Isabel Wilkerson closed out the Mayborn by describing the 15 years she spent reporting and writing her book, The Warmth of Other Suns. The book chronicles the migration of 6 million black Americans out of the South and into the North and the West from 1915 to the 1970s. Formerly a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the New York Times, Wilkerson drew the conference’s heartiest standing ovation. Here are a few highlights plus the talk.

On choosing her characters: I wanted people who were beautifully imperfect. Perfection is not real, and readers cannot identify with people presented as perfect. I wanted to find people who were at peace with their mistakes and with the things they had done not particularly well. I wanted people who were willing to be who they really, truly were.

On the characters’ emotions: These people wanted their stories told. They were the ones who spurred me on in the end. They wanted people to know what they had endured. They had lived with this for so long, that they were in some ways unburdening themselves.

On access: People might make assumptions that because I'm the child of migration and because I'm African-American that I might have had an easier route to get to the people, but I can assure you that I did not. Ultimately, the act of being a narrative journalist, going out and doing the research, makes you an outsider, because you're seeking something that they're not used to giving.

On the anti-memoir: I wanted to do (the book) as narrative nonfiction and not as memoir because I thought it needed to be established that (the migration) was huge, that it happened, that it is true, and that it was a national outpouring of people. 

The full talk, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. And you can find a 2011 conversation between Wilkerson and Storyboard here.

IW: I can't tell you what a thrill it is to come out of the cave of 15 years and to emerge into the light to be here among you, to be among truly kindred spirits. It is wonderful to just hear snatches of conversation about FOIAs and redacted passages in some FBI files, the DNA of a sentence.

I'm here to talk about part of what it took to write this book. It took 15 years to work on this book. I did not set out to spend 15 years on this book. I would've never signed on to 15 years. I come from the world of daily journalism. Fifteen years is multiple lifetimes.

And yet, the story called to me in a way that I think all of us are called to do whatever work it is we're doing. All of us could be writing fiction if we wanted to. All of us have the skills to be writing fiction if we chose to do it. It would be so much easier, wouldn't it? And yet, we decide to do this anyway. Nothing about it is easy, absolutely nothing, and yet we go ahead and do it anyway. There's no guarantee of success, there's no guarantee of readership, there's no guarantee anybody's going to see it. And yet, we do it.

And we do it, I think, because of a belief, and, I think, an obsession that the story needs to be told. The story must be told. The story is necessary and true.

I chose not to do (this story) as a memoir, even though I am the daughter of people who were a part of this Great Migration. My mother is from Rome, Ga. And my father was from Virginia. And had they not been part of this migration, I wouldn't exist, which is really, truly an American story. The majority of us are the products of multiple combinations of lineages and migration streams and unlikely combinations that are the end results of somebody's dream of something better across the Atlantic, across the Pacific, across the Rio Grande.

Now, to give you a little bit of background on what it was I was embarking upon, and I didn't truly know all that I was embarking upon at the time I started, but this basically I knew: That there were 6 million African-Americans who left the Jim Crow South, the segregated South, from 1915 until the 1970s. That this was a multi-generational outpouring of people as defection, one might say, from the Jim Crow South, that occurred throughout the 20th century. It was not a single wartime outpouring.

While working on the book I discovered that (the migration) was even more urgent and in depth in people than I had realized. They were in fact seeking political asylum within the borders of their own country. This is the language that we don't often think of for an internal migration such as this one. It really did not get the attention it deserved while it was in progress and does not take up its rightful place in our history books even to this day, and that was one of the goals of this book.

This was a defection from a caste system that was so arcane that I just want to say a couple things about that: There are no references in this book to water fountains or restrooms because every third-grader learns that in February. I did not need to spend time on that. In fact, had it merely been about water fountains and restrooms, I don't think the migration would've occurred.

These people were doing something that we don't often think about. This is the only time in American history that American citizens had been forced – or felt that they had no other option – to leave the land of their birth for another part of their own country just to be recognized as the citizens of the country to which they had been born. No other group of Americans has ever had to do that in our country's history. No other group of Americans has had to act as immigrants within their own country. I wanted to find a way to make this come alive.

As large as this migration was, and as massive its impact, there was no Grapes of Wrath for this migration. There was nothing that put you on the train seat with these people as they poured out of the South. There was nothing that put you in the car with them as they hurtled through the desert to get to California or other parts of the West, even though this migration was many, many times larger than the historic dustbowl migration that we all know about, and deservedly so. I was going to have to tell this story with an eye toward: What would it be like for a Grapes of Wrath to be told in nonfiction?

First of all, this was not a move as people (today) might move. This was in some ways a life-or-death seeking of political asylum. These people were leaving a caste system that was so arcane that it was actually against the law for a black person and a white person to play checkers together in Birmingham. Throughout the courtrooms of the South there was a black Bible and a separate white Bible, to swear to tell the truth on in court. I came across this in a headline out of a North Carolina newspaper; the only reason it made news that particular day was because there had been a trial in session and they could not find the black Bible for the person about to take the stand, so they had to actually suspend the trial and the bailiff or the court officers or the sheriff deputies had to comb the courthouse to find the Bible. These are the kind of arcane realities for people on all sides of this caste system. It did not just affect African-Americans; it meant everybody had to learn what the rules were in order to abide by them and in order to not climb over or breach the wall.

I knew I was going to be telling the stories through three protagonists. I did not have the protagonists. I did not know where I was going to find the protagonists. I did not know who they would be. I just knew there would be three protagonists through whom I would tell the story. Each of these three people would represent the three migration streams through which the people worked out of the South. There was the East Coast stream, which carried people from Florida and Georgia and the Carolinas and Virginia to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York, and on up the East Coast. There was a Midwest stream, which carried people from Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis and the entire Midwest. And then there was the West Coast stream, which carried people from Louisiana and Texas to California and the entire West Coast. They really wanted to get to Alaska, and they did, believe it or not.

They went to every state that was not South. The goal was to try and track those three streams. So I was looking for three protagonists who would represent the three streams.

Then I needed to have more than that. This is narrative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, we need to have our characters leap off the page, to have our readers see themselves in these people, to feel as if this is the closest that our readers will have to actually being someone else. The goal was to find someone who would be fully accessible, available and real people.

Real people. They needed to be real people, obviously, but they needed to become real on the page.

I needed to have people who had left for different reasons so you could see the unfolding of this migration through the stories of the people. They all left for different, precipitating events, and I wanted to have the reader close on the ground as they were making that decision to go. I wanted to have people who were from different socioeconomic backgrounds, people who would represent a variety of circumstances. I also needed, more than anything, people who, when you were on the page with them, you knew you were on the page with them. One of them ended up being a surgeon with a gambling addiction. That got my attention. That was someone who would clearly stand out on the page, and did.

I ended up essentially holding auditions for the role of being in my book. I didn't call it that. I didn't say that to the people. I didn't even in my own way think of it like that at the time. But looking back on it, I realize that's what I was doing. I was in some ways holding a casting call, and that casting call took me all over the North, the Midwest, and the West in order to find these people and to interview people and to narrow it down to the three. That meant I ended up interviewing over 1,200 people in my casting call.

Where I went was all kinds of places, anyplace I could think of where senior citizens might gather who were already in exile, you might say, expatriates in the North from the South. I actually went to AARP meetings on the south side of Chicago. I went to Baptist churches in New York, where, believe it or not, everybody is from South Carolina. I went to Catholic churches in Los Angeles, were everybody was from Louisiana. I went to other Baptist churches, where everybody was from Texas. Texas is a big state. There were lots of multiple Texas competing clubs within some churches in Los Angeles.

I felt that there were clubs in all of these major cities in the North for the people who had left. They had left to create colonies for themselves, which is what people often do when they migrate. In Chicago for example, there are multiple Mississippi clubs: There's a Greenwood, Miss., club; a Greenville, Miss., club; a Grenada, Miss., club; a Newton, Miss., club; a Brookhaven, Miss., club. And if you were in the Newton club you didn't go to the Grenada club. I mean why would you go? As small as these towns were, there wasn't much intermingling. So I had to go to all the different clubs to try to find people.

People might make assumptions that because I'm the child of migration and because I'm an African-American that I might have had an easier route to get to the people, but I can assure you that I did not. Ultimately, the act of being a narrative journalist, going out and doing the research, makes you an outsider because you're seeking something that they're not used to giving. I often tell students and other people interested in this work, “It doesn't matter who you happen to be. Ultimately, what you end up having to do is making the most of who you happen to be in order to get access to people that you need.” And it means being empathetic, being aware constantly of your circumstances, because the people in the world you're entering may be alien to you but they're keenly aware of the differences you may bring to it. I enter these places as a total and complete outsider. I didn't go to anybody that I personally knew.

Let me give you an example:

I went to all these senior centers and found myself at a senior center in Los Angeles. Of the several things I was trying to overcome, one of them was the very definition of what I was writing about. These people did not see themselves as part of the Great Migration. No one used that term. This is a term for sociologists and historians, but not the people themselves. So there was a challenge to get them to even understand what I see in them. I could go into a senior center and ask: “How many of you were part of the Great Migration?” Not a single hand would go up. If I ask, “How many of you came from either Texas or Louisiana to get to California between these years?” everybody's hands would go up. They didn't identify themselves as that because the goal was to break free of the expectations of being in a group. They wanted to see themselves as separate and apart, and as having made a decision for themselves.

One time, I was in a senior center in Los Angeles – and I typically would have to make arrangements, don't just show up. There are good days and bad days to show up. You don't want to go on a day when they're playing Bingo because no one's going to listen to you, no one's going to talk to you, they're busy. When you hear there's going to be a fish fry or a steak dinner, that's a good day to go because a lot of people show up to that. This particular senior center was extremely formal and very well organized and they actually had a program that particular day. It was a very big day; a lot of people were there, and I couldn't wait to start talking to people. I flew in from Chicago, so every day I went to any of these events it was a very big deal for me, a lot at stake; I needed to make sure I made the most of my time. On the program, right before me, was someone from the Los Angeles County Department of Aging who had an important announcement to make for those who had gathered there. He handed out some brochures and he said, “I want all of you to read these brochures very carefully. We're getting reports from our seniors of unscrupulous people who are going up to our seniors and asking them all kinds of questions. They wanted to know where did they come from, where were they born, what kind of work did they do, when did they get to Los Angeles, do they own their own home, do they have children, do they have grandchildren.” Pretty much everything I wanted to know. And that was just the tip of the iceberg of what I wanted to ask them. He asked them to read this brochure very carefully and to be very cautious because these people – these unscrupulous people – were wiping out the seniors’ savings, they were taking the homes and their pension checks, so be very careful of someone who starts to ask you questions.

“Next up is Isabel Wilkerson, who is writing some book.”

I had to figure out what I was going to say and what I was going to do because this was very important stuff. I merely acted as if the person hadn't said a word. What choice do you have? I told them what I was doing. Anybody migrated from Louisiana or Texas between these years, 1915 to 1970: I'd love to talk to you. That was an example of what you have to go up against when you are an outsider in somebody else's world. I tried to interview as many people as I could there, getting names and numbers and following up.

This work has so much in common with ethnography and anthropology, because you’re entering another universe. You have to learn quickly what the rules and the expectations and the protocols are. You have to learn the hierarchy. Who is in charge and who is not? Who can perhaps persuade or influence the person you have identified? I was keenly aware of the social graces and the things expected in the world I was in, but I always had challenges.

I should remind you I was racing the clock. The migration began in 1915. That means these people were really getting up in years. These were very old people. When I first started on (the book) in the mid- to late ’90s I remember being told, “You’ll never find anyone from World War I,” which of course meant I wasn't going to stop until I did. These people were really getting up in the years. Every single year, they were passing on, and I was losing the very core group of people that I needed. I was keenly aware of the passage of time. So I found myself on a bus. There's a parking lot – many of you from Chicago, there's this particular place in Chicago. I don't know why this place was a popular place to gather, but this is where all the tour buses would gather for all the family reunions or whatever church trips they were going on. In the early morning hours, about 8 in the morning, the parking lot would be filled with all these buses prepared to go all these places. I ended up going on one of those buses with seniors who were going from Chicago to a casino in Iowa. It was the first of the month. I'm making my way on the bus, and they were very, very gracious and kind. It turns out that particular day, on that bus, someone had brought a cooler with a delicacy from the old country. When the people on the bus found out what this delicacy was on that bus with them, there was an uproar. People in the back were saying: “Be sure to save some for us! Can you get it back here? We want some!” I didn't know what they were talking about. It was not clear what it was that had caused this commotion.

They were so polite and kind though – they actually offered me some first. And this was one of those dilemmas that squarely reminded me of the outsider-insider reality that I was in. So this is what it was. I hadn't heard of this thing they were talking about. They were all excited about hog head cheese.

My Georgia-born mother never made it, and my Virginia-born father never demanded it, so I never had it and never heard of it. I was from a different migration stream. I had to be very careful with how I responded to this because I certainly did not want to insult these people because I hadn't heard of it, and I wouldn't want to out myself as someone who didn't know something so simple in their culinary culture. I also didn't want to insult them by telling them there was no way in the world I would eat that. I needed to find a graceful way to get out of this thing and still stay in their good graces. I just said something about high blood pressure, which I did not have, which they took as a reasonably acceptable reason for not eating. They could certainly be aware of high blood pressure, so they passed it on and I got out of that one.

Of course, no one on that bus was anyone I (used) in the end. All of this might be seen as spinning the wheels, but this is all part of the process of hearing stories, of a tutorial of hearing so many stories that by the time I found the actual people who would be the actual protagonists in the book, I had an almost degree in what it meant to be in this Great Migration.

Now, clearly, I ran into a problem as a result of the fact I was from a different migration stream in that instance. When I went out to California, I ran into similar kinds of cultural situations. That was, the names were different. The names of the places people were from were different. It seems all the little towns they were from purposely mispronounced them so people from the outside could be shown by trying to pronounce them or say them. All of the touch points that we take for granted were different wherever I went. When I went to California, the foods were different. There were red meats and rice. There were many, many different ways of making chili with or without sugar. Then there were the issues of oxtails and all the things I was not accustomed to. Then, when I got to New York, I was doing the same kind of interviewing. I actually went to senior centers where not only did I run into people who recognized the town my father was from, suddenly it had meaning. That's how beautifully predictable a migration stream is.

That shows you how in some ways, if you just dig long enough, you run into yourself.

In any case, it was a reminder that once you get inside these worlds, you truly are an outsider and you must act according to the rules of the places you happen to be in. When it comes to actually finding these people, they were not in the places I described to you. Not one of them.

The story of how I came across Dr. Foster, the man who went from Louisiana to California: It took two years of this casting call to narrow it down to those three people. In the end, with him for example, I went to all these places where people from Louisiana, there were multiple Louisiana club meetings, there were Juneteenth parades (I know here in Texas, this is a very big deal here in Texas). They carried with them that celebration to California. I actually had a booth at the Juneteenth parade. That's how desperate I was. I went to all these different places and I started to run into people again and again and again. One Louisiana event, a woman came up to me and said, “I have seen you at all these different places. I've heard the questions you've been asking, and I hear what the people are telling you, and now I'm seeing you again. I think I have the perfect person for you.”

When someone says that to you, especially the way I go around doing this – I sort of think I have to look under every rock and only I can know which rock will lead me to the right one. And this was like someone setting me up on a blind date. And I wasn't feeling too keen about that. But I took the name down, and I called him eventually. I didn't call him right away. And I met with him.

He was one of these people who was not at any of these events. The club he was a part of was a private one, so he wasn't easily found. And so when I met with him, the very first thing he said, after having brought out some lemon pound cake with vanilla ice cream, which I did not want to eat, and he watched to make sure I ate it all, he said to me, “I love to talk, and I am my favorite subject.”

And so, with that, I knew I had found the one.

Even as we laugh at that, acknowledge that in some ways these are the many joys of this process.

I want to say a couple of things about the process of the writing and how I feel I had to find a way to pull it together. I needed to actually move into their lives and see what it was like to be them — the moving between people, moving between families, moving between states. One was in New York; one was in Chicago; one was in Los Angeles. I was constantly rotating between the three. I had to pick up where I left off as if there had been no break. I had to give the illusion that I was with them all the time even though I was not. Many things might have happened in the course of the time that I was not with them. There was the occupational hazard of age and aging.

Sometimes I would arrive from out of town to visit someone, and instead of seeing them in their own home I would have to go to the hospital, which meant very little of the real work got done. It meant sitting with them at the hospital and just watching them. It meant taking them to dialysis. There was no reporting, no time spent, no recollections of experiences because the time was spent doing that. That's all part of the work. That's what we do when we enter people's lives.

The other thing that had to happen with the process was to try and recreate what their experiences had been. One of the jobs I had to do, and a lot of people couldn't understand this at all, was I was bound and determined to recreate the journey of the man who had driven from Louisiana to Los Angeles. What he had done was, he had a friend in Houston, so he first drove to Houston and he had a place to stay there. He said, “I'm this close” – and we’re in Texas so you know it's not that close – “so I might as well go to Mexico, from Houston.” So he went to Nuevo Laredo, then came back, and all of this took more time and made it a more perilous journey. And he had not anticipated that when he got back to Texas he still was not free to stay wherever he wanted. He ended up finding that he was unable to find a place that would take him in for the night, and he had not anticipated or prepared for that. He was ready to and needed to sleep and yet no place he went to would take him in in Arizona. And that meant he had to drive through, ultimately, three states, from the Texas border all the way to California, without sleep. These were perilous times, and we're not talking about all that long ago. These people are alive today. It happened to be 1953 when he made that drive, but this was a world that existed until into the 1970s where African-Americans might not be assured of a place to stay when they were driving. They might not be assured of being able to get gas or being able to get food. They had to live in an almost alternative universe from everyone else who was on the road.

I sought to recreate that journey. I rented a Buick, like he had – he had a 1949 Buick Roadmaster. He said, "You would've wanted it too, before you dismiss it."

I had my parents with me, though they did not want to talk about their experiences. My mother had vowed not to talk. If she caught herself about to talk, she sort of would catch herself and stop. You're in the deserts; you're in the mountains. There are hairpin curves. It's complete and utter total darkness. There's no other cars on the road. I had gone without sleep as he had because I was trying to recreate it to the letter as he experienced. At some point, I began to veer off the road; I had fallen asleep at the wheel. My parents knew from the outset they weren't allowed to drive, they weren't permitted to drive. He had to drive the whole way; I was going to do it as well. As I was beginning to veer off the road, my parents got very alarmed and said, “You have to stop the car, and if you won't stop the car, let us out.” We were nearing the town of Piedmont, Ariz. There were motels and hotels there. I had to stop, and when we stopped, it made me feel even more empathy for what he and millions of other African-Americans had to endure – he hadn't had that option. So I was not able to recreate it to the letter because I had my parents with me, but it gave me more empathy for what they had gone through.

The world that we're in, it takes a lot of guts to do what we do. It takes a lot of fortitude, it takes a lot of faith to take this great chance on the hope that something will come out of all the work we do, all the time it takes. And, in this same way, these people made a great leap of faith into the unknown. They may have never been out of the county to which they had been born yet they were going to places far, far away that they'd never seen before. In some ways, what they did was a testament to the power of individual decisions, the power that one person can actually make a difference. One person added to another person added to another person, multiplied by millions, actually changed the regions they had been forced to flee.

By their decision to leave, and by their arrival in these big northern cities, they forced the North and the South to look at what was going on here, and to finally force all Americans to confront what was going on and to change it, so that it's a more equal world than it would have been if these people had not left in such large numbers. They looked around at themselves and said, “Here in the land of our birth, our work is devalued and our very lives are devalued. Perhaps we will fare better elsewhere.” And so they sought out other parts of the country.

I can't stop talking about it because I find such inspiration in what they did. It's humble people who had very little, very truly nothing, just hope that there’s something better across the river and across the mountains.

I hope that it will be an inspiration for us, (knowing) that they (could) do all that they did with so little.

All of us are descended from somebody who had to make the tough, tough decision to leave all those things they knew for things they had never seen. All of us are descended from someone who had to have that moment of departure. You have this young person who is about to board a ship to sail across the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean, or has packed up their things in a van or in the back of a truck to cross the Rio Grande, or at a railroad platform about to board a train to take them to California or to Chicago or to New York, or wherever it might have been. At that moment of departure, there was no guarantee that anybody who was there with them – their mother, their father, whoever might have been with them – there was no guarantee that they would see their parents alive again. Think about the magnitude of that sacrifice: No guarantee that they could see their parents again.

When you think about it, that's a tremendous sacrifice that is hard for us to even imagine today.

Remember that they had no Skype. There was no email. No cell phones. No reliable long-distance telephone service. And for many of them who had access to it, the people they were leaving didn't have phones. That was going to be a complete break from what they knew. That was a leap of faith.

In some ways that is why all of us are here at this moment at this place at this time, because somebody along the way made a sacrifice. We are products of people who followed their dreams with nothing to go on but hope and faith, and so I want to close with these words of Richard Wright, which I have come to memorize because they’re so embedded in me now. I also think they speak to all of us at this cusp of this new way of thinking, and what we're doing, and where it's going, and what the future holds.

These are the words of Richard Wright, who was part of the Great Migration. He wrote, as he was about to leave Mississippi for Chicago in 1927: “I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown. I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, (just perhaps) to bloom.”

From the Q-and-A with audience:

Q: Tell me some of the techniques you used to get them to talk to you.

IW: I ended up drawing on everything. If they had photographs, we would just spend hours just looking at the photographs. Whatever they had that would help to excavate a memory would be the kinds of things I would do with them. There were funeral programs at the very heart of the collections of many seniors; it’s a very important part of life for them. In many different respects, I say in the book, they collect funeral programs as people now collect email addresses because that's a way to keep touch, or keep memories, with the people they knew. They're not necessarily sad. They’re actually what helps keep alive the memory of what they knew. That was also tremendous information because each of those funeral programs would have a synopsis, a bio, of the people. Music was an important part of it. Whatever they were listening to, whatever they were inclined to listen to was a way to see what was important to them and would spark a memory.

I (also) went and took those who were willing to do it back south, to where they were from. Of course that was an opportunity to be flooded with reminders and memories and also to see other people they knew and to hear the interactions. Suddenly the language that they had once been steeped in, in the South, came into full flower and language and things and references I had not heard when I was in the world removed in the North or in the West became even richer and deeper in the South. I actually went with Ida Mae Gladney to Mississippi. She was a person who was a sharecropper's wife and she had been terrible at it, terrible. One of the things I had said in choosing these characters: I wanted people who were beautifully imperfect. Perfection is not real, and readers cannot identify with people presented as perfect. So I was looking for people who were beautifully imperfect and were willing to acknowledge that, because this isn't the kind of work where you want to pin someone to a wall and say, “Isn't it true you're not perfect?” I wanted to find people who were at peace with their mistakes and with the things they had done not particularly well. I wanted people who were willing to be who they really truly were, and she was willing to admit that she was truly terrible at picking cotton.

When we went back to Mississippi where she was from, I was driving down a very quiet road, no other cars in the road. We were looking for her sister-in-law's double-wide on this street on a dirt road somewhere in Chickasaw County, Miss., to get there we crossed what would be called bridges, but they were actually dirt mounds. It was harvest time. The cotton was high. We were driving for miles past all this cotton, and at a certain point, she wanted to get out. She wanted to get out of the car. She wanted to pick. I said, “First of all, we're in Mississippi, and this cotton does not belong to us. There might be people who might not appreciate our going in and picking their cotton.” And she was like, “They're not going to care what little bit we pick.” There was no one around, and we were isolated. She hopped out of the car – and she was in her 80s at the time – she hopped out of the car and she couldn't wait to get out in the field. When she had to be in the fields she hated it, but now that she had been away for 60 years and was back, it seemed like it had sparked a memory and she couldn't wait to get out there.

She started picking, and she was showing me how it was. It was the only time I had gotten that close to it.

I went to family reunions of all the people. I saw them at the hospital. I went to church with them. I went to the casino with them. I went to any place that they might be willing to go. Back to places where they had worked. Wherever they were willing to go, I would go.

These people wanted their stories told. They were the ones who spurred me on in the end. They wanted people to know what they had endured. They had lived with this for so long, they were in some ways unburdening themselves. They had gone through so much heartache. They were victims of post-traumatic stress. There was a Catholic priest who really got into the book; he told me, “You didn't choose these people. You only think you chose these people. These people chose you.”

Q: I'm totally inspired by the scope and the ambition and the perseverance of what you're describing here. How did you support yourself for 15 years with all of this travel?

IW: With nonfiction, generally, we do get an advance. But 15 years is a long time, a really long time. I was on leave from the New York Times, but I was coming back and forth to do things with them and for them. Katrina happened during the course of this, so I came back. There were some opportunities to do things that were useful, both to remind yourself that you can still write on deadline and secondly that you get some income there. Also, I was teaching. I taught for a good bit of time. That was a wonderful opportunity because that allowed me to not just help support myself but also to get access to archives. There are two major choices a person has when they do this kind of work. One of them is to dive into the archives and try to understand as best you can the phenomenon of what you're trying to write about; do as much of that archives work beforehand so that when you try to go out to find your protagonist, you know as much as you need to, to be able to identify who would be most representative of what you're trying to write. Or, you can just go in the field and start finding people, not knowing all that you might otherwise know, and then go to the archives later. I think that made a difference with the final product. I would not have met some of them had I not gone to the people first and to the archives second. They simply wouldn't have been there. They would've passed.

Don’t miss our other coverage of this year’s Mayborn Conference: a talk on voice, between Jeanne Marie Laskas of GQ and Thomas Lake of Sports Illustrated, moderated by the Tampa Bay Times’ Ben Montgomery, and the keynote address of Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb. 

The post "I wanted people who were beautifully imperfect" — Isabel Wilkerson on finding characters (Mayborn 2012, vol. 3) appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and of 23 other books, delivered one of the keynotes at this year’s Mayborn Conference for Literary Journalism. Here are five top takeaways from that address, followed by an edited transcript of his talk and a snippet from the Q-and-A session that followed.

Verity is the new workhorse. It carries all the freight of fiction but adds the density of fact. Robert Frost, the poet, once famously described writing free verse, cadenced voice with rhyme, as playing tennis with the net down. Verity raises the net and draws it taut, adding a challenge to the game that the game is better for.

The real poverty of the textbook school of writing is its apparent ignorance of the power of language to re-animate the world – the world of history, of technology, of science, of people, the natural world, whatever the subject might be. Stripping a text of its resonances, its rhetoric, of its performance of itself doesn't make it clearer; it just makes it deader.

The book in your head may be the platonically ideal book you could write, while the book you do write may seem a poor beast indeed, Caliban to your ideal book’s Prospero. But the book you write is real. And when you finish, you can hold it in your hands. And when you're ready, you can share it with others. The world will be a little warmer place as a result.

The work of writing is fundamental to all the many other forms that follow from it, whether printed books, digital books, theater, or television documentary and drama, and film and all their digital elaborations.

If you learn to write, learn to write well, learn to make people and events come alive in words whether fictionally or veritably. You will always have work, and it will be the best kind of work, work that uses, work that demands everything you've got. Who could ask for more? 

And the full talk:

So verity: Let's begin with that.

In Standard English, verity means "truth," of the Latin veritas.

Veritas was a Roman goddess. A pure, young thing. She was considered so elusive; she was believed to reside in the bottom of a sacred well.

I borrow the word ‘verity’ as a term of art to replace the term "nonfiction." I think "nonfiction" as a designation of a whole broad field of writing is dismissive, which may be why this conference qualifies itself as concerning "literary nonfiction."

Nonfiction as a term has no long heritage, which surprised me when I looked it up. In its first published reference, hyphenated, it appears in the annual reports of the Boston Public Library in 1867. I imagine a librarian trying to decide the other books besides fiction, in order to put them in another place in the library, came up with the term "nonfiction."

I dislike the word because it designates the kind of writing we do with a negative: non-fiction, not fiction, (reminding) us that we nonfiction writers dwell in the swampy depths beneath poetry and fiction. Well, poetry's a special case. I've written fiction and I've written verity, and I can say with confidence that verity is in no way fiction's foe. It's actually more challenging to write than fiction, because it adds to all the challenges of writing fiction a further challenge of building the elements of the real world. Elements with external reference. Fiction you can just make up. Verity you have to verify.

The joke is on the Olympians, however. Verity is coming to its kingdom, leaving poetry and fiction behind. Poetry, like firewood, once heated and lighted the world so that Darwin's grandfather, for example, had Erasmus lay out his theory of evolution in the form of a book-length poem. But poetry became niche material a century or more ago. Fiction is bifurcating into popular and literary, and if the popular kind is coal, pungent and sulfurous, the literary kind is charcoal: relevant and clean but rather a Sunday recreation.

Now, verity is the new workhorse. It carries all the freight of fiction but adds the density of fact. Robert Frost, the poet, once famously described writing free verse, cadenced voice with rhyme, as playing tennis with the net down. Verity raises the net and draws it taut, adding a challenge to the game that the game is better for. To extract meaning from the real takes imagination. It takes wit to find, as the art of finding similarities in seemingly dissimilar things.

If verity is craft, fiction is witchcraft.

If verity is science, fiction is magic.

Nothing wrong with a little magic now and then, a little witchcraft. We all like to feel the hair rise on the back of our necks sometimes. But with change accelerating and the future spilling into the present like a flood, there is value and there is joy in weighing and testing and making sense. It's not as if anything is lost writing verity. You still have to think and feel deeply. You still have to read between the lines. The best work, like the best love, should use everything you have. Verity, if you do it well, not only uses everything, it depends on it.

The sad, ugly change that followed when nonfiction was divided off from fiction was that verity was somehow devalued. Or maybe the delineation happened in school when history was condensed to textbooks but fiction was left beneath its covers to be read intact.

As a thought experiment, imagine if fiction were treated in the schoolbooks like verity, simplified, paraphrased, burglarized, stupefied. If I were a librarian, I would dump it off as non-verity, too. The assumption apparently was that verity is a sort of pudding, studded with raisins called facts, and that the facts could be extracted from the pudding and contextualized much more tidily and literally by the textbook authors. Who needs Gibbon to go on for six volumes about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? Who needs the journals of Lewis and Clark when a filling-station road map will do? Who needs Jefferson's notes on Virginia when he doesn't have all the facts straight? Who needs Ulysses S. Grant on the Civil War?

Narrative, the historians of the academy announced, was inherently flawed. How was it flawed?

Oh my God, it introduced into history the methods of fiction.

Narrative filled the gaps between facts, facts being defined as bits of information anchored in documents; narrative filled the gaps with structure, opinion, even speculation. It made history a conversation, a humanistic enterprise.

Writing is writing.

As a craft, it's highly abstract. You're not throwing clay. You're not carving wood. You're organizing verbal symbols into sequences that convey meaning. Considering how elusive meaning can be, considering how far down in the holy well sweet little veritas crouches, hidden. It's a wonder readers make any sense of it at all. Truth be told, they often don't.

By actual measure, the language level of most New York Times best sellers is that of an eighth-grade reader. That's one way best sellers sort themselves out from other books.

We don't have an obligation to write at the eighth-grade level, but given the long, narrowing channel that stretches from our experiences to prose, and from our prose to the reader's brain, we are obliged to help readers understand in every way we can. We do that by controlling the variables as well as we know how. By variables, I don't only mean dictionary definitions. Ninety-nine percent of all the words in the language are metaphors. They have natural histories and they accumulate meanings as they evolve. Some of those meanings drop off along the way but most of them remain intact. If you're oblivious to that, you're not likely to communicate what you think you mean to say. That's the negative.

The positive is that controlling as much as you have the gifts and the skill to control adds power, resonance, depth. The real poverty of the textbook school of writing is its apparent ignorance of the power of language to re-animate the world – the world of history, of technology, of science, of people, the natural world, whatever the subject might be. Stripping a text of its resonances, its rhetoric, of its performance of itself doesn't make it clearer; it just makes it deader.

That's what I mean when I said the historians of the academy put on their rubber aprons when they espoused a pseudoscientific historiography. They turned from restoring life to dead texts to autopsying them. Which means they turned from talking to the rest of us, to talking among themselves.

From time to time, I teach a two-hour master class at Stanford for students preparing to write their senior dissertations in international relations. In the advance of class, I tell them to send me several pages of their writing to review. I pencil-edit their samples to the standard to which I hold my own writing, and then we talk about them. I'm continually amazed at how few students, even at the senior level of a first-rate university, are aware that they use a fictional voice when they're writing. They think, evidently, the voice in which they narrate their dissertations is their own voice, the voice of the self-talk that goes on inside their heads, the voice of their consciousness. But anyone who has ever gone through the exercise of actually transcribing his self-talk directly knows that it's a mishmash full of half-thoughts, isolated words, sentence fragments, all the shorthand and code and private references we use to save time and energy when we're mentally processing something.

Students I work with don't seem to make that connection. They imagine they're thinking directly onto the page, like the brainwave systems under development that will allow fighter pilots to operate their planes hand-free just with their thoughts. In consequence of this misapprehension, my students think style, point of view, rhetorical level and so on are basically decorative issues, issues that for some unknown reason seem to engage their instructors passionately but issues that have nothing to do with the serious business of putting their sure, unalloyed thoughts onto paper. Needless to say, my editing of their writing samples is usually quite a shock.

The truth is: Writing is translation, among other things. It's translation because the rather alien, multi-dimensional, multi-sensorial, associative, only-partly-conscious mental processes that precede it are far too scattered and fugitive to make sense to anyone but yourself, and even yourself only listens by fits and starts. You have to wade into that glorious slough, start pulling up all the tangles of green underwater goodness, discard the dross, sort and shape and select and, yes, stupefy, to turn some of what's in your head into those verbal symbols on the page that replicate something in the mind of the average passing stranger.

What's in your head is seemingly infinitely richer than what you finally get down on the page. I think that's why some people never actually get the writing done. They have a dream of a book in their head, and every attempt to write it down feels impoverished. The difference used to bother me until I thought about what the tradeoff was. The book in your head may be the platonically ideal book you could write, while the book you do write may seem a poor beast indeed, Caliban to your ideal book’s Prospero. But the book you write is real. And when you finish, you can hold it in your hands. And when you're ready, you can share it with others. The world will be a little warmer place as a result. You'll have added an invaluable bit of organized intelligence to the dissolving world. That's the trade-off. It's worth it, believe me, I've done it now for more than 40 years, across 26 books and several hundred magazine articles and book reviews. The real, you can hold in your arms. The real trumps the ideal, any day of the week.

It's hard work, the best kind. Writing takes everything you can bring to it. Doing it well requires everything you've got – every gift, every skill, every sudden insight, every experiment, guess, throw of the dice, flight of fancy, and every trick of the trade.

Of course, I don't mean making up the facts. I'm not of the school that believes embroidering your life history to spice up your memoir is virtuous. God knows memory is unreliable enough. Verity differs from fiction in that its facts can be checked with external reference. But that's the only way, I would argue, that the two forms differed where the process of making them are concerned.

The opening of a book is an important moment when you hope to engage the reader's passing attention long enough to draw her in. You have to set the scene and bring it alive and to some extent; you have to establish the level of rhetoric you intend to use throughout the book. If you write from beginning to end as I do, you may also be experimenting with the rhetorical level, and behind it with the voice you need to find to tell the story.

We will need all the skill we can muster in the years ahead. The practical world of publishing is changing with the advent of visual technologies, change that will be as revolutionary as the change that came to the world when Gutenberg's invention of the movable type and all this minutiae devising that made books small enough to carry.

It isn't at all clear to me how the research and writing of long-form texts will be supported. So far, print publishers have responded to the competition to visual by reducing advances to authors, making it increasingly difficult for independent writers without private means to find the time to write. In its panic of declining book sales, the publishing industry seems to be going the way of the film industry, which I have heard recently described as, and I quote, "now actually destroying itself" – this observer goes on – “because it's harder to get financing and audience, companies are competing to make bigger, costlier films while eliminating risk, which is why ever more movies are based on intellectual properties." In other words, they're sequels.

The book counterpart to this observation is the increasing flow of advances to established best-selling writers and celebrity books, while advances to midlist writers have been cut by half or more. If a book proposal is even funded in the first place, as a midlist author my own work would hardly have been possible across these past 40 years without foundation grants, often usually from the Alfred P. Sloane Foundation in New York, bless its name, in my writing about science and technology. Not many foundations make book grants, however. And those that do necessarily limit themselves to books in specific subject areas. I might've written about many other book subjects in my career. One reason I've written so much about science and technology is that foundation grants have supported that work.

I don't know the answer to this new fundamental, economic challenge. I bring it up in part to bond us together because the test of true journalism in a writer, I've observed across the years, is that when you get together with other writers, you don't discuss actual literary matters. You bitch about your publisher.

This much I do know: The work of writing is fundamental to all the many other forms that follow from it, whether printed books, digital books, theatre, or television documentary and drama, and film and all their digital elaborations.

If you learn to write, learn to write well, learn to make people and events come alive in words whether fictionally or veritably. You will always have work, and it will be the best kind of work, work that uses, work that demands everything you've got. Who could ask for more? 

Q-and-A with audience:

Q: What writers have you found valuable? What has fed you?

Rhodes: I always have to think back to the particular best that other writers have sourced from me. Once you get into writing books based on documentary research, you spend 99.9 percent of your time reading those documents and previous books. I like to joke that books are made up of pulped-up previous books, and in a certain sense, they are. But as an impact over the years, the books that move me most deeply and really engage me and got me started in writing were, in particular, early on the works of Faulkner. Faulkner, Moby Dick and Herman Melville's work; I was really amazed at Ralph Waldo Emerson, of all people. One of the jobs I had along the way to becoming a full-time writer was doing public relations for Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, where I grew up and lived until I was 50 years old. We we developed a line of little gift books and they were all exactly 64 pages long, which made for some interesting editing. Most of all: Whitman. I still am just dazzled when I read his work. I keep saying to myself, as I'm sure every writer in this room does when they encounter work of a certain level, "How the hell do you do that?" And with Whitman especially because it sounds so conversational, seems so, so easy to do, and obviously, would still be with us and still resonating for us.

Q: One of the hallmarks in your work in science has been nuclear annihilation. One of our writers, Beth Langton, went out and spent some time with you, and she came away, after talking with you for several days, (with the idea) that you were trying to make your own sense of annihilation, that that was part of your motivation. I was wondering if you could talk about that: You grew up with this cruel stepmother who constantly inflicted terror in your life.

Rhodes: My wife is a clinical psychologist, and she likes to point out that her and her colleagues became psychologists by accident. They had issues, y'know? They were interested in exploring. I've only written one book-length biography, the book Audubon. Within the histories I’ve written are many biographies, are people, particularly scientists given what I've written about. It seems to me almost universal that they have their characteristic life preoccupations in place by the time they're 12 years old, or maybe 16. Certainly that was true for the scientists I wrote about, and of course it was true for me. My mother committed suicide in the heart of the depression when I was a 13-month-old infant. And my father tried to raise my older brother and I in boarding houses in Kansas City, Mo.; he did a pretty good job until he married, eventually, a woman who decided that we were a good source of day labor and night labor. We didn't get enough to eat, and we went through the usual kinds of mistreatment that children often go through in the world. We were lucky, I was lucky; my brother, a brave 13-year-old, went to the police when she was threatening him with a baseball bat one day. And even though it was 1949, when there was little social support in place in the United States to deal with children under those circumstances, we lucked out. We met a social worker later who handled our case, and she said, “We really didn't know what to do with you boys. You had two parents. Which was definitely the standard at the time. But you were both so obviously starved.” Which we were. So we went, by luck, to one of those old farm schools, a private home for boys, and lived there for the next six years, until I finished high school. It was not a psychologically oriented institution, quite the opposite really; it was a farm. I lived in the natural world and planted things and saw them grow up, saw the cycle of life, learned to do rural things like butchering animals, which is a pretty shocking thing to learn. But even that had context for us, so it was a very healing institution to be a part of. Then I got a nice college scholarship and went off to my life.

So of course my preoccupations are with human violence and where it comes from and most of all what can we do about it and how do we survive it? And I suppose the most large-scale violence we as a species have ever been able to learn to inflict on ourselves is nuclear weapons, but I've also written a book about what makes individuals violent, based on the work of a criminologist I wrote about in the book, whose model of violence developments seemed so robust and well-supported by evidence. He interviewed about 200 violent criminals for an average of 10 hours each in prisons in California, where he was doing graduate work at Berkeley. I decided to see if it would fit another context and then wrote a book about the SS-Einsatzgruppen group, who were a group of men who shot Jewish victims into bits all over Eastern Europe; about 1 1/2 million people were killed that way.

So I looked into violence. All of this, I say somewhere in my book: You think you're choosing a different subject. You think you're writing something totally disconnected from the last book you wrote, but it all somehow bubbles up anyway. We really cannot escape our characteristic childhood preoccupations.

Einstein at the age of 5 was both fascinated and terrified by the question, "Where does the light go?" Later in life he said: “It's really because I didn't grow up.” I sort of remained a child, asking questions about these deep fundamental questions.

I've just turned 75, and I feel like I'm way beyond those years. But right now, I'm feeling like it's time to get that big book on human violence done.

I used to try to write everything in this sort of 19th-century English historian style. Not everything of course, but the history I was working on. I deliberately chose that style for The Making of the Atomic Bomb, because I felt like it was a very large theme and deserved to be treated with that scale of language, if you will, to be embedded in that tradition so that the reader would feel she was reading something on the scale of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or whatever. But when I got to Audubon for example, writing a biography, I didn't want it to be ponderous. Audubon was a wonderful, charming, light-footed man who could sing and used to teach dancing on the plantations of the Mississippi River and New Orleans. He could play the flute and the guitar, he could braid hair; he was just the most remarkable guy. To inflict on him ponderous periodic sentences didn't seem appropriate, so what I did was, whenever my impulse was to hit the semicolon, I hit the period, and it worked very well.

In fact, I would almost go so far as to say you could style a narrative with something that simple. I also decided with The Making of the Atomic Bomb I would not use any contractions, so there are no don’ts or can’ts or ain’ts or whatever. I let everything go in its full range of language. But that's not true with other books. Other books are written in different ways. The language in your book needs to be appropriate to the book you're writing.

Don’t miss our other Mayborn coverage, including the talk, on voice, between GQ’s Jeanne Marie Laskas and Sports Illustrated’s Thomas Lake, moderated by Tampa Bay Times reporter Ben Montgomery. Tomorrow: a final recap, featuring Pulitzer-winning author Isabel Wilkerson.

The post "You will always have work, and it will be the best kind of work" — Richard Rhodes on writing (Mayborn 2012, vol. 2) appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

If you were following the activities out of Grapevine, Texas, last weekend you might’ve seen tweets like this one:

And this one:

And these:

Peter Simek of D magazine recapped this year’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference this way:

The after-hours antics at the Mayborn are not surprising. Writers are, stereotypically, cocksure, socially starved, self-destructive sorts; booze ignites egos and loosens tongues. But I suspect the revelry at the Mayborn is born of a more desperate fervor, the product of long hours each day spent in front of and surrounded by some of the best practitioners of your craft alive today. It is the type of conference where two-time National Magazine Award Winner Tom Junod tweets after the event that the Mayborn, “has reminded me how much I don’t know and how much I haven’t done. The great thing is that it has made those deficits inspiring.”

Our coverage started in Twitterville and continues today, with Thomas Lake, of Sports Illustrated, and Jeanne Marie Laskas, of GQ, talking about sportswriting, voice, love, the art of waiting and when and how to ask the right questions. (Check back next Thursday and Friday for new Mayborn posts.) We’ve edited the transcript of the conversation, which was moderated by Tampa Bay Times reporter Ben Montgomery, for length and clarity.

BM: My little brother – I call him “little” – he’s eight years younger than me but he stands about 6-8 and weighs about 280 pounds – he was a defensive end at the University of North Texas. A few years ago, he called and he said, “Hey, there's an ESPN The Magazine reporter hanging out. He's doing a story about how we’re playing the University of Oklahoma,” the team at the time predicted to win the National Championship. I told my brother, “If you want to make this story, say things in a way no one has ever said them before.” When he was interviewed, he tried to follow that. I'll quote him from the story.

“There’s a moment-you can feel it,” says Burruss. “It’s tangible, when all the air gets sucked out of the stadium and everyone is like, ‘Whoa, what's gonna happen next?’ At that moment everything is equal, and the underdog either takes it to the next level, or the bigger guy crushes his will. That's what you play these games for, that's what you live for, that one moment when you're equal. You either become a big-time player or go back to being just another guy in a helmet.”

There’s so much sports chatter out there. It’s rare that you hear something that’s not cliché, or that you hear someone’s real voice. So much of sports journalism is so wrapped up in cliché.

TL: This is what would happen if you hired a robot to be a football coach:

“The first game is so critical if you want to compete. We've got to go play the games. We've got to practice hard, play hard. Play every play every game for 60 minutes. Step up and make those game-winning plays. Impact the game in a positive way. Going to play a tough team every week. Week in, week out, consistent basis. From the beginning of the game until the end, it’s going to be a big game. Hopefully we can play our best game out there, utilize our personnel. You’ve got to go out and prove yourself. At the end of the day, you’ve got to go out and compete at a very high intensity level. Speed level, comfort level, talent level. Meet the expectation level that we expect. Proximity standpoint. Structural and schematic standpoint. Continue to move forward with dedication and buy-in, with proven track record of success. Grow the offense, grow the program, build the program, market the program. Structurally and fundamentally. The sky’s the limit. The sky’s the limit. The sky’s the limit.”

JML: I give kudos to my editors at Esquire and GQ, who came up with the idea of choosing someone who knows nothing about any sport in America to cover it at its biggest stage. That was a very good match. My first story was about Korey Stringer. Basically, here was the assignment: Go find really big, beefy football players nobody had ever heard of. Tell me what it was like for this guy to bash his head every day into a bunch of other guys. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know who your coaches are. I don't know if you're winning or losing, except that you're bashing your head over and over again. I didn't really care what he said in the beginning. I really was just interested in his tattoos. I didn't say, "Oh, how was that football game today?" I said, "What does FTW mean? You've got this big tattoo ‘FTW.’" Korey Stringer said, "Well, it used to mean Fuck the World. But I turned it into 'Find the Way.'" Now, I've got a whole narrative right there. “Tell me, how did that tattoo change in your mind to 'Find the Way?'” And he was open to me; he wanted to talk about it. That was a great character. And sports stories, to me, are just character studies. It's almost better if you're naïve, sometimes.

TL: My No. 1 rule I try to follow is: Look for somebody who’s not at their peak right now, somebody who’s not ever going to be famous or maybe used to be.

JML, on a story she just filed about Ndamukong Suh: Of course, everybody wants to know about this stomping. How we got to him was the same way we always do. Sort of a sympathetic approach, “Everybody seems to be saying X about you, we never hear the other side of it.” We almost always use that approach. There’s always going to be the other side of it; whether it’s the truth, you don’t know.

BM: Do you try to establish a legitimate relationship with people like that, and how do you go about establishing trust?

JML: This, outside of Al Gore, was the toughest sort of character to get into. Ndamukong Suh, as you’ll read, maybe, does not speak. I went to New York to spend all day with him; to Jimmy Fallon and to the Van Heusen Company to pick out ties, and literally, he said three words to me: ‘I like blue.’ He wouldn’t make eye contact with me. It was awful, awful. I gave up and I called the sister. I said, “What is up with your brother?” So through the family, eventually – it’s something I think you've got to be willing to commit quite a lot of time if you want to get character.

TL: My favorite stories start with a question and sort of a quest.

BM: Every relationship I think is a game of give and take. I think, Jeanne Marie, that you've got to give some of yourself. How much do you tell your sources about yourself?

JML: I say almost nothing. I really deflect. I pretend like I'm giving something. It's so boring to talk about yourself to someone who really wants to talk about themselves. You need to use that trick to build trust to talk about yourself without – y'know, so what you had a lousy flight, so what it rained and your umbrella broke. I just like to leave all that out. They'll ask me if I have any children, and I'll say, “Eh, two.” It's like your shrink. You want to know about your shrink? You do, kind of. (But) you want a blank screen who listens. I think that is the key. You just told me something about your life, your tattoo. You told me something important about your life. Listening, really being honestly present, I think people naturally respond to more.

TL: I have a different approach. I know that from listening to myself on interviews, I sometimes talk too much and I'll say shut up and listen. If there is a regular human connection that comes up, you've got to let it come up. For example, in this story about Jordan, I ended up visiting (his high school coach’s) daughter. We just had a wonderful time. They made me dinner, we sat there and we talked. I'd just met them but I felt like I knew them all my life. I couldn't get there without telling them a little about myself and where I came from and what's important.

BM: Do you sort of think of that relationship as definitely short-termed? Or do you think, “I might be friends with this person for a long while; I might have a relationship with them even after the story runs?”

JML: I always try and not become friends with them, but that always backfires. Sometimes, it's so intense. I'll give an example about not just about sports, being in Alaska on a frozen island with a bunch of guys for months on an oil rig. You're there, living in this polar bear cave thing, and they're protecting you from, like, man-on-the-moon stuff. The intensity of those connections, the stuff that they told me about, I see it sort of like an incredible gift you've got to protect, like with a friend. It makes for messy story-writing, very difficult to maintain boundaries in a narrative when you actually feel love, sort of brotherly love, for your characters. I'd say that's the downside, keeping yourself as a storyteller clean, almost like you'd think of a fiction writer. Yeah, you can be in love with your characters as a fiction writer, but they're not real. So, I'd say that's a personal challenge as a writer.

BM: Have you ever fallen in love with a character, a source, or had a source fall in love with you?

JML: That's like a whole book right there. Did I fall in love with these guys? I'm happily married. In a situation like that, you almost do. Like in Alaska, I can think of like five guys I sort of fell in love with. Sort of, I did. Did they fall in love with me? Yes, I think they – the same way you'd fall in love with a shrink, someone who is that interested in you, is logical. As a writer, you are that interested. But you're interested for a purpose. I say to people, “I am using you for a story, let's be clear. Maybe we'll be friends after this, but I don't trust me.” I, in that sense, am a vulture. I make it really clear, because we are.

BM: You say that up front?

JML: Not on the first day. This guy, TooDogs, is telling me about child abuse, I mean really awful stuff, his father killing himself. I would stop him: “I mean, hang on. I am a writer, this is for a story. Are you sure you want to tell me this?” I don't want to trick people.

TL, on note-taking: If I'm sitting down in a coffee shop with someone, I find it's most efficient to sit down and type on a laptop. I have the notes, they're searchable. If I'm out walking around, notebook. I'm scribbling furious trying to get all the sensory notes I can get in there. If I know it's a rare moment with someone I will only get for a short time, then I'll turn on the recorder. I was never a sportswriter before I came to Sports Illustrated. I covered courts, I did crime, I did investigative stories. And I find that every time I do a story, I need those skills, those skills of digging something out. This story was about a boy who died of heatstroke at football practice, I probably read 7,000 pages of police files and court records and transcripts. But the documents are never enough by themselves. I must have interviewed 30 people. Two of them stand out in memory. One was Chelsea Scott, a cheerleader. She was very hard to find. But the story needed her. It needed a moment for Max to be himself, to stop taking orders and instead take charge, and I knew from Chelsea's police statement that she had seen him that day. What I didn't know were the juicy details that would illuminate that moment. Well, she had an address list on the police statement. I punched it into the GPS and drove out there. No luck. Her family had moved away. I must have gone there three times knocking on neighbors' doors, looking for clues. Nothing.

Most adults can be found through a paid Internet service called Nexis public records, if you know a full name and a date of birth. But Chelsea was a minor. She wasn't listed. I didn't know what to do, but I kept looking. If you want badly enough to discover something, you probably can. At the courthouse I dug through this file for a civil lawsuit. Bingo! She had given a civil deposition more recent than her police statement, and that deposition contained a different address. I hightailed it out there and knocked on the door. A friendly woman answered. I explained who I was, why I was there, how I wanted to write something nice about Max from the perspective of someone who really knew him. The woman was Chelsea's mom. She seemed to really get it. She said Chelsea was at cheerleading practice now, but I could meet her later at the fish fry restaurant where the mom tended bar. So I sit down at the booth, and there's the cheerleader with her backpack and her three-ring binder. I'm a 30-year-old married guy with a baby at home. And I forge ahead:

So, Chelsea, tell me about your boyfriend.

Oh, he kissed you that day?

It was your first kiss with Max?

Could you please describe this kiss?

About how long in seconds?

Did he seem to know what he was doing?

The story, the story. It exists whether you find it or not. Finally, getting the cheerleader's cellphone number before you leave the restaurant. Don’t be ashamed to call her when, after you've written the scene, you decide it needs more juice. Ask her, were you wearing perfume that day? What brand? Oh, Victoria's Secret? What kind of Victoria's Secret perfume? Thank you, Chelsea. Thank you for your understanding. I'm sorry if that was weird. This is a big scene. The big moment for Max, the glory of his first kiss with his cheerleader girlfriend. And if Max were writing the movie of his own life, you can bet he'd want me to get all the details.

The other source I remember most was Max's mother, who told me he wouldn't even die without permission. A chill passed over me when I heard that. Immediately, I knew what had to be the ending. For weeks thereafter, as I finished the reporting, I couldn't wait to write that scene. It made me cry every time I thought about it. But that's the feeling you're after when you do this work. When you get up every morning to look for tragic beauty, for human triumph, for some silver thread of the inexpressible thing that makes us all alive, and it runs, and we chase it, and we find it. Now, it's yours.

Q-and-A with the audience:

Tom Junod: To Jeanne Marie, I found the surgeon's warning that you give your subjects, that you're really just a writer, that you shouldn't be trusted, I found that sort of remarkable. Whether to use something is sort of the eternal struggle. Does giving that (warning) up front sort of absolve you from that struggle when you're writing that story? Or does that still hit you when you're in the process of selecting details and writing in telling the story?

JML: I think first it absolves you only in the first draft. Okay, everybody knows I was there. I wasn't trying to trick anybody. I try and forget everybody in the first draft, so all the good stuff is coming out. That's in the early stages. Then, I'll read it, and I'll try to say, I'm the person I'm writing about and I'm reading it. Where have I rubbed up against the really difficult material where this person would not want anyone else to know? In those areas, I do, I really struggle. And in some cases, I'll call the person. I don't ever read a story to somebody, but I'll say this is the material in a section I'm using.

Lake, on the structure of his first SI story: It helped, having written for the St. Petersburg Times, which is a place that lets you write stories like you might for a magazine. I'm sure that preparation helped prepare me more than I might have otherwise. Edward P. Jones, The Known World – what a beautiful book. My mom bought that for me one Christmas one year. What a gift. That book does a lot of jumping forward in time, these spontaneous moments of sort of seeing into the future. It's another example, for me, why it's so important to read the very best writing out there, regardless of genre. For me, it's a lot of novels. I'm trying to absorb the lessons and techniques that these people have been able to use.

Lake, on how he found the story of an injured softball player carried around the bases by the other team: It was actually in the news a lot when it happened, so this is the example of a story that has been out there. From a newspaper's perspective, the time when you would want it the most is also the time when it's least accessible to you because it's the time when everyone else wants it, too. So, what do you do? What do I do? I sit there and wait. Weeks, months, however long it takes until everyone else is tired of that story. They may have moved on to something more interesting. But I still want that story, and I want to tell it the way I want to tell it, from beginning to end. Interviewing everyone involved, as much depth as I can. That story didn't come out until a little over a year after it happened. That's okay with me. I'm not trying to be timely. I'm trying to write something people will remember.

Andrew Pantazi covers crime as a Dallas Morning News intern. He also interned at the North Florida Herald, the Florida Times-Union and the Chattanooga Times Free Press. He is a senior at the University of Florida.  

The post Jeanne Marie Laskas and Thomas Lake on sportswriting, voice, source love and more (Mayborn 2012, vol. 1) appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.