He is a dad, and he is sitting there getting frustrated at his son. We may have gone to McDonald's. It’s been five and a half years, but I did see him do a lot of stuff. I didn’t specifically see him eat that, but it was just me asking Walt about that day. He chewed vigorously, with his mouth open, loud enough for Walt to ask him to stop. Occasionally, when he became anxious or upset, he might stand beneath the spout of the soda fountain and press the button, and try to catch the spill in his mouth. Did you try to ask Christopher questions? Was that even an option? I was just there. I let Walt and Angela communicate with him. We sat down and they put on “Aristocats” for him, and “Toy Story,” and I saw that actually happen, so aside from giving Christopher a hug or being around him, I didn’t really try to communicate with him because I didn’t want to demean what was reality and that is that he doesn’t really communicate. I mostly just was there while they were interacting with family and stuff.

As Walt watched Christopher eat, he tried not to think about the meeting he'd had earlier in the day with his ex-wife Robyn and her husband Ed. Can you talk about how you got this insight? How you were able to get what Walt was trying not to think about? When I asked him about what happened that day, he was like, “I had to meet with my ex-wife and that sucked.” And he told me not to talk to his ex-wife. And so that was a key event. But going into this piece, I didn’t know about Robyn or Ed. It’s like, when I talked to Robyn and Ed, everything changed. There is another side to the story, and I’ll never forget when I went into Robyn and Ed’s house. They help raise Christopher. What did you say to him when he said not to talk to them? I mean, she helped raise Christopher. She knows, from her perspective what happened that night. He was not happy that I wanted to talk to her. I said I’m just trying to do my best. I’m not trying to hurt you but I have to talk to somebody who birthed Christopher and is helping raise him. When somebody says don’t talk to somebody, you can’t obey them.

Walt had lost his accounting job a few months before and asked if he could cut back on child-support payments. He'd split with Robyn eight years earlier, and whenever they spoke anymore it was briefly, tensely, and only in regard to the kids. During this meeting, in which Robyn and Ed agreed to reduce but not eliminate payments, they asked Walt what he planned to do with the kids that day. "I don't know," Walt replied, though he did know. This is the first hint of a second source of tension in this story. What was your thinking behind introducing it here? I mapped this out, scribbled it down so I knew where I was going. I knew this was going to happen in the second section. This happened, something that happened earlier in the day, met with Robyn and Ed, and by the way, that is going to factor in.

They arrived at New Smyrna Beach around 6:30 pm. The five of them walked the long wooden boardwalk, Christopher plodding behind, sometimes staring down. Walt followed him. The Ponce Inlet Lighthouse was the one thing, long and orange, that rose above the sparse landscape in the distance. How did you get these details? I went there and I had him take me on the exact route and we walked the exact spot that he did, and that is what I did.The boardwalk ended at stairs that went down to the sand; by the time Walt and Christopher caught up to them, the girls had ignored the signs posted and were sliding down the backs of the white dunes as if on a playground. Walt and Christopher watched them for a while, then put their bags and towels down on the hard sand close to the water.

Christopher, in floral trunks like his dad, took off ahead of Walt, toward the south jetty, and splashed in, wading along the rocks. The tide on the protected side of the jetty looked serene. A group of people, their dark fishing poles like long weeds sticking up between the jetty rocks, watched them. Walt waded in to get Christopher, unaware that the tide had begun to go out, or of how strong it was, or that he was actually disobeying a county ordinance; no one was supposed to swim within 300 feet of a pier or jetty. Robyn and Ed had repeatedly asked Walt not to put Christopher in any situation that could be dangerous, and they asked him in particular not to take Christopher to the beach. Did you interview Robyn and Ed? If so, how did it go? That is a part where a lot of things change. I told them I was doing this piece and I wanted to talk to them. I talked to them about that night, how they raised Christopher. I had no judgments. They have their own way of doing it, and their way of doing it is not to let him go outside on his own. They have locks on doors, whatever, they didn’t want him to hurt himself. This is an amazing family story because this is a story about raising somebody, and I was not a parent. They loved Christopher, Walt loved Christopher, but here was my initiation into something completely different, here is what really happened that night. From their perspective, this was a disaster. Walt was not a hero. Why did he have Christopher at the beach in the first place? They’re telling me that they dealt with the Coast Guard. Can you imagine what this was like for them? They won’t even let him out of the house and Walt takes him to the beach. It completely changed the story. I came out of there, and my heart was pounding. The pitch of the story is moot. This changed everything. But Walt didn't listen to them. He was certain that it made Christopher happy to be here. Did you contact Terry Noland right away? Oh yeah. I was like, can you believe this?

The current grabbed father and son almost immediately. They floated past the glistening rocks, and then it pulled them faster, the sand disappearing beneath their toes. Within a minute, Walt and Christopher were 50 feet out, the ocean in their faces and ears.
"Do you need help?" one of the fishermen yelled at Walt as he watched him being pulled away.Does this come from Walt’s memory? I interviewed the fishermen. I got their names, I got their names from the Coast Guard. I called them and said, 'Do you remember this?' and they were like, 'Yeah, we were out there fishing.' They’re never named in the piece but they saw this happen, so I talked to the guys who were standing on the jetty watching this happen.

"We're okay!" Walt shouted back, giving a thumbs-up. He still thought he had things under control, that they could make it back. They had waded into this water a thousand times, he and Christopher.

But this time the current was much stronger. Another two minutes, 200 yards farther out to sea. Walt knew they were in trouble now. His heart thumped in his ears. "Don't come in!" he screamed to Angela, who was now staring out at them in fright from the jetty. "Call 911! 9-1-1! 9-1-1!" He repeated this instruction, hands cupping his mouth, over and over, trying to keep his head above water as the waves grew, but Angela was now out of earshot.

One second Walt could see the beach, and the next he was below the horizon. What was Walt like to interview? He seems like he has a very clear memory of this moment. Going in, you don’t expect someone to have a perfect memory. I liked him in that he was just a normal guy who loved his son and a regular guy who was trying to make a living for himself; he was flying back every other weekend to see his kids,. This is real life. I found him to be a caring, sometimes aloof kind of guy, but I got along with him really well. His memory is probably just like my memory. I kept asking him over and over again, 'Can you talk about this?' In the window of the night that this story takes place, where it’s only him and Christopher, you are just putting a trust in what you would call maybe an unfaithful narrator. Nobody can remember everything.

He tried to focus on Christopher's head, the dark-brown hair wet and matted, the only part of him above water. Christopher was about 20 feet ahead of Walt now, bobbing and laughing hysterically. Walt yelled at Christopher to swim back to the jetty with him – "Come on, let's go, let's swim!" – but they had been raked into the middle of the inlet, where the current's pull was even stronger.

After 20 minutes, they were about a mile out, at the mouth of the open sea. A green navigational buoy bobbed there, tall and round, with a rusted bell clanging back and forth. Did you ever get to see this buoy? I had the men who discovered him take me out on the boat they discovered him in on the path they took and where they found him. These are guys who plied this water often. I did my damnedest describing what it was like, not just picturing it, the only thing is that Walt wasn’t there. I could see (the buoy) from the jetty. I went on the boat and on the jetty. I went to the end of the jetty. I just remember the hunger of wanting every detail. There was no detail too small. What did they say on the boat? I told them what I was doing. The story changes because as soon as he is discovered, I don’t go from his perspective anymore. There are other people who now keep him in check. The story changes when he is discovered. Here is what was happening in other people’s lives. He was crying. Walt didn’t tell me that. He was babbling. He didn’t know what was going on. That was important. That changes when other people come into it.

Walt reached out to try and grab onto the buoy but struggled against the current. Christopher just kept laughing, unaware of the danger, of the situation, of the fading shore and the strength of the current, of the ocean ahead. As they floated past the buoy, there was nothing else to stop them from drifting into the sea.

Walt studied Christopher as the sun went down. It was a game to his son, he decided – floating there without a care in the world. Farther out from shore, the light dwindling, the land itself was less visible. The current seemed to relax, and it was hard to tell how fast they were moving anymore. Did you ever worry that Walt’s memory wasn’t accurate? How did you confirm his account of events? I talked to a lot of people you wouldn’t think I did. There were people who saw him get swept out into the ocean. I had all of this stuff, details firsthand, and then also other people were talking about what it looked like there. There were a lot of things I did to try and keep him honest in the story.

Staying afloat was all there really was to do. Walt told himself to keep his eye on Christopher, to make sure his head stayed above the four-foot waves. But his mind wandered to his own mom and dad waiting for them back at the house, to the girls left on the beach, to nothing at all. He forced himself not to consider what could be swimming below them. The only sounds to keep them company were the lap of the waves and the slap of the fins of the small fish that jumped onto the surface. Walt could see the white point revolving at the top of the lighthouse, counted the seconds of its revolution. He decided the coast guard would probably be coming for them soon. They had been in the water for two hours, he guessed. They were beginning to tire. Can you talk about the structure of the story? Why did you set it up the way you did? I’ve started a lot of stories I’ve written in the middle, the dramatic moment of the piece. As much as writing has influenced me, throughout the waking minutes of my life - my mother was a teacher, I’ve been reading since I can remember and I’ve been inspired by various types of writing - movies do equally. This is the ‘Goodfellas’ trick. I love that movie. He starts it, they’re in a car, they hear thumping and they stop the car and get out and open the trunk and Billy Batts is still alive and they shoot him and it’s hitting you and something is happening, and then it fades to black and goes back to the beginning. It just works almost every time that I do it. I start in most dramatic part, so you know something bad has happened. Walt is already out in the ocean. How did this happen? Then you come all the way back to this moment, and then the rest of the piece, which is my favorite part of the story, is what happened to them after. My favorite part of the story does not take part in the ocean. It seems to me, that this works well in narrative journalism because you’re giving the conflict right at the very beginning. This is what’s happened, so now the reader wants to know how it happened. If you go chronologically, you run the risk of losing the reader. One of my first magazine stories at Atlanta Magazine was about the spelling bee. I love the spelling bee. It’s full of dramatic moments. That story starts with her spelling the word that she loses on, but you don’t know that, and then boom, you’re all the way back at the beginning. Some stories allow you to do that, but you can’t do it on every story, I want someone to experience this like a movie, that style and that vision have influenced me just as much as writing. I want people to be captivated by this, and that is why the beginning is so important to me.

Christopher was no longer laughing, so Walt decided it was time to give him a break. He dog-paddled to his son, grabbed his arm, and let Christopher climb on his back. Walt, who'd become a certified lifeguard because Angela's Girl Scout troop needed him to get his license, took a deep breath. This is a pretty important piece of information. That he was a certified lifeguard. Did you intentionally leave it for a third of the way through the story, or is this just where it seemed to fit? Picking details here and there, it seemed like a good place to use it as he was treading water. He wasn’t just a regular guy in the water. He’s trying to figure out how to stay alive and not panic, and he’s a certified lifeguard so he’s done a couple things that he’s learned. You know that he is capable of floating. Then he arched his back and dipped his head forward below the surface, arms slightly extended from his sides – the dead man's float.

He lay facedown in 30-second increments, coming back up for air, wiping the water from his cheeks, spitting the ocean out of his mouth. Each time he would clutch Christopher's hands, then lift him up on his back. Christopher would lay his stomach on top of Walt and wrap his arms around his father's neck. Each time Walt rose to take a breath he ached more; after only a few minutes he came up again and clutched his stomach. Then he vomited. He puked everything he had eaten at lunch, big chunks of his cheeseburgers, floating in a pool of bile on the surface, barely digested. He dry heaved until his throat burned; he was screaming gibberish, nonsense, "Jesus, God, help us...."

Small fish surfaced in packs to feast on the vomited meal, and Christopher reacted with panic. He began to scream. He grabbed at Walt's hair and tried to rip it out of his head. He was thrashing on Walt's back, his weight pushing Walt beneath the surface. Christopher weighed about 120 pounds, and he was tearing at his father, digging his fingernails into him, crying at the top of his lungs. Walt pulled him off of his back, wiped his eyes, and croaked, "Please, Christopher, calm down. Please be a good boy." Christopher looked at Walt, pleading with a pair of helpless eyes, as if to ask: What are we going to do, Dad? Walt had no answer. He couldn't breathe. Can you talk about the editing of this story? How close to what you originally wrote is the piece that ultimately ran? Even though it was 10,000 words, I didn’t just spill out 10,000 words and then have you clean them up. I turned in a clean 10,000 words and he just trimmed it. The structure is intact. That one section about the 'dignity of risk,' which involved a more involved scene of Christopher biting kids on school bus, was cut, but this was just a trim. I’m hoping my stories read with the thought, I’ve thought about every sentence. I’ve polished it before I turned it in. I spend time on the sentences. I spent a long time trying to have a polished story that I wanted to show him. It was a great experience. Just me and Terry. And he came back to me and said here is what I think, we could lose this, everything had an explanation, and at the end, his boss wanted to lose the first two sentences and he got them to stay in.

Christopher grabbed for him again, jumping out of the water to get away from the fish, splashing salt water into Walt's eyes. Walt went under, gulping a throatful of ocean that made him vomit again. Crying, desperate to breathe, he yelled at Christopher, at the situation. Christopher was screaming again, too. What could Walt do? There was really only one thing he could do, for the both of them. He was forced to make a horrible decision: If they stayed together, if Christopher kept clutching his father, they would both drown. Their only chance was for Walt to separate himself from Christopher, to hope that his son could stay afloat on his own. It was the only choice that made any sense. He looked at his son again, then pushed him away into the ocean. What a horrible choice to make. How far along in the interviewing of Walt did he talk about making this choice, and what was your initial reaction? This seems like something that could easily show up at the very beginning, sort of like Wil. S. Hylton’s “The Unspeakable Choice,” when the mother deliberately drives her son to a hospital to abandon him. My reaction was I was like, 'Holy shit.' Nothing that I had read had talked about that, and that was a big confessional moment to me. And I was like, 'Really?' You have to tell me more about this. I don’t know if I believe all this. You are sort of taking his word about what is happening. He is the only narrator. I try to write it in a way you may be skeptical of Walt. And you believed him? In terms of letting him go, as a method of possibly saving them both, because that was his rationale? I said to him, 'Tell me why that makes sense, Walt.' He said, 'Well, I taught him to swim, and I didn’t want to die because he wouldn’t be saved.' Later on, when I saw how Christopher behaved, that made sense to me. Spending so much time with Walt and seeing how they interact, again the story is from Walt’s perspective. You have to go with him, and you may not believe him.

***
When he was 15 months old, they knew something was wrong. This is almost halfway through the story. Why wait this long to go into the backstory of Christopher and Walt and Robyn’s marriage? He looked at his son and pushed him away, and I felt like that was a good place for, not an intermission, but a great place to make Christopher a three-dimensional character. You step completely out of the ocean; here is Christopher. You’re not attached to him, but all of a sudden, here is what it’s like for him to be alive and for people to deal with him, and that was very conscious. I am going to completely step away and here is more about Christopher, make him as three-dimensional as I can without talking to him. It was a dramatic moment to step away. He didn't pay attention, didn't make eye contact, didn't cry. He would just scream and grunt. He didn't say a real word until he was four. After Christopher was diagnosed with autism as a toddler, Walt spent 20 grand on a couple of miracle cures, including an injection of pig hormones into Christopher's leg. He also looked into another form of treatment called "patterning," an exercise designed to improve neurologic organization that required several people to help lift and move the patient's legs and arms and head for several hours a day. But it cost $10,000, and Walt thought it looked like torture.

He knew where the bathroom was because Walt and Robyn showed him, but he didn't know how to ask for it when he needed it. Sometimes he would pee or shit in his pants and laugh, or smear his feces on the walls. He would make high-pitched noises when Robyn handed him the telephone and told him his dad was on the other end. He could say "goodbye," "hello," "thanks," "water," "hungry," "candy." He could repeat the phrases "I love you" and "Hi, Dad" and "Wow." A cadre of therapists had worked with him over the years, tried to teach him skills like brushing his teeth and buttoning a shirt, how to chew quietly. Some of them had quit because he bit them.

He ignored other children, mostly. He'd pick up an object – say, a string of thread – and let it drop, over and over, to see how it behaved on its way to the floor. Sometimes he would spin madly in a circle. Did you ever worry about taking the reader away from the ocean for too long? No, it’s just one section, and the section builds. I just wanted to make that section build to the way Walt looked at him, tried to look at him as a regular little boy. When you are with him, unless he starts biting or screaming, he just seems like a normal boy, and that is why Walt takes him to the ocean.

He had so much energy it was exhausting, and he required constant supervision. As he got older, he would sit in the backseat on his way to school with Angela and would bite her on the arm or pull her hair as she screamed. He was fearless and reckless because he didn't have a concept of danger. There was just a connection missing somewhere. Was there any reaction from parents of other children with autism or the autistic community to this story? I didn’t have any reaction from anyone who had children with autism. You have to understand where these kids are coming from. This is who they are, this is what we’re dealing with, these are beautiful, special children. That was the easiest way to describe it.

He couldn't carry on a conversation, but he could listen and understand. He could follow directions: Pick this up, please, Christopher. Take it over there and come back. He responded to sign language, because it was visual. He could point to a flash card to indicate what he wanted to eat. He was in an eighth-grade class with 10 other autistic kids, some who didn't speak or even act like they knew the teacher was there. The teacher once had a student who spoke only by reciting an infomercial: "If you didn't buy it here, you paid too much!" Why include this information? I thought that was such a memorable, heartbreaking anecdote. This is a real person, and this is what it’s like. What an amazing class, and that makes, that makes him a little more human. We are not just talking about someone’s name in a story.

In the callous terms of the DSM-IV – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Christopher displayed "markedly abnormal nonverbal communication." To his father he was shy and curious, and sometimes so quiet and so temperate that Walt could imagine his son was perfectly normal. Do you think Walt had a realistic sense of his son and his limitations? Did that play into his decision to take the boy to the beach against his mother’s wishes? He just wants Christopher to experience the world how he experiences it. He wants to take him places and do things. In his heart and his mind, he thinks he should experience the world like a normal boy. How did you approach that as a journalist? Did he know about the 'dignity of risk'? I asked him about it, and he didn’t know anything about that. He started researching it and he said, this is me. It validated the way that he did things. That wasn’t my intention, but he didn’t know anything about that term. I’m not a dad of anybody, but I don’t think he wanted or pretended or had a delusion of him being normal. He didn’t want to treat him differently. He just wanted him to experience the world.

***
The first rescue helicopter appeared just before nightfall, then the boats in the distance, engines breathing on the water. This is a great phrase. I was thinking how can I make this sound more interesting than just saying it. I did probably spend a few more minutes. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like that, but that is just a natural way that I write. Walt called over to Christopher, who had drifted maybe 10 feet away. He told him that he was a good boy and a great swimmer. He pointed his finger to the blinking helicopter high in the sky near shore, and said, "Blue lights. Blue lights. Blue lights coming to get us." Walt felt like he understood.

Christopher certainly understood what it meant to be in the water. Walt pictured him floating on his back at the YMCA in Oviedo, where he'd learned to swim. Walt had spent hours there teaching him to float, Christopher with his green goggles strapped across his face, laughing, looking up at the ceiling painted to look like a sky. You’ve kind of changed up the structure here. Before, the scenes that took place in the past happened in its own section, but now, you’re taking the reader out of the ocean and into the past within a section that starts in the ocean. Did you do that on purpose, and if so, why? As we’re building back up to the ultimate rescue, the rest of the story, these characters have become more evolved and three-dimensional. Now I’m moving in and out now. It started in the water, and now that it’s coming to some climax, it’s headed somewhere, learning they are in the water, but learning little flashbacks, learning about them. It’s a way to not just keep breaking section after section, tied to something happening in the water. He was in the water, he understood what it meant to be there, he was thinking about this stuff, maybe surviving because he taught him to swim, he took him to the YMCA. That is why I did that. There’s not enough to sustain water, water, water, water, water.

At the Y, Christopher was a regular boy. The lifeguards knew him by name, let him go into the utility closet and pick out a foam ring to play with in the water, the same green one every time. He always walked the tiled stoop around the pool, feeling the water on the tops of his feet. Then he'd jump in. Walt would show him how to fill his stomach with air so he could float, then pull him along by his shoulders, walking him around the left lane of the pool.

Out at sea, in the fading light, Christopher rose and dipped from Walt's line of sight. Walt tried to talk to his son to keep him calm, reciting his favorite lines from his favorite movies. Christopher loved to sit right in front of the small television in his room and watch Disney videos all day. Sometimes he would put his eyeball as close to the screen as he could get it without touching. His all-time favorite scene was Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story, flying into space, saying his trademark phrase: "To infinity ... and beyond!"

"To infinity!" Walt yelled to Christopher over the waves. He waited for Christopher to respond. The part where Walt starts yelling the 'Toy Story' phrases to Christopher… I thought that was amazing. I thought that might have been a detail that he said to another reporter on 'Good Morning America.' That is something we talked about, such an amazing way they communicate is through Disney movies, I saw that happen right in front of me.

"To infinity, Christopher!" I’m assuming you got this through interviews with Walt. How much time did you spend with him? This is the ultimate example of recreating. Half of it is in person, but half I didn’t witness. I spent 15 days total with Walt, which is a lot of time. Half of that is trying to be able to recreate this what happened in the water. I have to be able to paint a vivid enough picture. Half the story is what happened to him that night. The other half is the things that happened in front of me that play out in the piece.

"... and beyond!" lightly from atop the wave, as Christopher was lifted back into view. It didn't sound like that when Christopher said it, though. It always sounded like "infin' a beyon'..." And he'd always send his fist into the air. That little fist pump – Walt did it in the water then, too, even though he was trying to conserve energy.

After a while the first helicopter left and another took its place, its blue light flickering over the open water. Looking out toward the black sky, Walt began to wave his arms, certain now that no one could hear him. Christopher pounded his fist against the waves. A group of jellyfish interrupted them, swimming into Walt's and Christopher's legs, clutching onto them and burning like strands of electric hair. Christopher shrieked. Then Walt was lifted up at the same time Christopher was lowered. When the tide evened, Christopher was even farther away, 30 or 40 feet. Walt tried to swim toward him, flapping his arms as hard as he could. Then a wave lifted Christopher, and Walt was caught on the other side. When the wave broke, Christopher was no longer there. This is a really powerful paragraph, and a lot happens here. Also, we’re finally back to pretty close to where the story begins. When you first started writing this story, did you imagine this type of structure, where you would start at a certain moment in time and then go back in time, and then circle back around toward the middle of the story? I did a napkin outline. This is more like one sentence on a napkin, beginning in the water, knew I would come back here, everything that happened in between just happened, I have these little guides. I need to talk about this in this section, but no sentences until I started to write. I love that they just appear. When you’re writing, that is how it happens. Write one sentence, read it, that is the process of creation for me. I knew what I wanted to include, and I knew I would come back to this.

Only his breath in the darkness, a silence as everything settled in. For half an hour, Walt had yelled, begging for Christopher to answer. He had given up conserving energy, had been swimming as hard as he could to try and find his son. "Who's my best boy?" Nothing. "Christopher, who's my buddy?" Only the fish beneath him, brushing against his back and legs.

"Christopher?!"

Walt spun in every direction, trying to spot the small white face and the dark-brown hair.

But he was gone.

Walt wiped his eyes, took a breath. He's gone. It was a thought as dark and fathomless as the ocean itself.  Can you talk about this sentence? It’s sentences like this that set your stories apart from so many other writers, that make them feel short story-esque. Do these sentences just come to you? Do you have to work to find and make them? I guess I am like, my brow is going up. I didn’t have to do that. You could argue that I didn’t need to do that. It’s just a simile. That is what sets your work apart from others. I didn’t have that written down beforehand. I need to have the marks of literary fiction in my story even if they might be hokey to someone else. That is just a simile. A lot of writing doesn’t interest me because it’s just straightforward. Maybe this is something I can do, make a turn of phrase. People might not like it. It’s bordering on the editor might cut it.

At that moment, he couldn't see it any other way – Christopher was dead. So Walt stopped yelling and shivered as a trail of bright green phosphorescence floated past him. He stared at it, amazed by its arrival, the only color on the sea, passing behind him like lights beneath the water. He told himself it was probably peaceful, told himself that Christopher just got tired and finally let go. Just slipped away under the sea.

But Walt's mind wouldn't fully accept that. Christopher was a terrific swimmer. He had nine lives, Walt liked to say. Maybe he was merely playing a game. Maybe he was floating, just beyond where Walt could see. Maybe he just wanted to be alone for a while, like he sometimes did. How did you find transitions like this? I’m sitting there thinking, I need to address the fact that he has eloped. It plays directly into what is happening in the water, Walt knowing that he’s been okay in the past. How am I going to get from here, I have to tell this anecdote about him going to the mall. Well, how do I get there from the ocean, and that is something that I thought about. And sometimes an editor will be like, 'We need a transition here.'

Christopher had wandered off so many times, Walt learned to expect he would always be okay. "Eloped" is the word used to describe the way an autistic person sometimes wanders off – is there one second, then vanishes. Did you talk to experts about autism for this story? If so, what type of help were they able to give you? I talked to Walt’s teacher about eloping. I read something about eloping. I think Robyn and Ed had some literature for me. My friend is an expert in autism, and he had been sort of like the patriarch of a house of autistic guys, and some of these guys will elope and they will end up at some sort of water, a puddle or a lake and that kind of plays into all this. I feel like somebody else might have read 10 books for this story. I get overwhelmed in the minutia of learning about something. I don’t want to be an expert.

Christopher had eloped at the mall, at the hardware store, from Walt's parents' house, and after a search they would often find him playing in water. At first it was the lake in their old neighborhood, then the retention pond at the bottom of the street – the police had sent a helicopter to search for him. Then it was the neighbors' pool: floating on his back, naked. The neighbors called the cops, who came and pulled Christopher out and saw the silver chain bracelet on his left wrist with his identification and phone number.

Once when Christopher wandered off, the police searched for him again, and half an hour later, he turned up in the fountain at the Oviedo mall. Christopher had walked across a busy intersection, crossed through six lanes of traffic, had navigated the winding road back to the parking lot at night. He had taken his clothes off and was splashing beneath the falling water in his underwear, his feet brushing the pennies people had tossed in to make a wish.

After each of these episodes, Robyn would fume at Walt. She no longer trusted him. She and Ed held their breath whenever Christopher was with Walt. When Christopher was with Robyn and Ed, they never let him outside without maintaining physical contact. But Walt wanted Christopher to experience the world like a regular boy, wanted him to walk the stadium stands without holding his hand and feel the beach sand and breathe the air, wanted him to make choices. You’ve got so much information and details about Walt and Robyn’s relationship. Can you talk about how you got all that information? This is the first time you learn that they don’t think that what he does this right. They don’t agree with the way he raises Christopher. They are worried about stuff like this happening. And then right after it, you’ve got this juxtaposition right here. They don’t want Christopher to do this, but Walt can’t even bear to call him autistic.

Walt couldn't even bear to call him autistic, to label him that way, and his voice always cracked when he talked about his "little buddy." He took the good days, swimming together at the Y, sitting together in the front pew of church, eating at McDonald's without incident, and weighed all of that against the tantrums, the outbursts, the moments in which his son would lunge at him, out of the blue, and sink his teeth into his arm. That's when Walt would sob. He'd lament having to shout at Christopher, asking him why he'd attack his own father. For every good day there was always some kind of reminder of the bad.

But now he was gone. They shouldn't have come out to the beach, he told himself. He should've rented a movie and spent the day at home. He could never face his own family. He wouldn't know what to say to his mother and father, to his daughter, to the coast guard, to Robyn and Ed. The guilt, too, the realization that he had been responsible for his son's death. This story, I think, might be one of the best at getting inside the head of the main character. How did you do that? You spend 15 days with somebody, and you have a little authority. You ask them about this stuff, you use things that happen. You’re doing a story on somebody and asking them about certain things, you’re at a restaurant and see how they interact with other people. You gradually learn about who they are, and that kind of plays into this. You do learn, depending on how much time you spend with a person. But you do see things happen in the course of being with them that speak volumes, like Christopher biting him. Everything became so clear to me. It all rang so true in that moment. This was all real.

He decided that he should take his own life. It would be easier. Bawling, his tears mixing with the salt water on his face, he took a deep breath, exhaled, and slipped like he imagined Christopher did beneath the surface.

But there was Angela. He had almost forgotten about her. He kicked his legs and came up for air, expelling a mouthful of water. She needed a father too.

The ocean at dawn is a wonderful dream. He thought the night might last forever and now considers the morning itself a sign, too. The birds dive to the surface, stretching out their patternless wings as if to yawn. You spent so much time out there, obviously, to get these details. I was on the ocean a couple hours after dawn. I was asking Walt, 'What happened when it was daylight? What happens when you’re still alive and its morning? Sunburn, tired, did you give up? It’s all changing right now. You’ve survived the night, and the dawn itself is like this sign. That is why this section exists. What is happening to you? What does your skin feel like? What do you see?' Every little thing he sees is a sign that he might survive, but he is still thinking of Christopher. But now things are going to change. He has survived. This is shift into the next part of the piece.

A seagull, white and with crystal eyes, lands right next to Walt. It looks directly at him, opens its orange beak like it's trying to get him to talk. Walt can suddenly see the life of everything, the fish swimming on the surface, the actual blue of the water. His neck aches like hell. His hands and wrists are swollen stiff. His lips are chapped and bleeding. He's numb and warm. His tongue is swollen, his eyes dry.

He thinks he's floated much farther out, but he really has no point of reference. No one even knows the exact direction in which he and Christopher floated. He has survived the night, he realizes, for nothing. He stares forward, shielding his face from the sun with his arm, and then looks back down to the water, thinking of Christopher. Part of the tension of this story extends from the fact that we need to know how Walt is rescued, because we know he is. We know you talked to him, so we want to know how he is rescued and what happened to Christopher. Can you talk about developing that engine? Did you know right away that was going to be the narrative engine? I’ve come back to the climax. He pushed Christopher away, and now you have to sort of take the story into the afterward. One, does Christopher survive? I did that because you still don’t know what is going to happen. You just discovered some dude in the water and he is incoherent. The guys in the boat are like, this is the most amazing thing they’ve ever seen, so the story shifts to the perspective of people encountering the survivor. They have found this guy and he has this amazing preposterous story, and everyone thinks the son is dead.

***
At 7:15 am, on the deck of a recreational fishing boat called the Open Range, Shawn McMichael looks out and sees a reflection in the water. Just turns his head, while the five other men on the deck are staring forward toward the horizon. Did you look to other stories as models for this one? If so, which? I did go back and read “Moby Dick.” I skimmed it to see how he was writing about the ocean. It’s ancient, beautiful writing, but it wouldn’t work today. “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane is the best thing I’ve ever read. I thought, I want this to be pretty memorable. When I was in Vancouver, Washington, I stopped in Portland, which is right next to it, and a friend of mine, Paige Williams, said I should read “The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I did. That is a heart-pounding, minute-by-minute retelling of what happened to this guy in the ocean.

A glitter, something sparkling, something that maybe on a thousand other days would never catch his eye. It could be anything, maybe one of the cruise-ship balloons that frequently float off the deck and then settle and shimmer on the surface. Shawn looks again and sees movement. Stanley Scott, the boat's owner, realizes it's a man. Floating. By himself, waving his arms. The boat slows, turns hard, comes within 50 feet of him.
"How did you get here?" Stanley shouts. "Where's your boat?"

The man is delirious, won't stop yelling – they can't get a word in. He asks about someone named Christopher. The men ease up to him, extend a boat pole out on the left side so he can grab onto it, and walk him around to the platform on the back end, by the engines. It takes two guys to haul him in. Dripping water, swollen, pale, shivering, jellyfish stings like long red scars on his legs. The silver pendant dangling below his chin – that's what Shawn had seen reflecting.

"I lost him!" They sit him on a beanbag in the back of the boat. "I lost him!" He repeats that phrase until they can get him to stop shouting and ask what he's talking about. "Christopher, Christopher...have you seen him? Oh, my God, have you seen him?" The men drape a windbreaker over his shoulders, hand him a bottle of water. He drinks six, one after the other. "He's a great swimmer. He's a great swimmer.... Oh, God, he's gone." This scene of the rescue contains so much compelling detail. How did you get it? I interviewed the guys on the boat. When they found a survivor who was floating out at sea, he was sunburned, his hair was oily and curly. I put a little leeway into trusting people’s memory. Walt’s description came from them. How did you find these guys? The boat was called the Open Range, and I did a search of Coast Guard documents. I think I might have found one of the guys through that. Three guys took me out on the boat, and then I found the helicopter people too.

He has an amazing, preposterous story, all right. He's floated nine miles northeast into the ocean from Ponce Inlet. This is the first mention of how far he had floated. Was that done on purpose? That is a reveal. Now you know, holy shit, they floated an unfathomable distance in the ocean. And Walt had no idea. Now you are getting everything from other people’s perspective.

The men don't say a word. They're in awe. They get the coast guard on the radio and tell them they've found a man named Walter Marino, and his autistic son is still missing.

Walt shivers and sniffles in the boat. He calls his younger sister, Linda, and tells her that he's alive. The night before, Linda had not been able to sleep, knowing her brother and nephew were missing. She stayed up with her elderly mother and father, calling the pastor at the church and asking him what to do. "We're going to pray for a miracle," he had told her. Robyn and Ed stayed up too, in fear for Christopher's life, Robyn convulsing, so sick that Ed almost called 911. Angela had gone to sleep thinking about how her dad had once told her he wanted his ashes scattered, and that she couldn't remember where.

Walt tells Linda now that Christopher is still missing, that he's been in the water 13 hours.

"My God, that's a long time," she says.

He calls Robyn, too, gritting his teeth. "Tell Angela I'm alive," he says.

His voice is weak, raspy. She can barely tell it's him. "Walt?" she shouts. How did you get this dialogue between Robyn and Ed? Robyn was a meticulous person, and I asked her what he said over the phone, and that is basically it.

"We've lost Christopher," he says.

"What? What? How? Where is he?" She's hysterical, asking about her son. She's talking so fast, asking so many questions that he doesn't want to answer, so he hangs up. Seriously? Robyn said, ‘I will never forget.’ It was memorable to her and to me because he just did not want to talk. That is what this signifies. You have nothing to say. You have no answers. She wants answers, and this thing just happened to him, and he doesn’t have anything else to say to her.

An orange-and-white coast guard boat pulls up next to the Open Range at 9 am. For an hour and a half, Walt has been sitting on the beanbag, moaning. A door opens on the side of the boat, and two men pull Walt inside. He waves goodbye to the guys on the Open Range, who stand in stupefaction.

The ship's captain asks Walt if he wants to be taken to the hospital or stay on the boat as they go search for Christopher. "Let's go," Walt says. But he chooses to sit below in the cabin, because he doesn't want to be there when someone spots Christopher floating on his stomach, bloated, dead – he doesn't want to be the one. Can you talk about Walt’s rescue scene and what happened immediately after? Were there any troubles with trying to figure out how to navigate from here to where the story was going? I wanted to play up that he was so upset that these guys couldn’t get anything out of him. I remember asking him, he said he just didn’t say anything. He thinks Christopher is dead. Ultimately we’re going to get to the main part of the story, which is about not only the outcome of this night, but raising a child differently. It is all building toward that. So I was thinking, he doesn’t know Christopher is alive, I don’t want you to know he is alive. I was very purposefully trying, and it’s the truth, not over dramatizing this. They were expecting to find him dead.

So he's escorted down a flight of stairs to a room filled with life jackets and flare guns. An officer in charge of keeping an eye on Walt sits opposite on a bench and says only, "You look like you regret something. Do you regret something?" Walt just shakes his head in his hands – he doesn't want to talk. You have mentioned a couple times that Walt is an unreliable narrator. Why? I think that, isn’t everybody? If you asked me to tell you about what happened to me a few months ago blow-by-blow, I mean. You can call me an unreliable narrator, though it happened to me. You may not know what really ever happened. Did it have anything to do with his personality? Maybe a little extra, because he is sort of flaky. That plays into that term a little, but mostly, I mean, isn’t everybody?

All the way from Clearwater, out of the skies above northeastern Florida, the Jayhawk helicopter rides 100 feet above the water. It's got a bright orange tail and white-striped body, like the fish from Finding Nemo. At 300 feet the trained men aboard can see gulls hitting the surface, but they're flying even lower this morning, as low as they can go, because they're looking for a 12-year-old boy.

The helicopter goes into a right-hand orbit, circling once, then again, initially lowering to 50 feet. The flight mechanic had seen the dark-brown hair and white face in the tide line, had seen a body floating there, bobbing. Tom Emerick, a rescue swimmer, is already wearing a shorty wetsuit and puts on a black mask with a snorkel. Can you talk about how you got all of this information? I’m assuming there were some public records involved? I talked to the people who were in the helicopter and who had the flight plan. That is why there are so many numbers. That is why they had this information, how high up they were, here is the time it was, I had all that stuff. Nobody told me that it looked like “Finding Nemo,” I saw what the helicopter looked like. That is my tip of the cap to the fact that Christopher loved Disney and that is probably what it looked like to him. And up to this point in the story, Christopher is assumed dead. Everyone is just sort of clinically expecting him to be dead, from the guys in the helicopter to Walt who doesn’t know.

Lowered 20 feet down by a thick hoist cable, Emerick hits the water feet first. He swims toward Christopher, the boy's small pale eyes staring at him, unblinking. Emerick signals for the helicopter to send the basket down. It's 9:15 am, three miles from where his father had been discovered two hours earlier.

"Hi, how you doing, my name is Tom," Emerick says.

Christopher says nothing, barely makes a move – just watches as Emerick pulls him into the stainless-steel basket. So… This is the first instance where we know, at least upon being rescued, that Christopher is alive, and we’re nearly to the end of the story. Clearly you did this deliberately. Why? You do not know it until the very second. You think that he might be dead when he swims toward the body and the blue eyes are staring. He could be dead still. That is completely on purpose. Even sending the basket down could be for a body. Until he talks to him, he would not be talking to a dead body. That is a cinematic way of doing it.

"Don't climb out of it, okay, buddy?" he shouts. It's deafening beneath the whir. The rotor wash is coming down so hard that it stings them, nearly suffocates them.

Christopher rides up in the basket silently, looking down at Emerick still in the water, studying him like a piece of string.
In the stomach of the helicopter, Emerick wraps a wool blanket over Christopher's shoulders, checks his breathing, his pulse, has him track his index finger with his eyes. He asks him if he wants something to drink, and when Christopher doesn't answer, he makes a motion with his hands to emulate taking a sip from a cup, and Christopher nods. Sitting on a bench in the helicopter, he shivers, freckles beneath the dark hair. His skin is warm; he's slightly hypothermic. But other than the jellyfish stings, there doesn't appear to be anything the matter with him. This is amazing. I cannot believe it. Even Walt surviving, nothing is wrong with him. Physically, he doesn’t’ seem to have anything wrong with him.

Robyn and Ed take Christopher home on September 8, after he stays one night at Halifax hospital in Daytona. He can barely walk, so they carry him back and forth from his bed to the bathroom. He can't put any weight on his legs because of the jellyfish stings. He's dehydrated. He eats carrot sticks, bananas, pieces of chicken. They let him watch Disney movies, tuck him under his Tigger and Pooh bedsheets. Robyn goes in and sits beside him, asks him softly what he saw out there in the ocean, what it was like. Two days, and she asks him this several times, and finally he tells her: "It was dark." A whole sentence.

Robyn and Ed have a beautiful home on a quiet street with a pool out back that Christopher can play in. The property is bolted down so tight, Christopher can never elope. The front and back doors have key locks on the inside as well as the outside. The garage is locked. There are locks on all the sliding doors. The house has an alarm system, with a chime function. This harkens to a prison. And then when you compare it to the wide open ocean, it’s quite the juxtaposition. But then, obviously, the home is the safe place for Christopher. This is also the first time we get a sense of Christopher’s life with his mother. It’s easy to say, I’m not going to side with anybody, but when you think about it, objectivity is a myth. I liked Walt. I didn’t really know Robyn and Ed very much. I personally felt like maybe keeping him locked in the house, and the language that I wrote it in, made it seem like it may not have been as humane as letting him experience the ocean. It does seem very locked down, in your description. But then you know what his mom has had to go through. She has gone through some stuff. I am not going to say that is the right way to do it or the wrong way. I wrote it in a way that was sort of diplomatic, but that is just how it was, that is how they are keeping him in the house.

When Robyn was living alone with Angela and Christopher, he was nearly impossible to care for, and as a single mother she felt she had no other choice but to put him in a place where other people could take care of him 24 hours a day. He got kicked out of day care because he bit other children. They had to put a harness on the bus for him, a five-point seat belt, because without it he'd run up and down the aisles, hitting students and even the driver. Christopher split his weekends between Robyn and Walt and stayed at the group home on weekdays.

When Robyn and Ed first saw Walt after the incident, it was on the dock, as he stepped off the coast guard boat; he was sunburned and babbling like a child. They didn't have the energy to confront him, to yell at him, to tell him they had been right. They were just happy that Christopher was alive. Curious. Were they happy that Walt was also alive? You can infer. They’re not evil, but whatever, they care about whether Christopher is alive.

Three weeks after he comes home from the hospital, Christopher is named grand marshal of the parade at Disney World. Robyn and Ed make sure to keep a sharp eye on him the whole time and to hold his hand. He gets a Florida Safety Hero award. He gets to stand on the bridge of a coast guard cutter and pretend to drive.

In January, Walt moves to Vancouver, Washington, just across the bridge from Portland. Did you get the sense that Walt’s move was related at all to the incident and its fallout? He was doing contract work. I don’t think it had anything to do with it. He loves spending time with his kids and it’s a pain in the ass to go back and forth. He was taking work where he could get it. He takes a job contracting with the FDIC, closing a bank, for good money, and thus has to live so far away. He flies back to Florida on Friday evenings every two weeks just so he can spend a day and a half with Christopher and Angela before getting up at 4 a.m. on Mondays and flying back. When he drops Angela off at Robyn and Ed's house, they do not wave at him as he leaves. Were you ever at the beach with him? We walked right up to the edge of the water where they got swept out. I wanted to go back out with them, to feel it, see it. I was feverishly writing in my notebook while we were there, see the jetty, the sky, what was the tide like, how is it different than what we’re looking at.

He lives in a hotel room, a suite with comfortable furniture and a nice bed, big wooden cabinets where he can store his things. He goes to the bank in the morning, watches cable in the hotel after work, and lounges around in his sweatpants and gray Columbia fleece pullover. He shares a white Pontiac Vibe hatchback with one of his co-workers. He's a tall guy, 46 years old, a little pudgy, with high blood pressure.

In March, Walt goes to Florida and takes Christopher back out to the beach at Ponce Inlet. Were you there for this? If so, how did this happen? I said I would love to see where it happened. I didn’t force them to do it at all. They sit up in the front seat of the Celica listening to an audiotape of The Aristocats. Christopher eats a bag of Doritos Cool Ranch chips and, later, two McDonald's double cheeseburgers, layer by layer. "Aaah, eeehh, uhhhhh!" he shouts, off and on.

They drive by the mall where he was found in the fountain with the pennies. "Wow, dude!" Walt says, looking into the empty bag. He leans in and puts his face right up to Christopher's, almost touching his nose, and says, "You're my best buddy." Christopher giggles and then stares at the passing cars. Obviously this reads as if you are in the car, which reminds me of something Jim Sheeler says, and that’s to always get in the car. You also got in the car with Puddles the Clown. Is this an important thing for you to do when reporting, and if so, why? What do you get out of it as a reporter? I would love to write every story with so much access that I see everything happening in front of me. I wanted to be with them. This part of the story is my favorite part of the story because it’s like when you go back to real life from this amazing event and it’s so complicated and here is Christopher going back to that house and they tuck him in and do all this stuff and Walt goes back to this hotel room and it’s so beautifully messy to me. It’s so much more interesting to me than what happened in the ocean.

Christopher walks on the beach and looks around, then goes into a bathroom to put on his swim trunks. He dips his feet into the water, recoils upon discovering how cold it is. The waves press into the rocks, the jetty long and uneven out to the ocean. Christopher lies on his stomach in the sand, laughing.

But when Walt takes him back to the group home at around 9:30 that night, Christopher, who had been silent and mostly calm the entire day, looks at his father, then throws his cup of McDonald's water at the car window. When Walt gets out of the car in front of the group home, Christopher runs into the empty street and sits on the concrete of the cul-de-sac, beneath the streetlight. He looks lost and frightened in the glow.

He starts hitting his head with his fists and shouting at the top of his lungs.

"Please, buddy, please," Walt begs.

Walt puts his hands under Christopher's arms and tries to stand him up. Christopher won't budge. Walt's voice quivers, "I know you don't want me to leave, man, but I have to."

He manages to stand Christopher upright and drag him about 20 feet toward the door of the home, and then Christopher jumps at him, sinks his teeth into Walt's arm, so Walt lets go and falls halfway to the ground. It had been so easy to forget all day. Was Walt concerned with the fact that you saw all this, that this would probably be in the story? I almost dropped my notebook. I wanted to go help Walt, but I was just standing there like an idiot with my mouth open. I thought, this is real, this is very real. Christopher lashed out at him. He did not want him to go, and he bit him. That was unbelievable to me. It was an instance where everything we had talked about crystalized as being truthful, because I could not, after seeing that brief moment, I could not imagine what it was like to raise him. I can’t pretend to know what Walt goes through or what Robyn goes through. And you have to accurately portray that. I look back at this now, I almost want to end with this, “tears running down his face… “ instead of Christopher just stands there.

Walt cries out in pain.

"Why, Christopher, why?"

Tears are running down his face, with nothing but the back of his bitten arm to wipe them away.

Christopher just stands there.

***
Walt has tried to imagine what that night was like for Christopher. He has imagined it repeatedly, in his sleep, at his work, in his rented hotel suite with the curtains drawn, the empty plastic soup containers on the counter. He has imagined Christopher giggling and splashing, the fish touching his back and arms; Christopher staring in awe at the dolphin snouts and falling stars, soothed by the foam tops of the waves; has imagined the whole night was like this one big adventure, the biggest adventure Christopher will ever have in his life, floating on his back as the water warmed his ears, in wonder as the sounds changed beneath the surface; has imagined that those sounds captivated his son's imagination, and that since Christopher loves to float and swim more than anything, perhaps he even had fun. And the phosphorescence, the most colorful thing, he hopes it passed his son in a trail on the top of the water, long and thin, sparkling there like something hopeful; prays that Christopher got to see it. He has to believe he did. He can just picture Christopher sticking his hand in the filmy substance, holding it up to the moonlight, slick and shiny and Disney green. In fact, he cannot bring himself to imagine anything else. Walt aches for the day, a day that will probably never come, when he'll be able to actually talk to Christopher, and ask him about what he saw and what he felt and what he was thinking, how he survived. Why not end the story with the tears streaming down his face? Why add the epilogue? This gets back to the narrator part. Walt is a kind of an aloof guy, he’s kind of a kid, and the ending, when you hear this as one of Walt’s things that he tells himself, that it was okay for Christopher and he wasn’t scared and he loves the water, as a magazine writer, you can have the place to call bullshit. I wrote this end because this is a way for me to communicate that I do not agree with him. This builds up. He imagined Christopher giggling, and splashing, Disney sounds and colors. It had to be okay, and he can tell himself that. That last ending is like, right, it was dark, it was a nightmare, and that really is a magazine way of saying that here is how he looks at it. He probably did not enjoy that time, and it reveals a lot about how Walt is trying not to blame himself. That was my shot at saying that I disagree.

But really, all he can do is wonder.
What did Walt think of the story? At first he was like thank you so much, but he hadn’t read it. And then when he read it, he cussed me up and down and was angry, and then I asked him to read it again. What had happened was, he had also read, when this came out, Nieman Narrative did a thing and interviewed me, and I said one of the reasons I was drawn to this was the story was a hero went out to save his son, but that wasn’t the story, and he was upset that I had said he wasn’t a hero. He said I didn’t know anything about him and Christopher, and that is true, but then I talked to him, and he sent me a picture of Christopher last year. I have fond remembrances of them.

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