Ask Andrea Elliott a question and it’s not surprising that she has a tough time being succinct in her answers. “Of course I do…I’m a long-form journalist.”

By anyone’s definition, that description is an understatement. Her deeply moving story about Dasani Coates – a resilient 11-year-old in Brooklyn with seven siblings, two parents and no home – ran on the front page of The New York Times for five days in December 2013. “Invisible Child: Girl in the Shadows” reportedly was the longest ever published in the newspaper up to that time. Paired with photographs by colleague Ruth Fremson, it sparked direct action from incoming Mayor Bill DeBlasio, who had Dasani on the stage at his administration’s inauguration in January 2014.

But if you think Dasani’s story was wrung dry, you’d be wrong. Elliott did what few journalists get a chance to: She returned to her subject again and again, probing for more details and context. What does it mean to grow up poor in one of the richest cities in the world? What is it like to occupy one room at a rodent- and cockroach-infested shelter? To not just share a bed with your sister, but a pillow?

Drawing on nearly a decade of reporting, Elliott’s book, “Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City,” (Random House) was released this past October, touted by Amazon as the best nonfiction book of the year and one of The New York Times’ “10 Most Notable Books of 2021.” An 11,000-plus word excerpt, “When Dasani Left Home,” ran Sept. 28 in the Times Magazine.

Elliott, 48, can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be a reporter.  She started her career as an intern at the Miami Herald in 1999 and was soon hired to cover crime, courts and immigration. In 2003, she joined The New York Times, where she shaped a beat around what it means to be Muslim in a post-9/11 America. Her three-part series,  “An Imam in America,” was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.  The “Dasani” series would bring more honors, including the George Polk and Scripps Howard awards.

Getting your arms around an amorphous topic such as poverty is never easy – especially now, in such a deeply-divided nation. Elliott was determined to avoid getting tied up in the “personal responsibility vs. society responsibility” debate, so she pitched a book focused on how poverty affects children.

“Children are bystanders, after all,” she writes in the book’s afterword, where she explains some of the negotiations with her editors. “It would be difficult to argue that they are responsible for their own well-being or that their destitution is the result of their own bad choices. Their struggles exist on the margins of American politics.  Children cannot vote. Their voices are rarely heard.”

Telling stories through history and humanity

Elliott has always been drawn to stories of people on the margins.  Her mother was a Chilean immigrant and a therapist whose family fled the brutal regime of General Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s. “I grew up in an exile community, around people tragically out of place,” she told me when we talked. Her late father, who was from a blue-collar background in upstate New York, served as general counsel of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under President Gerald Ford, crafting the legislation on Section 8 housing. He also wrote the government’s response of the 1976 Supreme Court ruling in Hills vs. Gatreaux, which helped disperse public housing tenants outside of high-poverty neighborhoods.

Elliott interviewed her dad on background for her book to gain a better understanding of how the past impacts the present. “There were all these moments across history that I needed to understand just to make sense of this one family’s journey…but it’s easy to find yourself way out in the weeds.”

While the historical lens was essential, so was finding a way to humanize the story. “If there isn’t a human narrative that draws you in – and keeps you there –  the reader is unlikely to stay the path,” she said. “You can write that 99 percent of the kids at Dasani’s school are poor, but once you introduce this child into those abstract stats, that statistic bothers you more. That world — which is so foreign — becomes your world. Dasani’s problems become your problems.”

The story shifts between the rough streets of Brooklyn and bucolic Pennsylvania, home to the Milton Hershey School, which has been working to lift kids from poverty since 1909. Dasani gets accepted to the private boarding school — the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket — where everything from her tuition to health care is free. There’s even a $95,000 college scholarship waiting for students at graduation. As you read, it’s impossible not to cheer for her to succeed and break the cycle of despair. But nonfiction stories, like life, doesn’t guarantee happy endings. Elliott paints a layered portrait of Dasani, and shows that there are no easy fixes when it comes to poverty and families.

I was curious how Elliott juggled navigated relationships and ethics with such a sensitive reporting project, and kept track of all her material. Here’s what she had to say, edited lightly for length and clarity:

How did you originally find Dasani?
I first met her in October 2012, when she was 11 and growing up in Fort Greene in Brooklyn. She, her parents and her seven siblings were homeless and living at the Auburn Family Residence, this dilapidated city-run shelter just blocks from townhouses that sold for millions.

Journalists have a tendency to think about stories in three parts or three themes. At first, I wanted to follow three families to give readers a sense of the spectrum. But I ended up going with this one family because what mattered to me more than anything was intimacy — to go as deeply as I could into one family’s life. There was something about Dasani that was electrifying. She walked into a room and things shifted. She had this ability to say what she was feeling in a profound way. I found the same thing when I wrote about the Imam.

What did two such different story subjects have in common?
They’re both the kind of people you want to follow. They create action.  Both were surviving a crucible in New York City that was going largely unnoticed by the country, and they wanted to talk about it. For the Imam, it was what it meant to be Muslim in post-9/11 America. For Dasani, it was growing up poor in a gentrified city, and I wanted to write down everything that came out of her mouth. The title (of the newspaper stories and book) comes from Dasani saying she felt “invisible.” What is not extraordinary, though, are her circumstances. She’s  representative of a large part of New York, this city that is divided by two extremes.

How did you build trust with Dasani and her family?
The process was a long one. It took months. I first met them standing outside the shelter. Eventually, the mom (Chanel) agreed to meet me in a park nearby. She gave me consideration but hadn’t yet surrendered. I think eventually she just got tired of my persistence. It’s not magical — in fact, it’s the opposite of magic. It’s boring, repetitious stubborness.

There have been lots of stories about child poverty. What made you think you could bring something fresh to this topic?
I think a lot of stories romanticize the escape —they’re about the one kid who got out and went to Yale. We all want to know that story, but it perpetuates a myth: That if you’re just smart enough or talented enough or lucky enough, you can find a way out. That narrative bothers me because it lets us off the hook and suggests that escaping poverty is all about a person’s perseverance.

Dasani is deeply compelling, but she’s like thousands of other kids. That’s the whole problem with meritocracy — it’s not a fair contest if you’re born in a place so completely lacking in resources.

You took on a sprawling, four-generation landscape and accumulated some 14,000 pages of official documents, from report cards to drug tests to court records. How did you keep track of everything? Do you have a system? Do you ever use a spreadsheet, like Excel?
One thing about poverty is that it leaves a long paper trail. Dasani’s family interacted with so many government offices —housing, welfare, courts, education, Medicaid — and those records were critical to filling in the story. I was juggling that with my street reporting, which (over eight years) produced 127 hours of audio recordings alone. It was a mountain of information. I don’t think I could have written this book without a tedious system of organization.

I’ll spare you the details, but my anchor is a timeline. It’s pretty basic: just a single Word document where all the facts of my story live. I update it whenever something new happens, like a scene I have just witnessed or a new fact spotted in a court record. I plug in the date of that event and then I summarize it. Each entry corresponds to a color-coded category. For example, anything involving Dasani’s mother is in green. City policy is gray. Police records are red.

Sometimes, I found that random events were, in fact, connected. For example, a policy entry about Clinton’s welfare reform (gray) preceded the moment when Dasani’s grandmother (pink) started a job cleaning the A train. Sure enough, in her files, I found that she had joined a welfare-to-work program.

Why were these historical events so important to the personal story of one family?
The more time I spent with this family, the more history was present in their own narrative. They were constantly bringing up the South and Jim Crow.  Society has a tendency to write off a child as “homeless” or “poor” but those labels don’t really describe a historical plight that, generation after generation, robbed the family of the safety net that white families take for granted.

One example would be of the great-grandfather’s military service. No one in the family knew for sure if it really happened. In fact, the kids thought he was making it up,  So I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with Veterans’ Affairs and it turned out to be true: Wesley Sykes fought in Italy in an all-black regiment and came home a triple Bronze Service Star veteran. But he couldn’t take advantage of the GI Bill — which lifted many white veterans into the middle class — because blacks were largely excluded.

So yes, this is one family’s story but it’s representative of what was going on in the country. I’m always thinking: ‘How does this hold up a mirror to America?’

Tell me about your reporting process, starting with your first months with the family to your final fact-check eight years later. Did you share the book with the family? Did they want anything changed?
I tend to write about people who have never met a reporter. The burden is on me to explain what I do and how I do it. And that’s never easy because my work is, for lack of a better word, strange. I’m an immersionist. I can spend months, even years, immersed in the lives of other people. And it still feels like a miracle every time they let me in.

I spent my first weeks with Dasani’s family walking the streets and talking. I gave them a stack of my published work. As I explained the rules of my profession, I avoided phrases like “off the record” and tried for more direct language, asking them to say “this is private” if they didn’t want something published. But they rarely said that.

I’m not sure that trust is something you ever “win” as a reporter. It’s a constant work in progress. But I think what Dasani’s family trusted in was the power of their story, and they could see I was devoted to it. I’m an insecure over-reporter. I can drive my sources crazy because I keep calling them to re-check the facts. With Dasani’s family, I felt I had to go the extra mile. I spent five days reading the book out loud to Dasani and her sister, and her parents also read it. They took no issue with the facts but suggested a few minor tweaks for context.

Let’s talk about ethics, such as sneaking into the Auburn Family Shelter, along with photographer Ruth Fremson, for the original New York Times series. Did you get any pushback from your editors?
Throughout the process, there was tremendous discussion around the ethics of this reporting, especially about interviewing children. We constantly had to wrestle with our role, to ask ourselves: “What is the purpose of this work?”

Before I snuck in to Auburn, I talked to the Legal Aid Society which said they would represent the family if they were penalized in any way. Yes, I was breaking the rules. It was a risk — but a risk worth taking because the conditions of the shelter needed to be exposed.

(In  her book, Elliott goes into more specifics about ground rules: She could pay for meals with Dasani’s family at restaurants so they had a warm place to meet in the cold. The Times provided the family with cameras to keep a video diary, and a local nonprofit filed FOIAs for city records on the reporter’s behalf. It should also be noted that a portion of any potential proceeds from the book will go to Dasani’s family.)

How did you get access at Hershey? You note that in their 112-year history, you were the first journalist they allowed to spend so much time on campus.
Negotiating access with Hershey took months. The school is very cautious and proud of what it does. So I said, ‘If you’re proud of what you do, let me see it. If you feel that you have nothing to hide and are open to letting people see you, then show it.’

Again, I can talk my best game, but that’s no match for simply showing up. It’s my constant presence that helps the process — or maybe people just get tired of saying no? Maybe I just wear them down? I don’t know, but the more school officials got to see me, the more they saw that I’d stay in the background as much possible, that I’d listen to various perspectives, that I’d withhold judgment and that this would be a deep and nuanced work — not a drive by.

Did you worry that the NYT’s early attention to the family altered the normal course of events as you continued your reporting? For example, after the series ran, Dasani took part in the mayoral inauguration and was held up as a symbol of social justice.
There’s no question that being on the front page of The Times was a life-altering event for Dasani, as it would be for anyone. The series got a tremendous amount of attention. But many months later, I was struck by how little changed for the family. Whatever power came with being in The Time was no match for the power of poverty in their lives.

When Dasani got kicked out at Hershey, what went through your mind? Did you want to throttle her or did you think ‘My story just got juicier?’

Like so many other aspects of covering a story, I have a human reaction and a reporter reaction. The human reaction was to feel like Dasani was feeling — crushed. It was very hard to see her go through that moment. But I also never stopped seeing the hope her life represents, even in the darkest moments. The hope in that moment was all about reuniting with her family, so she chose to leave. My job in that moment was not to judge her decision but to follow her life, wherever it went.

In terms of the story, I knew by then that with Dasani, there’s never a dull moment, and whatever came next would be an important chapter.

Where is Dasani now, at 20? How about her siblings?
Dasani’s life has always been unpredictable. But right now, she’s feeling successful. She was the first child in her family to graduate from high school — a major milestone — and she is now working part-time and studying business at a community college. Two of her siblings have been reunited with Dasani and her mother, which has been healing for all of them. Her other siblings are up and down. The oldest brother is in jail, facing murder charges. Another sister is still in foster care, and three are living with a family friend.

Given the economic realities of today’s newspapers, very few journalists could get the amount of time you had to cover one story. What advice would you give a reporter who gets a month? Is there a way to cast a smaller net, but still do the story justice?
I’m very lucky to work for a newspaper that invests in this kind of journalism. But you can create your own luck, too. When I started at the Miami Herald, I was covering night cops in the suburbs. I was burning to do enterprise. But I was too much of a rookie to be given the chance. So I started doing those stories on my own time, working weekends or before my shift. And then, with a draft in hand, I could say, “Do you want this?” It was the only way to break through.

Some of the best stories cast a small net. They go deep rather than wide. Take a month if you can get it! But it’s also important to remind editors that long-form is a worthy investment. Readers love a good narrative; the metrics prove it. Dasani got more than 3 million hits and even though the series was 28,000 words, readers stayed on the page longer than ever recorded. There’s clearly a hunger for this kind of story.

Finally, one of the questions that hangs over the entire narrative arc is:  Does leaving poverty really mean leaving your family?  After your incredibly immersive reporting, what do you think?
Society’s message to poor children is “get out.” You need to leave your family, your neighborhood, your roots, because that’s how you exit poverty. But where do you land? In a place that, for Dasani, felt inauthentic. She’d like to thrive without leaving home. And I think that’s the power of her story — that it challenges us to rethink our definition of success. Why should a child have to leave in order to win? Every time we celebrate the one kid who “got out,” we’re forgetting to ask why so many others remain stuck or choose to stay. And if we stay with them, rather than departing, we’re forced to reckon with the reality of their neighborhoods —hunger, gang violence, failing schools, insecure housing. That reality is at the heart of Dasani’s crucible.

***

Bonnie Miller Rubin is a Chicago-based freelance writer.  She spent 25 years at the Chicago Tribune, mostly as a metro reporter. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other publications.

The post How an “immersionist” held up the story of one homeless child as “a mirror to America” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]I[/dc]n today’s deeply divided world – where relationships have unraveled over everything from politics to public health – Mary Schmich is a rare commodity: A columnist who can tackle the most contentious topic and still manage to make us think it’s all going to be all right. That restrained, even-handed approach is just one reason why Chicago Tribune readers have loyally turned to Schmich’s column for almost 30 years.  She’s like the houseguest who never wears out her welcome.

Schmich, who won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2012, attributes her longevity to the way she interprets the column. There’s a long legacy of metro columnists as testosterone-fueled, Scotch-swilling men who covered City Hall with a swaggering  “put up your dukes” style. When Ann Marie Lipinski, who would go on to be editor of the Tribune (and now curator of the Nieman Foundation), offered Schmich the position in 1992, the reporter envisioned her mission differently.

“I wanted to write about my place — Chicago — and how it connects to the world. On most days, people are not thinking primarily about politics — or at least they weren't before Trump. They’re thinking about the people they love, their health, the things that make them happy or sad. So  I wanted to write about the issues that are at the heart of how we live. That is probably more of a female way of approaching things...but I was redefining this genre for the way I needed to work.”

Schmich grew up in Georgia, the oldest of eight children. She was in the fourth grade when she first realized that she might have a flair for writing. The teacher assigned the class to write something amusing that happened in their households, which, in young Mary Theresa’s case, included five younger brothers: “I wrote about how my brothers thought it would be hilarious to take all the fuses out of the fuse box. I called it ‘Fuse Confusion’ and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Now isn’t that fun?’ There was this recognition of the play that could exist between words.”

After moving to Phoenix, Arizona, for high school, she attended Pomona College in California, where she co-edited the newspaper. In 1980, as a student in Stanford University’s master’s journalism program, she interned at the Los Angeles Times, followed by jobs at the Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo Alto and the Orlando Sentinel in Florida before arriving in Chicago in 1985.

Schmich may be the only Nieman Fellow (class of ‘96) whose resume also includes a comic strip. For 26 years, she wrote Brenda Starr until the intrepid girl reporter hung up her press pass in 2011.

But it is her thrice-weekly column that is the core of her identity and the place where she weighs in on big issues (poverty, sexual harassment, violence) and small ones (college reunions, email salutations). Perhaps her most famous is “Wear Sunscreen” — written as a commencement address, erroneously attributed to Kurt Vonnegut and turned into a recording by Baz Luhrmann. But whatever the topic, her voice is sure to find the common thread that will pull us all together.

According to Mark Jacob, the former metro editor at the Tribune and Schmich’s editor for seven years, including the year she won the Pulitzer Prize, it isn’t just the wide range of subjects that keeps her relevant, but her meticulous writing.

“She’s so darn thoughtful about every word. She doesn’t try to convince the audience that she’s a fine writer...she doesn’t use a dozen adjectives to describe something. She uses one or two, giving those words more power. And because she picks such compelling subjects, her spare style lets the subjects of her columns come through clean and strong,” said Jacob, who is now an editor of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Jacob has several favorite columns that he says should be taught in journalism school. He singles out one as a contender for the best story written in Chicago during his 34-year tenure at both the Sun-Times and the Tribune: The saga of 10-year-old shooting victim Tavon Tanner.

“After Mary filed that story, I printed it out and took it with me when I left the office. I started reading it on my train commute and ended up crying on the Red Line.”

These days, like everyone else, Schmich is working from her home, which is on the city’s North Side. Since the start of the pandemic, she’s been back to the newsroom a couple of times describing the scene — with its wilted plants, dusty Kleenex boxes and TVs droning on to no one — “like Pompeii after the big eruption.”

She misses the banter with other journalists, which helps get the creative juices flowing. “I’m a big newsroom schmoozer. Most people in other professions don’t have that same engaged conversation with colleagues. I think that’s one thing that draws us to journalism.”

So, we schmoozed — on writing, aging and other topics. Our conversation has been edited slightly for length and clarity.

[caption id="attachment_160439" align="alignright" width="650"] Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune newsroom when the 2012 Pulitzer Prizes were announced.[/caption]

[dc small]Y[/dc]ou’ve been writing a column since 1992. How do you keep it fresh?
It’s a combination of profound curiosity about the endlessly fascinating world — along with a fear of failure. I get up so many mornings and say “This will be the day I can’t do it.” I have been in that place many times and it still scares me. As I get older, I can’t help but wonder: Is this level of dread healthy for me? But then I do it again and I’m always glad I did and that keeps me going.

You have reported on some very sensitive subjects. How do you make sure that your story subjects are OK with what you’ve written?
When I’m writing about someone who has suffered a profound loss, I check in with the person a fair amount. I let them know it’s important to me to represent them correctly. For example, I spent several months talking to Joan Lefkow, the judge whose husband and mother were murdered in her basement. It was an emotional, complicated topic for her and for me, too. It was the most profound sense I’ve ever had of carrying someone’s life in my hands. I decided before it was done that I would go over to her home and read her every single quote so that nothing surprised her. She was fine with almost everything but asked me to change one thing because she worried it would hurt her kids. We talked it through and I ended up keeping it.

Running quotes by a subject who’s suffered — especially someone you’re writing about because they’ve suffered — feels respectful and it feels like a way of deep fact-checking, a way of insulating me and the Tribune from error and misunderstanding. Generally, I’ve found that people are OK with what you’ve written as long as they’re not surprised. If you can help them through the shock of seeing their lives in print, it’s better for them and for you.

How do you feel about anonymous sources?
Again, if you just show respect for people’s feelings, you can usually get them to come around and be on the record. If someone’s reluctant to give their name, I explain that readers might not believe what they’re saying if their name is not attached. Of course, in some circumstances, like stories involving violence, being named might be dangerous to them or their family so it might not be fair to persuade them to go on the record. But my inclination is to avoid anonymous sources. There’s just so much mistrust of the media right now and we have to be very careful to be as clear with readers as possible.

You’ve shared your own family stories with your readers, such as growing up poor and your dad’s alcoholism. How do you decide how much to divulge?
My feelings on this are still evolving. When I first started writing, I was more cavalier about it, and I mostly wrote about my mother, who seemed to like it. But I would never have written as candidly about my father and the difficulties he caused for the people who loved him if he were still alive. A couple times, I’ve said out loud “I’m sorry, Dad” because I feel like I betrayed his trust by writing about him. But I think it’s important to tell my Dad’s stories.

He had a very old-fashioned rigid Catholic moral code and believed that if he failed to live up to it — or if his children, for whom he felt responsible, did — he could go to hell.

He could be harsh, mentally and physically. When I wrote about him on this Father’s Day, I was flooded with mail saying, “We had the same father. Thank you for reminding me that I could still love him.” The older I get, the more I realize how many people are struggling with both a love for their father and recognition of the damage that he inflicted.

I was moved by the story about taking your mom to Paris and her crawling to the top of Mont St. Michel because of her physical disabilities. How do you feel about your own aging?
Sometime in my early 60s, I realized that this was an entirely new phase of life. Through your 50s, you can look in the mirror and still look like a version of yourself. But in your 60s, even if you stay very active, you change, physically, emotionally. Your people start to die. In the last 10 years, I’ve lost a sibling, a parent, two best friends and a generation of aunts and uncles.

Still, I don’t mind getting older. In some ways, I find it exciting, fascinating, which is good because it’s inevitable. By the time you’re 67, you can see your own ending on the horizon. It’s unproductive to pretend it’s not happening. Though I have yet to achieve my mother’s saintly level of acceptance.

You don’t see a lot of older people in the newsroom anymore. Have you thought about what comes next for you?
I get asked if I’m going to retire all the time. You get to a certain age and you just can’t escape the question.

I stay in this work because I love it and I believe in it. I also think it’s important for women my age to stay in the game so younger women can see that working and staying publicly engaged is an option. Because if you don’t see it, it’s harder to be it. I do feel some responsibility to show younger women that just because you’re 67, it doesn’t mean that you have to step aside, little lady.

That’s a good segue to diversity of all kinds — age, gender, race. Do you think newsrooms are doing a better job of recruiting women and minorities?
In some measure, newspapers have gotten better for women and minorities. There’s a much greater awareness of the need to bring a wider variety of people into the news process. But newspapers are shrinking. There’s a huge financial squeeze that complicates hiring people and keeping them. People coming into this business now, with the exception of a few papers, are poorly paid. I was able to make a good living, but that is not the case anymore for most young journalists, which further complicates getting a wider variety of people into this work.

Finish this sentence: If we in the news business want to move forward, we need to...
Among other things, we need to find a better way to deliver our digital product. At the Tribune, we always talk about delivering relevant content but, like a lot of newspapers, we struggle with presenting it in a user-friendly way. A lot of that has to do with the financial pressures — mind-numbing ads and other money-driven clutter can overwhelm the story. Readers won’t stick with you if you make it hard for them to read.

Finish this sentence: You don’t know hate mail until you write about…
Trump. Or anything involving race.

What column has generated the most outrage?
After 28 years of columns, all the outrage blurs into one big lump of outrage in my brain. In general, the columns that generate the most vitriol involve — no surprise — politics. The outrage has been particularly vicious during the Trump era, but it’s not new. One thing I’ve learned from column-writing is that almost anything — even just a word choice — can drive some people to crazed, insulting anger.

I often think the most outlandish outrage comes from people who aren’t really mad at me. They’re mad at their spouse, their boss, the universe. They see a name, a photo and an email address on a column and think that’s an anonymous place to vent, failing to understand that columnists are people, too. Some people, of course, respond with legitimate disagreement. And more people write to say nice things rather than to express outrage.

I tell myself that the way people respond to what I write is an education in how people think, and that’s a form of reporting. But the true hate mail does get exhausting.

Trump frequently has used Chicago as the poster child for violence. After almost 30 years of writing a column, what would you want him to know about Chicagoans?
Chicago contains the world — the people of the world, the tragedies and struggles and beauties of the world. You can’t sum the place or the people up in a word. Poverty, segregation, trauma and violence are the city’s deep, enduring, confounding troubles. The people of Chicago haven’t figured out how to fix those problems, but one thing I love about this city is the ways so many people keep trying. I’ve noticed through the years that most of the nasty mail I get about Chicago is from people outside Chicago. Real Chicagoans try to help.

Well, that lets us end on an uplifting note. Who do you read for inspiration?
When I want nourishment, I generally read fiction or poems. Books I’ve read recently and love include “Deacon King Kong” by James McBride and “This is Happiness” by Niall Williams.

I think often of this quote from Susan Sontag: “The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions… Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions — whenever asked — cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity."

Schmich's columns are now collected in a book: "Even the Terrible Things Seem Beautiful to Me Now: On Hope, Loss and Wearing Sunscreen."

Bonnie Miller Rubin is a Chicago-based freelance writer.  She spent 25 years at the Chicago Tribune, mostly as a metro reporter. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other publications.

The post Writing past politics to a “female way of approaching things” in commentary appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

If the first rule of nonfiction is “write what you know,” then Melissa Fay Greene has embraced this principle like few others.

She has spent her career chronicling the interior lives of families on the outside — those often struggling to just get through the day. For perspective, she need look no further than her own household of nine children —  four biological, one adopted from Bulgaria and four from Ethiopia — to understand the complexities of families that defy the conventional mold. In doing those intimate stories, Greene doesn’t shrink from one simple fact: That those whom are most precious to us can also be the most challenging. She builds them on a foundation of rock-solid reporting, heart-tugging prose and a dollop of humor.

All that is on display in her sweeping story in the July/August issue of the Atlantic, “Can an Unloved Child Learn to Love?” Greene used the 30^th anniversary of the fall of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu as her hook, allowing her to drill down into what happened to the thousands of kids warehoused in Romanian orphanages during his regime, deprived of human contact and affection before being adopted by unprepared American parents who naively believed that love was enough.

She found Izidor Ruckel, a 39-year-old Romanian adoptee living in Denver, and his adoptive parents, Marlys and Danny Ruckel of San Diego, to examine the lingering difficulties facing many of those orphans and their families. The result takes readers far beyond the usual feel-good, airport “welcome” stories on adoption; Greene dares lead us, without flinching, into the realm of reality.

Finding a small example to tell a big story

Greene, a Georgia native who now lives with her family in Atlanta, has always pushed beyond the superficial. She is the author of six books of nonfiction, and a two-time National Book Award finalist. Her first book, “Praying for Sheetrock” (1991), examined how one black community in rural Georgia threw off two centuries of oppression; it was named one of the Top 100 Works of American Journalism of the 20^th Century by a panel of experts convened by New York University. She has taught as the Kirk Writer-in-Residence at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.

As she wrote in the introduction of “Sheetrock,” she teaches her students to look for “large and important things happening in a very little place,” an approach she used when she profiled one Georgia county to illuminate the rise of Civil Rights and the dismantling of the “good ol’ boy” era.

Said Greene: “That’s been the goal with a lot of my work, including The Atlantic article (about Romania adoptees), in which a story of the crimes of a megalomaniac...is told, in part, through the eyes of a child survivor.”

I have long been a fan of Greene’s work. And as an adoptive mother of a foreign-born child, I was especially interested in how she tackled a subject that can be fraught with sensitive issues of sourcing, access, ethics and exposure. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity. After our q&A, we offer glimpses of some of the journalism that has inspired Greene.

You are writing about a very nebulous subject — attachment. What were some of the challenges of reporting on something that most people can’t even describe?
We fling around the word “attachment” lightly to describe bonds of affection among people of any age. I quickly learned that child development experts define “the attachment relationship” more narrowly as the two-way relationship between a baby and her primary caregiver that sets the stage for all future development. “A positive secure attachment relationship between infant and caregiver sets the infant up for a lot of good things to happen in life,” Dr. Martha Pott at Tufts told me.

I wanted to investigate the opposite: what happens when a baby is not offered the chance to form an attachment relationship with an affectionate, responsive caregiver. Can such a child ever learn to love? Specifically, what happened to the tens of thousands of children neglected during the Soviet-Romanian regime of Nikolai Ceausescu in the mid-20^th century? Is there a cut-off point — a “sensitive period” — after which children deprived of attachment relationships will be unable to form close bonds of friendship and love?

So, I ventured onto this melancholy landscape of what life might look like for adults whose infancies were defined by indifference and neglect. I found terrific experts and scientists, like the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP),  and including Dr.  , whose longitudinal research sought answers to questions about whether cognitive/emotional “doors” ever “close” in children denied attachment relationships.

The key was whether I could find a survivor of one of the institutions who could take me deeper than the science and tell me what it was like growing up in there, behind the bars and barbed wire, in chaotic rooms, essentially alone. My hope was that I could answer the implicit question — ‘Can a person unloved in childhood ever learn to love?’ — on both the scientific plane and the personal. The latter was harder.

How did you find Izidor Ruckel? Did you interview a lot of subjects before you settled on him?

I’d heard Izidor’s name over the years. My husband and I adopted a little boy from a Bulgarian orphanage in 1999; the world of Eastern European adoptees and their American families was small, and Izidor, who self-published a memoir in 2002, at 22, grew to be something of a spokesman for his cohort.

I interviewed other Romanian-adoptive families before I could locate Izidor. Several exemplified the findings that children removed from orphanages before their second birthdays can do quite well. I interviewed some blissfully happy families who’d whisked home young babies from Romanian hospitals largely unscathed. I found other adult survivors who’d been so harmed by the deprivation that they couldn’t capably relay their stories to me.

I found the perfect family, with three adult sons adopted out of “Home Hospitals for Irrecoverable Children,” and their parents were open to having me visit, but the young men felt finished with Romania, didn’t want to talk about it anymore with anyone. I spent a lot of time last summer thinking this article wasn’t going to happen. There was no story, no narrative arc, no heart.

And what happened when you found Izidor?
Everything changed. From our first phone conversation, I was floored by his detailed memory, his chilling assessment of what had been done to him, and his openness to talking.

He, in a way, exemplifies children discussed by Dr. Charles Zeanah, of Tulane, in the article: the kids whose material provisions in an orphanage were sufficient to allow them to achieve normal IQs, but whose neglect left them attachment-impaired anyway.

Izidor introduced me to Christina, and old friend from the orphanage, and I flew to California and Colorado last fall to visit Izidor, Christina and their families.  Interviewing an adult with cognitive challenges is tricky; I proceeded carefully with Christina, 41, as if interviewing a young teenager, and in the company of her mom. And, honestly, interviewing adoptive parents can be delicate, too, especially when they’ve faced steep challenges. A great many parents who, in the 1990s, adopted Romanian orphanage children found their lives turned upside-down.

Did you disclose your own personal story?
I think that my being an adoptive mom made it easier for them to trust me to handle their stories gently and respectfully, and with the understanding that ‘Yes, it’s been tough; yes, we love our kids.’

I reviewed their quotes with them before publication, having promised the adoptive parents that they could change their minds before publication and become anonymous. I believe that allowed folks to share more openly. One woman, a psychotherapist, told me her marriage had crashed soon after she and her husband realized what they were facing with the kid they’d brought home from Romania — that is to say, a lifetime of being his caregivers. There wasn’t room to include her very poignant story,  but if she’d decided at the last minute to become “an adoptive mother in New England,” or whatever, I would have obliged.

Your story is almost 9,000 words. Was it assigned or intended to be that long?
I invariably start out with the notion of being succinct. Crisp. Laconic!

But the more I take in, the more I learn and see and absorb, the more people I interview, the more I begin to see the thing as not a simple story at all but something almost ineffably complex and subtle, with deep historical roots and psychological resonance. I start lobbing more and more words at the situation, to try to bring it around.

Nevertheless, the fact that this article swelled to 19,000 words by mid-December was not entirely my fault! Questions from editors filled my in-box, many in the scientific realm. Example: Why, they wondered, had humans evolved in such a way that a child requires just one, two, or three attachment figures — rather than a larger group of adults — in order to develop normally? It would have required a doctoral dissertation to do justice to some of these questions.

You then spend weeks rounding up more experts, reading more scholarly articles, scheduling more interviews, and trying to write something accurate, definitive, and yet sparkling and fascinating, while also succinct. The word count mounted well beyond the stage of anything publishable; and yet probing scientific questions from higher-ups continued to arrive. I grew fearful of checking my email, and depressed when I saw the return addresses.

Then you’re interviewing fantastic, important people, who give you their time and who offer tremendous quotes; and your heart sinks because you’re thinking: “This is fabulous and there’s no way there will be room for it.”

Do you have a writing routine?
I wake up early, head out for a swim or a walk of three or four miles with the three dogs, then write until early afternoon, or whenever the coffee stops making an impact. It’s infinitely easier than the days I juggled small children and their preschool schedules. Tuesday/Thursday 9-to-noon “Mothers Morning Out” didn’t give you time to do anything more than sit in the parking lot and cry.

Most people don’t have the luxury of 9,000 words and 10 months to work on a story. What advice would you give a reporter who might get two weeks and 3,000 words?
With 3,000 words, you wouldn’t throw such a tremendous net as “What happened to the generation of the Romanian orphanage survivors?” or “Can a person unloved in childhood ever still learn to love?”

But you could pursue a little-known finding, like (as an example from my story) neuropsychologist Dr. Ron Federici’s observation that, of the 9,000 adopted post-institutionalized adopted children he has seen in his practice over 30 years, roughly a quarter of them require round-the-clock care, even as adults. This means, of course, that there are adoptive parents who have been in the trenches since the early 1990s. You could build a fascinating 3,000-word piece around that.

The next step is to find a protagonist whose story you can tell. The very essence of a story is the journey of a protagonist — someone with whom your readers can empathize and identify.

Maybe you find a mom who, back in the day, facing infertility, wanted more than anything in life to raise a child. Maybe she imagined PTA meetings, school plays, proms and college visits. But because of the damage invisibly inflicted on her child by a long-dead dictator, she never got any of those things and here she is now, in her 60s, still cutting the crusts off peanut-butter sandwiches and reminding her daughter to be gentle with the cat. But with children, you want to make room for hope, so I’d think you’d want to find some positives, some moments of intimacy and sweetness. So her daughter landed in the worst-off 25 percent of the post-institutionalized adopted children, unable to live independently; but then, you know, at bedtime, the young woman says, “I love you, Mama,” and even now, facing some health issues, worried about her own future and her child’s, the mother’s heart melts.

That’s what I’d try to do, given 3,000 words.

Speaking of numbers, were you worried that these dense factoids would take away from the emotional power of the narrative — that the readers' eyes would glaze over?
Yes. My own eyes glaze over. I adore strong narrative, with just a sprinkling of vital data points. I appreciate that the editors pushed me to include as much of the science as we did. And honestly, it’s the data that offers the news hooks. I alternated sections, though, so folks who wanted to read straight through the storyline could hop-scotch through the piece on those sections.

Can you give an example of how you made numbers more palatable?
I try to lower the threshold of data-heavy, fact-heavy sections. To introduce the brain imaging technology and longitudinal studies, for example, I introduced pediatric neurologist Charles Nelson as “gregarious and kind” and having a mustache that looks like Captain Kangaroo’s. I’m hoping that even the most statistics-averse reader might feel, “Oh, gregarious and kind? Captain Kangaroo? Okay, I can handle this.”

At one point, you take us into Izidor’s apartment near Denver, and describe what is almost an alternative world he has created. The description is not lengthy, but really paints a picture. What did you want the reader to see and understand from this passage?

From every visit to his home country, Izidor has brought back folk art and souvenirs—hand-painted glazed plates and teacups, embroidered tea towels, Romanian flags, shot glasses, wood figurines, cut-glass flasks of plum brandy, and CDs of Romanian folk music, heavy on the violins. He could stock a gift shop. There are thick wine-colored rugs, blankets, and wall hangings. The ambient light is maroon, the curtains closed against the high-altitude sunshine. Ten miles southwest of the Denver airport, Izidor is living in an ersatz Romanian cottage.

My experience last September of stepping foot into Izidor Ruckel’s rented room in a subdivision outside Denver — “Welcome to Romania,” he said, swinging open his door — is what worries me the most when I imagine trying to report a story now, via Zoom, while in COVID19 lockdown.

I had no idea at all how Izidor lived, what I would see, how anything would strike me. I didn’t fly to him with a to-do list — not even with a list of questions. I went wide-open, to be his guest for a day and see whatever he wanted to show me, and with the intent of absorbing as much as possible. But his bedroom suddenly reminded me of a passage in his memoir, in which he describes his miraculous overnight visit to the apartment of Onisa, a nice nanny from the orphanage, and his first-ever opportunity to eat delicious food and sleep in a real bed. “This…kind of reminds me of Onisa’s apartment?” I began, thinking of the maroon quilts and throws he’d described. “Yes, look!” he said, picking up his bedspread woven with red roses and dark leaves. “This is the same! I bought it in Romania because it reminded me of that night.”

Anyway, what a remarkable discovery, that this 39-year-old man was living in a room redolent of the only happy night of his early childhood.

Roses become an important emblem in the story. How did you hit on that? Here’s a passage that occurs just before the end:

Sometimes, Izidor has feelings.

Two years after the Ruckels kicked him out, Izidor was getting a haircut from a stylist who knew the family. “Did you hear what happened to your family?” she asked. “Your mom and sisters got in a terrible car accident yesterday. They’re in the hospital.”

Izidor tore out of there, took the day off from work, bought three dozen red roses, and showed up at the hospital.

“We were in the truck coming out of Costco,” Marlys recalls, “and a guy hit us really hard—it was a five-car crash. After a few hours at the hospital, we were released. I didn’t call Izidor to tell him. We weren’t speaking. But he found out, and I guess at the hospital he said, ‘I’m here to see the Ruckel family,’ and they said, ‘They’re not here anymore,’ which he took to mean ‘They’re dead.’”

Again, it was just fortuitous, like recognizing the resemblance of his adult rental room to Onisa’s apartment. I didn’t go looking for that connection either. I was confirming the details from Izidor and from his mom, Marlys Ruckel, about his panic when he learned the Ruckel family had been in a car accident and how he rushed to buy roses to take to them. I had that thump of recognition. “Wait, really?” I thought, flipping back through my notes because it seemed too good to be true.

But yes, Onisa’s quilt two decades earlier and his bedspread now were adorned with roses and he stood, heartsick at how he’d treated his family over the years, with his arms full of roses. I didn’t want to emphasize it, so I offered the lightest of touches: I repeated the word “burgundy” about the roses and the word “dark” about the leaves. Perhaps, in some readers’ minds, that chimed.

The ending had me reaching for the Kleenex. It is the continuation of the scene above, picking up when after Izidor leaves the hospital with the roses still in his arms. Can you explain the challenges of switching verb tenses, which is so crucial to the emotion? Here’s a passage where that comes into play:

Izidor raced from the hospital to the house—the house he’d been boycotting, the family he hated.

Danny Ruckel wasn’t going to let him in without a negotiation. “What are your intentions?” he would ask. “Do you promise to be decent to us?” Izidor would promise. Danny would allow Izidor to enter the living room and face everyone, to stand there with his arms full of flowers and his eyes wet with tears. Before leaving that day, Izidor would lay the flowers in his mother’s arms and say, with a greater attempt at earnestness than they’d ever heard before, “These are for all of you. I love you.” It would mark a turning point. From that day on, something would be softer in him, regarding the Ruckel family.

But first Izidor was obliged to approach the heavy wooden door, the door against which he’d hurled the photo album Marlys made for his birthday, the door he’d slammed behind him a hundred times, the door he’d battered and kicked when he was locked out. He knocked and stood on the front step, head hanging, heart pounding, unsure whether he’dbe admitted. I abandoned them, I neglected them, I put them through hell, he thought. The prickly stems of burgundy-red roses wrapped in dark leaves and plastic bristled in his arms.

And then they opened the door.

What mattered to me here were the verb tenses. The end of the story doesn’t happen chronologically. The incident itself is out of chronological order within the story’s timeline and then there’s a time-shift even within the episode.
Because a “door closing” is the great metaphor among child development experts, signaling when it might be too late for a deprived child to make up lost ground developmentally, I noticed something else here that “rhymed.” Izidor — who’d faced severe deprivation and all sorts of cognitive doors closing in early childhood — now stood outside a closed door. The moment I heard this story and pictured him knocking for entry, unsure if they’d let him in, I knew the article would end there, with him outside the door.

So this episode needed to move from simple past tense, when he approached the door, to the conditional — to the fact that he would be allowed in and permitted to apologize and give them the roses (which echo the Romanian bedspreads); then back to the simple past, so that in “real time,” he is standing outside the door, not knowing if it would open — which is the theme of the article.

I hoped that these overlapping, cascading echoes and themes would be moving to readers, even if they weren’t aware of how many quiet notes were being sounded.

Amazing work. Thank you. What other journalists or writers do you look to for learning and inspiration?I could happily list 100 novelists, poets and journalists I treasure. Here are three whose works I assign to my journalism students at Agnes Scott College, which they and I thoroughly enjoy:

• Stud Terkel's "Working" series. I assign a dozen stories for their listening pleasure, rediscovered and broadcast by NPR in 2016. I suggest they jot down their favorite questions, as he is the gold standard for combining fact and feelings in questions like 'Does your job affect your outlook on life?' 'Can you describe what you do step-by-step, like you're explaining it to a child?' ‘Do you ever question what you're selling?' 'Would you like to do this work for the rest of your life?' They then use questions like these in their own interviews.
• Novelist and children’s book author Jacqueline Woodson on Africa, America and Slavery’s Fierce Undertow. It’s a narrative about Woodson’s journey to Ghana, which invited descendants of enslaved Africans to consider it their “home.” But, as the deck hed in Woodson’s New York Magazine piece asks: “Can you go home again?” The piece is a beautiful example of work that combines memoir and third-person reporting. I think of it as first-person reportage. The students love this piece. Many of them lean toward memoir, but I want them to do real fact-gathering and reporting. Woodson shows how both are possible.
• Katherine Boo’s 2009 narrative for The New Yorker, "Opening Night: The scene from the airport slums." This is a valuable piece in so many ways — the vivid reporting and eloquent writing, the open-mindedness and compassion with which Boo enters into the world of a scrappy little kid, and the subtle ways she shows us her theme: though Mumbai's slum-dwellers are invisible to the city's super-rich, the reverse is not true; the desperately poor can see over the walls and will not be able to stand the disparities forever. (Editor’s note: Boo has won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Magazine Award and aMacArthur “genius” grant. The piece Greene cites is part of the reporting that led to Boo’s first book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” published in 2012, and winner of a National Book Award. Many interviews with her can be found on Nieman Storyboard.)

Bonnie Miller Rubin is a Chicago-based freelance writer.  She spent 25 years at the Chicago Tribune, mostly as a metro reporter. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other publications.

The post Wisdom from Melissa Fay Greene about deep reporting on sensitive subjects appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.