There’s a war on words and images out there.

Book banning in schools is trending these days, supercharged with the twin engines of social media and political extremism. Banning has reached historic highs. Book challenges are local, school district by school district, but often coordinated and coached nationally. The targets are largely anything “other” ­– other races, other sexualities, other perspectives beyond the mythos of the White, puritan ruling class.

Outrage abounds, even as each news item’s life cycle bores us with its repetition. Famous books  – the illustrated Anne Frank diary, for instance – or mundane instructional volumes are barred from impressionable schoolchildren after pressure from a parent, or a group of moms. Rinse and repeat on titles such as “Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation;” “Women;” “The History of the Blues;” “An Introduction to Watercolor.”

How to get beyond the shouting?

Narrative lives in ambivalence and ambiguity. It celebrates complexity. It leans into emotion, but not in a superficial way. When it works, it is an antidote to the toxic and superficial political speech so common in our land. Good narrative celebrates the messiness that is lived experience. It takes us into the dimensions in which fear and hope and anger and love all coexist.

The Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson dives headlong into that muddy mess of humanity in her work on book banning. As a national K-12 education reporter, she has done deep dives on the people (“Jennifer Petersen keeps 73 school books she detests in her basement”) and issues (Arkansas librarians face up to six years in prison for allowing obscene or harmful texts). Her portfolio in the past year is a lesson in how to own something that’s on your beat.

I particularly liked her piece this fall about an AP English teacher, Mary Wood, who faced deep ethical and practical questions – What can I teach? Who can I trust? What’s my purpose? – after being reprimanded for using a book that made at least two white students feel uncomfortable. In South Carolina, that’s a legal no-no; teachers shouldn’t subject their students to guilt or other forms of psychological distress. The book, by the way, is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” and I would highly recommend it. Yes, it should make all of us uncomfortable, because it describes systemic racism at basic, personal levels. And isn’t that the job of teachers? To expose us to ideas and people who test our assumptions about life?

But Natanson’s narrative is not my harangue. Instead, she takes us deep into the land of ambivalence. The piece is about journey that Wood, the teacher, has had to wade through the shoals of morality politics. It begins with the anxiety of that first step back to school this fall, then resets to that moment in the spring when two students turned her in to administrators. There is context along the way, like the uninformed social media campaign against Wood, that have a familiar ring, but they are told through the eyes and heart of this experienced teacher and mother of a teenager who will be taking her class.

To gain a deeper understanding, Storyboard asked Natanson about the background of the book-wars series and her profile of Mary Wood. The Q&A is followed by an annotation of the story.

What’s the genesis of ‘The School Book “ series title? Is there a war out there?
This is far from the first time America has seen book challenges. But the scope of this latest round is historic: Challenges surged to record-highs in 2021 and 2022, according to the American Library Association, which has tracked the issue for two decades. At the same time, states are passing laws that give parents more power over library curation, circumscribe students’ access to books and even threaten librarians with years of imprisonment and tens of thousands of dollars in fines for giving “obscene” or “harmful” books to minors. School board meetings nowadays regularly feature speeches from parents and residents upset about the books children have access to, with the discussion sometimes devolving into a shouting match. Given all this, my editor, Adam Kushner, and I felt justified in using the tag “Wars.”

What are the challenges of covering a subject that’s become so polarized?
One of the biggest challenges is convincing folks on all sides of the issue to trust me and speak with me. In every story I do, I aim to feature voices spanning all perspectives – but conservative-leaning parents can be especially wary. I recently profiled a woman in Virginia who challenges one school book a week, part of a quest to rid school libraries of sexual content. It took me several weeks to gain her and her friends’ trust. For the story on Mary Wood, I tried repeatedly to get in touch with parents and students who disliked and objected to her lesson on Ta-Nehisi Coates. One woman exchanged a few introductory emails with me before refusing to answer my questions and cutting off communication.

How did you find Mary Wood?
My editor Slacked me a post on X sharing what happened in Mary Wood’s classroom. He suggested there might be a deeper story there. Once I read a bit about her, I knew I wanted to tell her story in a narrative feature. I found her email online and wrote a long message explaining who I was and the kind of piece I wanted to write. After a few phone calls and a few weeks of considering the idea, she consented.

In the Post Reports podcast, you talk about scrambling to be able to be there on the first day of school. How important was that?
It was vital. I knew I had to witness that moment if I wanted to write a scene-based narrative about Mary Wood. My purpose in reporting the story was to capture what it’s like to return to teaching after your own students report you for a lesson on race. I wanted to take readers inside Mary Wood’s head. To do so, I had to be with her the morning before she left home and headed to her classroom again. In those last, vulnerable minutes, I guessed, her fear, anxiety and uncertainty would loom largest.

Who is your intended audience? Did you think about readers who might not be “the bluest of the blue,” as Mary Wood is?
I almost never have a particular demographic in mind when I write. The reason I love journalism, and especially narrative journalism, is because it can inspire people to consider life from new angles: to ponder perspectives, happenings and truths they never would have encountered otherwise. That’s always what I hope will happen with my stories.

ANNOTATION: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Natanson’s answers in blue.

THE SCHOOL BOOK WARS

Her students reported her for a lesson on race. Can she trust them again?

Mary Wood’s school reprimanded her for teaching a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Now she hopes her bond with students can survive South Carolina’s politics.

By Hannah Natanson

September 18, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

CHAPIN, S.C. — As gold sunlight filtered into her kitchen, English teacher Mary Wood shouldered a worn leather bag packed with first-day-of-school items: Three lesson-planning notebooks. Two peanut butter granola bars. An extra pair of socks, What a detail.just in case.

Everything was ready, but Wood didn’t leave. For the first time since she started teaching 14 years ago, she was scared to go back to school.

Six months earlier, You jump back in time right away. What's the thinking?I wanted to explain the circumstances – what drove Mary Wood to this point – as soon as possible, so the reader could understand the heightened emotions, tensions and stakes of her return to teaching. This was not an ordinary back-to-school, and I wanted to make that clear.two of Wood’s Advanced Placement English Language and Composition (AP Lang) students had reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her all-White class readings from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America. You explain Coates's book in greater detail later, but here you leave it with the barest of descriptions. Had you considered more? "What it means to be Black in America" on one hand doesn't seem to be much of a prompt for the reaction that follows, but these days it's probably more than enough for readers to understand.I didn’t want to slow the narrative too much right at the top. I was already asking readers to jump backward six months, as you noted, and I needed to keep things moving as swiftly as possible – per advice from my excellent editor, Adam Kushner.

The students wrote in emails that the book — and accompanying videos that Wood, 47, played about systemic racism — made them ashamed to be White, violating a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race.

Reading Coates’s book felt like “reading hate propaganda towards white people,” one student wrote.

At least two parents complained, too. Within days, school administrators ordered Wood to stop teaching the lesson. They placed a formal letter of reprimand in her file. It instructed her to keep teaching “without discussing this issue with your students.”

Wood finished out the spring semester feeling defeated and betrayed — not only by her students, but by the school system that raised her. The high school Wood teaches at is the same one she attended. This becomes a significant subplot. How did it strike you when you first met Wood?One of the first questions I asked Mary Wood after arriving in South Carolina was where she grew up. It’s often one of the first questions I ask; it’s usually an easy starting point for a conversation and it helps me understand the person I’m interviewing. I was astonished to realize Chapin was her hometown. Mary Wood didn’t tell me she graduated from the high school she now teaches at until a little later, when she took me on a driving tour of campus – and that was even more startling.

It had been a long summer since. Wood’s predicament, when it became public in a local newspaper, divided her town. At school board meetings, and in online Facebook groups, the citizens of wealthy, White and conservative Chapin debated whether Wood should be fired. Republican state representatives showed up to a June meeting to blast her as a lawbreaker. The next month, a county NAACP leader declared her an “advocate for the education of all students.” The county GOP party formally censured the school board chair for failing to discipline Wood.

Wood’s case drew national, polarizing attention. Conservative outlets and commentators decried Wood’s “race-shaming against White people.” Left-leaning media declared her a martyr to “cancel culture,” the latest casualty of raging debates over how to teach race, racism and history that have engulfed the country since the coronavirus pandemic.

South Carolina is one of 18 states to restrict education on race since 2021, according to an Education Week tally. And at least half the country has passed laws that limit instruction on race, history, sex or gender identity, per a Washington Post analysis. Wood is not the first teacher to get caught in the crossfire: The Post previously reported that at least 160 educators have lost their positions since the pandemic due to political debates. Among them was a Tennessee teacher who was terminated for telling White students that White privilege is a fact. A Texas principal who lost his job for allegedly promoting critical race theory. And a Wisconsin teacher who was dismissed after criticizing her district’s decision to ban the song “Rainbowland,” which lauds inclusivity. I'm always fascinated when writers break rules — in this case using a series of sentence fragments — to build emphasis or highlight tension. What's your thinking here?I like to break up long sentences with short, staccato ones; advice I got from a favorite English professor in college, as well as several great editors at The Washington Post. This just felt right – right rhythm, right emphasis – when I read the sentences back in my head. Cramming all of those details into one long sentence would have been a disaster!

The months Wood had hoped to spend hiking, doing yoga and vacationing carefree on the beach turned into a summer spent avoiding people’s gazes at the grocery store and the gas station.

Now she had to go back to school. Which meant confronting the conundrum she had avoided all summer.

Wood believes trust is fundamental to the classroom. She has to trust her students. They and their parents have to trust her. But trust, she believes, is impossible without authenticity. And for Wood, teaching authentically means assigning writers like Coates — voices unfamiliar, even disconcerting, to students in her lakeside town. Because of what happened last year, though, Wood now worried anything, from the most provocative essay to the least interesting comment about her weekend, might be resisted, recorded and reported by the children she was supposed to be teaching.

And if she couldn’t trust them, how was she supposed to make them trust her? These two paragraphs make a powerful nut. How did it develop? Trust is such a powerful concept, way at the top of the ladder of abstraction, yet you have laid the foundation upon a series of concrete actions in the grafs above.In narrative stories, it’s always better to show than tell – to lay out details and scenes and allow readers to draw their own conclusions, rather than writing prescriptively. Still, it’s important to have at least one paragraph that outlines the central theme, question or tension of a story. This was my attempt at that – but I didn’t want to place it too high up, nor to end the first section with my own words. I wanted the beginning and end of the introductory section of the story to be pure scene.

“I should probably head out,” Wood said to her husband, Ryan Satterwhite, glancing at the time on her oven’s digital clock: 7:38 a.m. But she didn’t move. “I just don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“It’ll be fine,” Satterwhite told her, setting his mug down and crossing the room.

She looked up at him and placed a hand on his chest. They stood framed in the front window for a moment. He bent down to kiss her.

“Hopefully,” she said. Her mouth quirked into a half-smile, half-frown.

She readjusted her bag, gripped her car keys and walked out the door. You can reconstruct a scene like this, but there's nothing better than literally being there! The understated quotes reveal high emotion. Great dialogue, great scene.Thank you! This is why I worked so hard to be with her on the day she left for school.

* * *

The first complaint didn’t alarm Wood.

It was early February. A day after she gave out copies of “Between the World and Me,” a mother emailed asking to speak about “an assignment.” Wood didn’t see it as different from the parental objections she was used to fielding in Lexington-Richland School District 5, which serves roughly 17,000 students and is about two-thirds White. In interviews, several teachers recalled dealing with opinionated Chapin parents who pushed back against lessons or for better grades.

Wood emailed, phoned and left a voice mail with the mom. “Please call me back,” she remembers saying. She figured they would chat and that would be the end of it.

Wood thought she was on safe ground. She had taught Coates’s book — and accompanying YouTube videos titled “Systemic Racism Explained” and “The Unequal Opportunity Race” — the year prior. No one complained.

She also counted on the fact AP Lang is supposed to be a high-level class. The College Board curriculum says it can address “issues that might, from particular social, historical, or cultural viewpoints, be considered controversial, including references to … races.” Wood’s supervisor, English department chair Tess Pratt, had signed off on Coates’s book. Plus, Wood had required AP Lang students to read a speech from former president Donald Trump, a balancing conservative voice.

And Wood believed the school district had come to accept her — respecting her students’ 80-plus percent AP exam passage rates year after year, above the national average — even if not everyone liked her methods. Chapin was her hometown. Chapin High School had been her school, the place she began to question the conservative, Christian views espoused by her classmates, friends and family.

No teacher ever assigned her someone like Coates, Wood said, but her father Mike Satterfield, a teacher and later principal at Chapin, encouraged her to pursue whatever outside reading she found interesting. That led her to left-leaning authors. By the time she graduated from University of North Carolina Wilmington, she was a self-professed liberal. Ba-bing! Her political leaning is strongly implied above. What led you to this sentence in this place in the story?Given the allegations against Mary Wood, I felt her politics was a subject I had to address in the piece. I placed it in this section because it seemed to fit most naturally here – this part of the story is meant to give the reader background on who Mary Wood is and how she came to be that person.

Satterfield capped his long career in education by winning a seat on the school board in November 2022 — and that made Wood feel safe, too. (Satterfield declined to comment beyond writing in an email that said: “I love my daughter very much and respect her for the person that she is.”)

She knew most students leaned right and guessed that many of her colleagues did, too, based on their social media presence and offhand remarks. The popular circles at school are red, current and former students said.

But amid a red sea, Chapin’s English department was a blue island. A stark contrast. Did you and your editor discuss whether to use the red/blue construct? It certainly seems apt here, but your story also bends beyond such sharp lines.I don’t remember discussing this beforehand with my editor, Adam Kushner, but when he read the draft he liked the metaphor. I settled on this image because, throughout all my interviews with educators and students at Chapin High School, I kept hearing about a sharp, partisan divide between the English department and the rest of the teaching staff – and the image of a blue island amid a red sea just swam (ahem) into my head. And Wood was known as the bluest of the bunch — conspicuous for decorating her classroom with posters of Malcolm X, Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes and LGBTQ pride stickers.

“She had that granola-crunchy vibe,” said a former Chapin teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional and personal retaliation. “It wouldn’t be difficult to guess how she votes walking into her room. I think that’s what made her a sort of lightning rod.”

Aubrey Hume, a recent Chapin graduate, recalls seeing the Malcolm X poster and immediately clocking that Wood thought differently from most people in town. She also taught Black, female and queer voices that most students never heard in other classrooms nor at home — which Hume said she liked. But other students didn’t.

“It was like, ‘Oh, I got Miss Wood, and now I have to scoff and roll my eyes because she’s going to teach me things I don’t want to learn,’” Hume, 18, recalled. “A lot of kids did not like her.”

Elizabeth Jordan, now 20, was one of those students. Raised in a conservative, Christian household, Jordan was unhappy to learn Wood would be her AP English teacher back in 2019, Jordan’s junior year.

At first, Jordan found Wood’s lessons unsettling — especially the classes focused on mass shootings or transgender rights, during which Wood held up left-leaning viewpoints for students’ inspection. Jordan could not understand why Wood was asking high-schoolers to discuss controversial current events. This is such a telling sentence, suggesting the deafening silence in high school education.

“All I was thinking was, ‘This isn’t allowed, this just isn’t allowed,’” Jordan said. “Just because it was a complete 180 from anything I had known.” (South Carolina had not yet passed its legal restrictions on what teachers can say on these topics.)

Over the course of the year, though, Jordan’s opinion shifted. She noticed how students seemed to pay more attention in Wood’s class. She noticed that Wood never pushed students to adopt viewpoints but challenged them to account for their convictions. Now a junior in college, Jordan still remembers the debate that followed after a popular boy, the student body president, said transgender athletes should not be allowed to play sports.

“Okay,” Jordan recalls Wood saying, “can you explain that a little bit more?”

By 2023, when Wood assigned Coates, her strategy hadn’t changed: She still gave difficult texts about hot-button issues, convinced it was the best way to keep students’ attention — and teach them how to argue, an AP Lang exam requirement. She still demanded students consider novel perspectives, setting the essay question: “Explain Coates’ problem with America’s tradition of retelling history. Explain your support or disagreement with his position.”

For the two days Wood got to teach “Between the World and Me,” classroom discussions were lively and open, said Connor Bryant, 17, one of the students who took AP Lang last year. Bryant, whose father is a Chapin English teacher, said his peers debated systemic racism and what it’s like to be Black in America, agreeing and disagreeing with Coates, without Wood picking a side.

“She did a really good job of keeping things not boring,” Bryant said. “People spoke up and they had different opinions — I honestly didn’t hear a single complaint about the book from anyone.”

Still, Bryant did remember a handful of disengaged students in the back of the room. They whispered to each other during class.

As in years past, Wood’s style of teaching had left some students feeling uncomfortable. But this time, they didn’t come to respect her.

They reported her. Terrific transition. A very chapter-ending sequence. Did you get this on the first try?Thank you! I did, actually – but I also have to give credit to Lynda Robinson, a superb narrative-focused editor at The Washington Post. She and I worked on a narrative several years ago about Matthew Hawn, a Tennessee teacher fired for telling White students that White privilege is “a fact.” One of the sections of that story ends in a similar way: “ … the school system argued in a filing submitted to the independent hearing officer that it was not Kingsport that had grown less tolerant of opposing political views. / It was Hawn.” Lynda suggested that ending to me at the time, and I loved the rhythm and drama of it. When I was writing this piece on Mary Wood almost two years later, I recalled those two sentences and suddenly knew exactly how I wanted to close this section of the story.

* * *

The student email arrived in school board member Elizabeth Barnhardt’s inbox at 8:51 p.m. on a Sunday, four days after Wood assigned “Between the World and Me.” The student thanked Barnhardt for “looking into this matter.”

“I understand in AP Lang we are learning to develop an argument and have evidence to support it, yet this topic is too heavy to discuss,” the student wrote, according to school records obtained by The Post. “I actually felt ashamed to be Caucasian.”

Another student email followed at 9:35 p.m. “I feel, to an extent, betrayed by Mrs Woods,” the second student wrote. “I feel like she has built up this idea of expanding our mind through the introduction of controversial topics all year just to try to subtly indoctrinate our class.”

Especially troublesome, the student wrote, was one of Coates’s sentences stating: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”

The student names were redacted from the emails obtained by Wood through a records request and provided to The Post. A parent who complained about Wood’s course to the school board did not answer a list of emailed questions. Barnhardt, who was endorsed by Moms for Liberty last year, did not respond to a request for comment.

The following Monday afternoon, Wood had finished teaching and was preparing to leave school when she received a call from a school secretary. The woman told her she had an unscheduled meeting with Chapin’s assistant principal of instruction, Melissa Magee, and the district’s director of secondary instruction, Neshunda Walters, at 4 p.m.

The woman didn’t say what the meeting was about, but Wood guessed. At this point, she hadn't been told of the complaints to the board, right? Was there something more going on that would have taken the reader on a tangent here?No, she hadn’t heard about the complaints. But she had gotten that phone call from a mother referenced in the previous section, in which the woman complained about “an assignment” right after Mary Wood set students Coates’s book. So she figured this meeting had to do with complaints about “Between the World and Me.” She grabbed Pratt, the English department chair and one of her best friends, hoping for protection. And she pulled up the AP Lang course description on her laptop, figuring she might need it.

Wood and Pratt were kept waiting outside a conference room for over half an hour, they later recalled. Through a window in the door, Pratt said, she could see Magee and Walters sifting through pages of documents in a manila folder. Around 4:30, Wood and Pratt said, they were let into the room — but Walters dismissed Pratt over her protests, the department chair said. She kept waiting outside as Wood underwent what the English teacher later described as an interrogation.

A set of administrative talking points prepared ahead of the meeting, obtained through Wood’s records request and given to The Post, show that Magee and Walters were supposed to start by telling Wood her teaching had sparked “concerns.” I generally caution writers against one-word quotes. Why did you think it appropriate here?I am also generally opposed to one-word quotes: whatever the writer’s intention, it can come off as sarcastic. In this case, though, I wanted to take readers inside that room – inside the moments when school officials are reprimanding Mary Wood – as much as I could, given I wasn’t there when it happened. The set of preparatory administrative talking points I obtained was a real gift from the journalism gods. To better reconstruct the meeting, and capture the precise nature of administrators’ objections to “Between the World and Me,” I quoted closely from the planned language laid out in the talking points.They were supposed to mention the South Carolina policy against making students uncomfortable because of their race. They were supposed to remind her of school rules stipulating that “teachers will not attempt, directly or indirectly, to limit or control students’ judgment concerning any issue” — and that “the principal must approve supplementary materials” for classes.

They were supposed to “let her talk” about Coates’s book and her reason for assigning it. But the verdict was already determined: “This assignment could run in conflict with proviso and policies,” the talking points said. “We need to cease this assignment.” (It is unclear who wrote the talking points; the school did not answer a list of emailed questions about the document.)

Wood said the meeting proceeded almost exactly as the talking points laid out. She tried to defend herself. She cited the AP Lang course description, quoting the part that said it was okay for teachers to assign controversial texts. She said the purpose of the lesson was for students to hear a stimulating argument they could explore and critique.

Magee and Walters let her talk. After she finished, Wood recalls, Walters delivered a two-word order: “Pause instruction” related to Coates’s book. Such stilted, bureaucratic language! I'm glad you decided not to paraphrase here. The district did not answer questions about the meeting nor make Magee or Walters available for interviews. Superintendent Akil E. Ross Sr. declined to discuss any aspect of Wood’s lesson or its fallout, noting the district does not comment on specific staff members or incidents. You sprinkle the refusals to talk throughout the story. Did you discuss the approach before writing, or did it just fit naturally?With a narrative, you want the story to flow as smoothly as possible. Chunky refusals to comment or statements can interrupt and bog down the story. As soon as I realized the district was going to give me a statement, and not make anyone available for interviews, I planned to cluster the district statement at a relevant, far-down point in the story.

Ross wrote in a statement that “we want our students to be critical thinkers with the ability to develop their own understanding of the world.” He added, “There will be times when students or parents disagree with issues discussed in class. The best way to resolve these matters is communication between the family and the teacher.”

The school gave Wood two days off teaching for “professional development,” she said, so she could come up with something to replace Coates’s book, which she was supposed to teach for the next three weeks. A substitute taught her classes in the meantime.

Wood struggled to figure out what to do. It was bad enough that she was supposed to overhaul a whole unit in two days. Worse, Wood said, Magee and Walters had revealed the complaints came directly from students — not parents, as was more usual. They wouldn’t say who, Wood said. They wouldn’t provide copies, not even anonymous ones.

Wood agonized over how to face her classroom again. She wasn’t angry with her students, she said. She expected high-schoolers to get upset about some of the things she taught. But before, teenagers and their parents had always brought their complaints to her. And she had always defused the situation.

What frustrated her now was that she’d been skipped over: The students had gone directly to the school board. And school officials were listening to the teens, not her.

“Taking the word of a couple of students over the professional integrity of a seasoned educator is damaging to the relationship between all parties involved,” she wrote in an email to her principal and the superintendent on February 8.

But most of all, she was scared.

“I didn’t know who did it,” Wood said. “And I — I didn’t know how to talk after that.”

She decided the safest course was to teach examples of old AP exam questions for the rest of the semester. As a teacher, my heart hurts here. She wouldn’t allow debate anymore. She wouldn’t so much as mention “Between the World and Me,” a decision reinforced by the letter of reprimand, which arrived in early March.

But her students still had copies of Coates’s book.

So, on her first day back, five other English teachers — including Pratt — walked with her to first period, AP Lang, which all of them had free. The following scene of collecting the book was obviously important for you to include, even though Wood isn't in it. Can you take us through your thinking on including it?Wood actually was in the classroom, although she didn’t help gather the books. I asked about what happened when she had to take the books away because I’m always curious about the physical logistics of book removals. Once I found out that five teachers had teamed up to collect the books – and that some students had difficulty parting with their copies, lingering over pages they’d marked with sticky notes – I knew I had to include the scene in the story, because I was riveted hearing accounts of it. My editor Adam Kushner and I went back and forth a few times discussing how to write this scene in the clearest way, given Mary Wood cannot function as a narrator the way she does in the rest of the piece. I’m happy with the final version which, at Adam’s suggestion, draws heavily on student and teacher perspectives to recreate the moment. At a regular English department meeting that morning, Wood’s colleagues had decided to gather the books on her behalf. They also wanted to collect the titles as speedily and professionally as possible, Pratt recalled, to minimize stress and awkwardness for Wood and her students. They figured more teachers would pick up the books more quickly. The five teachers lined up near the door as students filed in. Wood sat behind her desk.

Once the last teen had sat down, Wood delivered three stilted sentences, screened and scrutinized by most of the English department in advance. Stripped of all possible controversy.

“We will no longer be reading this book,” she said, according to six people in the room and a contemporary, written account of the day’s events provided by Pratt. “We will be collecting it now. Please look at the Smart Board so that I can direct you to today’s lesson.”

The five teachers walked up the five aisles between students’ desks. They lifted copies of “Between the World and Me” from desks as they walked. Some students began rereading underlined or favorite passages as teachers approached, said Bryant, the AP Lang student.

A boy sitting next to Bryant had plastered his copy with what looked like five sticky notes per page. A teacher, Pratt, stood and waited until the boy had pulled out each note. It took almost half a minute.

“Looks like you wrote a lot,” Pratt remembers telling him.

A teacher placed the collected copies of the books on a shelf in the classroom. They remained there, untouched, until the last day of school.

* * *

On a steamy Monday afternoon in late June, Wood pulled up the live stream link for that month’s school board meeting. Her golden lab mix, Saint, and Yorkie poo, Happy, jumped onto the couch as she cast the meeting onto the television screen. Hooray! You got the name of the dog. Both, in fact.Yes! Always, always, always ask people their pets' names. And what they're carrying in their purses or backpacks. And why!

News of Wood’s canceled lesson had broken two weeks earlier in regional newspaper the State. She had mostly stayed inside the house since. She figured the board meeting, with its opportunity for public comment, was one way to take the temperature of the town.

The first speaker was a woman in a white striped dress, her blonde hair piled into a bun. She said South Carolina was making the news for the wrong reasons: “We now know that there have been teachings in a school, here in this district, of systemic racism. … This is not only inappropriate and divisive, this is illegal.”

Then came another woman, who declared herself “surprised to learn that this teacher is still employed.” Still another, who said she was a grandmother in the district, began by thanking the board: “You opened this meeting with a prayer. That was awesome. I hope that means we’re all Christians.” She, too, called for Wood’s firing. Watching, Wood recognized none of the women.

(The district declined to answer questions about Wood’s employment, but board members have previously said the power to punish teachers rests with school-level administrators. Wood said she has received no discipline beyond the reprimand letter.)

The fifth speaker was South Carolina State House Rep. Robert J. “RJ” May III (R), who had driven 30 minutes from his home near South Congaree to reach Chapin. In an interview with The Post, he said worried parents and students, some of them in Wood’s class, contacted him asking him to speak at the meeting.

He was happy to do it because he thinks Wood broke state law and acted outside the parameters of her job by assigning Coates’s book — which May said presents the author’s biased views of history as fact. Had he read the book?In an interview with me, May said, “I have read some of this book.”He said books that deal with systemic racism should be taught in social studies, government or politics courses. If they are taught at all.

“We should be a colorblind society,” May said that night.

On her sofa, Wood shouted at the screen. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I absolutely love that you recreated "dialogue" even though it was through the TV set.

The front door banged open behind her, admitting Summit, her 16-year-old son and a student at Chapin High. Turning to greet him, Wood saw his lips pressed into a line.

“What happened?” she remembers asking.

“Mom, did you break the law?” he said, according to his and Wood’s recollection of that night. “My friends called you racist.”

Wood told him that, sometimes, good people get bad information from the wrong places — like Fox News, popular in Chapin. Summit nodded, face tight. Wow. What a teacher and mom. Not sure I could have been so .... measured.He said he’d tackled one of the students who called her racist and didn’t want to be friends with those people anymore.

Wood knew the friend group he was talking about. They were all boys she liked: They’d eaten lunch in her classroom many times the year prior. She swallowed the hurt and told her son what she knew she should say.

“You can be friends with them,” she said. “You just have to talk to them about it.”

Summit considered. “All right,” he said after a moment, and went upstairs to play video games.

The board meeting on TV stretched onward. Speaker after speaker denounced her.

Wood didn’t sleep well that night. Or most of the summer.

A bright spot was the next school board meeting, in mid-July. This time, a dozen teachers and residents spoke out in Wood’s favor. Coates himself traveled to Chapin to meet her. They went out to dinner. Coates came with her to the board meeting, sitting silently in the back. He signed her copy of “Between the World and Me.” He told her he appreciated her courage, she said. (Coates did not respond to an interview request.)

She went on vacation to Ocracoke Island, N.C., in late July, where she tried to sum up her feelings in a journal entry. How open was she in sharing her journal? It suggests her level of trust with you was pretty high.Before coming out to South Carolina, I spent weeks talking to Mary Wood on the phone and Zoom, showing her past stories I’d written and explaining the kind of piece I wanted to write about her – how it would require being open about intimate parts of her life, including showing me things like text messages, journal entries and emails. We also talked through potential consequences, good and bad, of being featured in The Washington Post. I told her I couldn’t guarantee anything but that I wanted her to be prepared for the kinds of outcomes I’d seen with sources in the past. I also explained to her my fact-checking process: For a narrative feature like this, I call back everyone I interviewed to go over the facts I’m including about them in the story (name, age, etc.) to ensure accuracy. I also go over people’s quotes, although of course I cannot alter those. My motto as a reporter is “No surprises." Sources might not always like what’s appearing in my story, but they certainly won’t be surprised by it. By the time I arrived in South Carolina, Mary Wood trusted me.

“Teachers are afraid,” she wrote. “Teachers are silent. Teachers cave.”

* * *

As Wood pulled into the Chapin High parking lot on Aug. 7, her stomach twisted.

She wouldn’t have to face her students. It was a “professional development” week: Time for teachers to knock out trainings, organize their classrooms, prepare their lessons. But she did have to see her colleagues, many for the first time since her debacle went public.

Seven minutes before the start of school, sitting in her car, Wood texted another English teacher: “Will you walk in with me? I’m scared.” Such telling detail!

The day went okay. At a welcome-back teacher breakfast, Wood nibbled on casseroles as her English department friends shared details of their summers: playing pickle ball, hiking in the High Sierras. She joked in reply that her own summer had been “pretty boring.”

She would be teaching AP Lang again. Her son, Summit, would be taking the class. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

She saw two students had requested to switch out of another English class she was teaching without sharing why. She wondered if it was because of what happened. A few teachers who she knows disagree with her politically didn’t respond when she said “Hi” to them in the hallways. She wondered, again, if it was because of what happened.

A week later, on the day students returned to campus, her phone buzzed with a text during morning assembly: “I love you,” Summit wrote. Then a second message: “Thanks for always doing what is right.”

Wood’s AP Lang class met in the early afternoon. At 1:15 p.m., as the last students settled into their chairs, Wood rose and introduced herself. She looked out at the 25 teens, spotting her son, three of his good friends, two children she’d taught before and three others who went to preschool with Summit. She told the room she grew up in Chapin, too.

Wood pulled out a plastic sandwich bag filled with shell fragments she collected on the beach in during her Ocracoke vacation. She gave the bag to a student and asked him to pass it around the room. She told each teen to take one.

The shells had once been whole, she said. Like a promise kept. A trust fulfilled.

But they broke. Maybe in stormy waters, or when they were dragged across the bottom of the ocean, or because a beachgoer stepped on them.

Sometimes, “we start to feel broken,” she said, “tossed around kind of like those shells. We’re chipped away at … broken from each other.”

She watched her students plunge their hands into the bag and fish for shells.

“But the thing is,” Wood said, “that’s not true.”

She hoped she was right. A five-word ender, full of hope (naturally) and fear and ambivalence. Can you take us through how you came up with this scene as your ender. Did you know it would be that from the moment you heard it, or did it evolve?I always knew I wanted to end the story back inside Mary Wood’s classroom, recounting what she said to this year’s students – perhaps describing her hopes for the year to come. Once she told me what she said (the district wouldn’t let me inside her classroom to hear for myself), I knew this had to be my kicker.

* * *

Tom Warhover is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, where he served several years as executive editor of the Columbia Missourian. He previously worked as a reporter and editor at the Virginian-Pilot.

The post Reporting past the black-and-white politics of school book bans appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]A[/dc]t the end of each semester, after all the discussions of craft, I remind my reporting students at the Missouri School of Journalism the why of it all: the larger purpose their journalism serves. By then they have become so immersed — sometimes overwhelmed — in assignments that their focus has narrowed to the point that there’s a haze around their oxygen-starved corneas. So we read, in the round, the words of James W. Carey in his address to an incoming class of Columbia University journalism grad students. It’s called The Struggle Against Forgetting.

Carey cites the author Milan Kundera, who posits that humankind’s struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. By that, Carey means a collective memory, a common understanding of what has transpired so that we may move forward as a larger community. “That which goes unrecorded goes unpreserved except in the vanishing moment of our individual lives,” Carey writes:

For here you will study the practice of journalism. Not the media. Not the news business. Not the newspaper or the magazine or the television station but the practice of journalism. There are media everywhere. Every despot creates his own system of media. There is a news business everywhere; there just isn’t all that much journalism, for there can be no journalism without the aspiration for or institutions of democratic life.

As citizens, we have been enjoined in a great national struggle as to whether the American experiment can continue without a set of shared facts, as evidenced by the attempt to overturn the election of the president in November 2020 and powered by The Big Lie, uttered even before the first vote was cast, that the system was rigged to throw out Donald J. Trump. The Lie’s excruciating outcome, then and now, is the threat of violence — and the threat made real.

As we have rolled inexorably to one of our saddest anniversaries, the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020, it’s a good time to take stock.

I haven’t read all the miles of material written about that day, when organized rioters helped push the rest of the mob into the building and to the doors where the House and Senate had been sitting minutes before a chaotic evacuation. Publications have pushed out millions of words, from searing retrospectives to investigations to predictive essays.

The Washington Post has treated the insurrection as a local newspaper should, covering every development during and since in real time. If you find it hard to keep up, as I do, I recommend dialing back to The Post’s blockbuster series, “The Attack.” The book-length story, published Oct. 31 and organized by “Before, During and After” the incursion, does what good storytelling should: bring together many disparate pieces into a coherent whole.

[dc small]C[/dc]onsider the task of the reporters, writers, designers, photographers and editors who delivered “The Attack:” Hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, videos and audio recordings, all collected and analyzed by 75 journalists over six months. An Everest of work, all in need of sifting, organizing, prioritizing and producing. Newspapers bow to their working-class roots. Thus, those writers aren’t singled out as they might be in magazines; that distinction goes to a select few lead-writer bylines, with the dozens who contributed listed in an “About the Story” box. I remember, as a newspaper editor, sending out more than a dozen reporters to cover breaking stories knowing that the only way to truly make sense of all the information flowing in was through the hands of one or two writers (regardless of whether they were called reporters or editors). Everyone who touched this project deserves stand-out credit.

The revelations were many, encapsulated in a bulleted “key findings” summary atop the series: Alerts were raised and ignored or discounted; fears around “optics” kept the National Guard in the background; a network of intelligence centers, formed after 9/11, raised the red flag, “but federal agencies did not show much interest in its information;” the president resisted calls from his own party leaders to urge the rioters to disperse while his attorney continued haranguing Vice President Mike Pence throughout the afternoon and evening to reject electors and throw the election back to the states — the list goes on.

Particularly harrowing: the nasty, awful threats election officials continue to receive, and the fact that they “spiked immediately after the former president and his allies raised new claims.”

Summary findings are useful to readers, but can leave even more pressure on the storyteller. The Post series succeeded in holding my attention, though. There are many reasons. These three rise to the top for me:

Organizing time

Fiction writers can control time, condensing and expanding it to fit the demands of scene and plot. Non-fiction writers don’t have that luxury. We create arbitrary time frames — the anniversary being one of the most common (thus this essay) — but they are bound by the events and the people that actually experienced them.

The Post created timelines that fit the narrative. It was deceptively simple: before, during, after. Note, though, that the timeline for each day isn’t cut up into traditional calendar divisions (e.g. six months before, three months before, etc.) but into high water marks in the story. We begin 102 days Before, then move forward 39 days, then 10 days, then five, then 12. Those divisions correspond to an extraordinary meeting of regional homeland security offices, to the morning after the election, when Trump falsely claimed that the election was rigged, to increasingly radical plans for a national “Million MAGA March,” to Trump’s naming of Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell as agitators in chief, to Attorney General William P. Barr’s interview with the Associated Press in which he declared the Justice Department couldn’t find enough fraud to affect the election’s outcome.

The second and third parts — During and After — maintain their own logic as well. The actual times, whether days or minutes, matter less than the structural mandate that each works on its own, but also in service of a greater whole. I originally came to the series by reading the last day and was perfectly satisfied; there weren’t missing holes created by not yet reading the first two days. I felt the same way in reading the series straight through. That’s incredibly hard to do.

Character

If I were a writing contest judge and had the choice, I would plop this series in news or community service, not feature. But I found gold coins along the path that sparkled in the development of characters, some very public, some unknown to the average reader.

The introduction to some of these characters comes within some heavy news moments. We meet Paul Hodgkins, a 38-year-old crane operator who voted for Barack Obama in 2008. We see him drift into radicalization in the backdrop of a September debate in which Trump hinted that the election could be determined by Congress. Hodgkins will become the first person with a felony conviction for his part in the attack. He’ll apologize and promise reform and finally return to his starting place as staunch Trump supporter. We see Capitol Police Capt. Carneysha Mendoza on the front lines of a Nov. 14 pro-Trump march, pinned in the middle of insurgents in the Capitol on Jan. 6, and later trying to explain it all to Congress and to her 10-year-old son a month later. We watch as Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, hires private security in preparation for Jan. 6, and as Clint Hickman, an Arizona egg farmer and Maricopa County supervisor, flees his home the next day due to threats against him and his family.

These little peeks into people’s lives propel the story forward more than any other characteristic.

Long, but svelte

The series is an investment of time for the reader, but the editors did us a great service in using digital tools to help get some of the more clunky parts out of the way. They call them footnotes; I’d describe them as hypernotes, because you click on each number to reveal the information. Much of it is simple attribution (“this account of Nichols’s online posts is drawn from court documents”) or explanation (“Fann did not respond to requests for comment”). They are the kinds of things narrative writers are tempted to drop completely because they get in the way of fluid storytelling. But The Post lets the story move and lives up to its obligations of accountability and transparency. (Every story in every newspaper should be doing this, but we’ll have to let big series at big papers with great content management systems show the way for now.)

Also, video and audio clips serve as direct attribution to the narrative and allow more expansive quotes than would be desirable in words. Some of the audio clips of radicals threatening election officials (“we’re coming for you, b—" … “we’re gonna try you and we’re gonna convict your piece of s— a-- and we’re gonna hang you”) are harrowing and distressing for the future of our democracy.

[dc small]I[/dc]n a letter to readers, Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee wrote that the project began after Congress failed in efforts to create a bipartisan panel to investigate the attack. A committee would be formed, eventually, and it continues to jackhammer information from recalcitrant former Trump administration officials and current members of Congress.

It’s important work. The drumbeat of The Big Lie continues, and if you believe the election was stolen then maybe it’s not so far-fetched to believe that patriots should take over the nation’s Capitol. A Post-University of Maryland poll released this week says 1 in 3 Americans think violent action against the government can be legitimate. “The Attack” series shows how quickly we can devolve from patriotic dissent and discussion to insurrection. I return, for a moment, to James Carey:

Journalism arose as a protest against illegitimate authority in the name of a wider social contract in the name of a genuine public life and a genuine public opinion.

The struggle against forgetting — the struggle for democratic life — continues. Telling true stories is critical to our collective future.

***

Tom Warhover is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, teaching reporting, fact-checking and journalism semantics. He was an editor and reporter for 32 years at the Virginian-Pilot and the Columbia Missourian.

The post Epic history that inspired epic storytelling appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Writers usually stuff facts in dispatches from the front or the cop shop or the accident scene. All those W’s and H’s, jammed together.

Generally, the formula works. But individual facts, as well as individuals, can become lost in the crowd.

It’s why I loved this simple sentence from The New York Times’ reporting of the exodus from Afghanistan. Reporter Farnaz Fassihi begins this 571-word article in classic inverted pyramid:

A member of Afghanistan’s national youth soccer team was among the people who were killed as they tried desperately to cling to a U.S. military plane evacuating people from Kabul this week, the country’s official sports federation said on Thursday.

A lot of action in that lead. It would have been easy enough to slip in the teenager’s name and age. Instead, Fassihi sets off those facts in the second graf, using a secret weapon: the passive verb.

His name was Zaki Anwari, and he was 17.

Here, “was” becomes so … final.  Zaki will never be a member of the youth soccer team again. He will never be 18.

Writing celebrates the active. Those verbs can make us dance, play, romp, run — they let us see. Sometimes, though, the lowly passive can break our hearts.

The post “His name was Zaki Anwari …” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Lou Abbott and Bud Costello’s most famous comedy sketch builds off a play on punctuation. Abbott names a baseball team’s infielders, and Who’s on first. Costello hears the period as a question mark. Confusion ensues. Frustration builds. It’s like they aren’t using the same language, even though they are both speaking English.

The bit is funny.

President Donald J. Trump asserts the election is rigged, months before there even is one. He and his henchmen build off a play on facts and double down on the Big Lie after the votes are in.  Journalists and watchdogs scurry to find proof, and, of course, there is none. Confusion and frustration ensue. Polling shows eight in 10 Trump voters believe former Vice President Joseph Biden did not win legitimately.

The Lie is scary.

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin asserts, rightly, that the press bears blame for repeating back the tweets and posts and press conferences in which this Lie and other lies find traction. She fired the strongest broadside to the partisan networks that air deceivers and disseminators of disinformation in a piece on November 10, a full week after Election Day and three days after the election was called. The headline was unflinching: "The media should remember key lessons from the Trump era."

Of course. And Rubin wasn't the first to say so. But it was this sentence — a clear statement of why those lessons are imperative — that held me:

In doing so, they damaged the fabric of democracy, which demands we operate with a common appreciation for truth.

A bold predicate and object, to be sure. It combines with the subtlety of the end of the sentence. “A common appreciation for the truth” suggests the need for a common language — that we agree on the need for truth before we do the messy, inefficient, wonderful work of democracy.

The truth, for most of us in the “reality-based press,” as Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan calls it, is a practical one, born of the best available facts at the time we know them. This truth demands an answer to the question: “How do you know that?"

I like Rubin's definition of democracy, and of the responsibility it places on us, as journalists and citizens, to uphold it.

Tom Warhover is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, teaching reporting, fact-checking and journalism semantics.

The post “… a common appreciation for truth.” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

America’s quadrennial obsession with Iowa has passed like the season’s last snow storm, there for a turbulent moment but forgotten three days later. The nail-biting over bad election apps and inadequate phone banks and questions of a weird caucus process have migrated to other states, other primaries. And now all that has been clouded over by our latest obsession: coronavirus.

What remains?

Washington Post reporter Dan Zak went to find Iowa before its citizens met on Feb. 3 for the first in the nation popularity poll for presidential candidates. His task: find the soul of a state, or at least define its character.

What he found was a place that’s much like many of us: full of deep pride and confusion about its past, present and future, about whether it deserves its moment in the sunshine, about what it means to be an Iowan and what being an Iowan means to the rest of us.

In "Why Iowa?," published Jan. 30, 2020, Zak found a story with a long tail. It’s as good a read now as it was in February. It's a valuable study for anyone writing about place, history and culture; politics is, in this case, the convenient excuse but far from the end game.

It’s hard to write a story when the main character is 3 million people scattered over 56,000 square miles. Zak traveled 800 of those miles in five days, and found people in towns with names most people outside the state never heard of. (That is, except for the throngs who make it to the pedaling mecca, the Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, or RAGBRAI. If the 2020 version goes forward this July, be sure to say hi as you zip past me.) This is not his Zak's first rodeo. He has done news and features across the globe, including some outstanding writing about place. Consider this lead from his 2015 story about the Marshall Islands, which was the site of extended nuclear-weapons testing in the years after World War II: 

It’s March 2 at an event marking Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day, and the boy in the shallows is now the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, which has entered the 21st century as part trust-fund baby, part welfare state. Its elders have endured burns that reached to the bone, forced relocation, nightmarish birth defects, cancers in the short and long term. Its young people have inherited a world unmade, remade and then virtually forgotten by Washington, D.C.

Nothing so dramatic in Iowa. But the job is the same. Find story where fly-in, fly-by, fly-over reports lie scattered like corn stalks after the fall harvest. I’m a Midwesterner by birth (Illinois) and residence (Missouri). I have two siblings who live in Iowa, both who reported in from their caucuses on election night. I entered to Zak's story braced for the expected scenes of farmers with GEDs drinking coffee in the local Casey’s (where you can get gas and surprisingly good pizza), griping about Trump haters. Zak sees those, and gives them a twist, like the java-drinking resident with an opinion — and a PhD from Yale. 

Some of the things I like about Zak’s work. It: 

• It meets myth and fact and weaves a story around both. Ambivalence is one of the most common and powerful places where we find great characters, and Zak shows it in his journey across the state. 
• It leaves what writing coach Donald K. Fry has called “gold coins along the path.” That is, little pieces throughout a story that compel the reader forward, whether it be a quip, a quote, a piece of dialogue or a kind of “well, I didn’t know that” factoid. “Iowa poisons the well.” Gold coin. “Iowa loves to feel, to talk, to listen, to prod.” Gold coin. 
• His characters are round, not flat, as the late editor Jack Fuller called them. Put more simply, these are people in his story, not props. Emilia Marroquín is not one-dimensional, but an immigrant, a college graduate, a community leader, a mom. 

There’s is so much in Zak's Iowa story to like and learn from that I reached out to talk to him. He answered my questions and then, together, we annotated "Why Iowa."

The Post has a lot of political reporters. And in a presidential year, the Iowa caucuses can become something of a cliche. So why you, and why Iowa?
Well, I’m not a political reporter. I report on politics routinely, but as an outsider, a non-expert, a bumbler. I put a note on my calendar, a year before the caucuses, to remind myself to write about Iowa: not just its place in our process of picking a president, but its place in the personality of the country. My intrigue and bewilderment were long-standing, and almost adversarial. Why do we let these people make this decision? I find myself writing a lot of ambient landscapes and meandering scene pieces. I thought: Let’s apply that form to an entire state at a moment when America was redirecting its superficial attention to it.

What did you bring to this story from your own background? Are you an Iowan?
Before spending five days there for reporting, I had never set foot in Iowa. The audacity!

What did you have in mind before you set foot in the state? What were you looking for?
In 1988 the Post’s Henry Allen wrote a piece that began with the sentence “New Hampshire is a fraud.” He proceeded to filet the state — on the cusp of its primary — for its smug, shabby grip on our political consciousness. He did it with reporting and he did it with voice. I thought we could do something similar with Iowa. But early in my pre-reporting, on the phone, I realized this would not be an adversarial takedown. It would be, in aggregate, a kind of love letter, written by the people I interviewed but conveyed through my voice. That said, I try not to look for specific things when doing a story like this. I have general avenues of inquiry; I’m not trying to fill out a Mad Libs.

Who was your intended audience?
The average reader, I guess? I don’t really envision an audience when I report or write. I just envision myself having to explain to a subject, or a boss, how I got something wrong.

The main character in this story is the state. What challenges and opportunities did that present?
A state is not a monolith. Iowa has physical borders and properties, but it can’t be fully represented in a piece of any length. In any type of story, with any type of subject, you’re going to leave something out, or gloss over something, or offer a characterization that will offend (and readers will let you know). The biggest challenge was balancing fair generalization with tactile specifics, and giving short shrift to people and elements that could’ve been a story unto themselves. For example, the Rosmann family and Emilia Marroquín could each be the subject of an entire story, or book. I spent an entire afternoon with the Rosmanns, talking in depth, and I could only give them three glib paragraphs. That makes me sad.

There are lots of towns named (as well as people in them). How did you go about  finding the range? Were these all places you visited, or could you do some of this in other ways?
I drove about 800 miles over five days in January — with a nonfunctioning windshield washer, mind you — from Muscatine in the east, to Harlan in the west, to Storm Lake in the northwest, and parts betwixt. I couldn’t get to places like Lamoni or Ottumwa in the southern tier, or Mason City or Dubuque in the northeast. Some of the people in the story (like Art Cullen and Rachel Paine Caufield) I talked to on the phone in advance of the trip. Most of the others I encountered in person, either by happenstance or by arrangement. When I could, I got into someone’s car and they took me around. Darcy Maulsby toured me through the Lake City region, and brought me into the home of a hog farmer for an hour-long chat that I wish ended up in the piece. Rob X. Barron, a school-board member in Des Moines, talked to me on the phone beforehand and then drove me around the capital city for two hours, pointing out everything that’s changed and not changed — and I didn’t even mention him in the piece. In some cases, one person led me to another; Barron directed me to Emilia Marroquín in Storm Lake, for example. In others, I found them by accident; I happened upon the Rosmann family because I was trying to reach the patriarch’s brother, a psychologist who wasn’t readily available to talk, and called the family store.

Much of the story is about the what of Iowa — the people, places and contradictions — in an attempt to get at the why of the caucuses. Did you think you found the answer?
No. Yes? I don’t know. I don’t think these types of stories provide answers. I think, when successful, they provide feelings.

The annotation:Storyboard’s questions are in red; responses from Zak in blue.

Why Iowa?

It gets to go first. We can only watch. And wonder what it means for the rest of us.

By Dan Zak

JANUARY 30, 2020

Iowa is a fairy tale. Somewhere between the crumbling bridges, the meth clinics, the jackknifed tractor trailers, the zombie combines steered by satellite, the putrid purgatories for dinner-bound hogs — somewhere among the wannabe novelists and suicidal farmers and drooling cage fighters sponsored by bargain hotel chains, down rutted byways to giant wind turbines, alongside ditches oozing with nitrates and Busch Light — is a loose menagerie of utopia, where Americans are pleasant, responsible and cooperative, where they pass down their civic duty like a trust fund, where they still have one hand in the fallowing topsoil, the other locked in fellowship with their neighbor, and their eyes on the future of the republic. [annotation q="Wow. An incredible 109-word sentence. It feels like the opera tenor who holds a note longer than a pearl diver holds his breath. What inspired you? " a="Henry Allen’s piece on New Hampshire. His second sentence has 125 words. But this is a gimmick I use now and then: contrast short with long, try to draw in a reader with a cascade of description that pivots at a certain point. Here you think you’re reading a takedown, but then wait a second — maybe you’re not."] This frontage road of a state, this frozen slab of soybean fields and carpenter gothic, has threshed the Democratic presidential candidates for a year now, and it will make the first winnowing of the field Monday, when about 0.1 percent of the country’s registered voters — after being harassed by campaigns and spoiled with millions of dollars — could set the course for the rest of our lives.

Some people, as usual, aren’t happy about it. [annotation q="A real understatement to what follows. Was that your intent?" a="It was. The vitriol against Iowa, even before the caucus-night debacle, was intense. I thought underplaying the lead-in would be amusing for the informed reader."]

Iowa is small, they say. Iowa is white. Iowa is moving backward, or moving forward too slowly. Iowa is just a heartland fetish. Iowa votes for Steve King, the anti-immigrant congressman who’s badmouthed his way to obsolescence. Iowa is what America was, not what America is becoming. [annotation q="Terrific use of a repeated passive verb. It adds to  a sense of a place with no movement." a="The repetition of the subject was more intentional. Sometimes when I write moodily about broad subjects, I repeat them as an incantation. Like it will get me in a meditative state. I know that sounds ridiculous. I’m going to stop doing it."]

“Iowa poisons the well,” wrote journalist Drew Magary this month, “and it’s in the midst of doing so once again, at a time when Americans can least afford to have an election that orbits around its phony agrarian horses---.”

Former Cabinet secretary Julián Castro put it more diplomatically [annotation q="Why did you add the qualifier?" a="I think as a button to the earlier understatement."] in November: “It’s time that our presidential nominating process reflects our nation’s and our party’s diversity.”

Bernie Sanders is polling well here, but two young climate activists who came to rally with him in Iowa City know that something is amiss. 

“We don’t believe that Iowa is necessarily representative of the entire country,” said Bridget Williams, 22, of Cedar Rapids. The arcane and time-consuming caucus process, she said, discourages participation from people who work multiple jobs, who can’t afford child care, who aren’t fluent in the procedure.

Campaigns in Iowa focus “more on getting people who have already been involved to stay involved,” added Dorothy Hogg, 22, rather than “bringing in new voices and perspectives that are representative of the country.”

Then again, what state — what process — truly represents the country? We are a nation of 327 million people who rely on 538 electors to select a president, after an epic primary process that stumbles through all 50 states (plus the District of Columbia). This goat rope has to start somewhere. [annotation q="Some Midwesterners might think you were referring to a rodeo event. Why the “goat rope?”" a="I just like the term. I wish it served a higher purpose here."] Should it start with Louisiana or New Jersey, which more accurately reflect the race and ethnicity of the country? If we go by median household income, we’d start with Rhode Island. Maybe the first position should belong to the bellwether state of Missouri, whose electoral votes have aligned with all but three presidential contests since 1904.

But, no. Iowa, home to 1 percent of the U.S. population, goes first. It’s the law. (State law, but still.) It’s been this way for nearly 50 years. Over that time, the United States has changed. Iowa has changed. But the latter still guides the former.

What story is Iowa trying to tell us this time around, and should we believe it? [annotation q="You’ve used this question as a nut graf. It also serves as a suspenseful transition to the next section. Did you get here with the first draft, or did it evolve?" a="I don’t remember! I’m sure this wasn’t my original kicker. But I wanted to set up the suspicion that Iowa was selling us something that was either untrue or misunderstood, and then spend the rest of the piece showing what was true and understandable."]

“There’s a bad funk in Iowa.” [annotation q="You may now enter the quote-gathering Hall of Fame." a="Credit to Art Cullen. All I had to do was listen. If you want to read better journalism on Iowa, get his book “Storm Lake.” Beautiful, heartfelt, mournful, true."]

Art Cullen loves his state. Laments it, too.

“We’re just whipsawing back and forth, and I think we’re going to whipsaw back. I think that Trump will not win Iowa . . . because people are really unhappy here.”

Extreme rainfalls are drowning crop yields. Trade wars have spooked one of Iowa’s top pork customers. (That would be China.) The Trump administration has been fooling around with ethanol policy, and Iowans see Big Oil beating Iowa corn. For generations, Iowans have been decamping to cities, or fleeing the state entirely. And 48 years of quadrennial obsession from the national media has corrupted local politics, too, according to Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times in the northwest corner of the state.

“It would be better for Iowa if we weren’t first, because we’re 35th in everything else, except literacy,” he says. “It would be good for Iowa, but it would be bad for the country. Because I do think that these are pretty pragmatic, moderate people.”

Pragmatism shaped Iowa’s early geography: Frontiersmen formed small towns spaced six to 10 miles apart, in square counties, to accommodate the needs of farmers, the stamina of horses, the pit stops of locomotives. From this blueprint grew a very localized government, including the caucuses, which began when Iowa attained statehood in 1846. [annotation q="Two nouns — pragmatism at the beginning and statehood at the end — anchor this graf. Terrific."]

Iowa’s firstness? Pragmatism again. The state accommodates the needs of all those practical little towns with a multilevel delegate selection process: a thousand-plus precincts hold caucuses to furnish delegates to 99 county conventions, and on up the chain, to the district, state and national conventions. Back in 1972, this took forever; Iowa had to fire up the mimeograph machines in January to show up on time to the Democratic National Convention that July.

“It wasn’t that we were trying to be first — it just took us this long to get the paperwork done,” says Tom Morain, former administrator of the State Historical Society of Iowa. “Then the national press descended upon us. Jimmy Carter got a bump out of Iowa in 1976, and from then on, everyone wanted to do well in Iowa. It wasn’t ‘we ought to be first because we have superior knowledge.’ We were descended upon by you journalist people looking for a story.”

Oh, but Iowa loves the attention. [annotation q="You challenged the last quote with this sentence. Why?" a="Because my reporting necessitated some pushback. Many Iowans told me they love the privilege, they enjoy the process, they take it seriously and are glad to have the spotlight on their issues, concerns and questions. And I did want to be a little adversarial, when called for."] How else could a state with shrinking relevance — Iowa has fewer than half the electoral votes it did in 1928 — garner so much focus and flattery?

“You only need about 40,000 Iowans to change the future of this country,” candidate Andrew Yang said in Des Moines in September, adding: “I did the math: Do you know how many Californians each Iowan is worth? One thousand.” When asked for that math, the Yang campaign said there was none, and that the candidate was just making a point. But anyway: “That is the magic of this state,” Yang continued. “This is the only place where democracy actually works.”

Tell that to Iowa’s teachers (whose wages have stagnated) or Iowa’s rural commuters (whose bridges are structurally deficient) or Iowa’s growing Latino population (whose demographic has zero representation in the state legislature). There’s mythical Iowa, picturesque cradle of electoral politics, and then there is real Iowa. [annotation q="Perhaps the first explicit explanation of the contradiction. Why now?" a="Because we’re nearly halfway through the piece, and it’s time to start drilling past the bedrock of politicians’ encomia and Iowa’s own mythology."] Over the past 50 years, farms have evaporated, town squares have emptied, even fencing has disappeared as livestock has been separated from the land.

“A factory leaves, a church closes, school districts consolidate,” says Rachel Paine Caufield, professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines. “And when you start losing gathering areas, people feel disconnected from each other, and therefore disconnected from institutions of government.”

Except on Monday, when democratic magic will appear for real in gathering areas across the state — in school gyms, town halls, churches. Iowans will physically divide themselves by preferred candidate. If their candidate fails to attain 15 percent support in the room, they can realign with another candidate. That means talking to each other about what is needed, what should be worried about, which of these outsiders can be trusted. Here, voting is not a solitary task performed in a curtained booth. It is an enterprise of togetherness, a bridge between the phantom idea of democracy and an actual roomful of people, way outside of Washington, trying to plot a way forward for everyone. [annotation q="You zoom to the top of the ladder of abstraction here." a="Put that on my tombstone. But it should be noted: This sentence was a collaboration between me and my brilliant editor, Steve Kolowich."]

“There are very few venues left in American life where people come together and collectively make decisions,” Caufield says. “I think the rest of the country thinks of it as a quaint mythology of Iowa, but it’s real.”

Iowa, like America, is a land of myths. It is the bridges of Madison County. It is the reason Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama became president. It is where Donna Reed and John Wayne were born, where a future Starfleet captain named James T. Kirk will be raised, in the year 2228, six weeks after the Iowa caucuses (if we still have them in the 23rd century). [annotation q="Stardate Kirk. Love it."] Iowa is where you can play catch at twilight with the ghost of your father on a baseball diamond you built, inadvisably, because a voice in your head told you to.

“Is this heaven?” John Kinsella asks his son in “Field of Dreams,” a modern American fairy tale filmed outside of Dubuque. “It’s Iowa,” shrugs Kevin Costner, who returned to the state last month to sprinkle some stardust on Pete Buttigieg. [annotation q="Was it an easy choice to use this movie line? On the one hand, it epitomizes your theme. On the other, it’s been used so much in so many places." a="I did worry that this is a useless reference. But Costner was out for Buttigieg, and this story is about mythology or fairy tales, and “Field of Dreams” is modern mythology. Also, my editor came up with the line that begins the ensuing paragraph, and it perfectly popped the “Field of Dreams” balloon while linking it to the quest of John Delaney. (My editor is very good.)"]

But what if the voice in your head is wrong? A couple of weeks ago, John Delaney was at a family restaurant in Muscatine, on the eastern edge of Iowa, because John Delaney was still running for president. He has been traipsing around the state longer than any other candidate, because he believes in Iowa’s magic: connecting with people here means plugging into the national oversoul.

Except it hadn’t been working.

“Your philosophy, your approach to the campaign — you’ve convinced me, and yet I don’t see the results in the polls,” said Davenport resident Charles Van Fossen, who’d driven down along the gray, slushy Mississippi River to eat with eight other Iowans and a bottom-tier presidential candidate.

“I don’t want to be in the corner alone” at the caucus, Van Fossen said. “I’m not afraid to do it, but I don’t want to be alone.” [annotation q="Cosmic quote. No one wants to be alone." a="The dinner with Delaney was the type of Iowa event that few outsiders get to see: a very small “event,” with a bottom-tier candidate, that nevertheless becomes a long, serious discussion about the direction of the country. This was at the end of my first day on the ground, and I drove away thinking “This is inspiring.”"]

Delaney, a moderate former congressman from Maryland, had just delivered a bracing diagnosis of America as his guests ate burgers and rice pudding. In the past decade, 80 percent of venture capital investment went to just 50 counties, Delaney told them, and outside franchises have supplanted local businesses and suffocated reinvestment in small towns, which are the blood vessels of Iowa, of America.

These Iowans in Muscatine were relieved to hear someone recognize this. But why hadn’t John Delaney caught on here? His wife, April, suggested that a “social-media primary” has weakened Iowa’s power. And Iowans are ticked off by the Democratic National Committee’s debate criteria, which they think have stolen their job of sorting viable candidates from wayward dreamers.

“This race became nationalized very early,” Delaney, who has since dropped out of the race, told the diners. “And I think that was unfortunate. Because I think what you all do, here in Iowa, is you figure out people. You figure out what’s in their head but also what’s in their heart.”

Iowa loves to feel, to talk, to listen, to prod. Iowa wants to see the barbecue sauce on a candidate’s rolled-up sleeves, the run in her stockings. Iowa wants to judge a candidate’s handshake, glimpse her treatment of staff, nab him in moments of fakery. Iowans shift their schedules to encounter candidates in fleshy 3-D, away from the terse theatrics of billboards and cable-news hits. They drive hundreds of miles on bad roads to knock on strange doors. They cram into mansions in West Des Moines to talk climate with billionaire Tom Steyer, or basements in Denison to potluck and divvy up precinct activity for Joe Biden. They welcome frozen canvassers for Amy Klobuchar into their warm foyers even though they’ve already committed to Elizabeth Warren. They show up to town halls on dark nights, as the sky spews sleet, so they can ask Buttigieg about the price of insulin, because they have friends or patients who can’t afford it. They let Delaney buy them dinner so they can ask about issues beyond their white, rural world: the crisis at the border, the mass incarceration of black men. They volunteer for positions of leadership, even if they’ve never thought of themselves as leaders. [annotation q="Great graf. Every sentence begins with subject and verb. You use repetition often, either in structure or in a word or phrase. Why?" a="I go back to the notion of incantation. There’s something meditative or poetic about repetition, when used correctly. Although this graf skates dangerously close to the dreaded “They came” lede..."]

“It feels really good,” says Anthony Miller, 22, who, despite crippling anxiety, has found himself a precinct captain for Buttigieg. “Especially being a volunteer — I have a place. And I haven’t felt that anywhere else.”

The Iowa that exists once every four years is made up — by politicians, by Iowans, by the journalists who stare at politicians and Iowans. But that feeling of belonging, of connectedness, of duty in laying the first brick in a path forward? It’s real. It doesn’t travel well, and you feel dopey trying to explain it after you leave, but it’s real. [annotation q="A moment of vulnerability on your part. What were you thinking here?" a="Sometimes I’m too clever by half, or try to be; I do too much showing and not enough telling. Here my editor and I thought we should be more forthright: This was one of my favorite reporting trips, there were multiple times when I felt chills or was near tears while talking to people, and this feeling had to be communicated somehow. I had gone to Iowa to bust up some mythology, and yet I was seeing evidence of it everywhere I turned."]

The feeling of dread is also real. Outside Harlan, in western Iowa, the Rosmann family has been farming since the 1870s, without pesticides since 1983, organically since ’94. They’re worried about the path being broken, about connections being severed — how reckless consumerism is changing the climate, how money is corrupting politics, how Big Ag is breaking the food system and flushing poison downriver to the Gulf of Mexico.

“When we still had vibrant communities, when you had a diversity of agriculture, when land was held by as many people as possible — America and Iowa were at their best,” said Ron Rosmann at his son’s farm-to-table restaurant in Harlan two weeks ago. “That model can serve a lot of states.”

“We feel like we’re on our own little island out here, doing what we’re doing,” said David Rosmann, 38, referring to the family’s conservation practices. “I think if people in New York knew what was happening to land in our state, then I think they definitely would say we need Iowa. We need Iowa to change.”

Iowa is not one story or one feeling. Yes, you can drive through it and see, off an interstate, two giant signs that read “JESUS” and “TULSI.” Yes, you can meet Iowans who think Iran attacked us on 9/11 and therefore Solemani had it coming. Yes, it’s very white: more than 90 percent.

Also true: Iowa integrated schools 90 years before Brown v. Board of Education, and Edna Griffin led sit-ins in downtown Des Moines seven years before Rosa Parks refused to budge on an Alabama bus. Yes, Iowa is still a farming powerhouse — and the largest U.S. exporter of pork, corn and grain products — but barely 5 percent of Iowans are farmers. Yes, it’s in decline in some places: A majority of its counties have fewer people than 100 years ago. But its cities have flowered anew.

“We spend a lot of time, every four years, thinking of who we are, because of the whole national spotlight,” says Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, a professor at Iowa State University who researches U.S. agricultural history. “But I think people have no idea what Iowa looks like.”

It can look like anywhere. Teleport yourself to a farm and you might think you’re in Indiana, to downtown Des Moines and you might think it’s Cincinnati, to the suburbs of Dubuque in the autumn and you might swear you’re leaf-peeping in western Massachusetts. Iowa’s cities — Davenport, Sioux City, Waterloo — don’t overwhelm the state in the way that Chicago does to Illinois. On a clear day in the countryside, Iowa’s blue sky can feel Montanan in its bigness, but you can reach most anywhere in the state in two or three hours.

“Do you know Tolkien?” asked Rick Morain, a fourth-generation resident of Greene County, at a coffee shop in Jefferson (population 4,300). “When I was out East, going to school, I always thought of Iowa as the shire — kind of a bucolic area where people are more interested in the people around them than they are in the big world. I don’t think that so much anymore.”

“Rick’s modest,” said Jed Magee, a retired judge. “He’s a PhD from Yale.” [annotation q="(And — bam! — assumptions whiplash, dear reader.) You use dialogue sparingly. Is that because it’s hard to capture or for a more writerly reason?" a="Well, 95 percent of what people say (myself included) is inarticulate, awkward, misleading, what-have-you. I think there are writerly reasons, related to rhythm and impact, but also most people, most times, are just not very quotable."]

Across the town square from their regular meetup, a software start-up has taken over a facade built 174 years ago by a fraternal order. Iowa is disappearing in some ways, and reappearing in others. Iowa may feel provincial, but it knows the world.

“How many farmers 50 years ago would think about China?” Magee asked rhetorically.

“Now they’ve all been to China,” said retired columnist Chuck Offenburger. [annotation q="An overstatement, I assume. Why did you decide to include it?" a="I think it’s clearly hyperbole, but making an accurate point: Farmers are not provincial actors. They are in a global market, and their familiarity with international issues is commensurate."]

Darcy Maulsby, who lives in the former railroad hub of Lake City, grew up during the farm crisis of the ’80s and listened to the disembodied voice that many young Iowans hear: If you have the brains, leave. She did, for a while. She traveled the world. She lived in Des Moines. In 2006, she came back to Lake City, where four generations of her family are buried. There’s one local grocery store left in her county. The Italianate-Gothic school building, long closed to students but preserved for history, is now a meeting place for Narcotics Anonymous. Outside of town, groves of oak and cottonwood mark where farmsteads used to be.

Maulsby, a writer and farmer, drives past it all in her SUV. Iowa has changed, she says, but Iowans haven’t. Elsewhere politicians have stripped “grass roots” of any meaning, but here in Lake City you can feel them, and see why Iowans trust them.

“We understand that grass roots are so powerful: the voices of the common people starting at the lowest levels, going to the highest levels, rather than from the top down,” she says. “That’s the magic of America.”

Magic, mythology, grass roots, democracy — they can sound like weak slogans for a sad-sack superpower. Except over lunch with Emilia Marroquín in Storm Lake. [annotation q="You devote more words to Marroquin's story than to anyone else in this piece. Why?" a="Her life felt emblematic of Iowa to me. She came to it for opportunity, as settlers and farmers did originally. She represents the growing demographic of Hispanic Iowans. She invested in Storm Lake, grew into a community leader, and lived out the mythology that otherwise seems like a fairy tale. Her life bears out the themes of belonging, community, opportunity, pragmatism, civic engagement."]

Iowa is where Marroquín arrived 20 years ago. She’d grown up in San Marcos, El Salvador, hiding from helicopters and soldiers waging civil war. She was pregnant at 17, and tossed out of school and home. At 20, she immigrated to Los Angeles, met a man on the bus to work who had also fled El Salvador, to escape the clutches of junta forces and the guerrilla resistance. They became a couple. They married. Had children. After a shooting in front of their house, they wanted to relocate somewhere safer. A friend’s mother, living in Iowa, had always rhapsodized about life there. There were jobs. There was quiet. And a beef processor was paying to relocate new employees to Storm Lake.

Marroquín arrived there in 2000, with her husband and children, and little command of English. There was one Mexican restaurant in town, and only the cook spoke Spanish.

Marroquín signed up for ESL classes. She became a substitute teacher for Head Start, where her daughter was enrolled. It took her two years of part-time study at night, she says, but she finished her GED. Then she got a bachelor’s degree in human services from Buena Vista University. Last year, she was reelected to the city’s school board. Storm Lake is now 38 percent Latino, and Marroquín is demystifying the caucus process for other immigrants who thought they had to vote only once, in November.

“In California, maybe nobody would know that I exist,” Marroquín said. “Here, at least, we have our own world. There is a lot of people who are leaders in this community, and they are making a difference.”

She has found herself, at the age of 48, written into the myth. Two years ago her son Matthew, now 20, delivered a speech at a state oratory festival. He told a story about a boy and girl who escaped violence, found each other, worked hard and ended up in Iowa — a state that can make you a president, or just make you a life.

“Thank you, Mom and Dad,” Matthew Marroquín said at the end of his speech, a tribute to his parents and, in its final line, to Iowa: “This is our Happily Ever After.” [annotation q="Nailed it. The reality and the myth. Did you know this would be your ending when you saw it?" a="I’m not an outliner, but after reading Matthew’s writing a few times, I realized that the notion of a fairy tale would bookend the piece. At first it would be a pejorative (“Iowa is a fairy tale”), but by the end it would be an actuality (Iowa is a fairy tale”). I had originally planned to end the piece with a litany of Iowa’s positive attributes — to balance the negative ones in the lede — but my editor and I decided to just let Emilia’s story stand, as an example of Iowa at its best."]

The post Writing the character, contradictions and soul of a place appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

After you watch Greta Thunberg’s speech a second or third time, after your heart rate slows, after your guilt subsides (a bit) — read the transcript.

Franklin Foer of The Atlantic wrote about the counterintuitive power of her child-like appearance, her "jarring monotone" and her use of the "accusatory second person" to jar people out of their delusions. Jennifer O'Connell of The Irish Times dug into why a single, small teenager is so "triggering" for some, especially for some men, and lashed back at the shaming that Greta is subject to on social media. Both referred, briefly, to Greta's speaking style.

So study, for a moment, the actual transcript of her speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit earlier this week. The writing is just as powerful as the delivery.

Short, declarative sentences fall like hammer blows, making her message unequivocal.

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.”

She damns us with truth, sometimes with simple pronouns (emphasis mine):

“They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.”

Structurally, Greta sandwiches science between raw emotion and climate facts. Rhetorically, she returns to the dual themes of outrage —

“how dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual'"

— and scrutiny —

“we’ll be watching you.”

And we’ll be watching Greta, with awe.

The post “How dare you…” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Dear Reader,

As the holiday weekend approached, a newspaper friend asked me why, as editor of a community newspaper, I reprinted the editorial “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” on Christmas Day every year for 15 years. Usually right there on Page One.

The practical answer: You aren’t looking for the next Pentagon Papers on Christmas Day. I’m lucky if you trudge out to the lawn to pick up the paper or browse away from the Amazon.com returns policies page online.

The philosophical answer: We need things that bring us together – things that, in these divisive times, we can gather around. The newspaper, as daybook for the conversation of our communities, provides routines and traditions. What better tradition than an annual reading of a beloved essay?

The most honest answer: I get goosebumps every time I read "Yes, Virginia." I soak in its optimism. I love this essay. I want to share it.

And, hey, every once in a while the executive editor gets his way.

So I give for your consideration on this Christmas Day one Francis Pharcellus Church, a New York Sun editor and editorial writer at the turning of the 19th century. War correspondent during the Civil War. Son of a Baptist minister and religious skeptic.

Curmudgeon.

You may have run into writers like him. There were a few in every newsroom I ever worked, right down to the preacher’s kid who becomes an atheist. I like these journalists. Well, most of them.

Many – perhaps all – have a secret: They’re closet believers in humankind.

Church’s pen revealed him on a September day in 1897. He was tasked with writing an editorial reply to Virginia O’Hanlon of 115 West 95^th Street. Virginia's letter, in full: “I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun, it's so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?”

(I think I would like Papa.)

Church “bristled and pooh-poohed at the subject,” according to one account, “but he took the letter and turned with an air of resignation to his desk and in a short time produced the classic expression of Christmas sentiment."

The 121-year-old editorial endures. Parents everywhere know the signature phrase even if they can’t place its source. Church's reply to an 8-year-old girl’s question has been reprinted and remade into illustrated books, movies and music. It has been translated into more than 20 languages. Jane Pauley of CBS Sunday Morning featured the life of letter writer Virginia O’Hanlon this month. The Owensboro, Kentucky, Messenger-Inquirer reprinted the letter and response. You just missed the Lakewood (Washington) Playhouse’s three-week run of a play named … yes, you guessed it.

For those 15 years we ran "Yes, Virginia" in the Columbia Missourian, I don’t recall a single reader complaint.

To update Mr. Church for the 21^st century, let us abandon for a moment the cynicism of a cynical age. Let us fight back the bilge water of lying bots and false prophets. Let us dare wet a line in the pristine, unspoiled streams of assurance, hope and — may I say it? — faith.

Church makes those aspirations concrete in the form of Mr. Claus:

“He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus!”

Church plays to two audiences, child and adult, like the wink of a Bugs Bunny witticism. I laugh every time I read: “Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies.”

A good high school debate team could make quick work of Church’s logic. That’s not the point. Ideals don’t come neatly packaged. In not trying to tie a bow, Church makes magic.

After the question that prompted this reflection, I called another friend who still works at the Missourian. I’m happy to report that the new editor plans to reprint “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” again this year.

This is the opening of the "Yes, Virginia" letter as it first appeared in the New York Sun in 1897. Below that is the full text of the letter.

DEAR EDITOR:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

— Virginia O’Hanlon, 115 West Ninety-fifth Street

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

The post Yes, everyone, there is a reason to believe … appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]I[/dc] sat on a bench with Wade Livingston the other day. We talked about an alligator attack, a woman who drowned, and the people who saw fit to condemn her for the audacity to up and die while walking her dog.

It’s 968 miles from my house in Missouri to that bench on the South Carolina Coast. It took just 17 words for Livingston to get me there:

Let’s sit on it, here off Governors Lane in Sea Pines on Hilton Head Island, and talk.

And so we did.  As did anyone who read Livingston’s story and was moved by it.

Livingston has reported for The Island Packet and its sister edition, The Beaufort Gazette, for the past 2½ years. Senior editor Liz Farrell says he’s the storyteller in the newsroom. This piece – he referred to it in the generic sense as an article, his editor called it a column, and their readers probably didn’t bother to wonder— began with that invitation, and then:

Did you see those Facebook comments folks posted after Cassandra Cline died, just a few feet from this bench?

The question foreshadows a statement. We know what it will be thanks to the headline:

A WOMAN WAS ATTACKED BY AN ALLIGATOR IN SC.

PLEASE STOP ATTACKING HER ON FACEBOOK, SOCIAL MEDIA

[dc small]H[/dc]ere’s what makes Livingston’s story special. This is not just another screed about the incivility of social media. This story builds its house on questions and treats the trolls respectfully while making clear that their words hurt and aren’t OK.

I liked this story so much I had students in my advanced reporting class at the Missouri School of Journalism read it aloud in a round-robin. Then I made them close their eyes and I read it to them again. Livingston, who earned a master’s degree in journalism to go with a PhD in something completely unrelated, sat in that same classroom just a few years before.

I called Livingston because I wanted to know how he found this story less traveled. It was a few hours after his piece ran online and nine days after he first arrived at Governor’s Lane to help cover the breaking news.

The story from the bench, he says, was born of anger.

[dc small]L[/dc]ivingston took care with the predictable follow-ups to the news itself: an immediate portrait of the victim and, a few days later, a short piece about memorial services and how to make donations in the wake of a tragic death. Cassandra “Casi” Cline had been a kindergarten teacher, recently transplanted to the South from New York. Requested donations to help students at her old school included glue sticks, backpacks, tissue and No. 2 pencils. That headline:

HERE'S HOW YOU CAN HONOR THE MEMORY

OF THE HILTON HEAD WOMAN

WHO DIED IN A GATOR ATTACK

Through it all came the social media response, much of it sympathetic and some anything but. One scolded that Cline would be alive if she had carried a gun. Another said the alligator shouldn’t be blamed because Cline was the one at fault. And this response, punctuated by a Haha! emoji, to how people could help:

By not walking your dog too close to a pond known to have alligators…

Reading them, Livingston grew livid.

[caption id="attachment_141670" align="alignright" width="150"] Cassandra Cline[/caption]

[dc small]L[/dc]ivingston had come to know a bit about Casi Cline through his reporting. She wasn’t just the victim of a freak accident. She was a wife and a teacher and a friend. She was described in the profile Livingston wrote, the day after her death, as Mary Poppins.

So the morning after he read those comments, Livingston says, he “went off” during the daily newsroom meeting. He railed against assholes who could be so thoughtless and mean. Somewhere in there, he says, he made a pitch, although “really, it wasn’t a pitch — it was a rant with little semblance of structure or clarity.”

His rant hit home. Editors gave him the green light to try … something. That led to a one-on-one discussion with Farrell, his editor. Livingston credits her with distilling his jumbled thoughts. She channeled his anger into brilliant questions directed at the people behind the worst of the online shaming:

• What need did it fulfill for them?
• Would knowing more details change anything?
• Would they say the same thing in person, or just in this civility light, digital bubble?

Livingston laced those questions throughout his story from the bench. He wrote this specifically about the person who suggested that the best memorial to Cline would be to know better than to walk your dog near “known” alligator haunts:

I reached out to that guy, sent him a note through Facebook, asked him what, exactly, he intended his comment to mean, and why he posted it – what need did it fulfill?

I love this question. Livingston lets the reader fill in the blanks. The question asks me to think about the nasty post from the point of view of the person who posted it. (The only answer I can come up with, by the way, is that he must be emotionally needy.)

Later in his story, the second question:

Would knowing every detail of the tragedy change people’s response to it — would more information help them better sympathize or empathize with a husband who lost a wife, a family who lost a sister and a daughter, a group of first-graders who lost the teacher who just shepherded them through kindergarten?

He follows with a series of three “we knows” — that people witnessed the attack, that someone called 911, that a neighbor saw Cline’s body dragged out of the water. Then:

We don’t know everything that happened that day, just that something terrible did.

The answer, again, becomes obvious. The post from the shamer is poisoned by his own psychoses, and no detail can change that.

And, almost at the bottom of the story:

Still, I wonder if the folks who used her death as an opportunity to be snarky or funny or cruel would utter the same words here, on this bench.

Would they step from behind their keyboard shields — could they look a person in the eye, and hurt them?

Livingston points his kid-gloved wrath at them. He keeps the rest of us with hiim.

[caption id="attachment_141671" align="alignleft" width="300"] Memorial at the site where Cassandra Cline drowned after trying to save her dog from an alligator attack.[/caption]

[dc small]I[/dc] asked Livingston about framing the story as an invitation and then a series of questions. “The conversation,” he said, “become a gentle reminder that, really, none of us were there when she died, a fact that is at once germane and irrelevant to our conduct but one worth talking about, because physically sitting together and talking — before or in lieu of judging, blaming, etc. — is the point.”

At the heart of that point, Livingston's story implies, is that the people who commented with meanness (they are, after all, more than “commenters,” a word not seen in this story) don’t merit a place on the bench. But by inviting them to sit with him and face his questions, he dares a hope and a challenge:

Maybe they’ll stay quiet the next time…

I hope Livingston never does.

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