A stray remark during a visit with her grandmother sent newspaper reporter Casey Parks, then a college journalism student, on a years-long quest to unearth the story of a trans man in Louisiana. As the project evolved — from aspirational podcast to hoped-for movie and finally to a published book, from nonfiction story to memoir — Parks learned which journalistic rules to keep, which ones to toss and the importance of staying flexible.

Parks first heard the story of Roy Hudgins —a woman who presented as a man in 1950s Delhi, Louisiana — when she was home from college in 2002. Parks had just come out as gay, which was not something embraced in her southern evangelical family. So she was astonished when her conservative grandmother told her that she’d grown up across the street from a woman who “lived as a man.” When Parks pressed her grandmother for more, the older woman said Hudgins played the banjo and was a pretty good country music singer, she but knew little else. She urged Parks to find out what had happened to him.

That plea stayed in the back of Parks’s mind as she racked up journalism prizes and accolades over the next few years. She was the first winner of New York Times columnist Nick Kristof’s “Win a Trip” reporting contest, accompanying him to Africa in 2006. She got an internship at the Oregonian in Portland, Oregon, which turned into a job that lasted 11 years. While covering bread-and-butter beats like education and suburban government, she longed to do more ambitious stories. She decided to find out more about Hudgins, using weekends and vacation days to travel to Louisiana for research and to try to obtain his diaries, which were kept hidden by a couple who took care of him before he died.

Parks left the Oregonian in 2017 to freelance; her work since appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Oxford American, USA Today and the Nation. In 2019 she won an education reporting fellowship to Columbia, where she studied politics and poverty, and began working in earnest on a book about her search for Hudgins’ story. “Diary of a Misfit: A memoir and a mystery” intertwines the story of Hudgin’s life —a largely lonely one, decades before same-sex marriage and trans rights — with Parks’ own story of being raised a Pentecostal Christian in the South and her fear of being rejected for being lesbian. Parks won the J. Anthony Lukas Works-in-Progress award, co-administered by Columbia and the Nieman Foundation for the book. Reviews since its publication have described it as “richly textured,” with praise for Parks for her “keen talent for observation, reporting and empathy.” The book was featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review in mid-August, and Parks described her personal/professional journey to Tommy Tomlinson in a podcast interview for SouthBound.

Disclosure: I was not involved in Parks’ book, but overlapped with Parks for a time at the Oregonian; we are again colleagues at the Washington Post, where she covers gender and family issues. I asked her to take some time from her book tour to describe the reporting, writing and editing process for “Diary of a Misfit.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you come up with the idea for writing this book?
I think my reasons for doing it changed over time. Initially, when my grandmother first told me about it 20 years ago, I didn’t know any other gay people or trans people. So I was really fascinated by the story just because I wanted to believe I wasn’t alone and that there was some context for me. Then when I really started working on it in earnest, honestly it was because I felt like I sucked at my regular job.

I had all of these ambitions back at the Oregonian to be great, but I didn’t know how. Now when I look back, I think actually going through all of those bureaus and less-sexy reporting jobs is what makes you great, or at least what makes you good. But at the time, I really I want to be doing huge projects. I wanted to get on “This American Life.”

Once I realized “This American Life” wasn’t going to hire me and once I got better at my regular job, the reason that I kept pursuing Hudgin’s story was to have a reason to go home. The older I got, the more scared I became of going home. I didn’t know how to do it unless I was working on this project.

How did you balance your daily newspaper job with this project?
I was in my 20s and had a lot more energy than I do now. I spent every vacation day that I had on this project. I did not do anything fun. It’s kind of become passé to encourage people to work for free on their off hours,  but that’s the only way I saw I could do it. In my three weeks of vacation each year, I would just be full-on and not think about anything but this project. Then when I was back at work, I’d be back at work.

The thing that took the most time was transcribing all of the tape. I transcribed eight terabytes of video footage by hand. I would get off work, eat dinner and then sit there transcribing, or I would get up before work and transcribe.

How did this project evolve from being a podcast, then a film and finally a book?
When I first started reporting it back in 2009, I wanted to make a podcast. My mom had no idea what a podcast was. But she knew what a film was. So from 2010 until 2017 or ‘18, I worked on it as a documentary film but could never figure out what the end was supposed to be. One person told me that she wouldn’t give me a grant because Hudgins was dead. She was like, “He can’t be your main character.” I remember telling her on the phone, “Well, what about my grandma?” She was like, “What about you?” And I said “No, thank you. I’m a journalist. I don’t want to be in it.”

What changed your mind? Why did you decide to include yourself?
There’s this really famous book-writing class at Columbia. My professor, Samuel Freedman, really pushed me to just try one chapter with myself in it. The words he used were, “Don’t act like you don’t have skin in the game. This is personal to you.” Once I wrote one chapter about myself, I thought, Dang! It was so much better than anything I had ever done.

As journalists, we’re taught to not put ourselves in our work. All of my favorite journalists in the 1990s would lionize the invisible journalist. I did not want to break from that rule. I worried if I did this, I’d never get another job. Even now I still have that fear that people aren’t going to let me be a regular journalist if I’m a human

How did you organize everything?
I have a folder for every single chapter of the book, and each of those folders has a bunch of research. Almost every chapter is built around a scene and they kind of alternate between a reporting trip that I took and then my personal life. What I would do is try to fill in those trips with outside research.

Chapter 2 is all about my grandmother being a sharecropper and the sharecropping business, and how she ends up in this rural town living across the street from Roy. For that, I read multiple books about cotton and about sharecropping. I would listen to old episodes of the Grand Ole Opry or the “Louisiana Hayride,” which were popular radio shows when she was growing up.

Small-town newspapers covered everything back in the day. I read this article about there had been so much oil and so many people moving to Delhi that the bank had to hire three extra tellers and they ran out of money. It’s only half a sentence in my book, but I just love that detail. That’s the kind of thing no one is going to remember to tell you when you interview them, but to have that kind of contemporaneous document is invaluable.

How did you put all the threads together of Roy’s story, your relatives’ stories, yours?
I went through several different structures. I would make note cards of every possible scene. I sketched out a lot of rising and falling action. I made the major arc and then I would make arcs for each chapter. There’s an arc to the whole book, but then each chapter needs to also feel like its own little complete thing with a beginning, middle and end. Most of the chapters have multiple scenes in them.

My goal was to do 500 words a day. On the days when I really couldn’t write, I would just try to push myself to get to 500 words. On the days when I would exceed that, I’d get to have a lot of ice cream and be like, You’re amazing. You did a thousand words today. A lot of this was in the pandemic, too, so you really needed the treats.

You give a shout-out in the acknowledgments to Anna Griffin, an editor at the Oregonian when you were there, for reading through multiple drafts.
The thing that she’s best at is asking you a question. She’ll just ask you things she would want to know. Oftentimes as I went to answer her questions, it would make everything much richer.

What is the main difference between book-writing and journalism?
You don’t get immediate feedback. I had a couple of meetings with my book editor, but for the bulk of writing, you’re your own.

To get a book deal, you have to outline the whole book. I had already had a basic idea of the structure. Some of that changed as I was writing it. When my editor bought the book, one of the first things she said is that everyone wanted more of my mother than I had outlined.  I was initially resistant to that, but I think they were right.

Most of my chapters were 7,000 words, which is about the length of the magazine articles I was doing at the time. So I was just like, I’m writing this 7,000-word piece. It honestly didn’t feel that different.

Was there a lot of back-and-forth with your editor after you sent in your manuscript?
My editor didn’t tell me how to write the book, but told me what she was interested in. She sent me a 14-page letter with a lot of questions like, Why isn’t your dad in here very much? Can you talk more about romantic love? It was less like sentence-by- sentence editing and more of the big-picture stuff.

What were some of the biggest challenges?
Finding the right agent is probably one of the harder parts — finding that person who really believes in you and will push you. I initially talked to my agent in August 2018 and she told me she liked aspects of Roy Hudgins’ story but she would not initially represent me because I didn’t have his diaries. After I started writing for the New Yorker other agents reached out to me. Some of them would talk to me in this exoticized way: Oh, you’re a poor Southern lesbian. I can sell that. I finally wrote my agent back. I told her I didn’t have Hudgins’ diaries but really needed to do this book. She said OK: “I’ll take the long game with you, but you have to go back and try one more time.”

What’s your advice you have for someone who aspires to write a book?ƒ
Know that it’s going to be hard, so make sure that you absolutely want to do it. Also, be extremely organized and come up with a system that works for you to make it happen in a manageable way. I also think having thick skin helps. My book went out to an auction and eight publishers put in bids. But a lot said no.

***

Lisa Grace Lednicer is the local night editor of The Washington Post and an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

The post So you want to write book? A long journey from newspaper reporter to book author appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

More decades ago than I care to count, I was assigned to read “The Canterbury Tales” for a high school English class. That was before email and texting reduced the English language to rubble, and yet I still found it hard going. That is, until my mom, who majored in English at the University of California, Berkeley, read the Prologue aloud to me the way she said it would have sounded in the original Middle English.

I was transfixed by the rhythm and flow of the sentences and the sing-songy sound of each line. I had no way of knowing whether my mom’s pronunciation was correct or whether the timbre of her voice was appropriate, but that moment remains etched in my memory. It was as if she had opened a door to a world I hadn’t known existed. She made the 14^th-century text accessible in a way it hadn’t been for me until then. (A couple of years ago, when my daughter was still in elementary school, I asked my mom to read the Prologue to her, too, and the photo I took of them immersed in the text is one I will always treasure.)

Recently I stumbled across an app that lets people hear “The Canterbury Tales,” written by Geoffrey Chaucer, in Middle English. (Pause here to consider how Chaucer’s mind would be blown knowing that his medieval poem can now be listened to on a 21^st-century portable device.)

A team led by the University of Saskatchewan in Canada released it in 2020, and the university claims it is the first major literary work, in any language, developed as an app. Accompanying the reader’s sonorous voice is a digitized version of the original text, with each line highlighted with the words in print — the Middle English version on top and modern English below.

The sound of words

Chaucer began writing the “The Canterbury Tales” around 1387. The manuscript, which he didn’t finish, was published the year he died, in 1400. It is recognized as the first English-language poem, published at a time when poets wrote in French and Italian and thus were read only by the educated, wealthy members of society.

But Chaucer’s use of Middle English made it accessible to everyone; it was meant to be recited aloud, since only the elite knew how to read. (The Bible had been published in English only a few years before Chaucer started writing “The Canterbury Tales.”) And his cast of characters — a motley group telling stories as they head out on a springtime pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket in Canterbury — gives modern readers a taste of life in medieval England.

You can find oral versions of “The Canterbury Tales” all over the Internet, but the app created by the University of Saskatchewan’s team is a cut above the rest. Listening to it is an immersive, almost hypnotic experience. Perhaps that’s because the reader, former university student Colin Gibbings, sounds like he’s doing more than just reading off a page; he’s clearly transmitting his enthusiasm for the work and understanding of what’s being said. You can tell from the timbre of his voice that he’s relishing the fullness of the language in each line. The result is a retelling of a 620-year-old work that sounds lyrically and musically interesting:

Whan hath Aprill, with his shoures soote (When that April, with his showers sweet)

The droghte of March has perced to the roote (Has pierced the drought of March unto the root)

And bathed evrye veyne in swiche lyquor (And bathed every vein in that liquor)

Of which vertu engendered is the flour (Out of whose strength engendered is the flower)

Inspired hath in every holt and heath (Has breathed to life, in every copse and heath)

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne (The tender shoots, and when the young sun)

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne (Has in the Ram his half-course run)

And smale foweles maken melodye (And small fowles make their melody)

That slepen al the nygtht with open lye (That sleep all through the night with open eye)

So priketh hem nature in hir courages (For Nature pricks them so in their ‘courages’)

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrymages (Then folk long to go on pilgrimages)….

The text is still a bit of a struggle to get through, even with the modern English translations underneath the Middle English. But listening to it aloud in this version highlights the richness of the language, especially in the character descriptions:

A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man (A knight there was, a most important man)

That fro the tyme that he first bigan (Who from the moment that he first began)

To ryden out, he loved chivalrye (To ride abroad had loved all Chivalry)

Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye (Loyalty and glory, freedom and courtesy)

Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre (He’d fought successfully in his lord’s wars)

And thereto hadde he rydden, no man ferre (And ridden thence, no other man so far)

As wes in cristendom as hethenesse (In Christendom and heathen regions too)…

Reading your writing out loud

Just as “The Canterbury Tales” made poetry available to the masses, this app makes it available to people everywhere who strive to make their writing sing. Middle English, considered vulgar in Chaucer’s time, can sound beautiful when read aloud today.

When we write, we subconsciously read silently, but what we really need to do is read our work aloud — not sentence by sentence as we’re writing, because that tortures each word and renders it lifeless — but when we think we’re near our final draft. That’s when we catch awkward phrasing, a misplaced word, a cliché that makes us grimace.

If we orient our work to be read aloud, if our voices rise and fall, slow down and speed up in the right places — if we’ve written a story that can be read with the brio of this app — then we know we’ve completed something memorable, even if it won’t necessarily be remembered 620 years from now.

***

Lisa Grace Lednicer is the local night editor of The Washington Post and an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

The post What a modern reading of “The Canterbury Tales” can teach us appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Veteran U.S. newspaper journalist Brian Bonner has given the last 14 years of his career to Ukraine. As the longtime editor of the Kyiv Post, an English-language newspaper in the country’s capital, he directed a staff of reporters who wrote about everything from Kyiv’s nightlife and food scene to the 2014 EuroMaiden Revolution that overthrew Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovych, triggering the start of Russia’s ongoing war. The newspaper also did groundbreaking work investigating governments and oligarchs from its start in 1995 all the way up to current President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Bonner was born in Wisconsin, graduated from high school in South Dakota and has a degree in history from the University of Minnesota. He spent 20 years as a local reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota and also filed stories from Russia, Belgium, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom, before finding his way to and falling in love with Ukraine.

His 14-year leadership of the Kyiv Post ended last November after the newspaper’s owner fired the entire 50-member staff, suspended operations for a short period, then restarted with new employees. Many of the refugees from the former Post launched their own Web start-up, The Kyiv Independent, where they’re covering the war — some from the front lines, some from other parts of Ukraine. (As of this week, the Kyiv Independent had 2 million followers on Twitter.)

Bonner, 62, now works as an editor at Geopolitical Intelligence Services, a think-tank that studies and writes about contemporary global issues.  A consummate newsman, he is now without a newsroom, left watching the biggest story of his career play out around him. He says he’s proud of the Independent editors and reporters he trained through his time at the Post, but acknowledges he’d love to be with them again, leading coverage of a war that looks to be headed to a prolonged stalemate.

I worked with Brian decades ago at the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, and have followed his career with interest since both of us left. I’ve been worried about him ever since Russia invaded Ukraine five weeks ago and continues its efforts to take the capital city of Kyiv. So, I was especially grateful that I was able to reach him and he took time to talk. I asked how he’s faring physically and emotionally, his thoughts about news coverage of the war and what stories he thinks most need to be told. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

First, are you staying safe?
I’ve been in and out of Kyiv for the last month. Currently I’m safe. The train runs every day from where I am to Kyiv. My ex-wife and my daughter are safe for now; they were in a bomb shelter in Kharkiv but recently relocated to southern Ukraine. (Editor’s note: We are not disclosing Bonner’s location to protect his safety. He faces particular risk as an American and a journalist who has criticized Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine.)

If you were still running the Kyiv Post, how would you be covering the war?
The same way we covered the revolution and the start of Russia’s war in 2014. We didn’t know until the end how the revolution was going to turn out, whether Ukraine was going to win or lose. But you can go to a Reuters story today and it’s still called a “Russian operation.” This isn’t about “breakaway republics,” it isn’t about “separatist republics” — it’s a straight-up Russian invasion that started in 2014. And they don’t call it that.

I wouldn’t have left our newsroom. If I were there, I don’t think I’d do anything differently than the journalists who are covering this. We’d do it from our unique vantage point as the hometown newspaper, the capital newspaper in the country that’s being attacked. I’ve been dreaming of headlines, front pages, because I’m an old print guy. Part of me feels like an amputee because I just don’t have that outlet anymore, or the staff, or the printed newspaper, or the website to update, or the stories to edit or the coverage to plan.

Have you talked to your former colleagues who are covering the invasion?
The demolition of the Kyiv Post by the owner couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I’m very glad my colleagues stayed together at The Kyiv Independent. They’re much younger. All of them are bilingual, tech-savvy — an amazing generation of people that I was able to hire and mentor. They dispersed for safety reasons but they’re still kicking ass. And to be honest, the Twitter feed is everything in times of fast-moving stories. They jumped from nothing on their Twitter feed to 2 million. They’ve become the go-to news service. They’ve raised $75,000 in monthly membership pledges and have a GoFundMe campaign that has raised $1.5 million. Some have stayed very close to the front lines, but the front line moves and shifts, so it’s dangerous. They’ve done it with classic beat reporting: Some reporters are handling the refugee crisis at the border, some are handling the military, others are monitoring what Zelensky is doing, still others are covering the diplomatic side, and so forth.

They’re massively overworked; I’ve tried not to bother them. They don’t have a printed newspaper, so it’s a website, a daily newsletter and their must-go-to Twitter feed. I know from managing during COVID that it was a huge challenge to go from a newsroom to remote. But in that way, COVID provided a great lesson: You can still pull together with a little extra effort and manage people who are dispersed all over the nation or even abroad.

How would you balance the need to protect your reporters with the need to tell this story?
When I was editor of the Post, we had a policy for covering the revolution and war: You were never forced to go to the front lines. It was voluntary, and we had enough journalists who wanted to volunteer. You have to not be cowboys, not send people out to their doom, and we never did that. And thank God we never had injuries in the revolution or war, despite the fact that thousands of people got killed and hundreds of people got hurt.

What do you think of the Western media coverage so far?
I’m proud of what the journalists are doing here. The human angles are everywhere. But the larger picture is that we have a 21^st-century genocide against the Ukrainian people, against the Ukrainian state. I’m upset that officialdom is standing aside, treating it in some ways like a reality TV show. If we stand aside and allow this genocide to go forward, how is this going to look to the future of humankind? Do we say we didn’t intervene forcefully because Ukraine is not a member of NATO, so we didn’t have a legal obligation? There’s a moral obligation, I think, to save Ukrainians.

If you get translations of Putin’s remarks, he sounds like an enraged Hitler. Ukraine is a democratic, peaceful country that is being punished just because it wants to keep its own statehood. There are people who oddly, at this late date, are apologists, trying to get us to understand Putin’s point of view. He has no legitimate point of view on this. That’s the frustration I feel when I watch some of the coverage.

What about the context?
There’s still not a true understanding of the evil that Vladimir Putin poses to the free world. Some people still think, ah, let him have Ukraine, then it’ll end at NATO’s border. Not gonna happen, guys. So wake up to that, stop him now, when he can be stopped more easily. The other thing is they say is that sanctions don’t work. Well, sanctions don’t work because they’re not severe enough. If you actually flipped the switch and disconnected the Russian economy from the world, and that means shutting off the oil and gas, he cannot fund his war machine.

We saw sanctions, very weak ones, rolled out after the Crimean invasion in 2014. They weren’t enforced. I don’t think the coverage has really reflected that.

What should the Western media be doing more of to hold people’s attention?
They need to stay on the story. We’ve seen some great investigations of assets. But in the short term it’s not about that. This is our moral test of the 21^st century. Are we going to fail it again like we did with the Syrians, or are we going to pass it? Ukrainians are being killed just for being Ukrainian. That’s genocide, and it has to be stopped.

When you say stay on the story, what do you mean?
It takes enormous resources and energy, and there’s fatigue. It’s a marathon, and we’re now a month-plus into the active, full-scale invasion. As an American who’s made his life in Ukraine, I really hope Americans stay interested. I hope that they keep the moral obligation. There’s more than enough Ukrainian men and, actually, foreign fighters now to turn the tide. We need to understand the effects of this in the long term, in terms of alliances and the economy and reorienting our economies away from autocrats.

What should the media and reporters do to have this story heard above the daily din? Do we just keep filing stories and images and hope people pay attention, or is there something more to be done?
That’s a good question. I don’t know what more journalists can do. I think journalists are saints. They work way too hard and take too many risks.

The larger global struggle is over a free press, and that’s part of why Ukraine has been attacked by Putin. Ukraine certainly had big corruption problems, including in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration. And Zelensky is partly to blame for telling people that he didn’t believe there was going to be a full-scale invasion up until the week it happened. That led to a lot of complacency.

Ukraine is still relatively free, especially when you compare it to China, when you compare it to Russia, when you compare it to Belarus. This is where we need global support for journalism. And I think in crises like these we have to get resources to journalists who are able to get the story out. It’s illegal right now in Russia to call this a war. But Russians have internet; they can choose to find out the truth. Unfortunately, and this is even the case with some of my former friends in Russia, many buy into Putin’s lying with absolutely no concept of reality.

How are reporters getting access to people in Ukraine and how are they staying safe?
Access in Ukraine has been pretty good because there have been so many changes in governments,  so it’s never been a huge problem getting to people in power. The administration holds a lot of off-the-record briefings. It’s not like the Kremlin. Officials are all on Twitter or available on their cellphones. It’s a very open country — maybe too open. They had to crack down a little bit because journalists were getting too close to the front lines and there was a warning about the risk of tipping off the Russian enemy. One of the few times some censorship is valid is during war.

As for Ukrainian citizens, they are by and large a pretty open people; they’ll tell you their story.

What news sources are you relying on for coverage?
First and foremost I rely on my former colleagues, now at The Kyiv Independent. But that said, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Economist, Atlantic Magazine, Financial Times — they’re all over this story. I don’t live a day without CNN. Heaven forbid we lose our internet and TV and cellphones.

There are a lot of stories that would be huge front-page news but they get lost in the war. One of them is that Ukraine’s electricity grid was hooked to Russia’s. But now, fortunately, the grid has been disconnected from Russia and reconnected to the European grid. That’s a big, big deal and huge advancement in security, in the electricity market and the energy market.

Are there stories that are being missed or undercovered?
Stories aren’t being missed, especially about what’s happening in Ukraine and on the battlefront. But the bigger stories are the ones that are being told on the business desks, by the investigative teams, in the political arena. Those are taking place all over the world, in Brussels, in Washington, Berlin, Moscow and Berlin. You don’t need to be in Ukraine to tell this story. Even to interview Ukrainians now, you don’t need to be in Ukraine. Ten percent of the country has left.

The West moves slowly, but once it’s unified it does have power. Yet coverage shows that NATO is still a very timid organization. I don’t think Putin will ever use nuclear weapons, but this notion that the West is telling Putin what it will do and won’t do is kind of ridiculous.

As for stories that need more attention: How Putin’s money and the autocrats’ money have corrupted politics in the Western countries. Those are the big stories that can be done wherever you are in the globe. South Dakota became a leader of these blind trusts, where they’re not required to reveal who owns them, who got the money, anything. It’s just money laundering.

What news organizations are doing a really bad job of covering this?
I won’t watch him, but I know that Tucker Carlson on Fox is the poster child of Putin appeasers: Oh, let’s try to understand Putin, give him an off-ramp. The guy doesn’t WANT an off-ramp. I was asked to go on Fox twice by Sean Hannity and I didn’t respond. I don’t think you can argue with a guy whose whole platform is based on misinformation and supporting Donald Trump.

I think the hottest place in journalism hell goes to those who spread Kremlin propaganda — that there are bioweapons labs in Ukraine, that Ukraine was developing nuclear bombs, Ukraine is full of Nazis. This is such garbage that no journalists who run down the facts would repeat them. Even though it’s only Ukraine fighting, with Western supplies, it is a World War III in the sense that everyone has to choose up sides: Ukraine or Russia? If you choose neutrality, that’s taking Russia’s side.

And who’s doing the best coverage?
The people who write most insightfully keep history in mind: Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum, Garry Kasparov, Diane Francis. And Illia Ponomarenko, who has become internationally famous, went to the University of Mariupol, which now is in ruins. Illia is funny despite the war. He was tweeting at 3 in the morning — ‘fucking Russians, stop your artillery! I’m trying to get some sleep here!’ He’s got a million Twitter followers last I checked. He’s the front-line guy, the military guy. He bought an apartment in the northwest suburbs of Kyiv, which was also the center of the battle, and lost it in the shelling. He wrote a piece — Is the front line moving forward or back? — and, as only Illia could do because he’s so well-sourced and is actually on the ground, gave us a very good state of play about whether Kyiv was going to fall. It was very nuanced. It was like community journalism. So that’s the one that stuck out because I’m a Kyiv resident. I own property here. I have my life invested in Kyiv. And, dammit, I want to know if I will still have a home or I’m going to be bombed in my bed or whatever.

Postscript: After our conversation, Bonner sent this link to a New Yorker podcast and a perspective story from The Kyiv Independent that he recommends for further understanding of the situation in Ukraine. Then he added this personal note: “Thanks for the time. Remember, if I die, I died doing what I want, where I want, with whom I want…nothing better in life.”

The post A view of Ukraine, from an America journalist who has made his life there appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]C[/dc]op-shop PIOs typically don’t ruminate on life in a small city or make jokes at their own expense. At least, not on social media. But since 2014, Tim Cotton — a lieutenant with the police department in Bangor, Maine (pop. 32,000) — has used the agency’s Facebook page for much more than news releases or photos of “the man putting his thumb down on the citizenry,” as he puts it. In addition to public service announcements about job openings or criminal activity, Cotton dispenses advice about road conditions in the snow (It’s Maine, so there’s a lot of snow.), grumbles about potholes and tells stories about the quirky interactions between officers and citizens. Scrolling through the folksy page is akin to listening to the best days of “A Prairie Home Companion,” but instead of a droll Garrison Keillor you get a wisecracking cop who just happens to be a good writer.

Here's a typical post from November 2021:

While this has become an old story across the nation, we do catch a few of these catalytic converter thieves.

Something to keep in mind is to park your trucks, and other vehicles with more easily accessible converters, in areas visible to the public when possible.

If you see someone scurrying under a vehicle with a battery operated sawzall in hand, they are not "mobile oil change specialists," or "Federal Exhaust Inspectors," they are thieves.

Call us.

Park vehicles in view of cameras, under bright lights, or under the watchful eyes of Blitz, your wonderdog.

It might not follow the AP Style Guide, but neither does it bow to stiff law enforcement jargon.

Cotton, who will turn 59 next month, has been the police PIO in Bangor since 2014 after many years as a detective. He plans to retire this summer, turning the communications job over to someone who will, no doubt, "do it differently than I do," he told me. Cotton will devote his writing chops to his website and blog, @TimCottonWrites, and books, most recently fiction.

He has no formal training in writing ("I failed English three times in high school."), but grew up in a house filled with books. His grandfather had a large home library and got him a subscription to Field and Stream when he was 8 or 9. His grandmother gave him Reader's Digest and clipped Erma Bombeck columns for him. And he read the newspaper, preferring the police blotter to the comics.

Cotton talked to Storyboard about why he reshaped the department’s Facebook page, his writing process, the public (and his bosses’) reaction to his posts and what he now reads for inspiration. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity, with a needed apology to Cotton: We unbroke some of his broken writing rules to loosely follow AP Style.

[dc small]H[/dc]ave you always been a cop?
Actually, I started out in radio back in the ‘80s. I worked for Stephen King at his radio station when I was like 20. One of the station managers had a small newspaper and I wrote some columns for them, just simple stuff, at $25 bucks a column. I wrote for a small sailing newspaper another friend opened; I knew nothing about sailing but I could write about boats.

My dad was a cop when he was younger, my grandfather was a fireman, so I felt like I wanted to do some community service and I became a cop. I’ve stuck with it, and I’ve enjoyed most all of it.

How did this Facebook page come to be?
I’d been a detective forever, then put in for a promotion in 2014. The only two jobs open at the time for sergeants were a midnight shift and the public information officer. I selected public information. It included handling the Facebook page, which at that time had 9,000 followers. I really didn’t know anything about social media. But I knew that in order to have people read a page you need to have something there for them  — not just memes and traffic warnings and weather alerts. I wanted to make it interesting, so I decided to write stories about human interactions.

Not a lot of agencies were doing anything humorous at the time, and it just exploded. We gathered 50,000 followers over the course of that summer; it’s about 330,000 now.

Some people don’t see the purpose of this because they feel like, why should a police department be funny? But if you want them to read the informational things, you have to provide something for them to come to in the first place. So I just wrote about officers’ interactions, funny things, interesting things, tidbits.

Give them something to read and they will come?
Yeah. That was my theory. No one’s coming here to read that we put cones on First or Second Street. They don’t care, and rightfully so. I know that if I read something myself, I like it to be humorous. I’d rather laugh than cry or be mad.

How did the department brass react?
My chief was real supportive and said, “Yeah, let’s do it. Do whatever you want to do.”

Sometimes he hears negative things from certain people, but usually those people have an underlying agenda. A lot of people would say we’re wasting money. But I write it on my own time. I get up about 3 a.m., and look at some national event that I can somehow relate to Bangor. I usually find something to write about around 4 or 5, then shut the book and move on.

Were there any parameters?
Just the same parameters we have on anything: Don’t talk about religion and don’t talk about politics. Other than that, it’s a free-for-all.

How do you deal with comments?
You have to interact with the folks who are following your page. I read all the comments every day. If someone has a question or an inquiry, I answer it. I think that’s been key to the page — that there is some interaction, and people are able to reach out and talk to a specific somebody. They know me as Tim, or TC, or lieutenant, or whatever they want to call me. If people give me crime tips,; I pass them along to the appropriate people..

You've published two books and have a website and blog. What are your books about?
I have my own Facebook page, which has about 66,000 followers, and I have the website where I do a blog, and 16,000 or 17,000 get that in their email each week.

My first book is called “Detective in the Dooryard" (published by Down East Books in Maine). It’s basically stories of interactions; some of that stuff is taken from the early Facebook posts. There was old stuff, new stuff and rehashed things. I sold 35,000 of those. The second one is “Got Warrants?” which is the most popular feature on the page. It’s a a comical take on the average interactions and arrests with police officers, so I wrote a book with all new “Got Warrants?” and they’re based on actual arrests, crimes, but written in a lot more hyperbole, with humor. We don’t make fun of people, but we make fun of situations. That came out last October. My third book is going to be a follow-up on my first one, which is essays and a series of stories. Now I’m working on fiction.

What do you read?
As a kid, anything, everything. But now I love E.B. White. I I love humorous essays. I always read newspaper columns like Dave Barry, P.J. O’Rourke — I read his stuff when I was just a kid — Art Buchwald, Patrick McManus. I read a lot of history books. Right now I think on my nightstand I’ve got “The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family,” because I enjoy reading the background of the 1960s and actors. I like the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child.

My career was made through the polygraph and investigations — basically crimes against persons, homicides, child abuse. You had to have a wide array of things in your head to have some connection with the people that you’re dealing with, whether they be a criminal or or a witness. So it’s nice to be able to talk about anything. I have always urged every cop that you really need to read a lot of different things even if you don’t like them. When I’m in the doctor’s office, I read the Ladies’ Home Journal.

Really?
It’s not something that’s going to come to my house, but there are interesting articles all through those. The more you know a little bit about a lot, it helps when you have to have discussions with such a varying cross-section of humanity.

I don’t see (reading) as a front-burner interest of most people that are coming into this trade now. It’s obviously a different generation, and they grew up with videos, the quick one-off things. I can’t say I know a lot of readers in police work.

What are the most unexpected reactions you’ve gotten from your posts?
Mostly females read my stuff; it’s interesting to see their take on it. And I’ve had people who drove distances to meet me because they said the writing helped them get through some trying times. A lady from Indiana, when she was cleared of her breast cancer, her husband asked her what she wanted to do. And she said, “I want to go to Maine to meet Tim Cotton.” A lot of people call and drop me letters to say, “My mother was dying and one thing I could do was read to her from your books, or from your posts.”

How did you come up with the sign-off  “Keep your hands to yourself, leave other people’s things alone and be kind to one another?”
It’s from my mother. It kind of came from how we were raised. It was commonly said, maybe not in that order, maybe not all at the same time, but those are three things that I heard constantly.

You said you've never had any writing training, and break the rules of writing that you do know. Tell me more.
I can’t tell you how I know, I can’t tell you what I know, I just know when I finish a sentence, I can tell you how many likes it will get because I can feel it when I write. If it’s funny and it makes me laugh, or if it’s sad and it makes me cry — I know if it works on me it’ll work on someone else.

I’ve had a lot of teachers who want me to come speak to their classes. I really don’t know enough about this to teach anyone. Like if you asked me to diagram a sentence, I would completely fail. But I’ve always felt like I was an adequate communicator, and so when I speak or when I write I do it exactly the same way. I certainly have become better at creating decent sentences, but I also defy most of the rules of writing.

Which rules?
I enjoy run-on sentence because they’re fun for me.
I like to use words together that aren’t commonly used together. If I said strangely humorous or vaguely clear, people understand what I’m saying.
I excessively use commas.
I like to write a paragraph and then one sentence after it. One of the things I do is I’ll write a long legal notice. And then at the end I’ll say, “That’s from the legal team.” And then in the next sentence I’ll say, “And, by the way, we don’t have a legal team.”

I write long things for Facebook, 800-word essays. I was told, “Don’t do that. Facebook has to be so many words and more pictures. And it’s not gonna work for you.” The week someone would tell me that — some professional in social media — I would have 10,000 likes and their page would go down by 300. I love to hear from critics but I don’t change because of a critic.

Why do you think more professional PIOs don’t do what you did with your department’s Facebook page?
I’ve had a lot of people say, What’s your secret? Can you tell me how to write like that? And I always say don’t try to write like I do. I can tell you that I believe interaction with people who read your page is most important. You need to be human. And you need to accept that you’re flawed, just like everyone who is reading your page.

I’ve taught at a couple of out-of-state communications classes. I watch a lot of pages before I go to an area, and I see no one answering comments. If someone has an inquiry, you have time to go back, even if you give them a short answer. People should know that you’re reading their comments because that’s what makes them feel like they’re being heard. If you want them to pay attention you need to let them know that you’re paying attention.

What do you think you’ve accomplished with the page?
I wanted people to find a different way to interact and see some positivity from a trade or an agency that is many times misunderstood. People don’t believe that cops are human; they think we’re robots who follow the rules. I wrote a column once called “Please don’t thank me for my service.” I don’t want you to thank me for my service, because it starts on a level where you’re lauding what I’m doing. I’m getting paid to be here. You’re thanking me with a check. How about we just talk about something else?

There are some horrific cops out there, no question, and they should be out of the trade or in prison. But the majority of your local police officers, state officers, federal officers are good people who are going to the Little League game with you. They don’t want to talk about speeding tickets, they’re not watching your inspection sticker, they don’t really care.

I think what I was trying to parlay through the page was that we’re just like you are and we think things are funny, too, and we can make mistakes. Because I really make fun of cops more than I do anyone else. I make light of our humanness.

***

Lisa Grace Lednicer is an editor at The Washington Post and an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

The post Not your usual police report appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

“A plus-sized Jewish redneck lady died in El Paso on Saturday.” That’s the first line of the unforgettable obit of Renay Mandel Corren, who died in December at age 84. Written by her 52-year-old son, Andy Corren, it transcends the dry, sober style of many death notices and becomes a modern-day Canterbury Tale, full of rollicking details and literary flourishes:

A more disrespectful, trash-reading, talking and watching woman in NC, FL or TX was not to be found. Hers was an itinerant, much-lived life, a Yankee Florida liberal Jewish Tough Gal who bowled 'em in Japan, rolled 'em in North Carolina and was a singularly unique parent. Often frustrated by the stifling, conservative culture of the South, Renay turned her voracious mind to the home front, becoming a model stay at home parent, a supermom, really, just the perfect PTA lady, volunteer, amateur baker and-AHHAHAA HA! HA! HA! Just kidding, y'all! 

Renay — Rosie to her friends, and this was a broad who never met a stranger — worked double shifts with Doreen, ate a ton of carbs with Bernie, and could occasionally be stirred to stew some stuffed cabbage for the kids. She played cards like a shark, bowled and played cribbage like a pro, and laughed with the boys until the wee hours, long after the last pin dropped.

We learn that Renay, who died in El Paso, Texas, had lived in McKeesport, Pennsylvania.; Fayetteville and Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina (“where Renay’s dreams, credit rating and marriage are all buried”); that she drove a Chevy Nova; that she had survived pneumonia, infections, blood clots, breast cancer and COVID; that she’d had multiple abortions and bankruptcies; and she was a “talented and gregarious grifter.” That she exasperated her kids. And that, in the end, they loved her.

Corren, the youngest of Renay’s six kids, describes himself as a “Jewish Southern homosexual” who was born and raised in North Carolina and spent three decades as a talent manager. (His clients included Rebel Wilson, James Gandolfini and Lucy Liu). He said he wrote the obit with his family’s approval in lieu of having to pay for an expensive funeral. Corren says he was astonished at the attention it got: After a New York Times reporter tweeted it, news organizations around the world started calling, and he was interviewed everywhere from CNN to the Guardian in the U.K. The reaction convinced him that it was time to leave the talent management business to work on a proposal for a collection of essays about his mother, as well as a podcast pitch.

“I had a front-row seat to a very colorful life,” he says. “A person who didn’t hide who she was, who lived extremely often without any guardrails, let alone boundaries. At the end of her life, the most fitting tribute I could give her was not a big fancy funeral, but a story about her.”

Corren talked with Storyboard about his relationship with his mother, how he conceived of and wrote the obit, and his siblings’ reaction to it. He also addresses how the public reaction — it was viral on social media — has prompted him to make a leap-of-faith career change into full-time writing. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your role in your family in terms of being the storyteller?
I’ve always shared stories with my mom. She was really not a deep reader but a voracious reader. She read by the pound, not by the author. And that’s not a joke; that’s exactly how she read. We shared a great love of reading, and we would share books and stories. She had five living sons; her only daughter predeceased her. I’m the only gay son; we were very close, we were very tight. In many respects, I was also her first listener. I think a lot of times women, especially fat women, are made to feel or be seen as invisible. She wasn’t invisible to me. She spoke, and I listened.

Did your mother have that kind of close relationship with your other siblings?
Yeah. She loved her children very much; we just had a different playing field. Ours was much more open, emotional, intellectual. We shared books and ideas. Especially the last 15 years, we were thick as thieves.

Do you have writing or storytelling in your education or professional life?
I’ve been writing my whole life, but really picked it up first as a journal-keeper in the mid-1990s and then moving into narrative formats, whether that was a screenplay or short story or play. In the early 2000s I started getting into a very comfortable environment when storytelling shows were exploding all over the place. I was doing regular appearances storytelling shows hosted in theaters in New York, Los Angeles and Asheville, North Carolina. I was doing sketch comedy in New York and L.A. while pursuing a career as a talent manager. It just became impossible to do both, so writing became my private practice, my spiritual practice.

A lot of my early storytelling efforts were shtick, about hustling laughs. But I’m much more interested in the confident, authorial voice that you read in the obit, and that’s where I am now — having scope and scale and command, but also having fun. Being funny, and being loose enough to be funny, are important to me. It has taken me many decades, and I’m really just getting started.

Let’s talk about the crafting of the obit. Did you revise it a lot, or did you just write it in one hot take, or…?
It’s very much a product of my writing practice, which I take seriously and daily, and which is a direct result of our last three years in American life; I was able to seize my gifts and center them in a daily practice. I’d had a few close calls with my mother’s death over 15 years. Let’s just say I had a draft, a folder of drafts, because Renay had the most astonishing ability to just not die. When I was summoned home for what I thought would be a goodbye, it would turn out out to be a false alarm. A couple of times, on the plane or in the cab, I would dash off what I thought should be in an obituary or eulogy. They were just cribbed-together notes, but it turned into a short story.

While my mother was failing I was able to read her a section of the obit at her bedside, which was wonderful and silly. She laughed. Then I stopped working on it, because attending to someone’s death is quite enough. I would not recommend doing any extra work. So I came back to the Catskills and sat still for a few days. I revised and pressed “send” from a café here.

Did you look at other obits for guidance?
No. If you look at an obituary page once, which we all have, it is not a place to go for any sort of lyrical narrative or poetic inspiration or heft. It’s the last place you’d look. Like a lot of people, I never felt that those pages did the lives they purported to celebrate any justice.

Obituaries in newspapers are horrifically expensive. So primarily what I did with Renay's story was not just edit but extract, make it as lean as I possibly could. Even so, it was almost 1,000 words, which is insane. I put it in three newspapers because Renay live din multiple locales, and I think altogether it cost close to $2,500.

The obituary is funny and touching. That comes through in the details you use. Did you write those from memory, or did you call other family and friends?
I didn’t have to source it. She was my mother, and I was there for all of it. Even when I lived other places, especially the last 20 years, I entered a kind of care-taking arrangement with her, so there was never any separation. She would not have allowed it.

You’ve been telling stories for years. What storytelling rules did you follow and which did you throw out the window for the obit?
I do not have a degree in English; I have a perfectly useless BFA in theater. I don’t have a lot of rules; I have a voice, and it’s strong, and I don’t care if people like me anymore. So I threw out caring if anybody liked this; I just wanted to get it printed. I think a great rule in general for all writers is not to write to please anybody but yourself. Frequently I would just laugh while I was writing it. If I made myself laugh, or felt free, or felt sad, or felt, then I knew I was doing justice to a gigantically entertaining human being.

Personally, I didn’t really have a lot of other rules except to not have any typos because my mother was a typo fascist. It could be an eviction notice, it could be a check made out to her, it could be a death notice. If it had a typo on it, that’s all she could fixate on. So I wanted to make sure it didn’t have a typo.

Your mother obviously was a unique character. Was there something universal in her story, in her life that people could relate to?
One of the things I’m wrestling with in my storytelling, the work that I’m exploring now, is the perfect mother mystique. It’s a complete lie. But somehow this irreverent, grifting scamp of a parent of mine touched a lot of hearts. It really moved people to speak up — a lot of times about their own complicated relationship with their parents, and particularly with their mothers. If I could be a rallying cry for fucked-up mothers everywhere. By all means, let’s have that conversation.

There’s no question that women — particularly single mothers — are placed in an impossible, impossible predicament. Mine did the best she could.

Did you run this past your siblings? Were there any negotiations of what stayed and what was left out?
One of my brothers and two of my nephews had a chance to look at it because the fact-checker from Gannett had a couple of questions. Other than that there was no sharing with my brothers. They knew what I was doing, and they loved it.

What was your reaction to the obit going viral?
Completely unexpected, totally hilarious, overwhelming, exhausting. I would not recommend civilians go viral. I am not a civilian; I’ve worked in show business a long time, but even I was like, this is nuts. I’ve been with clients before where they’ve had hit movies, scandalous moments, a breakout performance, a No. 1 TV show, one of them is acting opposite a future duchess — stuff like that. But I’ve never been the target of that stuff, and so it is a different experience.

I stayed very clear, very sober and very present to it because I did feel that it was just another part of this gift of sharing Renay with the world. I treated it like a gift, enjoyed every second of it — and was glad when it ended.

Did you get any nasty responses at all, people who thought it was inappropriate?
There were people, I’m sure, who perhaps take issue with some the descriptions or language or whatever, who didn’t have the kind of experience I had and that’s totally their right. But I did not experience that up close.

Why do you think so many people did respond the way they did?
I think it has to do with the time of year that it came out, and the layers I explained to you. We have an authentic life, fully on display. Everybody’s got a mom. It’s the holiday season approaching and things are bad. Giving people something to laugh about or cheer on or embrace is a good thing. I’m not afraid of schmaltz; neither was my mom. The more chicken fat the better! There was schmaltz in there, just enough to let people feel, or at least see that it was OK to feel.

Was it that response that prompted you to let go of your talent management business and switch to writing?
I had been working on a book for the last year. The hours that I write typically are very early; I’m usually up by 5 and writing until 10 or 11 a.m. Then I have to pivot to the rest of my day and life, taking care of myself, taking care of my dog, taking care of my actors, taking care of this business. It was really crushing me. I felt like I couldn’t sustain that. So I was already one foot out the door, and then this kicked the door down.

It also felt like the best time for my clients to give them time to find new representation, to let the industry know that I’m grateful and this has been an amazing ride, and that the dorky little semi-performing talent manager that you have cheered on is going be a full-time writer now, so go buy his books.

I love the ending of the obit, what reporters would call the kicker: “Bye, Mommy. We loved you to bits.” It was so sweet and, honestly, it brought a tear to my eye.
Everybody deserves an act of grace in their final days and final hours on this Earth. Everybody deserves a good death. Nobody, nobody deserves anything else, anything less. And if it wasn’t clear up to that moment that I loved my parent for all of her many, many, many unique traits and characteristics, it needed to be made clear that she was a mommy, and she always was and always will be loved.

For me, with my mom, it was making sure that I closed the door gently with love.

***

Lisa Grace Lednicer is an editor of The Washington Post and an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

The post An obit gets honest and goes viral appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]O[/dc]n Saturday, the 20^th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, I was listening to coverage on NPR and wonder whether there was anything meaningful I could say on social media. Mindful of a friend’s entreaty that “if you don’t have any good reason to be posting about Sept. 11, maybe just leave it alone,” I decided to pull up an essay I wrote a few days after the attacks and posted it on Facebook, with the comment, “This is all I will say today about Sept. 11, 2001.”

[caption id="attachment_166468" align="alignright" width="350"] Lisa Grace Lednicer with her husband, journalist Drew DeSilver, in 2021.[/caption]

It seems like a lifetime since I wrote that essay. I was newly married to another journalist, living in Oregon, and working as a reporter for The Oregonian. Not surprisingly, a lot has changed since then. I’m still married, with a daughter in middle school. But we live in northern Virginia now, and I am the night local editor at The Washington Post. I also teach journalism part-time at the University of Maryland.

Back then, I remember I had to get approval from The Oregonian’s op-ed editor for the newspaper to run my piece, which I had written in a mad flush of anger and grief. My anger, I’m ashamed to say, came from a particular journalistic wiring: I hated that I wasn’t on the East Coast, covering the attacks directly; the biggest story of my generation was happening and I had to watch it by remote. My grief stemmed from the fact that I couldn’t help the survivors on the ground.

Before I posted my essay from that time on Facebook last week, I read it again, confident that it had held up over time. To my dismay, that wasn’t the case. I found myself wincing at my use of certain words and phrases, and grimacing at the sweeping statements I made back then that now seem ponderous. So, with the hindsight of 20 more years of journalistic wisdom, I decided to edit the Lisa Grace Lednicer of 20 years ago.

Annotation: Lednicer's comments of her piece are in red. To read the essay without annotations, hit the HIDE ANNOTATIONS button in the right-hand menu of your computer screen or at the top of your mobile device. We strongly encourage you to read the essay both with and without  the annotations.

By Lisa Grace Lednicer

September 2001 ~ The Oregonian (annotated September 2021)

[dc]T[/dc]he stream of human misery flows across my television, an endless feedback loop (“an endless feedback loop” feels clichéd of shock and devastation. Huddled This makes it sound as if I was huddled under the covers, whimpering, which was not the case. 3,000 miles away in Salem, I try to wrap my mind around the violence that has shattered my home and terrified my loved ones. This wasn’t exactly accurate. “Shattered my home” sounds as if New Jersey, where I grew up, was destroyed, which it was not.

(I teach my journalism students at the University of Maryland to keep ledes to no more than 30 words; ideally, under that, except in rare circumstances. This is 41 words, and it feels too long. There is just too much tinsel on the tree here.)

Who am I, I wonder; New Yorker, or Oregonian? Think this should be “WHAT am I.”

I grew up in northern New Jersey, but New York always felt like home. I spent weekends biking in Central Park and riding the subways, a treat for a kid stranded in a suburb without buses or trains. There were plenty of buses in Hackensack, N.J., where I grew up, as well as ways to easily get into the city. This line makes it sound as if I grew up in a rural part of New Jersey, which I did not. Not sure why I included it.

I sneaked into Greenwich Village, prowled the streets of lower Manhattan, walked the observation deck of the Twin Towers. I saw those towers every morning from my parents' living-room window. On plane trips back East, they were the first glimpse of home, a reassuring whisper I’d change “a reassuring whisper” to “reassuring me.” A “reassuring whisper” sounds too self-consciously writer-ly. Also, buildings don’t whisper. that I could still claim New York for my own, if I wished. This phrase is vague. What does “claim New York for my own” mean? Better: “… that I was still, at least in spirit, a New Yorker.”

And now, terrorists have driven a jumbo jet through my memories. This metaphor feels cringe-y now. Better: “and now, terrorists have shattered my certainty that New York would always remain the same, no matter how far away I lived” or some such.

I want to race back and hug my parents, stare at the wreckage, feel the grit-studded air brush my cheeks. I want to join my sister as she moves from shelter to shelter, offering food and clothing — or just a shoulder for someone's tears.

We are a restless people, we Americans: Always impatient for a change of scenery, we seem ever-willing to pick up our lives and deposit ourselves in a new city, a fancier house “fancier house” feels like a fusty phrase to me. Better: "a nicer apartment", a different weather pattern. I thought at the time that “a different weather pattern” was a unique way of using climate to describe different locations across the United States, but now it just reads oddly. In fact, the whole graf above feels pompous and unnecessary.

So it has been with me. “So it has been with me” drags down this graf. I left home at 18 and traded my memories of Broadway shows and museum outings for the flatlands of Illinois, “flatlands” doesn’t really say anything. Maybe: “the plains”?, the cypress canopies of Florida and the chest-freezing winters of Minnesota. This graf and the next one should be combined for better flow.

Wherever I moved, I became an expert at scouting for bakeries and coffee shops, smug in my belief that I'd discovered the real America. New York, for all its grandiosity “grandiosity” isn’t quite the right word to use here. Better: “New York, for all its bravado/bluster/bombast", was so . . . parochial. And despite what my Brooklynite sister said, it didn't really matter that I hadn't read last week's Village Voice. This column was written for an Oregon audience, so I’m not sure that readers would know the significance of this publication.

Four years ago I moved to Salem at the gentle urging of my husband, I’d drop “gentle.” “Urging” means to advocate for something strongly, so how can you “gently urge” someone? Was my husband being gentle about talking me into moving to Salem, or did he urge me to? determined to sell me on the Pacific Northwest.

I assumed the trappings of an Oregonian: I bought a tent. Signed my letters "Love, from the 45th parallel." Booked a trip this summer to Eastern Oregon, where I squinted at the sky through the pine trees and thought, "Maybe I'll stay here for good." I raved about the blackberries in August and the crisp winter evenings, bragging to my parents that I could see the Milky Way -- the Milky Way! -- from my backyard. This graf has just enough to make it interesting. Anything more would be overload.

I stopped trying to talk them out of moving here. This is confusing; who is “them” referring to? There are too many words between “my parents” and “the Milky Way” for readers to know. And, anyway, it’s unneeded. Better to jump right from the Milky Way to the Twin Towers collapsing. That jarring contrast – a peaceful nighttime scene with the horror of the towers falling – is more effective when it’s not separated by a wimpy sentence.

And then the Twin Towers collapsed. I’m glad I used “collapsed” instead of “fell.” Even though it’s a two-syllable word, it packs more punch and is more evocative than “fell.”

I feel isolated, an expatriate on American soil. Another ponderous sentence. C’mon, Lisa, knock it off. I have spent the days since Tuesday morning glued to the radio and weeping, unaccountably, whenever I hear a New York accent. Those staccato sounds “staccato” isn’t the right word. Better to say what that accent sounds like: “…whenever I hear a New York accent, with its mangled vowels and left-off “rs” in words like “horror." are oddly comforting in Oregon, a state with no distinguishing accent of its own. I should have tried harder to come up with a description of what Oregonians sound like when they talk.

One of the most poignant scenes, my father tells me, is the sight of all the cars at the commuter parking lots, cars that will never be picked up because their owners have perished. I really like this scene.

"You look down at the tip of Manhattan, you don't see the World Trade Center and it really tears your heart out," he said. "You really have to live here to fully appreciate it." Great quote from my dad; I was lucky he spoke so descriptively.

I used to get annoyed when he'd say that, Should have said “things like that,” for clarity. when my parents loftily asserted that New York had everything. Yeah, I'd counter, but Oregon has perfect summers. Food tastes better here. We have pinot noirs that rival California's. Snow stays on the mountains, where it belongs. I’m a big believer in the “rule of three,” but I think that four descriptors work in this case.

But now, somehow none of that matters. I can't bury my memories after all. Wait, who said anything about burying memories? Why would I want to, when I’ve spent the whole essay talking about how much New York means to me? I miss New York -- the lights twinkling atop the George Washington Bridge, the oversized pretzels that only taste right This implies that there’s a wrong way for pretzels to taste, when what I really mean to say is “good” as opposed to “bad." when you buy them from a street vendor. Racing the cab drivers on Saturday night. This makes it sound as if I drag-raced against cab drivers. Better: “Weaving my car through Saturday-night traffic.”) Snaring a parking space in front of Lincoln Center. Should have said: “Snaring a RARE parking space in front of Lincoln Center.”

A year after I moved to Oregon, a state senator told me, only partly in jest, "You may live here all your life, but you'll never be an Oregonian." At the time I dismissed that idea as ridiculous, a kind of reverse elitism.

But now I can say: Senator, you were right. I have been, and always will be, a New Yorker.

I’m still happy with these last two grafs, so I’d leave them as is.

***

POSTSCRIPT: After I posted the original essay on Facebook this past Saturday, my dad told me he’d read it. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “Beautiful.”

“It’s funny you mention that,” I said. “I was re-reading it, and I’m not sure it stands the test of time.”

He assured me that it does.

***

Lisa Grace Lednicer is the night local editor of The Washington Post and an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

The post An editor annotates her own column from 20 years ago about Sept. 11 appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is one of two posts today analyzing the power of the presidential inaugural poem delivered Jan. 20, 2020, by Amanda Gorman, and reflecting on its place in history. The other, by writing teacher Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute, explores the specifics of Gorman's use of language.

[dc]L[/dc]ike everyone watching the U.S. presidential inauguration Wednesday, I was awed by Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb.” In just a little under six minutes it managed to capture not only the spirit of America — its energy and optimism — but also acknowledge the darker forces of nationalism and fear unleashed over the past few years. It is America’s first hip-hop inaugural speech, influenced by slam and spoken-word poetry, and it was flawless.

At 22, Gorman is the nation’s first youth poet laureate and the youngest poet to speak at a presidential inauguration (according to poetry.com, poets have read their work at only four presidential inaugurations — those of John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and now Joseph R. Biden’s). That may have been a strategic choice — she is 56 years younger than Biden, the oldest president to be inaugurated. If so, it worked: The poem radiates with the urgency of the moment, two weeks after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Biden as president. It was rebuke of the too-near present rather than a contemplation of the past:

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,

It can never be permanently defeated.

And, later:

We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation

Our blenders become their burdens but one thing is certain

If we merge mercy with might and might with right

Our love becomes our legacy and becomes our birthright.

[caption id="attachment_161707" align="alignright" width="500"] Members of the Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps march during the Presidential Escort, part of Inauguration Day of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021, in Washington.[/caption]

That rebuke of the worst of our instincts — and the very structure of the poem itself — are rooted in hip-hop, the musical genre born in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods in the Bronx in the 1970s, long before Gorman was born. You can find it in “In the Heights” and “Hamilton,” the Tony-winning Lin-Manuel Miranda musicals. Here’s more from Gorman’s speech:

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.

In the norms and notions if what just is isn’t always justice.

And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it.

Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken,

But simply unfinished.

…And here’s part of a song from “In the Heights” that has a similar structure:

She'd say "Alabanza"
Alabanza means to raise this thing to God's face and to sing
Quite literally "praise to this"
When she was here, the path was clear
And she was just here
She was just here...

According to The Washington Post, Gorman listened to “Hamilton” while she was practicing her speech and tweeted that she included two references to “Hamilton” in “The Hill We Climb.” (I only caught one, from George Washington’s farewell address):

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid.

Gorman also summons imagery from another masterful source: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. From his “I Have a Dream” speech:

From the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, let freedom ring. From the mighty mountains of New York, let freedom ring. From the mighty Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snow capped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only there; let freedom ring from the Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain in Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill in Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And here’s Gorman, summoning Americans from every corner of the nation to come together:

We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West.

We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.

We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states.

We will rise from the sun-baked South.

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful.

When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid.

The mashup of hip-hop, King and traditional alliterative and prose technique have many on social media rhapsodizing about the poem, calling it one for the ages. As the nation continues to grapple with a pandemic, an economic meltdown and calls for racial justice, Gorman acknowledged our fear and distrust. But she also pointed us toward hope. Her words, perfectly timed for the moment we’re in, will surely endure.

***

Lisa Grace Lednicer is a multiplatform editor at The Washington Post and an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

The post America’s first hip-hop inaugural poem ties history to the present, optimism to urgency appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]A[/dc]s federal law enforcement officers descended on Portland, Oregon, last month and clashed with protesters demanding an end to police brutality, Eddy Binford-Ross — who lives in Salem, about 45 minutes south of Portland — rushed to the scene. For almost three weeks straight, the editor of The Clypian newspaper live-tweeted what she saw on the ground, shot photos and video, took detailed notes, then went home to grab a few hours of sleep before posting to her publication’s website. The next night, she’d head back into the fray and stay until after 3 in the morning, long past the time the national TV and newspaper reporters had packed up their equipment and left.

[caption id="attachment_158144" align="alignright" width="262"] Eddy Binford-Ross[/caption]

It would have been exhausting for a seasoned war reporter, but Eddy isn’t a war reporter or even a full-time journalist. The Clypian (Anglo-Saxon for “call”) is the newspaper of South Salem High School, where Eddy, 17, is entering her senior year and juggling two part-time jobs — one as a communications assistant for Salem-Keizer Public Schools and another as a legislative aide to a member of the Oregon House. Her reporting pluck has drawn the attention of The Washington Post, MSNBC, the BBC, Fox, Reuters and other news outlets.

The Clypian is published in print during the school year, but keeps up an online presence year-round. In addition to school issues, the staff has written about the Oregon legislature and done candidate endorsements; Eddy is working on a series about diversity in the school district, especially among staff, based on recently released stats. The newspaper has had the same advisor for 16 years, but is completely student-run; school officials don't monitor or approve stories before they are published.

I’ve known Eddy since she was 9. Her mom, Warren Binford, is a law professor at Willamette University, and we became friends when I worked as the law school’s communications director from 2010-13. Her dad is a teacher. So, as things in Portland appeared to calm down in the last couple of weeks, Eddy agreed to talk about her observations on the front lines of the protests.

And in case you’re wondering, as I was: her mom or dad always accompanied her to the protests, although they kept a respectful distance as their daughter did her job. When I asked her mom how she felt about her daughter placing herself in a dangerous situation, she said this:

“I had never gone to a Portland protest because they are so high-conflict — and that was before the feds showed up. So I was not thrilled and Chris (my husband) agreed to take her to keep her safe. Then I went with her on the third night and realized that the feds were completely out of control. From then on, it was all about getting her up there every night and keeping her as safe as possible so that she could keep documenting this in the detailed, blow-by-blow, matter-of-fact way she has come to be known for.

“Cutbacks to the press means there aren’t as many professional journalists on the street to report what’s going on. We don’t have adequate support for the press, and we have these historic events leading to the loss of democracy and the rule of law. So we wanted to support her in informing the public.

“Both friends and family on the right and the left told us that she became their most trusted source of the events, and I believe that her coverage helped to create an accurate, unbiased historical account of the feds' occupation of Portland.

“But I would be lying if I didn't tell you that I was shaking with fear some nights, but trying not to let her see my fear."

My conversation with Eddy, below, has been edited for length and clarity.

[gallery ids="10638,10639,10640,10641,10642,8417"]

[dc small]H[/dc]ow did you get interested in journalism, and is it a career aspiration?
I’ve always been interested in current events and politics. I’ve been an advocate for mandatory civics education. Before I started covering the protests, journalism wasn’t a career path I was going to follow. But now I’m seriously considering it. Before this, I didn’t fully understand the potential and what I could do in journalism. I like being able to see what’s going on; I like being there in person and witnessing events. This was an historic moment, and to provide documentation of what happened was a really big deal.

How did you get involved in covering the protests?
I started covering the protests in Salem back at the end of May when they first started. I went to Portland once, like in the middle of June. But then the news started to break about the unmarked vans. There was a video about a protester getting hit in the head with a munition. And one Friday I said to my parents, “We really need to go up to Portland.” What we saw was completely unlike anything I had ever seen. I’m like, “We’ve got to keep coming back.” That was July 17.

The protests in Salem were about George Floyd’s death?
Yes. We had a handful of days at the very beginning when there was conflict between Salem police and protesters; the police used tear gas. Salem is kind of a sleepy town, so they don’t usually have to do any crowd control. There were a few nights were there was conflict, and then the NAACP of Salem-Keizer sat down with Salem police, and since then they’ve had a working relationship.

The Cyprian was the only news outlet that covered basically every event; The Salem Statesman Journal didn’t really cover it daily. They had a photographer out there but they didn’t have reporters every night, to my understanding. It was a general consensus in the community that when they did cover it, it was very much based on everything that Salem police were saying. That was a big criticism; I saw it a bunch of times on community Facebook pages. We also have the Salem Reporter online. To my understanding they didn’t cover every night, either. They’re kind of new and their staff is super small.

What made you think that you had to be in Portland?
It was what I perceived to be a lack of coverage from the local newspapers. I wanted to know what was going on and I didn’t have a reliable source to figure that out. There was no outside person’s perspective. It was either the police account or the protesters’ account and there was no one who was just an observer.

But Portland was outside your coverage area.
Salem is 45 minutes away. People want to know what’s going on in Portland, but they’re not as connected to the local media there. They follow the bigger newspapers but it’s the independent media (freelancers) who’s out there. there were several independent reporters who were out there all night, every night. The bigger newspaper organizations often don’t stay all night. So they missed events sometimes.

Coming in as a student journalist, it gave me a different perspective than everyone else. Plus, the protests in Salem were very different than in Portland. Portland had consistent clashes with the police all the way throughout the entire period.  I had experience with this movement on a smaller scale. So I was able to do a kind of comparative analysis in my head.

What did that show you?
The Salem protests were a lot more organized, and it gave me a perspective on how organic the Portland protests seemed and how there wasn’t any clear organization for them. It was easy to see how the crowds were consistently bigger and how the movement had continued to stay even though it had died down in Salem.

Did you talk to you parents about how going to Portland could be dangerous?
Oh, yes. I had been following reports and everything, but we didn’t quite anticipate how dangerous it would be on the ground. Before the feds came in, the protests were consistently between 50 and 200 people and that was it. Then when the feds came we saw this huge spike. I don’t think any of us were quite prepared for the scale of the conflict there.

Our safety plan quickly evolved. We got gas masks, helmets, goggles, bulletproof vests, all of that stuff. We marked our helmets clearly as press. We tried a different bunch of goggles, because with glasses it can be really hard. Both my parents and I wore protective gear.

Where did you get all your gear?
The gas masks we borrowed from people. The helmets were from our skiing stuff; I teach little kids ski lessons in the winter. The goggles were swim goggles or ski goggles; we went back and forth. The bulletproof vests — one was lent to us and another one we bought at a tactical shop. We got lucky because everyone was saying that it would take like six weeks to get bulletproof vests. The tactical shop had one in for a female officer but it didn’t fit her. So we bought that one.

Did you ever worry about your personal safety?
Oh, yeah. It’s an incredibly dangerous and dynamic situation. And there where times were it was like, this could really go downhill. On multiple occasions we saw ICE agents carrying assault rifles. We’ve heard about a ton of head injuries from canisters being shot at protesters’ heads. I’ve had munitions guns pointed at me as I’ve stood off to the side and was clearly marked as press; I’ve been shoved into the wall and had stun grenades thrown at me.

Was there any particular moment that was really scary and any moment where it was sort of exciting?
It was scary when they threw the stun grenades. Those are very loud. They were thrown very, very close to us. And the tear gas is really scary. We got hit really badly the second night. They coated the entire park with tear gas, and it was super heavy and it’s just really hard to breathe in that stuff.

It was really interesting to see how the protesters evolved in their tactics. We saw even in the span of those two weeks, protesters became more organized when responding to officers and the agents. It was also interesting to watch the federal agents and how their tactics changed. Like one time they came out with leaf blowers because protesters had leaf blowers. There were a couple of instances that night where you had protesters with leaf blowers on one side of the fence and officers with leaf blowers on the other and they just kind of tried to blow the tear gas towards each other.

What was a typical reporting day like?
We would leave between 6 and 7:30 at night; it’s a 50-minute drive to the Justice Center. We would stay until like 3 a.m., because that was usually when the protests finally died down. There were a couple of nights where we got out by 2, but we usually stayed until 3, 3:30. The next day I would do my story and my photo gallery.

What was the reaction when you started filing your stories from Portland?
We saw a huge increase in our Twitter following. We were at 1,000 and now we’re over 12,000. And our website analytics saw a huge increase in our readership.
(Note: Eddy later told me that that before the protests, readership of the Clypian was mostly South Salem Students and their families. The newspaper gained readers from the Salem community (including the police chief; his PIO asked Eddy to send along several of her stories) when she started covering the Salem protests, and then gained a lot of readers from across the country when she started covering Portland.)

How do things stand now with your coverage?
The federal government has pulled back so they’re not in charge of crowd control anymore. Most of the reason I was there was because of the federal occupation. There are also Black Lives Matter protests to cover and other things here in Salem, so I’ll be refocusing on Salem. I’ll continue to go up to Portland, just not as frequently.

I read a bunch of your stories and you’re very straight ahead. There’s not a lot of flowery writing.
I had to choose between either observing or talking to people because you have so much going on — have all these speakers; crowds of 1,000; people doing different things. It was a decision mostly either/or. I was updating (social media) as events happened so it just made sense for my coverage to follow that. Most of the quotes were from the speeches. I just wanted to present what was going on on the ground, and provide a historical record of what occurred. If there aren’t enough reporters, it’s very easy to rely on the accounts of the people in positions of power — to default to the Department of Homeland Security’s read-out of what happened every night. That doesn’t really provide an accurate picture of what the scene was like.

Do you have any advice for professional journalists who parachute into this kind of situation?
Come prepared. Bring more than you think you need, especially safety gear. Bring lots of water. If there’s a possibility of tear gas, bring saline. My strategy was to usually embed myself with the protesters, but to embed myself off to the side a little. It’s so, so important that you’re aware at all times, because these protests shift in an instant.

What really gratified you or made you feel hopeful?
What I really liked was to see the community of journalists that the protests have created. It has created this really tight-knit group of independent journalists and I thought that that was really cool. I didn’t have a lot of interactions with them because I was doing my thing and they were doing their thing, but every time I talked with them they were incredibly kind.

Did your gender and age make a difference at all?
I think it helped.. I’m not intimidating as some of the other people, especially from national news outlets. A lot of the protesters have strong sentiments about national news. I think that not being with a big news outlet and being younger really helped me because I wasn’t lumped in with them. And then people kind of ignore me, so it’s easy for me to get through crowds.

Is there anything that you learned about reporting from this experience?
I’ve always known that journalism is important, but it really increased my respect for journalists and my understanding of how crucial it is that there are people on the ground and that we continue to have functioning news agencies. And it also taught me to stay late. Sometimes it’s tempting to leave early but a lot of the things happened after a lot of people have gone.

Do you have a favorite story or post from your coverage?
One of my favorite videos was one of the nights where there were like thousands of people in Portland. Every evening started with a peaceful rally. And at one of these rallies they all turned on the flashlights on their phones and they were swaying like people do at concerts, and you saw this sea of white.

Lisa Grace Lednicer is a multiplatform editor at The Washington Post and an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Maryland.

The post How a high school journalist geared up to cover protests in Portland, Oregon appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]E[/dc]arly in my career, while working in Minnesota as a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, I fell in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the city’s most famous native writer. It may have had something to do with the fact that I lived a block away from where he wrote “This Side of Paradise,” or that I was searching for the kind of newspaper story ideas that would allow me to experiment with structure, tone and dialogue. For about three years, I immersed myself in everything Fitzgerald: his youth in the Midwest; his rocket to fame with “This Side of Paradise” and the reputation he acquired as the foremost chronicler of the Roaring Twenties; his doomed marriage; his unhappy years as a screenwriter in Hollywood, followed by an early death.

What most interested me, though, were Fitzgerald’s short stories — the ones he wrote mainly for money and that appeared in the great magazines of his day: Collier’s, McCall’s, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire. They read like the newspaper stories I was trying to write, ones that could rise to Sunday 1A by making a universal point about lonely bachelors in Herman, Minnesota, or a town’s efforts to prepare for probable flooding from the Red River. The compressed form of the short story forced Fitzgerald to do something a lot of journalists have trouble doing: get to the point. And by writing them, Fitzgerald kept his writing chops well honed, much like writing dailies and weekenders helps reporters exercise the muscles they need to tackle multipart narrative or investigative series.

It’s a given that journalists can learn a lot about narrative, pacing and plot from studying fiction. But Fitzgerald’s short stories offer a good road map to journalistic writing. Think of him as national reporter whose beat was the Jazz Age, roaming the Midwest and the East Coast for stories about what it was like to live in America during a time of economic exuberance and the collapse that followed.

Some of Fitzgerald’s writing is too florid for today's readers, and his complex sentences can get lost in themselves, but the great dialogue and on-point descriptions of people — the way they talk, dress and carry themselves — feel like they could be dropped into any online or print story and feel just as fresh today as they did a century ago. Aspiring writers who want to bring a sense of place, character and action to their journalistic work could do worse than to study Fitzgerald. Compelling ledes, strong nut grafs, sentences with good rhythm, memorable kickers, background information that appears at just the point that readers want to know more — it’s all there.

Nut grafs in fiction

Here’s an example from “A Woman With a Past,” one of several short stories Fitzgerald wrote while struggling to write “Tender is the Night,” his novel that followed “The Great Gatsby.” The main character, Josephine Perry, is a 17-year-old girl from a wealthy family. She’s used to being pursued by many young men and has acquired a bad reputation as a result. When her schoolmate, Adele, introduces her to her prom date, Josephine is instantly intrigued because he seems different from the boys who surround her. She sets out to catch him, with disastrous results.

The beginning of the story works as a lede that could top a weekend profile about a wealthy young Jazz Age woman, whose values clash with those of the adults around her:

Driving slowly through New Haven, two of the young girls became alert. Josephine and Lillian darted soft frank glances into strolling groups of three or four undergraduates, into larger groups on corners, which swung about as one man to stare at their receding heads. Believing that they recognized an acquaintance in a solitary loiterer, they waved wildly, whereupon the youth’s mouth fell open, and as they turned the next corner he made a dazed dilatory gesture with his hand. They laughed, “We’ll send him a post card when we get back to school tonight, to see if it really was him.”

That opening makes readers want to know more: Who are these girls? What do they want?

We find out five paragraphs down, in a long graf that contains much of the stuff needed in a nonfiction "nut" — a tether to time and place, context or relevant background, news significance or, in the case of narrative, a sense of the story's heart or theme.

She was exactly seventeen and she was blasé. Already she had been a sensation and a scandal; she had driven mature men to a state of disequilibrium; she had, it was said, killed her grandfather, but as he was over eighty at the time perhaps he just died. Here and there in the Middle West were discouraged little spots which upon inspection turned out to be the youths who had once looked full into her green and wistful eyes. But her love affair of last summer had ruined her faith in the all-sufficiency of men. She had grown bored with the waning September days — and it seemed as though it had happened once too often. Christmas with its provocative shortness, its traveling glee clubs, had brought no one new. There remained only a persistent, a physical hope; hope in her stomach that there was someone whom she would love more than he loved her. 

Like a good reporter, Fitzgerald sprinkles additional context throughout the story as he introduces each section, like mini nut grafs. This one sets up Josephine’s pursuit of her friend Adele’s boyfriend:

She was discomfited by the unfairness of it. A girl earned her popularity by being beautiful and charming. The more beautiful and charming she was, the more she could afford to disregard public opinion. It seemed absurd that simply because Adele had managed to attach a baseball captain, who mightn’t know anything about girls at all, or be able to judge their attractions, she should be thus elevated in spite of her thick ankles, her rather too pinkish face.

And the final nut that sets up the quote kicker:

One mustn’t run through people, and, for the sake of a romantic half-hour, trade a possibility that might develop — quite seriously — later, at the proper time. She did not know that this was the first mature thought that she had ever had in her life, but it was.

The kicker itself echoes the lede, with a final glimpse of Josephine’s boundary-pushing character:

Josephine knew without cogitation which sort of man he was — and the moon was bright even on the windows. So with a certain sense of relaxation she took his arm and they strolled out to the pleasant bower she had so lately quitted, and their faces turned toward each other, like little moons under the great white one which hovered high over the Blue Ridge; his arm dropped softly about her yielding shoulder.

“Well?” he whispered.

“Well?”

Telling the story in scenes

Here’s another example from “Emotional Bankruptcy,” about Josephine Perry discovering, to her horror, that her taste for pursuing men seems to have worn off — until an American captain in the French army comes courting, and her interest in the chase resumes. Or has it? Here’s Fitzgerald the national reporter, setting the scene a few grafs in of young women on a train heading to a weekend of gaiety with the young men of Princeton, while other young men in far-off Europe are dying hideously in World War I:

This was in the fall of 1916, with the thunder of far-off guns already growing louder in the air. When the two girls started for the Princeton prom two days later, they carried with them the Poems of Alan Seeger, supplemented by copies of Smart Set and Snappy Stories, bought surreptitiously at the station news stand. When compared to a seventeen-year-old girl of today, Lillian Hammel was an innocent; Josephine Perry, however, belonged to the ages.

The story outlines Josephine’s growing disenchantment with young men, until the American captain briefly captures her fancy. But it doesn’t last, and their anguished exchange sets up the final nut graf and the kicker:

“You won’t help me,” she murmured abstractedly.

“How in the devil can I help you?” he answered impatiently. “You feel indifferent to me. You can’t change that, but neither can I. Good-by.”

“Good-by.”

She was very tired and lay face downward on the couch with that awful, awful realization that all the old things are true. One cannot both spend and have. The love of her life had come by, and looking in her empty basket, she had found not a flower left for him  –not one. After a while she wept.

“Oh, what I have done to myself?” she wailed. “What have I done? What have I done?”

Reporting as the key to confident writing

In “Babylon Revisited,” perhaps his finest short story, Fitzgerald turns to Europe. We can see him as a national correspondent gone abroad after the economic crash (Fitzgerald wrote it in 1931) to try to make sense of expatriate Americans. “Babylon Revisited,” a sort of “letter from Europe” or “Paris dispatch,” is a notebook dump of impressions of a glittering city gone quiet and sober in the Great Depression.

Fitzgerald introduces us to Charlie Wales, a recovering alcoholic who has come to Paris to reclaim his young daughter, Honoria. Honoria has been living with his wife’s sister, Marion, and her husband, Lincoln, who took custody of the girl after the death of Charlie’s wife, Helen. Helen caught pneumonia after Charlie locked her out of their house one night after a quarrel; Marion blames Charlie for her death and disapproves of his and Helen’s lavish, Jazz Age lifestyle. She’s distrustful of his intentions and not sure his sobriety will last.

Fitzgerald begins the story with a bit of dialogue between Charlie and the bartender at the Ritz. Like a good reporter, he sets the tone early on: This is a dispatch about the aftermath of the stock-market crash and the worldwide effects of America’s Great Depression. You can see it accompanying a front-page story about European leaders’ efforts to shore up their economies, or a piece about Europe’s efforts to recover from World War I and the early stirrings of fascism:

He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American bar any more – he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it. It had gone back to France.

This section of great quotes sets up the fight that will drive the direction of the story: Charlie’s determination to get his daughter back, and Marion’s conviction that he’s too irresponsible to take care of her:

“How do you like being back in Paris?”

“It seems very funny to see so few Americans around.”

“I’m delighted,” Marion said vehemently. “Now at least you can go into a store without their assuming you’re a millionaire. We’ve suffered like everybody, but on the whole it’s a good deal pleasanter.”

“But it was nice while it lasted,” Charlie said. “We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us. In the bar this afternoon” – he stumbled, seeing his mistake – “there wasn’t a man I knew.” 

She looked at him keenly. “I should think you’d have had enough of bars.”

Fitzgerald weaves historical context into his impressions. He’s secure enough in his interviews and his on-the-ground reporting to write with a point of view:

He remembered thousand-franc notes given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling a cab.

But it hadn’t been given for nothing.

It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that now he would always remember — his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont.

Charlie’s plans for a new life with his daughter are upended when dissolute friends from his old life show up, drunk, at Lincoln and Marion’s apartment. Marion, horrified, flees into another room and her husband tells Charlie to leave. He heads straight for the Ritz, but orders only one drink — and starts talking to the bartender, Paul. Fitzgerald weaves historical context (backstory) into the dialogue between Charlie and Paul as a series of nut grafs. Paul starts:

“Are you back in the States?”

“No, I’m in business in Prague.”

“I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.”

“I did,” and he added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”

“Selling short.”

“Something like that.”

 Again the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare — the people they had met travelling; then people who couldn’t add a row of figures or speak in a coherent sentence. The little man Helen had consented to dance with at the ship’s party, who had insulted her ten feet from the table; the women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs out of public places —

The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.

 Suddenly impatient, Charlie calls Lincoln, who says that Marion is sick and that Charlie will have to wait at least six months before bringing up the issue of Honoria. Charlie, disheartened, realizes there’s nothing he can do but send presents to his daughter, and wait.

The dispatch ends on a wistful note that bridges Charlie’s wild past and sober present. It highlights the contrast between the Roaring Twenties and the new Depression years:

He would come back some day; they couldn’t make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn’t young any more, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn’t have wanted him to be so alone.

Spurned as a newspaper reporter

It’s perhaps no accident that Fitzgerald’s shorter works read like newspaper or magazine sketches. After Scribner’s turned down his first novel, he tried to get hired by several newspapers in New York. He was unsuccessful: “The office boys were not impressed,” he said in an interview with the New York Post. So, he took a job in advertising until “This Side of Paradise” was finally accepted for publication.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Lisa Grace Lednicer is a multiplatform editor at The Washington Post and an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

The post How F. Scott Fitzgerald guided the hand and aspirations of a newspaper journalist appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

“Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.”

So begins Nikole Hannah-Jones’s stunning and provocative essay that opens “The 1619 Project,” an initiative by the New York Times to mark the 400^th year since the first enslaved Africans arrived at the British colony of Virginia. The aim of the project — which encompassed an entire issue of the Times Sunday magazine last August, a special section in the newspaper, a podcast, and a school curriculum — is to reframe our understanding of American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of our national narrative.

Hannah-Jones, a staff writer for the magazine who pitched the idea, did double duty: In addition to writing her piece, she oversaw the rest of the project as it took shape in the magazine — essays on aspects of American life that have their roots in slavery, and 17 commissioned works by contemporary black writers.

Hannah-Jones opens her 8,000-word reported essay with the fact that her dad, the son of sharecroppers and an Army veteran, always flew an American flag in front of their house. He had enlisted in the military in the hopes that by serving his country, he could escape poverty and finally be treated as an American. But he was passed over for opportunities, discharged for unclear reasons, and worked hard all his life but never got ahead. The display of the flag, Hannah-Jones writes,

...never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner?

And then, two paragraphs later, she answers her own question:

He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.

The rest of the essay bolsters that assertion with a powerful blend of data, historical anecdotes and gut-punch pronouncements:

(The framers of the Constitution) carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word … they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it.

And:

Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity.

We learn portions of American history that were glossed over — or omitted altogether — in schoolbooks: That in a White House meeting with five free black men in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln informed them that Congress had appropriated funds to ship black people to another country. That returning World War II veterans became a target of a particular violence from white Americans who thought black men in uniform were flaunting a dangerous pride. And that the Civil Rights movement laid the foundation for modern rights struggles of women, LGBT people and the disabled.

History through cinematic writing

Hannah-Jones employs cinematic techniques as she pulls readers through four centuries of history: Starting with a tight shot of her father; then a flashback to the arrival of enslaved people on the Virginia coast; then a close-up of Thomas Jefferson at his desk; background about the framers of the Constitution; another tight shot of Lincoln at the White House; and so on until returning to her own story, when she reflects that she is part of the first generation of black people in U.S. history to be born into a society in which black Americans had full citizenship rights.

But the essay, while pulsing with rage and sorrow, also contains lyrical passages, such as this one describing a ship carrying enslaved people:

They say our people were born on the water… the teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so completely from what had once been their home that it was as if nothing had ever existed before.

Our speech and fashion and the drum of our music echoes Africa but is not African.

And the kicker, which rewards the reader with this couplet:

We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.

Since the initiative launched in August, Hannah-Jones has been traveling the country nonstop, talking about the project. The project will be taught in every public high school in Chicago. and Random House will publish a book based on the series, as well as four books for young readers. Ten Speed Press plans to publish a graphic novelization.

Hannah-Jones talked to Nieman Storyboard about how she conceived of and wrote the essay, how it fit into the overall project, what she hopes readers will take away, the criticism that followed the piece, and the crucial relationship between a writer and editor. (Hint: It involves pushing deadline and editing on a cellphone from South America.) The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you give us an idea of the internal discussions at the Times that led to, “Let’s do this.”
I didn’t conceive of proposing a project until the end of 2018. But I had been thinking, of course, about the year 1619 for a very long time, thinking how this anniversary was likely to pass and most Americans had probably never heard of 1619. S I think my reporting has also tried to show this: that to look across so many aspects of modern American life, and see the legacy of slavery, is to see that it’s largely rendered invisible but that it shapes so much of who we are. I decided I was going to pitch the idea of assessing that legacy and making the argument that nothing has been left untouched by it.

One of the first conversations I had was with my editor, Ilena Silverman. I gave her some examples of American life that are related to slavery but people probably don’t think are, so I talked about capitalism, health care, politics, democracy, that sort of thing. She thought it was a great idea. We have a weekly meeting at the magazine where we talk about the stories we should do, and I pitched it. Jake Silverstein, the editor in chief of the magazine, said, “Let’s do it.”

A lot of people assume that it was hard for me to get approval for this, but it wasn’t. And, honestly, I didn’t expect that it would be, because I have a great relationship with my editors; there’s yet to be something that I’ve pitched that they’ve turned down. I would have been much more surprised if they had said “No,” or “We’re not sure.”

Could you take us through the process of conceiving and writing your essay?
My intention was that it would be a reported essay, but I didn’t really conceive of it as having a personal element. So I read widely, figured out what my argument was going to be, and then sat down and tried to write. And it was very, very hard — at times debilitating. I really could not figure out how to get into the essay, what was the proper starting place. Part of it was much of what I think of the as normal struggle with writing. But I also felt pressure. What was the right way to begin an essay representing 400 years of history? And 400 years about some of the most marginalized people in the country as an opening essay for a huge project? I literally was lying in my bed in the middle of the day, and I sent my editor an SOS text, and she called me and we talked it through, and she said, “Why don’t you start it with the story of Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration, with his enslaved brother-in-law there, too?”

I know writers have different ways of writing but if I can’t get my lede, I can’t write. I’m not one of those people who can start writing somewhere in the middle and then come back and write my top. So I said okay, I’m going to do that. But it just didn’t feel right. I could not start the story of black America with the white men who enslaved us. So it was back to the struggle.

Then I got that line in my head that starts the last section, which says, “They say our people were born on the water.” The part about my father, I put it at the end. I never really intended that to be part of the essay. I kind of wrote that section separately from the essay, after a kind of ugly Twitter argument with someone who I felt was extremely racist. And I went back to my desk, and I got a pen and paper, and just wrote that part about my dad and the flag, and it was out of anger, and it wasn’t even MEANT TO BE part of the 1619 project.

But Jake read it and said that he really felt that I should start the piece with my dad. Starting with “Our people were born on the water” was too abstract, but he said when he read about my dad he cried. He felt that personal story was a way to immediately connect people. I disagreed pretty strongly because I didn’t feel we should start the story of 1619 with a story of my family, or my story. We went back and forth, and he finally said, “Just try it.” He told me that if I really felt strongly about it, we didn’t have to do it, but I should just try it.

So I rewrote it, and once I rewrote it I agreed with him. Because, you know, this is what editors do.

Were there any issues around whether to write the essay in first person vs. third person, personal story versus big-sweep story?
I was always going to do a big-sweep story. I’ve done the personal narrative in a sweeping historical narrative before. A piece I did on choosing a school for my daughter was very personal. I did a piece on the anniversary of Freedom Summer, where I anchored a visit to my homeland, in Mississippi, with my father and my grandmother’s migration story. I won’t say I’ve perfected it, but I’m very comfortable with it now.

Did you have any models for this kind of piece?
It would be Isabel Wilkerson and “The Warmth of Other Suns.” That’s the most beautiful book of all time. I don’t believe I’ve reached that caliber of storytelling, but that kind of was the model. What she’s doing is so many different things at once. The narrative, different periods of time, telling this story of individual families, then telling the stories of individual states, then telling the stories of individual migration patterns, and then the story of a whole country and the history of race. So I think about her writing a lot when I try to do these kind of sweeping narratives — but also keeping in mind that I have this project that had to have some urgency of now.

You chose in the essay to highlight specific moments, like Lincoln’s moment with the five free black men to discuss sending them back to Africa and that they were the problem, and the beating of Isaac Woodard. Why did you choose those two examples?
The first draft I turned in was more than twice as long as what ran. There were a lot of examples that did not make it in the final draft. This is part of what makes long-form, deep research really hard. You just have so much information and it’s hard, when you’re so immersed in it, to figure out the most important examples and storytelling points. I used Scrivener to organize all of my notes, and this is where the writer/editor relationship is so important. I turned in a draft and had several discussions with Ilena, and I knew it was too long but I was like, “I don’t know what to cut at this point.” It all feels important to me; that’s why I put it in. From there it was a collaborative effort between Ilena and me, where she said some things seemed most important and suggested taking other stuff out, and I would push back. I probably spent weeks on the draft, just winnowing down or trying to distill the examples that tell the most about the argument I was trying to make. How do you make it come alive? How do you make it about not just repeating a bunch of dates and facts, but build them into a narrative?

You can build a mini-narrative around the Lincoln thing. But it’s also important because we have this idea that Lincoln was this great emancipator, and he represents the egalitarian North, and these ideas allow us to ignore all the racism that still existed. And ignore the complexity that one can be opposed to a brutal system of slavery but still not believe in black equality. Which is kind of how racism continues to operate: “Of course I think black people should have equal rights, but just not live next to me.” So with Lincoln, it was not only a narrative; it really exposed the paradox of America around race. Even those white people we hold up as examples of America, they were human; they were deeply invested in the capitalist system. There’s a narrative, but a way for us to see the hypocrisy, the struggle that black Americans have always faced.

I began the piece with my dad, who joined the military. When veterans came back from World War I and World War II, once they had that little taste of freedom, that’s where we got the Civil Rights Movement. Isaac Woodard is such a great example of a man who fights abroad and comes back and gets beaten and blinded for life. That beautiful narrative packs so much into it and allows you to make that human connection, as opposed to some lines about how black soldiers were brutalized.

What advice if any would you give journalists who want to try what you did?
If you want to do great, beautiful writing, you have to read great, beautiful writing. You study how other people write narrative, how they structure their sentences, what words they use, how they do transitions. My process is to just get the story down, and then go back and think about the writing. Structure is always the thing I struggle with the most. And structure is one of the most important things of the story.

The draft that I turned in looks nothing like what was published. It was a shitty draft; they all are. When you turn it in, you feel generally pretty hopeless, like it would never get into a form you’d be proud of. You just need to keep looking for a way to perfect it. That’s why I believe the editor-reporter relationship is the most important thing. If I didn’t have an amazing, thoughtful editor I trusted, who could both keep me calm and also say this isn’t really working, and who gave me the time to experiment and figure things out, it wouldn’t be what it ultimately is.

So, for you, the structure is hardest?
Yeah. I try to write in a structure that makes the most sense, but it almost never does. I know writers who do intensive outlining, and I don’t do any of that. I’m really more of a gut writer. I decide this is how it should go, and I jot down some notes about what I think should go in each section, and where I think a section might go, and try to think about what’s the narrative. But I don’t do a lot of outlining. I don’t do a lot of pre-writing. I just sit down and bang it out from my gut, and sometimes it works and many times it doesn’t, and then I go back in and keep trying to fix and fix and fix.

Which is what you did with this essay?
I was pretty damn close to deadline when I worked on this piece. Not only was I writing the anchor essay but I was overseeing the whole project. Almost every writer loves procrastinating. I was reading and researching as much as possible so I could avoid writing. By the time I really sat down to just dedicate time to writing, it was really close to deadline, and it was ugly.

How close?
I would guess when I turned my draft in, maybe three weeks out? And my editor was on vacation. But she didn’t want to let it go because we had worked on it together since the beginning. So she’s in Colombia, and when she could connect to Wi-Fi, she was editing on her phone. It was crazy.

But I’ve never seen a team come together and be so dedicated to a project than the magazine was on this. People just felt really such a passion for it; it was really kind of amazing.

I’m guessing some of assertions you made make white people pretty uncomfortable. Calling Monticello a “forced labor camp.” Declaring that “No people has a greater claim to the flag than us.” Did you and your editors talk about the line between making your argument and turning people off?
We didn’t have a single discussion about that. And I actually think that is the power. We were not thinking about how do we soften this, how do we make it more palatable. I certainly was 100 percent disinterested in that, and I don’t know if my editors had conversations without me, but I doubt it. In fact, I created a very short kind of index of terms that we should and shouldn’t use. I felt that the project needed to tell these stories in a very unflinching way. I needed to feel proud of what we made and not hold back about one of the greatest atrocities to occur in this country.

What was on the index of terms?
We were never going to call human beings slaves; we were going to use “enslaved” to describe a condition, not a person’s identity. Things like “forced labor camp,” “slave labor camp” instead of these very bucolic terms like plantation. We wanted to be honest about what happened. People were tortured, and used as forced labor. “Enslaver” instead of owner where we could — things where the sharpness of the language spoke to the reality of what slavery was. So much of what we’re taught about slavery is to soften the brutality and the brutal system.

I was so conscious every moment of not fucking this up. I understand what it’s like to do something like this in the paper-of-record. I also understand the ambivalent relationship that many black Americans have with the Times. I’m just thinking of every possible detail, of every possible thing that could derail what we were trying to do, and language was a big part of that. To me it wasn’t enough that I wasn’t going to use this terminology in this project, it was that nobody would and that it would be consistent, and that nobody who read it would not be able to see the argument we were making because they’d be like, “Why are you calling us slaves?” I was thinking constantly all of those types of things, what were the missteps we could make, and trying to make sure we didn’t make them.

That was a lot of pressure. How did it affect you emotionally?
When I say this was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I’m not being hyperbolic. It really was. To spend eight months completely immersed in the worst things that have ever happened to your people — I’m not just researching for my own essay, I’m reading everything that is being written. I’m looking at every photo; I’m looking at everything. It’s not the type of work where you go home at 6 p.m. and just leave it. These things happened to my ancestors. Some of it happened to my father. My grandparents. So, emotionally it was very hard. I cried several times working on this.

There was this moment in the newsroom — we were getting close to closing the magazine, and they print up every page and hang it on the wall so we can see how it all looks. It was the first time I could see the totality of it. And I started sobbing. I’ve never cried in a newsroom in my life. I just realized kind of this weight that — I mean, you push it down because you’re doing your job, and the work is important, but just this weight. I cried on the podcast.

People are going to think, Jesus, all I do is cry over my work. And it’s not! It’s just that this was really — it was really hard. I don’t know a black person on the project who didn’t cry at least once. All of these wounds are still so fresh and raw and are not healed, and this project was explaining all those things. It’s not something we can have some distance from, because you can look all around our society and see so many black people who are still suffering.

What kind of reaction did you want to get, and what kind of reaction did you actually get?
I honestly hoped that it would completely blow people’s minds. Certainly the average American, because they know nothing about this history, has not been able to draw the connections to modern America. We have some idea, particularly in some areas — school segregation, criminal justice — but don’t really know.

I kind of jokingly say this, but if done properly and if done to the standard I believed it could be, that this in some ways could be like the red pill in “The Matrix.” You wouldn’t be able to see your country the same and all the architecture would suddenly start to be exposed. That’s really what I hoped that people who engaged honestly with it would take away.

Have there been people whose response has not been what you wanted or expected?
I clearly believed there’d be pushback. People need to understand I’m not a historian. This is not history. It is a work of journalism that is making an argument — no more and no less. It is using history to make an argument. I certainly expected there’d be conservative pushback to this reframing of this idea that 1619 is our true founding, no one is more American than black folks, that we are perfecters of democracy. You don’t make arguments like that and not expect pushback. So none of that bothered me. History is itself constantly up for debate, constantly changing. New history replaces old history. So I was pretty sure there would be some scholars who didn’t agree with our interpretations. What was important to me was that we got our facts right. I knew people could argue with framing our interpretation but I did not want people to be able to discount our work on the facts.

But there’s been a particular group that has gone on a mission to discredit the project, and they have found academics to dispute the project even though those academics have acknowledged that they read an essay or two, and skimmed the rest. That that’s been really disheartening. I don’t think you can argue unless you’ve actually read the project.

There have been historians who have said we didn’t pay enough attention to abolition. In my essay, could I have talked about white abolitionists? Yeah, that was a choice I didn’t make. But people who are arguing that the history is bad, that we just don’t understand enough about it, that journalists shouldn’t be writing history — those are not arguments. And it’s gotten ugly. People are sending me emails, using racial stereotypes. They talk about our intelligence. They say black people shouldn’t be doing this.

Is there a single moment or line in your essay that you want people to hold on to?
It’s that in this 400^th year, maybe we can stop thinking about black people as the problem. Because everything that black people have experienced has been because we have been treated as a problem — not fully American, something that needs to be fixed — and it has allowed us not to have to address the structures that have been set up, and the racial caste system.

Why is that so important for people to hold on to?
So black Americans could stop growing up with a sense of shame.

The post Four hundred years of harsh history delivered in 8,000 unflinching words appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.