Irin Carmon would soon learn that she was pregnant for the second time as oral arguments were unfolding in the Supreme Court on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in December 2021. As it became clear that Roe v. Wade was likely to be overturned, Carmon fielded a call from the editor of her first book, “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” asking if she wanted to write a book on abortion.

Carmon, a Queens-based New York magazine reporter who has covered gender, reproduction, and the law, didn’t feel like she had much to add to existing or in-the-works coverage in book form. Her editor encouraged her to think big.

Tackling a new book project right before having another baby felt like less than ideal timing. But ideas kept percolating as Carmon covered Politico’s leak of a draft opinion in May 2022 indicating that the Supreme Court had voted to overturn the federal constitutional right to an abortion, which was confirmed in June.

“In reading the opinion in full afterwards, I was really struck by how Justice Alito completely disappeared the experience and burden of pregnancy,” Carmon said. She wrote an essay for New York magazine detailing a week-by-week account of how pregnancy changes the body, which won a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York.

“There was a lot more to say,” Carmon said. “Even though I was not seeking an abortion, I felt a deep sense of connection and rage and sadness about what was going to happen to anyone who was pregnant in this country, whether they wanted to be or not.” 

After giving birth in August 2022, Carmon scrambled to quickly finish and sell a partial book proposal in the fall while on parental leave from New York magazine. “Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America,” published in October 2025, chronicles five women navigating pregnancy care in New York and Alabama. One of the subject’s stories unfolds at Woodhull Hospital, a Brooklyn hospital where Carmon herself had considered seeking care in 2020 during her first pregnancy.

Today, the finished product is broken into four sections: “Life at Conception,” “Taking Care,” “How Pregnancy Ends,” and “After.” Storyboard caught up with Carmon to delve into how she brought this work to fruition, and the thread that has animated her coverage for more than a decade. Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, is followed by an annotated excerpt from the book.

Your first book was about the life and legacy of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Can you share a bit about how that book writing experience felt different from this one or influenced your approach this time?

That experience was different in every possible way. For that book, I was approached by Julia Cheiffetz, an editor at HarperCollins at the time, to write “Notorious RBG” after the moniker had already become a phenomenon. This was around November 2014. My co-author, Shauna Knizhnik, had started a [Notorious RBG] Tumblr. Our task was to figure out how to make this more than just a printed-out meme — how to tell a story, while also being true to the spirit of the Tumblr and phenomenon. It was a really fun collaborative exercise. We both did reporting and I did the writing. 

We had about six months to write that book. I took six weeks off, so it was a real crash course in writing, and then it immediately became an enormous success. It sold well over half a million copies. But it was a completely different endeavor than a traditional reported nonfiction book, like this one.

My two books came out almost exactly 10 years apart. What the first book did is bought me some time to figure out what I wanted to do. I quit my job at NBC. I started working on another book proposal that I ended up not pursuing. I got swept up in the reporting on the #MeToo movement. I was a full-time freelancer at the Washington Post between 2017 and 2018, breaking the story of the Charlie Rose sexual harassment allegations and sexual harassment allegations at CBS. Then I got hired at New York magazine and immediately after Justice Kennedy retired, one of the first stories I was covering was Brett Kavanaugh.

How do you see these works in conversation with each other and your other coverage on reproductive care? How would you describe the throughline of your reporting over the last dozen years?

On a woman’s right to choose an abortion, Justice Ginsburg famously said, “When government controls that decision for her, she’s being treated as less than a full adult human being responsible for her own choices.” I've been really interested in the way that reproduction is such a core nexus of our ideas about gender and power. Justice Ginsburg was deeply committed to a vision where every person can decide their gender identity and way of being in the world, and their pregnancy, on their own terms. That’s certainly a throughline between writing a biography of her and writing about American reproduction as it’s lived in the world today.

Books of this scope and rigor are time-consuming. But there’s also the quality of timing in terms of when people are interested in a particular news cycle. How did you balance the speed and urgency of what was happening in the national climate with the reality that this would be a lengthy project, and toggle between those competing pressures?

This was a timeless story that became more salient to people — that they understood better — because the Dobbs decision was bringing everything to a head. To me, there was no particular rush. But I understood that there was a market reason to sell the proposal during this window because that was when publishers were interested in this subject.

I've been doing this for long enough to see the news cycle move on and come back. The pendulum swings. I don't think it's possible to time these things, given the amount of time that it takes to actually write a book. It’s more like luck. Unless you’re writing a crash. But for the first book, I remember people thinking, “Are people going to still care about Ruth Bader Ginsburg a year later?” And they did. Nobody has a crystal ball.

I wouldn't have done the mad scramble to put together this book proposal postpartum if there hadn’t been fear that people would lose interest in this topic. But I took my time on the reporting. It was three years between when the proposal was finished and the book came out.

Can you talk about your relationship with your agent and how that person plays a role in shaping your early conception of a project?

My friend and now colleague, Rebecca Traister, asked me sometime around 2013 if I wanted an introduction to her agent at the time, Linda Loewenthal, who had asked if we knew each other. I met with her and was impressed with the fact that when I told her that I had no ideas for books and wasn't sure if I wanted to write one, she patiently continued to take an interest in what I cared about and what I was working on. She really did that. She waited for me to be ready.

“Notorious RBG” had appeared because my former boss at Jezebel, Anna Holmes, was originally approached for “Notorious RBG” by Julia Cheiffetz. Anna asked me if I wanted to do it and recommended me to Julia because I was covering the Supreme Court and I was interested in the law. That honestly landed in my lap. I had to write my vision of it and interview for it, but I didn’t seek it out. The ensuing period, as I mentioned, I was really just deeply engaged in other reporting — none of which naturally seemed to lead itself to a book. I pursued a couple of other ideas but there was nothing that lit me on fire. Linda was incredibly patient and we kept having conversations. The greatest asset that I had with her as my partner is that she kept in touch with me. She would gently prod me, but she never encouraged me to do something just for the sake of selling a book. Given how draining and taxing writing a book can be, it really has to be worth it to you as a writer and a reporter.

How did you think about your presence in the story as a narrator, and ultimately what you wanted your presence to be on the page? What informed your choices about how much of yourself you wanted in this story, versus the other subjects you follow?

I was mostly reluctant to write about myself, in part because I don't think I'm that interesting. And I don't think my story is that interesting or unusual. But what I realized is that I wanted to explain to the reader how my thinking evolved from being a reporter covering abortion for over 10 years to someone being pregnant during Covid and when the Dobbs decision came out.

The book went through a lot of different drafts and formats. At one point, my editor had suggested a possible way to structure it as a journey into pregnancy in America, narrating my reporting in the first person and largely chronologically. It didn’t work for this book because I didn’t feel that consistently telling it through my eyes added much. Instead, the stories begin in the third person omniscient, the chronology guided by the characters’ experiences, and I come in only when absolutely necessary. 

But I wanted the reader to understand where my own perspective and stakes came from. What was my sense of shock at experiencing pregnancy care in New York City? Why was I interested in the death of women at Woodhull Hospital, both as its own standalone outrage that told us something about New York City but also based on the feeling that this is my community? I almost went to that hospital for my own care and I understood why people would seek care there.

Journalists are traditionally trained out of the “I” and first-person. How comfortable are you, in general, with centering your perspective in your journalistic work or analysis?

Most of the time, I prefer to let the reporting speak for itself. But I also think that the nature of the book is so much about people's embodied experiences in the world — how they are different depending on who you are and where you live, but also a kind of universal throughline about the vulnerability of pregnancy and the potential power involved in making decisions about pregnancy. In that sense, I felt like I needed to lay all my cards out on the table. That involved both talking about my own privilege and my own values, because this was also a work of opinionated reporting that’s transparent about where I'm coming from. This is important when talking about a really contentious issue.

In some cases, the reporting and my own pursuit of it were impossible to leave out. I wound up meeting one of the five women I follow in the book at a picnic in the park a few blocks from my house. I think it's more powerful and interesting to say that I wasn't even looking for that story. It came to me. I could have written about two other subjects, Christine and Jose, without describing my own involvement. But it felt more honest and illuminating for the reader to experience what it was like to meet Jose, interview him and wind up having our daughters play together. He burst into tears at the dinner table. All of us were sitting down having a chicken dinner, and we talked about how my daughter had not had to learn about what death was at age three, but his daughter had.

How did you know when you’d found the right subjects, the five that you ultimately included in the book? What signaled to you that they were the people who would reflect and embody the story?

The book went through a few different drafts and structures. I worked with a freelance editor, Jane Fransson, during the process who helped me stay on track. At some point, Alessandra Bastagli became the editor of the book. She had the willingness to get in the weeds about structure in a helpful way. Because the book is so sprawling and ambitious, there were a lot of different ways that it could be structured. But it had to not feel jumbled or confusing.

The structure I laid out in my proposal was to follow women during their pregnancies. But what made it difficult to stick to that is one of the subjects, Dr. Yaschica Robinson, was such an important part of the book but is not pregnant during the course of the reporting. For another subject, Hali, most of what’s narrated about her happened after she was pregnant. I also had to figure out where all the history and policy should go. Nothing seemed to be working. 

Then I reread “Evicted,” by Matthew Desmond, which had been one of my earliest inspirations for the book in terms of structure. I was also trying to figure out: How many people is too many people for a reader to follow? In Evicted, there are many different throughlines but you never feel lost in it. You feel fully immersed. What really inspired me about that book was that deeply reported narrative — in Desmond’s case, a totally third-person omniscient narrator — moves so gracefully between narration, history and the policy of why this is happening.

What surprised me is that “Evicted” has a character who’s a landlady, not a tenant. Everyone else is a tenant. The landlady is the lens through which you understand the industry and why it is the way it is. I realized that Dr. Robinson — although a much more positive, inspiring figure than “Evicted”’s landlady subject — was someone who was on the inside of pregnancy care. She was providing both abortions and OB-GYN pregnancy care, prenatal care and birth care. The fact that it was so hard to do what she did — she was constantly swimming against this tide of those who wanted to treat pregnant people as either not capable of making their own decisions, or put them on a conveyor belt towards physicians’ or hospitals’ or the state’s priorities — allowed me to tell this piece of the story. It also allowed me to tell a really important history of how the racial and gendered roots of pregnancy care in this country took place in Alabama.

Through each of my five subjects, you see a different part of the puzzle of American reproduction — whether that’s infertility and miscarriage, abortion, birth, the eradication of midwifery, the rise of the OB-GYN, the marginalization of abortion, or the criminalization of pregnancy. My hope was that all of these parts would end up naturally flowing from them.

What tips or insights do you have for reporters in the midst of a narrative book project where the reporting is so expansive? 

I got this advice from the beginning, but I did not follow it and I hope others can follow it: write contemporaneously with the reporting. Keep writing even when you feel like you have no idea what’s in the book. I wish I had done this more. For me, the reporting flows so much more naturally. I find the writing excruciating. Not that reporting is easy, but I always feel the most connected to why I do this when I'm in a long conversation with someone about something that happened to them or that they experienced.

It's so easy to spend every waking minute reporting, especially because I was taking reporting trips to Alabama with a 2-year-old and an infant at home. Every time I went on the road, it was an additional lift at home for my husband and the web of child care we had been able to set up. I had to make the most of the reporting trips. I also took two spurts of unpaid book leave from my job at New York magazine.

What has the marketing experience been like since the book was released? What’s surprised you most about that leg of the journey? 

I've been really grateful for the reaction so far because this is the first book that was entirely my own conception, so to speak. I had no idea what to expect in terms of how people would engage with it, but I feel honored that they’ve done so thoughtfully. 

A lot of the progressive and feminist media and Twitter that helped make “Notorious RBG” a success simply don't exist anymore. It’s a different information environment, an environment with extreme billionaire backlash against these notions. Certain coercive and limited ideas about reproduction are being pushed on us. So in that sense, it’s more countercultural to tell a harder and more complicated story about pregnancy that’s not just, “You should be a Tradwife.” 

Even though I miss the feminist blogosphere, I’ve had the opportunity to be in conversation with amazing feminist podcasts and newsletters that didn't exist 10 years ago, like Jessica Valenti’s Substack or Kate Manne’s. Despite that a bunch of billionaires intentionally dismantled a lot of mainstream media, and also progressive and feminist media, so far it feels like people who want to have these conversations are finding this work. There are powerful forces who don't want these stories told — all different kinds of stories, including the one that I chose here. The challenge has always been how to bring these works out in a way that's sustainable. I just feel really lucky to get to do this while it’s still possible. 

***

Annotation: ‘Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America’

Part One: Life at Conception

Chapter 5: Yashica Robinson
Huntsville, Alabama

One summer, when Yashica Robinson was fourteen, she kept delaying her return from Alabama, where she was staying with her grandmother, to Atlanta, where she lived with her mother. Finally, her mother called and said, “What’s going on, Chi-Chi? Are you pregnant?” It had to have been maternal intuition. A doctor back home in Atlanta confirmed she was expecting. Yashica doesn’t remember discussing abortion with her mother, just what her mother said: “We’re here for you. You’re going to be fine. We’ll get through this together.”[annotation q="Carly Stern: Why did you decide to open the chapter here and introduce Yashica through this moment?" a="Irin Carmon: Unlike the other four women whose stories are narrated in “Unbearable,” Yashica’s trajectory is primarily about her vision and her work rather than a particular pregnancy experience. We see firsthand what a doctor who wants all pregnancy care to be better is up against. Even so, I wanted the reader to understand her as an actual living person, which means understanding how her mission was shaped by her early pregnancy experiences."] 

They’d gotten through plenty already. Her family had moved constantly. Yashica had a vague notion that her dad died when she was two, but she wasn’t quite sure, and she didn’t remember him. Everything was hard, and throughout the time Yashica was in middle school and high school, her mother drank too much, but Yashica was bright. She excelled in math and science, and teachers were impressed with her quiet seriousness. 

Yashica noticed the disappointment in the other adults who learned that she was pregnant and planned to carry to term. They told her they’d thought she was so smart — with the past tense implying they no longer believed that about her. Yashica didn’t need any help feeling more ashamed or disappointed in herself.

[annotation q="Presumably you interviewed Yashica as an adult, but these memories of hers are from long ago. In your conversations, did she find it easy to recall specifics and emotions from this earlier time of life? And more broadly, how do you approach interviewing sources about personal details that happened so long ago?" a="Yashica — I still find it hard not to call her Dr. Robinson — had spoken publicly about her two pregnancies in her teens, so I knew she’d be open to being asked about it. However, she’s a quite reserved person, who plainly hates talking about herself. And she’s one of the busiest people I’ve ever spent time with. Just following her around for a few days was exhausting, and while I was asleep some of that time, she was delivering babies. But in between the daily action of her life, we had some interviews just the two of us, or just her husband, Yashica and me, that were more unguarded — maybe because she began to trust me, or maybe because she was so exhausted. Those conversations led to some of the most illuminating details."] 

But the doctors at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta were different. It was true that Grady was a place for poor people where you needed to plan to be all day, waiting in line for the pharmacy in the basement for hours and hours or to be seen at the ER. In those years, there were so many teen pregnancies at Grady that it had its own dedicated clinic for them. It wasn’t a guarantee that the doctors there would see Yashica as more thana statistic, just another pregnant Black girl. But they were kind. They treated her like a human being.

When her mother began having seizures, Yashica, now a mother herself and in her first couple of years of high school, found herself back at Grady, waiting again and again for their turn with the doctors. She didn’t understand until much later that her mother’s recurring seizures were caused by alcohol withdrawal, which in turn correlated to when the money had run out.

One of the nights Yashica had to call an ambulance to their home, one EMT attended her mother, while the other kept her company at the kitchen table. He handed her a cheap blue stethoscope and put it around her neck. As a kid, her dream for the future had been to work in a grocery store, which she saw as a place of abundance. She wanted to scan products and produce, listen to that satisfying beep again and again, put the brand-new items in the bag. In that moment with the EMT, though, she decided she could be a doctor. And not just any kind of doctor, but a doctor to girls like her. [annotation q="I really like how you framed this key inflection point in her life in this paragraph." a="There’s so much in “Unbearable” about the medical system mistreating vulnerable pregnant people. It was refreshing, and surprising to me, that Yashica’s origin story was actually being treated like a human being by medical providers, and how just a glimpse at something better made her want to be like them."] 

Defying everyone else’s expectations, Yashica returned to school. She didn’t stop dreaming of being a doctor even when she found out she was pregnant a second time, while still in high school. She considered abortion, as she had done with her first pregnancy. But both times she was young, trying to figure things out, and her mother was dying. Soon it was too late to even consider doing anything. Each time, she carried to term. At her mother’s funeral, she held a newborn, a mother of two while still in high school. Her grandmother, who had never been taught to read or write, did the preschool dropoff so her granddaughter could return to high school.

Yashica thought of herself as an obedient person. When the school counselor she worked for part-time told her to fill out college applications, she did it, even as she wondered how she would pay for it. When she was told she was good at science and math and should study engineering, she complied. Despite everything she had on her plate, despite it being the fifth high school she’d attended in four years, she managed to graduate as co-salutatorian of her class.

Yashica was offered a full scholarship to study chemistry at Talladega College, a historically Black college in Alabama just under two hours away. So that she could focus on her studies, her son’s paternal grandparents took in her older son, while her grandmother took care of the baby in her senior-citizen apartment complex. Soon enough, Yashica returned to Atlanta, this time to get one step closer to her dream: She’d been accepted to medical school at Morehouse. She had even saved up enough to buy a modest house, with her grandmother co-signing the deed, that would be big enough for Yashica to live under one roof with her boys. At night, she would fall asleep reading medical textbooks, and her sons would gently spread a blanket over her and her books. [annotation q="This is a lovely detail." a="The reader might begin this section with certain expectations — or attach stereotypes — about what they’re going to hear, based on how Yashica’s story begins. I tried instead to be as specific as possible, and that included the beauty of how Yashica’s community supported her."] 

Part Two: Taking Care

[annotation q="Can you share a bit about how you constructed these different parts? What did you want to set up with this section, “Taking Care?”" a="The first section, “Life at Conception,” introduces each of the five women in their lives leading up to the events of the book. Taking Care follows them as they navigate the uniquely American system of pregnancy care — four as patients, Yashica as a provider of abortions for as long as she could and respectful obstetric care — in all its maddening legal and social and political ramifications. It’s also where I lay out some of the historic underpinnings of what they’re experiencing."]

Yashica Robinson
Huntsville, Alabama

As a young resident at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s medical school in 2004, Yashica learned how to perform abortions without thinking too much of it. In those days, UAB’s medical school had a designated day for abortion provision. A couple of years later, by then in private practice, Yashica casually mentioned to another doctor that she’d volunteered to fill in at the abortion clinic in Huntsville. Doctors had been rotating in at the clinic since the death of its longtime provider and owner, Dr. Carl Palmer, one of the very few Black OB/GYNs of his Alabama generation.

“Don’t ever say that again,” the other doctor hissed at Yashica. “What you do during your downtime is your downtime. But don’t ever say that out loud.” Yashica didn’t know you weren’t supposed to even say the word “abortion.” It was strange to her. Wasn’t abortion just part of obstetrics?

Dr. Palmer had thought it was. [annotation q="Why did this feel like the right place to delve into this new subject, Dr. Palmer, and his backstory?" a="Through Yashica’s coming of age as a doctor, we see the dangers and the bureaucratic nightmares of providing abortion care in America. Dr. Palmer represents the first generation of legal providers after Roe; Yashica’s generation is living through Roe’s end. And both are Black doctors deeply committed to serving the Black community in the South, which adds another level of richness — and challenge — to their stories."]

Born in 1949, he was just old enough to remember medicine when abortion was illegal, when an entire ward of a hospital would be given over to care for patients suffering complications from unsafe abortions. When people started offering abortion services in Huntsville, a few years after the Supreme Court struck down the abortion bans in 1973 Palmer started moonlighting at the local clinics, until the day someone threw a brick through his window. Then, in 1998, an anti-abortion zealot bombed a Birmingham abortion clinic, killing an off-duty police officer and maiming the registered nurse working there. Palmer decided he wouldn’t be scared off, and in 2001, after meeting a young and energetic college student named Dalton Johnson, the two decided to team up and step up for abortion care.

Dalton, a sturdy man with a thin mustache who grew up in Ohio, had thought of his mother’s experience when he’d heard of Dr. Palmer’s plans. [annotation q="I appreciate the way you illustrate how for many clinicians, particularly the ones you highlight, their decision to pursue medicine was rooted in an early personal experience." a="I met Dalton back in 2014 when I was reporting on the stakes for a Supreme Court case for MSNBC. That’s also when I met Yashica — she walked in halfway through our interview, and had an immediately arresting presence. Both of them could have had quietly successful lives doing almost anything else. I remain moved that they chose this much harder path, which is so connected to how their lives unfolded."]

His mother, an educator, had dreamed of a larger family, but after having Dalton and his sister, she decided two was enough. At the hospital for a tubal ligation, the nurses were so abusive to her she ended up reporting them. Dalton wasn’t sure if they treated her that way because his mother was Black or because they wrongly assumed, based on her light complexion, that she was white. Either way, he was struck by the disapproval of what he thought should be someone’s choice. Having kids, he reflected, was a lifelong commitment until you hit the dirt, and it was a hell of a commitment for people under the best of circumstances.

At the time there were over a dozen abortion clinics in the state, two others in Huntsville alone, and you could still do terminations in a doctor’s office: a prenatal appointment in one room, a Pap smear in another, an abortion recovery a few doors down. Still, even then, no landlord wanted to lease to an abortion clinic. It took eighteen months to get a variance to provide abortions in the building on Madison Street where Palmer had his private practice. [annotation q="This detail is super interesting; I haven’t thought as much about the real estate component of establishing abortion clinics." a="I’ve been covering the legal and political battles over abortion for about fifteen years, and until the Supreme Court conservatives had the votes to actually ban abortion, almost everything was a proxy war, and it was often about zoning and regulations. The idea was to bury the motives in technical details, while also portraying abortion providers as sloppy and dangerous."]

The book of regulations on abortion grew thicker and thicker, clinics kept closing, and by the time Palmer died, providing abortions had been fully divorced from all other reproductive care. But Dalton decided to keep going.

He needed a doctor, of course. At first, he was able to recruit OB/GYNs to fly in from as far away as Los Angeles. But Alabama’s laws at the time dictated that any abortion provider needed a backup physician with admitting privileges at a local hospital, which meant he needed someone right there in Huntsville. Dalton sent letters to every OB/GYN within thirty miles.

He found one, another friend of Dr. Palmer’s, who didn’t want to provide abortions but agreed to provide emergency coverage. Still, within a few months, the protesters were outside the man’s children’s school — a Catholic school. They soon had to change schools. The doctor not only didn’t back down, he started providing abortions after all.

Then came Yashica. After residency, she’d begun providing OB/GYN care in eastern Alabama, where she’d made a two-year commitment through a federal program to place physicians in underserved areas. A stint in a group private practice made clear there was too much opposition to her providing abortions alongside other care, so in 2010, she opened her own practice to be able to work on her own terms. In 2013, Dalton convinced her to put down roots in Huntsville, a growing city with a worldly streak thanks to aerospace and tech businesses. By then they had admitted to themselves they were more than just colleagues in the trenches; in 2021, they married. They complemented each other. She was guarded but propulsive; he was easygoing and chatty. She had the big ideas and the racing brain, and he was the practical one, the numbers guy. He was the one to say, “Well wait, we got to pay this off first. We got to do this and that . . .” She was the one to reply, “It’s never going to be perfect. Don’t tell me that we can’t do it.’”

The medical establishment in Alabama did not believe abortion was just a part of obstetrics, or if anyone did, they didn’t want someone else to find out. Yashica was treated as a pariah before she even arrived in Huntsville. She asked around fifty local doctors to serve as her required emergency backup. Some didn’t even bother to call back. There was the one who told her she would back her up, but on the day of Yashica’s orientation, a hospital official interrupted to tell her that the doctor had withdrawn and Yashica couldn’t start after all. 

With the help of so many around her, Yashica had gone beyond what anyone had expected of her, and in exchange she determined she would try to give the patients she served—so many of them Black women on Medicaid — more than the system had ever allowed them to expect. Above all, she gave them the respect of assuming they knew what they needed to do with their own lives. If they wanted to have a baby, she would help them do that. If they didn’t, she would help them do that, too, on their own terms. What she didn’t expect is how hard both parts of that mission could be. [annotation q="What a powerful paragraph. I think it really effectively encapsulates the driving purpose and tension in Yashica’s story." a="Thank you. Yashica was one of the very first people I knew I wanted to write about in “Unbearable.” She was living and working the argument I was seeking to make: how abortion politics had impoverished all of pregnancy care and how deeply interconnected different pregnancy experiences are in people’s actual lives. There are a lot of reckless or cruel providers in the book, so it was also important to me to show someone working within the system to make it better."]

An abortion has a beginning and an end, a predictable timeline. Above all, Yashica could feel like she had helped in a concrete way. Her patients’ biggest concern was that they had a pregnancy that it just wasn’t the time for. That was a problem she could do something about. And because abortion had always been hard, an entire infrastructure had sprung up around supporting ending a pregnancy. If a patient couldn’t pay for travel or childcare or the procedure itself, the clinic could connect them to abortion funds in Alabama and beyond. There were local escorts outside in pinnies to help patients walk through the protesters or even pick them up from the airport and take them to their hotels. They had become their own solution. They had to.

But even when women wanted to go through with their pregnancies, Yashica faced a challenge. What was she supposed to do when Alabama Medicaid, which covers at least half of births in the state, would cover only sixteen inpatient days during a pregnancy, no matter how sick or high risk a patient was, and it seemed like the patients were getting sicker and sicker? The reimbursement rates were pitifully low — $1,690 for an entire pregnancy, from the earliest prenatal appointment to delivery — and almost all of that was for the actual birth, which could incentivize doctors to quickly cycle patients through lest they miss their payday. [annotation q="Why did it feel important for you to connect the dots here between financial incentives and clinical practice?" a="In America, healthcare is a business. Even doctors who want to make decisions based on both medical necessity and respect for patient autonomy face financial realities. That includes paying their own bills and facing pressure and second guessing from the hospitals they work with."]

Outside the abortion clinic, protesters were warning of lifelong trauma from an abortion, but that wasn’t the reason women were bursting into tears during their first visits to Yashica’s office.

It was the general disrespect they’d felt getting routine pregnancy and birth care. Some felt bullied into C-sections by doctors who quickly opted for surgery rather than risk a lawsuit over a poor fetal outcome. Some spoke about nonconsensual episiotomies — incisions made from vagina to anus during delivery — once routinely performed and sometimes justified as preventing spontaneous perineal tearing. (Study after study has found it actually does the opposite, often causing worse lacerations and leaving untold numbers of women with painful recoveries, incontinence, and sexual dysfunction.)

The protesters outside the abortion clinic had initially left Yashica alone, probably because they didn’t realize that the young Black woman with the reserved demeanor was actually the doctor. But once they figured out who she was, they started showing up outside her other offices, where the state wouldn’t even let her provide abortions, to shout at women coming in for Pap smears or prenatal checkups, “Don’t you deserve better than an abortion provider? She murders babies all week.” [annotation q="What are some of your reporting techniques for extracting these kinds of details, like specific dialogue? Did this dialogue come from Yashica or the patients she treated?" a="I heard these stories from Yashica, her husband Dalton, their staff, local activists and doulas, and patients."]

More than one patient pulling out of the narrow driveway at Madison Street into traffic became so flustered by the protesters that she got into a fender bender.

Some of her nonabortion patients did balk when they found out she provided them. But sometimes they chose her precisely for that reason. “Well, you really took care of me when I was in a time of need, now I’m in a better position to continue this pregnancy,” one told her. Sometimes it went the opposite way. Two of her patients had come to the abortion clinic and then changed their minds. Yashica delivered those babies, and then continued to provide the patients with care. [annotation q="This framing as a two-way street is compelling." a="The anti-abortion movement promotes the notion that abortion providers only ever push patients to end their pregnancies, and also that abortion patients are somehow separate from others. The reality is far more nuanced."]

It was only possible because she was one of a dwindling number of independent practitioners; working for a hospital or large group practice might be less arduous, but in Alabama they’d never stand for an employee performing abortions. Doing it all, abortions and births and all manners of gynecological care, helped Yashica see things other people didn’t. An abortion later in pregnancy is more complicated, because the patient’s cervix has to dilate enough to remove a larger fetus. The traditional method is laminaria, actual seaweed that is placed in the vagina and that slowly expands as it takes on fluid; later on, a synthetic version was developed. The procedure can take days, so as a result, some people ended up driving back and forth from as far as Mississippi and Texas for each appointment, sometimes even in the same day, because they couldn’t afford to stay in Huntsville or just needed to be home for their kids.

In her obstetrics training, Yashica had helped run a study for inducing labor in patients whose water broke prematurely, using a Foley catheter. She wondered if that cheap catheter couldn’t be combined with misoprostol to soften and then open the cervix far more quickly. She was right, and soon other clinicians in other states asked her to teach them how to do it. Yashica was then invited to write up her research and give talks about it. The new method allowed them to do more procedures in a single day and see far more patients more quickly.

But her willingness to listen to her patients — whether and how they wanted to have a baby, or whether they wanted an abortion — cost her institutionally. She already knew that the chief of the OB department at the hospital was the medical director of the local crisis pregnancy center, dedicated to talking women out of abortions by any means necessary.

Another nurse was always chatty when Yashica ran into her around town, but when she’d say, see you around, talk soon, the nurse would respond, “But not at the hospital.” She meant that she couldn’t risk being seen being friendly with someone like Yashica. She soon learned nurses had been instructed to watch her, to take note of what Yashica did and write up anything they found irregular. [annotation q= Did she talk to you about how this kind of treatment impacted her on a personal or emotional level?" a="It didn’t end up in the book because of the structure of the narrative, but at one point in our conversations, Yashica broke down in tears of exhaustion and frustration at how she’d been targeted simply for treating each patient like an individual who deserved control over her care."]

The nurses at the hospital wrote her up whenever she did anything the other doctors might not do, even if it wasn’t actually against hospital policy, like attempting a vaginal birth instead of cesarean surgery when the fetus is breech, positioned feet down. But Yashica was experienced in vaginal breech birth and successfully attended several such births a year. Another time she got written up for not doing a C-section on a patient with preeclampsia, meaning her blood pressure got dangerously high, because the nurses thought she let the woman labor too long and that Yashica should have done a surgery, even though both mother and baby were doing fine and the official guidelines don’t specifically recommend a C-section for preeclampsia, though inducing labor might be indicated. Fed up by a series of frivolous investigations, Yashica told the doctor overseeing the latest one, “The next time you call me in here, you need to make sure that you have your facts straight and you have somebody in here that’s smarter than I am, that knows what they’re talking about, because this is a waste of my time.”

He responded, “I know you’re a very busy woman. And in the end, you may be right, but you would still have to justify why you’re operating against a community standard.” It didn’t matter that the actual case had just proven the “community standard” wrong. 

Yashica was still upset about the treatment of the teenager who went into labor well before viability. The fetus had no chance of survival, but because it was breech, a doctor in a leadership position said either Yashica should do a C-section or they would. Doing so that early in pregnancy would consign the teen to future, riskier surgeries, but the family consented. The way Yashica saw it, they had this little Black person telling them one thing and then you had this whole team of white people that came in and said that she needed a C-section. The patient was Black, but Yashica knew even Black people felt like white people had more authority and more knowledge. Yashica wasn’t going to abandon her to another doctor. But after doing the surgery, Yashica left the hospital in tears. The baby died six hours later.

Around Huntsville, Yashica started getting a reputation as someone who would actually listen to her pregnant patients. She started agreeing to accept transfers almost up to a patient’s due date. One day, a pregnant woman sobbed in her office and asked Yashica if she would get her medical records for her. Yashica was baffled. “Those are your records. You hired that doctor. That doctor works for you. You don’t owe them anything.” The patient kept sobbing. She sighed. “I’ll get your records for you. But you know, you shouldn’t be afraid to get your records.”

Not that she blamed her. People, especially pregnant women, had come to believe that doctors had the power and authority and that there was no challenging that. She was mystified by the patients who asked if she would let her be mobile during their labors or keep them on their backs hooked to the bed. Let them? They were adults. Wasn’t this supposed to be about informed decision-making? [annotation q="I think the way you build up here to this underpinning question of autonomy is very effective." a="It was so striking to me how bodily autonomy is so central to the conversation about abortion, but gets jettisoned entirely in other pregnancy care conversations as “doctor knows best.”"]

Yashica wasn’t sure what made her different. Maybe it was that she had never believed the power was hers to give.

***

The story of how American reproductive care had become dominated by white-coated patriarchs had begun right there in Alabama, less than two hundred miles south of where Yashica lived and worked. In June 1845, Montgomery doctor J. Marion Sims was called to attend Anarcha, an enslaved seventeen-year-old. [annotation q="In terms of structure, what signaled to you that this was the right place to leap backward in time to provide historical context? How did you think about managing this transition from Yashica to Sims?" a="An obvious way to structure the book was to begin with the history, but that felt inert to me. At a certain point it became clear that nesting the bloody and coercive history of medicine within the story of someone who was breaking with that tradition would be far more powerful. Yashica fully understands that history as a Black woman in the south — its effects are still being felt — and to the extent legally possible, her practice is the antithesis of what Sims did."]

Born and raised in South Carolina, Sims had come to Alabama in disgrace. His first two patients in his hometown, both babies, had died under his care, which consisted of slashing the infant gums to try to treat diarrhea. (In fairness, the medical training of the day included a few months of book learning and no hands-on experience.) Sims meant to seek his fortune in the west, but got waylaid in Alabama. 

Anarcha’s fetus had become compacted in three days of stalled labor. The ordeal tore a fistula, a hole in the vaginal canal that exposed it to either the rectum or the bladder, causing painful and embarrassing leaks, and Anarcha soon lost control of both her bladder and rectum. This patient visit would put Sims on the road to being recognized as the Father of Modern Gynecology, and Anarcha to immense suffering.

Black women’s wombs had become a matter of profound commercial interest to plantation masters after they could no longer bring in new captives to enslave, the transatlantic slave trade having been banned in 1808. “Black procreation helped to sustain slavery, giving slave masters an economic incentive to govern Black women’s reproductive lives,” reproductive justice scholar Dorothy Roberts observed. She quotes Thomas Jefferson’s letter to his son-in-law in 1820: “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm.” What rendered these words doubly chilling was that sexual abuse of enslaved people was sickeningly common; Jefferson himself fathered at least six children with a woman he enslaved, Sally Hemings. It took him decades to free his own children.

As such, fistulas threatened the enslavers’ bottom line. They were a particular problem among enslaved women, claimed a friend of Sims and fellow doctor, because their births were attended by “the ignorant midwives of their own color.” While it’s certainly possible that untrained attendants were a factor, the doctor doesn’t mention the women’s lives of hard labor or malnutrition or the fact that according to Sims himself, when he was first called to help Anarcha’s stalled delivery, he applied forceps to the fetus, a decision at least one historian has speculated could have actually caused her fistula.

Sims didn’t even want to try to fix what ailed Anarcha, according to his own autobiography. “If there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis,” he later wrote. He said as much to other plantation masters who came to him reporting the same problem among two more enslaved women, Lucy and Betsey. By chance, though, Sims soon came upon a possible solution to access the unreachable organs — first a pewter spoon, then a type of speculum he became famous for inventing — and he decided to try his luck at operating on the fistulas. “I had a little hospital of eight beds, built in the corner of my yard, for taking care of my negro patients,” he wrote.

With this in place, “I made this proposition to the owners of the negroes: If you will give me Anarcha and Betsey for experiment, I agree to perform no experiment or operation on either of them to endanger their lives, and will not charge a cent for keeping them, but you must pay their taxes and clothe them.” Eventually, Sims purchased an unnamed enslaved woman directly in order to continue his experimental surgeries on her. 

What Anarcha and Betsey and Lucy thought of what was to be visited on their bodies, often in front of audiences of white male doctors and other prominent citizens, is not in the historical record. Having a fistula was undoubtedly miserable; Sims asserted that “death would have been preferable” to the pain and stench they experienced. But they could not have anticipated what their masters had consented to on their behalf when they were handed off to Sims, in hopes of restoring their ability to produce new forced laborers. [annotation q="This whole section is so harrowing and horrific." a="It can be hard to read, but without confronting the roots of reproductive medicine, none of the current inequalities can be fully grasped."]

Then as now, there was at least a stated notion that Black women didn’t experience pain as white women did, though it is probably truer to say that these doctors simply did not care. “Physicians described in their writings how and why they had to restrain their enslaved patients during childbirth and surgery,” notes historian Deirdre Cooper Owens. “Why would this practice be necessary if black women were impervious to pain?”

Sims himself was under no illusion that the subjects of his experimentation could not suffer. With Lucy, he tried to leave a sponge inside her body to soak up the urine, “a very stupid thing for me to do,” he conceded, because of course it caused a massive infection. “Lucy’s agony was extreme,” he wrote. She was near death. Of another surgery, Sims wrote, “That was before the days of anesthetics, and the poor girl, on her knees, bore the operation with great heroism and bravery. I had about a dozen doctors there to witness the series of experiments I expected to perform.” [annotation q="Did the backbone of this section all stem from Sims’s writings? How did you find those materials?" a="I read Sims’s memoir, which is available as an ebook, as well as some important historical works: Deirdre Cooper Owens’s “Medical Bondage,” Harriet Washington’s “Medical Apartheid,” and Deborah Kuhn McGregor’s “From Midwives to Medicine,” to name a few."] In fact, surgical anesthesia was introduced during the several years Sims was performing trial and error on the enslaved women. Its use was demonstrated during surgery in 1846, a year after Sims began his work, and in childbirth the year after that.

Sims pronounced the thirtieth surgery performed on Anarcha to be a success, four years after she had come into his custody. By 1849, Sims was operating upon wealthy white women’s fistulas using anesthesia and offering them the kind of privacy and discretion that the women in his experimental hospital were never granted.

Sims could not have cured what ailed the white women had it not been for what the enslaved women endured. “Black women were used not solely for healing and research,” Cooper Owens writes, “but largely for the benefit of white women’s reproductive health.” She points out another contradiction: Medicine at the time performed a validating function for the lie that there were fundamental biological differences between “the races,” used to justify slavery and, later, state-sponsored segregation. Practicing on Black women’s bodies to serve white ones was a tacit acknowledgment of fundamental human sameness. 

Some of Sims’s peers regarded his experiments disapprovingly, not out of any special regard for his subjects, but because they preferred to experiment on pigs. The speculum he had invented also scandalized other doctors. The American Medical Association, newly formed in 1847 and eager to show how respectable professional medicine could be, was wary of a male doctor using his eyes, and not just touch, for a vaginal exam, lest he offend Victorian notions of modesty and gender separation. (They got over it: Sims later served as the organization’s president.) Images from the time show doctors in suits kneeling with their arms shoved under billowy skirts, or dispassionately an invisible hand as a clothed woman lay on a bed. No prurience here! Such delicacy, of course, was reserved for white women, whose newly reduced childbearing reproductive output particularly worried the new medical establishment. 

Across cultures and geography, reproductive healthcare — the whole span of it, including ending and continuing a pregnancy — had long been a domain for and by women. The word “midwife” derives from the middle English for “with woman,” but the tradition is much older and broader, not all of it captured by surviving documents. Two Hebrew midwives, Shifrah and Puah, described in the book of Exodus, refused Pharaoh’s orders to kill the firstborns of their people in birth; when called to explain, they lie and say that unlike Egyptian women, Hebrew women are vigorous and give birth before the midwife can reach them. There are records of Muslim midwives in medieval Iberia caring for women in birth and even testifying in courts. In the Christian Europe of the Middle Ages, the church deployed midwives to surveil potential sin and policed the midwives themselves for possible witchcraft or using herbs to perform abortions. [annotation q="You’ve brought the reader even deeper into history now and we have departed from Alabama. How did you think about keeping the reader’s attention throughout this denser expository section that’s more scholarly and less character-driven?" a="I was hoping to keep the voice as engaging as possible. These parallel histories of medicine and midwifery — and how one worked to crush the other — help us understand so much in the book: how obstetrics became so top down; the enduring racist disparity in reproductive medicine; why there are so many institutional barriers for Yashica when, as an obstetrician, she tries to collaborate with midwives for a safer alternative."]

What has been recorded of the care midwives gave, which is surely not all of what they did, includes prescribing herbs to try to end a pregnancy, and attending birth and its aftermath, as other women of the community assembled around the woman to support her.

So foreign was the presence of a man at birth that early on, male doctors were sometimes simply called “man midwives,” the rare example in which a man wasn’t assumed to be the norm.

Surgery had been the province of literal barbers and “sow-gelders,” who spayed pigs and sharpened their tools for the occasional human amputation. Until the late nineteenth century, surgical birth in the western world was almost always a deadly last resort, either done on an already-dead woman or with the understanding that she would not survive the slicing of the abdomen and the uterus to remove a fetus. Women were the ones in the room, navigating life and death, and both church and state feared how they might use that authority, especially to terminate pregnancies. And eventually men wanted in.

In the United States of the nineteenth century, a new generation of doctors, including Sims, were eager to differentiate themselves as the true professionals. They had new medical schools and associations and journals. And they found two major mechanisms to do so — cracking down on abortions and on midwives, who happened to be their major competition.

These men had watched with consternation as women figured out, on their own or with unregulated help from midwives and self-proclaimed doctors, how to prevent, plan, or end pregnancies, such that the number of children, on average, that American women bore decreased from seven children at the dawn of the nineteenth century to three or four at its close.

Credentialed doctors, they declared of themselves, weren’t like the traditional midwives who had controlled birth — at the time, many of them immigrants or Black women — and who were known to help women “restore their menses,” or end pregnancies through herbal concoctions. In birth, these doctors promised better results than midwives through the use of instruments like forceps, which midwives in Europe were often banned from using.

And they weren’t like the alleged quacks outside the new official medicine, the ones who advertised in the papers for abortion under names like Hooper’s Female Pills and Dr. Ryan’sWorm-destroying Sugar Plumbs. These doctors claimed clandestine abortion providers were putting women in danger, which may well have been true, although according to historian James Mohr, then as now, childbirth was far more dangerous. Doctors knew how to perform relatively safe abortions, but they also wanted to leave the decision about which procedures were medically necessary in their own hands. [annotation q="This last line is a conclusion you draw from your reporting. How did you think about the balance between laying out facts you found for readers and weaving in your own analysis, including when and where to assert your perspective?" a="The historical record actually shows doctors, many of them senior in the American Medical Association, being pretty explicit about all of this! But in general, I am transparent that the book has a particular perspective — unabashedly in favor of reproductive freedom and justice. To me, journalism is about process: reporting, research, challenging one’s assumptions, and putting as much of that on the page as possible. It does not require pretending that you don’t bring your own values and perspectives to what you’re writing about."] Influential physicians also stoked racist, nativist fears of a changing country. They wrung their hands at the arrival of millions of European immigrants, many Catholic or Jewish. In the 1860s, Dr. Horatio R. Storer, a Harvard professor who launched the physician anti-abortion crusade, openly worried about whether the children of “aliens” — immigrants — would supplant that of “our women.” It wasn’t enough for doctors to supplant abortionists; they had to put them out of business, one way or another, and one way was to declare abortion not only unsafe, but murderous. Storer took it upon himself to offer a new definition of pregnancy, citing advanced science. “Physicians have now arrived at the unanimous opinion, that the fetus in utero is alive from the very moment of conception,” he declared in 1867, and as such, physicians should oppose abortion.

***

Carly Stern is an independent reporter and editor based in Brooklyn who covers health, housing and economic security. Her enterprise work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Vox and The Guardian.

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Kate Sosin found their way to The 19th by a happy accident. After being laid off in 2020 from Logo TV, an offshoot of MTV focused on queer audiences, they were applying to any job postings they could find.

The 19th was then just an early seedling in the media ecosystem. The nonprofit news startup, which covers how politics and policy impact women and LGBTQ+ people, launched in January 2020 — moments before the world plunged into pandemic life. Sosin saw an open role for an LGBTQ+ beat reporter.

“I thought, ‘There's no way I'll get that, because every queer journalist I know is out of work,’” said Sosin, who’s based in Los Angeles. They also had no expectations for what the publication would become. “If I’m honest, I didn't think it was going to be a big deal. I was excited to get a job, but I just didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into.”

The 19th has since established itself as a respected nonprofit publication that’s partnered with outlets like The Texas Tribune, KFF Health News, The Guardian, and Teen Vogue. The newsroom earned two national Edward R. Murrow Awards in 2024 and 2025: one for breaking news coverage on Biden stepping down and Harris stepping up, and another for a series about being pregnant in a post-Roe v. Wade America. It also won an Online Journalism Award in 2024.

Sosin, meanwhile, has tackled a suite of subjects there with empathy and rigor. Whether it’s a story about the threats queer Native youth in South Dakota are facing or a spotlight on the legendary plaintiff Jim Obergefell, Sosin specializes in precisely situating the present moment within the sweep of history to provide rich context for readers.

“As a trans person, I have to write news that makes me want to get up in the morning,” Sosin said. “So I need to find a way to tell stories that are more constructive than just, ‘Here's another thing that has been taken away from you.’”

Storyboard spoke with Sosin about how to sustainably cover queer issues in today’s unrelenting political climate and how they honed their sense of the stories worth pursuing. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You've been covering the LGBTQ+ beat for a long time. What's been the biggest shift in your approach and priorities since the Trump administration took office?

I used to think I had to cover every story — and I kind of did. There were not other people doing this work, or there were fewer. Now I don't. Part of that is just that other people are doing it so I don't have to. Another part of it is that I can’t. It’s too sad. Every single story that’s a daily breaker, I just don't do. Because we're a nonprofit newsroom and everyone can pick up our stuff, if it's going to be done elsewhere, I'm going to not do it. They can read it elsewhere. Let me do something that has a bigger impact for us. This approach has been a lifesaver for me. 

Is this approach different from other places you’ve worked at? There’s a lot of pressure at daily news outlets to churn it out. Can you speak to how that mandate is different at The 19th or how you’ve carved it out to be different?

That’s been my whole struggle in journalism. Everyone's like, “We need a bite at that apple.” But do you really? Everybody wants that traffic. I get it. We want traffic too. We're still a business, even if we are a nonprofit. But we’ve continued to find that even if what we call “beat-building stories” are bringing some people in, it’s not that many people. Those are not the stories that draw in new readers because we're not the biggest mainstream newsroom. We don't have a staff that’s going to break that story first or pull in the whole nation. We're not CNN. So what can we offer that's going to be substantially different on day two that’s not already being offered? What can we offer that's going to enlighten, beyond the minute-to-minute breaking piece? That’s where we’ve learned to shine. 

There’s been an onslaught of news to cover since Trump took office, which we know is by design, and a truly overwhelming need for robust coverage on your beat in particular. But you’re one person. How has this climate shaped your instincts and choices when it comes to which stories to pursue and which to pass on?

My only goal is to not burn out. There have been so many moments in my career where I have burned out and I’ve been at risk of leaving journalism. The risk of burnout is so great when the news is so bleak. I know this is a time when I really need to do this job, and I need to do it well, and I need to do it with purpose. That means that I need to pace myself. 

I've tried really hard to work hard. But more than that, I’ve tried really hard to work sustainably. I don't work past my hours. When I leave work, I leave work. My life feels really big and a very small part of it is this job. When this administration came in, I reaffirmed that commitment. That looks like being nice to myself when I can. That looks like being OK with not covering some stories. That looks like focusing on one thing at a time. I have to be comfortable being slower. We all have to pace ourselves or we will succumb to the overwhelm, which is so easy to do. It’s such a stressful time.

These stories can be really tough and really sad. But folks at The 19th also do a good job highlighting things people are doing to make change and respond to this environment. How do you balance the breakdown between the reporting you want and need to do about problems versus solutions-oriented stories?

I don't have a ton of experience with solutions journalism. I've learned about it and I've done it, but I don't think about them as solutions stories. The only news that’s written for trans people is so devastating that if you just read trans news, you would not want to exist in the world after reading it. As a trans person, I have to write news that makes me want to get up in the morning. So I need to find a way to tell stories that are more constructive than just, “Here's another thing that has been taken away from you.”

But I also just don't feel that way about what's happening in the world. Our present moment is in a backlash because there's been so much progress made. I have a responsibility to communicate that what is happening is the result of incredible progress. We have to be responsible about it and not just information dump. I'm not looking for a silver lining as much as I am looking for an honest balance.

Do you find that your audience responds well to that? Do you have a sense of how they engage with stories that are more hopeful?

Our audience responds well to stories that are more nuanced. People always assume that an audience needs something really simple, as if audiences are somehow dumber than we are. They’re so smart. Every time I do a story, readers are like, “Here are all the things you got wrong. Here are all the ways you didn’t understand this.” And I'm like, “Thank you. You should have reported this, because you’re smarter than I am.” The more complicated you make a story, the more people you draw in. Because they see themselves in it.

How do you think about where the news ecosystem and industry is now in terms of the volume and quality of coverage of queer issues, particularly reporters with lived experience? How would you situate this moment in the landscape?

It's really cool. I look at the Trans Journalists Association, which didn't exist 10 years ago, and it has upward of 600 members. That’s crazy to me. I think back even further to when I started my career, which would have been 20 years ago, and the only other trans reporter I had ever met at that time was Monica Roberts, who’s no longer with us. 

I didn't know trans reporters. I didn't even want to be an LGBTQ+ beat reporter, it was just the only job I could get. Then I realized that being a trans person telling LGBTQ+ stories meant a lot to people, and that was a real job I could do. People didn't think of LGBTQ+ news. Now there are legions and legions of people doing this work. People are like, “You're an elder.” That's awesome. There are people doing so much cooler, better stuff. There’s so many people that I can’t keep up. They're all across newsrooms. Maybe the world feels really hard, but it's changing — and it’s changing really fast.

How do you talk about safety and privacy with your sources? Have those conversations shifted at all since the Trump administration took office and are you noticing sources are more concerned about that?

It's definitely become a greater concern. We’ve increased our safety protocols. I always was pretty cautious with sources about safety concerns. We’ll talk through, “Hey, if you go on the record and you're part of a national article, here are some things that can happen to you and you should be aware of that. Let's talk through the ramifications of how you decide to tell your story and what it means to share it.” But that’s heightened even more so now, especially if we get into things like immigration. 

It’s hard because there are ways in which I want to make greater exceptions that provide people with cover and anonymity. Yet we are less able to do that in this administration because we are ourselves more at risk as journalists if we do that. It has meant more difficult conversations. It probably has limited the stories that we can tell because our sources are less safe, which is a shame.

I’ve enjoyed how you pursue a really nice range of different kinds of reporting — some stories lean more heavily on narrative, while others are actionable and service-oriented. I thought the explainer earlier this year about passports was a good example of that. How do you think about what form a story should take when you start your reporting?

I don't really think about it that way. I think more in terms of, “What are people asking for?” With the passport story, so many people in my life were asking about this. To be honest, I was asking, too. I realized that I had all these questions, so what if I just answered those questions and used experts?

Usually if a piece is narrative-based, it's because someone has a story to tell or a story lends itself to an issue best. I report and report and report until the story just starts coming out of my brain. Sometimes that means I report too much, but this helps a story organize itself in my head. I’m at my best when I report it enough so that the story writes itself.

It doesn't sound like your editors are particularly prescriptive about the form a story needs to take. Is that a fair assessment?

My editors let me pick my stories, report them how I want to and turn them in on a timeline that makes sense for me. They give me a lot of space to do what I want to do. It's very rare that they say, “Do this and do it by this timeline.” Sometimes there is a deadline, obviously, because we're a newsroom. But for the most part, there’s a lot of room.

Your reporting is always grounded in the stories of real people living out the impacts of the policy choices you're writing about. How do you think about narrative in shorter enterprise pieces where the writing has to be economical because the real estate is limited?

That's actually my favorite. Sometimes it's just a few quotes or descriptions, or a few sentences, but you need to capture the essence of someone. It's a lovely little challenge to sew that together and give a snapshot of them. It’s really fun. We did this Voting Rights Act anniversary piece with little vignettes, about 300 words each. The questions are: Who is this person? What’s the elevator pitch version of them? What’s the most significant thing they said? What is the most significant thing that they've done? Why does it matter historically? By the time you start writing them, they’re done. For the most part, that’s all people want to read anyway.

What advice would you give to reporters on this beat right now, in this particular political climate?

Don't follow the news or be responsive to it. Create the news. 

It’s significant to me that everybody's writing stories about how all of our rights are being stripped away or asking, “Is gender-affirming care safe for kids or not?” Those guidelines have largely gone unchanged for years, but no one's reported that. Lawmakers continue to argue this, but the doctors don't. We're in this alternate reality where the news can change the outcome of people's lives. Our narratives can reshape our realities and how we perceive what is safe and what is not. But the truth of the matter is still the same: gender-affirming care has been found safe and effective. It's still prescribed. All the major medical associations back it. 

In terms of trans people participating in sports, there is science that still supports that trans women can compete in sports against cis women and there's no competitive advantage. But we don't report that anymore and engage in the noise instead. This defensive, silly, “Just present both sides of this argument without doing the actual research” is not good journalism. Go for the facts, and put them in the news.

***
Carly Stern is an independent reporter and editor based in Brooklyn who covers health, housing and economic security. Her enterprise work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Vox and The Guardian.

The post Journalist Kate Sosin on covering trans issues in the age of Trump 2.0 appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Like so many journalists, Megan Greenwell resisted inserting herself into the story that would ultimately shape her career. But the plot came to her.

Greenwell knows as intimately as anyone how a private equity buyout can alter the fabric of a workplace. In 2019, Great Hill Partners acquired the Gizmodo Media Group — the parent company of Deadspin, where Greenwell was the first woman to become editor-in-chief. Shortly into the new ownership, Greenwell resigned — and explained why in a viral blog post. 

Her own experience catalyzed what became an obsession with understanding the wide-reaching tentacles of the private equity industry and its powerful grasp on the American economy. But Greenwell wasn’t drawn to memoir. She instead chose to pursue a rigorously reported narrative account of the industry’s impact through the lives of four people working in retail, housing, medicine, and media. Her debut book, “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” was published by HarperCollins in June.  

Greenwell has previously edited or reported features for publications including Wired, Esquire, GQ, New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek and The New York Times, among others. She also serves as the deputy director of the Princeton Summer Journalism Program, which recruits and trains high school students from underrepresented backgrounds who are interested in journalism.

I spoke with Greenwell about the devotion necessary to bring a book project to fruition, her approach to structuring the reporting process, and how she juggled the book deal along with the rest of her freelance business. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written plenty of long magazine features before. What was the moment when you realized or felt convinced that this idea actually needed to be a book?

After I wrote a piece for Deadspin that went viral, a lot of people said to me “You should make this a book,” including my book agent. I was resistant to that idea because I didn't want to write a book just about the media industry. It felt too niche. And I really didn't want to write a book about my own experience. I’d rejected the idea of doing a private equity book for quite a while, but I also couldn't stop reading about it. I became obsessed with how private equity works in other industries and felt myself coming back to it over and over again. 

Have you always been interested in writing a book?

This was my first. I’ve had an agent since around 2013, and she signed me because she liked my work in other places. I knew back then that at some point I wanted to write one, but I was very adamant that I was not going to until I knew it was the right idea. For years, my agent and I had lunch every six months or so. I’d float some ideas and she’d say to poke around on them. Somewhere between the initial poking around and finishing an actual proposal, I would either determine there wasn't enough there or I just wasn't interested enough. I was very afraid of signing a contract for something I wasn't going to stay excited about. That went on for almost 10 years and this was the first idea that I never lost interest in.

Is it common to find an agent so long before there’s a seedling of an idea?

I certainly have other friends who’ve done the same. My agent in particular is very good at keeping tabs on what's out there because she’s willing to play the long game. I've been in her home office and she has this whiteboard with three categories: people who have sold a book and are working on it, people who are midway through a proposal and people who are just ideating. Last time I saw it, the ideating list was the longest. It’s smart because she ends up getting a lot of people who might take more time to get there, but are going to be ready when they get there.

How much reporting was required to put together the book proposal itself?

My proposal was probably 80 pages and had character sketches of people I thought would be my primary protagonists. I did find it harder to get people to talk to me for a book proposal rather than an actual book. Others told me that most of what you write for a proposal is not going to end up in the book, and I was like, “No, I'll be different.” I was not different. Basically, nothing from the proposal ended up in the book. But I was super glad I did all that work because in editor meetings, I got feedback that this was an incredibly thorough, well-reported proposal. I think this helped me get a good deal for it and helped convince editors that I was ready to do it. I did find it hard to be doing a ton of work — more than I had ever done for any story — without knowing whether this would sell, or whether anybody would ever see any version of it. This was not a mental space I’d ever had to occupy for that long.

How did you find your protagonist? What was your process like when you were exploring potential subjects who’d occupy the real estate of the book?

This was by far the hardest part. I knew I needed people who readers were going to want to spend a lot of time with. I had three characters in the proposal but four in the book. One from the proposal ended up in the book.

I did so much grunt work to find them. A lot of LinkedIn searching for people who had previously worked at various companies. A ton of scouring Facebook groups and Reddit, and talking to nonprofit groups to see who they recommended. I was trying to plumb every possible avenue. I talked to a little over 300 people for the book as a whole, and almost 150 of those were potential protagonists. 

I needed the right mix of geographic, racial and personality diversity. I also needed people who were going to let me into their lives for two years and tell me absolutely everything — which is not most people. I got relatively deep with several people before realizing they were going to be reluctant past a certain point, which is totally understandable. 

The worst moment was when I had been talking for months to a woman for the housing section. She’d given me recordings, contemporaneous notes, everything. I flew to Indiana to meet her and texted her about when she wanted to meet up the next morning, but she didn't respond. She always responded quickly. I woke up the next morning and she still hadn't written back. I texted her and knew her address so I went to her place, but she wasn’t there. I never heard from her again. She fully stood me up, but only once I got to the point of being in her town. All I can assume is that she got cold feet when it got to that level of reality. I wasn’t going to write the chapter without spending time with her, so I had to start that section from scratch.

What do you think is most misunderstood about private equity’s relationship with the media?

The private equity industry has been very good at making everybody think that the problems of any of these industries are the inevitable result of societal and economic change — particularly with media. Most people's understanding of the landscape is that the ad market got decimated so the media was screwed — and maybe private equity profited off of the ashes, but they didn't have anything to do with killing media. I just don't think that's true.

One thing I learned from the reporting that genuinely surprised me is that a lot of these local newspapers were still profitable at the point when private equity got involved. That doesn't mean the trend line wasn't down — of course it was. But private equity wasn't going to come in unless the businesses were still profitable. Then they came in and didn't do anything to try to adapt to the new age. So they either hastened the demise of a lot of these publications or really did directly kill them.

What has the marketing experience been like since the book was released? What has surprised you most about that leg of the journey? 

I tried to go into it with as few expectations as possible. My goal was to sell enough copies so that somebody lets me do this again because I really did love the experience. I was cognizant that I had gotten a bigger advance, relative to the typical scale of advances, so I didn’t want to be a flop. There are people who write their first book, it doesn't sell enough copies and they’re unable to sell a second — which is what I was most afraid of. As long as I could sell a reasonable number of copies, I would be happy. 

Setting my expectations low has made me pleasantly surprised by how things have gone. I got to do a little tour. I got to do a bunch of sold out events in towns that are meaningful to me because I was super conservative about only booking events in towns where I knew I could draw a real crowd. I didn't want to get my hopes up that I would even get reviews, much less that they’d be positive. How long the tail of this has lasted continues to surprise me. I thought people would care about the book for two weeks then never mention it again. 

How did working on the book trickle out to the rest of your freelance business? How did it impact the amount of work you could take on or what kind of work you could take on?

Having the advance allowed me to adapt based on what the book needed. I could make decisions for any given month, or any given season, based on what I needed to do for the book — instead of the other way around. The last three months before my deadline, I didn't take on any other assignments. But when I was reporting, I was still doing a mix of newsroom management consulting, freelance editing and freelance writing. 

Even if you do get a healthy advance, they’re typically split into four payments. Mine was in five. You get the first payment upon signing the contract. It took me two years to even get a first draft in, and you don’t get the second payment until the draft is through copy edit and legal review. It was two-and-a-half years before I saw payment number two of five. So even what sounds like a life-changing amount of money on paper is not exactly a life-changing amount of payment of money in the early days, but the advance did allow me to do what was best for the book.

This didn’t mean making the book my full-time job. I was still doing a ton of other stuff. But when I really needed to buckle down, I was able to buckle down. When I needed to travel for reporting, I could afford to fund it and take the time off of whatever else I was doing. I was very glad I did not try to do this book with a full-time job, and that I had the kind of freelance career with some flexibility to it.

What do you think is important for nonfiction writers who are considering pursuing a book to know? What should they keep in mind as they embark upon this process?

Make sure you really, really love the idea. I have done plenty of features where the idea is interesting to me, but it's not something I want to marry. For a book — especially a narrative book where the reporting is so intense — you are marrying that idea. I would have been absolutely miserable if I had been even 20% less excited about this idea.

I am 41 years old and just published my first book. A lot of people feel the pressure to write a book by a certain time, a bit like pressure to get married or have kids. For a certain group of writers, it feels like the next career achievement box you have to check. I certainly felt those pressures at certain points, too. But I do not think I could have written a book as good earlier in my career — in part because I had to work on my talents, but also because I had to get to that once, or twice, or 10 times-in-a-lifetime scale of an idea. 

I'm so glad I didn't listen to the pressure of “Just do it. You don’t have to be in love with every idea.” Maybe I’ll get to a point in my book writing career where that’s true. Maybe if you write 15, it gets to the point where it feels banal. But I was very cognizant that you only get to do the first one once.

***

“Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream”

By Megan Greenwell 

CHAPTER ONE: LIZ

Once, years ago, Liz Marin was talking to a friend who had recently been laid off. The friend, Annmarie, was fretting because her husband needed insulin to treat his diabetes and she needed an inhaler to treat her asthma, but she had recently lost her health insurance along with her job, and they could only afford to cover the cost of one of the two medications out of pocket. Liz was enraged — at the company that laid her friend off, at the American health care system for failing to provide an adequate safety net, at rich people generally for fighting to preserve the status quo. 

She couldn’t fix any of those problems, but, she figured, she could get her friend an inhaler. Liz didn’t have much money either, but she did have health insurance, and she also had asthma. So she did what seemed to her like the obvious thing: she called her doctor, lied that she had lost her inhaler, got a new one, and mailed it across the country to her friend. 

“Yeah, I know it’s insurance fraud,” she said later. “But the thought of her dying because she couldn’t afford a three-hundred dollar fucking inhaler, I couldn’t fathom that. I have the power to do something, and just because the government calls it illegal is not going to stop me.”

[annotation q="Of all places to start Liz’s story, why did this anecdote stand out to you?" a="My first draft started with a different scene, one I had actually witnessed at Liz’s home. But my editor pointed out, correctly, that it felt a little generic, and we wanted to communicate to readers immediately that Liz is a particularly strong-willed person. Going back over hundreds of pages of transcripts looking for a new place to start, it was the quote below that jumped out at me. It shows several things about Liz: her fury at how working-class people lose out even on basic necessities, her primal need to do anything in her power to help people she loves, her willingness to ignore laws when necessary, her love for the word ‘fucking.’ The rest of Liz’s story is about how she fought back against Toys R Us’s private-equity owners, so establishing all of this about her from the very first sentences felt perfect. Readers have really fallen in love with Liz as a character, and I think this story is a big reason why."] 

Liz can’t help herself from speaking up or butting in when she sees injustice in the world — especially when someone she loves is involved. Most of the time, it doesn’t involve violating federal law. But it doesn’t matter how much or how little she has; she won’t be happy unless she’s sharing it with family, friends, and strangers. [annotation q="How much time did you need to spend with Liz before getting to know her personality and ethos on the level where you could make an assertion like this? Is this something you gleaned or a sentiment that she expressed to you?" a="I spent many days with Liz over two years. The first time I was at her home, for 12 hours one Saturday, she mostly ignored me because she had a house full of relatives. I was worried about it at first — I had so many questions I needed to ask her! — but I realized pretty quickly she was giving me a great gift. Seeing her interact with her kids, her sister, her dad, her husband made me understand her in a much deeper way than I would have if we had gone straight into an interview. My other visits were a mix of focused interviews and fly-on-the-wall time, and I valued both equally. I also talked to her relatives and friends about her at length. So I don’t think she ever told me this verbatim, but it’s so core to who she is that she didn’t really have to."] Several years ago, her in-laws, who had never lived outside their home country of Colombia, moved to the United States to live with her and her husband, Henry, in Washington State. More recently, her own father, Loren, whom everyone calls Buddy, came from Alaska to the American mainland and began splitting time between Liz’s home and her sister Mindy’s, a couple hours south in Portland, Oregon. 

The Marin house, which sits on a quiet street of cookie-cutter homes atop neatly manicured lawns in University Place, a suburb of  Tacoma, is designed to take care of people. In the kitchen, next to stacked cases of Kirkland water bottles, sit value-sized boxes of individually sized snacks — mixed Frito-Lay chips, chocolate and vanilla pudding, Ensure, apple chips, fruit cups. Just above that, on the kitchen counter, is a first aid kit teeming with Band-Aids, face masks, rubbing alcohol, gauze, and painkillers. When Mindy’s family comes for the weekend, which happens often, Liz’s office is swallowed by an air mattress, the living room overtaken by video-game controllers and kids’ shoes, the bathrooms drowned in other people’s toiletries. 

Like many women socialized to put everyone else first, the one person Liz often forgets to take care of is herself. [annotation q="I really enjoyed this transition; I thought it was insightful and smooth."] Sometimes it’s because she’s too busy. Sometimes she’s just too broke from providing for everyone else. A few years ago, the Marins had a little financial breathing room for the first time in their adult lives. When one of the kids outgrew their sneakers, she’d sprint to the store to buy them a new pair, but she hadn’t bought herself a new item of clothing in years. Henry encouraged her to go shopping for herself — demanded it, basically — but she didn’t see the point. So he threw out her entire wardrobe. 

Liz still sounds a little shocked about it all. Henry is the soft-spoken one of the two, the one content to sit quietly, awaiting further instruction, while people mill about. He adores his wife. So when he and their children began carrying armfuls of her clothing to a dumpster near their house, she couldn’t quite make sense of it. Now you have no choice but to buy some new things, he told her. [annotation q="What did you feel like this anecdote more broadly serves to illustrate about Liz and what made you choose to introduce it so early in the chapter?" a="I am aware this story has been controversial on Goodreads; I guess some people read it as Henry being mean. Nothing could be further from the truth. Liz is the first to admit that she has to be forced into taking care of herself, and that felt like an important contrast to the Liz of the lede. Together, they make her a fuller, more complicated character. It was really important to me to treat my protagonists as complex humans rather than caricatures of victims. And though Liz and Henry fought about this, it was clear when she told the story years later that she interpreted Henry forcing her to buy new things as an act of deep love. She still struggles to take care of herself. She still relies on Henry to make her do so. People will always map their own feelings onto someone else’s relationship, but the significance of this story for me is showing this other side of her, and the importance of her marriage, that you wouldn’t see from watching her give a speech or march in a protest."]

He didn’t realize he had missed a bucket — a literal bucket — full of her oldest, most worn-out clothes. I’ll go shopping tomorrow, she promised. Instead, she took the clothes from the bucket, folded them, and put them in her dresser. Aside from a few holes and the fact that most of them didn’t fit particularly well, they were perfectly wearable. But Henry realized pretty quickly that the holey clothes that didn’t fit were not in fact new. The resulting argument lasted for days. 

Eventually she bought some clothes. She didn’t, however, shake off the guilt. [annotation q="‘Guilt’ feels like a very specific word choice."] Sitting at the dining room table recounting the story, she wore a threadbare pair of jeans and a six-year-old T-shirt from a Native Alaskan tribal celebration, her long salt-and-pepper hair cascading over the print on the front. 

The Marin home is also a monument to the people Liz loves. Family pictures aren’t sequestered to the mantel or a single gallery display. They cover every table, shelf, and wall, and feature every imaginable combination of relatives. On the few patches of wall that don’t hold photos, traditional Native Alaskan art hangs instead. Often the two are combined: two paintings above the dining room table depict Buddy and his sister in traditional dress at a powwow. [annotation q="I appreciate your attention to detail when it comes to setting — and in particular, to Liz’s internal and external home environment. Why did it feel crucial to make clear to readers early on the type of space that she curates for herself?" a="I don’t think narrative nonfiction works without specificity; I read so many books and features that fail because they try to position themselves as ‘literary’ but it feels like the interviews were conducted over the phone. What I love about narrative is the noticing: not just what someone said, but how she said it. Was she fidgeting? Was she making intense eye contact? Did her voice crack? That’s what separates my favorite works of nonfiction from the rest, and that was really important to me when writing my own. This was another advantage of getting to spend so much time in Liz’s house when I wasn’t conducting an interview — I got to look around, jot down details, and ask her about them later. I think being in someone’s home, seeing how they live, is absolutely crucial to understanding them deeply enough for any kind of profile. The number of family photos in Liz’s house is truly astounding; it would be impossible to understand her without knowing that."]

One room, though, is devoted to a different kind of memorabilia. Behind the desk and above the air mattress in the office/guest room, a waist-high bookcase houses dozens of giraffes. Large stuffed ones and bronze ones are surrounded by smaller ones made from plastic, rubber, and wood. Photos rest among the animals, most of them of Liz grinning with friends. In one, her son, Daniyel, holds yet another stuffed giraffe. This giraffe, with the tuft of dark brown hair between its ears and the stars that stud its neck, is recognizable to anyone who has ever stepped inside a Toys R Us. The display is a shrine to Liz’s six years at the company, a shrine to what was the best job she ever had until it all came crashing down. The giraffe in the photo, Geoffrey the Giraffe, is the one that upended the Marin family’s entire life. [annotation q="My curiosity is sufficiently piqued!"]

***

Before he launched the toy store that transformed retail, Charles Lazarus was a poor kid with a dream. [annotation q="Now we’re launching into the second thread of the chapter and meeting a brand new character, who (seemingly, as of now) is not yet obviously connected to Liz. How did you think about when to make this jump to Charles? When weaving two character-driven threads together, how do you generally approach facilitating that transition as smoothly as possible?" a="I am a complete nerd for narrative structure. When I was a terrified baby features editor, I’d go through my favorite magazine stories and diagram what made the structure work, which I think helped me immensely. (I also think editing per se is invaluable for understanding structure as a writer; it teaches you to think ruthlessly about what serves the story best, rather than what sounds the prettiest. I truly believe that every shortform writer hoping to become a longform writer should do a stint as an editor.)"] 

[annotation a="The structure challenge posed by the four opening chapters of my book (collectively called ‘Before’) is that they have to introduce both a protagonist and the historical context necessary to understand the private equity part of the story. And because there are 12 chapters in the book, plus an introduction and conclusion, they each have to do all of that in 7,000 words, and compellingly enough to successfully get people to the heart of the story. This was the trickiest of those chapters, because the two stories were so far removed time-wise, and Liz didn’t even start working at Toys R Us until after Lazarus was out of the picture."] 

[annotation a="I’ve always wanted to write a feature with a classic A-B structure, because I think it’s so powerful when it works. It came to me pretty early on that I had to at least try it here. This was the first chapter I wrote, and the only one that the editor who acquired the project, the brilliant Kate Napolitano, read before she left for another job. When I wrote the first draft, I must have been scared to commit to fully separating the A and B strands; Kate’s notes were about eliminating the spots where I tried to thematically combine them prematurely. She told me I could trust readers to see the similarities, which built my confidence."]

Lazarus was born in 1923 in Washington, D.C., where his father, Frank, owned a not-particularly-successful used-bicycle store called National Sport Shop in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. The Lazaruses, one of the few Jewish families around, lived behind the store: their home was connected to the shop by an opening in the dining room, so someone could get up quickly and help a customer who happened to show up during dinnertime. 

The family rarely had money for luxuries. There was always food on the table, even during the depths of the Great Depression, but Charles wanted more. He wanted to be rich. He didn’t dream of  Madison Avenue or Wall Street. He wanted to sell things to people. 

Lazarus, who died in 2018, once told an interviewer about a pivotal conversation he had with his dad while helping him fix up an old bicycle. Charles asked Frank — who had grown up in a Jewish orphanage in  D.C. and, by his son’s account, never aspired to anything other than the ability to care for his family — why they never sold new bikes, which would bring in more money. His dad responded that new products required too much money up front, and they would never be able to compete with big retailers like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Company. “I just didn’t believe that,” Lazarus said. “I just thought that you had to have a defeatist attitude to always sell used goods. And I told him, ‘I’m not going to do that.’” [annotation q="Given that Charles died in 2018, what was your primary method for gathering hyper-specific details about his personality and mindset?" a="I’m thrilled to be asked about this, because it was a huge reporting challenge, and because the answer to how I solved it is buried in my 400-plus endnotes! Considering how much influence Toys R Us had on the American retail industry, there is woefully little out there about Lazarus himself. Even his obituaries were fairly bare-bones; another book that covers Toys R Us’s acquisition by private equity cites his Wikipedia page in its endnotes. I had talked to some Toys R Us employees who were there toward the end of Lazarus’s time at the company, and they had some details to share. But I did think it was important to understand where he came from and who he was. I checked every source I could think of but kept coming up empty."] 

[annotation a="While scouring the internet one day, I found a link to a 3-minute YouTube video taken from an interview with Lazarus. The video description mentioned it was part of a larger project, and included the director’s name and website. When I emailed the filmmaker, I learned that he had recorded Lazarus for nine hours for a private project commissioned by his family members. After an intense negotiation over terms, he agreed to lend me the DVD version, which I had to buy an external DVD drive to access. The interview is incredibly thorough, and includes photos from various points in his life, which I was able to use to confirm details I couldn’t get from anyone else. Thank goodness his family commissioned it, because it seems that all but the most basic information about an important person in the history of American business would be lost."]

When the younger Lazarus got his first job delivering newspapers in elementary school, it didn’t take him long to spot a business opportunity. None of the other kids liked collecting subscribers’ payments, which often required multiple visits to every home. Lazarus offered to handle that part for them in exchange for a portion of their income.  Soon he had six boys funneling him a cut. He quit delivering his own papers; he was making a lot more money than he ever had on his route. [annotation q="This anecdote is very effective at illustrating how Charles’ mind was oriented and the shrewdness that drove him, even at a young age."]

After high school, Lazarus was eager to start his own business. He worked briefly for the U.S. Treasury Department, earning a relatively luxurious $25 a week, but his goal was $10,000 a year, a fortune by American standards at the time. First, though, he knew he would have to serve; it was 1943 and World War II was in full swing. Looking to avoid being drafted into work he didn’t want to do, he voluntarily enlisted in the Signal Corps as a radio operator and then cryptographer. Military life brought an important perk: there was nothing on which to spend his salary of about $100 a month. Instead he sent the money home for his mother to invest on his behalf. 

When the war ended, an honorably discharged white man with a healthy savings account had plenty of options. The GI Bill offered tuition assistance for college or trade programs, low-interest loans, and unemployment payments. Lazarus, who married his girlfriend, Udyss,  almost immediately after returning home, skipped higher education. With a $5,000 wedding gift from his father-in-law, the profits from investing his salary, and a government-backed business loan, he had enough to start a business. The GI Bill’s homeownership program also allowed him to buy his first home, in the tony town of Chevy Chase, Maryland, north of D.C. (Until the war, Jews had been banned from Chevy Chase, which was created by the white supremacist developer-turned-senator Francis Newlands in the 1890s.) 

Now Lazarus just had to figure out what kind of business would earn him that $10,000-a-year salary and put him in the upper echelons  of society. The winning idea came to him as he observed his fellow veterans. After being discharged from the Army, they all followed a  similar path: move home, marry your girlfriend, buy a house, have a child or two. Lazarus saw the baby boom coming, and he realized all those new parents would need to buy cribs, rocking chairs, changing tables, and playpens. Frank Lazarus had just about paid off his mortgage on the Adams Morgan building that housed his bicycle store and three apartments, so Charles convinced his dad to retire and offered him $320 a month for the building. National Sport Shop became National Baby Shop, a purveyor of all types of baby furniture. 

From the start, Lazarus fixated on how to make even a small neighborhood store a one-stop shop. He expanded his offerings vertically, building shelves to hold chests of drawers above their coordinating cribs instead of side by side, which allowed him to display significantly more products at once. He started with about $8,000 worth of inventory, but when his concept proved successful, he used the profits to stock up on new goods. It didn’t take too long for him to start doing well — not $10,000-a-year well, but making more money than his father ever had. [annotation q="The goal of making more money than one’s parents is such a deeply embedded ideal in American society and lore. Particularly in the 19th century, it feels like this benchmark was the standard success metric for upward mobility. How did you see echoes of this pull in both Charles’ and Liz’s stories?" a="When I started watching the Lazarus video, about a month after my first trip to Liz’s home, the parallels between their lives struck me immediately. They both grew up poor and part of a marginalized group — Lazarus Jewish in the 1930s and ’40s, Liz Native Alaskan in the ’80s and ’90s — and they were both extremely hungry to make better lives for themselves. Lazarus talked very openly about wanting to be rich, whereas Liz was focused more on stability, but yes, they both wanted to do better than their parents did. But there’s an interesting divergence in their stories, too. Lazarus’s success cannot be understood outside the context of the G.I. Bill. That funded the store that became Toys R Us, that allowed him to buy a house. But those kinds of social service programs were far less common, and far less generous, by the time Liz reached adulthood around the turn of the 21st century, and her tribe faced a unique legacy of discrimination and violence. She’s spent her entire career in retail just trying to get by."] 

Lazarus was always on the lookout for new opportunities, and one day he stumbled into one that would shape the rest of his life. “Somebody came in one day and said, ‘How about a toy for my baby?’” he said. “‘You know, to play with in the high chair or in the playpen or in the stroller.’” The idea surprised Lazarus, who recalled thinking, What do you mean, a toy? He sold essentials, not frivolities; toys didn’t fit the model. But he decided to stock a few as an experiment, and from then on, National Baby Shop offered toys along with all its other baby goods. 

Until then, people mostly bought toys in department stores. In the 1920s, Macy’s opened the country’s first permanent toy department in its midtown Manhattan store. The chain also started its Thanksgiving Day Parade, which ended with Santa Claus standing outside that Herald Square building, ginning up excitement to buy Christmas gifts. Not long after, Sears, Roebuck & Company followed suit with a toy department of its own, and quickly became the biggest toy retailer in America. 

These big department stores sold more than half of their toys between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But after the woman asked him about toys that day, Lazarus started to think maybe he could show parents that they could use toys year-round. In fact, he thought, toys might actually be a better business than furniture. After all, babies only needed one crib, one rocking chair, one changing table, and one playpen, and younger siblings typically got hand-me-downs. Toys, though — no kid could ever have enough toys. Children would out grow them, wanting new ones designed for their new ages. Or they would simply get bored with what they had and demand something new. And with the prosperity of the postwar era, selling nonessential goods, especially ones that delighted the children of the baby boom, just made sense. [annotation q="I appreciate how you dived into the nitty-gritty of his early strategy to paint a picture of the building blocks of this business."]

Soon after adding toys to the National Baby Shop inventory, Lazarus went all in. Initially he renamed his store Children’s Supermart, with reversed R’s to make it appear childlike. But that name didn’t look catchy on a sign, and it certainly didn’t spark joy in kids. So in 1957, he renamed his company Toys R Us. 

***

Liz knew what it was like to want more. [annotation q="Why did you choose this segue?" a="Is this the moment to say I actually find most section segues hackneyed and unnecessary? A new section doesn’t have to directly connect to the previous one; that’s the point of the section break! That said: this was the one place I allowed myself to directly nod at the similarities and differences between Liz’s and Lazarus’s experiences. I almost cut this line too, but I wanted readers to start thinking of these two people in relation to each other, to set up the moment when the two strands would finally cross."] As a child in Alaska—the state most associated with the American myth of rugged, individualistic bootstrapping—she heard all the legends about how anyone can will themselves to a more successful life, about how everyone has a chance to make something of themselves. Her Alaska, though, is very different from the ones written by Jon Krakauer or Jack London. Liz, or Láxhshaadoosti, is part of the Tlingit people, an Indigenous group who have lived in the southeastern part of the state for centuries. Her family’s history as members of the Eagle/Wolf house in Angoon, a community of a few hundred mostly Tlingit residents on Admiralty Island off the coast of British Columbia, goes back generations. 

As Liz likes to say, the fact that she, her family, or the village of Angoon exists at all is pretty close to a miracle. Almost exactly a century before Láxhshaadoosti was born, her own country’s government attempted to wipe her homeland off the map. On October 22, 1882, a Tlingit healer named Teel’ Tlein was killed in an accident on a Northwest Trading Company whaling boat. The United States had purchased Alaska fifteen years earlier and placed the territory under military control, so when the Tlingit reacted angrily to the company’s refusal to make amends in accordance with tribal practice, the Navy moved in. They shelled the coastal village with howitzers and Gatling guns mounted on a tugboat before sending troops to raze Angoon on foot, destroying the village and killing six children. 

Many Tlingit who were born generations after the bombardment, including Liz and her family, still speak of the event as if it were a fresh memory. Though Alaska was removed from military control in 1884 and became a state in 1959, the Tlingit and other native Alaskan peoples have continued to be discriminated against, cut off from many of the privileges associated with the American Dream. As a child, Liz’s mother, Miranda, like generations of Tlingit before her, was taken from her family in Angoon and sent to a boarding school designed to forcibly “civilize” and assimilate Indigenous Alaskans, stripping them of their native language and culture. Liz’s father, Buddy, was adopted by a white family who lived on a farm in Missouri, and returned to Alaska as an adult. 

As a result, Liz was born in 1979 in Anchorage, not her ancestral homeland of Angoon. She didn’t grow up understanding the Tlingit language, because her father never learned it and her mother had been brutally punished for speaking it. Miranda had moved her family to the city so that her children would blend in. In a majority-Tlingit community, they would never escape the risk of prejudice, persecution, or worse. [annotation q="Why did it feel important to establish Liz’s family history at this point in the chapter?" a="Understanding anyone’s family history is important to writing a profile, and I think writers often do themselves a disservice by thinking too narrowly about what ‘family history’ entails. Liz talks about the Angoon bombardment as part of her origin story as naturally as she does about her parents and siblings, so any story about her that didn’t talk about that would feel incomplete. (I will admit that in the first draft of the manuscript I went way too deep; I was totally compelled by a book and a doctoral dissertation about the bombardment and accidentally wrote a full two pages about this event that happened a century before my protagonist was born. One of my favorite things about being edited is having someone come in with clear eyes and point out when I’ve gotten lost in the weeds in a way that doesn’t actually serve the story.) Liz clearly feels pain about the fact that she doesn’t speak her family’s ancestral language, but to understand why she doesn’t speak it, you have to understand not just her parents’ lives but also these generations of absolutely brutal treatment of the Tlingit people. And her work as an activist, which makes up most of the later part of her story in the book, is inextricable from her identity as a Native Alaskan."]

Life in Anchorage wasn’t easy either. Buddy wasn’t around much, and Miranda struggled to pay the bills for her own three children and the four she adopted when her sister died. When Liz was in elementary school, her mom remarried, to a man who sexually abused Liz from the time she was eight until she was fifteen. He abused multiple cousins too. All the while, Liz excelled in school, particularly in math. But she also struggled with trauma and relentless feelings of worthlessness. 

When Liz was fifteen, her stepfather was arrested for sexual abuse of minors. Liz thought it might be a chance for a fresh start, but soon afterward, Miranda died suddenly from a seizure. Liz tried to care for her younger siblings herself, until an aunt intervened and took them  all in. Soon after, the state assigned the kids to different living arrangements: some moved in with relatives, some went to foster care. Liz and her sister Mindy were sent to group homes in Juneau. 

Liz completed her high school coursework there, but she missed out on a diploma because she left a few weeks early to care for a now pregnant Mindy. She gathered up her sister, left the group home, and moved in with their father, who happened to be living in Juneau too. She got a job at Costco to help pay the bills. In 2000, she had her first child, a daughter she named Alleah. [annotation q="How did you initially find Liz as a character? Was she keen to talk with you right off the bat? Was it challenging to earn her trust?" a="I found Liz because she had been quoted in a bunch of stories around the time Toys R Us liquidated, and had even written an op-ed in BuzzFeed News that mentioned Deadspin, where I had been the editor-in-chief before our private equity takeover. So on some level, she was the easiest of my four protagonists to find: I talked to more than 100 candidates to land on the other three, but Liz was the only character I wrote about in my proposal who actually made it into the final book."] 

[annotation a="That said, earning her trust took more work than the other three combined. When I first reached out to her, she didn’t respond for months. I started talking to other potential protagonists for the retail section, but I couldn’t get her out of my mind because she had done so much work on behalf of the laid-off Toys R Us employees. Finally, she responded and agreed to talk off the record. She felt burned by a lot of white people who promised to center her story, including the progressive workers’ advocacy group for which she had worked. So she wanted to interrogate me, which felt entirely fair. Once she let me in, though, she let me all the way in: I don’t remember a single question that she declined to answer or that made her clam up."]

In 2004, Liz was assigned to train a new Costco employee named Henry Marin on the overnight shift. Henry was from Bogotá, Colombia, and had moved to Alaska to live with his birth father. Liz thought Henry was cute, but he was also six years her junior, and she didn’t want to date someone so young. They became friends, though, and she loved how he cared for Alleah. They married in 2005, when Liz was twenty-six and Henry nineteen. She soon gave birth to a daughter they named Aracely. 

Liz also loved Henry’s ambition. After his night shift at Costco, he would go work days at Burger King. He had plans to become a pharmacist. Liz was used to scraping to make ends meet on a minimum wage income, but pharmacists make six figures; she knew he could care for a family. The trouble was, there was no pharmacy school in Alaska. Following Henry’s dreams and catapulting their family into the middle class would require living thousands of miles from the only homeland she had ever known. [annotation q="This is more of a general question from a pacing perspective, but how did you weigh how much real estate to spend with Liz vs. Charles in each section before flipping back to the other?" a="I thought about this a lot! I needed to include a ton of contextual information to set up how Toys R Us ended up being acquired by private equity. But I was terrified of making this book boring, and I knew that the best antidote to that was centering the four protagonists, each of whom I chose because they’re incredibly compelling people. Getting my hands on the DVDs of the Lazarus interviews allowed me to do some storytelling in those sections as well as revealing information from SEC filings and court transcripts and the like, but I did think we needed more Liz than Lazarus. (There are two sections after this one in the book; one about each of them.) I also knew right away which anecdote about Liz I wanted to use to end the section — I won’t spoil it, but it’s incredibly powerful in terms of shaking assumptions about what it means to be ‘just’ a retail worker. So I landed on hewing pretty closely to a classic A-B structure, but with Liz getting one extra section, so that she’s the first and last person we’re learning about."] 

She was terrified at the idea of moving away from Alaska, and hated leaving her family behind, but she knew it was the right thing to do. She hadn’t found much in the way of opportunities in Angoon, where the median household income was under $30,000 a year and her family usually made a lot less than that. She hadn’t found them in her mom’s apartment in Anchorage, or in the group home in Juneau. She lived in a world that had been systematically starved of resources over a period of centuries. Perhaps life on the mainland would be different. Perhaps moving to the West Coast like a twenty-first-century gold rusher would unlock the American Dream she had heard so much about. 

Relocating would require Liz to single-handedly support the Marin family — which in 2012 grew to include a son, Daniyel — for four years while Henry was in school. All of her work experience was in retail, so that’s where she focused her search. She wanted to be able to easily transfer to any city where her husband got into pharmacy school, so she looked for a job in Juneau that would allow her to move elsewhere when the time came. She needed a company with flexible transfer policies, because Henry would have to do his internship in a different city from where he was studying. She needed opportunities for career growth. She needed daytime hours so she could be home with her family in the evening. As she worked her way down her checklist,  

one company name seemed to tick every box. So Liz applied to work at Toys R Us. [annotation q="I really like the parallel construction between this line and the sentence that closes out Charles’ previous section. It’s a crisp signpost to the reader about where we’re going and how these two characters’ storylines are about to converge."]

***

Excerpted from “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” by Megan Greenwell. Copyright © 2025 by Megan Greenwell. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 

Author photo by Loreto Caceres. 

***

Carly Stern is an independent reporter and editor based in Brooklyn who covers health, housing and economic security. Her enterprise work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Vox and The Guardian.

The post Megan Greenwell on holding out for the once-in-a-lifetime book idea appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For this installment in Storyboard’s occasional series on effective editing, we bring readers a conversation with an independent editor who works one-on-one with writers and has built a suite of services on his own.

Glenn Stout was about 14 when he read a poem by Langston Hughes. “That hit me over the head with a two-by-four, and I decided I wanted to be a writer,” he said.

He went on to work for his high school newspaper, then attended Bard College, where he wrote poetry. He eventually took a job at the Boston Public Library, hoping to be surrounded by people interested in words. There, he stumbled upon a story about the Boston Red Sox manager from 1907 who had died by suicide. He pitched a story about it to Boston Magazine, where an editor took a chance on him. “I’ve never been without an assignment since,” Stout said.

Now 66, Stout went on to establish himself as an freelance writer and author of nonfiction books, including “The Young Woman and the Sea.” Many in journalism know him for his many years working on an annual collection of the best sports writing.

Along the way, Stout also has built skills and a following as a coach, consultant and freelance editor, often working with writers who are developing their own book proposals and manuscripts.

Storyboard spoke with Stout about the nuances of being an independent editor, how he thinks about the psychology of writers and the gap his services fill in a changing literary landscape. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted your shift toward editing?
It was word of mouth through the handful of writers, particularly through selecting stories for “The Best American Sports Writing.” People would ask for my thoughts on their work and it snowballed from there. I was old enough, or far enough along in my career, that I wasn’t concerned about what this business did for me; I took a great deal of satisfaction in seeing what it could do for other people. I got more gratification from somebody else’s story succeeding than from my own. I love helping someone who’s having trouble and doesn’t think they can do something get to a place where they can do it, and do so more on their own the next time — where they don’t need a person like me.

Where did you learn and who were editors who inspired you early on?
Ken Hartnett, who commissioned my first story when he was an editor at Boston Magazine, offered a good lesson: He took me seriously. I had no clips. I was nobody. Other than that, I never felt I was edited well. So when I started editing, I didn’t try to do it like anybody else; I tried to do it the way I thought it should have been done for me.

How should it be done?
One of the most important things for a writer in an editing relationship is to be given confidence and agency over their work. When I first begin a project, I tell writers directly: ‘This works best when it’s a collaboration. When we work together, the reader does not care how we get to the end. They want a positive reading experience. They want to take something away. … Everything I tell you is suggestive. At the end of this process, if you cannot stand behind every word on the page, I failed. I’m in service of you, the writer; you’re not in service of me. Don’t try to make me happy. Let’s try to find a place where the story can best be unfurled, in the best possible way.’

Many writers are unaccustomed to that kind of agency. Too many writers are beaten down by the editorial process where you write a story, you send it in, no one responds for six weeks, you get an edit back, you send it back in, then another editor responds with a totally contradictory reaction. This goes on and on for months.

It’s disrespectful when an editor doesn’t get back to someone. They can answer an email in 15 seconds. If an editor says they’re overwhelmed and can’t answer an email, then they are overwhelmed by their job and need to get a different one.

You said your editing comes out of the vacuum of writers whose editing needs are not being met. Can you elaborate?
I’m filling in gaps. I’ve seen a real shift over the last 10 years, particularly the last five years. I hear over and over that writers are not getting useful feedback from their editors, whether it’s in books or magazines. Everybody has cut back and has a fire hose of work. Editors are overwhelmed. They can’t give feedback the way they want to because they’ve got too much to do.

Twenty years ago, writers got feedback from editors or agents when working on a book proposal. Agents these days rarely put in much time when a writer is creating a book proposal. I tell writers who want to pursue books to pitch their idea. But if an agent likes it, the first question they’ll ask is: ‘Do you have a proposal?’ If the writer says they’ll have one in three months, by then that agent has forgotten about them. Writers need to have the proposal ready. It’s a real risk: Someone writes a whole proposal and there’s no guarantee an agent will accept it, but the agent isn’t going to help you with it either.

When I work with writers on proposals, we know the agent is always going to change something. But we’re giving them something to work with. Agents don’t have the time, like I do, to spend with a writer turning an idea into a tangible object.

What makes for strong chemistry between writers and editors?
Being upfront and honest at the beginning. I try to explain how I like to work and how this process should work: I’m there to serve the writer and they don’t have to accept my changes. If I make a suggestion, I might have identified something that needs to be changed, but the writer might have a better idea how to fix it. The worst is when a writer questions themselves every sentence. Let it rip. Get something on the page. We can work with something once it’s on the page, so I don’t want them to worry about being wrong. We’re not going to go over it just once or twice; we might go over it 15 times.

You talk about confidence and mindset. How do you see coaching versus editing?
It’s pretty much one and the same, whether I call it editing or coaching. Editing is more if someone shows me their copy and asks me to fix it, whereas coaching is when we’re riding along the story at the same time, sharing the saddle. I don’t know if it’s easier, but it’s more comfortable if the writer and I are together from story conception to the end, rather than jumping in when there’s already a manuscript. I prefer being together at the beginning because then we can have discussions and pre-revise before having written. We’re agreeing on a set of parameters: where the story’s going, what the writer is focusing on. When I come in later in the process, the writer has already made a lot of decisions. The reporting is done or there’s a deadline.

Often, I work with writers who feel like they’re not getting feedback from the editor they’re working with, so they come to me and say: ‘Here’s what the editor is telling me. I don’t understand what they mean.’ I don’t get in between the writer and editor they’re working for. But I work with the writer to try to get the work to where they want it, which is maybe closer to what the editor wants.

How do you establish that rapport with a new writer or a new-to-you writer?
I work with a lot of people over and over again, which is nice because you’ve got the shorthand and trust down. For instance, when I say ‘This sentence is really chewy,’ they know I mean they’re trying to cram too many ideas into one sentence. Too many phrases. It’s too clunky.

With somebody I haven’t worked with before, I have to bring them along. I just react to a piece in my first edit. I don’t do a whole lot of line editing, but mostly make comments and questions. ‘This works.’ ‘I don’t understand this.’ ‘Who is this person?’ I take it in stages, and every stage builds more trust. Then I always, always find things I like. That’s hugely important. No one likes to get a manuscript back that is just criticism. And I give them practical solutions — very simple, practical things they can do.

What are the qualities of your favorite writers to edit?
I really like working with writers who are willing to try things they haven’t done before. I have fun working with people where there’s enough trust that they don’t care what I do and I don’t care what they do: We’re focused on the end. With some writers, I become pretty adept at channeling them. I’ll read something and add a sentence and tell them: ‘I hear this here. I think this is where you meant to go. You might write this sentence better, but I think you need another beat here.’ At the end of the day, sometimes we can’t tell where the lines were between me and them. When I’m intimately involved in the text, I start to hear words the way the writer hears words.

How has your editing work affected your writing? Are you typically pursuing book projects and editing simultaneously?
For much of the last 10 or 15 years, I was editing while working on my own book projects. It’s funny — I really don’t think I knew what I was doing as a writer until I started helping other people write. I had been blindly going forward — not that I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing, but I wasn’t aware of what I could do as a writer. Through working with other people, I gained an awareness of things I could try because I’ve seen other people try them. I’ve also seen how you can tear something up entirely, if you need to, and build it back. That’s not an act of destruction; it’s an act of creation.

Other advice I share with writers: if you see what somebody else is doing, particularly structurally, it’s OK to copy structure.

How have you seen that play out?
I had an older writer, in his mid-40s, who was transitioning from shorter features to 3,000-word features. For his first big story, I told him to take a story similar in some way to his, not necessarily in subject matter but in format: ‘Look at it closely paragraph by paragraph, and do exactly what that other writer did,’ like starting with a quote, or following with a scene or expository writing. He did the most extraordinary thing: He sent me back his story, paragraph by paragraph, alternating with the one he was modeling.

If people have a hard time coming up with a lede, I tell them to read 25 ledes. One will spark the lede they want to do and help crack the story open a bit. W.C. Heinz, the great sportswriter, once told me he thought the beginning was the most important part. He was a classical music fan, and he said the beginning of a story was where he set the time signature and key. ‘Then I know where I can go with the rest,’ he said.

It was such a great metaphor. A writer sets up the bounds of the story very early — the tone, the voice. Every story has a different sound, a different vocabulary. A writer has to find what’s right for that story. There’s an organic nature to this work that comes from within the story itself; it’s not always a top-down process where you have a structure and make the story fit it. If you have to ‘make’ the story fit something, that’s not following the truth of the story.

What message would you send to folks without formal training, like you all those years ago, who want to sharpen their editing skills?
Once you start to do it, you’ll learn pretty quickly if you can. That’s a very murky response, but you’ll realize pretty quickly that if you don’t have anything to say about a text, then you probably shouldn’t be trying to do this. If you see a text and can see not just what’s on the page, but the possibilities of what’s on the page, then you should be doing this.

I used to tell writers that my biggest test was when I’d open a piece of writing with my morning cup of coffee. If I drink my coffee and go make a second cup, we’ve got issues. If I only have one cup, we’re getting somewhere. If I don’t finish the coffee, we really have something going. If the coffee turns cold and I don’t touch it, the writer has something really good. As an editor, it’s important to know the difference between those things. Never edit just to edit. Some of the best editing jobs I’ve ever done have been the pieces of work that I’ve edited the least.

* * *

Carly Stern is an award-winning enterprise journalist based in San Francisco who covers health, housing and economic security.

The post Effective editing: ‘I’m in service of you, the writer’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For this installment in Storyboard’s occasional series on effective editing, we bring readers a conversation with an independent editor who works one-on-one with writers and has built a suite of services on his own.

It’s common for people to think of a journalist’s career trajectory as going from a small publication to a bigger one, shifting from local to national beats, or transitioning from reporting to editing.

Julie Beck followed some of those paths in her own unique sequence and never got locked into any single one. She started out as an editor just as much as a reporter. And now, after 11 years editing at The Atlantic, she’s stepping away from editing to devote herself full-time to writing.

Beck graduated from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in 2011, interning and freelancing for Popular Science along the way. After graduation, she landed a job at a small, business-to-business corporate law magazine: “I was essentially running the website at the ripe old age of 21,” she said.

But she continued to freelance, reporting on topics besides corporate law. That led her to The Atlantic, where she became an associate editor on the magazine’s Health and Science team in 2013. The website’s staff was still small and scrappy, so Beck juggled writing, editing and fact-checking.

She has held many roles with The Atlantic since, including covering education and overseeing the Family desk. Beck built the desk into a home for voice-y pieces exploring the different ways that people live across subjects like friendship, relationships, parenting and family life. She launched a series called “The Friendship Files” and edited big swings on unconventional family structures, why the five-day workweek should cease to exist and how children cope with grief.

“For a lot of the time that I worked there … I was able to both write and edit, and I held onto doing both for just about as long as I could,” Beck said.

Now, at 34, Beck wants to focus on reporting and writing for the next part of her career path. She is on leave to write a book, “The Friends We Made Along the Way.” In the meantime, she launched a newsletter exploring everything from the nostalgia of revisiting our past selves to what bed bugs can teach us about social infrastructure. And she was named a staff writer for The Atlantic in May, a position she will step into next year.

Storyboard spoke with Beck about how she toggles between different parts of her brain while writing and editing, how she imports learnings from one realm into the other, and what she hopes for in her next chapter. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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What prompted your initial pull towards editing, and what attracted you about that path?
Some of it was inertia — those were the kind of jobs that I had, I enjoyed them and I just kept going. I tried to work writing partially into my job description. I did find that to be a really nice balance, because the editing felt easier and I didn’t feel as much pressure with output on the writing side. They fuel each other, and it can help to be doing both simultaneously.

Initially, when I first started in journalism, it wasn’t even really an option (to not also be writing). It was expected in the 2010s era of web journalism. Up until the point when I was leading a section, it worked well. Even after I took over as Family editor, I was still welcomed and encouraged to pitch my own stories. But with that job, it was very hard to make the time for writing.

What do you consider the essential ingredients for good chemistry between an editor and writer?
Chatting on the phone. When I was a younger editor, I resisted getting drawn into long conversations and kept things on email because I was trying to be efficient. But the more I have taken the time to be like, ‘Hey, can we actually just hop on the phone to talk about this?’ Whether it’s the idea someone is pitching, what they’re interested in if we haven’t worked together before, or even one weird, specific reporting problem, having a conversation with your mouth cannot be overrated.

It also takes some formality out of the relationship to have a casual, straightforward conversation. It makes clear that I’m a person, you’re a person and we’re figuring it out together. It helps remove a bit of the distance, especially when working with someone who is not in my office, or is a freelancer, or whom I haven’t met face-to-face. I really enjoy working with folks who love thinking out loud, both verbally and on the page. If I can see how a writer is thinking about something and they can show me their thought process — even if it’s messy — then we can get the piece there.

What do you think is the most underrated quality in an editor that can make a big difference?
Making suggestions. Sometimes an editor will tell a writer something isn’t working but won’t offer ideas about how to fix it. Some writers prefer not being told what to do and to figure out fixes on their own, but I think I’m doing a disservice to a writer if I know what I want but don’t tell them. It’s frustrating to be told that something isn’t working if you don’t know why or might need help to get it to a place where it works.

I always go in and say, ‘You could try something like this,’ or I’ll write something in say, ‘If that doesn’t resonate, delete it or change it or put it your voice. But let me show you the kind of thing I’m thinking.’ People are hesitant to step on the writer’s voice, but I think there is a balance and this approach makes things go a lot smoother.

Can you share a window into your process?
I work differently with different writers. I try to adapt to how that writer likes to work and receive feedback. But generally, we’ll start with a pitch or idea — depending on who it is and where it’s coming from, it may just come from an email. And then I say, ‘Okay, this seems interesting, but I have a few questions.’ There will usually be some workshopping of the idea, whether it’s over the phone or over email. Sometimes it’s as simple as, ‘This is so interesting. I would just add this one thing.’ Sometimes it’s, ‘Oh, you’ve got a really interesting topic, but it’s not quite a sharp idea yet.’ Or I might have specific questions that I want answered before feeling like an idea definitely has legs.

Sometimes, you’ll just get a gem and be like, ‘Yep. You know what you want to do and it sounds great to me.’ But over the years that I’ve been editing at The Atlantic, we’ve leaned more and more toward putting in workshopping and conversation upfront. Then when the draft comes in, it’s more likely we’re on the same page and it’s hopefully going to come in cleaner. This saves time in the long run.

But the process varies widely. While the writer is drafting, some want to check in about things they heard and how they’re structuring things. Some just go in a hole, then give you a draft. I’m flexible. When the draft comes in, I’ll read it through once and make some notes along the way, but mostly just get it in my mind. Then I’ll go back through again. I might do structural and line edits at the same time. If I feel like it doesn’t need that much, I might do one bigger-picture pass, send it back and do line edits later. It depends on the story.

What kinds of stories do you find most challenging to edit, as well as most challenging to write?
Stories that braid together a lot of different elements. Not just long features, but even shorter pieces where the writer is trying to do some personal narrative, reporting, anecdotes from other people and weave those together in a way that structurally makes sense. Those can often be the most rewarding stories to read, because I love it when people bring connections together that you weren’t expecting. But it’s hard to put together.

How has your editing work affected your writing process and vice versa? 
I have a hard time just barfing out a first draft. I’ll get in my head that I need to figure out the structure, transitions and what it needs even as I’m writing the first draft. Maybe it would be better to barf it out and deal with all that later. But I am able to edit my own work fairly well up to the point when one simply needs fresh eyes.

I pay a lot of attention to structure. I write outline after outline for myself, and I’ve been known to do that for writers. I’ve sometimes written handwritten outlines on a piece of paper, taken a picture and emailed it to the writer. I’m always thinking about transitions and what the great Jane Kim calls ‘signposting:’ placing sentences that explicitly guide the reader along, drawing connections back to the thesis and what came before. Those are the kinds of sentences that can really help the piece feel like it’s flowing but are easiest to forget because the writer already knows the connection. Sometimes it seems obvious or silly to spell it out, but ultimately that’s needed.

When I ping pong back and forth between writing and editing, I’ll find that something is helpful in one realm and import it into the other. But I need to have different days for different tasks. When I’m editing, I can toggle between anything and have no trouble multitasking; while I’m writing, I have to be in a hole for several hours to sustain the focus.

What prompted you to shift into a full-time writer role?
Being a full-time staff writer had been percolating in my mind for several years as I thought about the next phase of my career. My boss and I had talked about it here and there, with no rush. With nothing but respect, I would not want my boss’s job or my boss’s boss’s job, so I had tapped out in terms of how high I wanted to climb up the management ladder; it became clear that would have to be something else. The book deal I got last fall kickstarted the conversation.

What do you hope for in this next chapter and what are you nervous about?
I’m really excited to be able to write about my own ideas. As an editor, especially overseeing a section, you end up giving most of your ideas to other people — which is great and has its own rewards. But sometimes I felt like, ‘Oh, that would have been really fun to write.’ Or ‘Maybe I want to save this one and write it myself someday.’ I’m excited to have the time to act on ideas that have been simmering for years.

I am also excited to focus on one thing. So much of editing and managing is multitasking and juggling. You’re always thinking, ‘Who needs this from me?’ and ‘Where are all these projects at?’ There’s the mental load of remembering all of the moving pieces. It’s going to be interesting to not have that pinging around my brain and just focus on the story at hand, which is also terrifying, right? Because there’s nowhere to hide.

I hope I write good stories. I am worried about speed and pace. I find with writing, everything seems to take longer than I hope it will. While I’m excited to have uninterrupted time, I also am cognizant of the pressures and demands of digital media and the maw that must be fed.

Commissioning is an important part of an editor’s job. What are some ways for writers to practice strengthening this muscle?
As our old pal, Nora Ephron said, ‘Everything is copy.’ For The Atlantic’s Family coverage, this is especially true. It’s helpful to notice things in your life that are interesting to you or questions that you have: Why is this the case? Why is this happening? Why are all my friends suddenly talking about the Sunday Scaries? What the heck is that? Those are great seeds of story ideas, whether you are a writer looking for your own ideas or an editor looking for ideas to assign out.

In terms of commissioning, it’s taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact that randomly reaching out to writers I admire and asking them to pitch almost never works. At least in my experience, to get the kinds of stories that worked for my publication at a regular enough pace, I sometimes had to hand it to a writer on a silver platter. Editors have to be a bit like “The Giving Tree”: They give their ideas, time and attention to help someone else write a good story, although of course the writer puts their own spin on it and voice into it.

Is there anything else writers should know?
Never use the word ‘utilize.’ Just say ‘use.’ They mean the same thing and one is two syllables shorter. If I could leave one mark as I leave the editing world, it would be for no one to ever use that word again.

***

Carly Stern is an award-winning enterprise journalist based in San Francisco who covers health, housing and economic security.

The post Effective editing: Get on the phone to talk through ideas and problems appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Alexandra Zayas caught the journalism bug as a kid growing up in Miami, Florida, following some of biggest news events of the time. From there, she earned a journalism degree, spent several years reporting at the Tampa Bay Times and made a brief move into editing before national news organizations came calling.

Now, as deputy managing editor of ProPublica, Zayas has moved into editing where she builds training programs for other editors and reporters, guides big-picture projects and continues to work as the primary editor of the organization’s top bylines.

In our occasional series on Effective Editing, we featured a Q&A with Zayas where she emphasized her belief in emotional intelligence as a crucial editing skill. In this post, Zayas provides an editor’s view of how a major project came together.

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

Veterans Without Assistance

Investigating Mental Health Care in the VA System

Three Days of Tragedy: How a VA Clinic’s Inability to Help Veterans in Crisis Destroyed Two Families

Two veterans sought psychiatric care at a VA clinic in Chico, California. They were bounced between virtual providers and struggled to get support in the threadbare system. A staffer worried, “We are going to kill someone.” Then tragedy struck.

by Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi, ProPublica, photography by Loren Elliott for ProPublica, 
Jan. 6, 2024

[dc]M[/dc]arty and Candy Larsen were in their pajamas, getting ready to watch a movie in the living room, when they heard their 27-year-old daughter scream.

“I need help!” Julia cried.

They could see her standing just a few feet away, her long blond hair unkempt, her blue-gray eyes at once alert and vacant. She’d looked like this in other moments when fear overtook her and reality slipped away. But a new sight jolted them upright: their daughter’s fingers, wrapped around a pink handgun.

Julia pounded the weapon against a wall, then squeezed its trigger, sending a bullet down an empty hallway. “Help me!” she shrieked. Why did you choose to open the piece here?We were all taken aback by the fact that Julia is captured asking for help dozens of times on that 911 call recording. It felt resonant, since this is a story about veterans not getting the help they need.

The parents scrambled in different directions. Candy was on with 911 while Marty reached toward his daughter. “Julia, stand down,” he said. “How can we help you if you don’t stand down?”

But Julia fired again, repeating her plea like a mantra.

“Help me!” she cried. “Help me!”

The need had been building for almost six years, since she returned home from a stint as a Navy firefighter aboard a warship in the Persian Gulf. She was tormented by the rippling trauma of an on-duty sexual assault and grappling with symptoms that led her to be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder.When you thought about pacing, how did you and the writers decide this was the right place to zoom out and give the reader some context in terms of Julia’s personal history?I don’t like making the reader get too deep into a story without clueing them into its bigger-picture significance. I’ve analyzed 11 years worth of stories that placed in the Pulitzer Prize’s investigative category; they get to their first finding, on average, by word 166. In traditional investigative reports, that often happens with a hard pivot to the nut graf. You can be more artful than that with a narrative, and there are plenty of successful investigative narratives without nut grafs. But baking in as early as possible why this story matters is important. Also, narratively, the 153-word opening scene is enough to establish the situation and the stakes; any more than that would simply be an unfolding of plot points that will resonate more later on, once the reader has gotten to know the characters and history.

She was dependent on the Department of Veterans Affairs for care. Just that morning, when her latest crisis began, a nurse at the local VA clinic in Chico, California, had told her mother to bring her in. When they arrived, a telehealth provider was too busy to see Julia. A social worker asked questions to gauge her risk of suicide or violence; even though Julia refused to answer, she was sent out into the world and told to return for the next available appointment, in 11 days.

Such dysfunction had become the norm at the Chico clinic, one of several hundred such community facilities designed to serve veterans who live far from the nation’s big cities. From the outside, it looked like a haven for heroes: a state-of-the-art building with a gleaming atrium, a large American flag flying out front. But the clinic hadn’t had a full-time, on-site psychiatrist in five years. A single nurse was responsible for connecting hundreds of veterans, some with serious mental illness or active suicidal thoughts, with an ever-changing lineup of telehealth providers in different time zones. Echoing my question above, how did you decide this was the spot to introduce some systemic context? And how did you balance keeping the pace moving while getting in what you needed to?We always knew that we needed to follow Julia’s big-picture context with systemic context, but in earlier drafts, we were doing it in a thinner, more sterile way. It wasn’t until our brilliant top editor, Tracy Weber, came in that this paragraph and the next became what they are. She felt it important that we develop the clinic as its own character. She is the best editor I’ve seen who can marshal and hone investigative findings from throughout a piece into the top of a narrative to elevate the whole thing.

The military has long drawn recruits from remote towns across America, promising them a lifetime of health care in return for their service. But the VA has seldom staffed those same communities with the mental health professionals needed to help them once they return home. Two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned this chronic shortcoming into an emergency. The demand for mental health care has grown at a rate that’s triple the rate of growth for all VA medical services. Anguished employees, doing what they can with threadbare staffing and glitchy technology, are burning themselves out trying to avert disasters that feel inevitable. In Chico, nurses and social workers cried after their shifts, and the new site manager, a veteran and longtime health care administrator, had made a grim prediction: “We are going to kill someone,” she told colleagues.This nut graf is super effective.

If hindsight is 20/20, agency officials should have exquisite vision by now.A cutting line.I suggested this line, and I share that with permission to underscore a point: Whether it’s any good is subjective. Another writer may have thought it was too much, or not in line with their voice. This is where building trust comes in; writers need to feel comfortable enough to push back on adds like this.Their files are littered with cautionary tales of missed screenings and insufficient follow-up; in at least 16 instances since 2019, veterans who received inadequate care wound up killing themselves or other people; an additional five died for reasons related to the poor quality of care. Each time, investigators with the VA’s Office of Inspector General swooped in to determine whether the system failed; each time, they concluded it had.Shout-out to Neil Bedi who led an analysis of IG reports that allowed us to convey this broader harm. It was important to convey this wasn’t a freak one-off but a chronic problem.

To plug the holes, the VA grew its nationwide mental health workforce by more than 4,000 last year and plans to hire an additional 5,000 professionals over the next five years. But the sense of dread lingers. It’s a “perfect storm of real potential for gaps in care,” said Alyssa Hundrup, a director on the Government Accountability Office’s health care team.

Just as violence was erupting in Julia’s home on Jan. 3, 2022, another veteran sat alone in his dark bedroom, not far away, ruminating. Deep circles hung below his eyes. An unruly beard covered his chin.How did you think about threading Julia’s story with the second veteran? Why was it important to introduce both of them in the first section, and did you consider different ways to make this segue?The reason we decided to embark on this story at all was the unbelievable fact that these two incidents were linked so closely in time and place. It would’ve felt like a stretch in a fictional movie, and yet, here we were. We wanted to give these two veterans’ stories equal weight, which proved challenging at the start because we had far more information on Julia’s case than Andrew’s. The story got far stronger the more the reporters were able to learn more to achieve that balance.

Andrew Iles, 33, had come to believe the government was monitoring him and that his mother was in on the conspiracy. He, too, had tried to get help at the Chico clinic but for years was passed from provider to provider. Recently, all he could get was a psychiatric pharmacist who prescribed him pills. He felt abandoned, concluded the VA had never wanted to help him and slipped into a state of paranoia so intense that he threw away his belongings and holed himself up inside his mother’s house. How did the writers gain these insights into Andrew’s thinking?They did a tremendous amount of work to obtain access to both veterans and their surviving families, who participated in multiple interviews. The vets also signed off on allowing the reporters to see their psychiatric records. I want to shout-out Kathleen McGrory, whose superpower is her emotional intelligence. She did a beautiful job of building and maintaining trust with these subjects.

His sister, once his protector and closest ally, had stopped bringing her family to see him. His mother had tried to remove all of the firearms from the house but missed a few. Andrew had stowed them away.

***

CHICO, CALIFORNIA, SITS in the northern Sacramento Valley, in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. It’s a college town home to museums and breweries, funky cottages and trendy restaurants. Climb into the foothill elevation, though, and you enter another world. Aside from some big-box stores and picturesque downtowns, it’s mostly wilderness dotted with private homes. Cellphone service is spotty. Roads snake through dense forests.

Andrew Iles grew up in a particularly isolated community called Concow. When he was a kid, only a few hundred people lived there. They drove the same mountain roads, shopped at the same convenience store. There were enough children for a small school, but each grade level had just a handful of students. Most were eligible for free lunch.

Andrew’s family lived a mile off the main road in a one-room, A-frame home that sometimes had no electricity or running water. His parents, Glen Iles and Sue Hill, used methamphetamines. They disappeared, often for days at a time, and let other drug users hang around the house. Some of them forced Andrew and his big sister, Ashley Hill, to engage in horrific sex acts. The kids stayed quiet about the abuse. “We were so afraid to say anything,” Ashley recalled.

The siblings sought refuge on the mountainside. It was their own wild playground, full of creeks to splash in and salamanders to chase. But violence was never far. Once, when Andrew and Ashley were in grade school, they found their mother handcuffed to a refrigerator, bleeding from three gunshot wounds. A few years later, they watched Glen hold Sue at gunpoint and threaten to shoot her. Ashley called 911. Glen fled into the forest on his ATV but was caught and sent to prison. The ordeal made the local newspaper.Why did you feel it was important to share details this early in the story about the childhood trauma that Andrew had experienced?It was important to show these veterans as whole people, and this was a significant part of Andrew’s early life. Also, the reporters learned the military population has a higher proportion of members who had adverse childhood events than the civilian population.The arrest was a turning point. Sue stopped using drugs. She found a new partner and moved the family a few times, ultimately settling in a small city in the foothills called Oroville. After finding steady work at a rent-to-own furniture store and a new place to live, she started rebuilding her family.

Andrew grew into a gangly teenager with a sly sense of humor who wore braces, dyed his hair bright colors and swept his long bangs across his face. He and his friends were emo kids; they listened to Fall Out Boy and spoke out against the war in Iraq. Andrew dated the same girl for years. He showered her with attention and wrote her silly notes. He put considerably less effort into his schoolwork. As graduation neared, he started to believe he needed structure and discipline, and he thought the Air Force might provide it. Plus, he had a mind for math and technology, and the idea of working on multimillion-dollar airplanes appealed to him. “If I don’t do something like this,” he told his mother, “I’ll be in Oroville for the rest of my life.”

As a new airman, Andrew was stationed in Arizona as an aircraft electrical and environmental systems apprentice. His supervisors rated his performance as “truly among the best.” His first evaluations touted his “unrivaled initiative” and described him as a “superior performer” and “stellar airman.” One evaluation ended with a simple declaration: “Promote now!”Why did you choose to include these performance reviews?These are some of my favorite details in the story because they show the tremendous promise Andrew had; it makes what happens later in the story that much more devastating.And how did the reporter gain access to them?Andrew had saved copies and his family shared them with the reporters with his permission.

Andrew raised his hand for an assignment on Kunsan Air Base in the Republic of Korea where he could work on F-16 fighter jets. He traveled the country by train, visiting university cities so he could meet people his age. He found it thrilling to be somewhere so different from Concow with such freedom to explore.

His next tour took him to Ramstein Air Base outside Frankfurt, Germany, to work on hulking C-130s. He was 22 then, excited to visit Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris. But he was increasingly looking over his shoulder, wondering what his peers were saying about him.

Around that time, Andrew sent emails to his mother and sister that described neighbors spying on him. Sue and Ashley found the letters troubling. In some ways, Andrew sounded like his father, who had never been diagnosed with mental illness but was prone to paranoia and conspiracy theories.

Andrew had reached the age when, experts say, a typical life can start to veer off course. It is generally believed that some people have a greater biological risk of developing psychotic disorders than others. Genetics can play a role. Environmental factors like stress can trigger the onset of illness or make it worse than it would have been. Symptoms tend to begin when people are in their late teens or early 20s, as their brains mature. Explaining the mechanisms of the onset of psychiatric disorders can be super complex, but you frame it in quite a brief and digestible way here for readers. Was this challenging? It wasn’t easy. We started with too little context but realized that spelling this out helped address questions about how to think about his family history and childhood trauma in relation to his illness.

Andrew sought out behavioral health services on the base, he said. But he was certain his bosses saw him differently after that. He felt some treated him like he was less capable, while others seemed to think he was faking. He considered ending his life.

In late 2010, long before Andrew was supposed to leave Germany, he wrote his commanding officer saying he no longer believed he could do his job and asking to leave the military, he recalled. The Air Force approved his request for separation, giving him an honorable discharge, records show, but required him to transfer his remaining active duty service to the reserves, he said.

When asked about the circumstances of Andrew’s separation, an Air Force spokesperson, Michael T. Dickerson, said he could not comment on anything related to an individual’s physical or mental health or the nature of his or her discharge.

Andrew flew back to the United States. He was active in reserves in northern California for a period. But his growing fears about government surveillance kept his mind in constant motion. At night, he thought he could hear strangers talking about him through doors and windows. By 24, he’d moved back in with his mom and stepdad in Oroville, the one place he’d dreaded ending up.Did this description of Andrew’s paranoid thoughts come from Andrew himself? Or was it reconstructed from the accounts of people around him?It was a combination of those things. Andrew and Kat talked a number of times by phone and she drilled down on this detail, which struck her as a progression of his symptoms; he’d gone from worrying about what others were saying about him to hearing voices. Other people corroborated it.

***

JULIA LARSEN GREW UP a 40-minute drive from Andrew in a quaint foothills town called Paradise. Her father worked for the post office. Her mother ran a home day care. The youngest of three daughters, Julia was bound by few rules. She spent most of her time outdoors, searching for animals or digging in the red earth. A treasured family photo shows her holding a catfish she reeled in herself.

People who knew Julia as a teenager describe her as bubbly and a free spirit. Did you intentionally want to parallel the chronology of Julia’s tale with Andrew’s, in terms of jumping backward to childhood early on?Yes. It was just remarkable to us how these two very different people, with very different life stories, ended up in the same place.Her senior superlative in high school was “biggest daredevil.” Her family was always camping or hiking together. On weekends, when her friends came over for backyard sleepovers, her mother often joined them around the campfire. In Julia’s mind, Paradise lived up to its name. But like many young people, Julia was eager to escape the place she was from. So one day, she and some girlfriends struck up a conversation with the local Navy recruiter.

Julia told her parents while the family ate dinner together at the kitchen table. Marty, a Navy veteran with an anchor tattooed to his forearm, was elated. “I couldn’t stop bragging about her,” he would later recall. Candy worried about Julia’s safety overseas but trusted her to make the right decision. The two were more like sisters sometimes than mother and daughter.I found this last detail to be really striking and reread it a few times. What did you want this sisterly relationship to signal to the reader? There is a lot about this story that saddens me, but the most crushing aspect, to me, is that both of these moms were fighting hard for their sick kids and both of the veterans adored their moms. Establishing those relationships as early as possible was important, as was building out the moms as characters.

Julia arrived at boot camp outside Chicago in June 2012. She was 18. She traded a colorful sweater and jeans for a Navy-issued T-shirt and shorts and lined up to have her hair cut. The recruits marched and swam and studied and shot. It was easier than she expected. Her parents and middle sister came to watch her graduate. They cheered from the bleachers and then celebrated over deep-dish pizza and White Castle hamburgers.

When it came time to specialize, Julia became a flight deck firefighter. She went for additional training in the Florida Panhandle, where she learned to work a high-pressure hose and handle rescue equipment. That fall, she was assigned to the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier undergoing major upgrades near the Naval base in Norfolk, Virginia. Her home was a cramped bunk with a flimsy mattress deep in the ship’s belly. She placed the few personal possessions she had in a tiny locker and reported for duty.

She doesn’t remember much about the first day or even the first week. But she remembers the comments a supervisor started making about her body, and the way he pressed himself against her when she was chopping lettuce for the salad bar. Later, while she was on dishwashing duty in the ship’s scullery, he approached again, she said. He grabbed her arms and folded them across her chest. Unbuttoned her top. Turned her around. He was bulky, much taller than her 5-foot-7-inch frame, and had a thick, dark mustache. Julia had never felt so helpless. She fought to free herself from his grasp, burning her right wrist on a hot dishwasher in the struggle, but was completely overpowered. Before he could get much further, another young sailor walked in. The supervisor got spooked and scurried out.

Julia told a friend. Then she told the team that handled sexual assault allegations, she said. She wasn’t afraid of repercussions. She had been so excited to enlist. Was this what the rest of her military experience would be like? The Navy gave her the option to transfer to a different ship. For Julia, it was an easy call. She no longer wanted to be on the Roosevelt.

But while the Navy offered Julia a fresh start, it didn’t offer her mental health services, she said, as Department of Defense policies demanded. “I would have taken them up on it,” she told ProPublica. Asked to respond, a U.S. Navy spokesperson said, “While we cannot comment on the care Ms. Larsen may or may not have received, the Navy takes mental health for our Sailors seriously.”

It was, experts said, a crucial missed step. Research shows a clear association between military sexual trauma and mental health conditions including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and suicidal ideation. Studies have shown treatment can help reduce PTSD and depression symptoms, which sometimes emerge years after the traumatic event.I appreciate the clear and authoritative way in which the writers add expertise and perspective here. The idea that her sexual trauma could have been somehow tied to her later mental health problems was a revelation to me when the reporters shared that.

Julia was assigned to the USS Kearsarge, a massive assault ship that was already in the Middle East to support troops in the global war on terrorism. During her second deployment to the region, in the spring of 2016, a Harrier jet burst into flames departing from the Kearsarge’s flight deck. Julia was startled by the deafening pop. She sprinted toward the burning aircraft with the other firefighters to battle the blaze. “Her initial response, quick action and knowledge during an AV-8B Harrier fire on the flight deck was pivotal in the prevention of a major catastrophe and loss of lives,” her supervisors wrote in her performance evaluation. Again, why include the performance evaluation? What purpose did you want this input to serve for the reader?In addition to establishing her promise — it casts her as a literal hero — it also gives an authoritative sense of the harrowing conditions she experienced during her service.

Almost four years to the day after she began boot camp, Julia returned to California. She moved into a house in the southern Central Valley with her boyfriend from the Navy and enrolled at the local college. She set a goal of earning a degree in social work and becoming someone who could help veterans. But Julia couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. She had trouble concentrating on schoolwork. Some nights, she couldn’t sleep. She sought out counseling through the VA.

By June 2017, Julia had started feeling scared of the world around her. One night, she was certain she could hear people walking on her roof and called the police. The officers who showed up made her feel even more anxious. She worried they would take advantage of her. She pushed one and wound up at the police station. She was later taken to a psychiatric unit.

As soon as Marty heard what happened, he drove six hours to pick up his daughter. He packed her belongings into suitcases and hitched her car to the back of his truck. On the ride back, Julia was convinced they were being followed. She begged her father not to draw attention by driving too fast or changing lanes. Marty was stunned to see his easygoing daughter acting so out of character. “It was like a switch had flipped,” he recalled. What a powerful quote.

***

FOR VETERANS in the foothills like Andrew and Julia, the Chico clinic was all they had.How did your team decide where to start and end these chapters?We generally knew we wanted two parallel sections on their early lives that ended with their first struggles with mental illness, then two sections of them being failed by the clinic. The instinct was always that the sections would kick on an ominous beat, showing the problem getting ever worse. But the specific moments shifted as we grappled with these two very important clinic sections — more on that in a bit.

Its mental health team had been trying for years to convince regional leaders to add more positions. Even when the staff included two psychiatrists and a psychologist, plus a nurse, counselor, social workers and designated mental health administrators, the team struggled to keep up with growing demand, former employees told ProPublica. The clinic had more than 500 mental health patients, many of whom had complex illnesses.

The department’s longtime manager, a psychiatrist named Russell Cottrell, recalled once noticing that other rural mental health departments in the region had more personnel per patient than Chico did, he said. When he asked about the discrepancy, his bosses stopped sharing the data. He fumed, he said.

“I don’t think they paid attention to the growth we had,” Cottrell told ProPublica. “I would point it out and I’d get in trouble.”I appreciate how these paragraphs made it clear that the providers are operating in a broken system themselves, rather than framing them as responsible for the ways that their clients/patients were failed.That’s what we always strive to do with systemic investigations.

By the summer of 2016, the staff had gotten smaller, and Cottrell was the only psychiatrist in the building. Cottrell was no stranger to hard work; an Army veteran, he had devoted his career to treating the most challenging mental health cases. But he was tired of begging for personnel and running out of energy. That fall, he made plans to retire.

The lead mental health nurse, Michelle Angela, sent an email to a regional mental health leader in the wake of Cottrell’s retirement announcement. “We would like to invite you to come visit us at Chico Behavioral/Mental Health for an update on what the plan will be,” she wrote. “In addition to our concerns as staff members, our local veterans have been asking if there will be (a medical doctor) on site for their mental health needs.”

No such doctor was hired. Instead, the clinic filled the gap with a combination of visiting doctors and doctors in other locations who connected with patients through computer screens.

In many ways, the Chico clinic was on the forefront of telepsychiatry, then an emerging way to deliver treatment that had the potential to broaden access to veterans in remote locations. But some mental health professionals had reservations. While virtual sessions might work for some patients, they worried others needed the trust and connection that could only be established in person.

For Andrew, who started coming in for treatment after his father died in 2013, the changes were disorienting. Andrew had been seeing Cottrell and starting to untangle his thoughts. When Cottrell retired in February 2017, Andrew was assigned to a temporary doctor, then a specialized pharmacist who wrote prescriptions, he said. Andrew resented the arrangement. “I wanted to talk to someone routinely,” he said, “not just get a load of meds.”

Julia first arrived at the clinic on June 23, 2017. She wouldn’t maintain eye contact with anyone; while in the waiting room, she rearranged the chairs. That day, clinic staff offered her little in the way of answers. “She was informed that Chico VA Behavioral Health is an outpatient clinic and we do not have a psychiatrist on site,” a social worker wrote in her medical records.What was the process lof getting access to these medical records?Julia's attorneys had obtained her comprehensive medical records from the VA. They and Julia agreed to share them with the reporters so that we could accurately describe her symptoms and diagnoses as well as the care she received. Andrew's relatives had only been able to obtain a subset of his medical records from the VA. They shared them with the reporters, with his permission, for similar reasons. The reporters tried to obtain the records on behalf of both veterans, but were unsuccessful. They learned that tracking down these records can be very challenging, even for veterans themselves.

The following month, Julia started coming into the clinic for telehealth appointments with an off-site provider. Her records show she was diagnosed with PTSD from combat and military sexual trauma and bipolar disorder, the latter of which she disputes.

For a while, the patchwork system in the clinic’s mental health department seemed to be working, current and former employees told ProPublica. But cracks started to show. In 2018, the psychologist left. And the clinic sometimes found itself without a telehealth provider available to refill medications or see patients in crisis, emails obtained by ProPublica show. Are emails considered to be documents that reporters are entitled to via FOIA requests?The reporters didn’t obtain these through a FOIA request. As to emails in general, it depends on the content as well as the FOIA officer’s interpretation of the rules.

That November, a wildfire started burning up in the foothills. It was called the Camp Fire because it originated off Camp Creek Road. The blaze grew into a raging inferno that affected virtually everyone in the region. More than 10,000 homes were destroyed, including the one belonging to Marty and Candy Larsen where Julia grew up. At least 85 people died.

The day after the fire, when the air was still heavy with smoke and ash, Cottrell showed up at the clinic to help. He knew the fire would increase the demand for mental health services, he said. Seven months later, he came back on a part-time basis to help out until the clinic could hire a new full-time psychiatrist on site.

Months passed without a hire. Meanwhile, the Chico clinic moved into a gleaming new facility just a few miles away. The VA’s website trumpeted its status as a green building with energy-reducing and cost-saving features. But none of that improved the mental health department, former employees said. In fact, the new building eliminated a designated waiting area for veterans in crisis as well as private offices for mental health practitioners, meaning patients were seen in bare-bones exam rooms that evoked a school nurse’s office.

Amid the turmoil, Andrew struggled. When he noticed Cottrell back in the clinic, he wondered if Cottrell hadn’t really retired but had discarded him as a patient. Experts who were not involved in Andrew’s care told ProPublica that the constant provider changes would likely have reinforced Andrew’s paranoia and made him feel less connected to his care. One said the churn would have felt like a parent continually rejecting their child.

Julia’s life had become a rollercoaster. Some days, she felt great. She enrolled at Chico State and floated around its red-brick campus. “She could be very lucid and be her old self,” Marty recalled. “We kept thinking, she’s over it.” But stressors would trigger her. She would flash back to her darkest moments, start feeling paranoid. It wasn’t unusual for her to go days without sleeping.

She wanted counseling, she told ProPublica. But at the clinic, there was never enough time to get into it all. The focus seemed to be more on medication than talk therapy, she said. “They wanted to help me and (then) shoo me along,” she said.

***

THE STRAIN ON THE CLINIC would only get worse.In terms of structure, how did you and the writers decide when to focus on the two narratives and when to focus on how the clinic was faring?We initially had two sections that individually forefronted Julia and Andrew and their struggle to get treatment, but Tracy’s excellent feedback on enhancing the clinic as its own character led us to instead forefront the clinic for these two sections and let chronology be our guide. That really helped capture the clinic’s descent; naturally, the two vets’ narratives mingled in new and interesting ways amid that. The approach amplified the gravitational pull toward how this would all culminate.

The same month that COVID-19 swept across the country, the mental health team learned its designated administrative assistant would be shared by several departments. That made managing appointments even more difficult. Not long after that, one of the two telepsychiatrists started seeing fewer Chico patients.

Cottrell had had enough, he said. He decided he would retire for good at the end of the year. “I saw it as a lost cause,” he told ProPublica.Did he express experiencing any internal conflict over this decision? By this point in the chronology, Dr. Cottrell was so exhausted and frustrated, he felt like he had no other choice.

That summer, a psychiatrist on the East Coast was hired to do virtual visits on a part-time basis. But increasingly, technical problems were disrupting appointments.

In emails to regional mental health leaders, Chico’s front-line workers insisted that hiring an on-site psychiatrist should be the priority and noted the VA’s own guidelines, which said veterans who were suicidal, violent or in need of immediate medical attention should not be referred for telehealth services. “We currently have numerous serious suicidal ideation patients,” a nurse named Diana McMaster wrote. “With losing Dr. Cottrell, do we not need a psychiatrist in the building? A lot of times it is left up to Michelle and me to manage what happens with these patients on our side of the video. … That puts us in a precarious position.”

Dr. David Gellerman, the chief medical director for mental health services in the VA’s Northern California region, replied, writing, “No, we are not placing anyone in a precarious position. We can't hire someone who does not exist... if we get a good psychiatrist or [psychiatric nurse practitioner] candidate who can be on location, we can try, but so far we have not had any acceptances.” This does give some helpful insight into the fact that the VA was trying, but clearly having difficulty, hiring for the role (rather than totally neglecting the effort).

Gellerman pointed out that precautions were being relaxed in the pandemic. “Care by telehealth is better than no care at all,” he added.

Reached by email by ProPublica, Gellerman did not comment on the correspondence. He referred a reporter to the VA’s public affairs office that covers the broader region of Northern and Central California, Nevada, Hawaii and the Philippines, which did not respond. A national spokesperson said agency guidance does not establish absolute conditions under which virtual care should not be given.

By then, Andrew had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a mental illness marked by a combination of schizophrenia and mood disorder symptoms. People with the disorder can experience psychotic symptoms, losing their connection to reality.

Andrew hadn’t been employed since returning to Oroville. He had come to believe people were trying to kill him, even his family. He spent most of his time alone in his bedroom. He slept upright in his computer chair and ate only food that came in a can so nobody could poison him.

Sue quit her job to care for her son. She made sure he had canned food to eat and drove him back and forth from his VA appointments. In conversations with her sister, Sue worried Andrew’s doctors were always changing and he wasn’t getting the help he needed. Ashley felt helpless watching her little brother slip away. He was withdrawn and angry, a far cry from the outgoing kid she remembered. She thought back on how she had tried to protect him when they were children. “It felt like I’d failed,” she said.

The pandemic had rekindled Julia’s paranoia, too, so much so that she began to believe strangers wanted her dead. That May, her oldest sister, Jordan Pepper, a clinical mental health counselor in Ohio, traveled to Chico and helped her to seek in-patient treatment at the VA hospital near Sacramento, California. Doctors there diagnosed her with general psychotic disorder.

Records show Julia went to the Chico clinic in the weeks and months that followed. Candy and Marty took turns accompanying her. Candy made it a point to get to know the people who cared for her daughter, in some cases getting their personal cellphone numbers. She tried to stay optimistic.

In the fall of 2021, the telepsychiatrist who had been seeing Julia stopped seeing Chico patients. That November, Julia had a virtual appointment with a psychiatric nurse practitioner she had never seen before who prescribed a drug called atomoxetine to help her concentrate, her medical records show. But two days later, Julia called back and asked for something that would work faster. The nurse practitioner prescribed an antidepressant called bupropion and instructed Julia to take the two medications together, her records show.

More than a year later, in its report on Julia’s case, the VA’s inspector general would note that the combined use of atomoxetine and bupropion can trigger psychotic or manic symptoms. The nurse practitioner told investigators that despite what his notes said, he had not intended for Julia to take both.What a horrific oversight on the NP’s part.It isn’t clear which, if any, Julia took. She doesn’t remember.

Around that time, Julia began taking note of unusual things she believed were happening to her: strangers following her at the dog park, electronic files going missing. She installed a camera in her car and started carrying a pink handgun she bought after separating from the Navy.

The Chico clinic’s mental health department, meanwhile, fell further into disarray, current and former employees told ProPublica. Several other telehealth providers left, including the Connecticut-based telepsychiatrist who was seeing Andrew. Those who stayed buckled under the weight. “We were abandoned,” said Belva Fay, a senior social worker who was also the clinic’s acting manager for eight months. “We were trying to run a clinic with nobody to prescribe medications, nobody to see emergency cases, nobody to talk to these clients who are angry. …

“We kept saying, there is going to be a problem,” Fay said. “This is going to blow up.”These kinds of omens are really haunting.Agree. These on-the-record worker interviews were among the most important, and hard-to-get, pieces of reporting.

By the time Michelle Gradnigo started as the clinic’s site manager in October 2021, disaster felt all but certain. Gradnigo, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army and longtime military health care administrator, was so troubled by the lack of on-site mental health care providers that she asked if the clinic’s primary-care physicians could handle some of the load, she said. The answer was no, she recalled.

“I reached out to anyone at the time who would listen and said we are going to kill someone,” she told ProPublica.

VA officials told ProPublica the Chico clinic was trying to recruit mental health professionals by offering special salary rate increases, education debt reduction and relocation incentives.

Northern California VA leaders were also trying to grow the virtual mental health program. A proposal obtained by ProPublica through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that mental health vacancies were dogging clinics across the region and that “painstaking and time-consuming recruitment efforts” were bearing little fruit. The only positions drawing quality applicants, according to the presentation, were virtual.

***

WHEN THE SUN ROSE over the Sierra Nevada mountains on the third morning of 2022, Julia’s eyes were already open.

She had been awake for days, a fact she blamed on what felt like a constant barrage of electric shocks. She had tried to stop them by covering her walls in aluminum foil, but it wasn’t helping. She wanted pills to calm her down. At 8 a.m., she left a message at the clinic that she was “in crisis and very anxious,” government records show. An hour later, she started texting her mother, who called the clinic in tears. The mental health nurse was home that day with COVID, so a nurse from another department took the call.

The nurse sent an instant message to Julia’s nurse practitioner, who was seeing patients from another location, asking if Julia should come into the Chico clinic or go to the VA hospital in Sacramento. The nurse practitioner wanted Julia to go to Sacramento, government records show. But the nurse misunderstood and told Julia’s mother to bring her to Chico.

Marty and Candy brought Julia to the clinic around 2:30 p.m. Her body was tense, her eyes red and heavy with tears. But the nurse practitioner never evaluated her. He had nine appointments that day and no time to see Julia, a violation of VA policy requiring same-day availability for patients in crisis.

A triage social worker tried to ask Julia questions to help determine her risk of suicide or violence, but Julia wouldn’t engage, records show. Instead, she quibbled with her diagnoses and voiced frustration over the recent change in her mental health provider. The social worker should have posed the questions to Julia’s mom, who was inside the clinic while Julia’s dad waited in his truck. Instead, she marked Julia’s disposition as “routine” and concluded she wasn’t a threat to herself or others. There is no indication the social worker asked about Julia’s access to guns or other lethal means.Why was it so important to point out what the expected protocol was and what went wrong here?One of the most useful storytelling tools in investigative narrative is to establish how the system is supposed to work before letting the reader fully grasp the consequences of it not really working that way. Take a look at how we kicked the top in Hannah Dreier’s A Betrayal to see this strategy at its best. There’s no nut graf in that story, no list of findings — only a foreboding sense that there’s a way the system should work and it’s not going to work out that way this time.

Later, in an interview with the inspector general’s office, the social worker said she was unfamiliar with the protocols. She ultimately gave Julia the nurse practitioner’s next available appointment, in 11 days.

Julia stormed out of the clinic, furious that she had not been given the medication she wanted, her father recalled. Candy was frustrated; she wanted clear direction on how to help. Exhausted, they all headed back to Candy and Marty’s home, a cozy ranch on a remote hillside outside of Red Bluff, California.

Back at home, Candy offered Julia some soup and a sandwich and tried to help her calm down. Julia was still agitated, but around 10 p.m., she took a sleeping pill and retired to her parents’ bedroom. When it was quiet, Candy and Marty got ready to watch a movie in the living room, hoping it might help them relax.

Just before 11 that night, a call came into 911 dispatch.

The recording captured Julia as she pleaded for help, then fired one gunshot, then another. The line stayed open for an hour, chronicling all that unfolded.It’s been many words and chapters since you first opened with this anecdote at the top of the piece. Did you trust the reader would remember and connect the dots that they already knew how this would end?That was, indeed, the hope.

After the second bullet fired into nowhere, Candy was determined to lower the temperature. “We are trying to help,” she assured her daughter. “You gotta put the gun down first, honey.” Marty followed suit. “We’re here for you, OK?” he told Julia. “It’s not too late. Nothing bad has happened.”

For a moment, it seemed like Julia might relent. “OK,” she said quietly. “OK.”

Instead, she fired again.

Acting on intuition, Marty leaped at his daughter in an effort to disarm her. He wrapped his arms around her, he said, and tried to overpower her. Could it have felt to her, in that moment, like she was back in the ship scullery, trying to escape the grip of her attacker? It’s impossible to know. But she felt threatened and thrashed with all the strength she could summon, smashing at his ribs and clawing his eyes.

The gun fired again. This time, a bullet struck her mother in the thigh, tearing through a large blood vessel.

Julia didn’t realize. She fought her father for control of the gun for the next 10 minutes, pistol whipping his head until he started slipping out of consciousness. After that, she told him she loved him and went outside. He came to, and by the time she returned, had retrieved his own pistol from a drawer in the kitchen. He warned Julia he would shoot and then did, he said, striking her once in each shoulder and once in the thigh.

When the police had Julia in their custody around midnight, both she and her father were seriously injured. Her mother was dead.With an anecdote like this, where the reader was told the outcome at the beginning (in the lede), what are you hoping to impart when you return back to the same scene later?The reader saw Julia with the gun, but we saved the specific outcomes — the injuries and death — until the reader could experience the characters and their relationships. The consequences resonate more deeply this way.

The morning after the shooting, her bereaved sister Jordan called the Chico clinic, she said. She wanted someone there to explain Julia’s mental illness to the authorities, to advocate for her sister. The staff member who answered knew nothing about the shooting. “Oh shit,” Jordan recalled hearing from the other end of the phone.

That afternoon, just before 4, the clinic’s phone rang again.

It was Andrew, who was in a particularly rough place. The departure of his telepsychiatrist had made him feel cast aside yet again. He’d enrolled in an intensive VA program for people with serious mental illness, but abruptly withdrawn, believing the VA didn’t really want to help him. It’s so clear by these attempts that he was, at various points, seriously trying to get help.Just unbelievable how these events played out.On the call, he asked to speak to a doctor, he recalled. When he didn’t get one, he told a pharmacist that he had not been taking his medication and was feeling paranoid again. The pharmacist encouraged him to restart the prescription and scheduled a follow-up appointment in two days.

“Vet does not appear to be a harm to himself or others,” the pharmacist wrote in Andrew’s notes.

The next day, Jan. 5, Andrew sought out the family shotgun. While Sue had gotten rid of most of the firearms in the house just a few months earlier, Andrew had kept three in his possession.

Around 12:30 p.m., Andrew called 911 and told the dispatcher he had shot his mother. He was standing in the driveway when deputies arrived.

Sue died on the scene.

Ashley first learned there had been a shooting at her mother’s house when a friend called. She initially thought Andrew had taken his own life. She and her husband raced to the house, arriving alongside first responders. Deputies wouldn’t let her on the property until well after night had fallen. Ashley struggled to make sense of what had happened. Officials told her Andrew had performed CPR on his mother. “He tried saving her life,” Ashley said.

***

OVER THE COURSE of about 36 hours, employees’ worst fears about the Chico clinic had become reality. Many returned to the office in a state of shock.

Gradnigo, the site manager, requested a chaplain be brought into the clinic. But when she asked her supervisors what the next steps would be, she got no response, she said. Hoping the VA’s central office might intervene, she sent a tip about the shootings to the agency’s inspector general’s office, she said. She withheld her name so she wouldn’t face retaliation.

Gradnigo was fired in March 2022. The reasons provided to her were “inappropriate” comments and interactions with colleagues, records show. Gradnigo says the allegations about her conduct are exaggerated or false. She believes she lost her job because she reported wrongdoing and she is Black. She is pursuing a discrimination claim against the VA. The agency did not comment on the claim and told ProPublica it does not comment on personnel matters.

The inspector general’s office went on to investigate Julia’s case. Its report, which was published in February 2023, ticked off all the ways the clinic had failed, from medication mismanagement to not having a same-day access availability and improperly assessing her risk of violence. But the report did not mention a second patient involved in a violent act. It did not address systemic staffing issues. In fact, the office said it did not substantiate employee claims that facility leaders had failed to address their concerns about mental health staffing. The report found facility leaders had “ensured the use of telehealth and community care.”

The inspector general’s office declined to say why it did not include Andrew’s case in its report or publish a separate review. Spokesperson Fred Baker said the office reviews all complaints it receives. With respect to the employee concerns about staffing, he said, the inspector general’s office “found that leadership was taking steps to fill vacancies.”

The VA declined to make a clinic leader or official at its regional office in Sacramento available for an interview. In a statement, a Washington, D.C.-based spokesperson, Joseph Williams, said the agency “fell short” in treating Julia. “This incident does not represent the quality of care Veterans have come to expect from our facilities, or the standard to which we hold ourselves accountable, and we have taken several measures to ensure that it does not happen again,” he wrote.

The agency later said it could not answer specific questions about the care Julia or Andrew received due to privacy concerns.

After the shootings, the Chico clinic hired an on-site psychiatrist and an additional social worker, according to the inspector general report. The psychiatric nurse practitioner who prescribed the medications to Julia resigned. For the last several months, the mental health team has been fully staffed, the VA told ProPublica.

Andrew was charged with his mother’s murder in January 2022. He remains in the Butte County Jail. As early as this month, a judge could determine whether Andrew was legally sane at the time of the killing.

In an interview with ProPublica, Andrew described being stuck in a loop when he fired the shotgun. He was convinced his mom was poisoning him, something he now says was a delusion. “I love my mom,” he said. “I wish she was here.”

He doesn’t want to scapegoat the military or the VA for what happened, he said. He accepts responsibility. But he stressed that he had tried to get help from the VA repeatedly. “I do believe if there had been some form of intervention on their end, this might not have happened,” he said.

Ashley stayed in Oroville for a while, but it became impossible to go grocery shopping without someone staring at her or asking about her mother. “It felt like we were on display,” she said. Over the summer, she moved to Texas with her husband, young son and stepfather. She’s hoping to give her son the childhood she and Andrew never had.

Ashley is still mourning her mother, whom she described as a devoted grandmother and her closest friend. She has also been doing whatever she can to support Andrew in jail. She calls and texts him regularly and makes sure he has enough money in his account for the commissary. When he texted about playing Dungeons & Dragons recently, she replied like a mother might. “I’m so happy that you’re doing something fun,” she wrote. “I love you, Andrew.”

Julia was also charged criminally for her mother’s death. In January 2023, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She is now a patient at Patton State Hospital, a sprawling forensic psychiatric complex at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. She reads books in the library, helps organize group activities like bingo and keeps her fingernails painted vibrant colors. She has a journal with positive affirmations on each page; she writes down the things she’s grateful for.Why did your team choose to include these details?We’d given you so much of Julia before these tragic events, and we felt it important to now give the best insight into what is going on in her head after. The reporters also felt it important to show Julia as you'd find her on any given day. We spent a lot of time describing Julia on the day of the shooting, which was, in many ways, an outlier.

For some time after the shooting, Julia didn’t know she had caused her mother’s death. It was only after listening to the 911 recording months later that she began to understand what had happened. Coming to grips with that has been excruciating, she said. Her mom was her best friend. On a recent afternoon, during an open mic event at the hospital, she read a poem she wrote about their relationship. Audience members were brought to tears, she said.

It is hard to say what prompted the shooting. She recalls hearing an explosion in the distance — maybe a gas tank — and feeling like she needed to protect herself from some unknown threat. “It felt like I was unconscious, not awake,” she told a psychologist who evaluated her in January 2023, records show. “It felt like I was in a video game.” The psychologist speculated the explosion triggered her PTSD and may have put her in a dissociated state.

Julia isn’t sure how long she’ll be at Patton. She would have to be cleared by the hospital and the court to be released for supervised treatment in the community.

It has taken many months for Marty to begin recovering. His ribs were fractured and his back was broken in two places. He needed 15 staples in his head. The emotional recovery, he knows, will be much longer. He’s chosen to stay in the hilltop ranch where the shooting took place. He bought the property to grow old there, and that’s what he still intends to do. He finds comfort in his fruit trees and livestock and the sweeping mountain views.

He said he forgives his daughter. He keeps her military photo in his wallet. But he is furious at the VA. “I want to punch VA in the face,” he said one afternoon late in the summer, while the sun poured into his den. To him, it was obvious what had needed to happen and what went wrong.

It crystallized deep in his mind the night of the shooting, after Julia had finally relented and he picked up Candy’s cellphone to speak with the 911 operator.

“She really, really needs help,” he told the operator while waiting for the police to come and arrest his daughter. “We tried to get her help at the VA. And, God, the VA didn’t really help that much.”This quote gave me the chills. What a powerful line that gets straight to the heart of the issue.No kidding. We knew from the moment we heard it that this exchange was going to be the ending.

The dispatcher was empathetic. She’d heard Julia’s cries for help all night; dozens of them were captured in a recording of the call.Did your writers interview the dispatcher? No. The only thing they had to go on was an audio recording of the 911 call that did not identify the dispatcher, and police wouldn’t provide additional records.

“I’m sorry the VA didn’t help her,” the dispatcher said.

* * *

EDITOR'S NOTE: After reading a February 2023 report by the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Inspector General about inadequate mental health care at a VA clinic in Chico, California — a document that did not name any veterans or health care professionals or provide specific dates — ProPublica reporters wanted to more fully understand the tragedy that unfolded and what lessons it offered for the larger VA health care system. They spent months investigating the case at the center of the report involving a veteran named Julia Larsen as well as a second case involving a veteran named Andrew Iles who was also treated at the clinic.What did you hope to achieve by providing this kind of visibility into the reporting process, and transparency, to your readers? Even though we didn’t attribute each and every sentence to a source within the narrative, it was important to show the reader that this was all verified through rigorous reporting. We’ve found time and again at ProPublica that this kind of transparency — we call it showing the receipts — resonates with readers.

The reporters interviewed Julia in person at Patton State Hospital near San Bernardino, California, and spent many hours interviewing her by telephone and video call. They traveled to St. Louis to meet with her attorneys. They reviewed hundreds of pages of her military personnel and medical records, as well as police reports from the night of the shooting and transcripts of interviews Julia gave to detectives and psychologists after her arrest. They listened to the 911 call Julia’s mother, Candy Larsen, made before she died. They interviewed Julia’s father, Marty Larsen, at his home in Red Bluff, California. They interviewed her sister Jordan Pepper, childhood friend Brittney Apel and former boyfriend Ignacio Gutierrez by telephone. In addition to Brittney and Ignacio, who served in the Navy with Julia, they interviewed four other people who knew Julia from the military, one of whom Julia told about the sexual assault and corroborated her recollections. They also interviewed Laurie Smith, a close friend of Julia’s mother.

The reporters interviewed Andrew in person at the Butte County Jail in Oroville, California, and by telephone. They reviewed some of his medical records, military performance reviews and discharge records, as well as his court records and family photos from his childhood. They interviewed his sister, Ashley Hill, at her home in Texas and his half-brother William Iles, aunt MaryJo Hendricks, former girlfriend Kayley Reni and childhood friend Alex Kenworthy by telephone. They interviewed a second childhood friend who declined to be named.

Both Julia and Andrew consented to ProPublica publishing information from their medical records about their diagnoses and medical histories.

To better understand the issues at the Chico clinic, the reporters interviewed a half-dozen current and former employees. They reviewed emails sent between 2016 and 2022 that detailed staffing issues, as well as hundreds of pages in former site manager Michelle Gradnigo’s discrimination complaint. They also reviewed an internal proposal from 2021 to grow the virtual mental health program and documents from the Office of Inspector General’s investigation obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

To put the case into broader context, the reporters reviewed and analyzed more than 300 routine inspections and investigative reports published by the VA’s inspector general since January 2020, some examining events that occurred in 2019. They brought their findings to experts and interviewed the relatives of three veterans who died by suicide after receiving inadequate mental health care from the VA. They reviewed national reports on mental health staffing and outcomes.

Overall, the reporters spoke to more than a dozen mental health professionals, researchers and policy experts. They consulted with some on how to interview people who have experienced trauma and been diagnosed with severe mental illness. They asked others to describe how the treatment Julia and Andrew received from the Chico VA clinic differed from generally established standards of care and offer insight into the issues facing the VA’s health system.

The post Effective editing: Navigating failures of the military’s mental health system appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For other posts in the occasional series about effective editing, read our interviews with Mike Wilson of The New York Times, Scott Stossel of The Atlantic and Lynda Robinson of The Washington Post. This interview, with Alexandra Zayas of ProPublica, is followed by the annotation of a project Zayas edited.

Alexandra Zayas was exposed to the power of local news at a young age. She grew up in Miami and spent much of her adult life in South Florida. “Miami is just a wild news town,” said Zayas, who is now 41 and lives in New Jersey. “I recall just constantly being surrounded by historic events,” she said, from Hurricane Andrew in 1992 to the Elian Gonzalez crisis around the turn of the century.

Following the powerful reporting of The Miami Herald back then gave Zayas a sense that journalists had an exciting front-row seat to history. While studying at the University of Miami, Zayas’ professor — an editor at The Herald — helped her find freelancing opportunities at the paper. She covered a neighborhood beat as a college student before pursuing an internship with the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2005.

Zayas then found her way to The Tampa Bay Times, where she grounded and elevated her journalistic skills — first as an intern, then as a reporter across a wide suite of roles that spanned breaking news reporting, enterprise reporting and investigative reporting, and ultimately as an enterprise editor. In 2017, she joined ProPublica as a senior editor.

At ProPublica, Zayas has risen into the ranks of the leadership team to become deputy managing editor. She coaches reporters and editors within ProPublica and in the newsrooms it partners with on projects. She helped lead ProPublica’s second-annual investigative editor training, a boot camp where newsroom staff trains up to 10 editors from around the country.

Storyboard connected with Zayas to discuss how editors can demonstrate their impact on a story, her comprehensive pre-writing process and why trust is the bedrock of reporter-editor partnerships. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted or spurred that shift from enterprise/investigative reporting into enterprise editing? And what seemed appealing about editing after being a reporter for so long?
I had a life-changing experience with an editor as a reporter when I worked with Chris Davis, who is now an editor with The New York Times’ Local Reporting Project. I had never done an investigative project in my life — I fancied myself an enterprise reporter and was very drawn to narratives. I ended up working on an investigation called “In God’s Name” in 2012, about how a religious exemption created by the Florida legislature in the 1980s allowed religious group homes for kids that were almost like religious boarding schools. They were places you would send a ‘bad kid’ to be reformed with no government oversight, essentially putting oversight into the hands of preachers policing themselves.

I was paired with this investigative editor who really evangelized me and showed me that not only could I do investigative journalism, but also that investigative journalism was capable of making a change in the world. The idea that your work was not just to inform, but could change lives, was something he opened my eyes to. I had other editors who thought I was a good writer and put my stories on the front page. But Chris was never satisfied. He was constantly wanting to know if I had better examples or if I had gotten better access. He was interrogating my understanding of everything and forced me to set a far higher bar for myself than I thought I was capable of. That generosity — his patience and his dedication, the spirit of partnership and teamwork I felt from him — not only evangelized me to fall in love with investigative reporting, but also showed me how much impact you could have as an editor.

I didn’t immediately become an editor, in part because I wanted to keep learning from Chris, so I joined the investigations team and worked under him. I fell in love with that sense of team spirit — the idea that you’re in it with somebody, you’re talking every day about what you’ve got, you’re really stressed out sometimes and you’re really victorious sometimes. I ended up liking the relationship part of my job more than the ‘going and finding out stuff’ part. I realized the relationship part of the job is a huge part of being an editor. So little by little, I started thinking I wanted to be an editor.

Can you share more about what skills are required to be a good editor? What parts of your brain do you have to tap?
When I became a senior editor at ProPublica, it became clear that editing is not just looking at a piece of writing and figuring out how it can be better, or how it can be structured better, or written in a prettier way. It’s really about pretending the page is blank and trying to conjure out of the universe the best possible version of this story — then working with the reporter to figure out how to get that. It involves asking: ‘Do we even have all of the best possible material? The writing is really pretty, but is it actually true? Is it the most logical argument we can make? What are the fatal flaws buried under this pretty writing?’ It’s like an X-ray reading, seeing beyond what’s on the page to what the possibilities are.

How did you develop those skills?
My mantra was ‘I made a mistake a day.’ As an enterprise editor at The Tampa Bay Times, I was editing my friends, essentially, but that really only lasted for six to eight months because I took a job with ProPublica soon after. When I was an investigative editor, I was remembering all of the stuff Chris taught me about how to put together a bulletproof investigation. But it was really a lot of not asking reporters all of the questions I needed to ask and then being blindsided in the end with something that I should have asked at the beginning. With stuff like that, you just honestly have to make those mistakes.

So you’d been an editor for less than a year before the ProPublica job. How did sell your abilities for that job? And what made it appealing to you?
ProPublica had offered me a job four years earlier, after ‘In God’s Name.’ I turned it down because I didn’t feel like I was fully done being an investigative reporter under Chris. But I stayed in close touch with the managing editor there, Robin Fields, and we were constantly talking about different opportunities. This was right after Donald Trump got elected and there was a real hunger to put resources into investigative reporting. The New York Times and ProPublica offered me jobs the same week.

Both of those offers were for editing jobs. I think people liked my investigative experience and the fact that I had edited narrative. To be able to do both of those things is an increasingly desired skill set. I shared before-and-after drafts of some stories I had edited. One I was very proud of was by Kat (Kathleen) McCrory on a victim of the Pulse nightclub shooting. It involved going way beyond what was on the page to what was possible. I think all of those things made them comfortable that I was a conceivable possibility for that job. Even so, I still had a lot to learn once I got to ProPublica.

Reporters obviously have their own clips to show, though a lot of people have touched that copy before it sees the light of day. I imagine an editing portfolio is different because you take rough copy and shape it into something else. Is showing before-and-after drafts typically what you were asked to do? How common is that, and how do you show where you took a story from conception to actualization?
Now I’m part of hiring committees at ProPublica, and a big part of what we do is really try to figure this out. We want a memo to get a sense of how they someone as an editor. We also will give them early drafts of stories that need work and say, ‘What would you do with this?’ We ask folks to not look at the published version and also tell them that there are many ways to edit a story, so the published way may not be the only way. We’re looking for people to essentially go beyond the line edit and look for those very big picture issues — things that might need more reporting, things that might indicate a flaw in the logic. Those tests are very important in hiring editors. Then we try to talk to way more people than the references they offer up — former editors, former reporters they’ve worked with — to get a really good sense of what their skills are and where they need to grow.

When it comes to editing narrative, how would you describe the essential ingredients for strong chemistry between a writer and an editor?
It’s the exact same when editing narrative as it is for editing traditional investigative reporting: two people who trust each other. Trust is the bedrock of the relationship between a reporter and an editor. I need to trust that the stuff that you’re telling me is true. I need to trust that you are telling me when you don’t have something and why you don’t have something. You need to trust that I care about you, the story and your growth, and that we’re on the same team. You need to trust that I’m letting you know when I’m not 100% sure of something.

How do you build that trust?
It’s really important for people to see me as myself and for them to feel comfortable. I admit my own vulnerabilities. I’m very much myself. I don’t have highbrow tastes. I am kind of a dork. On a story ProPublica reporter Lizzie Presser, I told her for one story she was doing, I made her watch “The Matrix.” When reporters were working on an asbestos story, I made watch “Jurassic Park” because their story reminded me so much of it. I will seriously say the first thing that pops into my head.

I want them to feel as free as I feel when I’m talking out loud about a story. I’m asking them stupid questions that come into my head and making them explain simple concepts that I don’t understand. I want them to feel comfortable arguing with me if they think I’m wrong, because sometimes I am. I want them to know that if I’m arguing with them, it’s not just because I’m the boss — it’s because I think I’m right.

If I want reporters to do some needle-in-a-haystack kind of thing to find something, they’ll do it because they’ll trust that it’s for them, it’s for the story and I want them to succeed. Even reporters like Lizzie, who are way better writers than me, the trust we have in each other is so strong that sometimes she would get me a draft and I had an idea for maybe a lede, or a section hed, or something I wanted her to try out. I would write a fake version of it. I wasn’t writing over her; it was essentially me writing to give her an idea. The process is very iterative. It’s very egoless. This is not a situation where we’re fighting over word choice and commas. We start very big, very conceptual, very structural. I tell them, ‘Don’t even worry about the words at this point.’ The structure has to be right, the pacing has to be right, your voice is going to be in it — but right now, let’s work together on the very best possible framework for this thing.

On structure and pacing, how do you practice fine-tuning that sensibility and honing those instincts?
Exposure to really good storytelling. I see stories everywhere and I pay attention to how they’re told. Not just the great journalistic pieces that we see in writing, but movies; and not just the highbrow movies, but popcorn movies. A well-told Taylor Swift song. You can learn about storytelling from the stories that are all around us. I absorb and really pay attention to what works about them.

For instance, I was just watching “Karate Kid” with my girls and that final fight scene serves as a great example of pacing. It takes about four minutes from the moment the fight starts to the moment Daniel delivers that iconic, one-legged kick. And that kick lands with so much more resonance because of the way those four minutes are drawn out. There are beats that establish Daniel’s growth as a fighter, those that show how much is stacked against him, those that step up the suffering he has to overcome.

If you watch that scene knowing there’s a final blow coming, you understand why it doesn’t come earlier in those four minutes. You don’t want it to come before you’ve given enough oxygen to each of those important dimensions, but you also don’t want to belabor any one of them. By the time Daniel sets up for that final kick with that wild look in his eyes, that catharsis is earned.

You mentioned that your process starts fairly high-level. If you were going from the starting point to the end of your process — when you’re conceptualizing the story to when you’re getting the draft to applying polish at the end — what do you do first?
Story choice is essential. The writer and I will weigh the benefit of doing a story. For investigative journalism, they need to have an angle that reflects accountability for somebody or something, and there has to be a problem that can be impacted by the story. The big questions are: Who’s being harmed? How bad is that harm? What does that harm look like? What’s the scope of the problem?

The vast majority of investigative stories should not be narratives. Narratives should be reserved only for the stories that would be best served by that medium. I think too many people see narrative as better than a traditional investigative report. I don’t think one is any better than the other; I think you allow the investigative findings to dictate how you’re going to tell the story. Some stories are clearly better served by narratives than traditional investigative reports: ones in which you have deep access to people, or enough reconstructive material from documents or interviews that you can vividly reconstruct it. It has to be a tale that can carry a reader throughout its multiple chapters, where every chapter not only advances the plot, but also advances the points and serves the findings. This is a really high bar for even choosing to do an investigative narrative. It has to meet all those marks. Feasibility is also a big thing. Are we going to get that access? How are we going to do it?

I am very much a partner in the reporter’s reporting process. I’m encouraging them through all possible barriers. I help them think through public records requests or how to handle a first approach for a source — all different kinds of reporting strategies. We’re regularly checking in about progress. As a reporter, they are in the weeds. My job is to maintain a high-altitude perspective so that I can be asking all those big picture questions: Do we have enough of what we need? How does this next reporting task serve us in a bigger way? Sometimes, a reporter might get discouraged after striking out with something or learn about a caveat and think there’s no story. Having the editor as that independent brain is essential, because it’s like, ‘Actually, in the big picture, the problem still remains, right?’ I remind them of how outraged they were about this problem at the very beginning and about the things that excited them when a few months down the road, they’ve sort of become accustomed and desensitized to it.

At the ProPublica editor boot camp, I hand out a multi-page list of logical fallacies. I ask all the editors and reporters to circle all the ones they’ve seen or been guilty of — and it’s all of them, right? A big part of being an editor is psychology and spotting those behaviors, like putting too much emphasis on something because it’s the most recent thing they got or was harder to get. I’m a stand-in for the reader. I let them know when something excites me and encourage them to lean into that. I also egg them on when something’s hard.

When I was working on ‘In God’s Name,’ I had to do stuff that made me really anxious, like trying to get into abusive homes. Being able to have a pregame discussion with Chris Davis, then call him afterwards and tell him what I did, was a huge motivator for me. Being that coach and motivator for my reporters — caring as much about it as they do — is the job. And then we get ready to write. But we don’t wait until the first draft to start writing.

What do you mean by that?
There might be some memos along the way that we write about what the story is, what we’ve got so far, what we think we could get if we report a little bit more. That’s a very low stakes, low pressure way for writers to start digesting their reporting and put in some of the best bits that they’ve got without worrying about the writing part of it. It’s about digesting and thinking on the page. I have them write character thumbnails to flesh out who the different people are that they’ve talked to. I have them write chronologies and findings. Even for somebody writing a narrative investigation, I still have them write bullet points that are never going find their way into print. But we need to know the sharpest version of what our investigation found so that we can convey those findings in the clearest and most authoritative way. All of those writing exercises happen well before the first draft.

I would imagine that at a place like ProPublica, where projects span many months, this kind of digestion and metabolizing as you go is important. In my own experience as a reporter, the fresher and the closer you are to the material, the better — but these projects take a long time, by definition.
Even if you’re working on something quick, jotting down your findings and putting together an outline before you start drafting is essential. It saves you time on the back end. The saying goes, ‘Measure twice, cut once.’ With the outline, I want the writer to share the material they’ve got — not just one sentence for each chapter. I want to know what material is going to go in the chapter so I can become as familiar as possible with it. Maybe the chapter should be ordered in a different way, but I wouldn’t know that unless I knew what the material was.

Then comes the draft. First, I look at the draft for content. What more reporting do we need that would make it stronger? Are we making the points we think we’re making? Are we making them as clearly as we want to make them? Big picture, what is the structure that could best serve this story? Then, even when we get down to the writing part, I don’t worry about the specific words until later. I really care about pacing. Then we zero in and zero in and zero in.

What qualities do you think help someone shine in an editing role?
You have to have emotional intelligence. You have to be able to not only worry about the story at hand, but also the person you’re working with and get a good read on them — how they work, what they need. Every individual writer needs something different from an editor and you have to be flexible enough and intuitive enough to give somebody specifically what they need.

There are different kinds of editors that I’ve seen be successful. I’m more of an optimistic Ted Lasso style, cheering people on. I’ve seen really prosecutorial, pessimistic editors who are fantastic. There’s so many different kinds of personalities and also different personalities of reporters. Each editor has to be flexible enough to find — within their own style — what works for a reporter.

We start from zoomed out to way zoomed in on detail.

Also, the editor needs to be somebody who cares about the story and is enthusiastic about it. Somebody who isn’t just optimistic, but is comfortable enough to speak their mind when a story isn’t working. As optimistic and gung-ho as I am, my reporters always know exactly when I don’t get something, I don’t like something, something is not working out for me or I’m not as excited about something as they are. It’s really important to be forthcoming, honest and not shy about expressing that, because then your reporter is not going to feel comfortable expressing how they feel.

You mentioned that ProPublica has an editing bootcamp. What are some other roles or resources you’d recommend to reporters who want to edit?
I am leading an online group seminar through Poynter on investigative narrative in September, which is open for enrollment. We’ll talk a lot about the fundamentals of investigative journalism and reporting, but there’s part of it about storytelling that I think could be really useful to people looking to get into editing. And things like this conversation. I read Nieman Storyboard all the time — those story annotations are helpful in understanding how things come together. Or going to something like the IRE conference. At least from my perspective, when it comes to investigative editing, it helps to have a facility with reporting to understand how you can get the best material is as important as understanding how to craft a good story.

There was a recent interview on Ezra Klein’s podcast, with legendary magazine editor Adam Moss, that was one of the best discussions I’ve ever heard about the editing craft. After hearing it, we bought Moss’ new book, ‘The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing’ for all of our editor training participants.

It can be hard to build the experience or reputation you’re talking about if you are a freelancer. What are some ways to strengthen skills in terms of questions like, ‘Should this be a story? What meets the bar of what we should be assigning? How should we think about how this idea relates to the broader picture in the news?’
I think freelancers actually develop the skill a lot more quickly because they have to have a well-honed pitch and frame it well in order for it to get assigned. They learn through the cold, hard feedback of acceptance or rejection and learn to get really good at pitching if they are to survive as freelancers. I have found that the people I’ve worked with — like Lizzie Presser, for example — who came up as freelancers really had to, by necessity, develop that skill of proving out the premise of a story when pitching it. Trying to get feedback for why stories are accepted or rejected is helpful.

What has surprised you most the most about this path and what it entails?
It surprised me at first how hard it was. The tough thing — especially as a reporter who was used to going out and getting the exact answer to the exact question I had — is that someone else is out there in the world processing information and bringing it back to you. You’re one step removed. Your idea of a story as it is coming together might be different from what the reporter sees when they’re out in the field. Being able to interpret the world from one step removed is an adjustment. In some cases, this is why editors exist; you need that independent perspective. It’s an adjustment to rely on the reporter’s interpretation, though it’s something I’ve grown to really love.

You’ve risen up the ranks at ProPublica. How have your responsibilities as an editor changed as you’ve shifted from senior editor to assistant managing editor, and now to deputy managing editor? In particular, how has your relationship to the stories themselves changed as you’ve been promoted?
Senior editors only work with reporters. I had between five and seven I worked with directly. Each of them had a body of work for the year and we went through that entire process for all of our stories. Then as an assistant managing editor, I kept my reporter load but I was also asked to think more systemically about how things were done at ProPublica, like making sure that the most important projects had the resources they needed.

As deputy managing editor, I led a restructure of our visuals department and hired our first ever senior editor for visual storytelling. He is responsible for all of the photography, illustrations, graphics, design and film. Part of my portfolio now is managing those folks. I also have a couple of senior editors under me and talk to them about their stories. I dip in enough and am familiar enough with the material so that if I have a reporting or storytelling idea, I can suggest it as early as possible.

With every step, unfortunately, I have lost direct work with reporters, but I’m clinging for dear life to the last two who I edit. I love reporters more than anything else. I honestly cannot picture a day where I’m not editing reporters.

***

Carly Stern is an award-winning enterprise journalist based in San Francisco who covers health, housing and economic security.

The post Effective editing: Trust and Ted Lasso-style cheerleading appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR'S NOTE: In this installment of our occasional series on effective editing, we featured a Q&A with Lynda Robinson, an enterprise and narrative editor at the Washington Post, and follow it with this annotation below of a sensitive story, by reporter Peter Jamison, that she coached and edited. This complements an earlier annotation by Jamison of the same story.

The Revolt of the Christian Home-Schoolers

They were taught that public schools are evil. Then a Virginia couple defied their families and enrolled their kids.

By Peter Jamison
May 30, 2023

ROUND HILL, Va. — They said goodbye to Aimee outside her elementary school, watching nervously as she joined the other children streaming into a low brick building framed by the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Christina and Aaron Beall stood among many families resuming an emotional but familiar routine: the first day of full-time, in-person classes since public schools closed at the beginning of the pandemic. After reading the piece in full and then doing a close read of the lede, it seems that this opening really perfectly encapsulates a climaxing moment of tension these parents are experiencing: sending their child through the doors for the first time. When talking  through options with Peter Jamison about how to start the story, did you both feel this was the obvious choice for the lede? And was Peter there to witness this day personally, or did he recreate it from other reporting?We agreed that this was the right moment to begin the story, even though Peter hadn’t witnessed it. It was so filled with tension for the Bealls, who were defying their families and their own fears. Peter was able to recreate this scene by interviewing the Bealls and using photos of that day, as well Christina’s Instagram post from that day.

But for the Bealls, that morning in late August 2021 carried a weight incomprehensible to the parents around them. Their 6-year-old daughter, wearing a sequined blue dress and a pink backpack that almost obscured her small body, hesitated as she reached the doors. What lovely details here.Although Aaron had told her again and again how brave she was, he knew it would be years before she understood how much he meant it — understood that for her mother and father, the decision to send her to school was nothing less than a revolt. You segue into the core tension of the piece pretty quickly, just two grafs in, and then name the issue outright without much build-up: to this family and many others, public school equals an act of rebellion. Why did you choose to structure the pacing this way?The drama of this story was in the decision of the Bealls to enroll their daughter in a public school despite everything they’d been taught as home-schoolers about public  education. Peter made the most of that, telling readers right away that they were doing something that they’d been warned against their whole lives. Pretty compelling!

Aaron and Christina had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families. It’s super effective how you zoom in, state the core tension of the piece, and then zoom out here to provide the historical context for this particular family. What were you hoping to achieve with this setup? This was the first in a series of stories on home schooling called Home-School Nation. Peter wanted to deliver the intimacy of the Bealls’ story but also explain why it mattered. At The Post, we always explain why we are telling a story, including our long-form narrative stories.

At a time when home education was still a fringe phenomenon, the Bealls had grown up in the most powerful and ideologically committed faction of the modern home-schooling movement. That movement, led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life — a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.Structurally, how did you and Peter decide when to zoom in (on the Bealls) and when to zoom out on issues related to this movement and what it represents? How did you balance the pacing of that “dance” or the intertwining of these two threads? It is challenging in narrative stories to know how long to break away from your characters to explain the larger issues in play. We sometimes use context boxes that readers can skip over if they don’t want additional information about the issue. But they needed to know enough about the Christian home-schooling movement to comprehend how radical this moment was for the Bealls.

Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.

Like all rebellions, this one had come with consequences. Their decision to send Aimee to the neighborhood elementary school — a test run to see how it might work for their other kids — had contributed to a bitter rift with their own parents, who couldn’t understand their embrace of an education system they had been raised to abhor. And it had led Christina, who until that summer day had home-schooled all of their children, into an existential crisis.

“I never imagined sending you to the local elementary school instead of learning and growing together at home,” she wrote later that day in an Instagram post addressed to her daughter. “But life has a way of undoing our best laid plans and throwing us curveballs.” This is the first piece of dialogue (albeit, written dialogue from social media) where we hear directly from a subject in the piece. Why did this feel like the right quote to include in this opening section, and why did you place it here specifically?Because the scene is recreated, this quote is powerful because these are Christina’s exact words describing how it felt on the day it happened — not a recollection months laters. If you are recreating a scene, contemporaneous social media posts, text messages, videos, photos and emails provide an incredibly rich, real-time account of what happened. Reporters should always see if they exist and ask for them if they do.

Christina did not describe on Instagram how perplexed she and Aaron had been by a ritual that the other parents seemed to understand; how she had tried, in unwitting defiance of school rules, to accompany Aimee inside, earning a gentle rebuke from the principal. This is a really effective visual to demonstrate how foreign the concept of public school norms were to Christina. “Gentle rebuke” also strikes me as lovely language, and conveys a sense of vulnerability and tenderness in what this whole exercise represents for the Bealls. Peter is a gifted storyteller.

And she did not describe what happened after their daughter vanished into a building they had been taught no child should ever enter. What were some strategies you talked about with Peter to keep the drama, or emotional stakes, of the opening section high all the way through? It’s a relatively short scene so that’s part of why it maintains its tension. We talk a lot about pacing and about grabbing readers and keeping them engaged. Some of that depends on what the writer reveals and some of that depends on what the writer withholds. Notice that this entire scene describes about 10 minutes on the first day of school and doesn’t provide any information about how the rest of the day went for Aimee. We don’t see the Bealls pick her up. Everything is unresolved. If you want to know how it goes, you have to keep reading the story. That’s intentional. On that first day of school — first not just for one girl but for two generations of a family — the Bealls walked back to their SUV, and as Aaron started the car, Christina began to cry.Why did you go with this section kicker? Peter delivers the emotional toll of Aimee’s first day on her mother and forces people to keep reading if they want to know what happens next.

The ‘Joshua Generation’

Across the country, interest in home schooling has never been greater. The Bealls could see the surge in Virginia, where nearly 57,000 children were being home-schooled in the fall of 2022 — a 28 percent jump from three years earlier. The rise of home education, initially unleashed by parents’ frustrations with pandemic-related campus closures and remote learning, has endured as one of the lasting social transformations wrought by covid-19.

But if the coronavirus was a catalyst for the explosion in home schooling, the stage was set through decades of painstaking work by true believers like those who had raised Aaron and Christina. Aided by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) — a Christian nonprofit that has been dubbed “the most influential homeschool organization in the world,” and is based less than five miles from the Bealls’ house in Northern Virginia — those activists had fought to establish the legality of home schooling in the 1980s and early 1990s, conquering the skepticism of public school administrators and state lawmakers across the country.

Through their influence, a practice with roots in the countercultural left took on a very different character. Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA founder Michael Farris called a “Joshua Generation” that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles. This section feels much more steeped in context than the specific experiences of the Bealls and their kids. How did you think about where to weave in this kind of exposition?Because this was the first story in a series on home schooling, we wanted to give people the historical context. This movement shaped the lax home-schooling regulation in much of the country. It shaped the Bealls, too. It made sense to halt the narrative to explain that here, though we tried to contain how long it was because we knew readers would want to get back to the Bealls.

Home schooling today is more diverse, demographically and ideologically, than it was in the heyday of conservative Christian activism. Yet those activists remain extraordinarily influential.

Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”

But what should be a moment of triumph for conservative Christian home-schoolers has been undermined by an unmistakable backlash: the desertion and denunciations of the very children they said they were saving.

Former home-schoolers have been at the forefront of those arguing for greater oversight of home schooling, forming the nonprofit Coalition for Responsible Home Education to make their case.

“As an adult I can say, ‘No. What happened to me as a child was wrong,’” said Samantha Field, the coalition’s government relations director.

Earlier this year, Jinger Duggar Vuolo — familiar to millions of TV viewers from the reality show “19 Kids and Counting” — published a memoir in which she harshly criticized Bill Gothard, a pivotal but now disgraced figure in conservative Christian home schooling whose teachings her parents followed. Beginning a decade ago, Gothard was accused of sexual abuse and harassment by dozens of women — allegations the minister vehemently denied.

Farris said it is not uncommon for children who grow up in oppressively patriarchal households to reject or at least moderate their parents’ beliefs. However, he said such families are a minority in the home-schooling movement and are often considered extreme even by other conservative Christians.

“I view this as the fringe of the fringe,” Farris said. “And every kid that I know that has lashed out at home schooling came out of this.”

Christina, 34, and Aaron, 37, had joined no coalitions. They had published no memoirs. Their rebellion played out in angry text messages and emails with their parents, in tense conversations conducted at the edges of birthday parties and Easter gatherings. Their own children — four of them, including Aimee — knew little of their reasons for abandoning home schooling: the physical and emotional trauma of the “biblical discipline” to which they had been subjected, the regrets over what Aaron called “a life robbed” by strictures on what and how they learned.

Aaron had grown up believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control; Christina had been taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old. Their education was one in which dinosaurs were herded aboard Noah’s ark — and in which the penalty for doubt or disobedience was swift. Sometimes they still flinched when they remembered their parents’ literal adherence to the words of the Old Testament: “Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.”It must have been painful for the Beall parents to revisit early childhood memories, particularly traumatic ones. As an editor, how did you coach Peter to approach these interviews — especially because the material was so important to the core of the story?Peter spent months earning the trust of Aaron and Christina, and he was careful not to force them to go beyond what they were comfortable sharing. We talked repeatedly about not pressuring them but also being forthright about what he wanted to know. We always give victims of trauma the agency to decide what they want to tell us. He took his cues from them, and they talked about the corporal punishment more than once. The Bealls appreciated his sensitivity and his diligent fact-checking process. They also knew he was going to reach out to their parents and siblings.

The Bealls knew that many home-schooling families didn’t share the religious doctrines that had so warped their own lives. But they also knew that the same laws that had failed to protect them would continue to fail other children.I like how the Bealls connect their own personal experiences to the larger systemic ones.

“It’s specifically a system that is set up to hide the abuse, to make them invisible, to strip them of any capability of getting help. And not just in a physical way,” Christina said. “At some point, you become so mentally imprisoned you don’t even realize you need help.”
 

‘Breaking the child’s will’

Christina had felt no urge to escape when, at the age of 15, she listed her “Requirements for my husband” in neat, looping script on a ruled sheet of notebook paper.Throughout sections, you jump back and forth in time by several years. How did you and Peter think about structuring this?We wanted to explore the history of their courtship, how they came to marry, raise children and eventually decide to abandon home schooling.

“Must want me to be a full-time homemaker & only have an outside job if required or instructed by my Potter,” she wrote, referring to biblical verses that liken humans to clay in the hands of God. “Must believe in ‘full & unconditional’ surrender of our # of children to God Almighty.” And: “Must desire to homeschool our children.”

The list is a blueprint of what she had been taught about the proper ambitions of a woman: to bear and raise children while shielding them from what those around her called “government schools.” She felt both hopeful and nervous when, several years later, her father, Derrick Comfort, came home with news: He had just met with a young man who had been raised with those same ideals — and who wanted Christina to be his wife.

Aaron was shy and cerebral, a self-taught web developer who had grown up in Fairfax County, Va., had never attended college and, at age 26, still lived with his parents. He barely knew Christina Comfort, the oldest of eight children on her family’s 10-acre farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A graduate of Patrick Henry College — founded by Farris in Virginia to cater to Christian home-schoolers — she taught math and writing to her siblings and did chores around the farm. She prayed while riding a lawn mower for God to send her a husband.

The Comfort and Beall families were both active in a religious community led by Gary Cox, an evangelical pastor and pioneer of Maryland’s home-schooling movement. Christina was a graduate of Cox’s home education network, Walkersville Christian Family Schools, while Aaron began attending Cox’s church in rural northern Maryland as a teenager. The minister exerted a powerful influence over his congregation and students, teaching that children live in divinely ordained subjection to the rule of their parents.

Cox — who still operates a home-schooling organization, now called Wellspring Christian Family Schools — declined repeated interview requests. Last year his son, Dan Cox, a home-schooled Maryland state delegate who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, won the Republican gubernatorial primary. He went on to lose in a landslide to Democrat Wes Moore.Why was it important to include these former two paragraphs? They take up a very small portion of the piece, and we don’t come back to Cox again, yet this feels significant.Dan Cox’s run for governor played an important role in how we learned about the Bealls. Peter profiled Dan Cox, focusing on the role home schooling played in his personal evolution and his politics. Aaron Beall left a comment on that story, writing that he’d been part of the Cox family’s religious community and had suffered “incredible harm” because of it. One of our comment moderators saw it and alerted us to it. To comment on a Post story, you have to provide an email address, so that’s how Peter was able to contact Aaron and that’s how he learned that the Bealls had enrolled their kids in public school.

During Aaron and Christina’s “courtship” — a period of chaperoned contact that served as a prelude to formal engagement — they seemed ready to fulfill their parents’ hopes. Eating calamari in Annapolis or touring Colonial Williamsburg, they talked about what their future would include (home schooling) and what it would not (music with a beat that can be danced to). But signs soon emerged of the unimaginable rupture that lay ahead.

On a spring afternoon in 2012, the couple sat in a small church in Queenstown, Md. In preparation for marriage, they were attending a three-day seminar on “Gospel-Driven Parenting” run by Chris Peeler, a minister whose family was part of Gary Cox’s home-schooling group. The workshop covered a range of topics, including the one they were now studying: “Chastisement.”

“The use of the rod is for the purpose of breaking the child’s will,” stated the handout that they bent over together in the church. “One way to tell if this has happened is to see if they can look you in the eyes after being disciplined and ask for forgiveness.”

Bible verses were cited in support of corporal punishment. But Christina had misgivings.

“I really don’t think I can be a parent,” she wrote to Aaron in the margins of the handout. “It just feels like you have to be, like, hardened.”This primary source material is amazing, and so exemplary of where their ideological rift begins. Was it easy for Peter to unearth this? What was the process like of figuring out that these handouts existed (and that the Bealls still had them)Peter discovered pretty quickly that Christina had kept all kinds of rich archival materials from her past, including this workbook. She was happy to share what she had with him. It was incredibly important in recreating that period of their lives.Lesson: always ask people for the stuff they’ve saved. Photo albums, diaries, letters,Emails, texts, yearbooks, etc. It takes time to sift through them but it is always worth it.

“YES! YOU! CAN!” Aaron wrote back.

The use of the “rod” — interpreted by different people as a wooden spoon, dowel, belt, rubber hose or other implement — was a common practice among the conservative Christian home-schoolers Aaron and Christina knew, and one they had both experienced regularly in their own families.

The elder Bealls and Comforts did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the discipline they used with their children and the decision by Aaron and Christina to embrace public education. Aaron’s older brother, Joshua — who Aaron said still home-schools his children — did not return calls. Aaron’s other siblings could not be reached for comment. Christina’s siblings, some of whom have also left her parents’ home, either declined to comment or could not be reached.I imagine that if any of these folks had responded to requests for an interview, the story could have taken a quite different shape with their input. At what point in the reporting, writing and editing processes was it clear to you and Peter that you wouldn’t have this material? How did that affect how you thought about shaping the piece and what bases you had to cover?Peter made every effort to talk to the Comforts and the Bealls, making calls, sending emails and even driving to their homes to knock on their doors. We very much wanted their perspective. We eventually understood that they didn’t want to speak to us, so we tried to use texts and emails to capture their voices.

Aaron actually shared Christina’s qualms. He knew that the term parents in the movement casually used for discipline, “spankings,” did not capture the childhood terror of being struck several times a week — sometimes more, sometimes less — with what he describes as a shortened broomstick for disobeying commands or failing to pay attention to his schoolwork.

The memory of waiting as a small child outside his parents’ bedroom for his mother to summon him in; the fear that his transgressions might be enough to incur what he called “killer bee” spankings, when the rod was used against his bare skin; his efforts to obey the order to remain immobile as he was hit — all these sensations and emotions seeped into his bones, creating a deep conviction that those who fail to obey authority pay an awful price.

“For a long time, I’ve wondered why I was so unable to think for myself in this environment,” he says today, attributing the shortcoming to “learning that even starting to think, or disagree with authorities, leads to pain — leads to physical and real pain that you cannot escape.” What a powerful quote.

Now, on the threshold of parenthood — Christina would become pregnant within two weeks of their wedding on Sept. 29, 2012 — the couple’s reservations about “chastisement” could no longer be ignored. As a wedding gift, they said, Aaron’s brother and sister-in-law had given them “To Train Up a Child,” by the popular Christian home-schooling authors Michael and Debi Pearl.

The Pearls advocate hitting children with tree branches, belts and other “instruments of love” to instill obedience, and recommend that toddlers who take slowly to potty training be washed outdoors with cold water from a garden hose. Their book advocates “training sessions” in which infants, as soon as they are old enough to crawl, are placed near a desired object and repeatedly struck with a switch if they disobey commands not to touch it.

The Pearls have defended their methods, saying they are not meant to encourage brutality and, when properly applied, reduce the frequency with which parents must later discipline their kids.

Aaron and Christina did not follow the Pearls’ advice when their first child, Ezra, was born. Nor did they take on authoritarian roles with their second, Aimee, or third, Oliver. All were home-schooled, albeit in less isolation than their parents: Christina joined co-ops with other Christian mothers in Northern Virginia.

But by the time the Bealls had Aurelia, their fourth child, Aaron — now a successful software engineer whose job had enabled the family to buy a four-bedroom house in Loudoun County — had begun to question far more than corporal punishment.

“When it came time for me to hit my kids, that was the first independent thought I remember having: ‘This can’t be right. I think I’ll just skip this part,’” he says.I love the phrasing “independent thought.”

But if that seemingly inviolable dogma was false, what else might be? Aaron gradually began to feel adrift and depressed.

“It’s like having the rug pulled out from under your feet,” he says. “All of reality is kind of up for grabs.”

He scoured Amazon for books about evolution and cosmology. Eventually, he found his way to blog posts and books by former Christian fundamentalists who had abandoned their religious beliefs. He watched an interview with Tara Westover, whose best-selling memoir, “Educated,” detailed the severe educational neglect and physical abuse she endured as a child of survivalist Mormon home-schoolers in Idaho. Did it seem like Aaron took comfort in grounding his shifting feelings in the wider dissent shared by others?My impression is that he sought out those perspectives as he was grappling with his own transformation and loss of faith.

And in the spring of 2021, as he and Christina were struggling to engage Aimee in her at-home lessons, he suggested a radical solution: Why not try sending their daughter to the reputable public elementary school less than a mile from their house?

‘So much pain’

Christina could think of many reasons. They were the same ones Aaron had learned as a child: Public schools were places where children are bullied, or raped in the bathroom, or taught to hate Jesus.

But she also suspected that Aimee could use the help of professional educators. Just as important, she had learned all her life that it was her duty to obey her husband. She was confounded and angry, at both Aaron and the seeming contradiction his suggestion had exposed.

“I guess I’m just honestly confused and wonder what you think,” she wrote in an email to her father in May 2021. “I’m supposed to submit to Aaron, he wants the kids to go to public school. … You think that’s a sin but it’s also a sin to not listen to your husband so which is it?”At what stage in the reporting process did Peter gather these written/digital materials?He sought them at every stage of the reporting process and kept accumulating more. Much of the material never made it into the story but added to Peter’s sense of authority as he was writing. The falling out with their parents was being chronicled in real time.

At first, Christina’s and Aaron’s parents reacted to the news that they were considering public school for Aimee with dazed incomprehension. Did Christina feel overwhelmed, they asked? Did she need more help with work around the house? As long as Aimee was learning to read, she would be fine, Aaron’s mother assured them. Christina’s father sent a YouTube video of John Taylor Gatto, a famous critic of America’s public education system.

The dialogue took on a darker tone as Aimee, with Christina’s hesitant agreement, began school that fall. By then, Aaron had told his parents he no longer considered himself a believer.

“This is absolutely devastating,” his mother, Linda Beall, wrote in a long email to Christina. “I hurt so much for you Christina!!!”

“I don’t think Aaron is going to be wrestled into heaven with good arguments,” Linda added. “I think this is likely about his response to hard things in his life. I think he needs to come face to face with God himself, and bow before Him in recognition of his own sin, and need for a Savior.”

Despite the sympathy expressed in the email, Christina bristled at the suggestion that her husband’s crisis of faith stemmed from his reluctance to face “hard things” in his life. She knew that reexamining his religious convictions and traumatic memories had perhaps been the hardest thing Aaron had ever done.

Aimee, meanwhile, was thriving at Round Hill Elementary. By the third quarter, her report card said she was “a pleasure to teach,” was “slowly becoming more social and more willing to participate in class” and showed “tremendous growth” in her reading skills, which had lagged below grade level at the beginning of the year.

For several months after that first week of classes — when she had come home wearing a paper hat, colored with blue crayon and printed with the words “My First Day of First Grade” — Aimee had had a stock response when her parents asked her how she liked school: She would suppress a grin, say she “hated it,” and then start laughing at her own joke.

“You should have asked to go to school,” Aimee, who knew her mom had been educated at home, would eventually tell Christina. “It affects your whole life.”

Now it was Christina’s turn to question her belief — not in Christianity, but in the conservative Christian approach to home schooling. She began to research spiritual abuse and the history of Christian nationalism. Ideas she had never questioned — such as the statement, in a book given to her by her dad, that it “would be a waste of her time and her life” for a woman to work outside the house — no longer made sense.

Her loss of faith in the biblical literalism and patriarchal values of her childhood was coming in the way the movement’s adherents had always warned it would: through exposure to people with different experiences and points of view.

Those people just happened to be her daughter and her husband.

“This is the guy I’ve been married to for eight years,” she recalls thinking. “I know him. I know his heart. I know what kind of parent he wants to be to our kids. These easy answers of ‘Oh, you’re just not a Christian anymore, you just want to sin’ … didn’t work anymore.”

As Aimee’s first year at Round Hill Elementary came to an end, Aaron and Christina were more convinced than ever that they had made the right decision. But they were also at a loss for how to heal the tensions with their parents.

In a 2022 email intended for a pastor at her church but sent by accident to Christina, Linda Beall blamed her daughter-in-law for their deepening rift, saying she had taken undue offense at good-faith efforts to advise and support the family through Aaron’s loss of faith.

“So she is again flipping the script from the reality that we love them and her, want to support them, and have only tried to do that again and again, but have been assaulted every time we engage. And I have given up trying [because] it all gets flipped and used against us,” Linda wrote. “I really can not remember one conversations we have had since this unfolded that has not escalated things. So when she beats up ‘everything’ I say, never offers forgiveness, why would we want to engage again?”

Around the same time, Christina sent Aaron’s parents a series of text messages lamenting what she said was their unwillingness to reconcile and explaining that she had changed her opinions about the way she and Aaron had been raised.

“There has been so much pain but I am so excited to now understand and see past the ways that people control and manipulate me,” she wrote. “And you may not believe it but I still love Jesus.”

Aaron and Christina had decided that, in the fall of 2022, all three of their school-age children — not just Aimee but 5-year-old Oliver and 9-year-old Ezra — would attend public school. Aurelia, then 2, would remain at home.

Despite Aimee’s positive experience, Aaron and Christina were anxious, both for their children and about how their parents would react. One afternoon in June, Christina sent a text message to her mother.

“I need to tell you that all three kids are going to school in the fall. I’m sorry, because I know this will be upsetting and disappointing to you and dad,” Christina wrote. “I figured you should hear it from me first.”

Three hours later, her mother texted back.

“Dearest Christina, it is not at all upsetting or disappointing to me,” Catherine Comfort wrote. “You and Aaron are outstanding parents and I’m sure you made the decision best for your family.”

Even Aaron’s parents finally signaled a grudging degree of acceptance. In February, Linda and Bernard Beall walked into the gym at Round Hill Elementary one cold Saturday afternoon to watch a school performance of “The Lion King.” Ezra had a part in the chorus as a wildebeest.

Sitting on plastic chairs in the dark and crowded room, the pair gave no outward sign of the remarkable nature of their visit. When the performance was over, they hugged their grandkids in front of the stage and exchanged halting small talk with Aaron and Christina. Then they drove off, with no discussion of a visit to their son’s house a few blocks away.To you and Peter, what did this anecdote represent?It was an opportunity for Peter to meet Aaron’s parents, tell them about the story and ask if they would talk to him. But their presence at a play in a public school was also a hopeful sign that they were slowly accepting what Aaron and Christina had done. They clearly wanted to maintain a relationship with their grandchildren.

Family night

About 10 minutes remained before the Bealls would have to pile into their minivan, and the children needed to get dressed — in their pajamas. I noticed that throughout the piece, you often describe and show in photographs the “pre” ritual moments: getting ready for school, the morning before the school day when it’s still dark, getting dropped off outside the building, etc. Why did you choose to focus on these "moments before the big moments,” including in this final section?From a structural standpoint, the story begins outside the school. Now we are finally going to take you inside the school. This was an ideal scene to do that because all the Bealls were going to be in Round Hill Elementary for a classic kind of public school event. This also captured their life as a family so starting in their home was a lovely way to open this end scene.

It was Groundhog Day, a damp night in February, and a low fire glowed in the hearth of the Bealls’ living room. Aaron and Christina sat on the floor playing card and board games with their kids, while Ezra sat on the couch, wearing headphones and absorbed in a game on his laptop. Soon they would be leaving to attend their elementary school’s “For the Love of Reading Family Night,” held in the school library, where students were encouraged to come dressed for bedtime.

As Oliver rose to change (Ezra, the oldest, would not deign to put on his jammies), Aimee told her parents how her second-grade class had learned that day about Punxsutawney Phil.

Aaron looked at her in bewilderment.

“Phil?” he asked. “Am I out of the loop?”

His daughter stared back at him in disbelief.

“He’s famous!” Aimee said. She explained Phil’s role in predicting the length of winter.

“I knew about groundhogs,” Aaron said. “I just didn’t know about Phil.”

“He’s really famous,” Aimee said.

Christina smiled at her husband.

“Home-schooler,” she said.The use of dialogue and direct quotes feel fairly sparse throughout the piece. What did this exchange represent and why did you choose to include it?It’s funny. It also speaks to the gap between them and their kids, which is the result of the gap in their educations. Peter uses dialogue when it’s revealing or pushes the story forward. He never quotes for the sake of quoting, which is a mistake a lot of less experienced writers make.

These were the gaps Aaron and Christina had become accustomed to finding as they learned about a world whose boundaries extended far beyond the one in which they had been raised. There were so many things they had not learned, and perhaps would never learn.Based on Peter’s reporting, do you think that at this point the Beall parents had made peace with all the experiences and knowledge they would never have?I think they were still discovering all the things they don’t know, including Punxsutawney Phil. There isn’t a way for them to fill in all those gaps but it’s made them value the broad education their children are getting. The one they missed.

Stacks of books on the living room’s end tables testified to their belated efforts at self-education: popular works by the biologists Neil Shubin and Robert Sapolsky, as well as “Raising Critical Thinkers” by Julie Bogart, a leading developer of home education materials who has criticized conservative Christian home-schooling groups. Aaron and Christina were still young, but they knew enough about the demands of life, work and family to understand that they could not recover or reconstruct the lost opportunities of their childhoods.

But they could provide new and different opportunities for their own kids. They were doing so in Loudoun County, one of the hotbeds of America’s culture wars over public instruction about race and gender.This feels like one of a few explicit nods in the piece to the broader national cultural wars that envelop this issue, conflict that spans much wider than just the homeschooling issue. Why did you place this line here?Because public schools have been accused of indoctrinating their students, and that’s been especially true in Loudoun so we needed to nod to that debate. There’s real irony in the fact that this story is set in a school system that’s been a target of conservative anger about public education.To the Bealls, who truly knew what it was like to learn through the lens of ideology, concerns about kids being brainwashed in public schools were laughable.

“People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,” Aaron says. “It’s not even comparable.”

There were still moments when they were condemned by an inner voice telling them that they were doing the wrong thing, that both they and their children would go to hell for abandoning the rod and embracing public schools. But the voice was usually silenced by their wonder and gratitude at the breadth of their children’s education.

That breadth was on display as the Bealls jostled into the school library with other families. Was it hard for Peter to get access to school events like these? Were there certain rules about reporting in a public school or with other kids around?Sometimes it can be hard to gain access to public schools, but Round Hill’s principal was totally fine with Peter and our fantastic photographer, Matt McClain, being there. Matt wasn’t trying to take photos of anyone besides the Bealls. If there had been other children in his photos, we would have asked their parents for permission to use them. Basically, you never know how school administrators will respond unless you ask!It was the second day of Black History Month, and the shelves were set up with displays of books about the Underground Railroad, soprano Ella Sheppard and Vice President Harris. Where the walls reached the ceiling a mural was painted, with Mary Poppins and Winnie the Pooh.

Aaron and Christina stood shoulder-to-shoulder, surveying the room. This was the belly of the beast, the environment their parents had worked to save them from.What a powerful line.

But they weren’t scared to be inside this school, and were now familiar with it. On Tuesday mornings, Christina volunteered here, helping Aimee’s class with reading lessons.

“Let’s go out this way, guys,” she said, leading the way through an exit when it was time to disperse from the library to listen to the teachers read stories aloud.

The hallways were long and wide, with plenty of room for small legs to gather speed. Soon Aaron and Christina were watching as their children, who knew the way to their classrooms, ran far in front of them. What did you hope to achieve with this kicker?I am not a fan of stories that end on quotes; the stories I edit rarely employ that cliche. They almost always end on a specific moment or idea. Peter landed on the perfect image: a physical description that also symbolizes what the Bealls have done. They’ve given their children the chance to learn about and explore a much wider world than they had access to growing up. It delivers the meaning of the story in a single image.

* * *

Carly Stern is an award-winning enterprise journalist based in San Francisco who covers health, housing and economic security.

The post Effective editing: Lynda Robinson annotates a sensitive story on faith and family appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For other posts in the occasional series about effective editing, read our interviews with Mike Wilson of The New York Times and Scott Stossel of The Atlantic. The below interview with Lynda Robinson, an enterprise editor at the Washington Post, is followed by her annotation of a sensitive story edit.

For longtime journalist Lynda Robinson, stumbling into the editing track was a happy accident. Robinson — who is now based in the Outer Banks, North Carolina — was working as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun in 1995 when a merger between the jointly owned morning and evening newspapers threatened her job. Robinson had been writing for a decade by then and wasn’t eager to leave it behind. But an editing role opened up at the Sun, a lifeline that she describes as her “escape route.” Three decades later, she says editing is her true calling.

Robinson spent several years at the Sun as deputy national editor before helming a now defunct D.C.-based magazine called Capital Style. After that publication shuttered, Robinson moved to The Washington Post in 2000 as a local enterprise editor, where she shepherded ambitious narratives by a stable of enterprise writers. She took a buyout from the Post earlier this year and will wrap up editing assignments through 2024.

Robinson has had a hand in some of the Post’s most sweeping longform narratives and award-winning work across a range of topics, such as an investigation into hundreds of law enforcement officials who have been accused of sexually abusing children and a wave of Christian home-schoolers who are renouncing their education.

The Christian home-schooling story centers on one Virginia couple — Christina and Aaron Beall — who were obedient disciples of the religious home-schooling movement before defying their upbringing and community to send their children to public school. This decision caused a rift in their family that Washington Post reporter Peter Jamison followed intimately over the course of a roughly 3,000-word feature.

Storyboard spoke with Robinson about why upfront communication is essential to editing and how she structures her time coaching reporters. She unpacked some of the specifics of her approach to the home-schooling story; a partner post features Robinson’s annotation of that story, which provides an interesting complement to Peter Jamison’s earlier annotation of the same piece.  Our conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

What drew you out of reporting and into editing?
That was the result of one of the many cataclysms I lived through in the industry. At that time in Baltimore, there was a joint agreement between a Morning Sun and an Evening Sun, and they were being merged. It meant there were duplicates for every job and they were requiring we all reapply for our jobs. There was a buyout on the table and general panic about what was going to take place. I was a late rewrite person three nights a week and had two days on general assignment. The national editor of the Morning Sun, Ed Goodpaster, approached me and asked if I wanted to replace his deputy, who was leaving. When he asked me, I remember thinking, ‘God, who would ever want to be an editor? That sounds like a terrible job.’

But then I thought about it a little bit more. There were only a few parts of the Morning Sun not duplicated by the Evening Sun, which were the foreign bureaus and a big Washington Bureau with national correspondents. So this editing job became my escape route.

What are the parts you thought you’d hate? And what did you find a natural fit?
I think a lot of reporters walk around thinking, ‘What do these editors do all day?’ I was expecting it to be boring. A part that I turned out to be really good at was that I’m very decisive. As deputy national editor, you had to be decisive and have good news judgment. I was alone on the night of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. My late rewrite skills came in very handy. That was a trial by fire because I wrote our story five times every half hour or 40 minutes. I was taking all the wires and crafting a story about what was happening in Los Angeles because we didn’t have anybody on the ground.

I also found I had a good eye for stories and story ideas. The beauty of editing is you can have a tremendous amount of influence on the news product — far more influence than you can have as one reporter pursuing one story. You get people excited about these ideas and get to watch reporters go out and do them. Some people who become editors go back to writing as soon as they can, but I never had any desire to go back. From the second I started, it became clear this is what I was meant to do. This was a calling.

Which editors trained you? Where did your knowledge absorption come from?
I was working for the Sun’s national editor, Ed Goodpaster. Then when I moved to Washington, I was working for the Sun’s Washington bureau chief, Paul West. I absorbed a lot of knowledge from them. It’s very similar to going to a fire for the first time as a reporter. Unless it’s a really huge fire and there are a lot of other reporters around, you’re just learning by doing it. Each story that I work on makes me smarter for the next one, and that’s a process that has never changed. I’ve edited four books now. I learn from each and every story that I work on and each and every chapter of a book. You’re taking what you learned and applying it to the next. Reporting is a craft and so is editing, and you can’t learn it unless you actually do it.

For reporters who are trying to gain editing skills or figure out if editing is something they want to pursue, what are some avenues of practice and training?
At The Post, there are a lot of opportunities for peer editing. People get practice when they’re editing colleagues’ work. Sometimes they edit one another before they show me a story, particularly if someone in the building is an expert on the topic. Also, instead of doing reporting shifts on the weekend, Post reporters can raise their hands and say, ‘Can I do editing shifts on the weekend instead?’ A third way to hone those skills is teaching. If you were, for instance, going to teach a writing class at a local college, you’ll be editing the work of your students.

For freelancers, I would consider being part of a writers collective where people share their work and talk about it, and where story ideas get discussed and debated. There are lots of places around the country where freelancers get together and critique each other’s work. Another is to keep your eyes open for a part-time editing gig or something occasional.

Can you share a window in your thought process? When copy first reaches your inbox, what are your steps and what do you do first?
We’d probably need to back up, because my process is very much oriented to the front end. Too many people are fixated on ‘Here’s the story.’ Not enough thought and time goes into the front end of the process, which is, ‘What story are we pursuing? Who are their characters? How are we reporting it? What can we see? What is the point of tension in the story? What’s going to drive that? How long do we think it should be? How long do we think it might take?’ When you are working on narrative stories, deciding on ‘What is the story?’ is the first decision that an editor helps a reporter make. By the time I’m handed a story, I’ve discussed in minute detail what’s going to be in it. It doesn’t materialize out of thin air.  The least interesting part of the process is what happens after I get the story.

Take us into the minutiae of how you approach those early conversations. What does that process entail? Is this just with staff writers you work with regularly? Are you having conversations with them about every idea? Are they coming to you or are you pitching them?
It’s a combination of things. I will have ideas and pitch them to the reporters, and vice versa. It might be helpful to actually talk about the homeschooling story, and that process.

That began with a story that Peter Jamison wrote about a gubernatorial candidate in Maryland, Dan Cox, whose dad was Gary Cox. Gary Cox was a transformational figure in the homeschooling movement. When writing the profile of Dan, Gary wouldn’t talk to Peter. Neither would Dan. The story focused entirely on Dan’s education. After it appeared, Peter knew there was a possible series to be done about the explosion of homeschooling in the U.S.

Then a comment was placed on that Dan Cox profile that one of the Post’s comment moderators flagged to Peter. When you register with The Post, you can’t comment unless you’ve provided an email address. This person said he had been part of the Cox family’s religious community and had suffered incredible harm as a result.

How did the process unfold from there?
Peter emailed the commenter, who responded 90 minutes later. He ended up being the key person in the homeschooling story, Aaron. When Peter showed me the comment, we both agreed there could be a really powerful story here but it meant having access to Aaron and his wife. Peter went to see them and persuaded them to let him tell their story. Homeschooling had created an incredible rift in their family and it was very fraught. This story required a lot of trust and a lot of time. We made many efforts to talk to both sets of parents, but ultimately couldn’t. We wanted to be able to represent everyone in the family, but text messages and emails allowed us to at least represent their point of view.

A story like this required a lot of discussion on the front end. ‘What did we want to see? Where should we start the story? How do we want to explore the issue of Christian homeschoolers renouncing their own education?’ There were a lot of incredibly tricky questions here and Peter spent quite a bit of time with this family getting to know them. Sometimes a protagonist, like Aaron, is key to a broader movement; other times you set out to explore a particular issue and look for the character to do it. But this is a story we never could have found on our own.

Stepping back a bit more broadly, how would you describe the essential ingredients for strong chemistry between an editor and writer like Peter?
As important as it was for Peter to gain the trust of the Bealls, that’s how important it is for me to have trust with Peter. When I work with reporters, I am always cultivating trust. When we’re talking about how a story should begin or discussing how a story should be structured, that discussion has to come from a place of belief in me.

To cultivate that trust, you have to be available to people. That means when my reporters are on the road reporting all day, they call me in the evening. I sit there with them on the phone for an hour and they tell me what they’ve got. It can be incredibly time-consuming. But when they’re ready to structure the story, I know what their reporting shows because we’ve already talked about all of it — not in one conversation, but in a series of conversations.

That’s remarkable to me because I can imagine from a reporter’s perspective, they have the full panorama of everything that they’ve gathered, while you have a fresh lens and are keeping an eye on the product and the big picture. Yet, as an editor, you make the effort to get to know their material as intimately as they do.
It’s really important to their process because when they come back from a really incredible day of reporting and are telling you what they saw, it’s distilling for them in their mind: What was most important? What was most remarkable? What struck them the most? It’s very much like when you tell a story to any friend, someone says, ‘Well, tell me what happened.’ You’re using shorthand. For long pieces, those front-end conversations are happening simultaneously to the reporting. That’s crucial. It’s not happening weeks after; it’s happening hours after. If your reporter is getting back at 7:30 p.m. from a trial that is going to be the basis of a long story, they call you at 8. Sometimes you have to say, ‘Let’s talk in the morning.’ But the fresher it is, the better the details. Not making the time isn’t really an option. Because otherwise, what’s happening is that somebody’s working on a story for weeks or months, and you have no idea what the story is.

After your reporter files a draft, how would you describe your style or approach to shaping the language? How do you think about having a light touch versus a heavy touch?
The goal is to say ‘yes’ as much as possible and ‘no’ as little as possible. Because of the front-end part of my process, they don’t give me a story that I’m not expecting. That would be a big problem. When editing goes awry, it generally means the editor is being caught off guard by what they’re being given, and that means the communication sucked on the front end. I work with remarkable writers. I’m not rewriting any of them. If you say to one of them, ‘This transition isn’t working, and let’s try the top of the story this way,’ or ‘I had an idea about the kicker,’ that’s all fun. But if you have to blow a story up, that just means that you failed as an editor. It’s definitely on the editor to facilitate that communication, not the reporter.

When you think about some of your favorite writers to edit, what qualities do they share?
I love their dedication to reporting and being there to see things firsthand. You can’t write around shoddy reporting. The reporters on my team were never satisfied with surface reporting. They went back again and again, probably too many times, and sometimes were frustrated when they couldn’t get more access or couldn’t get their hands on documents like medical records, legal records or sealed files. They all shared a complete and total devotion to a 360-surround. A lot of people talk about writing, and of course writing is important, but you can’t write your way around thin reporting.

What kinds of pieces do you find most challenging to edit?
Multi-character stories are more challenging than single character stories. Stories that rely almost entirely on reconstructions rather than first-hand reporting are also more challenging, because where are you getting those details from? You can look to text messages and emails and Instagram. Real time is easier because you’re not relying on people’s memories, which are faulty. Maybe it’s court transcripts, or body cam footage where you can actually see the interaction.

I love when stories are really complicated. It means there’s a lot there. And then you have to make really hard choices about what to leave in and what to leave out.

How do you practice strengthening the muscle of making really hard choices to ‘think like an editor?’
I think a lot about pacing in stories. Length is less important to me than how the story reads. Does it read fast? This is subjective, obviously, but when you’re editing a story, you can tell when it’s slowing down. Sometimes I will say to one of the writers, ‘It’s just too slow here.’ Or ‘Let’s get rid of this entire section because it’s slowing everything down and it’s not that interesting,’ or maybe reduce it to one graf. Again, this comes back to their trust in me because if you’re asking somebody to lose an entire section of the story, that can be painful.

You have to be sharp-eyed about it, and sometimes hard-hearted. You want the best possible version of the story and the reporter has to believe that’s what you’re dedicated to, but you also have to represent the reader. Are they going to feel compelled to keep going? What are you withholding? What are you forcing people to keep reading to find out? Will they find it not just interesting, but compelling? Long narratives require way more than just being interesting.

What qualities do you think help someone shine in this kind of role? What are some of the crucial ingredients to a fruitful experience as an editor?
The most important thing is it’s not about you, at all, ever. It’s not a good role for people who want a lot of acclaim or attention. It’s not your story; it belongs to the writer. You have to be comfortable with being self-effacing, in a way, because your byline is not on the story.

In the last few years, The Post has started putting editing credits at the bottom of the story. My name was never on stories I’ve edited before that. But you have to take pleasure from the success of other people because when you’re an editor, your success comes from the success of your reporters. If they’re not successful, then you’re not successful.

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Carly Stern is an award-winning enterprise journalist based in San Francisco who covers health, housing and economic security.

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