Seattle-based freelance journalist Wudan Yan is a founder, producer and host of The Writers’ Co-op podcast. She’s a business coach, a content marketing writer and an advocate for fair and prompt pay for freelancers. She’s a knitter of beautiful sweaters, a rock climber and a long-distance hiker who takes on continent-spanning trails.

Next month, to add to that extensive bio, she will open the virtual doors of Factual, an agency that matches nonfiction storytellers across platforms with vetted fact-checkers to help ensure the accuracy of their work. The agency is an expansion of Yan’s business-savvy approach to freelance journalism and draws on her own experience as a fact-checker of magazine articles, books, podcasts and documentary films.

Storyboard spoke with Yan about the new venture and the nature of fact-checking, but also about how she juggles major projects and what she calls her journalism escape fantasy. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

First, what is Factual?
Factual is an agency that matches people producing nonfiction works — books, podcasts, documentaries, memoirs, and so forth — with a fact-checker who meets Factual’s standards. You can think of us as matchmaker or a dating app for fact-checking.

The intended client differs based on the industry. For instance, if a magazine wants to hire a stable of fact-checkers to check every single issue of their magazine, the magazine pays them.; the freelancers writing for the magazine don’t pay for the fact-checking. For books, the burden to pay for fact-checking shifts to the author. For podcasts it’s often the production company that pays for fact-checking. For documentary films, it may be the distributor.

In my business model, the client pays Factual, which takes a fee for its services, like a literary agency does, and Factual pays the freelance fact-checker a project fee. Prices set with the client help ensure I can pay my operations staff and the fact-checkers what they want to make to support their income goals. Fact-checkers get paid by the project, too, and are responsible for making sure they earn what they want, which is a minimum of $30 an hour.

What about people who work for newspapers? They generally don’t have their work vetted by fact-checkers. Do you have advice about what they can do to fact-check their own work?
First, I think we need to define fact-checking, because the way you used fact-checking in that question is not how I would define it. People refer to three separate things as fact-checking.

My definition is pre-publication fact-checking, which is when the nonfiction project has not yet been brought forth into the world. Somebody who has not been involved in the production, writing or editorial process comes in with fresh eyes to verify things, propose suggestions for accuracy and flag inaccuracy. That is what Factual will provide: pre-publication fact-checking.

Another definition is post-publication fact-checking. I like to call this the fact-debunking industry, like Snopes and PolitiFact. So if Kamala Harris and Donald Trump debated, this is combing back through what they said for accuracy.

The third is when a reporter says: No third party helped; I did the fact-checking myself. But you can’t fact-check your own work. In my view, fact-checking is similar to the peer review process in science: You submit a paper and then other people vet its methods. In that model, fact-checking only works if somebody else is doing it. If you are doing it yourself, you are double-checking your own work, and I cannot consider that fact-checking. A new set of eyes brings some disinfectant to the whole editorial process.

Might the solution be to have a colleague in the newsroom look it over?
At some newspapers, the copy editor helps with fact-checking. If you are filing a story for a newspaper, it can be instructive to provide fact-checking annotations. If the editor wants to change the text for readability, they can go to the source material and figure out an accurate way to do that.

You do a lot. I think every freelance journalist would like to know how you juggle it all, or at least I would.
Over the years I’ve learned that not all my dreams need to be realized at once. The way that I made room to launch an agency is similar to the way I plan out a reporting project that is due in six months: I set manageable goals for myself every month. Example: In quarters one and two of 2024, I realized I had 10 hours a month to figure out Factual. Once I determine that, I just have to hold myself accountable.

This is the through-hiking perspective as well: On long trails, eventually I’m hiking 20-plus miles a day, but that’s not where I start. Building that muscle and rhythm into my workflow helps me account and reprioritize whatever’s going on in my life and business every month, every quarter.

What advice do you have for journalists who would like to become fact-checkers?
I think reporters are uniquely suited to being good fact-checkers. What happens so often with freelancers is that they are scared to start doing something new, even though the skills are transferable. For freelance reporters looking to break into fact-checking, emphasize your skills at chasing down facts and hunting the best source. Bring that to clients that you’ve loved working with before that might use fact-checkers: Hey, I’m offering a new service. Do you need any help?

This is expanding your service offerings as a freelancer rather than breaking into a new service. We have a whole episode on The Writers’ Co-op about ways to frame the transfer of skills from one service area or industry to another. Brooke Borel also wrote a good reference book about fact-checking. But there is no better way to learn than to practice.

In addition to your business focus, you are a talented journalist. Will we be seeing more journalistic work from you soonThank you. I am a freelance journalist who cares a lot about the craft, but I see my first business, my editorial business, as laying the groundwork for learning how to be an entrepreneur. I’ve started two businesses and now am on my third. I know how much the journalism industry is struggling. What I’ve taken from these 10 years of freelancing is how to build a business. If we’re talking about escape fantasies from journalism, that’s probably where I’m headed if my priorities change.

It gives me a lot less fear about this media environment for myself, but we shouldn’t take this on individually; we should fix the system. Personally, I see that freelancing let me build up the skills for running a business, which I then scaled up. It can give you the confidence to run other types of businesses as well.

* * *

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist based in Vermont.

The post A new freelance business works like a “dating app for fact-checking” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is our final dispatch from the 2024 Power of Narrative conference. For earlier posts, see deadline narratives by a Wall Street Journal podcast team, the braided structure used by The Atavist for complex stories, practical tips on empathy as a reporting tool and John Woodrow Cox on interviewing children about gun violence.

To write “I Lived to Tell the World,” a book of profiles of survivors of mass casualties such as the Holocaust and Rwandan genocide, Oregon-based writer Elizabeth Mehren collected an overwhelming amount of information. She had hours of audio recordings, video recordings, notes and interview transcripts from the 16 survivors she profiled. She had interviews with regional experts for historical context and countless academic articles on each of the mass casualties she covered.

Another journalist might be overwhelmed by that amount of research and the sheer length of the project. But Mehren — a former professor of journalism at Boston University’s College of Communication, Los Angeles Times New England bureau chief and Washington Post editor and author of four previous books — developed a process that works. In a session at the 2024 Power of Narrative conference at Boston University, she shared how she learned to turn all of this “stuff” (her own word) into a compelling narrative.

Start where the story starts

Mehren’s process began from the very first question of each first interview with a source. She knew that eventually she was going to build a timeline, so her first question aimed to determine where the story began. She asked about the person’s childhood or their everyday life before the crucible events. Even with the two Holocaust survivors she interviewed, who experienced anti-Semitism in their pre-Holocaust childhoods, there was a period that was normal before things escalated, she said.

Because of the importance of chronology, she asked a lot of “when” questions. When was your father taken away? Was it day or night?

Transcribe and cross-reference your notes

Mehren has several ways of keeping her material in mind as she researches. She transcribes her interviews. “It’s a really tedious process, but it works,” she said. She also meticulously cross-referenced all of her files.

For the book, she not only cross-referenced background material about the culture and politics of each region, but also her interview notes. This helped her avoid redundancy while interviewing and writing about several people from Bosnia and several from Cambodia, for example. Papers, such as photos and scraps with thoughts and insights went into a shoe box.

Create a timeline

Mehren had one main tip for turning a load of research into a narrative. “If you have this pile of abstract stuff,” Mehren said, “create a timeline. Chronology helps us organize things. I think it’s something our brain likes to have.”

That doesn’t mean you have to tell the story in chronological order, she said. You might want to start in the middle, then go back to the beginning. However, organizing your narrative starts with knowing the order of events.

Build around a central focus

While sifting through all the information she gathered, Mehren asked herself “the big, cosmic question: What is this about?” Any information that didn’t fit the focus wasn’t included.

Collaborate for accuracy, authenticity and morality

Finally, for Mehren, a story doesn’t just have a beginning, middle and end. “A good story engages us cognitively, emotionally, politically, ethically, ideologically and morally,” she said. “It helps readers connect with facts that can be confusing, and in my case, downright disturbing.”

To address the moral aspect of her work as an author, Mehren does something that as a reporter or a journalism professor she would have considered journalistic blasphemy: she collaborates with her sources. If anyone had suggested this when she was a journalism professor, she said, “I would have thrown something.”

Collaboration means her subjects get to review a draft of what she writes about them, and they get to correct any facts she may have misunderstood. They can’t change her writing or the conclusions she draws, but Mehren’s sources start the interviewing process knowing that they will see the result before anyone else does.

Even while telling these morally complex stories, Mehren believes it’s important to make sure storytelling doesn’t tip into advocacy. The difference, she said, is that advocates tell you what to think. A storyteller lets you draw your own conclusions.

Mehren used these techniques even at the very last moment of producing her widely-reviewed and praised book. After the book was written and edited, the publisher wanted to change the title, which had been “To Bear Witness,” from the Holocaust author Elie Wiesel quote carved into the entrance of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Unfortunately, many other books had already used it, her publisher pointed out.

To find a new title, Mehren reviewed her materials, thinking about the book’s focus. She came across a statement from a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, who gave Mehren a philosophical reason why he survived while the rest of his family was killed: “I think I lived in order to tell the world.”

“And that became the title,” she said, “because I realized that was what these stories were about, telling the world.”

* * *

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist based in Vermont.

The post How to turn all that “stuff” into narrative appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of ourdispatches from the 2024 Power of Narrative conference at Boston University. For the first post, see deadline narratives by a Wall Street Journal podcast team.

How can you make a story twice as rich, twice as intense and twice as meaningful? Braid or weave together two stories that resonate with each other. In a talk at the 2024 BU Power of Narrative conference, Atavist editor-in chief Seyward Darby explained how how two narrative threads can be woven into a story that is greater than its parts.

Darby used a story from The Atavist by Scott Eden, “The Gilded Age,” is a 25,000 word investigative story about the international gold trade. (Our summary includes mild spoilers, but that doesn’t take away from what you can learn by reading it.)

Step one: Count your threads and identify the resonance. Resonance is the key, and I confess that I looked up the definition to understand how it applies here. It means an echo or reverberation that enriches or intensifies. Darby wants us to ask: If you thread these things together, will the story elevate to a place it otherwise would not? How are these stories going to speak to each other? Where will they meet?

In “The Gilded Age,” one thread, or the A Plot, follows two men from Miami and how they grow rich by ignoring the corruption of the gold trade. The other thread, or B Plot, follows Don Alfredo, a land owner and logger in the Peruvean rainforest, whose land is being destroyed by illegal gold mining.

A hint of the resonance between the two plots comes in the first transition between them, Darby said. Eden writes that Miami men did not know that the place the “gold came from had been transformed into a hell on earth.” Lack of curiosity plays a big role in the story.

Step two: Timeline or outline your threads. When you see the key scenes in the order they happened, you can see how the pieces might fit together. For example, because most of “The Gilded Age” A Plot takes place in Miami, when someone from the Miami men’s team goes to the Peruvean rainforest, it’s a place where the pieces fit together. Another place they fit is when an A Plot character falls asleep during a presentation about the dangers of illegal mining:

In late 2014,Renato and several coworkers attended a mining conference at a hotel in Lima. They sat in on a panel about illegal mining, but no one paid much attention. “It was kind of like the ASPCA commercial on late-night television where they show dogs with one leg,” said an NTR employee.

For his part, Renato found the panel “ungodly boring.” As the presenters droned on about environmental destruction, he fell asleep.

Step three: Find the possible breaks where you can switch between plot lines. Using your timelines, look for the places where questions are raised or answered. Look for cliffhangers. The break should be in a place that subtly links to the next thread, but also leaves the reader eager for the first thread to pick back up.

Darby pointed to a section of the story where the Miami team is in peril after their supplier cheats them, leaving readers in suspense to go to another scene of fracturing, where someone is murdered in the rainforest:

With a group of Don Alfredo’s neighbors, Randy went back to the house. By then more than three hours had elapsed since the shooting. Puby, Don Alfredo’s estranged brother, showed up soon after. No one had contacted the police yet, though from Lima, Freddy had called an ambulance. Investigators finally arrived the next morning. A murder inquest was opened. Statements were taken. Because Randy was the only witness, he was simultaneously a suspect and presumed to be in grave danger. The killers might come back for him. Don Alfredo’s neighbors said they’d protect him.

Freddy mourned, he ruminated, he raged. His thoughts turned to Puby. “I saw my brother dead. It seems like they put three bullets in the head and death was instantaneous,” Puby had told a local reporter.

Puby was a gold miner. He’d tried to attack Don Alfredo with a machete. Was it possible, Freddy wondered, that his uncle was behind his father’s murder?

Step four: Play with the puzzle pieces. “I think of my work as a writer and editor as being a quilter who is figuring out how the pieces fit best together,” Darby said. Tools for this work include notecards or a whiteboard to list and rearrange scenes.

Step five: Tie everything together at the end. Leaning into the braiding metaphor, Darby said that just as a hair braid will only stay together if there is an elastic at the end, story threads should tie together at some point — although it doesn’t always have to be at the end. That can be as simple as characters meeting, or it can be a bigger revelation or epiphany. “It doesn’t have to blow your mind,” she said. “It just has to show that the time you spent with these threads is worth it.”

An early draft of “The Gilded Age” didn’t have that intersection, Darby said. But Eden did additional reporting and heard one of the Miami men’s (A Plot) reaction to Don Alfredo’s story (B Plot). It brought the two threads together literally and thematically. The piece ends with a child’s story that beautifully illuminates the story’s central conflict:

WHEN FREDDY VRACKO was a child—about eight years old—he wrote a story for school. He told me this toward the end of my first visit with him, at his mother’s house in Puerto Maldonado. He’d shown me old family photos of the home his father had built in the jungle—like something out of Robinson Crusoe—and of Don Alfredo in his thirties, standing in his sawmill amid stacks of boards planed smooth and ready for the carpenter. Young Freddy’s story was meant to be like a fairy tale. “El Asseradero de Oro” is the title he gave it. The golden sawmill.

“It is about a man like my father who knows the jungle,” Freddy explained. The man is leaving on a trip, and before he goes he tells his brother: You must protect this enormous ancient tree, “because it is the spirit of the forest.” But the brother forgets what he has been told. He cuts down the tree so he can sell the wood. And when he cuts down the tree, the whole forest—“everything, absolutely everything”—turns to gold. The man eventually returns from his trip and sees what his brother has done. He takes his son on a long journey “all over Madre de Dios.” They seek out other spirits of the forest in order to ask for forgiveness. At last they find a “brother spirit” of the lost tree, which grants them their request. Bit by bit, the forest regenerates from solid dead gold “back to how it was.”

But that’s the child’s ending. In this other ending—the real ending—the father is murdered, the guilty walk free, and as long as the rivers of money keep flowing, the forest can only be made of gold.

A braided or dual narrative means taking two stories that could almost stand alone and weaving them together, Darby said. Meaning comes from those two stories and the resonance between them.

* * *

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist who is based in Vermont.

The post 2024 Power of Narrative: Double the power of your story with a braided structure appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

It’s a chronic problem with narrative journalism. No matter what media you work in, no matter what genre, no matter whether your deadlines are short and solid or long and adjustable — it never feels like you have enough time to produce the best story.

But consider The Journal., a podcast that tells “the most important stories, explained through the lens of business,” by The Wall Street Journal in partnership with Spotify. The show has aired a narrative every weekday for five years. Even allowing for a bit of time off, that’s roughly 250 stories delivered at a very fast clip. So it’s hard imagine two people with more experience telling stories on a tight deadline than Katherine Brewer, a senior editor at The Journal podcast, and Sarah Platt, the program’s executive producer. The two offered tips for fast-turn stories in a talk at the 2024 Boston University Power of Narrative conference.

First, a caveat: The Journal. team includes several producers and works on multiple stories at a time. But they have created episodes in mere hours and rarely spend more than a few days on a single story from start to finish. The narratives are always built from a strong news hook and rooted in a keen knowledge of narrative structure. Here’s the core process:

• Find a character. In news-driven stories like the ones told on The Journal., you are really telling two stories, or two focused parts of the same story, Brewer said. The first is the traditional news story, such as echnical and business reasons that iPhones and Android phones are incompatible. The second is the story of your character. In one episode of The Journal., for example, the main character was a man couldn’t join his in-laws’ family group chats because he is an Android user and they use iPhones. In other shows, the character may be competing sides of a lawsuit, or a high-level company official or a well-known person in the business world, such as Elon Musk or Sam Altman.
• Create a timeline. “Chronology is the fastest way to narrative,” Brewer said. That doesn’t mean you have to tell your story chronologically, but a timeline helps you determine where to start, and where find the beginning, middle and end of your story.
• Use a three-act structure. Act one is the set up. Act two is confrontation. Act three is the resolution. “You can scramble those,” Brewer said, “but if you don’t have those pieces somewhere, then you probably need to re-think your narrative.”
• Know your driving question. “Reality TV is good at ‘driving questions,’” Platt said. (Example: Who will be voted off the island tonight?) Platt played a clip from an episode of The Journal. featuring a woman whose car keeps getting stolen. The driving question of that story: Why are Kias and Hyundais being stolen in record numbers? “It sets up the stakes for the character, but also for the car companies,” Platt said. While some journalists think of this as the thesis, The Journal. team likes to build stories around a strong, driving question, which then threads through the three-act structure. In the first act, a question is raised; in act two, the question is explored; and in act three, it is answered. Platt warns against building a story around a driving question that is not answerable: “That is almost always a mistake.”
• It has to mean something. While a news story can end with what’s happening next, a good narrative needs to reveal something about the world, Platt said. The answer to your driving question is what provides that meaning. This can be difficult, but small moments can be profound. The pair used an example from a story about gambling addiction. When the main character walked into her first Gamblers Anonymous meeting, the room was full and she realized that what had happened to her could happen to anybody. That small moment contained a profound realization.
• Stay focused. Keeping focused on the story in progress and the process of producing it helps The Journal team work efficiently. The editor and producers ask direct, specific questions of rpeorters and don’t allow tangents. “Know your driving question, know what you want your timeline to be, and stay within the walls of that,” Brewer said. That discipline of focus allowed The Journal. to post an episode on the day-long January 6, 2021, Capitol attack that same evening. It remains one of The Journal’s most-downloaded episodes.

* * *

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist who is based in Vermont.

The post Power of Narrative: Compelling stories delivered on tight deadline appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Browse through a year of articles on The Atavist Magazine website and you will see stories about a diverse collection of topics: swimming cows, abuse at an elite high school, a fossil tooth,* a spy, a cult and a daring escape across the Bering Sea.

“The thing uniting our stories is that they are narrative. They are driven by plot, with great characters and scenes,” said The Atavist’s editor-in-chief in her session at this year’s Power of Narrative Conference at Boston University. “You come to The Atavist for the kind of story you want to sit with. You want to read it to the end because you want to find what’s going to happen, which can mean a number of things.”

In her talk, Darby discussed the process of writing a compelling narrative, from interview through edits, including the art of keeping readers scrolling to the end of the story. Sometimes a writer knows how they are going to propel a reader through the story before they even pitch The Atavist, Darby said. Other times the elements are there, but the story’s engine is either built or re-tuned during the editing process.

Once, Darby said, The Atavist commissioned a writer who had never written an article longer than 1,000 words, but still had a compelling story to tell. Another time, a writer had gathered fascinating information about the decline of monarch butterflies and the people who were fighting to save them by various means, including growing native plants. But what would hold it together as a story? What would keep readers scrolling so that they could would follow the butterflies and the people to try to save them.

The power behind a story, a “story engine” or “narrative engine,” can be a question. Tom French, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who now teaches at Indiana University, has often said that a story’s engine is a question. Among the questions that have driven French’s own stories are: “Will the boy get a kiss?” and “When the tiger escapes from her enclosure at the zoo, who will die?” Readers keep reading to find out the answer to that question. Beneath all of those questions is another question, French has said: “What happens next?”

Darby said that a story engine can be a direct question like “Who done it?” or it may be something more subtle.

She explained how to find the best what-happens-next thread to pull your story together. One technique is to write a working nut graf — a paragraph that summarizes the story and puts it into context or that links the story to a larger meaning. She doesn’t necessarily recommend that you include that nut graf in your story, but to use it as a navigational tool to guide your writing. A nut graf is especially helpful when you are lost in a thicket of research and interview transcripts.

Tell it out loud to a friend — or yourself

Darby also recommends telling the story as you would to a friend — not as a way to write the final draft, but as another tool to find that narrative thread. Telling a story out loud lets us tap into the “eternal human art” of verbal storytelling because we want, by our very natures, to keep the listener entertained. She recommends recording the narration in a voice memo on your phone. In the course of that telling, and then listening to it, ask yourself what were the most important things you said to keep people engaged.

When you find those engaging things, you have found your story engine.

For example, Darby said, Nora Caplan-Bricker, a Boston writer, pitched a story about the decline of monarch butterflies that was already a perfect feature for a magazine like Scientific American. Caplan-Bricker turned it into an Atavist story by including the journey of a single butterfly as a unifying thread. Caplan-Bricker could do this because people tag butterflies with numbered stickers to track their migrations. A boy had named this butterfly “Flamingo.” (You can practically feel the story click into place with that fact.) The result, Darby says, is a beautiful story about climate grief, butterflies and making a difference.

Darby sees the story engine as including not only the question, but the person, object or situation attached to that question. For example, it includes the person trying to answer the question. In another illustration of a story engine, she recounted an article about a possible treatment for Batten’s disease, sometimes described as juvenile Alzheimer’s. The story’s focus was a boy with the disease and how his vocabulary shrank as the disease progressed. After the treatment, he gained a word. The big loss of language and then the small gain of a word was the story’s engine, she said.

Propelling the narrative forward

Keeping readers reading isn’t always about ratcheting up the drama, Darby said. A cliffhanger isn’t always the best way to end a section. She prefers sections that end in “trampolines” rather than cliffhangers. A cliffhanger leaves the protagonist in peril, but can leave readers hanging. A trampoline is something that, when your reader lands on it, bounces them forward.

For example, in The Atavist story “A Crime Beyond Belief” by Katia Savchuk, about a home invasion in the San Francisco area, the story could have begun with the bizarre crime and the police department’s dismissal of the couple’s terrifying experience. Instead, Darby said, the story begins with a police detective finding a strange collection of items in a suspect’s home: swim goggles covered with black tape, a Nerf Super Soaker with a flashlight and a laser pointer taped to it, a bottle of NyQuil and one blond hair.

Sometimes, Darby said, the question that will really keep a reader wondering is not “What happens next?” but the mystification of “What is going on here?”

I came away from the session not only with ideas about how to find the through-line or the narrative engine within a story, but also about where to search for stories in the first place. I’m inspired to find some significant endings and then look upstream for the stories that brought them about. If I’m lucky, I may find my own equivalent of a butterfly and the child who named it “Flamingo.”

* * *

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist based in Vermont. Her story, “The Curious Case of Nebraska Man,” was published in The Atavist last year.

The post 2023 Power of Narrative: Revving the story engine appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Profiles are the bread and butter of nearly every feature writer at nearly every type of publication, from trade magazines, to national newspapers, to the glossiest of newsstand magazines. In the rush of deadlines, it’s tempting to see a profile as a one-source story or as a place to dazzle readers with your writing, even if your access to your subject wasn’t broad.

However, Geoff Edgers, a national arts reporter for The Washington Post, had another take on the genre in a talk at the 2023 Power of Narrative conference at Boston University: The way to write the best profile is to do the best reporting.

Edgers’s profile of the actor and comedian Adam Sandler, which ran in the Post in mid-March, was a culmination of years of work. The week it published, it was selected as one of the recommended stories in Sunday Long Reads.

Of course, while Edgers is known for profiling some of the most famous people in America, most of us are profiling people known only in our cities or industries. Still, everyone from CEOs to dog trainers may see themselves as a celebrity, so Edgers’s techniques can apply no matter who you are profiling.

Extensive pre-reporting

Because securing a celebrity interview can take years, Edgers always has many profiles going, each at a different stage. “I just have all these strings out all the time,” Edgers said.

It took him seven years to convince Adam Sandler to speak to him. He used the time well. For the artists Edgers writes about, research means being familiar with all their work, and in this case that meant he and his family watched all of Sandler’s movies. “You can’t fake knowing a body of work,” Edgers said.

That background research also meant interviewing co-stars, business partners and other people in Sandler’s life even before he had Sandler’s agreement to talk. “I did all the secondaries first and hoped I wouldn’t waste them,” he said.

When it comes to the secondary interviews that give a well-rounded view of the profile subject, Edgers talks to the people the subject suggests and comes up with his own list. Some of his favorite people to talk with are people who are close to the subject but who are out of the spotlight themselves. That meant talking with Sandler’s buddies from New York University, some of whom he still works with, and the director of one of Sandler’s first movies, who had dropped out of the public eye. “I found her phone number listed online,” Edgers said.

This early reporting is important, because Edgers has already decided on an angle by the time he pitches the idea of the profile to the subject, although that angle may change during the reporting. Very often his angle is that the person is under-appreciated, he said, or that they are known for one aspect of their career when he thinks they should be better known for something else.

Edgers prefers to observe and interact with his subjects doing the things they are famous for, not a leisure activity. Some writers believe that seeing the subject out of their element adds depth to the portrayal, but Edgers disagrees. “I always get asked if I play golf,” he said, but he hasn’t done any golfing interviews. “I want to see people at work, doing what they do, but I don’t want to fake it,” he said.

When he profiled Ava DuVernay, he took the half-hour press tour interview slot for the release of her Netflix documentary “The 13^th,” but he didn’t stop there. He attended a talk she gave at a prestigious arts institut, and went to the studio to see her directing the movie “A Wrinkle in Time.” The profile’s publication was timed to the release of that movie, Edgers said, but it was based on a year of reporting.

Trusting your curiosity

Edgar said that his best profiles happen not when they are an obligatory event when the subject has a book or movie coming out, “but when I have to do this story before I die.”* **

It’s a good reminder that our best profile subjects live where our own fascinations meet our readers’ interests. It’s also a reminder that when we are excited about what we are writing, and treat all our profile subjects as celebrities, it’s easier to create an exciting experience for the reader as well.

* * *

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist who is based in Vermont,

The post 2023 Power of Narrative: Prepping for profiles appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

After reading a remarkable work of nonfiction, have you ever wished you could learn exactly how the writer created what you just read? I don’t think I’m alone in being intrigued by how the stories that move me came about. We all juggle required assignments with passion projects. We all decide to ask our sources certain questions and not to ask others. We all need to arrange the information we find into a particular experience for our readers. But some articles rise above the ordinary to create memorable experiences for readers.

How does that happen?

Lane DeGregory, the Pulitzer-Prize winning enterprise reporter for The Tampa Bay Times, has created more than her share of these extraordinary experiences for readers. In her new book published this month, “'The Girl in the Window 'and Other True Tales,” DeGregory shows that not only does she have the knack for writing emotionally detailed narrative articles, she also has an incredible memory for how those articles came to be and an admirable generosity in sharing her techniques.

Here, I must confess to being a Lane DeGregory fan. I’ve listened to every episode of WriteLane, a podcast of story craft conversations between DeGregory and her former editor, Maria Carillo. In a two-minute video interview, she discusses her passion for storytelling. And I got to speak with DeGregory two years ago for a Storyboard piece about the reporting and writing decisions that went into her 2002 profile of a transgender woman.

DeGregory’s new book collects 24 of the stories that have appeared under her byline over the years. The anthology inevitably includes some old favorites, along wiht bits of advice that DeGregory has mentioned in her podcast or at conferences and workshops. Still, encountering them in a new form is a helpful reminder of her creative and compassionate approach to profiles, including:

• to ignore the “important” people for the more interesting people in the shadows
• to suggest that a story subject bring a friend or relative to an interview help them feel safer
• to find the “bruise on the apple” by including a profile subject’s flaws so that they come across as fully rounded and credible humans
• to always get documents, official and personal, not just to fact-check what your subject is telling you but because they often include specifics helpful for creating a narrative

The book also offers insights into DeGregory's work that I hadn't heard before, including the various ways she has written about subjects being dishonest with her or with others, while still portraying these people empathetically. For example, in a story about panhandlers, DeGregory mentions a man who “swears he fought in ’Nam,” wears a hat that says “U.S. Air Force” and carries a sign with the Marine motto, “Semper fi.” In an annotation about it in her book, Gregory writes:

Some of the best characters are flawed and unreliable. I needed the panhandlers to trust me…. But I wanted readers to know that I didn’t believe everything they were saying…. You don’t have to aggressively challenge their claims. But alluding to conflicting military allegiances, you can hint that the truth is elusive.

I know that when writing narrative, especially the intimate narratives DeGregory specializes in, there will always be people who won’t talk with you and mysteries that will remain unsolved no matter how long you dig. For example, a story about a child's murder includes a section where many people in the child's life express their guilt and regret over small actions that may or may not have saved the child. She writes about asking the same question of people closest to the child but who declined to talk to her. Rhetorical questions about their roles, along with the simple sentence, “None of them would say what happened,” tells the story these sources would not.

Lessons for beginners and pros

The book is published by the University of Chicago Press, so easy to see as a textbook for journalism classes — and to envy the students in those classes; anyone who aspires to narrative journalism would be fortunate to be exposed early on to DeGregory’s empathetic stories and the exacting details of her approach. But journalists of all levels and experience should find valuable tips.

For each story in the anthology, DeGregory lists how long it took to report and how long to write. She describes how and why it was assigned, and sometimes her reaction to getting that assignment. She doesn’t always welcome each assignment — which in itself is a good lesson for beginning journalists, and a good reminder for experienced pros. But it’s what she does with those less welcomed assignments that’s worth the price of the book.

DeGregory may have resisted writing an anniversary story of a heinous crime, rejected following the journalistic pack to Orlando to report on the Pulse nightclub shooting and snubbed a public relations person’s plea to write about foster children. But how she made each of those stories her own offers the rest of us possibilities for our own unwelcome assignments.

For the crime anniversary, DeGregory dug a little deeper than the many who had already covered the story, revealing the humanity of both a murderer and his victim. For the nightclub shooting, she avoided the journalistic pack and found a unique perspective on a heavily reported event. And by focusing on a single foster child — one with an extraordinarily painful story finally turning toward hope ­— DeGregory wrote the series that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

The table of contents is organized by the core journalistic strategy demonstrated in the featured story, allowing readers to dip into wisdom they find most useful or intriguing. Running in the margins of every story are insights into DeGregory’s reporting and writing process. She reveals the question she asked to get that great quote. She points out wordplay and her thought process while writing those words. Even better, she admits when hunches or pure luck resulted in journalism gold. The result is a little like a Storyboard annotation and a little like having DeGregory herself reading over your shoulder and explaining the techniques behind the magic.

“The Girl in the Window and Other True Tales” satisfied my curiosity about how these richly textured stories were created and offered advice and inspiration to dive into my next narrative journalism project.

* * *

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist based in Vermont.

The post An annotated guide to narrative magic appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]T[/dc]amara Dean thinks a lot about the elements of story, whether she is writing for magazines such as The Progressive; essays for Orion or Creative Nonfiction; or a fictional short story for a literary journal such as the Bellevue Literary Review. “I’m an impatient reader,” she says. “I find it hard to stay with moony or philosophical nature writing. I want things to move along. I want my revelations to come with liveliness.”

That thoughtfulness underlies “Slow Blues: On confronting the wonder and terror of nature,” published in the autumn 2020 issue of The American Scholar, and a finalist for the 2021 National Magazine Award for feature writing.

“Slow Blues” is taken from the common name for a particular type of firefly that lives only in the same stretch of southwestern Wisconsin that Dean calls home. Her story — part nature essay, part personal essay and part journalistic report — takes readers on a journey through the same region, where she is drawn by her awe of fireflies. It’s also a journey through her personal struggle to recover from multiple cases of Lyme disease, which left her fearful she might have to leave the rural land she loved:

We could find a safer place to call home. But we might sacrifice, among many things, the potential for regular awe. I wasn’t sure I could make the trade.

The structure of Dean’s piece, made up of entwined story strands, is known to essayists as a braided essay, and similar to what some journalists call a woven narrative. It moves readers from moment to idea to information to digression along a route that is neither predictable or random.

“I find it hard to stay with moony or philosophical nature writing,” Dean says. “I want things to move along.”

[caption id="attachment_165971" align="alignright" width="141"] Tamara Dean[/caption]

Dean earned an MFA in fiction writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the tools of fiction are put to good use in “Slow Blues.” “I’ve spent so many years studying and writing fiction,” she says. “The kinds of essays that appeal to me as a reader follow some of the conventions of fiction.”

She also teaches fiction and nonfiction writing in workshops for The Loft in Minneapolis, and independently. In 2008, she published a book on sustainable living, “The Human-Powered Home.” Her previous career in technology resulted in bestselling college textbooks on computer networking. (And she is not to be confused with the other Tamara Dean, an Australian art photographer who also blends nature with very human intimacy. “But I’ve occasionally received email messages meant for her,” Dean the writer says.)

Dean’s grasp of sophisticated and satisfying storytelling is seen in the ending of “Slow Blues.” She concludes the piece, not with the end of the quest, but with the completion of the protagonist’s emotional story arc. It closes on a hopeful note, but with a sense of what has been lost and of the work that has gone into achieving that hope. “I like the idea of the best endings combining an emotional win with a loss,” Dean says. “I want to be immersed in a world of the senses, captivated by a mystery or quest, and brought along on a ride by an empathetic protagonist.”

I asked Dean about her writing process in general and the specifics of writing “Slow Blues.” Our conversation is edited for length and clarity, then followed by an annotation of the text.

[dc small]Y[/dc]ou are one of those writers who does it all: fiction, essays, journalism. Which comes first, the genre or the writing? That is, when you have an idea, how and when do you decide what form it will take?
I’m usually sure about what genre an idea belongs to from the start. Ideas that arrive with a big “what if?” factor are likely to belong to fiction. Ideas that I think will benefit from a fidelity to facts or are utterly compelling without any make-believe quotient are likely to become nonfiction.

Journalists typically have been trained (sometimes over decades) not to include themselves in their articles. Do you have any advice about how we can use our personal experiences to generate stories?
What I tell students in my workshops is to go straight for your obsessions, your guilty pleasures. Whatever topic holds the most energy for you right now, even if it seems silly, you’ll write about in a compelling way.

What about getting the most out of writing in the first person? What’s the most important thing a writer can do to use the first person to its full effect?
Be faithful to the voice and stance in every aspect — diction, syntax, attitude, emphasis, etc.

What do you wish other writers knew about “Slow Blues?”
It went through 12 drafts before I felt satisfied with it. I didn’t used to like revision — and I still love first-drafting best. But I’ve come to appreciate that taking time with a piece, looking at it from multiple angles, and asking more of it transforms the material and surprises me. I’ve heard some writers say that revision not only creates better versions of our work, but also better versions of ourselves. We grow by close attention and devotion to a story or topic. I think that’s true.

The annotation: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Jackson’s responses in blue. To read the story without annotations, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button, which you’ll find just below the social media buttons in the top right-hand menu or the individual gray boxes throughout the text, or at the top of your mobile device.

Slow Blues

On confronting the wonder and terror of nature

By Tamara Dean | November 12, 2020

[dc]L[/dc]ate on a mid-June night, I stood barefoot in the yard between our house and a field of prairie forbs. Around me fireflies blinked greenish yellow—hovering, dodging, or posing on stems. The night before, they had drawn me to the window. Now, although I’d stayed indoors for most of the past six months, their light had lured me outside. Do you have any rules for deciding whether you will be a character in an article?I don’t. I guess it’s intuitive. If it serves the truth and meaning of a piece, I’ll make myself a character. In some articles, I’ve used myself as a stand-in for the reader, briefly. I might convey how I was introduced to an issue or affected by it, then move on to the meat of the piece.

I wore clothing infused with permethrin, a potent tick repellent, and carried a canning jar and a swatch of cheesecloth for a lid. In minutes, a fast flasher flew into the jar. It signaled frantically as I brought it indoors for inspection. Under a magnifying light I saw its red-dotted head, its tan-striped back, nearly two centimeters long, and its antennae half that length. An ivory lantern spanned two segments of its lower abdomen. Lynn Faust’s Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs (2017) told me that this specimen was probably a subspecies of Photuris versicolor—common in the eastern United States—but beyond that, I had no idea. Fireflies can be hard to distinguish without a microscope. Some are more easily identified by behavior, their blinking pattern, and the hue of their light.

I kept the beetle only long enough to examine it. I didn’t want it to miss another moment of its brief mating season, its brief adult life—a mere three or four weeks. Outside, the field was still alight. I uncapped the jar and shook it gently over the grass, but the firefly, probably petrified, didn’t leave. I set down the jar and left it there, assuming the insect would find its way out. For the reader, this article starts with a scene with you in your yard looking for fireflies, but is this how it started for you as a writer? Was there a scene you wanted to capture? A story you wanted to tell?It really began with a fascination with the fireflies. And a quest. Once I discovered that this rare, blue-glowing firefly lived near me and nowhere else in the world, I had to see if I could find it. I didn’t intend to write about my experience with Lyme disease, but that was a big part of my life when I was hunting for fireflies, so it came along.

[dc small]M[/dc]y second bout with Lyme disease had made me feel steamrollered, flat as a paper doll, limp as a deflated balloon. Some days I didn’t have the strength to sit at a keyboard and type. While I lay on the couch, my ears rang and pains stabbed at random—elbow to ankle to knee to hand. My heart would stumble, stop, suspend its work like a parachute waiting to open, then restart with a jolt.

My partner, David, and I had moved to the country 12 years earlier to try our hand at rural living and learn all we could about the land and its inhabitants. We’d made bricks from our own clay subsoil and built a house with them. We foraged and grew fruits and vegetables, heated with wood we cut from our forest, and experimented with prairie restoration. The life we’d crafted and loved required energy. Now I was walled off from that dream. I gazed out the window as the seasons came and went.

In attempts to be positive, I would ask myself, What can I do? Most days I had enough energy to hold a book and pen. So I read and took notes. Were you conscious of this being a braided essay while you were writing it?Yes, I set out to write a braided essay. My big idea was to juggle more elements than I’d ever tried to juggle in one piece. The first version had too many elements, including a friend’s death that happened the first summer I went looking for the slow blues and even a potential UFO sighting! But these were distracting, beside the point, and needed to go.

[dc small]A[/dc]ccording to Faust, over 2,000 species of fireflies exist worldwide, but that number is a guess. A thousand more might remain unidentified. Some are scarce, found in shards of habitat—a single slope in the western Andes, a certain beach along the Delaware coast.

One type, Photuris caerulucens, nicknamed “slow blue,” lives only in a narrow band, 80 miles north of our place, that crosses the Mississippi River from Minnesota to Wisconsin. It glows turquoise for a second, dips as if to punctuate its message, then goes dark for about four seconds before signaling again. Slow blues were first identified in 1926, and researchers recorded sightings in 1970 and 2014, but the species is minimally documented. Few scientists have seen it. Entomologists I consulted at the University of Wisconsin–Madison weren’t familiar with it. Like me, they had been introduced to slow blues by Faust’s book.

On routine walks around our property, I have often encountered phenomena I could not have imagined: a live snake in an overhand knot in the middle of a deer path, a road carpeted with toad hatchlings, an oak’s canopy thick with raccoons that swung like monkeys and scarfed down acorns all morning. I would gape, lose my sense of time’s passage, lose myself. Each discovery reminded me that more discoveries were possible. If wanting more awe is a kind of greed, I was greedy.

I wanted to see the slow blues.

I hoped their range was poorly understood and that they lived farther south than where they had been identified. Sitting inside, I watched for them. I wished for a blue-lit beetle to rap on my window, but the only flashes I saw that June were yellow or green. I knew that awe depends partly on luck and partly on effort. To see a slow blue, I would have to venture beyond my yard. Did you write the two strands of the essay separately, then weave them together? Or did you find yourself digressing as you wrote? I didn’t write the strands separately. I deliberately toggled between subjects as I moved forward. The sequence of material in the final draft is basically as it was in the first draft. I like to play with contrasts as I write, let my mind wander and take leaps. As a reader, I love when an author takes leaps, when I’m challenged to figure out how things are connected, why she juxtaposed the material in that way.

[dc small]E[/dc]xhaustion had kept me indoors, but so did the fear of being bitten again. Our woods and fields were full of blacklegged ticks, which convey the Lyme disease bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi, to other animals through their bites. I had often found the poppy-seed-sized nymphs or BB-sized adults on my skin after hikes. Some were crawling. Some had latched on. I would pluck them off or pry them out nonchalantly—until I got sick.

My doctor, a regional Lyme disease expert, had called our valley “the Midwest’s ground-zero” for tick-borne illnesses. A month before I went out to catch a firefly, a friend who lives up the road had been hospitalized with anaplasmosis, another of the six diseases conveyed by the ticks in our area. A second woman I knew was struggling to live after anaplasmosis caused her kidneys to fail. So far, I had avoided the deadliest pathogens. Still, I resented the one that ruled my life.

During my first bout with Lyme, in 2012, I had heard voices. Berating, shrill, insistent. I’d told the doctor, “I feel like I’m possessed.” He looked up from my blood test results and said, “You are.” He explained how the bacteria lodge in the heart, joints, and nervous system tissue and take different forms, making themselves more resistant to antibiotics. How the infection causes the brain to swell and how that leads to headaches, confusion, and behavioral changes. Lyme had made me no longer me.

Defiantly—very much like me—I told the doctor, “I’m going to beat this,” as I marched out of his office.

He called after me, “Well, I’m glad you have a good attitude.”

The Lyme bacteria’s possession dredged up memories of delusional parasitosis. For asthma, at 13, I had been prescribed adult doses of two drugs whose extreme side effects had included hallucinations and psychosis. I watched, horrified, as worms crawled out of my arms and legs. I was convinced I had lice. I pulled out my hair strand by strand, picked at my scalp, and woke my mom at all hours to show her proof—some imagined but very real arthropod pinched between my fingernails—that I was infested.

That phobia ended when I stopped taking the medicine, but thereafter, I was warier around insects. I cringed at any reference to lice. I inspected the sheets for bedbug trails. Then came Lyme disease, and with it, a concerning circularity: one form of psychosis caused by the bacteria’s effect on the brain is delusional parasitosis. I wondered if I was particularly susceptible. And if so, who was I to gauge whether my fear of ticks was overblown? Most writers who aren’t already professionals tend to focus on writing about their own experiences. What is the most important thing these writers can do to make their experiences relevant to readers?Reach the universal through the particular. People want to read about experiences as filtered through a distinctive sensibility. The sensory details you notice and how you perceive them make up your self on the page — the reader’s guide. Through these details, the big emotions like fear and love become visceral and readers are more deeply affected than they would be if you just wrote, “I was afraid of the swamp.”

[dc small]S[/dc]low blues, according to Faust’s book, had been seen over a marshy field with tamaracks in the distance, “between the now-small community of Bluff Siding and the village of Dodge, Wisconsin.” Bluff Siding is a bar, a bank, and a few homes overlooking a state highway that hugs the Mississippi River. Beside the river is a federal wildlife refuge. The refuge’s director told me slow blues didn’t exist there but suggested they might be found in the nearby Tamarack Creek Wildlife Area.

In early July, David and I drove to Tamarack Creek. On the way we passed industrial chicken operations with their block-long barns. The farmhouses and outbuildings became fewer and farther apart and the roads became smaller, until we were driving on a dirt track in the woods. Lightning flashed above the hills to our north. We parked in a turnoff hemmed in by trees. With alarming speed, insects enveloped the car—mosquitoes, of course, and flies the yellow-gray of a tornado-brewing sky.

I sat still in the silent, safe interior. We could turn around and go home. But we had researched and planned the outing. We had driven an hour and a half to witness something astonishing. I put on a mesh jacket with a veil over my permethrin shirt, took a deep breath, and stepped out.

[dc small]Y[/dc]ears earlier, between my first and second bouts of Lyme, a friend told me that the disease had changed her personality. Once, she had been an extrovert; now, she was reluctant to go out. She no longer planned parties or volunteered at her kids’ school.

With my second case of Lyme I experienced similar inversions. Where I had been prone to impatience and haste, I was now slow and mild. I walked at a lag, pitching and rolling as if inside a bubble, while the horizon bobbed, too. I preferred sitting still. I could endure hours of small talk with dreamy, outsize interest. My lifelong insomnia disappeared. My memory was potholed, my reasoning sludgy. Also, just as I leaned on David physically when I was too weak to walk, I leaned on him emotionally more than before. I didn’t want to be left alone, not even for an hour. What are the benefits of including the first person and personal experience in stories? Are there any that stand out for you as a writer and a reader?It’s strange to say as a personal essayist, but I’m wary of the first person. It can be cloying or claustrophobic, easily deceptive. But it can also be convincing in a way that other points of view aren’t. The reader is completely immersed in the narrator’s worldview. Still, I think the first person requires extra caution, or skill, to use it to its full effect.

[dc small]A[/dc]cross the road from where we’d parked, David led the way into the bog, stomping down the reeds to clear a path. The sun was setting. The air was muggy. Thousands of fireflies blinked around us. They appeared as a web of tiny lanterns strung across that middle of nowhere. I felt daring and full of wonder, like the person I had been before Lyme, as I entered the marsh.

In an email exchange, Faust told me that a dozen species of fireflies probably live on my property, but I had distinguished only two types in my back yard. At Tamarack Creek, I recognized a multiplicity, each with a subtly different hue and pulse pattern. One type floated slowly as it glowed. Another dipped while signaling. But I saw no light that could have been called blue or bluish green. We stood among the reeds for hours, dwarfed by them, suspended between the pulsing lights. Then, in one moment, the bog went dark. In the next moment, all the beetles flared again. We gasped. Faust told me later that although synchronously flashing fireflies don’t live in Wisconsin, “they often seem to get one another going, with their enthusiasm causing periodic mass flashes.”

I detained a few fireflies in empty spice jars and examined them under a headlamp, but they looked just like the one I’d caught in our yard—too large to be slow blues and signaling yellow-green. Maybe we were early. Maybe we’d picked the wrong spot. How narrow, really, is the slow blues’ range? Are they rare or only understudied?

I’ve read that science has not even begun to decipher the mysteries of the commonest species, such as field mice, and that we have discovered only 14 percent of the species living on our planet. Did you give any thought to what was the right amount of scientific detail to include in the piece? Did you take any scientific facts out? Were there any facts that you only added in a very late draft?Yes! I think my tolerance for scientific detail is higher than most people’s. I’ve heard that from trusted readers over the years. So I’m in the habit of watching for an excess of those details when I revise. In an early version of this piece, I had mentioned the method for determining which days in July the slow blues would be flashing, including a definition of mean growing degree days (mGDD). Who cares? Something I added later was the bit about fireflies’ use in Japanese traditional medicine. It fit and underscored my point. Often while hiking, I’ve thought, Why do we explore space or read science fiction when we’re surrounded by the bizarre and miraculous at home?

[dc small]“N[/dc]ervous awe and apprehension are born out of proximity and attention,” the poet Mary Ruefle writes in her essay “On Fear.” She quotes Barry Lopez: “On a day-to-day basis [Inuit people] have more fear. Not of being dumped into cold water from an umiak, not a debilitating fear. They are afraid because they accept fully what is violent and tragic in nature.” She adds, “The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it.”

Allowing for the common, if problematic, distinction between “nature” and “human,” when I was a city dweller, I would drive hours to take solace in nature’s sensory extravaganza—the pine’s incense, the creek’s rush, owls calling at dusk. It calmed and revived me. But my noticing then was temporary, and being short-lived, superficial. After I moved to the country, nature dazzled me in different ways. I observed its systems at work, its rhythms and interdependencies. It seemed to want nothing from me. What a relief. I could wade through the river and wander all day on the other side without a smartphone, ID, or money. Nature didn’t ask favors or demand a response. But that was only more romantic imagining. Lyme disease made clear to me that nature has an agenda of its own, and a certain degree of wariness is wise.

[dc small]A[/dc] week after David and I stood in the marsh, I went slow blue hunting again, this time with my friend Liz. I had studied the map and found another tamarack swamp closer to Bluff Siding, where the entomologist Eunice Myers and her student Bernard Boland had identified and named the slow blues in 1926.

As we drove north, I watched the verdant hills and thought, peril. With every passing field and forest: tick, tick, tick, tick. How many millions were out there, lying in wait? One night in the swamp—bushwhacking through vegetation, standing still in the bug-thick air—seemed foolish in retrospect. It might have been all I could tolerate.

Studies with mice demonstrate that memories can be transmitted through generations and that specific phobias might be inherited. I welcomed this news. Maybe my shaking and sweating palms when climbing a ladder weren’t so irrational. According to my crude understanding of epigenetics, my symptoms might have originated in the refashioning of a 16th-century woman’s DNA as she watched her husband fall to his death from the chimney he was mending. Thus, her progeny’s DNA harbored a sensible fear of heights.

Genetics might have explained my acrophobia, but my fear of bugs was learned. I paid them little mind when I was a child. Even as an adult, I don’t fear them categorically. Rather, I fear their cunning and what they convey—not death so much as my involuntary metamorphosis into a person I don’t recognize. Although my journal indicates that in July 2017, I was feeling somewhat better, with enough energy to drive and walk and take notes, and enough lucidity to identify what I observed, I was not who I had been, and I didn’t know if I would ever return.

Philosophers and physicists say that repulsions come with equal attractions. But whether we fear or adore something, we are bound in a relationship with it. I wanted a better, braver bond with arthropods. The slow blues offered possibility. Also, inspiration. For this nearly forgotten species in its nearly forgotten habitat, a small blinking light was a matter of survival, an urgent attempt to carry on. A hopeful sign I needed to see.

[dc small]I[/dc] parked on the shoulder of a county road next to the swamp. It was 70 degrees at 10 p.m., dark, humid, and very still. The sky was cloudless, the Big Dipper garish above us. I wore my mesh bug suit and carried a camera, flashlight, notebook, and pen. Liz carried a butterfly net. I vowed to stay on the pavement to avoid ticks.

The slim, curving road looked similar to the road I live on but felt less friendly. Pickups rumbled in from a distance and blew past us. Each time one approached, we scurried to stand behind my car. A few motorists slowed. One man stopped and asked if we were okay, and we hastily answered, “Yes!” Once the headlights passed, we focused on the marsh again. We saw fast flashers, slow flashers, steady glows, and beacons that traced out long-division symbols. We counted seconds between the light pulses, and I wrote the timing in my notebook. Bullfrogs barked and grunted. Something hissed. Other beings plunged or plopped into the water.

After a half hour, we still hadn’t seen a slow blue. We reviewed what we knew of their preferred conditions. We decided again that the night was ideal. We debated scouting out another location to the west.

Then we turned to face the opposite side of the road, where the treetops we could barely make out indicated that the ground rose slightly. We stared through the dark. About 12 feet above the weeds, a bluish-green light was moving from north to south. It dipped slightly, went dark for four and a half seconds—I was counting silently—before lighting up again farther south. “That’s it!” we whispered. We held our breath. The tiny glow transfixed us. It drifted south, then switched off and on again in a pattern matching exactly what Myers and Boland had recorded and in an unmistakable turquoise hue, unlike anything we had ever seen. This would have been a very different piece if you ended it with you and Liz seeing the slow blue fireflies. Did you ever consider ending it there?No. A few readers questioned why I didn’t end the piece there, but I always knew that wasn’t the true end.

[dc small]I[/dc]n his writings about Japan in the late 19th century, journalist Lafcadio Hearn reported on the East’s reverence for fireflies. The Japanese followed the insects’ annual light shows. They celebrated, captured, and caged them. Some people believed fireflies to be the ghosts of fallen soldiers. Others used them in traditional medicines. According to Hearn, “Firefly-ointments used to be made which had power, it was alleged, to preserve a house from the attacks of robbers, to counteract the effect of any poison, and to drive away ‘the hundred devils.’ And pills were made with firefly-substance which were believed to confer invulnerability.”

But despite their onetime use as invincibility potions, many fireflies are toxic. Their bodies contain lucibufagin, a potent cardiac glycoside, a substance that can stop the heart. In addition to advertising their sexual availability, their light might serve as a warning to potential predators, such as bats, that not only do they taste terrible, but they are also poisonous. Ingesting one beetle could doom a salamander. More than a handful might kill a human. Still, I thought, maybe the firefly substance acts as a tonic in fractional doses. Maybe, like foxglove’s digitalis, another cardiac glycoside, it bolsters the heart’s contractions and steadies its rhythm. Had someone handed me those pills, I would have downed one.

[dc small]L[/dc]ynn had asked me to catch a specimen and take closeups of its front and back. So Liz jogged after the flying beetle with her net held high, as I hurried after her. But given this male slow blue’s altitude, there was little chance we could capture it. We searched for one of the females, which stay closer to the ground, but didn’t see any.

The area we jogged toward smelled like a carcass, and for the rest of the night, as we paced the road, gazing toward the upland side, the smell followed us. When a car passed, the stink rushed us and seemed even more putrid. The swamp’s night creatures rasped and groaned, while Liz and I joked about zombies lurching after us. At any moment they might clap their greasy claws over our mouths. We laughed to chase away our fears.

Slow blue males flickered a few more times, but never more than two simultaneously. Compared to the quickly flashing Photinus consimilis and Big Dippers, Photinus pyralis, on the other side of the road, Photuris caerulucens was elusive. Near 11 p.m., when we were about to leave, we saw one more. Or so we thought. I said to Liz, “Everything matches, but I haven’t noticed it dropping in flight.” Then the turquoise light swerved downward before being extinguished. Liz said to it, “Thank you for the clarification.” What value does the scene with you and Liz seeing the blue firefly have as a middle scene?Putting that scene in the middle, which answers a question raised at the beginning of the piece, indicates to the reader that finding the slow blues isn’t all that the piece is about — that there are other questions, maybe bigger ones, to be answered.

[dc small]F[/dc]ireflies’ bioluminescence is called “cold fire” because unlike a campfire, it produces no heat. It’s the product of a reaction between luciferin and luciferase, chemicals named after lucifer, Latin for “light-bringing.” Luciferase, an enzyme, is also used as a marker in biochemistry, enabling researchers to trace certain bacteria, for example, through generations of organisms.

Scientists know that fireflies control their chemical signaling with precision but not why different species glow in different shades. They don’t know how quickly firefly populations are diminishing or how habitat loss and skies brightened by artificial light are affecting different species. Or why slow blues live only in a narrow swath of upper Mississippi River backwaters. What factors led them to evolve and thrive there? Algorithms can predict the bounds of a species’ niche, the only place it can thrive, given ideal temperature, humidity, the hours of light and darkness, food sources, predators, and pressure from other species that share its range. But no one has run the calculations for slow blues.

Also unknown is how quickly slow blues could adapt to changing conditions. If the tamarack swamp is drained for farmland, if the climate gets warmer or wetter than they can tolerate, will they evolve in time to survive in new circumstances? With their life cycle requiring two years underground as larvae or pupae, it’s unlikely they could migrate. Fireflies depend on very specific habitats. Their sensitivity makes them an indicator species. When conditions degrade, they’ll disappear before others.

Ticks, just the opposite, are highly adaptable. They have flourished and conquered new territory as North America’s temperatures have warmed. In 2018, the second year of my second bout with the disease, investigative journalist Mary Beth Pfeiffer published Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change. Although the bacteria that causes Lyme has existed for millennia, Pfeiffer writes, “we have revived and empowered a sleeping giant”—thanks to warmer winters and earlier springs, “ticks have climbed latitudes like ladders; they have moved up mountains.” In fact, the spread of Lyme disease is one gauge the EPA uses to track climate change.

Reading Pfeiffer’s conclusions, derived from her interviews with experts worldwide about Lyme disease and the spread of ticks, could alter the DNA of even the most critter-bold explorer. For me, she confirmed a familiar dread. On viewing Monet’s Poppy Fields near Argenteuil in a museum, she wrote, “I can no longer look at such pastoral loveliness without seeing what lurks within.”

[dc small]A[/dc] year after I had stepped out to catch a firefly, a combination of pharmaceuticals, exercise, and diet had brought me close to normal functioning. To avoid ticks, I no longer walked into woods or fields. I wouldn’t brave the path to the prairie we’d planted, although I longed to see it and the bees and butterflies it must have attracted. Those were the ticks’ habitats. But I wouldn’t give up my garden. I planted rows of tomatoes, peppers, beans, greens, broccoli, pumpkins, potatoes, and popcorn. Gardening, I was my old self. I also restarted my running routine, shuffling up and down our road, careful to stay on the asphalt. I really related to the protagonist of this story, even though we have many differences. How do you create a relatable protagonist, or persona? It must be especially difficult to do this as a first-person narrator. Does contradiction or paradox play a role?So many things play a role. Being honest and vulnerable are key — and if you’re honest and vulnerable, you can’t help but portray contradictions. As a writer of nonfiction, you have to regard your written self as a persona, a character of a different time or environment or at least temperament than your writing self. You need to be compassionate toward that character, but you can’t be overprotective.What does it mean to be vulnerable as a writer or as the first-person protagonist of a story? I suspect it means writing from a different place than where the average journalist writes from. (For me, I would say I try to be certain and unassailable in my journalistic writing.) How would you describe that vulnerable mindset?I think it’s a matter of knowing yourself, being aware of your own b.s. and where and how it’s likely to come up. What are you hesitant to divulge? What shifty phrases or dodges do you use to avoid what’s painful? Find those and you’ll find where you might open up more.

In mid-May, I found a tick dug into my scalp. It seemed impossible. What had I done wrong? Where had I crossed paths with it? I pulled it from my hair—a scrap of skin still in its mouthparts—and dropped it in a jar of alcohol. I tried to dismiss the incident. Given the volume of antibiotics I had taken over the previous 18 months, I imagined I was unlikely to contract Lyme disease again. But three weeks later, I was flattened, chilled, and feverish. Pain jetted down my legs and arms. I filled a new prescription for antibiotics.

The next month, I felt well enough to go outside and harvest some things, including a plastic bag full of kale. I used half the kale that day. Three days later, I took out the rest. At the bottom of the white bag was a black dot. A fleck of soil? I brought it close. A tick. I put on my glasses. Five more blacklegged ticks clung to the bag’s interior. All my precautions had proved useless. Most likely, I had been bitten in my own garden while wearing boots and clothes saturated with permethrin, my invincibility potion. As David tweezered the ticks out of the bag and into a jar of alcohol, I paced the kitchen behind him.

Some people in our valley live among ticks, get bitten, and don’t get ill. Some fall ill and shrug it off. They adapt to whatever changes it brings. They would never give up their place in this quiet, stunning landscape, this close-knit community. But after my third case of Lyme, with my habitat narrowed to exclude forests, fields, prairies, and even my garden, with my energy sapped, I admitted that maybe, to be the person I wanted to be, I would have to redefine my niche.

The unthinkable suddenly became possible: Leave the land. Get rid of the tractor, sawmill, chainsaws, beekeeping supplies, and gardening tools. Walk away from the house we had built. Break the news to friends with sadness. We could find a safer place to call home. But we might sacrifice, among many things, the potential for regular awe. I wasn’t sure I could make the trade.

Months later, after I’d regained some strength, after my workout partner said, “You got your fire back!” I thought, maybe I’m fully recovered. I told David, “We can stay.”

He pushed back. I couldn’t walk in the woods. Couldn’t mow. Couldn’t prune. Couldn’t garden. I was nervous about stepping off our walkway and into the grass.

[dc small]E[/dc]ven after two years of struggling, I found it hard to admit that I was no longer who I had been. Days I never left the bed I kept secret. I only wanted to return to normal. If I had enough energy to wash dishes, I was thrilled. If I had more, I went running or baked bread. I would insert my old self into my new circumstances, even if the exertion set me back for another week. Then, at least for a while, I had denied Lyme’s control over me.

I couldn’t accept an unconditional exile from the natural world. I wanted to see the slow blues again. I wanted David to see them. I had new information about their habitat, a photo from an obscure entomology journal of the very “tamarack swamp in Wisconsin” where Eunice Myers identified the species in 1926. The photo was taken in 1970, but I imagined not much had changed, that ground too flood-prone to be plowed.

In July 2018, David, Liz, our friend Gary, and I drove north to find the swamp in the photo. At sunset, the clouds over the Mississippi were rouge and lavender stripes. The water was flat. A barge headed downstream. Gary pointed out islands where Native Americans had built effigy mounds and hills with bald crowns that were restored goat prairies. Together, we dreamed up techniques and conditions for experiments we might conduct to research the slow blues. In a lab—or no, in a giant tent over the grounds where they breed. Gary kept asking me about their lifecycle, but I couldn’t remember anything. When we stopped for gas, I handed him Lynn’s book.

We found the very spot where the 1970 photo was taken, matching the curve in the road, the 35-mph sign at its left edge, the gentle hill in the background. It was less than a mile west of where Liz and I had seen the slow blues the previous summer. We passed an old tractor pulling two empty hay wagons, then parked at the entrance to a dirt road marked with a modest “No Trespassing” sign.

I wore my permethrin garb and doused my ears, neck, and hands with bug repellent. I carried the butterfly net, although I knew I wouldn’t use it. My heart was in witnessing, not capturing.

The night was cooler than normal. Whether because of temperature or humidity, previous flooding, or some shift in the predator-prey balance, even the commonest fireflies were scarce. But near 11 p.m., on the upland side of the road, I saw one moving slowly about 15 feet above the ground. I thought that its lantern was a shade of blue—I wanted it to be—but the others contradicted me, and I wasn’t certain enough to insist.

Several pickups stopped. We talked with the drivers: the man who owned the land, who said it was okay for us to park there to look for fireflies, but didn’t understand why we’d want to; a man who farmed the ridgetop we faced and couldn’t say whether he had ever seen a blue-glowing firefly because he was colorblind; and a pair of citizen scientists like us, who were looking for bats.

An hour later, with no slow blue sightings, I gave up hoping to see what I had come for. With the others, I simply stood beside the bog and stared into the dark. I was aware of feeling contented in an imperfect habitat—outdoors, but on a manmade surface, not entirely safe from ticks and not fully immersed in nature. Happy, anyway, to be with people I cared about and who cared about me.

We packed away our flashlights, notebooks, and nets. We got into the car. But rather than drive away, we sat quietly, waiting, giving our quarry one last chance. Just then we were astonished by a brief, brilliant shooting star arcing across the southeastern sky where we had been watching for fireflies and where Mercury had been rising and falling all summer. It was so bright that I imagined I could have seen it from anywhere in the world. Maybe, maybe not. But as its arc faded, I felt sure that no matter where I went, I would experience awe, if coupled with fear, as long as I kept paying attention. Did you always know the piece would end with the shooting star scene?Yes. That was there from the start and it felt right to me. The wording and scope changed during revision, though. I think that as journalists, we consider ourselves lucky to get a satisfying conclusion, an end to the quest, such as seeing the blue firefly. Do you have any advice about how to probe for that deeper, emotional conclusion?Endings are hard. Fiction writers are taught that the best endings are inevitable, yet surprising. Endings should at the very least answer any questions that the piece raised. Often, they represent the protagonist in a changed state. With nonfiction, it’s important to show a shift, but also not to stretch too far for something lofty that might be unearned. When I’m revising, I also look for the ending to resonate with the theme (which might not be apparent until after a few drafts) and to speak to the beginning, whether in contradiction or confirmation.

***

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist who is based in Vermont, but will travel just about anywhere for a good story.

The post Tools from fiction build a sophisticated National Magazine Award feature finalist appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This week, in honor of Pride Month, we feature three posts about transgender issues. Today, see how Lane DeGregory of the Tampa Bay Times handled a profile in 2002, when there were few other journalistic models or guides, of a transgender woman dealing with challenges to transition. Tomorrow, a transgender teenager who was thriving loses her confidence during COVID isolation because she fears being defined by the sound of her voice. Finally, a teacher and former journalist talks about her own transition and offers tips about what other journalists need to know when writing about transgender people.

[dc]O[/dc]n the day in late April that I call Lane DeGregory in Florida, The Tampa Bay Times, where she has worked as a reporter since 2000, had just released an update to its style book. The update, DeGregory says, covers what pronouns to use when and what gender-neutral terms to use instead of gendered language such as “actress” and “meter maid.” (The answers are “actor” and “meter reader.”)

DeGregory didn’t have any of this guidance in 2002, when she wrote “The Making of Maddie,” a profile of Madalynn Shepley, a transgender woman. The story follows Shepley as she attempts to update her driver’s license to make her official identification consistent with her self-identification.

“It’s been 19 years since I wrote that story,” DeGregory tells me. “We’re finally putting this stuff in the style book, today.”

Back then, the newspaper (then the St. Petersburg Times) had a daily feature section. “I was always scanning the news stories asking, who are the people who are being affected by this or the people who are behind this?” she says.

In this case, the story of Maddie came to her. DeGregory’s best friend covered city hall for the newspaper and had reported on a revision to the St. Petersburg human rights ordinance that would include gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. “It felt very woke, for 2002,” DeGregory says. But the city council voted down the clause that extended protection to transgendered people. “We didn’t really know what ‘transgendered’ meant, but we were appalled that the council would just eliminate protecting a whole group of people.”

Finding the right character to tell the story

Some narrative journalists audition 10 or more people before selecting one to profile. DeGregory says she seldom has the time or resources for that. “Sometimes I do two or three, but I think Maddie was the first one (I talked to).” She found Shepley by calling a transgender rights advocate who had spoken at the city council meeting. She asked to be connected to someone affected by the ordinance, and was introduced to Shepley.

“I look for is someone who is going to let me in. Maddie was really open,” DeGregory says. “I try to explain that I’m not just here to interview you. I want to hang out with you, be in your world for a while, talk to your family and your friends. In response, Maddie said, ‘I want to explain. No one has given me a voice.’”

In 2007, DeGregory wrote several other articles on transgender issues. Most were about Susan Stanton, a city manager in Largo, Florida, who became nationally known when she was fired from her job as she was transitioning. In another story that DeGregory wrote that same year, a gay man looks back at his marriage to a transgender woman, and a love that transcended gender. “I like a character with a little flaw now and then, and he didn’t mind showing his warts,” she says.

In 2009, DeGregory won the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for her story “The Girl in the Window,” which is described on the Pulitzer website as a “richly detailed story of a neglected little girl, found in a roach-infested room, unable to talk or feed herself, who was adopted by a new family committed to her nurturing.” She has also won dozens of other national journalism awards.

Today, journalists can consult transgender style guides and other resources to make sure their stories about transgender people are accurate and respectful. In writing about Maddie, DeGregory had to rely on Maddie's retelling of her own story, on a clinical psychologist who had worked with more than 200 transgender patients, and on her own intuition. At the time, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) — the official mental health handbook used by health care providers — still included “gender identity disorder.” With the fifth edition, published in 2013, the DSM says “gender non-conformity is not in itself a mental disorder.” It lists “gender dysphoria” for the identity-related issues that some transgender people experience.

“The Making of Maddie” is intimate, emotional and suspenseful. To me, a cisgender woman, it seems both aware and advanced for 2002. It suggests to me that writing meaningfully about transgender people is largely a matter of empathy. And DeGregory is a master of that.

I spoke with DeGregory about how she dove so deeply into a contemporary issue that the stories work still resonate nearly two decades later. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and is followed by an annotation of her her profile of “The Making of Maddie.”

[dc small]H[/dc]ow do you know whom to profile? Are you looking for a sympathetic character? For example, in this story, why did you profile Maddie instead of the man who was mean to her at the DMV?
My late-night indulgence is true crime shows. I am drawn to the underdog and to people whose emotions get the best of them in some ways. I'll spend a week under the bridge writing about the sex offenders who are living down there in tents. I'll go talk to the murderer in his cell. I interviewed a lady who killed her sister and then lived in the house with her for six weeks, her body all rotted out. I just want to know those stories. Part of it is just wanting to know how people tick, wanting to show readers another side of whatever the news headline is.

I rely a lot on my editors. They trust me, but it’s helpful when they say, “Don’t go there.” There was more about the DMV guy in (Maddie’s story) that my editor cut.

If I can make people slow down enough to actually try to understand what it's like to walk a mile in someone's shoes, then I feel I've maybe done a service in illuminating a piece of the world or someone in the shadows.

Your stories, including this one, are told with such empathy for your sources. It’s one thing to feel that in person. But how do you show readers what it feels like to be someone else?
When I started this story, I didn't know what the frame was going to be. I spent maybe a week or two with Maddie and we had lots of long talks on the phone at night. I had a scene when I watched her put her makeup on one morning. I had a scene of her going to church. My editor was very smart about asking, what's really at stake here?

She wasn't about to get reassignment surgery. She wasn't about to get fired from her job. She wasn't about to enter a relationship or reconnect with her kids. The thing she really wanted was to change her picture on her driver's license, so it could match who she is now. When it came time to write the story, my editor suggested I just frame it around that day at the driver's license office.

I've always liked to whittle a big, unwieldy issue down into a little moment, but also have it be something universal that everybody can relate to it. How many people can relate to feeling like they're in the wrong body? Not very many of us. But we can relate to losing 40 pounds and wanting a new driver’s license photo. Or to getting divorced and wanting your name back. If you can find one of those moments, you can frame around that.

I would ask whoever I was writing about, whether it's about the battle for transgender rights or any other issue:  What's at stake? Maybe it’s, “I want to go to the prom in my tuxedo and bring my girlfriend with me.” Or, “I just want to play soccer.” Then find that moment you can wrap the whole issue and this human story around. It doesn't have to be anything big. It could be as simple as
"Is anybody going to call me 'sir' when I go to the grocery store?" Small victories.

The annotation: Storyboard’s questions are in red; DeGregory’s responses in blue. To read the story without annotations, click the Hide All Annotations button, which is in the right-hand menu bar on your monitor screen or at the top of your cell screen. You can hide individual annotations by hitting the gray quote boxes throughout the piece.

(Note: This article was first published in the St. Petersburg Times on November 17, 2002)

The Making of Maddie

St. Petersburg Times/Tampa Bay Times

by Lane DeGregory

[dc]O[/dc]n a warm, sunny Thursday, just after lunch, Madalynn A. Shepley steers her wood-paneled van into the parking lot of the Clearwater driver's license office. She stops in an end space. Cuts the engine. Then she tips down the rear-view mirror to check her face. You’ve said (in your podcast, Write Lane) that you like to start your articles using just pronouns, introducing the person’s name later. Was this article written before you started doing that, or did you consciously start off with a name in the first sentence?That’s a shift I made later in my career. I think it’s easier for someone to relate if you don’t name the person right away. It depends on whether you want them to be a character or an everyman. I wanted this to be about Maddie. This moment is about a name on a driver’s license, so I started with a name and ended the section with another name.

She wants everything to be perfect for this picture. So she fluffs her brown bangs, pulls a compact from her purse, pats shimmery powder across her chin.

"They might ask me to remove my makeup in here," she says. "So they can have a true representation of this person who is supposed to be me."

Maddie is 38. Her shoulder-length hair is feathered in front. Her brown eyes crinkle when she laughs. She has broad shoulders, big biceps, slim hips. She's 5 feet 5, 175 pounds. She's wearing a soft red T-shirt and new red capri pants with white flowers.

"I'm even wearing Lady in Red perfume today," she says, laughing. "I bought it to celebrate.

Oh, I've been looking forward to this day for a long time."

She pulls out her wallet and finds her driver's license. The photo shows a 37-year-old man with short brown hair, brown brows and serious brown eyes. A thick, dark moustache blankets his upper lip.

The name on the license says: Andrew Shepley.

Maddie has come to change that photo — and that name.

"They could give me a hard time in here today," she says. I admire how suspenseful this story is. How do you create that suspense in a nonfiction story that has to follow real events?I'm always thinking about that when I'm writing my stories. Somewhere up top, before the jump, I want to ask the question or set out what's at stake. With this quote, you know something bad can happen. Most of my stories run: scene, background, scene, background…. By the end of that first scene, I want to leave people hanging so they have to read the background to find out what happens next.

Doctor’s orders

Maddie shares a Clearwater condo with her friend Nickie and a gray tabby cat named Booger. She repairs roller coasters and other rides at a Tampa amusement park she’d rather not name. She plays softball on Tuesdays, goes to a Metropolitan Community Church on Wednesday nights, listens to Styx and Rush, and makes a mean pot roast.

She was born a boy.

About a year ago, she moved to Florida and started taking hormones and calling herself Maddie. She had laser surgery to remove her moustache. She softened her voice and let her hair grow. She learned to walk in heels and appreciate salad and change her van’s oil without chipping a nail.

She wants, more than anything, to blend in. To be just another woman out buying groceries, pumping gas. But sometimes, strangers stare.

She wants to become a woman so badly — needs to, really — that she gave up her wife, her four children and her house. She got fired from a job as an RV mechanic when she started coming to work as a woman. She lost almost all her friends. Her dad and her two brothers won’t talk to her. Her mom keeps calling her Andrew.

She often feels alone.

But she’s not.

An estimated one in 30,000 people is transgendered. Transgendered people have the mind of one gender, the body of another. They are divided evenly between men who want to be women and women who want to be men. They have existed throughout the ages, in virtually every culture around the world.

It’s a psychological disability. It’s included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, along with depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

Transgendered people are born that way. There is no cure.

Doctors who treat transgendered patients usually prescribe hormone therapy, counseling and trying to live in the correct “brain gender.” The way science and medicine look at transgender people has changed since 2002. How much did you know about transgender issues when you started this story?I barely had heard the term before. Back then, there were organizations for gay and lesbian people, but none that specifically included transgender people. I read a lot about being transgender before I went to meet Maddie. I did my homework, as if I were going to write a research paper for college. I read scientific journal articles. I looked it up in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. I read the history and references in literature. I talked to Kathleen Farrell, the therapist who worked with Maddie. So I had a framework of what people were talking about.

But society doesn’t always accept that. Many people don’t want to see a man wearing makeup and women’s clothing. They worry: Where will these people go to the bathroom? What if one of them wanted to live in my neighborhood?

About the time Andrew Shepley moved to Florida to become Maddie, the St. Petersburg City Council was revisiting its human rights ordinance. The law protects people from discrimination in employment, public accommodations and housing. Someone had asked the council to include lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people in it.

Council members told the lesbians, gays and bisexuals: We’ll protect you.

They told the transgendered people: But not you. Wait! Here’s a news hook, 22 paragraphs in. Why did you put this information all the way down here?We had covered this story in the news pages throughout the weeks before. I wasn't trying to peg it on that as the reason to do the story. I really wanted this to be about Maddie.

“You are sending a message that transgendered people don’t count,” activist Jessica Archer told council members.

Maddie has never felt like she counted. Long before she worried about the picture on her driver’s license, she knew she wasn’t meant to be a man.

Everyman

To almost everyone except himself, Andrew Shepley seemed like a regular guy.

He was born outside Chicago, the oldest son of a carnival owner. He grew up riding bikes, playing baseball and cheering the Cubs with his brothers. It’s so difficult to decide how to refer to a transgender person in the past, when they presented as another gender. How did you make that decision here? It must have been especially difficult because, at the time, there was no style guide to refer to.In the present tense, she's Maddie. And in the past tense, when he was Andrew, I use male pronouns. In the articles about Susan Stanton, for example, I didn't feel like it was disingenuous to call her Steve when I'm doing the background of the life she lived as that person. I think now I would ask, “How would you like me to refer to you?”

Even then, he said, he knew.

One afternoon, while his brothers were playing catch in the back yard, he went inside, into his mom's closet. He fished through her laundry basket and pulled out one of her slips. He still remembers how sweet it smelled, how soft the fabric felt against his skin.

He draped the slip around his small shoulders. Then he pulled on a pair of her pantyhose.

"Oh, I was in heaven," he says. "I knew this was who I was meant to be."

He was 7 years old.

His mom caught him and told him never to do it again.

If only it were that easy.

Andrew didn't want anyone to think he was a freak. So he watched other boys and tried to imitate their mannerisms. He learned to swagger in work boots, to talk tough and swear. He lifted weights and built up his biceps. He learned to fix car engines and carnival rides.

He was a good actor, he said. But he couldn't convince himself.

Sometimes, when his family planned to go out, he would pretend he was sick so he could stay home. So he could try on his mom's stockings, put on her makeup, spritz her flowery perfume on his wrists.

When he was a teenager and other boys started bragging about the girls they'd been with, he would lie and tell stories, too. But he didn't date. Didn't go to his prom. Never had sex - with anyone. Some people assume that transgendered people are homosexual. But sex has almost nothing to do with it.

The problem is how they see themselves. I don’t like this sentence. It shouldn't be their problem. If I could go back, I would say, “They know they were supposed to be another gender,” or something like that, and not make it into a problem.

One day, while Andrew was helping his dad set up a church carnival, he met a girl. The preacher's daughter. She was sweet and cute and had blond hair. Andrew was 20. She was 16. She was his first female friend. Maybe, he thought, this was love. You are so empathetic in your articles. I feel like I’m seeing the world through the subject’s eyes. Do you ever struggle to see your source’s point of view?When reporting for emotion, you need to ask not just what they are doing, but what they are thinking, what they are worrying or praying about, what keeps them up at night. As a younger reporter, I wanted to show I understood. Now I say, “I don't understand. Help me.” I am willing to let them take me somewhere. Here, I asked why she got married if she knew all along. I was thinking, “How could you do this to her (the wife)?” but I asked in a non-combative way. Her answer was illustrative. She said, “I really didn’t know what it meant to love somebody.” I’m glad I asked.

Maybe he wasn't so weird after all.

So Andrew married her. They had a daughter, then three sons. Andrew worked as a truck driver, an auto mechanic and on carnivals. During his 20-year marriage, he was never with another woman.

Except Maddie.

Inside out

"There are things, like getting married, that society says we're supposed to do," says Kathleen Farrell. She is a St. Petersburg therapist who holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Cincinnati. Since 1985, she has worked with more than 200 transgendered patients around the Tampa Bay area. She and Maddie meet monthly.

Most transgendered people desperately want to fit in, Farrell says, so they get married and have kids. Many transgendered men try to appear more masculine by joining the military, learning to hunt or ride motorcycles, taking jobs in construction or auto repair.

But they can't change what's inside.

Andrew's wife knew he liked to wear women's clothes. He often wore her underwear under his Lee jeans. Sometimes, he slept in her pale blue nightgown.

His wife usually tolerated it. "As long as I kept it in the bedroom," Maddie says.

But over the years, Andrew's obsession grew. He was feeling more and more like he had to be a woman. He started fussing at his wife, yelling at his kids.

"Andrew basically became a jerk," says his daughter, Stacey, 18. "We didn't know why Dad was so unhappy. We never saw him wearing Mom's clothes." The reaction of the spouses, or, in this case, the family, across all the stories you wrote about transgender people back then are so different from each other. In the later stories, you detail the hurt and blame within marriages. It changes the way the person you are writing about comes across, with Maddie maybe seeming less flawed because her family is less critical in the article of how she handled her transition.I have to share the other side. I hesitated to reach out to the women who were hurt by their husbands, and opening that wound again. But I also felt like their perspective was really important to understand and to acknowledge. By the time I got to Maddie, she and her ex-wife and her kids had come to an understanding, which wasn't the case with the subjects of the other stories. Susan (Stanton) got politically and publicly messed with at a point where it should have been her own private journey. The media outed her before she was ready. I felt that all I could do is offer her a chance to tell her own story.

Andrew prayed for answers, asked God for help. He didn't want to do anything wrong. So he read the Bible, searching for scripture that said you shouldn't change your gender. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus . . . he couldn't find anything. He couldn't take it any longer.

So on a cold Chicago morning, just after Thanksgiving, he called his children into the living room. Stacey and the boys, ages 10, 12 and 14.

"I'm sorry," Andrew told his kids. "I'm going to Florida. I'm going to start living my life as a woman."

 Turning heads

Maddie's greatest fear is that she'll be "made." In the transgendered world, this means that someone notices you're not a biological woman. Some stranger stares or, worse, snickers.

Maddie has been taking three pills twice a day to suppress her testosterone and add estrogen. The medication costs $150 a month. Insurance won't pay for it.

It won't pay for sex-change operations, either. So she has been working overtime, trying to save $15,000 for the procedure.

She wants to get laser treatments on her cheeks and chin so she can stop shaving. She wants breast implants so she can stop wearing foam forms. She could get her Adam's apple shaved so it wouldn't stick out, her vocal cords altered to make her voice higher and have a couple of ribs removed to make her waist smaller.

But even after all that, she knows she still might get made.

"I have to face that," she says. "I try to be content with the best face I can present."

Right now, she says, she needs a new driver's license more than any medical procedure. She needs identification that looks like her, that has her new name, so she can cash a check, get a library card, rent a movie. Without giving herself away.

A well-groomed woman

After waiting almost 40 minutes, Maddie makes it to the front of the line at the driver's license office. A middle-aged clerk wearing bifocals is sitting behind the counter. "Can I help you?" she asks.

"I need to update my driver's license," Maddie says.

The woman slides her glasses down her nose, peers over them. "Do you have an appointment?"

"No."

"Well, is it for an address change?"

"Yes," Maddie answers. "And for a name change."

The woman behind the counter pushes up her glasses. She looks at Maddie through the lined lenses. "Do you have the court documents?"

"Yes," Maddie says, unsnapping her purse. She pulls out two pieces of paper. The first is a copy of the order signed by a Brooksville judge legally approving her name change. She chose Maddie because it's a combination of Mommy and Daddy. Because she feels like both to her kids.

The second paper is a letter from her therapist, Farrell. "To Whom it May Concern: Madalynn A. Shepley has been diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder, which has been persistent since childhood. . . . Ms. Shepley presents as a well-dressed, well-groomed woman living full-time as a female since December 2001. To be consistent with this life change and for her on-going safety as well as her emotional well being, this letter supports the petition to the court for changing her legal name."

The letter also says the sex designation on Maddie's driver's license should be changed to female. "To be consistent with her female gender and her legal name change."

Maddie hands both papers to the woman behind the counter. The woman looks them over. Then looks Maddie over again. "This letter doesn't say that the surgery has been performed," the woman says, a little too loudly.

Maddie swallows. "It hasn't," she says. "Not yet."

The woman behind the counter leans forward. "Well, we can't change the gender marker until your doctor says you've been changed surgically."

By now, everyone in line is listening. Other clerks are coming over.

"So you're telling me," Maddie says softly, "that until I have surgery, I'm going to be walking around with a driver's license that has a female name and photo and a gender marker that says I'm a man?"

"Yes," the driver's license woman says. "That's what I'm saying."

Maddie steps back. But she doesn't turn around. The folks behind her in line are all looking, all buzzing about her.

The woman behind the counter calls over her manager. She shows him Maddie's papers. She points at Maddie.

The manager is Frank Head. He looks Maddie up and down. He speaks loudly, so everyone can hear: "Can I help you, SIR?" How did you decide whether or not to name this person? Do you have any regrets?I don't regret naming him. He was proud to have been that guy. I think if he had pushed back when I asked his name, and thought about it even a minute, I might've just said, “the DMV manager.” But I wanted to say, "OK, you're proud of doing this in public. And there are 200 other people in the lobby who see you doing this. And you're a public official. Yeah. Own it."

Some people in line laugh. Maddie squares her shoulders. Tips up her chin.

"You mean Ma'am," she says.

"No, sir," says the driver's license official. "I don't."

Girls like us

Maddie often wonders whether this is all worth it.

She misses her kids. She's seen them only once this past year. They call her Mom now. "Some of my friends think it's strange. But I say, "Go ahead. Whatever makes you happy,' " Stacey says. "I know since this change, she's not as uptight or as quick to fly off the handle."

Maddie's ex-wife has remarried. She wants her new husband to adopt the kids. "She thinks I'm a Jerry Springer show or something," Maddie says.

Maddie misses her friends in Chicago, her brothers and parents. Some of the guys she works with know her secret and seem to be okay with it. But she doesn't hang out with them after hours.

She's lonely a lot.

She's thought about going back to being Andrew.

She's thought about killing herself. Most transgendered people do. Half die by the time they turn 30 - usually by their own hand. They don't want to risk everything to be who they know they are.

But they can't stand to keep looking in the mirror and not seeing themselves.

"It takes a really incredibly strong person to undertake this transformation," Farrell says.

Seventeen years ago, Farrell started a support group for her patients. Starburst has more than 40 members, including Maddie. The girls, as they call themselves, get together once a month.

Sometimes they gather at a St. Petersburg church and invite laser surgeons or makeup artists to give presentations. Or they get together at an all-you-can-eat buffet and talk about the Winn-Dixie truck driver who got fired for wearing women's clothing off the job. Or they rent a movie at Maddie's condo and laugh about whether Patrick Swayze passes as a woman.

They talk about friendship and dating. Some want to meet a man so they can be in a "regular" relationship. Some are still attracted to women.

Maddie isn't sure what she wants. She's had a few dates, all with other transgendered men who present themselves as women. "Sort of like a lesbian relationship," she says.

"But you know," she says, "the longer I'm on this estrogen, the more I realize what's so great about Brad Pitt."

Maddie and the other Starburst members dress like soccer moms, or ladies you might see at a bake sale. They wear sun dresses, short-sleeved sweaters and gold-rimmed glasses. They're parents, grandparents and former military officers. One is a 68-year-old retired Navy commander who has been "playing dressup" since age 5.

Most waited until their children were grown, or until they retired, to start living as women.

Georgia is 60. She has been married four times. She did combat in the Congo. She has been shaving her body since 1978. She used to mail-order women's clothes and have them delivered to her office at MacDill Air Force Base.

She celebrates small triumphs, like someone saying, "Excuse me, lady," at the drugstore. And finding size 14 pumps on the Internet. And waking up and for a few minutes forgetting that she spent most of her life as a man.

The Starburst girls nod and smile. They understand. For many of them, these other "trannies" are their only friends. “Trannies” is in quotes here, so I’m guessing it wasn’t your word, but a word others used, maybe in that way of reclaiming a slur? I don’t think people use this word anymore.Oh, yes they do. Someone I know used it with me the other day. He was saying that it was just in the news that transgender kids can't play on sports teams unless it's their birth gender. He was arguing about how, “Those trannies shouldn't be allowed to play high school or college sports, anyway.” I flipped my lid on him.

"Do you think if we had a choice, we would choose to give up our families and our jobs and our self-esteem so that strangers could laugh at us and stare?" Maddie asks.

"The only choice, for us, is when to stop living the lie."

Face forward

Frank Head, the manager of the driver's license office, tells Maddie to wait a minute. He walks to his office. Maddie stands at the counter, alone. Fluorescent lights glare above her. Behind her, dozens of people in the long line are whispering, smiling.

Maddie turns her back on them. She taps her red fingernails on the counter. She tries not to cry.

Head comes back, carrying a hardback book of Florida laws. He sets the thick book on the counter. Opens to Chapter 316. "Sir, please understand," he says, again addressing Maddie as a man. "Physically, if you're a male, sir, you have to have male on your driver's license."

Maddie blinks. She doesn't move.

Head looks past her, to the long line of strangers. Raising his voice, he gives his rationale for this policy. "If they're incarcerated, we're not going to put a male in the women's jail. If they get pulled over on the side of the road, do I want a female officer patting them down?"

Maddie stays silent. The manager has one more point.

"Still, anatomically," he says over Maddie's shoulder, "he's a man until he has that surgery."

Maddie clears her throat. She steps forward. She reaches onto the counter and closes the law book. She struggles to control her voice.

"Well, sir," she says. "I still need to change my name on my driver's license. And I need a new photo."

The people in line stop whispering. Maddie twists her gold bracelets around her right wrist.

The manager looks again at her documents. Then he looks up. The place is packed.

"It will take at least two hours, SIR," he says.

Maddie says, "I'll wait."

She squares her shoulders, steps back from the counter and turns to face the strangers. She walks past them slowly, her sandals clicking on the bare floor.

When she gets near the end of the line, a skinny teenage girl steps toward her and smiles.

"You're very courageous," the girl says.

Maddie stops and turns. She looks at the girl, who is about 17. She's here with two friends, all wearing tank tops and drop-waisted jeans. They're trying to get their driver's licenses for the first time.

"What?" Maddie asks the girl.

"What you're doing, I admire it," the girl says.

Her friends nod. A few other folks in line do, too.

"And I admire how you handled that man. How you didn't let him deny you."

Maddie doesn't know what to say. "Thanks," she says, finally. "Thank you for saying something."

The girl reaches out and squeezes Maddie's arm.

"You're welcome," the girl says. "I think you're a beautiful lady." This is a quick-moving scene with a lot of information. How did you get it all down?We had to sit for two hours at the DMV. I used that time to observe and ask questions.

Two hours later, Maddie moves to the front of Line 3. She puts her papers on the counter, in front of another state official, and steps back while he stares her down. She waits while he types her information into the computer. Waits while he verifies her address, criminal record and driving history. Waits while he studies her paperwork, and prints out some more, and changes her address - and her name.

Finally, it's time for her new photo.

Maddie steps in front of the camera. She fluffs her brown bangs. Everyone is watching.

"You can smile if you want to," the man behind the camera tells Maddie.

She does.

***

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist who is based in Vermont.

The post An early portrait of gender transition with no style guides to steer by appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]W[/dc]e are living in a century of displacement, says Jessica Goudeau, award-winning author of “After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America.” And because we are, journalists need to learn to tell the stories of displaced people by reconsidering some entrenched journalistic convention and leading with empathy.

Consider her book’s primary characters: Mu Naw, a Christian woman from Myanmar, and Hasna, a Muslim woman from Syria. Both names are pseudonyms, as is Amina, the Syrian-American translator who worked with Goudeau to tell Hasna’s story. Goudeau and her editors agreed to protect the women’s identities — even when it meant leaving out compelling bits of their stories — because to do otherwise would put families they left behind in danger.

“Empathy may be my highest journalism value,” Goudeau told me.

[caption id="attachment_164954" align="alignright" width="400"] Jessica Goudeau[/caption]

Her work proves its value. “After the Last Border” won the 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for best American nonfiction writing from Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. It also won a Christopher Award, which honors work that celebrates “the power of facing hardships with hope, courage, determination, and faith,” and was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice book. A New York Times review by Mimi Swartz calls it “simply brilliant, both in its granular storytelling and its enormous compassion.”

The review notes that immigration is part of America’s mythology. “Such stories are the staples of newspaper and TV news features,” Swartz writes, “so much so that telling them in fresh ways seems almost impossible.”

Goudeau says that telling these stories in fresh ways is the only way to get at the truth, and that requires a bigger box of journalistic tools, starting with empathy. Goudeau’s process with all her sources is collaborative. Her reporting and writing about Hasna and Amina was especially intimate, with the women meeting at each other’s houses for lunch every two weeks for almost two years.

Goudeau has written about displaced people for publications such as Teen Vogue, Catapult, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. She also produces documentaries.

She says her empathetic approach to journalism was informed, in part, by her own experience as a foreigner in other countries. She lived in Thailand for two summers in college, in Brazil and Chile later, and traveled extensively around South America, spending time in Argentina, Mexico and Peru, among other places.

“I had the experience of being treated like a child,” because of her lack of language skills, she said, “and the frustration of recognizing that my brain was moving faster than my mouth could.”

I talked with Goudeau about her journalistic process and what’s at stake when journalists interview vulnerable people. At one point I referred to the subject of her stories as “refugees” and she said that a better term would be one that doesn’t equate a single status with an entire person or group. Careful language is one way to honor the complex humanity of people seeking refuge.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

[dc]H[/dc]ow do you find the people you write about?
I've taken a non-traditional path to journalism. When I was getting a Ph.D. at the University of Texas, I began advocacy work with former refugees and that eventually led to writing. For me, so much of the work of finding people who are interested in my telling their stories has been through friendships. I’ll call a close friend, who will connect me with other people.

Mu Naw and I had been friends for over a decade before we began the process of writing together. To find Hasna, I interviewed several people. I knew I wanted to tell the story of someone who came from Syria, but I wasn't sure how to find someone. The minute I met her, I knew she was the person. She not only had a story that is interesting, but she is the kind of person that I could connect with on the deep level needed to do this work.

How do you build that trust?
If you are friends with people for 10 to 15 years and then wait for a president to ban those groups of people, that's a great way. I'm not sure that there's a fast way to do this.

Studying literature gave me a deep knowledge of representation and the ways that white people have done damage telling the stories of others. That was excellent training in respecting the stories of the people that I tell now.

I've tried to take on the more professional aspects of journalism, but it’s still my instinct to lead with empathy and friendliness. That comes from my advocacy work. I give people complete narrative control as much as possible. If there's something that they don't want to say, they can trust me with that.

How do you negotiate the details of how you are going to identify someone, such as using a pseudonym, when someone’s story can put their life, or others’ lives, in danger?
Discussing pseudonyms is actually one of the more awkward conversations I have in short interviews. With Hasna and Mu Naw, because these were such long-term interviews, we had built trust by the time we made decisions about their names and identifying details.

For Hasna’s story, in the first draft we told it straight with all the details, the correct names, everything — just getting the story down. Then my editor and I went through and made some decisions about which stories would definitely reveal Hasna’s identity. There were amazing stories, but anyone who had connections in Syria would know the family. We had to take those out.

My biggest fear is that my writing is going to put someone who's in danger in further danger, but I also want to honor the people whose stories I'm telling. I work with them to make sure that they understand what's at risk, so they can make good decisions.

What about negotiating with editors about protecting your sources’ identities? In my experience, editors don’t like anonymous sources.
We pitched the book under the pseudonym. My editor at Viking immediately understood the stakes. She even flagged some things I missed.

With magazines and newspapers, early on in my writing, I pitched some articles that got accepted and then editors didn't want to change the names. And I pulled them. Lately that hasn't happened as much. Having a book published, and as I build this writing career, the editors I work with understand the connections I’m making. The best editors are the ones who say, “Absolutely, what do we need to do?” I appreciate that attitude because this is not fictionalizing. It’s about protecting people whose stories would otherwise not be told because of the danger.

What do you wish journalists knew about writing about refugees or displaced people?
There are so many tropes that journalists have for displaced people. We want them to be grateful. We want them to be needy. We want them to have an amazing journey that takes them to the edge of death. That’s what increases sympathy for a U.S. or European audience, but those limited tropes rarely encompass the full story of these complex people.

I think centering people as they experience their lives makes for better stories and gives them some control over what story they want people in positions of power to hear. This is a move from fiction: the specific is more universal than generalities. People who were displaced or have gone through tragic circumstances are more than just that situation. If their personhood comes through, it honors their story and makes for better writing.

There need to be discussions about how to help journalists handle the mental health aspects of interviewing traumatized people. There needs to be scaffolding to allow journalists the empathy to ask good questions and not to do damage in the interview. I really struggled with this during “After the Last Border.” Luckily, I had an amazing editor and agent who helped me make good decisions. If I lose my ability to empathize, I lose something important in the writing process.

Do you have any advice for journalists about how to interview traumatized people?Although I have a list of questions in my head or in my notebook, sometimes you just have to let people tell their story. There is an adage in memoir, “Write from your scars, not from your wounds.” When the wounds are fresh, I try not to push, and sometimes that means I don’t get the best interviews.

Usually I ask: what would you like to tell me? Or: If you have the chance to talk to people in the United States, what would you want them to know about you and your situation? That's often a great entry point because I can hear the “why” behind their interview. I find that allowing them to begin and lead the story, I can ask follow-up questions and we can eventually develop this whole narrative together.

If they say they don’t want to talk about something, I don’t push. I may be missing what would be amazing and sensational details for a story, but I'm doing it in a way that I hope is leaving them not feeling abused or bruised by my questions.

When you have one of those interviews that is scant on details, do you try to make up for it in the writing?
The interview technique for people in positions of power — where I’m happy to push back—– feels like a very different process from when I'm interviewing people whose stories don't often get told, which is more invitational. What story do you want to tell? What details would you like to include? It’s a much gentler tone and a more open way of questioning.

It doesn’t always work out. I have so many interviews that don't make it to publication. But I have almost never encountered people who have been displaced, who are seeking asylum or who are undocumented, who don't want their story told as long as they can do it in a way that doesn't jeopardize their place here. They genuinely want people to know.

For me, those are always easy interviews. I almost always get about 10 times more material than I'm able to use in any story. This is why I love books. They have a longer word count.

How do you take care of your own mental health so you can continue to be empathetic to others?
I want to start with a caveat that my mental health is not as important as the stories of people I'm telling.

Doing these interviews has been surprisingly freeing for me. That was not something that I expected. I feel contentment and joy knowing that I'm able to do something about what’s happening in the world. I can write. I can interview. There's a purposefulness to this work that carries me a long way.

Therapy is amazing. I have had a good therapist for a long time. I have a partner who values and supports my work. I have amazing friends who talk me down and help me recognize that I have to give space to this, that I can’t just muscle through it.

Carolyn Forché is a poet and journalist who wrote a book called “Angel of History.” I have found there is a way that poets are able to be open to the world and yet not broken by the world, that reflects the approach I’m trying to have.

I read a lot of silly books. I watch a lot of silly movies. Sometimes I just have to sit and let it be, and I have to grieve, too. I feel like I'm still always figuring this out. It's lifelong work.

Is there anything else you think journalists should know about working with displaced people?
This is going to be the century of displacement. This work is incredibly important around the world, but displaced people’s voices are rarely centered. It's a real disservice because they're the experts. Journalists and editors who are centering those voices and making sure that the true stories are being told, are the ones who are moving ahead in a much better way for this kind of writing.

***

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist based in Vermont.

The post Empathy as the prime directive in writing about displaced people appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.