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Editor's note: I am away this week, so we're excited to feature a guest newsletter from journalist, author, and Storyboard contributor Kim Cross. — Mark Armstrong

***

Dear Storyboard community: 

Atlanta-based artist Daniel Troppy has always worked in visual media: painting, photography, and sculptures from found objects. Following the death of his brother, painter Darrell Troppy, Daniel turned to words. “When my brother passed away, that’s when I started to write,” he told me. “And I am not a writer. I wasn’t an artist with words. But writing saved me.” 

In grief, he found catharsis in writing tiny true stories — defining moments, memories, micro-narratives — each paired with a black-and-white photograph with the mood and grain of film. Written with telling detail and brevity, the stories averaged 100 words.

Instagram became his gallery. Amid the selfies and funny cat videos, his silver gelatin prints stood out like an art exhibit in a circus: An empty swing set that echoed William Eggleston’s untitled Memphis tricycle; an old woman pushing a walker through a hallway lined with portraits; a wrinkled hand with an IV line; thinning hair in curlers.

The images were arresting, more concerned with a mood and a moment than technical precision. The writing used specific details to avoid cliché. But what was this? Journalism? Art? Documentary? Visual memoir? A serial narrative unfolding in real time? 

“They’re love letters,” Daniel told me. “Each story captures a small moment in time. A visit. A question. A memory. A feeling. I wanted to use my photography skills and write these short stories to document my parents’ end-of-life journey.” 

It was all so raw and intimate, I felt uncomfortable — and moved. Brave and unflinching, Daniel pressed the shutter in moments that might have caused me to look away. They pulled me into a world I felt I shouldn’t be privileged to see, like Sally Mann’s family portraits. There was a touch of documentary, á la Walker Evans’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” but this photographer wasn’t an outsider. He was part of the scene, invisible but present. Shooting not only with permission, but love. 

I recently interviewed Daniel about his process for my newsletter, The Waterproof Notebook. As a writer of narrative nonfiction, I’m always looking to learn from other storytelling genres — especially those that convey a story with a narrative arc in a short-form format. And social media, for better and worse, remains a place for stories to reach an audience. 

Instagram increasingly feeds us influencer sludge more than posts by people we follow. But it remains a good place to practice writing short-form stories set to a sequence of images or videos. 

Neil Shea, a longform writer for National Geographic and other publications, called Instagram “one of the world’s most successful general interest magazines.” He’s been using it to tell short-form stories for more than a decade. “Soon after I began experimenting within the app’s creative constraints, something strange happened—I found I loved writing short,” he wrote on Storyboard in 2015. “Beneath the selfie surface, Instagram provided a powerful, unexpected, and mostly underutilized storytelling tool.” Did that get old after a while? Nope! It looks like he is still going strong at @neilshea13.

I’ve been using Instagram to practice writing short, learn video editing, reveal a peek behind the writing process, and experiment with visual storytelling. A computer scientist told me the algorithm favors Reels that start with a human face, so I’ve been trying that (cringe), with some posts performing better than others. My most viral post is a carousel of 20 portraits of my mother, followed by a painfully honest confession of mixed feelings about inheriting her miniature Yorkie. (Do not stay tuned for more Yorkie content; that one brought out the trolls.)

Do you have a favorite source of short-form narrative inspiration? I’d love to hear from you. Shoot me a message over at kimhcross.com, on Instagram (@kimhcross), or on Substack at The Waterproof Notebook. 

— Kim

Links of note 

• Hannah Dreier and the staff of The New York Times have been awarded the 2026 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for their series “Exposed and Expendable,” about wildfire fighters getting sick and dying young from exposure to poisonous smoke. 
• The Poynter Institute is offering a free 75-minute webinar on April 28 (11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. ET) on how to cover ICE enforcement and its impact on children and families.
• Scratch magazine returns: Written by a collective of powerhouse female freelance writers — Latria Graham, Maggie Mertens, Rahawa Haile, and Manjula Martin — this weekly dispatch gets real about the financial realities and survival tactics of those fighting to make a living in publishing. 
• The Sunday Long Read True Crime Spotlight newsletter has a new editor: After a wonderful year working with SLR, I’m passing the torch to Shaun Assael, an award-winning author, magazine writer, and producer. 

Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast

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The post The art of the micro-narrative appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Cinematic scenes are the beating heart of a narrative, the literary element that, more than any other, brings stories to life on the page. These scenes pulse with action, drama, and dialogue, and they require a certain set of journalistic skills when you can witness them live, unfolding before you. When you can’t do that — because you’re reporting remotely, the scene played out in the past, and/or your character is no longer alive — you need different skills: those of a historian and biographer. 

For his latest book, “The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine”, journalist Brendan O’Meara wrote his first biography, the life story of one of the most charismatic competitive runners in America. Steve Prefontaine — known simply as “Pre” to fans — was known for his brash confidence on and off the track, a gifted athlete and personality who became the first celebrity face of Nike. Prefontaine is a celebrity athlete celebrated by celebrity athletes: Lance Armstrong recently Instagrammed a selfie at “Pre’s Rock” with a telling comment: “I, like I’m sure some of you do, get asked from time to time, ‘If you could have dinner with anybody, alive or not, who would it be?’ I’d pick a table for 4. Steve Prefontaine gets a seat every single time.” 

Pre’s Rock in Eugene, Oregon, marks the spot where Prefontaine died in a car crash on May 30, 1975, at the age of 24. Driving home from a party in a convertible, with a blood alcohol content of 0.16 percent, he hit a rock and his car flipped. The site is now a memorial festooned with running shoes, medals, race plates, and other mementos left by those who make a pilgrimage to the spot on Skyline Boulevard in Eugene. 

Pre died five years before O’Meara — who also lives in Eugene — was born. So the author had to get to know his subject intimately without being able  to meet him or interview him. One of the most challenging aspects of a reconstructed narrative (one you’re not able to witness in person) is what MFA writers like O’Meara might call “interiority.” (I call it “getting in your character’s head.”) What are they thinking and feeling in a pivotal moment? What’s driving them? Why are they doing whatever they’re doing? 

For his first book, “Six Weeks in Saratoga: How Three-Year-Old Filly Rachel Alexandra Beat the Boys and Became Horse of the Year,” O’Meara shadowed a horse and her entourage through a pivotal horse race in 2009. All the major characters in that book were alive, and he could interview them as well as shadow them, reporting immersively throughout the live event. 

For “The Front Runner,” O’Meara had to change his reporting approach. He says his research broke down to “maybe 70 percent the skills of a historian” — digging through newspaper archives and microfilm, and mining secondary sources to find primary sources. The other 30 percent of the work employed journalistic skills — tracking folks down and interviewing them about moments from the past. It’s worth noting that O’Meara, who came to narrative writing through an MFA at Goucher College, developed his interviewing skills over 12 years as host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, on which he has interviewed hundreds of writers including Susan Orlean, David Grann, Laura Hillenbrand (and, in the interest of full disclosure, yours truly). 

To learn how he got in the head of his character, we’ve asked O’Meara to annotate an excerpt from Chapter 13. The scene takes place at a pivotal moment in Prefontaine’s career. His college career has come to a close, he’s been humbled by a fourth-place finish at the Olympics, and he’s starting to see the opportunity to use his talent and celebrity to elevate other people, not just himself. He’s heard about a fund-raising meet at Hayward Field — the historic track at the University Oregon some called “the temple of milers” — to rebuild the dilapidated bleachers. He knows his celebrity can pack the stands, and he has an idea to use that ability in a way that could not only raise money for a good cause, but also set a competitor up for a record-breaking performance. Prefontaine was one of the fastest runners in the world of middle-distance races — between 1,500 and 10,000 meters. But his rival, Dave Wottle, found his sweet spot in the mile. “He ran into Dave Wottle — who was a true miler — and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come up to Hayward Field with me and we’ll go after the world record in the mile and raise a lot of money for Hayward Field,’” O’Meara says. “Pre was like, ‘I’ll pace you through a mile at 2:56 and pretty much put a world record on the platter for you to take.” 

This decision marks a character-defining milestone in Prefontaine’s evolution as a person as well as an athlete. It shows a change in the internal “why” that’s driving his behavior. Below, O’Meara reveals how he went about it. 

Excerpt: ‘The Front Runner,’ Chapter 13

With Steve’s outdoor college track and field career over (he would have one more redshirt semester in the fall of 1973 at Oregon to run cross-country), he had to consider what post-collegiate running looked like for him. He would remain an amateur, but he had the wherewithal to know he was an attraction and that he had leverage. With the right degree of savvy—or redirecting the brashness he had historically reserved for his rivals toward the Amateur Athletic Union—he was testing the limits of amateur racing as it was currently structured. He planned on breaking new trail, which was something athletes did not do back then. Everyone else merely got in line and dealt with the necessary evil that was the amateur system. [annotation q="How did you learn what he was planning? And how much research did you need to do to make this statement with confidence—that other athletes didn't do that back then?" a="Steve was very candid about his disdain for the AAU, dating all the way back to his days as a teenager. He was very clearly absorbing the insights from many of the jaded runners who came before him."] 

[annotation a="In 1973 in particular, he had given voice to going to Europe on his own time and dime to run in the races he wanted to. He had just finished his outdoor track career at the University of Oregon (he would hang on one more semester/term to graduate and run cross country). It was time to leave the nest, so to speak."]

[annotation a="He would run in some AAU races in Europe, likely more to stay somewhat in their good graces, but he saw himself as a free agent and wanted to exercise what he saw as his free will, and thought little of those who would trespass on it."]

A week after NCAA championships, on June 16, 1973, after having initially balked at going to Bakersfield for the three-day AAU championships, Steve came within .4 seconds of breaking the American three-mile record in a time of 12:53.4. He was playing a game of chicken with the AAU. Steve thought its draconian authority over where and when an athlete could run was deeply un-American, this from an institution that purportedly gave the athlete full freedom to pick and choose. [annotation q="This is such a specific thought. How did you know what he was thinking with such nuance?" a="As you'll see in the quote below, he had given voice to his frustration with the AAU. Its treatment of athletes was borderline criminal: they were boarded in squalor while the administrators stayed in lavish hotels and ate gourmet meals, all while the athletes scrounged on a pittance."]

[annotation a="Steve was very individualistic and believed in personal agency, and if he wanted to take his talents to a particular meet and a particular race, that should be his decision and nobody else's."]

[annotation a="After reading thousands of articles, you start to get to really know a person and what drives them. My brilliant and kind and all-knowing editor (Matt Harper) would impress upon me, ‘You're the driver of the car. You have your thumb on the scale. You need to make assertions.’"]

[annotation a="With this little sentence, it wasn't much of a stretch for me to make this assertion. He practically said as much before and after this moment."]

Steve had every intention of running in Europe under his own banner on his own time and dime, not the AAU’s, a declaration of independence. “I’ve run five years for my country on a team. Now I want to run for me.” Still, by running in the AAU championships, Steve was throwing the AAU a bone. In return, Steve hoped for a travel permit from the AAU.

He wanted to travel on his own schedule and run against those he deemed worthy. Even make some money under the table. Steve began to realize that he and his peers had more power than they realized. “If the athletes don’t take the initiative in this, who will? We know the AAU and the American Olympic Committee won’t. I hate to sound critical, but to me the AAU is just a bunch of old men taking medication so they can stay alive for another four years to hassle us. Right now I’m being hassled. I don’t need it, really.” [annotation q="Here, you can really hear Pre's voice and attitude. When do you decide whether to use a quote or convert it to in-scene narration?" a="My early drafts were too quote-heavy. I was timid about putting too much of my own writing into this because Steve was so vibrant, I didn't want to interrupt him from speaking, if that makes sense."]

[annotation a="So it came down to internalizing much of what he said, putting it into my own words, narrating with confidence, and then letting his real zingers stand out. This quote is too good to internalize. We want to really hear him say this."]

[annotation a="If you quote too heavily, or too frequently, it can come across as far too newspaper-y. We want to stay in the pocket and not be jarred out of it. We're telling a story here so the narration must be done with confidence."]

The real question would be if Steve would race in the Restoration Meet at Hayward Field scheduled for June 20, 1973, another exhibition meet — just like the Twilight Meets — to raise money for renovations. The West Stands were dilapidated and held together with spit and prayer. Bowerman was still spearheading the fundraising, and he had a headliner in Steve that could draw people out, the proceeds going into the Hayward Field coffers. Steve and 1972 800-meter gold medalist Dave Wottle were supposed to leave for Europe on June 19. While in Bakersfield, Steve hatched an idea. Steve knew Dave Wottle was going to Europe with him. “Hey, why don’t you just come up to Eugene in a couple of days. They’re trying to raise money to restore the stadium. We’ll go after the world record in the mile. I’ll bring you through in 2:56 for three-quarters.” [annotation q="Is this recollected dialogue, recounted by Wottle in an interview? Do you have any tips about using dialogue recollected years later versus (or along with) dialogue recorded in-scene or by secondary sources (newspaper stories, etc.)?" a="This is recollected dialogue! I always love asking what they remember saying to each other, recreating memories with dialogue. Since this was a one-sided recollection you just roll with it. If there are more than one party involved, you bounce it off everyone. ‘So and so said this ... is that how you remember it, too?’ In these instances, unless there's a camera in their faces at that moment that you can transcribe, it will never be 100% accurate, but you can bet it was pretty damn close."]

Wottle had an apocalyptic kick. It was how he won his gold medal in Munich. Steve Prefontaine willing to be a rabbit? Why not? [annotation q="What question in your interview with Wottle prompted this bit of internal dialogue?" a="I asked ‘Did you have much contact with Steve shortly after or maybe in the the months after Munich?’ This would be after the 1972 Olympics. Dave then went on to speak for about six full minutes without interruption that included topics from Munich, watching Steve train in Munich, and then he just kind of went into this Super Mile memory. This was fine because I eventually wanted to talk about this in detail as I saw it as a major moment in the narrative. He offered this without any prodding from me at all."] "Steve knew Wottle was the superior miler and Steve figured that the pair of them could team up for a special headlining event. Here, Steve was willing to sacrifice himself. He couldn’t expect to win, but he knew his star power combined with Wottle’s kick might break Jim Ryun’s long-standing world record . . . and raise a lot of money for Hayward Field. [annotation q="How did you know what Steve was thinking here?" a="Steve loved to run the mile, and was a damn good miler, but he knew he couldn't really compete with true milers like Wottle. Being a strong front runner, Steve figured he could set a world-record pace for Wottle and if he actually paced Wottle through 2:56 for three-quarters of a mile, Steve would have zero kick to beat Wottle. All Wottle had to do was stay close to Steve until the final 200 meters or so and he would blast clear."]

The pair were stark opposites. Wottle was tall, pale as a sheet, ran with a golf cap. He raced no longer than the mile and saved his energy for the end. He was soft spoken, even bashful. [annotation q="Did you observe this in your interview with Wottle? Or did this characterization come from newspaper stories or other reporting?" a="Dave told me how reserved he was, especially compared to Steve. Photos of Wottle and Steve together show this dichotomy quite well."] Steve was shorter and would never cover that glorious mane of hair; he led from the front, mutton chops and dark mustache. Steve was also soft spoken, but he carried a heavy fist. Wottle was more shy and didn’t socialize much; though Steve appreciated the quieter moments, he was just as comfortable being the center of attention. Wottle never drank. Steve made a sport of it.

Dave Wottle was the NCAA mile champion, but he had never run faster than 3:57. Steve, to his credit, had run 3:55 earlier in the year in blustery conditions, call it the Hayward magic. Deep down Wottle knew he needed a better mile time if he was going to tell people the mile, and not the 800 meters, was his best event. Wottle had always wanted to run against Steve, and if that were to happen Steve would have to drop down and set the pace. “I know his plan; he’ll try to take me out and break me early,” Wottle said. [annotation q="How you decide when to use a quote (said to a reporter after an event) instead of turning the quote into in-scene narration?" a="I suspect like many musicians, they go on feel with their phrasing. This very well could have been — maybe should have been — folded into the narration. If I could re-write it, I probably would say something to the effect of: ‘Wottle knew Steve's plan, turned it over in his head, that Steve would try to go out beyond Wottle's comfort level, all in an attempt to break him as early as possible.’ Or something like that. And then cite it as I would the actual quote."] How close they got to that world record depended on Steve. He would sell out for Wottle, for Hayward Field.

The day could not have been better, on the eve of summer, balmy and windless. Wearing a “Nike” track and field T-shirt and Nike trainers, Steve checked in with a clerk shortly before his event was set to go. The stands were flush with 12,000 people. Wottle, who had just been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Air Force Reserves, had been tabbed to run in the Air Force colors instead of his usual Bowling Green University kit. While in Eugene, a captain for the Air Force gave Wottle his uniform. Wottle wanted to focus on the race, and he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be saluting or calling him sir or not. [annotation q="How do you get subjects to remember what they were thinking and feeling in a particular moment many years ago?" a="In this instance, Wottle had veered away from the Super Mile, so I said, ‘Getting a little more granular on that Super Mile race, in the time leading up to it, how are you starting to mentally prepare for it, even physically prepare for it, Oh, I have the opportunity to do something pretty special if things go according to plan?’"]

[annotation a="He started off by talking about the officer from the Air Force and how he just wanted to focus, but wasn't sure to what extent he had to be ceremonial around this officer now. Dave told me, ‘I didn't know how to act of if I was supposed to be saluting this guy or calling him sir all the time.’"]

[annotation a="It definitely made way more sense to fold this into narration because you can picture a young Wottle thinking these things, feeling distracted, but wanting to get ready for this big, big race."] Eventually and unceremoniously, Wottle slipped away to warm up. The plan was simple: stay with Steve. Steve said he was going to pull them through in 2:56. His gift to Wottle. Wottle thought, Pre’s the best rabbit you can have, except he’s the type of rabbit who usually wins.

Wottle was feeling good. He had slept ten hours the night before and logged an easy two-mile morning run. [annotation q="Did Wottle recall this in your interview? Or did he tell a reporter this in 1973?" a="Wottle shared with me his training log from June 1973 and in his log, he mentioned how much he slept and the morning jog with went on that day."] As race time neared, he jogged two-and-a-half miles as the stands swelled to the brim, hip to hip. The last time Wottle raced at Hayward Field was the Olympic Trials a year before. After he tied the world record in winning the 800 meters, he went across the street to McDonald’s and treated himself to a Big Mac meal. He wasn’t much for ceremony or theatrics. And when he was called to the starting line for the “Super Mile,” the people screamed and Wottle began to tingle. Then he heard the screams for Steve.

Whoa.

The race went off and just like Steve told Wottle, he paced him through three-quarters of a mile in 2:56, Steve hugging the inside lane and Wottle coasting to the outside of Steve’s right shoulder. [annotation q="What kind of questions do you ask in an interview to elicit the details and specificity you need to create a cinematic scene?" a="I really try to get people to slow down. Sometimes I'll say, since I couldn't witness this moment, pretend I'm a bird on your shoulder: What am I seeing? What am I hearing? What am I smelling? What am I feeling underfoot? Hell, what am I tasting (salt? did they bite their lip and are tasting blood?)? Sometimes they remember, other times they have no clue."]

[annotation a="I asked him in this instance, ‘As you're shadowing him throughout the early laps, physically, how are you feeling as your'e riding that wave?’"]

[annotation a="Then you balance what they remember, that perspective from a such a remove, with what you're reading in the newspaper archives of them in the moment, of the half-dozen or so accounts. And you can read those quotes back to them, ‘You said this, what else might that trigger?’"]

Wottle had never gone faster than 3:01 for three-quarters. Steve’s legs felt heavy and, at this point, he wanted to explode. He had run four three-mile races in 13:20 or below in ten days. The acceleration wasn’t there. He had no snap. Wottle was told by his Bowling Green coach that his best races would come off a fast pace and right there before him on a platter was about as fast as he’d ever experienced. Steve put the world record in Wottle’s sights; all Wottle had to do was take it. Steve rushed by the east stands with 220 yards to go. Fans knew the book on Wottle and, right on cue, Wottle surged 10 yards clear of Steve.

There would be no catching Wottle, but Steve chased after him not only to keep up with the clock, but to give his people in the rickety West Stands reason to cheer. Maybe the roar would push Wottle past the point of reason, past Ryun. By the time Wottle struck the tape, the time was 3:53.3, the third fastest mile ever. Wottle winced at the finish. Steve finished a few yards behind Wottle and gave his people all that remained, what would be his career best mile, 3:54.6. A little girl screamed, “That’s okay, Pre! Don’t worry about it!”

Years later, Wottle looked back at this race with a rare pang of regret. So much of his mindset was geared toward winning the race, not the clock. Time was secondary. He never wanted to sell out too soon. “Instead of going for it and laying it all out on the track and say, ‘Hey, you know, if I can run a 55-second last lap, I can get a world record,’ I was holding back because I was afraid of tightening up down the home stretch. Steve being the strong runner he was, I thought he could beat me. . . . I regret that, truthfully. I regret that he brought me through such a great race and a great time, and I didn’t lay it all out there on the track. That’s a weakness I had.” [annotation q="I love this paragraph, Wottle's insight and self awareness. I can hear the voice of an older man reflecting on the hubris of his younger self. In the interview, how did you encourage Wottle to open up about a tough and painful subject with such candor? Or did he go there naturally?" a="We're nearly 40 minutes into our conversation, and he offered this up naturally ... but I had never read or heard him articulate this before in any other interview. That's what 50-plus years of distance provided. This perspective was so beautiful and you can really feel his ache and the regret. Most elite athletes don't speak of regrets. Here, Dave went there. I was grateful he did."]

Wottle also didn’t want to like who he was running against, the better to flog them. He wanted to run angry. And after the race, with the fans still clapping and cheering, Wottle began his victory lap. Steve jogged up beside Wottle and grabbed his arm and raised them together above their heads. Wottle thought, What are you doing running with me? This is my victory lap. “How stingy,” Wottle remembered. “How stingy of me. Steve was endorsing me to the fans at Hayward Field. He was also saying, ‘You did that because of me,’ and he was absolutely right.” [annotation q="These three sentences combine external action, internal dialogue, the tension between them, and reflection/insight. It's very emotionally stirring. Do you think intentionally about such combinations? If not, what do you think about when you're trying to stir the reader emotionally?" a="This had the combination of the in-scene moment of Steve sidling up to Wottle, not commandeering his victory lap, but showing his appreciation. It made sense to internalized Wottle's recollection of this moment and how upset he was that Steve would try to hijack his moment. But then we step out into the reflection, and it made sense to pop out into the older, wiser pensive version of himself, scolding himself for not realizing in the moment just what Steve was doing."]

[annotation a="The writing of it came kinda naturally. Echoing that moment of how musicians might be going on feel, I think this was an instance of surrendering to the material in a way that felt true to the moment."]

Ernie Cunliffe, who was the coach for the Air Force working with Wottle, found Steve and told him, “It was a best-of-life for seven [other] guys [in the race] and you made it possible. You set it up for them.” Steve often made it possible for others to level up, his gift to them. The few who beat him also ran out of their shoes. Wottle bettered his best time by nearly four full seconds to win this night, the fastest mile ever run at Hayward Field, this in the temple of milers.

Wottle recalled, “If he had not brought me through in 2:56, there’s no way I could have run that fast. It was a valuable lesson for me to learn back then. I did reflect on it afterwards thinking, ‘No one’s on an island. You have a family, you have coaches, you have teammates, you have competitors. All that together is what makes runners achieve their goals.’ Steve helped me learn that lesson. I was always grateful for that.” [annotation a="Sometimes, at readings, this part kind of chokes me up, because running, like writing, is viewed as an individual/solitary endeavor, but it's really a team sport. And this moment always makes me think of the people who make it possible for me to do what I do. I'm getting kind of misty just thinking about it now."]

The Restoration Meet was a beautiful illustration of Steve’s evolution as a person. He started to see his rivals as peers, even if it meant falling on his sword to lift others up, all to give back to his community, these people, those stands. [annotation q="This is a nice moment of narration. You've illustrated this point, and now you declare it with a authorial confidence. Do you do this instinctively or with a specific intention?" a="In the conversations I had with my editor, he impressed upon time and time again that I had to make assertions and judgements. Always that I had my finger on the scale. A biographer brings a point of view, a framing to the story. Matt would tell me, ‘You probably know him better than anyone at this point based on the reading you've done and the people you've spoken to. You can make assertions.’ In fact, he insisted that I do that."]

[annotation a="There's no first person narration in this book, but this is a moment where I am very clearly signaling my interpretation of Steve's character and maturation at this moment in his life."]

After the race, Steve was swarmed by children seeking autographs. He signed them attentively. One of Steve’s older fans brandished a bottle of champagne in a paper bag. The fan offered Steve the bag and Steve, appreciatively, took a swig. [annotation a="I love this little moment that put a nice coda to the event, and speaks to Steve's appetite for a party. This ends the chapter, but it was the lede of the article I cited. I bring that up because all these articles are a writer's paints and they're all on the palette and it's like, ‘How do you layer in this paints to create texture and depth? And when?’"]

***

Kim Cross is a New York Times best-selling author and feature writing instructor for Harvard Extension School's graduate journalism program and the Larry McMurtry Literary Center. 

The post Annotation: How Brendan O’Meara Reconstructs Steve Prefontaine’s Legendary Races in ‘The Front Runner’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

A bazillion years ago, when I was a journalism undergrad, I made the stupidest mistake of my career: I turned down a paid summer internship on the features desk of the St. Petersburg Times* (now the Tampa Bay Times) to take an unpaid internship at SHAPE magazine. I was young and ignorant of the paper’s reputation as the pinnacle of narrative journalism in the newspaper business, nurturing Pulitzer Prize-winning storytellers like Lane DeGregory, Thomas French, and Rick Bragg.  

Instead, I spent the summer living rent-free with my aunt and working 40 hours a week at Weider Publications in Woodland Hills, Calif., where I rode an elevator with editors who pretended I was invisible. The only staffers who’d actually speak to me were on the copy desk — where I worked as a fact-checker — and two Muscle and Fitness associate editors who let me lift weights with them in the gym.

As an intern, I hoped to report and write a few small stories to beef up my skinny portfolio. But I was only allowed to fact-check articles written by freelancers. Every manuscript was printed out in double-space type and annotated by hand for the fact-checker. 

With fact-checking, everything must be verified 

Back in the analog days, here’s what that looked like: Every verifiable fact or quote was swiped with a highlighter and numbered. The numbers corresponded to sources listed on the fact-checking source list: a scientific study or other document (printed, with relevant facts highlighted) or a human source with a phone number. As I recall, reading scientific studies was above my pay grade. It was my job to call the sources and verify every quote and fact. The phone calls went something like this:

“Hi. I’m a fact-checker for SHAPE magazine, and I need to verify some facts. Let’s start with the spelling of your name, Bob Smith. Is that spelled B-O-B…S-M-I-T-H?”

As I read each letter aloud, I would strike it through on the manuscript with a pencil. The facts had to be read one by one, extracted from the context of a sentence. “Your hair is brown. You’re a registered dietitian. You live in Los Angeles…” As each sentence was verified, I’d strike it through. 

Fact-checkers are unsung heroes 

When I left SHAPE without a single published clip, I thought I’d wasted my summer. But I did learn some skills that would later be indispensable:

1. Be kind to interns.**
2. Custom-design your reporting workflow and organizational system for the benefit of your future self and fact-checker.
3. As you write a first draft, annotate the text with fact-checking footnotes: Links, sources, and other breadcrumbs can be followed back to the source.

Meta may be ending its fact-checking program on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. But in the journalism world, fact-checking lives on. At newspapers, much of it falls on the reporter and copy desk. At commercial magazines, the copy desk often employs a squad of staff and freelance fact-checkers. They don’t get bylines, and their work is often invisible to the reader. They are great unsung heroes, now more than ever.

Most readers — and a shocking number of journalism students — don’t understand the rigor and process of fact-checking. At some publications, such as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, the process has been known to bring professional writers to tears. But those same fact-checkers help us sleep at night. Especially the night before a story comes out in print.

When I published my first book, which contained some technical asides on the science of severe weather, I was mortified to learn that book publishers don’t employ fact-checkers. That falls on the author. Having grown accustomed to face-saving fact-checkers who caught a typo, transposed number, or misspelled name, I decided to hire one. Fact-checking rates often start at $50 an hour, so I sold a beloved mountain bike to be able to afford one. (There are also agencies, like Wudan Yan's Factual, that news organizations and journalists can hire.) 

Below, I'm sharing my own guide to working with fact-checkers. It will help you better understand the process and keep your reporting organized for when the time comes to share it.  For more insights on fact-checking, see this post by National Geographic fact-checker Brad Scriber.

Kim Cross's guide to working with fact-checkers

How does fact-checking work? 

During this process, fact-checkers call your sources to check quotes and verify facts you've reported, ask you for interview recordings and transcripts, and expect links or documents that verify facts, figures, and other details in your story. 

When does fact-checking occur? 

Fact-checking occurs in a small window of time (a week or two) after you've finished rounds of editing and reporting with your editor, and before the manuscript goes into copy editing and production. "Production" is the part of the cycle when stories are being laid out, text is being "copy fit" (trimmed to fit the layout), pages are being proofed by several layers of editors, including the Editor-in-Chief. This all happens on deadline and is the most stressful part of the month for your editor, so the easier you can make the fact-checker's job, the more likely the editor will be to assign you another story. 

What will I need to share? 

1. A source list. This can be a spreadsheet or a Word document. It should include the name, phone number, and email of every human source you've interviewed, and all other sources cited. If an interview subject is hard to reach or prefers to be contacted in a certain way, note that too. (Before you do any of this, let every source know they will be contacted by a fact-checker. Be sure to prepare them for what to expect, technically and emotionally as well — for many of your sources, it might mean another process of re-reporting difficult or traumatic moments.) 
2. Interview recordings and transcripts. I use a digital recorder and upload the MP3 files to a service like Otter.ai for automated transcription. You can generate a URL to each interview and paste that link in your source list. (Be mindful of privacy and security settings for cloud-based services.) Pro tip: You can use the highlighter tool in Otter.ai to highlight quotes and key information that makes it into your story. 
3. Links and digital copies of all primary and secondary sources. These may include scanned book pages, websites, newspaper articles, scientific studies, photos, videos, and screenshots of texts or social media posts. It's anything that you used to find a quote, detail, or other fact in your story. If I write a scene in which a character is wearing a blue dress, I will need to submit a photo of the character in a blue dress. 
4. Calculations or sources for any facts and figures you calculated yourself. For example, I sometimes use Google Earth to measure the distance between two scenes "as the crow flies" and/or travelled by car, on roads. I submit a screenshot of Google Earth showing the number. If I calculate the average number of miles someone drove over a period of time, I write my math calculation in the footnote. 

This sounds intimidating. What can I do while I'm reporting to make fact-checking easier and less stressful? 

That's a great question, and I'm so glad you're asking it now. If you are not prepared for fact-checking, it can be stressful and even traumatic. But this should provide a strong incentive to design your "system" around fact-checking needs that will arise at the end of the process, sometimes months after you reported a story, when your head is deep into the next story and you can't remember where you found a given fact or where you put the source. Few things frustrate me more than wasting time re-finding a source. 

Here are a few pro tips from my own 'system'

1. Use a secure, cloud-based storage platform (Dropbox, Microsoft One, iCloud, etc.) for all your reporting files. These systems are backed up remotely, so in the event you lose/damage your laptop or delete a file, you can access that file through the web. I personally use Dropbox. (Another reminder to be mindful of privacy and security settings for your folders and data.)
2. Create a folder for each story or project. I name certain files starting with 000, 00A, 00B (etc.) so my most urgent projects appear at the top of the (alphabetically sorted) list. 
3. Inside that story folder, create a "fact-checking" folder. Store digital copies of all your sources here, in one place. If you find a page in a book, use a scanner app on your phone to create a PDF, and upload it to this folder. (I use an app called Scanner Pro, which allows me to upload directly from my phone to a specific Dropbox folder. You may find newer, better ones.) 
4. Name your files (especially interviews and dated documents) with a date-based format: YYYY-MM-DD-Keyword. This will automatically sort your files into chronological order, which comes in handy later when you're looking for something. 
5. As you're writing the story, generate a URL for each source and paste it into a footnote in your draft. Dropbox (or any other cloud-based service) will generate a unique URL for that file. You can paste this link into the footnotes as you're writing your story. A fact-checker (or you, or your editor) can click on the URL and — voilà! — up pops the primary source. Here's an example from a real story. Pro tip: If you really want to impress your fact-checker, you've already highlighted the part of the document you've referenced. Their eye will go right to it, so they don't have to read the whole document. Click here to see an example.
6. Highlight and link your interview transcripts as well. Here's an example. Note: The free (or less-expensive) version of Otter.ai now limits the number of files you can import in a given month. To avoid this limit, you can record interviews directly in Otter.ai (the web-based platform on your computer or the phone app). I like to record on my audio recorder as a backup, in case my phone dies or someone calls me and the app stalls.  
7. Keep a list of all your sources in one place (a spreadsheet or document). Ideally, include the links here, too. This creates an index that you can use to see an "at a glance" inventory of what you have. (Often, in a big story you'll gather so many sources you forget what you have, and then your effort is wasted.) 
8. Ask yourself this question: If someone questions a fact in my story a year from now, will I be able to find it quickly? Some publications require you to keep sources for one year after publication. If anyone questions something in the story, your editor will come to you and expect you to pull up the source. So, design your system based on how your brain works. 

***

Kim Cross is a New York Times best-selling author and feature writing instructor for Harvard Extension School's graduate journalism program and the Larry McMurtry Literary Center. 

***

* A decade later, after four years of working for magazines, I crawled back to the St. Pete times, confessed my stupid mistake, and begged for another chance. I spent the summer as their 27-year-old married intern and met a lifelong mentor, who is now the Great Reads deputy editor at The New York Times.

** A future intern, ignored by everyone else, got me my first speaking gig at a conference, where I met my first literary agent, who got me a book deal that led to me quitting my staff-editor job to write books and freelance.

The post We need fact-checkers more than ever. Here’s how to work with one. appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

“Excuse me for interrupting, but you’re The Writer, right?” 

I looked up from my conversation at a coffee shop in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood to see a burly man with a chest-length beard the color of steel wool. He wanted to know if my coffee companion was, in fact, Lee Gutkind — the writer, editor, and professor whom Vanity Fair in 1997 called “the Godfather behind creative nonfiction.”  

It was. The bearded guy introduced himself as a writer-friend of someone whom Gutkind had taught in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, where Gutkind had founded Creative Nonfiction, a literary journal-turned-magazine that catalyzed the evolution of the genre. 

After telling us about the novel he had (finally) finished, the bearded man spent 10 minutes fan-girling over Gutkind, a soft-spoken, white-haired, bespectacled professor who had no idea who this guy was (a ceramic artist and lead guitarist for a band called Old Money Jesus). Then the man turned to me and said, with the earnestness of a Swiftie:

“This is like an Elvis encounter!” 

Gutkind and I were three hours into what was intended to be a one-hour chat, and this was the fourth celebrity sighting. As we introduced ourselves to each other outside Jitters café, an award-winning playwright stopped him on the sidewalk. As the playwright filled my ear with praise for Gutkind, a woman passing by on the sidewalk reached in, without a word, to hug Gutkind’s neck and kiss his godfatherly cheek. When we moved to Georgie’s Corner for lunch, the owner thanked him by bringing us a free cupcake and chocolate chip cookies. 

And, of course, he was receiving extended attention from me. I was in Pittsburgh to celebrate my grandmother’s 100th birthday. When I realized Gutkind lived there, too, I invited him for coffee to talk about “Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue,” an anthology of 32 essays representing the kaleidoscope of nonfiction writing published by the magazine over 30 years. I was still mourning the end of Creative Nonfiction’s publishing run in 2022. But I was grateful for the unusual parting gift: “The Final Issue” is being mailed to his 2,800 subscribers — free. 

“I felt I owed you guys something,” he said. 

The spark of a movement

Flashback: It’s the early 1990s, and Gutkind is an English professor at Pitt — the only one he knows of there “without any advanced degree whatsoever.” He is surrounded by poets, fiction writers, and playwrights who consider nonfiction inferior. He wants to write nonfiction that reads like fiction. 

True stories, mind you — based entirely on fact — but stories deployed with the tools of fiction: scenes, dialogue, point of view, voice, characters as fully rounded as any found in literature. 

“I was an outlier,” he said. “But I thought there were so many writers like me, writing nonfiction that read like short stories.” 

He had long admired the characters and craft experiments of the New Journalists, rebels who started rewriting the rules of nonfiction in the 1960s. Think Gay Talese’s profile of Frank Sinatra — written without any real access to the star — in “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (1966). Or the hallucinogenic narrative fugue of Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). Or Joan Didion’s artfully fragmented portraits of young hippies, forming her mosaic of Haight-Ashbury counterculture in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968). 

“I thought, this is really something,” Gutkind said. “And I wanted to do that.” 

Whatever “that” was needed a name. Something other than “New Journalism,” because the J-word was off-putting to folks in the literary world, who considered factual writing antithetical to creative writing. 

Gutkind embraced the term “creative nonfiction,” because he felt it encompassed the broadest spectrum: memoir, essays, narratives, profiles, immersion reportage, and so on.

“I wasn’t the first person to use that term,” he said. “But I was the first person who really hung onto it.” 

Journalists recoiled. “They hated the word ‘creative,’” Gutkind said. “They thought it meant you could make stuff up, which wasn’t true.”

Creative writers took umbrage, too. “They resisted the evolution of the essay and the idea that creative nonfiction could take shape and read like fiction.” 

Literary critics were among the harshest naysayers. As Gutkind recalls in the introduction to “The Final Issue,” an editor for The New York Times Book Review described creative nonfiction as “bullshit. … If it is creative, then it’s not nonfiction and if it is nonfiction then it’s not creative.” 

And so began years of  “literary fistfights” — the theme of his memoir, published last year by Yale University Press, which is as much a history as it is a memoir. “The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting” chronicles not only Gutkind’s personal arc but the evolution of creative nonfiction from an incite-fully oxymoronic term into its own legitimate genre.  

“My mission was always to make creative nonfiction the ‘fourth genre,’” Gutkind told me — as respectable as fiction, poetry, and playwriting. “I wanted people to accept it. I got a little crazy about it. I really pushed.”

Gutkind fought so hard to legitimize the genre that a Vanity Fair writer called him “a human octopus.” Which, in retrospect, could be considered a back-handed (or eight-handed) compliment. In the same derisive critique of “Creative Nonfiction” (both the magazine and the genre), the critic dismissed memoir — including Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer winning “Angela’s Ashes” and “The Liar’s Club” by Mary Karr — as “navel-gazing” and “civic journalism for the soul.”

A slow embrace of the form

Flash forward: It’s 2024, almost 2025. The Vanity Fair critic who snubbed memoir as “navel-gazing” published his own umbilically contemplative memoir 10 years after writing those very words — figuratively and literarily eating them. 

Creative Nonfiction had evolved from a perfect-bound literary journal with 150 subscribers to a quarterly magazine with a small but devoted readership of 2,800 paying subscribers and 35,000 on the email list. It had published writing by the likes of Valerie Boyd, John McPhee, Richard Rodriguez, Charles Simic, and many other “outliers.” It had become a literary lab for Pulitzer Prize winners and National Book Award recipients and even some non-writers with a great story to tell — all of them true-storytellers experimenting with craft and form.  

It had become legit. 

The genre, meanwhile, had evolved from a concept that irritated both journalists and English majors into a genre worthy of its own MFA programs. Gutkind helped start the first ones — at the University of Pittsburgh and the low-residency program at Goucher College — both in 1997. 

Acceptance expanded. As Gutkind writes in “Literary Fist-Fighting”: 

“There are more than 200 MFA creative writing programs and three dozen PhD programs — not just in the U.S. but in Asia, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland the UK, and other countries. Nearly every week, creative nonfiction books appear on the bestseller lists of The New York Times and The Washington Post; they are featured and reviewed and excerpted in major magazines and on literary websites. Many newspapers today, once critical of creative nonfiction (and the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s), regularly solicit and publish personal essays for opinion and feature pages. News stories, once limited by the five Ws — who, what, when, where, why — are often written as dramatic narratives.”

Creative nonfiction is now one of the fastest-growing disciplines in both academia and publishing, Gutkind says. Which seems like an appropriate setup for a mic drop. So I was astonished when Gutkind told me that he had never been invited to speak at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference at the University of North Texas or the Power of Narrative Conference at Boston University (formerly hosted by the Nieman Foundation). 

What? Why?! 

It seems that the parallel universes of literary journalism and creative writing still haven’t fully merged; they coexist as a sort of Venn diagram, with a little overlap between two curiously siloed disciplines. As a writer who haunts the overlap, I have witnessed this: at conferences attended by journalists but few MFAs; at writers’ residencies where I was the lone journalist among poets and novelists, even in my own classrooms. 

I’ve taught creative nonfiction in English departments where I had to find a word other than “reporting” to teach students how to research better material for their stories, and I’ve taught feature writing in journalism programs where I struggled to get experienced reporters to understand what a scene is, or the difference between dialogue and quotes. 

Both camps could benefit from the sort of cross-pollination that Gutkind sought to infuse in his magazine and his classrooms. But even after 30 years, he feels rejected by literary journalists who can’t seem to get past the C-word — as if “creative” implies making stuff up instead of the creativity of the craft. 

Gutkind has been pressed through the years to define “creative nonfiction.” He has refused, because he didn’t want to define boundaries that might limit the creativity and experimentation of writers. He felt that writers should be the ones to define the genre through their writing. That said, his magazine’s tagline offers a sort of definition, with plenty of room for interpretation: 

True stories, well told. 

Keeping the story flame alive

In 2022, Gutkind left his final professorship at Arizona State University and returned to Pittsburgh, coming full circle (like a good essay) back to where he began. After shutting down the magazine and co-editing the anthology with Leslie Rubinkowski, his former student, he has more time to focus on his own writing, wrangling a narrative that has been incubating for some time and thinking about the future of creative nonfiction. 

Not long after the magazine ceased, Gutkind received an email from Narratively, a storytelling platform that champions true storytelling in many forms: written stories, podcasts, TV, film, and an educational arm called Narratively Academy, which offers online writing workshops.  

Not knowing the magazine had stopped publishing, the crew at Narratively asked if Gutkind might want to share a piece they had published. He was already “a fan and admirer” of Narratively and found the timing a moment of kismet, because he’d just been thinking about reaching out to the site “with some ideas about how we might work together.”  

Narratively’s founders, Noah Rosenberg and Brendan Spiegel, were journalists who found themselves stymied by the storytelling constraints of what they call “big journalism.” Their story ideas were repeatedly rejected as “too quirky, complex, or in-depth for mainstream media,” according to their website. So in 2012 they built a platform “that champions diverse, indie journalists and storytellers and celebrates humanity through the most authentic, unexpected and extraordinary true narratives.” Narratively has since been lauded as one of TIME’s 50 Best Websites (2013) and Columbia Journalism Review’s 11 Best Experiments in Journalism (2015). 

These journalists, who are of a younger generation, didn’t see themselves as part of a separate camp. When Rosenberg discovered Creative Nonfiction 20 years ago, he thought: I’m not alone. I’ve finally found my people. And Gutkind was one of them. 

“He’s the consummate player-coach,” Rosenberg told me on the phone. “He has practiced the craft. He has helped define the craft in so many powerful important ways, while also becoming an important teacher and mentor.” 

Synergy can be an off-putting word. So let’s call what happened next a syzygy.

The journalists and the creative nonfictionist got on the same page (which would be a cliché if it weren’t a double entendre). In February they announced a partnership. Their first collaboration is a series called “The Art of Narrative Storytelling,” which invites writers to examine the stories that move them and try to crack the code that makes them work. Narratively will also offer a discounted subscription to Creative Nonfiction subscribers, but more importantly, an alternative to the void left by Creative Nonfiction, with the Godfather’s blessing. 

“The advice he has offered us has demonstrated that he’s willing to pass the baton,” Rosenberg said. “Which is a responsibility we don’t take lightly.” 

A writer’s reality check

If this were a news article, that would be a fine kicker. But in homage to the Godfather, this is a story, and we will end it with a flashback. 

It’s 1965 and Gutkind is a freshman at Pitt, taking Composition 101. His professor is teaching the five-paragraph essay: intro, three paragraphs supporting three points, conclusion. It feels limiting and frustrating and not what young Gutkind thinks writing should be — at least not any writing he’d want to read. 

So he goes rogue. Instead of an academic-style paper, Gutkind turns in a story. 

His professor catches on. Sees what he’s doing. Purses his lips and tells his student: 

“You ought to think about becoming a writer.” 

Seven years later, Gutkind published his first book, “Bike Fever: On Motorcycle Culture.” He would go on to become a leather-clad professor who stomped into class in motorcycle boots and smoked cigarettes during his lectures. He credits his 101 professor for unlocking the door to this life.

Over the years, Gutkind wrote letters and email trying to reach the prof to thank him. He never heard back. Perhaps he’d been “way too overboard in appreciation and praise.” Maybe all that fan-girling had made the poor man uncomfortable. 

Then, one day, he was sitting in a coffee shop and saw his teacher walking by on the street.

I’ll let the Godfather finish the story:

“I rushed outside and pursued him, calling his name quite loudly to get his attention. When I caught up with him and told him how he had been instrumental in launching my writing life — I had by then published two books — I realized why he had never replied. … He had no idea who I was.” 

***

Kim Cross is the author of creative nonfiction stories and books, including “What Stands in a Storm” and “In Light of All Darkness.”

The post Passing the torch of the creative nonfiction movement appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Three weeks after the nation’s deadliest wildfire in a century blackened a huge swath in Maui, freelance journalist Erika Hayasaki felt called to go there and tell the story. At home in Southern California, she saw dramatic TV coverage and news stories about escapes, but noticed that “information felt very muddled.”

“I thought: There is a need for narratives there,” she recalls. After reaching out to a few editors, some of whom were on vacation, she wasn’t able to secure a story assignment. She’d have to travel on her own dime and report on her own time. But she had a friend on the island and enough airline miles for a round-trip ticket. “So I just went.” On her way to Maui, she did receive one assignment from an editor at New York Magazine, which ultimately covered her travel expenses and led to her first published piece out of Lahaina, “Maui on Fire.”

During her 10 days of reporting on the ground, she found other compelling stories that spoke to many themes: colonialism, the environment, the history of Hawaii, climate change, the economics of natural disaster relief. When she returned, she sent out 23 pitches and two grant applications to do more in-depth reporting on Maui. “I got 16 rejections (including the grants),” she says. “I had all these people I wanted to write about. A lot of editors thought, ‘The story is over.’ When people move on, that’s when it gets hard.”

Out of the 23 pitches, she eventually landed seven features. The last one, annotated below, was “She Survived the Maui Wildfire. She couldn’t Survive the Year After.” It was repeatedly rejected by various publications. But Hayasaki couldn’t give up on it.

A high-stakes story with a clear theme

Hayasaki met the main subject, a Flilipina janitor named Edralina Diezon, at a resort hotel where Edralina was sheltering with 1,000 other survivors. “What struck me about her story is that she was still going to work every day in a mall that was completely closed down,” Hayasaki says. “The stakes were clear: What is she going to do on a day-to-day basis? How is she going to survive the next year?”

Shadowing Edralina as she applied for post-fire disaster relief, Hayasaki witnessed her central conflict: “Managing her livelihood became an arduous daily undertaking that involved navigating a confusing and often uncoordinated network of organizations that provided aid, housing and other support.”

[display-posts orderby="date"]

The elements of a compelling narrative were there: An empathetic main character; a central conflict that provides tension and manifests in a clear struggle; a distinct point of view that distills and focuses a specific element of the bigger disaster; a driving question that speaks to a bigger theme: What does it mean to survive when society’s most vulnerable remain unprotected after a crisis?

The resulting 2,000-word feature felt like a “micro-narrative” for a writer whose sweet spot is in 5,000- to 7,000-word stories. The story echoes the elements and themes of a book that shaped Hayasaki’s approach to narrative nonfiction: “Hiroshima,” by John Hersey, which tells the story of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima through six Japanese survivors. She read the book when she was 13 years old, after her Japanese father encouraged her to learn about this history. “The book always stuck with me,” she said in the audio reporter commentary embedded at the top of the story. “Because of the power of the writing and the narrative. It became a sort of guiding light in my own career years later.”

Trusting your story instincts

In addition to being an independent journalist, Hayasaki is an associate professor in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches longform feature writing. One of the biggest challenges is getting students to understand the elements of what she thinks of as “multidimensional narratives.” To help them find and focus this kind of story, she encourages them to define three key dimensions:

1. The character dimension: A person, place or thing moving through time
2. The social dimension: What does this story tell us about the world we live in, or the forces that shape it? (The nut graf of a story is usually embodied in dimension #2, as well as throughout the piece.)
3. The human condition dimension: The existential questions that haunt our reporting and research, becoming our themes.

These dimensions existed so clearly in Edralina’s story. Despite the rejections, Hayasaki kept pitching the story. “We’re often told ‘That’s sad, but it’s not really a story for us,’” Hayasaki says. “But you have to trust your instincts.”

The pitch finally landed in The New York Times. Reader letters confirmed her gut. One, from a person who serves as a full-time caregiver, wrote: “It makes me feel less alone. It’s a bulwark against despair. It makes me furious enough to work on strengthening my worn out compassion.”

The letter reminded Hayasaki why she felt so compelled to get on that plane to Maui.

“One of my mentors told me that what we do is part the curtain on humanity,” says Hayasaki, who adds that stories about disasters are ultimately stories about people. “Through them you can see something bigger.”

Annotation: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Hayasaki’s answers in blue. To read the story without annotations, click teh HIDE ANNOTATIONS button in the right hand menu on your monitor or at the top of your mobile screen.

She Survived the Maui Wildfires. She Couldn’t Survive the Year After.

Edralina Diezon was working as a janitor and sending money to her family in the Philippines when wildfires destroyed everything she had. The road to rebuilding her life proved to be perilous.

How did you feel about this headline? Did you feel like it generated tension through foreshadowing or worry it was giving away the ending of the story?I did worry that the headline gave away the ending. But after hearing from readers, I realized that many didn’t not know “survive” would be in a literal sense and in the end I thought the headline could foreshadow something, but leave readers wanting to know what happened to Edralina. In my audio interview about reporting the piece, the producers for Reporter Reads were also intentional to not reveal anything about the ending.

By Erika Hayasaki

August 21, 2024

The New York Times

[dc]A[/dc]s a whirlwind of flames nearly encircled the Lahaina Gateway shopping center on Aug. 8, 2023, Edralina Diezon hid in a storage room, surrounded by mops, buckets and brooms. Terrified, Ms. Diezon, who worked 80 hours a week as a janitor, did not leave for two days and two nights. When she finally emerged, starving and disoriented, the neighborhood where she lived was gone. How did you report this reconstructed scene? How do you go about choosing an opening scene?For this scene, when I first met Edralina, she described hiding and being encircled by flames, wandering out starving. I did visit her at the mall where she worked. But it was not until after she passed away that I went inside the janitorial room. I had returned to Maui, and I found her coworkers, who took me into the room where she hid. I captured the details of the mops, brooms (and much more, which did not make it into the story) on my phone videos and photos. I always knew this would be a potential entry point into the story, because the idea of hiding for so long and coming out into a destroyed landscape felt like a pivotal moment, and an inciting incident for what would come next.

Ms. Diezon, 69, wandered the charred streets for a few hours before encountering a police officer who took her to a hotel that had been turned into a shelter. Eventually, she would move into the beachfront Royal Lahaina Resort and Bungalows, along with more than 1,000 of Maui’s 8,000 displaced survivors.

One year ago, the deadliest wildfire in the United States in over a century turned Lahaina, on Maui, into a town of ash and ghosts. Buses still did not run in September. Streetlights did not shine. Stores left standing were shuttered. Employees and customers did not populate the Lahaina Gateway.Your most telling details here focus on what was missing. Had you seen Lahaina before the fires? Or did you have to imagine what it must have been like?Since I was there in the weeks after the fire, all of the burn zone was there before me. The lights were out, the employees gone. These were notes I had already from immersive reporting.

But Ms. Diezon still showed up to her janitorial job every day, unsure of where she would eventually live.Putting this sentence last in the paragraph increases its power. First you see the desolate, ruined landscape, and then you see a character moving through that landscape. Can you talk about how you decide to sequence facts and images in the beginning of a story?Readers often need to know a lot of things at once, but the order in which the details unfold often influences the effectiveness of a narrative. I had two brilliant narrative editors many years ago, when I was a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times. One, Steve Padilla, always emphasizes the power of endings — not just the endings of stories, but of paragraphs and sentences. The last line or word can stay in a reader’s mind, echo, or leave them with a question, wanting to know more.My other narrative editor, Richard E. Meyer, wrote this Pulitzer Prize-finalist feature (interviewing a woman who could not speak, by using a letter board). He also emphasizes building stories through scenes and mini-cliffhangers. He calls this a “pile-driving” narrative. Propelling your story forward by planting questions in the reader’s mind: What will happen next? And what happened after that? So how you end a section, a paragraph, or even a sentence can do this narrative work for you.Lastly, in my classes at UC Irvine we often dissect story structure and think about how an anecdote is its own mini-story, with a beginning, middle and end. The director of our program, Barry Siegel, talks about how scenes are the structural building blocks of narratives. They also enliven the anecdotes that invigorate our nonfiction.

Each year, millions of people in the United States are displaced from their homes because of fires, hurricanes and other weather-related disasters — and then find themselves struggling to rebuild their lives, as Ms. Diezon did.

Nearly half of Maui’s wildfire survivors lost their jobs, according to the preliminary results from 679 people in a University of Hawaii study, which aims to track more than 1,000 people over the next decade. Thirteen percent of survivors in the study still do not have health insurance, and 40 percent of households are experiencing low food security.The previous two paragraphs are an effective nut graf (or nut section) that answers the “So what?” question and clarifies for readers how Ms. Diezon’s story fits into the bigger picture. How do you generally feel about nut grafs? Were these paragraphs part of your pitch?I have written longform stories that did not have nut grafs, like this one. I do remember having debates over whether narratives should have them or not. I think it depends. But I have also grown to appreciate nut grafs in magazine stories. They can help orient a reader by signaling why this story is important, but not giving away the ending. I will also say nut grafs are hard for me to write. I am much more comfortable in scenes. And yes, a version of this nut graf was in my pitch — and when it comes to pitching stories, I think they are essential.

For Ms. Diezon, managing her livelihood became an arduous daily undertaking that involved navigating a confusing and often uncoordinated network of organizations that provided aid, housing and other support. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the United Way had begun to provide services, and celebrities pledged funds for fire victims. Locals also set up Venmo donation funds for families, but Ms. Diezon did not have an account.

She survived the fires that killed at least 102 others. But what does it mean to survive when society’s most vulnerable remain unprotected after a crisis?Great example of narration here to establish the driving question and theme. Do you include a sentence like this in most of your stories?This sentence was added after the editor pushed me for more here — a good call. I often think of stepping out of the scene and into narration, a statement or a reflection as “confident narrator’s voice.” You have to confidently know the story based on your reporting, and tell it, succinctly, to move it along and help establish themes. For Ms. Diezon, the road to rebuilding her life would turn perilous.This is a textbook lede that gets us very quickly into the narrative: In 382 words, you set the scene, introduced the main character and established her central conflict. It has an opening scene, nut graf(s), zoom-out moment to reveal and quantify the bigger picture, and a bit of narration that makes clear the central theme. Can you describe your approach to ledes? And how you teach your students what makes a great lede?I actually don’t teach traditional news lede writing in my classes very often, since I focus on feature writing. I do teach narrative and feature ledes, which to me can be more like anecdotal ledes, narrative scenes in medias res, or explanatory and declarative ledes. In my tip sheet for students, I tell them good narrative nonfiction or feature story openings achieve some, most, or all of these goals:

•  Intrigue your reader with the first line or first few lines.
•  Show action (in medias res).
•  Establish or hint at a conflict. Introduce a crossroads or tension.
•  Memorable detail/s that hold meaning.
•  Emotion (which is conveyed by the details chosen).
•  Establish or hint at a point of the piece.
•  Use your confident narrator’s voice.
•  Establish your main character, and point of view, perhaps from inside his or her mind.
•  Establish questions for the readers, which we want answered by the end of the story.
•  Establish the main subject as someone readers want to care about and get to know, someone we can relate to, even if their story is so completely different from ours.
•  End on a cliffhanger. Withhold enough information to keep us wondering what will happen next.

A Longer, Darker Commute

Ms. Diezon’s husband, who had long been the family breadwinner, died of colon cancer in 2014. A year later, she received her green card and moved from Manila to Maui to join her brother, who drove a taxi and owned a now-destroyed seven-bedroom house where he rented rooms to tenants, including her.

Ms. Diezon was employed by a cleaning service and recycled aluminum cans on the side. She earned $15 an hour while juggling two or three jobs and saved enough to send $500 to $1,000 every two weeks to her four children and six grandchildren in the Philippines.When you met Ms. Diezon, how and when did you know what her central conflict would be? And how did you broach the topic of money, which can be awkward to talk about?This didn’t take much extra effort. It was all unfolding in front of me as I followed her around, and she wasn’t guarded about it. Edralina was pretty clear with me that this was all part of her daily struggle, and thousands of others right there alongside her.

Ms. Diezon’s paychecks helped pay for upgrades to her family home in the Philippines and her grandchildren’s schooling. She also collected goods, sending a care package every three months filled with clothes, cologne, handbags and food.

Before the wildfires, Ms. Diezon walked less than a mile to get home from work, an easy distance to her neighborhood of multigenerational houses behind the Lahaina Gateway. After the fires, one of Ms. Diezon’s daily dilemmas involved figuring out how she would commute. The Royal Lahaina hotel was four miles north of the shopping center, along the fast-moving and dangerous Honoapiilani Highway.

One dark evening in September, Portia Marcelo, 43, encountered Ms. Diezon waiting alone at an unlit gas station adjacent to the Lahaina Gateway. (Disclosure: Ms. Marcelo, a photographer, is a friend of this reporter.)Why was it important to disclose that relationship? Was this your or the editor’s instinct to add the disclosure?Initially, I wrote this part and some other sections in first person, because I knew Portia was going to be a part of it, and I didn’t want that revealed in a clunky way. I think because I am used to magazine writing these days, you can get away with slipping into first-person. But the editor let me know The New York Times would not use first person for this story. So the first round of edits actually cut out any parts mentioning that I knew Portia. I raised that issue with the editor, and explained I thought it would be unethical to not reveal Portia is a friend. He agreed and we added the clunky phrase. When in doubt, it’s always better to be ethical, even if the prose is not as pretty.Ms. Diezon was trying to go back to the Royal Lahaina and had resorted to hitchhiking. She climbed into the back seat and Ms. Marcelo, who is also Filipina, asked Ms. Diezon if she was OK.

“I’m sad,” Ms. Diezon replied. She explained how difficult it had been to get rides back from work.

“Auntie, I know in our culture it is hard to ask for help,” Ms. Marcelo said to her. “But always ask for help.”

A Maze of Services

Courtney Lazo, 34, who is Filipina and Native Hawaiian, said non-English-speaking communities often slipped through the cracks. Filipinos make up 40 percent of Lahaina residents, and Ms. Lazo, a fire survivor, had seen frustrated Filipino families walk away from Red Cross sites without aid because they could not navigate services. So, on Labor Day, she helped coordinate a Filipino outreach event at the Royal Lahaina.

The event had translators who spoke Tagalog and Ilocano. When volunteers arrived in red-and-yellow “Lahaina Strong” T-shirts, Ms. Diezon dashed to the front of the “needs assessment” line.

“We’re getting everybody’s name, what you’re needing,” a volunteer said. That information would be submitted to the larger community organizations, which were coordinating relief efforts, funds and support. Ms. Diezon sat at a table opposite a volunteer.

“Do you need insurance claims?”

“I don’t have insurance,” Ms. Diezon replied.

“Employment?”

“I have work for now.”

“OK, transportation?”

“I need, yeah, I need.”

One of the most powerful elements of narrative craft is dialogue (something said by one character to another in the moment) as opposed to quotes (said to a reporter after the fact). Dialogue can also be one of the hardest things to report. Was this a conversation you witnessed? Did you record it or take notes? When you want to incorporate dialogue into a reconstructed scene, how do you go about the reporting?All of this was witnessed by me and also recorded. I brought audio equipment with me on my trips, in case any parts of the story could be used for audio stories. But I also relied on my iPhone to record all conversations, including the ones where I was a fly on the wall.

The volunteer asked more questions about rebuilding, housing and her mental health, then told her to move to the next station. “That’s where they’re doing the Oprah,” she said. “They’re going to help you sign up for that one, OK?”

Oprah Winfrey and the actor Dwayne Johnson originally committed $10 million to the People’s Fund of Maui to provide direct monthly cash payments to families whose homes had been destroyed. They teamed up with the Entertainment Industry Foundation and ultimately raised nearly $60 million. For recipients, it worked out to temporary payments of around $1,200 a month.How did you report and fact-check these figures? These came through previous reporting in The New York Times. Also, I was able to confirm some of these numbers on the ground when following Edralina as she applied for aid.Ms. Diezon took a photo and handed over her ID and bank routing number.

Next, Ms. Diezon went to another hotel to inquire about disaster relief funding from Maui United Way, which was distributing direct cash payments of $1,000 to nearly 8,000 individuals affected by the fires. But when she arrived, she was directed to another location that she couldn’t go to because she had to leave for work.

Ms. Diezon’s journey is emblematic of the toll taken on many survivors trying to navigate services after a climate disaster. Government organizations like FEMA and the Small Business Administration can provide financial assistance, but some survivors discover that they aren’t always eligible because of various bureaucratic reasons and instead have to rely on nonprofits like church organizations and friends or families for aid.

A Final Shift and a Return Home

In the days and weeks that followed, Ms. Diezon, heeding Ms. Marcelo’s advice, asked for help.Deft transition. What’s your advice on writing good transitions? I often follow the “Law and Order Rule,” which I did not come up with. This is another craft technique term coined by Steve Padilla. It is about cutting to the scene, to the middle of it. Cutting out the “throat clearing,” details where someone is walking, turning a knob, opening a door, etc. Just cut to action. This goes for the first scene in a story. But also the subsequent ones and mini chapters within our stories. I think of stories as having mini chapters, even ones at this length 2,000 or so words. This story section is less scene-based, more confident narrator’s voice, but it is the same idea of cutting to the key action of the section: Edralina asking for help.At first, she asked Ms. Marcelo, who spent a few days shuttling her to appointments to have her glasses replaced, to the motor vehicle division to get an official state identification card and to a supermarket to wire money to her family. She complained that her foot hurt and another survivor, Myla Lazarte, 42, told her she should try to get new shoes.

By winter, most of the Gateway’s shops had reopened and buses had started running again. Ms. Diezon’s shift usually ended around 8 p.m. — the same time the last bus back toward her hotel stopped running. Missing it meant that Ms. Diezon would be scrambling, yet again, to find a ride in the dark.

By spring, Ms. Diezon began to appear despondent.Seems like a deliberate choice of words to avoid saying she felt despondent. Can you talk about that word choice?At this point, this particular detail had come from Edralina’s coworkers, after her death, when I went back to Lahaina to interview them and piece together the details of how she died. Since Edralina was no longer alive to tell me how she felt, I chose to write this through the eyes of her coworkers, who described her as appearing despondent. It also felt more accurate.

She had told her daughter Eden Diezon Balobo that she lived “like a princess” at the Royal Lahaina, with her own room, bed and balcony view. But most fire evacuees had been notified that they would be moved out of the hotels by the summer, and waves of survivors had been told to check out. Lahaina had a severe housing shortage, and some survivors relocated to far-off neighborhoods.

For Ms. Diezon, moving away from Lahaina would have most likely meant finding a new job after she had spent the last seven months doing everything to keep the one she had.

On April 1, Ms. Balobo, who lives in Manila, received a $300 wire transfer from her mother.

Two days later, Charlie Solis, 65, Ms. Diezon’s longtime co-worker who considered her an “older sister,” called her before she finished her shift.

“Don’t forget to clean the manager’s office,” he said. Ms. Diezon assured him that she would make it tidy.

It was dark when Ms. Diezon left work. She was not wearing the white flower-printed Hawaiian shirt uniform that the other cleaners wore. On this evening, Ms. Diezon wore black.How did you report this telling detail, and why did you use it?It establishes that she was less visible in the dark. But it also feels like a hint of metaphor or foreshadowing. This was a detail in the police reports. But I confirmed it with coworkers, who showed me the uniform she was supposed to wear and also explained to me that she disliked wearing it and would prefer to wear her own attire. They also fretted over how they wished she wore the uniform because it was brighter and perhaps that could have prevented her from being hit.

To catch the bus, she had to cross the Honoapiilani Highway and cut across the parking lot of the Lahaina Cannery Mall, where the driver picked up passengers. There was a crosswalk at Keawe Street, but that meant overshooting the bus stop. Ms. Diezon might have spotted the bus coming down the highway. Maybe she tried to move fast. Maybe she moved too slow. The “maybe” acknowledges the uncertainty of factors that we may never be able to know for sure. Can you talk about when and how to use this in a narrative?I am such a narrative nerd, I actually have entire lessons on using “speculation” in nonfiction writing, the language of “perhaps,” “what if,” “imagine,” “maybe,” “could have,” etc. Speculation can add richness to lost moments in history, and to the lives of people who cannot be quoted today, or whose stories were not preserved in full color — sometimes because the systems did not keep meaningful documents on them, or did not consider them to be multidimensional humans in the first place.So I draw from writers like “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,” by Saidiya Hartman, who uses speculative interjections to imagine how her historical subjects may have reacted, spoke or experienced life in a particular moment. Or Johanna Adorjan’s “An Exclusive Love,” in which she reconstructs her grandparents’ suicides in vivid scenes by stepping out of reported “facts” and using “I imagine.” Or Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild,” when he goes on his own journey into the woods to consider how his dead subject, Chris McCandless, felt. Or Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm,” when he reconstructs what it would be like to drown, even though he could not ask the victims themselves. Also Maxine Hong Kingston’s essay, “No Name Woman,” in which she imagines how her aunt became pregnant, and this gives her aunt a voice.

A 2017 Nissan Rogue driven south on the highway by a 17-year-old girl struck Ms. Diezon around 8:15 p.m., about 400 feet north of Keawe Street. The Maui Police Department said it did not appear that Ms. Diezon had used the crosswalk. This moment, when the main character dies unexpectedly in a dramatic and tragic way, might have invited some writers to use more words or purple writing to accentuate the drama. You chose a succinct approach with unadorned prose. Why?I just think being spare, especially with something so tragic, is the way to go. It doesn’t need anything more. The incident itself is enough, and it is shocking.

Ms. Balobo received a video call from Ms. Diezon’s brother. He was in a hospital room, next to his sister. Ms. Diezon had died, three days before her 70th birthday.How and when did you find out that Ms. Diezon had died? How did you feel and react? How did it change the story? How do you continue working on a story with sources who’ve just suffered a tragic loss?I found out from another woman who knew Edralina on Maui and whose family had been living in the same hotel. She sent me a Facebook post via text about the accident, because she knew I had spent time with Edralina on Maui. I actually did not believe it at first. I went down a rabbit hole trying to find out if it was true. It was heartbreaking. I had been trying to pitch and write Edralina’s story, and many other survivors’ stories, for a while. But I had received many rejections. Her death propelled me to keep trying. I wanted people to know her story. To feel something for her, as I did.I wrote this graf into the first draft of the story, but when they cut the first-person, it got cut too:

After she died, I reread text messages that I had received from Ms. Diezon, not long after I met her in the wake of the wildfires. She wrote to me about her grandkids in college, high school and elementary school, how she supported them financially. “I don’t know what’s happening next to my work,” she wrote. “It’s very hard for now ma’am.”

Ms. Diezon’s friends and loved ones could not fathom how she had survived the devastating wildfires, working to reconstruct her livelihood, only to die senselessly.

Ms. Diezon’s brother started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to send her body back to the Philippines to hold a proper funeral. Her children did not want her returned to them in ashes.

The family set a fund-raising goal of $30,000 to pay for the transportation of Ms. Diezon’s body, along with funeral expenses. It raised only $475. The family did not know how it would ever afford to bring her home and considered burying her on Maui.

In May, Ms. Diezon’s brother called Ms. Balobo. He had learned about his sister’s savings account. It contained all the money she had saved over her lifetime: $19,000. It was enough to ship her to Manila and pay for her funeral.

On June 11, Ms. Diezon’s body arrived in a coffin wrapped in brown paper. Six men carried her remains into a truck. For Ms. Diezon’s funeral on June 17, her open coffin was shrouded in white daisies. A framed photo of Ms. Diezon sat alongside her body and a statue of Jesus.This makes me think of Hemingway’s advice for writing emotionally stirring scenes: Don’t describe the emotion. Describe “the sequence of fact and motion which made the emotion.” How would you describe your approach?Yes, I always would prefer to have details in my reporting that show the emotion. I try to cut the adjectives and adverbs when I can, stick to reported details that convey something deeper and evoke a feeling, rather than trying to describe one.

Upon learning of her death, Ms. Marcelo wondered if she could have done more to help Ms. Diezon. “She is a victim of that fire,” she said.

* * *

Kim Cross is the author of three nonfiction books, including “In Light of All Darkness.” She teaches feature writing for Harvard Extension School’s master’s degree program in journalism and is a founding instructor of the Hemingway Center’s Sawtooth Writing Retreat.

The post How a freelancer’s story instincts landed a piece in The New York Times appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

I don’t go to church, but I am a religious reader of The Sunday Long Read, which arrives in my inbox each Sunday like a menu of the week’s best long-form stories. I peruse the choices — curated by narrative connoisseurs — and read the ones that I hope will move me and teach me something about exceptional journalism, but also about life, about the human condition and maybe about myself.

Gmail truncates the newsletter, and sometimes I’m too rushed to click the ellipses at the bottom of the email to keep reading “below the fold.” But that’s where, one Sunday, I found a story that moved me to tears of anger, compassion and maybe even faith.

In “A Death in Alabama,” Esquire writer and longtime executive editor Mark Warren tells the story of Bubba Copeland, a Southern Baptist pastor who ended his life after a website wrote an exposé about something he did in private. Some people judged Bubba’s actions severely. Others, who may not have understood or agreed with his choices, leaned on the power of grace and love — and tried to stop him from ending his life.

This story made me wonder so many things — about the reporting, the writing and how Warren, as an outsider, could gain trust from and capture the nuanced spirit of a place as complicated as small-town Alabama. Having lived many years of my life in Alabama, some of them in a tiny town, I bristle when I read stories about Alabama written by folks who “ain’t from around here.” A lot of writers head to the Deep South with self-fulfilling assumptions. Many of them find the Southern-gothic views they expecct (which do in fact exist) but miss the finer nuances of a culture that’s easy to judge on the surface but hard to really understand.

Mark Warren has lived in New York City since 1987. “But I am also from a tiny, redneck town in southeast Texas, have a vast Cajun extended family in south Louisiana (my mother’s side), and a not-so-vast extended family in south Mississippi (my father’s side).” He was no stranger to the fraught and beautiful complexities of small-town Southern culture.

Warren wove bits of scripture into the story, a risky move that could have come across as pandering — but didn’t. He conveyed some ostensibly contradictory things about Copeland’s congregation without making them look like hypocrites. What might have been written as a true-crime story about a controversial suicide “ultimately was more about community, grace, tolerance and love — being human — in the teeth of a hateful dominant culture.”

“Last fall, when I heard about what happened to Bubba Copeland, I felt his death like a shot to the solar plexus,” Warren told me. “I felt some kind of innate kinship to the people in those towns. I was struck by the initial public bellow of grief and love that they had expressed for Bubba — unafraid, unabashed and beautiful — and wondered if the same thing would have happened in my hometown if, God forbid, the same thing had happened there. It struck me as different, and remarkable, and I wanted to understand it.”

Storytelling in “smart layers”

I wanted to understand how Warren approached such a sensitive story profiling traumatized people who are still actively processing that trauma. The reported facts of the story stabbed me in my solar plexus, too, but the way he wrote it twisted the knife. It stirred emotions — anger, surprise, empathy, awe, grief and faith in the power of love. It gutted me.

It also made me think differently about a place I lived and thought I knew. It produced an emotional and intellectual response. For me, few stories do both.

One thing that struck me most about this story is what I call “the smart layer” — those intermittent moments when a writer pauses the scene-by-scene narrative, surfaces with authorial voice and offers some insight, revelation or expository aside that frames the scene with meaning. Warren calls it, simply, “narration.” So the question is: How do you find the right balance between narrative and narration?

We talked about all of this and more over coffee during a recent trip to Manhattan, when I asked Warren if he would annotate his story. We talked for more than two hours, and both of us found ourselves dabbing our eyes. We visited the old journalistic admonishment: “Don’t get too close to your sources.” And the reality that sometimes your own moral compass supersedes that code. At one point, Warren felt the only human thing to do was give one of his sources — Bubba Copeland’s son — a hug.

“This was a young man who had just lost his father to suicide, and he was weeping at the end of our interview,” Warren says. “I am a journalist but I’m also a father and a human being. Before me stood another human being, and he was suffering. Bright lines between subjects and journalists exist for very good and important reasons. But in that instance, there was nothing wrong with having a human response. And if there is, then I am happily wrong.”

Amen.

THE ANNOTATION: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Warren’s answers in blue. To read the story without annotations, click the HIDE ANNOTATIONS button in the right hand menu of your monitor or at the top of your mobile screen.

FEATURES

A DEATH IN ALABAMA

Bubba Copeland was the heart and soul of his Alabama community—pastor, mayor, businessman. When a website exposed his deepest secrets, his life wasn't the only thing that was destroyed. An American story.

Let's start with the dek hed. Esquire could have added an adjective like “right-wing” or “conservative” here, but you left it neutral: a website. Was there a discussion about this decision?Not a discussion, exactly, but my editor and I were completely in concert on this point: When I begin a story I always suspend judgment in all directions, including as related to suspected bad actors. A part of that process is taking care to avoid polemical or slanted or prejudicial language as much as possible. Using shorthand like “right-wing” would have larded the piece with an almost unconscious ideological viewpoint from the outset, which acts as a sort of bulwark against understanding. At the outset of my reporting, I certainly had no ideological ax to grind or feelings of any kind regarding anyone involved. After deep reporting I, of course, came to conclusions that I had earned the right to draw. Before I began my reporting, though, I understood some basic facts and had basic inclinations about what had happened. I am human, and those inclinations are vital to a reporter, as long as you remain open to having your mind changed by experience. But I made a point of accepting none of the established online narratives regarding 1819 News. I wanted to earn a point-of-view — about them, what they’d done and what happened to Bubba Copeland — based on the merit of my own reporting and deep immersion, not on opinions or judgments I had received from someone else. I wanted to start from scratch, follow the facts where they led, fully embrace the complexities of the story and distinguish this as a piece of careful journalism in contradistinction to the “journalism” that had done such harm to the communities I discovered when I arrived in East Alabama. The Internet is brimming with dehumanizing ad hominem, empty tribal polemics and vitriolic labeling. We are in danger of being destroyed by all of that, in my view. So without sounding too grandiose, I wanted to take such care with this piece that each word would be mine, and not a cliche or code to a tribe or affinity group somewhere. I wanted to write a human story, with my fidelity being to the truth, not to an ideological point of view. Thus, I tried to let the facts speak, and avoided easy characterizations like “conservative” or “right-wing.” (Note: When the magazine posted the piece online, the editors changed the title from the title as published on page, from “A Death in Alabama” to “Right-wing Media and the Death of an Alabama Pastor.” The online title is perfectly accurate, and is certainly less elliptical and more direct, but it was their choice, not mine.) I also avoided any ideological shorthand regarding gender, as that language is similarly loaded. As important as gender and sexual difference were to the circumstances of Bubba’s life and death, the person who might have illuminated that subject for the reader was dead. And this piece ultimately was more about community, grace, tolerance and love — being human — in the teeth of a hateful dominant culture. Likewise, this might have been framed this as a “Southern Gothic” or “Deep South” or “Southern Baptist” story. What informed the choice of the broader descriptor “American?”My editor believed that this was a story that transcended narrow religious or regional categorization. The story of Bubba Copeland is much larger than exigencies of life in small-town East Alabama. Through the lens of Phenix City, Alabama, in the aftermath of his death, you can truly tell the story of something profound that is seizing this country right now.

APRIL 1, 2024

MARK WARREN

AT THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF PHENIX CITY, ALABAMA, THE last Sunday of October 2023 was Pastor Appreciation Day. In less than 20 words, this sentence grounds the reader in time, geography and cultural context. What’s your philosophy on writing effective first sentences and ledes?Every subject and story is different, so I don’t believe that there is a rule one must obey, other than maybe this: Don’t waste words, especially at the beginning when you are setting the world that you are creating in motion. So high-performing sentences, layered in with useful visual details, are important. It’s funny, because the original first line of this story was the sentence that now begins the second section (“We all have things that we don’t want other people to know about us.”), and that’s certainly one way to go. But after a talmudic discussion with my editor, it became clear that this was the natural lead, and that hard-working sentence took its proper place.  The church was festive, the service well attended. There was strawberry cake, Pastor Copeland’s favorite, and special music in his honor by two of his closest friends, who sang a program of Baptist hymns, accompanying themselves on piano. Bernard Vann, the church’s elder statesman, spoke from the pulpit on behalf of the congregation, testifying as to how blessed they all felt that Bubba Copeland had entered their lives and bestowed his gifts, bound them together as a spiritual community. After reading a very long list of duties that make up a churchman’s life, Vann ribbed Bubba that he sure was getting a lot of attention that day for a job that’s just “one day a week.” Then he turned to Bubba and said, “We as a church love you, and we appreciate you for everything you’ve done,” with the true feeling of an old man, as he embraced his pastor. Obviously, you weren’t able to witness this scene. How did you go about reconstructing it, and particularly the dialogue, in your reporting?The First Baptist Church of Phenix City has both a YouTube channel and a Facebook page, where all of the Sunday services and Wednesday Bible studies are archived. I watched this service, along with between 24 and 30 hours of other services and sermons. Archived video was also instrumental to immersing myself in the world and ethos of Bryan Dawson and 1819 News. This was a vital complement to the approximately 30 hours in formal interviews I conducted.

Once Vann took his seat, Bubba stepped up to the pulpit. “I am so undeserving,” he said. “I don’t come from a background of being a pastor. I come from a background of loving people. And I believe there’s a giant difference between being a Christian and being Christlike. I try my best to be Christlike. There’s a lot of Christians that hurt people. What we should strive to do is go out of our way to love people unconditionally, despite who they are, what they are—because you know why? Jesus loves me.” On first read, this rang true to the Southern Baptist philosophy I was exposed to living for years in Alabama, but it didn’t strike me as a “zinger” or a stand-out quote. When I re-read the piece, it gave me chills because I saw the foreshadowing. Did you know right away that it belonged in the lede?Yes, I watched this sermon after I returned from my time in Phenix City, and was struck dumb by its power and portent. It very simply established who this man was and what he believed,  which was so very different from the theology of those whose actions would precipitate his death. It filled me with a strong sense of dread for what was to come. I knew that Pastor Appreciation Day and that sermon would need to go very near the establishing shot of the piece.

Bubba would often talk about how his life had been suffused with a grace that was beyond his comprehension. He believed that was the essence of God, and today he was telling his congregation that if God could love him—of all people—it was a sure sign that God loved everyone created in His image.

That last Sunday of October 2023 would be the last Sunday of Bubba Copeland’s life. This is an effective section-kicker, in that it creates instant tension — the engine of a narrative — and makes clear what’s at stake. But it also gives away the ending that many readers may not have known. What informed your choice to include this?It’s a very good question, as there are times when you might not want to give something as dramatic as that away so soon. You might want to withhold, build drama. But especially given the gravity of these events, and the depth of pain and grief I discovered in Phenix City and Smiths Station, that sort of approach somehow felt disrespectful to me. The people I had met had just been through a shattering, life-altering experience, and I felt an obligation to them to not be coy for the sake of artifice or building drama. And there really was no need to do that, as there was already inherent drama. In short order, we knew that a man beloved to his community was dead: How on earth did that happen? Let’s know of his death very near the beginning, and then carefully and deliberately put together the story of who he was, what he left behind, who was involved and how things had spun so disastrously out of control.

WE ALL HAVE THINGS THAT WE DON’T WANT OTHER PEOPLE TO know about us. Things that might be hard to explain, even to ourselves. The world can be an unforgiving place, quick to judge, and friendships can be fleeting. Would the people whose regard means the most to us look at us differently if they learned of our hidden selves? Would they abandon us? Surely God knows our secrets. What does He think of us?

This is a story about just that—what God thinks. It’s also a story of identity and exposure, of revenge and public humiliation. Of deep love and senseless loss, and the unending grief of a small town.

And secrets. It is a story about secrets. Two questions — and I’m not being glib here: Do you believe in God? And do you believe in nut grafs? How did your answer to both of these questions influence the thematic declaration above?I was raised religious in the South in a very small town, and have been backsliding ever since. So I am a lousy believer in God. But my mother was deeply religious, and for her entire life I remained in awe of the sense of spiritual transport that she experienced through prayer. So let’s just say that I believed in her belief.   I am a little more faithful when it comes to nut grafs, but I do labor mightily to try to avoid NUT GRAFS or BILLBOARDS (as a long-ago editor of mine called them), per se; they can sometimes be such disruptions to storytelling. But guidance on what we mean by the story we’ve come to tell is important, so I work hard at making a summary nut a piece of narration that also seamlessly works as writing.

Bubba Copeland had many secrets. And as a servant to both God and man, the judgments of heaven and earth were the alpha and omega of Bubba’s existence. What God thinks of anything, much less any of us, is difficult to discern, if we are honest. But the people of the First Baptist Church of Phenix City, Alabama, unabashedly adored Bubba.

He was empathetic and industrious and always seemed to be doing something for somebody. By last fall, he had been the senior pastor at First Baptist for four years and the church’s youth minister for fifteen years before that. Bubba was not seminary trained and was not what you might call an intellectual from the pulpit, but what he lacked in academic theology he made up for in his eagerness to answer to the spiritual and material needs of others, no matter the time or expense. According to the people in his church family who knew him best and loved him most, Bubba possessed an enormous capacity to serve, and his sermons were personal, compassionate, and often funny. As a Christian and as a pastor, he thought that in a pinch the Sermon on the Mount was just about all the Bible a man would ever need, and his favorite verse was Matthew 7:1—“Judge not, that ye be not judged.” All he knew about the ministry he had learned by the side of his first father-in-law, Dr. Eugene Langner, who pastored to the souls of the congregation at First Baptist Church for thirty years until his death in 2013. Even after Bubba and Merrigail, Langner’s daughter, got divorced, the two men maintained a loving friendship. Bubba and Merrigail had given Langner a grandson, after all. Young Carter Copeland would grow up underfoot at the church, singing hymns from the pulpit with a poise that would make his father cry. Grandfather, father, and son remained exceptionally close, their relationships unburdened by the strain that often comes with divorce.

By the last Sunday of October 2023, not only were Bubba and his second wife, Angela, and his two stepdaughters the first family of First Baptist Church, but the Copelands were also the first family of nearby Smiths Station, Bubba’s hometown, where he was finishing his second term as mayor. He was renowned for bringing a Love’s truck stop to the main highway through town, a feat of economic development that most mayors of towns the size of Smiths Station (population: 5,470) can only dream of—to hear the awe with which the people there talk about that truck stop, you’d think Bubba had brought IBM to town. When a tornado struck Smiths Station in 2019, killing twenty-three East Alabamians in the neighboring community of Beauregard, he was a twenty-four-hour one-man rescue crew—removing debris, providing supplies and reliable information to his people, and offering hugs when nothing else would do. That same year, when a high school senior in Smiths Station named Lexi Webb took her own life, Bubba initiated #SSNotOneMore, a suicide-prevention campaign. On the night before school started, without telling anyone they were doing it, Bubba and a group of volunteers scattered hundreds of signs all over town: you are worthy of love. your mistakes do not define you. you matter. don’t give up. He had Post-it notes printed with the same affirmations and had volunteers pass them out at all the schools.

In his spare time, Bubba also owned and operated the Country Market over in Salem, where he had a reputation for employing local folks who might have trouble finding work elsewhere. His social-media feed was always full of cheerful posts about the latest specials on pork butts and paper towels. Where did you find those details?I scoured Bubba’s social media feeds, collecting wonderful glimpses of his life, and he would regularly post on the specials at the Country Market.Life was good, if maybe a bit hectic.

In his corner of the world, Bubba Copeland was needed, and he loved being needed.

David White, a retired doctor and chairman of the First Baptist Church board of trustees, was always urging Bubba to take a break, get out of town with Angela and the girls on vacation, disconnect for a while. “My only concern for Bubba was that he was spread too thin,” White says. “But his idea of a vacation was thinking up new outreach programs for the church.” This is the first quote in the story. How and when do you decide to break scene and incorporate reportorial quotes? (Note for readers: There’s an important distinction between dialogue, which are things characters say in the moment captured by a scene, and quotes, which things said to a reporter by sources describing the scene after the fact.)The purpose of this section is to establish who Bubba Copeland was to his communities in Phenix City and Smiths Station. We’ve just come through eight paragraphs that describe the several roles that defined his public persona. I wanted to then introduce the voices of what I thought of as sort of a Greek chorus — a cast of characters who all illuminated Copeland’s life for me, and who would all be central to his last days and moments. I spoke to many more than I could include here, and I didn’t want the section to become distended or redundant, or make it seem as if I was trying to create a portrait of him that was rosier than reality. Hence, this select few — a representative sample of what he meant to the people who knew him best.

The Reverend Ralph Wooten, who for several years was pastor of the First United Methodist Church in Phenix City, says he first saw Bubba “emerging from a cloud of barbecue smoke” at the First Baptist annual cookout, and the two men became dear friends. “Bubba was a father of a blended family. He was a husband. He was a pastor. He was a successful small-business owner. And he was the mayor of a town that he loved,” says Wooten. “Any one of those things is enough for one human being, and yet he was all of those things. I knew it was a lot and encouraged him to take care of himself. He seemed to be taking it all in stride.”

Daniel Windsor, a dentist in Phenix City and a longtime member of Bubba’s church, says that Bubba was a “five-finger friend”—that is, he was one of a small group of cherished people in Windsor’s life so vital that you can count them on one hand. “He was an indispensable friend—and I loved him dearly,” Windsor says.

Jay Jones, the sheriff of Lee County, Alabama, says that “Bubba was hard not to like. He was that selfless and that reliable, the sort of person who rushes toward need, no questions asked. There aren’t that many people like Bubba in this world.”

The sign on the lawn in front of Bubba’s church read all are welcome. And all were welcome. For Bubba, that was how God worked in people. You might call it the essence of the Copeland theology. “Ain’t God good?” he would say to friends and strangers alike. And with Bubba, you were never a stranger for long.

Dan Elkins became a member of First Baptist Church in 2018. He was himself a Baptist minister and for ten years had successfully tended his own flock in an “itty-bitty” town in southern Alabama. Married with two kids, Elkins had tried to make his marriage work even though he had known for years that he was gay. After he and his wife divorced in 2003, he resettled in Phenix City, where he would meet his husband, Jason Price. Their first date was at the Home Depot. “In case it didn’t work out, you always need something at Home Depot, right?” Price says with a laugh.

Both Elkins and Price have a deep faith and struggled to find a church that would be a true spiritual home for them, where they would be welcomed as full-fledged members, not “as lesser than.” “There’s churches that will cash our checks and let me and my husband sit in the back pew, but we didn’t want that. We feel that we have a lot to give and love being involved in a vibrant community,” Elkins says. They had heard good things about First Baptist in Phenix City, but Price had serious reservations about committing to a Baptist church. “I thought, I ain’t going to no Southern Baptist church,” he says. “Been there, done that.”

Elkins first wanted to talk to the pastor, have a frank conversation, and manage everyone’s expectations from the start. Elkins called the mayor’s office in Smiths Station, and Bubba said to come on by. “We sat there across from each other, and I told him that Jason and I wanted to be members of a church where we would be treated with dignity and respect and welcomed without reservation.” Instantly, Bubba responded, “Dan, you are my brother. God has blessed our church by sending you to join us.” Bubba added that his son was gay and that he was “not sure how to relate to him. God has brought you into my life to be Carter’s gay stepdad.” This is a terrific character-building anecdote. When we read this story in a graduate feature writing class that I teach, one of my students, who lives in Kentucky, thought the congregation’s point of view relied too heavily on the testimony of Jason and Dan, a white gay couple. She wondered if there were any Black church members and what they had to say. She thought that for a Southern Baptist Church in a Deep South small town, this all sounded a little too peachy to be true.Interesting question. There are Black members of the First Baptist Church, and I did some reporting to inform myself about the racial composition of both the church and larger community, and of Bubba’s role in fostering that diversity. But to tell the story of what happened to Bubba Copeland, I saw it as my principal obligation to first learn the basic facts and then follow them where they led. That meant finding out who the main actors were in the events that I was trying to illuminate. Who were the people closest to Bubba during those days and hours? Those are the people I focused on. And as I have mentioned, the community I encountered was traumatized, grieving and very suspicious, so it’s not as if I could interview people at will or whim. This was a highly sensitive undertaking, requiring great care and patience. I was seeking to illuminate the deeper truth of a very specific set of facts, and I didn’t see it as my prerogative, or even a realistic option, to launch into a broader social anthropology about the attitudes of the greater First Baptist Church. As for whether I “relied too heavily on the testimony of Jason and Dan,” this story is to at least some degree about sexual difference in a Christian faith in the Deep South not usually very accepting of such difference, so talking to Dan and Jason was absolutely vital to my understanding of Bubba Copeland’s church. I see it less as relying heavily on the testimony of gay, white characters and more as relying heavily on the main characters of the story — people who were in a position to tell me what had happened. Not only were Dan and Jason central characters in the struggle to keep Bubba alive that terrible week, they also were also essential witnesses to the kind of congregation that Bubba Copeland built at First Baptist Church, as he sought to establish an atmosphere of loving inclusiveness, guided by the New Testament, in sharp distinction to most other Baptist churches in his state. I took great care to affirm with several other witnesses, in hours of interviews, that Dan’s and Jason’s experience was true and accurate. So while it might shatter stereotypes, this church community was not too peachy to be true. Last note on this one: It should also be said that over the past several years, as First Baptist Church evolved in this direction, it lost members who simply were not comfortable with this more liberal direction. But the church also attracted new members, including several other gay married couples.

“So we joined First Baptist and never looked back,” Elkins says. “It’s hard for me to express the depth of my gratitude for what Bubba gave us.”

It’s not that Bubba’s friends idealized him or thought he was perfect—they didn’t, and he wasn’t. For one, he had to keep a laminate of the Lord’s Prayer in a right-hand corner of the pulpit at First Baptist, as he sometimes forgot the words. Did you see this detail in person? Or learn it in an interview?I saw it in person. An old church caretaker took me on a tour, and I stood at Bubba’s lectern and there it was. I took a picture of it and asked several people about it, which is how I came to learn what it was for. A bigger problem for Bubba was that he worried too much about what people thought of him. And he spent way too much time looking at his phone. These days, of course, there is a direct correlation between those two things. Bubba felt an unending sense of responsibility to the people of his church family and to the people of Smiths Station. An unkind comment on Facebook could keep him up at night. If this is a common modern affliction, Bubba had an acute case. This is the first time I hear your voice and POV speaking clearly and directly to me, as the reader. I call this, for lack of a better term, “the smart layer.” What do you call this? Editorial voice? Authorial POV?. You do more of it later in the story. I’ve always wondered how to do this properly — at just the right time, in the right dose —– in a narrative.I’d just call it narration. I try to narrate concisely and at just the right fulcrum moments in the piece, to bind, steer and propel the narrative. As an editor, I have always advised writers that it’s their obligation to periodically stick their heads up out of the hole to tell readers, in the authorial voice, where we’ve been, where we’re going, and why it matters. These pieces of narration should tease out the deeper meanings of the story and be thoughtfully calibrated so as not to be a syllable longer than they need to be. This sort of narration should never feel like a cudgel, or an editorial. It would be his undoing.

At the end of the Pastor Appreciation Day service, Bubba joined Dan Elkins and Daniel Windsor at the piano on the altar to sing a favorite song. The Lord did not bless Bubba with much of a singing voice, but what he lacked in talent he made up for in effort. The voice and bless-yer-heartedness of this made me laugh and sounded like the kind of back-handed compliment I’ve heard in Alabama many times. You echo this again later in a way that’s not funny, but chilling.The people where I come from talk just like they do in Phenix City and Smiths Station. And just as in those towns, it is a commonplace to believe that God is minutely involved in the day-to-day, moment-to-moment of existence. If you have a lovely voice, it’s a gift from God. If you don’t, well, it’s a blessing in disguise, also from God. Just as the people I grew up with didn’t use this manner of speaking ironically, neither did the subjects of my story. So weaving this into the narrative voice of this piece not only felt very natural, it felt essential. And yes, to lend a sort of sinister symmetry, I also use this same framing later with Bryan Dawson, to a very different purpose. The song was “Sweet Beulah Land,” and the second verse goes like this:

I’m looking now, just across the river 

To where my faith shall end in sight  

There’s just a few more days to labor 

Then I will take my heavenly flight   

Three days later, on the morning of Wednesday, November 1, an online news site called 1819 News, which states as its mission the promotion of “Alabama values,” published a story about Bubba Copeland and all his secrets. Titled “The secret life of Smiths Station Mayor and Baptist pastor F. L. ‘Bubba’ Copeland as a ‘transgender curvy girl,’ ” the story was about Bubba’s hidden online life and featured pictures of him in makeup and a blond wig, wearing women’s underwear and clothes. He had posted the pictures to Reddit subgroups, including one called TransLater, where they would collect comments such as “Sister you look beautiful. Cute outfit,” and Bubba would reply, “Thank you doll!”

When the 1819 News correspondent, Craig Monger, had called for comment, Bubba had begged him not to publish the story, fearing that news of his private life exploding into public view would embarrass his family, his town, and his church. Dressing up was something he and his wife had done on a lark, he told Monger. He then went further, saying that cross- dressing was something he had done on occasion since he was a young man, a hobby to relieve stress. “I have a lot of stress,” he told Monger. “I’m not medically transitioning. It’s just a bit of a character I’m playing.” This is a crucial piece of dialogue. How did you report and fact-check it?This quote is from the first 1819 News expose, published on November 1, 2023. The correspondent Craig Monger called Bubba for comment, and I am quoting from his response.

“The more I talked to them, the more turned around it got,” Bubba would tell a friend.

When the story hit the next morning, Bubba’s son Carter, a junior at Auburn, was still asleep. He woke up to a text from his best friend that read, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do.

“I had no idea what she was talking about,” Carter says. “I called her, and she told me what had happened. Immediately, I looked up my dad’s name online and saw it everywhere. It was early in the morning, and every news outlet I’d never heard of had already jumped on it, like piranhas. I watched the whole world tear him down almost instantaneously.”

Carter and his father were extremely close. Over the years, each had confided in the other about their innermost struggles—in high school, Carter had come out to his father, and Bubba had shared his secrets with his son. Carter was shocked at the meanness of the story and was overcome with a visceral fear that he had never known before. In a panic, he called his dad.

“He picked up and said, ‘Good morning, buddy.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about, Good morning?!’ Trying to calm me down, he again slowly said, ‘Good morning, buddy.’ And I said, ‘Okay, good morning.’ And then I said, ‘Dad, we have to talk.’ And he said, ‘No, we don’t. I need to get into a meeting. I have people I need to take care of. We’ll talk later.’ ” Interesting that you chose to break scene a bit and include a quote recounting what was said instead of using in-scene dialogue. Can you talk about this choice?When Carter Copeland had reached out to 1819 News, desperate to tell them who his father really was, the people there decided not to even give him the courtesy of a reply. I wanted to make it very clear that I had spoken to Carter and had heard him out. This was his story to tell, even if it might mean losing a bit of the immediacy of just writing this in scene. I would make the same choice when it came to recounting his last phone call with his father. Afraid, and not knowing what else to do, Carter wrote to the story’s author, whose email address was posted on the 1819 News website. He received no response. The next day, Thursday, November 2, he wrote to him again:

Mr. Monger, . . . 

I am Bubba Copeland’s son. What you have done is not by any means journalism. You have hurt the man who has been here for me my entire life. My father is my hero, always has been, and always will be. I have seen some awful things in this world and experienced a great deal of hatred myself as a gay man. You have fueled a fire of hatred and bigotry unlike any other I have ever seen in my life. I have over the last 24 hours watched my father completely break down. I truly wish I could express to you the emotions and the feelings I feel towards you and your colleagues, but I am unable at this time. My only wish now is that you are able to carry on with your life and have the peace which you have so heartlessly taken from countless lives by writing this article. . . .  If you find time in your day to step aside from your [duties] I would greatly appreciate a call. More than anything else I would like to tell you the WHITE kind of person my father really is. You should truly be ashamed of yourself.

By that day, Bubba’s family, his church family, and several of his closest friends in Smiths Station had become concerned that he might harm himself. The 1819 News story was all anybody was talking about. And another story—more lurid, more humiliating, harder to explain—was on the way and would reveal the last of Bubba’s secrets to the entire world. He was in disbelief at the coverage, and the brutal anonymity of the hate pouring onto the First Baptist website and Facebook feed beggared belief.

Hypocrite!

HAHA faggot. 

You should kill yourself.

Jason Price and Dan Elkins were the administrators for the church accounts. Along with another volunteer from the church, they would stay up all night taking down the comments so that Bubba wouldn’t see them. But Bubba couldn’t sleep and was fixated on the velocity and reach of the Internet and its lacerating judgments. As the calendar turned from Thursday to Friday, the community of people who knew him best and loved him most—the people you have just met, and many more besides—desperately tried to form a bulwark between him and the ugliness of the world.

Bubba, hold your head high. You are so loved and have so much support.

Bubba, you are going to get through this—we are going to get through this, together.

Bubba, just hold on, brother—get out of town for a few days, this will blow over. 

Bubba responded: These are dark days.

Sensing his growing despair, his friends and family began sending more urgent messages:

Bubba, where are the guns?

Bubba, we can’t do this without you. How are we going to live our lives without you?

When the world comes at you, though, it comes at you.

The story had gone global, and Bubba couldn’t look away from his phone. Have you seen the New York Daily News? he would ask friends, obsessing over the latest headline.

Elizabeth White, a WRBL News 3 crime reporter based in Auburn, Alabama, who reported on Bubba in his capacity as mayor of Smiths Station, says that “Bubba was down, and they just kept kicking and kicking and kicking. It wasn’t enough for them to just expose him. They wanted to hurt him. It’s devastating to know that for all the good he did, he spent his last days and moments in unbearable anguish.”

On the afternoon of Friday, November 3, feeling all but destroyed, Bubba Copeland finished the job and killed himself.

The Lee County coroner, Daniel Sexton, would write in his report that the cause of death was a .38 slug to the right side of Bubba’s head, just above the ear. But no clinical description of what a handgun can do to flesh and bone will ever capture the true cause of Bubba Copeland’s death.

The next morning, Bubba’s son again wrote to Craig Monger:

I hope if you ever have children, they never have to face what I am now going through. I hope that they never have to find out that their father caused another man’s death by his own hand. You and your colleagues took my father from me. . . . I hope the Lord’s judgment for you is swift and deliberate. Carter Copeland is still waiting for a reply.

WHEN A STRANGER COMES TO A SMALL TOWN ASKING PAINFUL questions of a grieving community, the third degree is not only understandable, it’s to be expected.

“You like coffee?” David White asks me. “Well, if you’re in Phenix City anyway, then I guess you should come by so we can look each other in the eye and size each other up.” You surface here subtly to provide some transparency on the reporting, which adds some important context. How do you know where, when and how to insert yourself in a story? There’s a whole lot more backstory here than can be expressed in two short paragraphs.After I’d been in Phenix City for a couple days, I became aware that my presence there had become controversial and that some people in Bubba’s church family were very reluctant to talk to me. I thought that it was important to convey this profound discomfort, because as I heard from them, I could sense that they were working through the conundrum. Ultimately, David White and a raft of other remarkable subjects decided to talk to me, so that 1819 News wouldn’t have the last word on Bubba Copeland. They agonized over the decision, but in speaking to me, they reclaimed their friend’s narrative. 

The doctor and his wife, Lori, live across the street from First Baptist Church. He is quick to point out that on Easter Sunday in 1865, Union general James H. Wilson began one of the last battles of the Civil War from his yard, staging his attack on Confederate fortifications across the Chattahoochee River in Columbus, Georgia, before going on to capture Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. White is bemused at his proximity to this history. In fact, he seems to wear a bemused expression as his face’s default setting. The staging area used by Wilson’s Raiders is now used to stage White’s beehives; his family’s annual “canning kitchen,” in which they put up thousands of jars of fruit preserves and jellies and pickles to give away to friends and strangers far and wide at Christmas; his own small vineyard, where he cultivates grapes for a wine that’s “best served in Dixie cups”; and the pits for the church barbecue on the last Saturday in April, where they’ll smoke two thousand pounds of pork.

White is from Phenix City, fifth generation, and grew up in this house, which was built in 1906. During the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, as there were no hospitals, the house was made into a flu infirmary, with the sick and dying in the front and concerned family members coming and going from the back, the two halves separated by a heavy curtain that no one was allowed to cross except for the nurse. The doctor would come once a day to leave morphine and aspirin, pronounce the dead, and figure out where to put the new arrivals. “There’s a Black community a quarter mile that way,” White says. “We all grew up together. That’s the way it was. And in those days, nobody had anything, so there was no economic distinction between neighbors. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t good, but it was a lot of people striving together to get by. It wasn’t all Ku Klux Klan.”

Per the census, Phenix City has a population of thirty-eight thousand, spread out along the Chattahoochee River, straddling Lee and Russell counties. But it has the feeling of a smaller town, essentially a modest suburb of Columbus, Georgia, directly across the river. Roughly half Black and half white, the diverse population is reflected in First Baptist’s congregation.

White’s father was born in this house in 1917 and was a newborn when both of his parents became gravely ill with the flu. The nurse was caring for White’s grandparents, who were laid out in the front of the house, and the baby was quarantined on the back porch. The need was so great, and the nurse was doing the best she could, but at one stretch she forgot about the newborn and went forty hours straight without crossing the curtain. When she realized what she’d done, she just knew that the baby was dead. She rushed through the curtain to the rear of the house only to find a six-year-old Black boy named Roy Pierson—who had sick family in the front of the house, too, and had himself been lost in the shuffle—caring for the baby, who was quite alive. “Roy was not big enough to pick him up. So he would sleep under the cradle and rock him, and he did his best to keep him clean, but he couldn’t figure out how to feed him. So he would get food and he would chew it up, and he would take it from his mouth and put it into my father’s mouth,” White says. “So when I came along in the South in the early sixties, my Uncle Roy was a Black man. He was my father’s brother, as much of a brother as my father would ever have, and they could not have been any closer had they been related by blood. That’s kind of the weave of the history here.”

He is wearing that bemused expression, but just the night before, White had been on the phone for half an hour, sternly interrogating me about why I had come to Phenix City. “We are hurting, our friend is gone, and we don’t need more salaciousness and scandal,” he said. “The press—so-called—did this to Bubba. Why would we talk to the press? People are concerned.”

He pours the coffee and says, “The people you are here to meet are still in shock at what happened and feel a profound sense of failure at not being able to save our friend. But if we are talking to you, it’s because we don’t want 1819 News to be the last word on Bubba Copeland.”

The people who exposed Bubba’s secrets said they presumed several things about him, chiefly that he was a hypocrite, preaching hate publicly for the life that he led privately. Bryan Dawson, the founder of 1819 News, would say publicly the week after Bubba’s suicide that Copeland was “pretending to be one thing—uber-conservative, Baptist, Trump, Christian, all of that”—while living a life that made a lie of those claims. Maybe Dawson was making broad assumptions about what it means to be a Baptist preacher in Alabama, but if he and his editorial team had known more about Bubba Copeland, they would have known that that assertion was far from accurate. Dawson would also admit that not only had he never heard of Bubba Copeland before receiving “a tip” about his online life, he had also never heard of Smiths Station.

The story of the Internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure. In this case, those assumptions and that ignorance would make Bubba less a human being than an ideological target in a raging culture war, and the damage radiating through these towns is now plain for all with eyes to see. And it’s not just these towns. Coinciding with the breakdown of our social order and abetted by technology of astonishing power, we find ourselves in a conflict over rapidly changing conceptions of gender and sexual difference. In the backlash to this upheaval, the casualties are mounting. Wow. This powerful expository aside is, again, what I call “the smart layer” — the authorial voice and insight that elevates a story beyond straight narrative. I spent a whole era of my career learning to write pure narrative without breaking scene — to show, not tell, letting readers draw their own conclusions from the constellations of facts presented in the story. But this kind of exposition requires a higher level of courage and skill. Please share some advice for those of us who are still developing the confidence and wherewithal to state clearly: Here’s why I think this matters.I agree with you that as a general rule in narrative, showing is blessed and telling is tedious. BUT: One must narrate. Sometimes the material alone will not give the story the depth of meaning and layers of dimension it needs, especially when the story that you’re telling has a larger resonance than the mere facts. In this case, I felt that an element of essay was not only good, but required, to pull out the thesis on private facts, technology, culture war and malign actors through the piece.

To learn about Bubba, who he actually was and what he cared about, it’s important to meet his church family, and the best place to do that is here, at David White’s dinner table. Here is where so many people have broken bread and laughed and carried on. Here is also where the trustees and deacons held an emergency meeting the Saturday morning after Bubba died to figure out if and how the church would continue. Lori White made biscuits and coffee, and a somber group sat around this table to plan the next day’s service, which is about all they had in them to do. One service at a time. Get through Sunday, then give some thought to the funeral.

It was decided White would lead the service the next day. He is an easy public speaker with a deep familiarity with scripture, and it was not unusual for him to offer a sermon. Bubba was eager to share his pulpit with speakers he saw as more talented than himself, and White had already been scheduled to do the talk that Sunday. But his sermon would need to be very different now. From there, he and Dan Elkins would share pastoral duties, and other area clergy—even including a Methodist pastor named Laura Eason—would be invited in to help keep the church going.

To keep going is the point of a church. Just as White and his family are fed at this table, so too are they fed at the church across the way. The need for spiritual sustenance doesn’t explain why we believe what we believe, but the two are intimately related, as with common purpose comes community. Coming together in awe and doubt in the face of eternity might be the last human feeling that AI can’t take from us. There it is again! How do you decide when and where to surface in a piece with authorial insight?I’d say that sometimes it’s deliberate, by design, and other times it’s more intuitive. In this instance, there was a point to be made and a transition needed. I thought it was important to convey the material sustenance Bubba’s church family got/get from First Baptist, and also just how delicate — and deeply human — the chemistry of a church community is.  If a religion splits over a breach in heavenly doctrine or earthly politics or a combination of the two—as the Baptist church did in 1845, cleaved down the middle due to the belief held by what would become Southern Baptists that slavery was an “institution of heaven”— then the community splits, too, profoundly and perhaps irrevocably. The Southern Baptists are no longer confined to the South and now have churches in forty-one states, which makes them the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. In 1995, church leaders apologized for the faith’s racist origins and at the same time repented for the church’s opposition to the civil-rights movement and interracial marriage.

There have been other fault lines more recently, involving the enduring Old Testament penchant of more-conservative Christians to take it upon themselves to cast people into hell, as well as contemporary social issues—issues—whether women can preside over services (an emphatic no in Southern Baptist churches) and whether God loves gay people (the Southern Baptist position might best be described as “hate the sin, love the sinner”).

What they all seem to agree on is that the Bible is a well-worn daily instruction manual and not some ancient relic. It is important to White that I understand the First Baptist ethos and the mark that Bubba left on the church in Phenix City. Deft transition here signaling the end of the expository aside and return to the narrative.

“Our philosophy is this: We open those doors,” he says. “You can read your whole Bible, and nowhere in it does the Bible give you permission to judge your fellow man. But time after time after time, it tells you to love your fellow man. No matter what. That was Bubba’s attitude. It’s the attitude our church shares.”

It seems an uncontroversial point and a handy distillation of the foremost of the Christian commandments, familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the New Testament. All of the gospels enunciate a version of this basic tenet of Christianity, and the Gospel of Mark makes clear that there is “no commandment greater” than to love God and to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

“It’s not that complicated,” says White, “although because we are human, we keep pretending not to understand how this is supposed to work. We keep pretending that God intended for us to rough each other up using his Word. Buddy, there but for the grace of God go I. Maybe we don’t cross-dress and that kind of stuff, but we all have our faults, and none of us deserve the harsh judgment of other flawed humans. First and foremost, Bubba Copeland was my friend. I don’t fully understand what was going on with him, in his life and in his home, but I also don’t know that I’m supposed to. I don’t think it’s my business.”

The evening of November 1, after the 1819 News story had broken, Bubba led his last Bible study at First Baptist. He chose a fateful passage to teach: Psalm 23:1–6, which had him walking through the valley of the shadow of death. After the session, he walked into a very tense meeting of the church’s board of trustees that began in anger and ended two hours later in tears and hugs. The trustees, led by White, had, like everyone else, been blindsided by the story and just wanted to know one thing: Bubba, is it true?

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . .

Yes, the pictures were real, he told them. They were private and never meant to be public. It was dumb to post them on the Internet. He was abjectly sorry for the embarrassment he would cause, adding that he would never purposely do anything to hurt the church or his friends.

He restoreth my soul . . .

“We did not suspend him. We did not reprimand him. We did not fire him,” White says. “We talked to him frankly. We expressed our shock and disappointment, and then we replaced that with our concern and our love and our support for our brother, who was suffering. The church would be fine. Now it was Bubba we were worried about.”

I will fear no evil, for thou art with me . . .

The next morning, one of the trustees from First Baptist who had been in the meeting the night before received a call from a man from the Russell County Baptist Association. The caller wanted to know what First Baptist planned to do to punish its pastor and why it hadn’t done so already.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies . . . 

The First Baptist trustee told the caller from the Baptist Association that as First Baptist had not been aligned with the Southern Baptist Convention for decades, the situation with Bubba Copeland was none of the association’s business.

Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over . . .  

The trustee added that just as the New Testament instructs in the books of Matthew, Luke, and Galatians, when a brother goes astray, as Paul wrote in his letter to the early Christians of Galatia, “you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.”

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Matthew emphasizes that this counseling should be done privately; Luke, the importance of forgiveness after repentance. And that, the trustee told the caller, was how First Baptist planned to address the situation with its brother Bubba Copeland. Thank you for calling.I can hear the pitch-perfect tone of this, and the tone says so much more than the four words of indirect dialogue. Did this actually come out of someone’s mouth? Or do you just instinctively know the voice and tone from living or spending time in the deep South?The substance of this exchange is how it was reported to me by several sources —  genteel but firm, ending with an icy ‘Thank you for calling.’ I was confident in the substance but did not put it in quotes, as I did not want to signal that this was precise dialogue.

“WE HAVEN’T BEEN SOUTHERN BAPTIST FOR TWENTY YEARS,” White says. “And you’re probably not going to find another Baptist church in a small town anywhere that has gay couples that come to church every Sunday. Of course, you have to be sensitive, because we have members that are old-school, in their eighties and nineties, they might not be ready for all of that, but they’re accepting. After Gene Langner died, we started looking for a pastor. I was on the search committee that brought the next pastor here, and we had people in church that were gay. It was generally known but not discussed. And the older members, some of them—the staunchest, most Republican, redneck guys, I mean—I grew up around them and I watched God change them, but they’re still very conservative. And more than one of them came up to me and said, You’re looking for a pastor, but, you know, so-and-so sits over there in the third row. They’re kind of different. Don’t you bring anybody here that’ll hurt them or turn them away.”

The Southern Baptist Convention still regards sexual difference as an abomination against God, and even homosexual desire not acted on is “always sinful, impure, degrading, shameful, unnatural, indecent and perverted,” according to the denomination’s “Resolution on Homosexual Marriage.” As a remedy for impure thoughts, the SBC endorses sexual reorientation.

When Dan Elkins had his country church in southern Alabama and was struggling to reconcile his ministry with his sexuality, he came out to his then wife. That was 1996, and it would be seven years before they would divorce. “We did counseling, and I was told, You can beat this with prayer and fasting, and I prayed, and I fasted, for years—ever the good little Baptist boy—but I was earnestly trying to change something that simply can’t be changed,” Elkins says. “I had come out to a confidant at church, and that person betrayed my trust and it got out in the community, but I didn’t know it. We showed up for church one Wednesday night and the parking lot was full, and I’m like, Something’s going on. This was January 2002. Oh my word. If Facebook had been around then, I’m not sure I’d be here. I’m not sure that I would have seen the way out. Like Bubba couldn’t see the way out.”

In this pocket of East Alabama, though, the church doors are open, and the Bibles say that God loves everybody. “That’s how this church has evolved,” says White. “We have members who are gay and married and accepted, and that’s relatively new. And we have older members who are accepting even if they don’t understand. It’s been a long trip for them. You cannot fail to recognize how far they’ve come.

“And that’s Bubba’s legacy,” White adds. “I can tell you that his legacy is not defined by that week. His legacy is defined by the friends he leaves, by the people that he led to the Lord, by the life and values he lived. That’s his legacy. Not 1819 News. 1819 News is to journalism what a quack is to the practice of medicine.”

BRYAN DAWSON BELIEVES IN REDEMPTION NARRATIVES. Especially his own.

The founder of 1819 News (so named because 1819 is the year Alabama became a state) has a compelling personal story that he has honed into a performance piece on various podcasts and pulpits across Alabama  for the past several years, although he is not from the state or even  the South. As a young man, Dawson lived in Colorado Springs, and it’s there that his life of crime gave him the material for his story. He trafficked in weed, cocaine, and meth; was the kingpin of a “motorcycle, automobile theft ring”; and in spring 2007 beat a “snitch” over the head with a chain with a padlock at the end of it, for which he would be charged with attempted murder, among other felonies. (He would eventually plead to reduced charges and receive a sentence of sixteen years in prison.) These experiences have been memorialized numerous times in the press, in stories such as “From Breaking Bad to Redemption: The Story of Bryan Dawson” in Newsweek and in an interview on his own website titled “From Tragedy to Triumph, the CEO of 1819 News Shares His Story.”

In his story, he tells of a sad and lonely young man with no self-esteem raised in a broken home, who is always put in the “friend zone” by young women and who only ever feels comfortable as himself when he is high or drunk. And then he becomes a violent criminal, faces hundreds of years in prison, is extended grace and kindness over and over again by strangers and the state, finds God, and is ultimately salvaged by a community that forgives him seventy times seven (Matthew 18:21–22). In the details and framing of his story, Dawson is pleading for understanding, and his adoring interviewers give it to him; one even adds at the end, “I think if you had been born way back, you would be in the Bible.”

Yes, you might say that Dawson’s Colorado Springs redemption epic is like Saul on the road to Damascus, if Saul had attempted to murder a man with a padlock on a chain, causing “permanent disfigurement,” according to the attending physician in a police report, who added that “the victim was lucky to be alive.”

Saul of course repents, calls himself the “foremost of sinners,” and becomes Paul, the greatest writer of the New Testament. In his redemption narrative, Dawson also becomes a different person, but when he tells his story this new person doesn’t mention the man he tried to kill, doesn’t indicate how he feels about him or whether he ever thinks about how he might be getting on with his permanent disfigurement. Instead, in his redemption story, Dawson occasionally shines a little light on his supporting cast—his wife, his mother—but mostly he finds satisfaction in the power of his own narrative. His interviewers feel the same way, and they interrupt him to say things like It’s just like in the movies!

Which brings us to his fresh start in Alabama, where he grew an apostolic beard, started to allow the slightest bit of a twang in now and then, joined a Baptist church in Wetumpka where he sometimes preached from the Old Testament and where just ten days before his life intersected with Bubba Copeland’s he delivered a sermon that revealed him to be an aspiring theocrat. Preaching from Deuteronomy and Samuel, he refers to “God’s government”; is entranced by the “rod of correction,” the “power of the sword,” and offenses against God that are “punishable by death”; warns of the consequences that will come when a church “neglects to use the sword properly”; and says things like “We’ve done a great job of rooting out the rubbish and the refuse of the Philistines in our church. We’ve done a phenomenal job” and “Right now in the state the fear of God is not before their eyes, so they just do whatever they want.”

Appearing on a podcast this past January about the “Dangers of Progressive Christianity,” Dawson said that “progressive Christianity comes from feminism creeping into the church” and that the one true faith had fallen victim to “soccer moms” and their tendency to be more welcoming and less judgmental. In the same broadcast, he trained particular fire on a prominent evangelical minister who had sparked controversy by advocating that churches be more supportive of the LGBTQ+ community. For this, Dawson called the minister an “apostate” and a “full-blown heretic” and then went on to improvise that the man was gay and was cheating on his wife, and to finish the point he said, “I wish there were Old Testament lightning strikes that happen to people when they blaspheme the Lord the way that he does.”

The Lord did not bless Bryan Dawson with a talent for public speaking, but what he lacks in fire he makes up for in brimstone. This echoes a line you used earlier in the story: The Lord did not bless Bubba with much of a singing voice, but what he lacked in talent he made up for in effort. When you wrote the first line, did you know you would include this one? Or did it come to you as you were writing?A great question! It was not planned. It came to me as a parallel construct as I was writing. His Christianity seems somewhat unfamiliar with its namesake. In that, he is a familiar figure, older than time, and not only among Christians—a religious enforcer who knows just enough of a holy book to be dangerous. You might say that he put down his padlock, picked up his Bible, and didn’t skip a beat. I see a double entendre here in the use of “beat.” He beat people with a padlock, and then became what some might call “a Bible beater.” This must have been intentional on your part. But it’s so subtle many readers likely missed it.

Dawson then merged his brutal version of the Christian faith with the often brutal politics of Alabama on the always brutal platform of the Internet and in late 2021 founded 1819 News to counter the most prominent news site in Alabama, AL.com, which is, he says, “communist propaganda.”

These details of Dawson’s story are important, because in the moral calculus of 1819 News, Bryan Dawson is allowed a redemption narrative sanitized of victims, but Bubba Copeland is not. Perhaps that is because Dawson’s violent felonies were manly crimes, just like in the movies, whereas Bubba Copeland’s transgressions were of thought and behavior that Dawson could not square with his version of the faith and would not tolerate, and rather than extend Copeland the grace that he himself had been the beneficiary of so many times, he ignored Bubba’s plea for mercy and leveled him instead. Your framing of this allows the reader to infer what you think about Dawson. How do you decide how much to include about what you think, personally, versus delivering facts and letting readers draw their own conclusions? I think it makes the piece more insightful and authoritative, but it’s something some writers (including me) are unsure of, or maybe afraid of, doing.Completely understand your reluctance. This felt like important narration to me, given the bitter irony of Dawson’s past as a violent criminal and the grace that had been bestowed upon him, and his pitiless treatment of Bubba Copeland. I thought long and hard about this passage: It was vital to me that it be modulated just so and based strictly in what I knew to be true. Ad hominem does not improve the world, and ruins journalism. He and his editor in chief, Jeff Poor—an alum of the Daily Caller and a regular contributor to Breitbart—would make the case that it was Bubba Copeland, who did not preach violence from his pulpit, who was the dangerous one. After his death, they would assert publicly that he was a troubled man, that he had victims, that it was their duty to expose him, and that, as Poor would say, “the people at First Baptist Church, Phenix City, had a right to know what their worship leader was doing.”

On the day that Bubba Copeland took his own life, 1819 News published its second feature on his fantasy life online. This story was even more lurid than the first, detailing pieces of erotic fiction that Bubba had posted as his alter ego. Some of the fiction was gruesome—one story in particular dealt with a trans protagonist who stalked and killed a woman so that she could have a relationship with her victim’s husband. The story was titled “Dangerous Obsession”: “In my cubicle I scanned her page. She posted a new picture! Excited I screenshot it to add to my ever-growing collection. To say I was a stalker would be a bit of an understatement. Every post she made I studied it, analyzing and taking notes of her daily routine. What she ate, what she drank, from her favorite coffee to her favorite alcoholic drink. Her life had become my obsession.”

In the two days since 1819 News had posted its first story, it had been alerted that Bubba had used pictures of at least two real people from the Phenix City area in at least one of his posts—a meme about transitioning. The two were a brother and sister, and people from the community have confirmed for me that the brother was a minor when the picture that Bubba used was taken. In his second feature, correspondent Craig Monger wrote that the father of the children pictured had called 1819 News, informed the site that the pictures were of his children, and asked them to remove the images. (The photo of the boy was taken from the father’s social-media account.) In his posts, Bubba seemed to use photos from the Internet both purposefully and indiscriminately, once including an image of a teenage girl who was not from the area.

A local woman had contacted the site to say that Bubba had used pictures of her in some of his posts. Monger also discovered that Bubba had used the name of another local woman in “Dangerous Obsession.” I reached out to the father of the brother and sister but did not hear back, and also to both of the women. One did not reply, the other wrote back, “No need to bring all of that back up as those . . . families heal.”

When Dawson and Poor had published their exposé on Bubba two days earlier, the 1819 News editorial team had apparently not been aware that he had used the names and images of people he knew in posting to his online community. But in the days after his death, his poor judgment would become their justification for having published the stories in the first place. 1819 News’s initial imperative—to expose a cross-dressing pastor that its editorial team had assumed to be a hypocrite—would no longer be enough.

The week after Bubba’s suicide, Dawson and Poor released a thirty-four minute video podcast on which they outlined all that had gone into their decision to publish their exposé. The timeline, they say, is that they received a tip about Bubba’s online life on Monday, October 30. They called him for comment. They published on Wednesday morning after deliberating for three hours the night before on whether to go through with it. How many hours did you spend deliberating with your editor about decisions for the story you wrote? For example, the decision about whether to run a photo of Bubba dressed up?We deliberated for months on the fine points of this piece, determined to get it right. The use of that picture took up about a solid week. Ultimately, we decided that a reader coming to this story cold needed visual information to understand what was going on. I established a strict rule: No lingerie or underwear shots. Only fully clothed. And it will be small on the page. Even then, publishing that picture made me nauseous. But our use of it was very different than Bryan Dawson’s.

In the video, the two strike a sober pose. “It’s a tragic situation where no one wins,” says Dawson. They grant themselves absolution for doing the right thing and say that they feel besieged by criticism on social media that 1819 News had acted irresponsibly. Dawson does not allow himself to understand the reaction in anything other than ideological terms. “This story,” he says, “has shaken things up in the leftist community!”

Poor wears the look of a man surprised to find himself in the middle of a matter of such consequence and bristles at the suggestion that decisions he was party to might have contributed to the death of a man. Don’t assume that Bubba Copeland killed himself because of those stories, he says. “We may never know, but don’t assume that.”

As they hash out their reasons, Dawson and Poor repeatedly refer to “Dangerous Obsession,” acknowledging that the story is fantasy while nonetheless treating it as if it were evidence of real conduct. Poor becomes exercised and shouts, “What if people don’t ever find out about this? What if it just is allowed to continue on into the future?” And then, with no apparent basis in fact for saying so, he adds this: “We don’t know what else is out there—don’t assume that there’s nothing else out there. This behavior does raise a lot of unanswered questions. . . . I think maybe a little caution here is warranted.”

Six days after Bubba Copeland killed himself and his family and community had been devastated, the editor in chief of 1819 News began to urge caution while continuing to assassinate his character.

Near the end of their podcast, Poor says that although he was “not celebrating the death of Bubba Copeland,” he was “at peace” with the decision to publish. Considering they declined to speak with you, it was fortunate that they made this podcast, which provided material and quotes that allowed you to give voice to their reasons. How would you have handled this part of the story if you hadn’t had this podcast?Thank God I didn’t have to figure that out. Without the ample documentary material that a self-promoting Bryan Dawson and his team had dumped onto the internet, representing the 1819 News point of view would have been very difficult to do. You can only report what you know. If they had not left such a trail, then I would have thrown myself into reporting about them in their communities. I did make a number of calls to their donors, including some very prominent names in the conservative Birmingham legal community.

It’s easy to see that Bubba was wrong and crossed an ethical line in using the names and images of people he knew in his fiction and other posts. One can only assume that it must have been an awful experience for those two women and the father of that brother and sister to be unexpectedly swept up in this story. But in this Alabama skirmish in a hellish culture war—over gender and speech and objective reality itself—with its dehumanized politics and competing conceptions of heaven, suffused with rage and loss and bereft of much clarity, two things are clear: First, 1819 News wanted the whole world to see Bubba’s posts, without fully understanding what they contained. Before posting its stories, the editorial team there also didn’t seem to know much beyond the few facts they had discovered, things they saw as sensational and repugnant. And second, Bubba Copeland was desperate for his hidden life to remain hidden and never intended for anyone other than perhaps his wife and the other pseudonymous members of his online community to see his posts. He was shattered at the sudden collision of his private and public identities and killed himself.

The last story 1819 News published about Bubba Copeland came on November 11, eight days after his death. It was a short essay in support of the editorial decision to run the stories, and its conclusion was that Bubba had completed “his rejection of God’s laws” because he had “murdered himself.”

I wrote to 1819 News four times, asking to discuss the stories it published about Bubba Copeland. I did not receive a reply. I imagine it would have been tempting to launch into a vengeful character assassination of Dawson and his team.As much as I came to have feelings about what they did and the decisions they made, I don’t know these people, and so have nothing personal against them. It was especially important to me to modulate this very strictly, to say only what I knew, and to even err on the side of being conservative in my utterances and conclusions.   

HE GAVE HIMSELF THE NICKNAME, AS HE DIDN’T MUCH CARE FOR “Fred Copeland Jr.” and thought that “Bubba” sounded friendly. He was a standout linebacker for the Smiths Station high school football team, but his real passion in school had been acting in drama productions, because, as he would tell his son, “you can become someone else for a moment.”

When he and his first wife, Merrigail, were dating, Bubba sat her down one night and said he had something to tell her. “Have you heard of transgender?” he asked her.

“Bubba, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she answered. He explained it as best he could, and then Merrigail asked, “Why are we talking about this?”

“Well, I dabble in that,” he said. “There have been times that I have dressed up.”

The news threw Merrigail, but the attraction between them was so strong that she thought their relationship could withstand anything. The couple were married in 1997, and she would soon come to believe that Bubba had a compulsion that he couldn’t control. When they’d been married for a year or so, they decided to buy a dog. When the day came to pick up the dog, Bubba was working, and so Merrigail and her father, Pastor Langner, walked out to the garage to get some rope to secure a large crate. When she opened up the tool chest on Bubba’s truck, she found that it was full of women’s clothes. Merrigail turned to her father. “Dad, I don’t want to embarrass him,” she said.

“I won’t,” her father said.

A few years later, when she was pregnant with their son Carter, she discovered some “transgender stuff” on his computer one afternoon. When Bubba got home from work, he found Merrigail crying. He apologized profusely, saying that the stress at work was too much for him and that dressing up was an escape. “I’ll try to do better,” he told Merrigail. She knew how bad her husband’s stress was. Bubba worked with his father, who, she felt, “talked to him like he was a dog.” Fred Sr. was a hard man, a combat veteran who had returned from Vietnam and made his fortune in the grocery business in Georgia and Alabama. Bubba would often come home saying that he wanted to do something different with his life.

Merrigail’s father told her, “Sweetheart, he can’t help it. This is who he is.” Langner would counsel his son-in-law with compassion, saying, “Bubba, Christ didn’t come into this world for us to be two people. You can only live one life. You need to decide which life you’re going to lead.” How did this anecdote/scene come up in your reporting? Did you ask a particular question that led to it, or was it simply offered?My interview with Merrigail was very intense. almost therapeutic. She had a lot to say about her life with Bubba, and offered her testimony about their struggles, and her father’s counsel, with only the slightest prompting. This had been on her heart and mind for a long time.

In East Alabama, though, Bubba couldn’t imagine a world where he could be himself in a way that people would accept. The marriage broke down, and when the couple divorced in 2009, Bubba was so despondent that he seriously contemplated suicide. One morning, when Carter was eight years old, he found his father sitting on the floor in the shower, sobbing. “I said, ‘Dad, are you okay? I love you,’ ” Carter remembers. “And he said, ‘I’m okay, buddy. I just need a second.’ ” There’s a nineteenth-century cemetery—Mechanicsville Cemetery, it’s called—near the grocery store Bubba owned, and he would sometimes go there to think when he was troubled. After dropping Carter off with the babysitter, Bubba went to the cemetery, intending to kill himself. He had the barrel of a handgun in his mouth when his phone rang. It was an old friend from town, who told Bubba, “Hey, buddy. The Lord put you on my heart, and I just wanted to tell you I love you.”

The call stopped Bubba. But his torment would continue.

After the divorce, Carter lived mostly with his father and attended the Glenwood School in Smiths Station, a private Christian academy. Bubba was a devoted father, and in the years before he met Angela, his life revolved around Carter. Two things happened in the years before Bubba remarried that would define the relationship between father and son. When he was twelve, Carter came across a digital camera in his father’s closet full of pictures of Bubba dressed in women’s clothes. “This is not something that I ever wanted you to find out,” Bubba told his son.

“I just need to know if you’re doing something really wrong, Dad,” Carter replied.

“Absolutely not,” Bubba answered. “This has been a hobby of mine for a while. It’s my escape.” When Merrigail found out that her son had discovered his father’s secret, she said, “Your dad is an incredible man. Don’t let this change the way that you feel about him.” It didn’t. In fact, it gave Carter the feeling that he could talk to his father about anything.

Two years later, when Carter was a freshman in high school, he told  his father that he was gay and that he was struggling with how to live honestly at school and in the world. He wanted to be free to be himself. God had made him this way. Why would he hide who he was? His father was afraid for Carter and angry that he couldn’t talk him out of coming out publicly. He knew what would happen to him, doing so at such a young age in such a small town, and the two fought bitterly. Bubba wanted him to wait until college to come out, wanted him to go far away, be happy, live his life. Carter decided instead to come out to a cherished teacher who betrayed him to a school administrator, who called Carter into his office and told him that he was going to hell. Once the news spread, Carter experienced what felt like torture. Students would spit on him in the bathroom, throw food at him in the lunchroom, and threaten to physically attack him. The teachers were of no help, as they now hated him, too. There was no safe harbor for the gay kid at the Christian school. There is nothing like being the singular locus of a compounding hatred, in a closed system that justifies the hatred and calls it good. After school one day, Carter went home, his head full of monsters, and he swallowed a bottle of pills. And then he walked into his favorite room, the family library with its cathedral ceilings, and lay on the floor and looked up and watched the ceiling fan turn. His father found him there, saw the empty pill bottle, and dragged him to the bathroom, where he put his fingers down Carter’s throat.

It would be the first of several suicide attempts for Carter. Time after time, his father would save him. And the last time, Bubba just held Carter and told him, “God loves you, Carter. And I love you, too. Don’t listen to those people at school. There’s nothing wrong with you. The only thing wrong with you is the judgment of the world.”

“And then he said this: ‘Carter, if I can survive this, you can survive this, too.’ And we made a pact with each other that day that we would live. We would make ourselves happy, we would make others happy, we would live fulfilled lives. And as long as one of us had to do it, the other had to do it, too. ‘No suicides. Promise?’ ”

Carter says now that he realizes that by coming out when he did, he was trying to show his father that it’s okay, that you can be who you are. It’s all right.

“I had reached a point in my life where I had begun to accept myself,” he says. “I had finally gotten to that point, and now my own father had to go through it. And the people that hated me and wanted me to be morally punished were the same people that took my dad from me.”

IT WAS THE AFTERNOON OF FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2023. THE LAST hour of Bubba Copeland’s life. How did you decide where to put this in the story? It could have very well been the lede of an in medias res structure.As I began to write, I knew that we would come to the full telling of the passion play of Bubba Copeland at the end of the story. This material would not have had the power it has if I decided to spend it at the lede, for the simple fact that we do not yet know these people and so are not yet vested in their lives and stories. It just didn’t make sense to me to write this devastating ending at the beginning.  For days, those who knew him best and loved him most had encircled him, lifting him up, trying to hold tight to keep him from slipping away. Their efforts had seemed to be working. Earlier that day, Bubba had gotten a couple new tires for one of his cars, he’d stopped by the government center in Smiths Station to pick up his new city credit card, he’d checked in at the country market. He’d also sent a long and heartfelt letter to the congregation of First Baptist, thanking them for Pastor Appreciation Day, in which he seemed to see a future. “I look forward to continuing our journey of faith, growth, and service together,” he’d written. Now he’d gone missing. In Auburn, Carter Copeland received a call from his stepmother, Angela. “Your dad just called me. And he said that he loves me and that he’s always loved me and to go to my parents’ house. And then the call dropped off, and now every time I call him, it goes straight to voicemail. I don’t know what to do, Carter. You know him better than anybody. Where is he?”

By then, the Lee County sheriff’s department had fanned out all over the county to find Bubba and make sure he was okay. It wasn’t just law enforcement, either—Bubba’s friends and family had also begun searching for him, and as Carter ran to his car to make the drive from Auburn, Lisa Deason, who had worked as Bubba’s communications director in Smiths Station, had gone looking for him, too, and was pulling up at Bubba’s house. Deason had helped him draft letters of resignation as mayor and pastor just the day before. The letter resigning from his position as pastor read, in part, “Admittedly, there have been instances where my wife and I have taken private pictures within the confines of our home, which should have never been shared online. I realize this was a significant lapse in judgment and a personal failure, for which I bear complete and absolute responsibility. . . . I apologize for any distress or humiliation my actions may have caused. Love to all, Bubba.” The letter would never be sent.

Like many of his other friends, Deason had been urging Bubba to get out of town for a few days, let the Internet find somebody else to destroy, let things blow over. That morning, though, 1819 News had dropped its second feature on Bubba and, mesmerized by the coverage on his phone, he had started telling people that he didn’t know if he could go on. The night before, Dan Elkins and Jason Price had had a long talk with Bubba about his growing despair, and Elkins had asked him, “Bubba, where are your guns?” Bubba said that he had surrendered his handgun to a safety officer in Smiths Station. As several of his friends would say, though, he lives in the South and his name is Bubba—he’s got more than one gun. Some editors might have cut this for fear of it coming across as too glib. It’s almost funny, but also deadpan true. How do you walk the fine line of deciding whether or not to include a line like this?It might be because I am from the South, but especially given that three people told me this in almost the same language, I was very comfortable reporting it. It’s an enriching detail that his friends actually said this.

The latest 1819 News piece seemed to break something in Bubba, unleashing a lethal shame, and by that afternoon his phone was as dangerous a weapon as his gun.

Not finding Bubba at home, Deason stood in the driveway of his house and called 911, saying that her friend was suicidal, and at that moment, his Tahoe pulled up in front of the house on Oakhurst Drive. He got out and left the motor running. “What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“I came to check on you.”

“Who’s with you?”

“I’m by myself.”

“Do not tell Angela where I am. I mean it. Don’t you tell a soul where I am.”

Bubba went into the house for no more than thirty seconds, and when he came out he was walking fast and moved to get back in his truck. “I love you,” he told Deason, “but I got to go.”

She said, “No, I’m not going to let you do this, Bubba! Please don’t do this. You have way more people that love you than you can even imagine. Don’t do this. Don’t do this to your family. Please. Don’t.” Deason was sobbing now and trying to hold on to Bubba, with her arms wrapped around him. No, I’m not letting you leave. Realizing she couldn’t restrain him, she let go, ran around him, jumped into the driver’s seat, turned off the ignition, and grabbed the steering wheel. I’m not going to let you leave.

“I’m going to do it in front of you if you don’t move,” he said. Bubba pulled her out of the truck, and in desperation, she was thinking, What the hell can I do? In that instant, 911 called back, and instead of the operator, it was Jeff Pitts with the sheriff’s department on the line.

“What’s going on?” Pitts asked.

“He’s trying to leave and he won’t listen to me! He’s adamant. He says he’s got to end it.”

“Let me talk to him.”

“Bubba, it’s Major Pitts, Jeff Pitts.”

“Jeff, man, I love you,” Bubba said. “But I’m done. I can’t do this no more.”

Bubba handed the phone to Deason, got in his truck, and peeled away. As he drove, a cousin who had joined the search pulled up behind him. Bubba told him, If these deputies make me stop, you’re going to see something that I do not want you to see. How did you report and fact-check this scene and the dialogue it contains? First, I extensively interviewed Lisa Deason, the person with whom Bubba Copeland was engaging in this horrifying scene. Second, I reviewed contemporaneous notes that she had written down shortly after the encounter, as well as contemporaneous texts that she had sent to several people. Lastly, I corroborated her account with two of those people.  

Carter was driving 100 miles per hour toward Mechanicsville Cemetery, because he knew his father might be there. He called his father’s number over and over. Nothing. And then his father called him.

“I love you, buddy,” Bubba said. “I’ve lived my whole life to make sure that you are successful and that you have what you need. And I just want you to know that I love you more than anything in this world.”

“I knew immediately what that meant,” Carter says. “And I just said, ‘Please, Dad, please tell me you’re not doing what I think you’re doing. Please, we can get through this.’ ”.

“It’s too late, son. I love you. I’m so sorry.”

“I told him, ‘You have nothing to be sorry about. There’s nothing to be sorry for. I love you. You’re my hero. Always will be. This is going to be horrible. We’ll get through it.’ ”

“I’m sorry. This is what I have to do. This is the only way out.” This is an interesting blend of dialogue and quotes. What made you decide to include this as a quote instead of in-scene dialogue?As noted above, I wanted to include Carter’s telling of the story, as it truly is much more his to tell than mine.

Carter remembers feeling desperate to hold on, desperate to find the words that would make his father stay, desperate. He screamed at the top of his lungs and felt a rush of emotion such that he thought his vocal cords might explode. I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! “I screamed it as loud as I could for as long as he was on the line, because I knew he was listening. I knew. I could see he was still on the call. I kept screaming. That’s all I knew to say was, I love you! It’s okay. I love you. It’s okay!”

And then silence.

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF BUBBA’S death, along a country road in the town of Beulah, Lee County sheriff Jay Jones took possession of his electronic devices, and his office searched them for evidence of criminal conduct. They found none. “In my view, Bubba Copeland would never intentionally do anything to harm anyone,” Jones told me. “I just don’t think that he was that type of person.”

David White would write a new sermon for the Sunday after Bubba’s death, staying up well past midnight the night before, sitting at his dinner table, writing in longhand. He would preach Psalm  23:1–6, just as Bubba had in his last service. And he wanted to make sure the world knew that the church had remained true to its pastor and always would. “Despite what may have been implied in the media,” he wrote, “members of this church have been steadfast in their love and concern for our pastor.”

We all have things that we don’t want other people to know about us. Things that might be hard to explain, even to ourselves. The First Baptist Church of Phenix City did not abandon Bubba Copeland, even after learning the secrets that he might not have been able to explain even to himself.

Bubba’s body would be turned away by the two Baptist cemeteries in Smiths Station, his hometown, the town that he loved. He is buried in a private family plot many miles away. Oh, I felt this in my viscera like the twist of a knife.I learned this from three people. Each was filled with rage when they told me. Most of the facts in this story had been previously unreported, as no one was talking before I got there, I was amazed that this shocking fact had not been made public. It’s not hard to a) discover that the mayor of the town was not buried in the town, and to then b) ask why not, and where is he buried? Later, I learned that one of the cemeteries is jointly operated by the Baptists and the Methodist Church in town. When the Methodists found out that Bubba had been refused burial, they apparently said, ‘Why didn’t you ask us? We would have been happy to give him a proper burial.’

As I finished my reporting for this story, I took to asking the people in Bubba’s life what they might say to the people at 1819 News if they had the chance. Several told me that they are required to love them and will be praying for them. As Bubba Copeland always said, “God loves you, and so do we.” How and when did you decide how to end this story? Any advice for writers who struggle with endings?There is a feeling of a sudden hush, and an element of exhaustion, to this last section. The atmosphere here feels right, an observance that a man has died. It is a short — almost terse — but hardworking section, resolving essential narrative lines, providing vital information about the immediate aftermath, defusing some of the most toxic intimations made by 1819 News about Bubba after he died, answering the question posed at the top of the piece (If they knew the truth, would they abandon him?), offering a note on what will come of this tragedy. I asked several people that question at the end and could not have been more surprised by the sincerity and anguish in the answers. It kind of knocked me out — how in spite of all that they had been through, their faith was undiminished. Their determination to not be vengeful, but to pray for those who had done them such grievous harm, was when I at last allowed myself to feel the full emotions of the story. It was so surprising and counterintuitive, and also seemed to give those people something constructive to do with their grief. I knew immediately that it would need to be the last note of the piece.I have no real useful advice to give to writers on endings, other than maybe this: Allow yourself to be surprised. If your reporting takes a twist that you didn’t see coming, pay full attention to that. It might be important.

* * *

Kim Cross is the author of three nonfiction books, including “In Light of All Darkness.” She teaches feature writing for Harvard Extension School’s master’s degree program in journalism and is a founding instructor of the Hemingway Center’s Sawtooth Writing Retreat.

The post Reporting beyond shame and blame, secrets and stereotypes appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The final post in our series on narrative interviewing explores how a reporter focuses in on the cinematic details that create compelling scenes. Previous posts outlined the difference between reporting for news and for narrative, the pre-interviewing needed to find a character and make a successful story pitch, the interview that outlines a story arc and sequencing scenes to build a structure.

The last major phase of interviewing for narrative usually occurs just before (or precisely when) I’m ready to sit down and write. My story is solid. I know my central character and the arc of the story’s journey. I’ve identified pivotal moments and structure in mind. Now I need to fill in those scenes with detail and movement. I’ve chosen the pivotal moments worthy of cinematic scenes.

Before we talk about interviewing for scenes, though, we have to talk about structure, because structure informs which pivotal moments should be developed into scenes.

“Story structure” is one of those abstract terms that I struggled for years to articulate to my students, some of whom had trouble grasping it as something other than a formula. I finally settled on my own definition: A deliberate sequence of revelation. Another way to think of it: What you let the reader know — and when.

Not all writers believe in creating an outline before sitting down to write. I don’t like the term outline, because it triggers traumatic memories of Roman numeral outlines wrung out of us in middle school. I prefer the idea of a story map. It might look like a flow chart, a paper-napkin sketch or a screenwriter’s storyboard, which contains a sequence of drawings, usually with dialogue and a bit of stage direction, representing different shots and camera angles.

Here’s Gay Talese’s story map for “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” one of the most famous profiles in the history of feature writing:

I can’t speak to Talese’s use of color coding or geometry, but clearly this is a deliberate blueprint that speaks to how the author’s mind works. (He famously cut shirtboards into quarters and rounded the corners so they’d fit in his pocket for note-taking. He also used them for story outlines.)

It helps some of my students to think of a narrative as a necklace strung with scenes, summary and exposition. Scenes capture a specific moment in time when something pivotal happens in a story; time is often running at a normal pace, and the use of imagery, action and dialogue let the story play out in the reader’s mind like a movie. Summary compresses time and transitions the reader from scene to scene, often connoting cause and effect. Exposition is like a narrative pause button, a brief diversion from the story to explain something the reader must know to fully understand the meaning of the scene they just saw or the scene that’s about to happen.

The more you can stay in scene, the more the story immerses the reader, like a movie or a great novel. Summary allows you to speed things up to get to the next great scene; it often includes some backstory — prior events or key context. And exposition reveals why it matters and what it means; these are often the lovely literary pearls that get underlined and quoted or made into memes.

In my classes and workshops, I have students write a bullet-point version of each scene on an individual 3×5 notecard. They might also make a notecard for something technical that needs to be explained (exposition) or a bit of summary or backstory. I first ask them to place the notecards on the floor in chronological order. After snapping a photo to record this sequence, I ask them to pick a scene that’s not the first one, but has particular drama, tension or meaning. Then I ask them to reorder the notecards, prioritizing the most pivotal moments and considering others as possible flashbacks. This often reveals a new structure that they had previously never considered.

Here’s how one of my book proposals began:

Filling in scenic details

The way my brain works, I need to reach this point before going back to the character (for the Nth time) to do what I call “interviewing for scene.”

At this phase of the process, the questions get very granular. I start interrupting and saying, Wait. Let’s back up. Do you mean…? As the character is speaking, I’m constantly pressing for more specificity. More detail. The more concrete the detail, the more crisp the image in the reader’s mind.

Here’s a bit of an interview transcript for “In Light of All Darkness,” where I’m trying to get a play-by-play from an FBI agent, the Evidence Response Team member who lifted a partial palm print from Polly Klaas’s bunkbed frame using the then-brand-new technology of fluorescent powder and Alternate Light Source (forensic light).

Q:    So you’re dusting Polly’s bed frame with fluorescent powder. In one interview, you said “orange.” In another you said “red.”

A:    They call it REDWOP, but it’s a fluorescent orange.

Q:    Because REDWOP is “powder” spelled backwards, right?

A:    Yes.

Q:    So you scanned the whole room with the (forensic) light before you put on any powder?

A:    I would have done an overall scan of the room. Then I would have gone to the target I was looking at, which was the bed.

Q:    Why was that the target?

A:    That was an object that was doable. And it was within arm’s reach of the suspect. Proximity. So I went close to the floor and I did test patterns with different powders.

Q:    Are you talking about the bottom of the bed frame?

A:    Down by the floor, at the bottom, where I knew the suspect could not have touched.

Q:    By “bottom” do you mean the horizontal piece of wood along the mattress? Or the vertical leg of the bed frame?

A:    It was on the vertical leg.

Q:    And were you wearing goggles?

A:    I was.

Q:    So you first would have turned off the lights, right?

A:    Yes.

Q:    Would you have closed the door?

A:    Correct. I needed as much total darkness as I could get. The darker the room, the better the light fluoresces.

I later realized that it looks a lot like the trial transcripts I was reading, in which a trial lawyer is examining a witness on the stand. In a way, the lawyer and the reporter have a similar objective: elicit a narrative with such crisp detail that a jury member, or reader, can imagine it vividly.

As the character is speaking, I’m trying to see what they are seeing on the silver screen of memory. My friend and fellow narrative journalist Bronwen Dickey likes to say, “Pretend I’m a GoPro.” I like to see not only what the character is seeing in that moment, but also understand what they’re thinking about it. I hunt for internal dialogue.

Q:    What was it about REDWOP that worked better? Could you describe what the green looked like, and what you were not seeing that you wanted to see?

A:    With the green, there was not enough reflective material on the bed. It did not define for my eyes any fingerprints at all.

Q:    So then what did the REDWOP look like?

A:    I could see a palm print. I could see fingerprints. I could see residue from the black powder used by the police department. I could see smudges. My difficulty was that the palm print I saw was over a round disc, which was plastic. Normally, powder will adhere to plastic but not to wood.

Q:    Is there a word that pops into your head when you’re like, “That’s it!”

A:    I would normally just say, “Oh my!”

I’m constantly pressing for more specificity — for telling details and concrete imagery low on the Ladder of Abstraction. Evidence, you say? What kind of evidence? Fingerprints? Which hand? Which finger? Was it a loop, an arch, or a whorl?

Some people are more visually inclined than others. Some have better vocabularies or ways of describing a scene. I ask my story characters if they have photos, videos, text messages or other visual aids. If we flip through a photo album, I’ll point to certain objects, hoping to unearth a telling detail. (A “telling detail” is something that reveals character, yields insight or advances the narrative; it’s more than a bit of scenery.) If I need to take the reader inside a house that no longer exists, I’ll ask them to draw me a floor plan.

As the scene starts to come together in my mind, I’ll plumb it for meaning and try to see it through a particular Point of View. (The best definition of POV came from my son when he was in fifth grade: “It means, ‘Whose head are you in?’”). I try to write a scene through the Point of View of only one character in that scene to avoid what I think of as “head hopping.”) To do that, I need to get inside that character’s head. Some of my favorite questions for doing so are:

What did that look like?

How so?

What do you mean?

How did that feel?

Why do you think that is?

Fact-checking as a final interview

The last phase of my narrative interviewing process is calling up the character and reading them scenes I’ve written in their particular point of view. This is my way of fact-checking all the assumptions and interpretations involved in using my vocabulary to describe someone else’s experience. Did the language I chose accurately represent what they saw and felt and thought?

I know I’ve done my job if they find it not only accurate, but true.

What's the outcome of that work? You can read the passage from the book here.

* * *

Kim Cross is a journalist, historian and author of three nonfiction books, including “In Light of All Darkness.” She teaches feature writing for Harvard Extension School’s master’s degree program in journalism and is a founding instructor of the Hemingway Center’s Sawtooth Writing Retreat.

The post The art of the narrative interview: Filling in scenic details appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The fourth post in our series on narrative interviewing describes how a reporter begins to zoom in to explore defining moments and plot points in a character’s story. Previous posts outlined the difference between reporting for news and for narrative, the pre-interviewing needed to find a character and make a successful story pitch, and the interview that outlines a story arc.

Your story idea is solid and focus is clear. You have a compelling character for readers to follow. You’ve outlined the character’s journey through a situation or ordeal. Now it’s time to identify the main beats of that journey.

Fiction writers call these “plot points.” Something happens that sets the story into motion. Soon something else happens. Then another thing, and so on. All of these happenings are linked in part by chronology and — typically, but not always — an element of cause-and-effect.

In this stage of narrative interviews, I look for what I call “pivotal moments” and “defining moments.” They’re similar, but with an important distinction. One involves external or situational factors. The other is largely internal.

A pivotal moment is when something happens that causes the story to pivot in a new direction. Often it’s an event or situation shaped by external forces. The hiker, miles from help, is bitten by a venomous snake. The wide receiver leaps into the air in the end zone; catching the ball means winning the game, and not-catching it means losing. Often, these moments are self-evident thanks to their inherent drama. They make vivid scenes.

A defining moment is also pivotal, but nothing actually changes except a character’s perception. It’s an “a-ha” moment, the realization of some insight or truth that changes everything. A wife answers the phone and learns her husband has a second family. A detective realizes the prime suspect didn’t actually do it. The external situation hasn’t changed at all, but the internal shift rocks the character’s world. These don’t always make for action-packed scenes, but they open the door to internal dialogue and getting in a character’s head.

Often pivotal moments and defining moments are linked by cause and effect. Like a series of tumbling dominoes, these events cascade into action, each one triggering the next. That sequence informs story structure when it’s time to sit down and write.

Start with a timeline

People who tend to free-associate often share things out of chronological order. Let them. Unless I’m pressed for time in an interview, I try not to interrupt and just let them run. Then, after they’ve talked themselves out, I take a break, read through my notes and identify gaps and questions about the sequence in which things occurred.

Pulitzer-winning feature writer Lane DeGregory told me she scribbles questions in the margins of her notebook that arise during an interview. That way she doesn’t have to interrupt the person she’s talking to, but doesn’t forget things they mentioned that she wants to know more about.

I recently spoke on a panel of “fact crime” authors assembled by the Mystery Writers of America,  where my book, “In Light of All Darkness,” was nominated for a Best Fact Crime award. The moderator asked us about our storytelling process, and I was surprised when we all said the same thing: We start with a timeline.

In all of my books, the timeline has been integral throughout the process, from the minute I start reporting to the very end, when I’m fact-checking. It helps me stay grounded in time and immersed in the “narrative now” of the story — the time frame in which most of the scenes are unfolding. Those primary scenes also are the point that suggest supporting scenes — flash backs and flash-forwards — which determine verb tense shifts.)

My timelines have evolved with each book project.

For “What Stands in a Storm,” a narrative account of the biggest tornado outbreak on record, I had a series folders filled with Word documents listing chronological events unfolding from different Points of View: Main Characters (people in the path of the storm), Meteorologists, First Responders and Community Members (people helping victims in the aftermath). I highlighted Pivotal Moments from each POV and merged them into a master timeline — a Word document into which I pasted screen shots of radar screens, text messages between characters, Facebook posts, 911 calls and first responder radio transmissions, all of which were time-stamped. This created the backbone for a story that unfolded minute-by-minute.

A matrix of time, themes, scenes and sources

In “The Stahl House,” a book about the making of a historically significant Modernist house, I created a spreadsheet with columns for Month, Year and Event. I color-coded based on theme, which helped me see patterns that threaded through the story and informed my chapter structure. In the example below, pink reveals the Stahl family storyline. Yellow reflects moments related to the architecture and construction of the Stahl House. Blue is for photographer Julius Shulman. Green is related to John Entenza, the Arts & Architecture magazine editor who created the Case Study House Program. White indicates historical events that I could reference to anchor the story in time. Those events often place a story in time for readers better than specific dates. For example, mentioning the first time man walked on the moon conjures a black-and-white moving picture framed by a console TV with rabbit ears and big knobs.

My most recent book, “In Light of All Darkness,” is an insider account of the Polly Klaas kidnapping in 1993. I used a spreadsheet to log the timeline, which grew to more than 800 lines. Again, I color-coded, which helped me identify thematic threads (green for moments that advance the investigation, purple for “red herrings” that lead investigators astray, red for roadblocks or problems, orange and yellow for pivotal moments that should be written in-scene) and Point of View (blue for law enforcement agents, yellow for volunteers). I added a column on the right to keep track of primary sources to reference when writing scenes.

This is when I realized another valuable use of the timeline spreadsheet: It’s an index that provides a 30,000-foot view of the narrative, but also allows me to “zoom in” and get granular. That’s an important function to consider when choosing a timeline format.

Visualize the storyline

Pro tip: Pick a format that works for your particular brain. I’m a visual person, so I see patterns in the color-coding that lead to insights and cause-effect relationships. I also need to see a calendar format with only a few key moments, because my brain likes the left-to-right flow of weeks stacked on top of each other in monthly blocks.

I printed these out and taped them to boards that surrounded me as I wrote. It’s particularly useful when writing transitions. Whenever I change scenes, I make sure to signal when and where a scene is taking place relative to the previous scene. Time cues such as “An hour later at the police station across town…” or “Five days earlier…” will orient the reader in time and space, which is essential when a narrative deviates from strict chronology.

I also had other boards with maps and photos, which helped keep me oriented in space/geography as well as in time. Here’s what my workstation looked like as I was writing the first draft of “In Light of All Darkness:”

* * *

Kim Cross is a journalist, historian author of three nonfiction books, including “In Light of All Darkness.” She teaches feature writing in Harvard Extension School’s master’s degree program in journalism and is a founding instructor of the Hemingway Center’s Sawtooth Writing Retreat.

The post The art of the narrative interview: Sequencing your story appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In the third installment of our series on interviewing, narrative journalist Kim Cross describes how to find and follow the arc of a story and the central tension or conflict that drives it forward. Previous posts outlined the difference between reporting for news and for narrative, and the pre-interviewing needed to make a successful story pitch.

Interviews are not one-and-done, especially when filling your notebook and recorder for complex pieces that require multiple sources and multiple layers of information. A lot of that work is done before you get to the heart of the story you hope to tell. Preliminary interviews are needed to ensure you have a solid story idea then to find the character or characters who embody that idea — in other words, to find the person you and the readers can follow through an experience.

Once you’ve found your central character, it’s time to work with them to find the narrative arc of their story.

The True North of the first interview with your central character is a search for tension or conflict — the struggle they face and must resolve. But that’s not the best place to begin an interview. Diving straight into the hard questions can set a person back on their heels and make it harder to build rapport.

I like to begin by warming up. That part of an interview should feel more like a conversation than a formal interview. “So, what do you do for fun?” is one of my favorite questions. It almost always elicits a pleasant emotion, an anecdote and plenty of follow-up questions: What’s that like? How’d you get into that? What do you love about it?

It’s even easier if you’ve done a little homework beforehand, perhaps a smart Google search or a survey of their social media posts. You’ll already know that someone’s a Dodgers fan, an avid knitter, a grandparent or the owner of a labradoodle puppy. Ask about those things and nervous subjects will smile, relax, even gush.

It may sound like small talk. But if you listen closely (and watch), you’re gaining insight into character. It’s also a path to finding common ground — a shared interest, hobby or situation that establishes a human connection. Don’t be afraid to open up and share a little about yourself, too. Knowing who they’re talking to — a real person, not a automaton or a clichéd cap-letters REPORTER! — tends to put people at ease.

The first interview can take place at a neutral spot — a coffee shop, park, wherever the person feels comfortable. But there are great advantages to meeting in the person’s natural habitat — their workplace, or better yet, their home.

Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer Lane DeGregory says she always asks, “Can I come over?” If a prospective story subject says no, she doesn’t push or fold. She simply asks, “Okay, where do you want to meet?” But often the people she reaches out to say yes and invite her into their lives. She usually starts by asking them to show her around. Give her a little tour. It makes people feel a little less “perceived” and more in control. It can also lead to a story different from the one you were expecting.

“I had this one lady take me on a tour of her house,” DeGregory told me. “The story completely changed by the time we got up the stairs.”

The way people inhabit their space and feather their nest reveals a lot about them and invites easy questions that can help them (and you!) relax as you get to know and trust each other. Questions like:

• Are those your kids in that photo? How old are they? What do they do for fun?
• How did you win that trophy? How’d you get into that sport/hobby/endeavor?
• Is that a souvenir from a trip you took? Where? When? What was it like?

The struggle that makes the story

I usually spend the first five or 10 minutes of the first interview warming up. Once I see a person relax, I move slowly toward the goal: conflict.

In classic narrative, it’s the struggle that follows an “inciting incident.” It’s the journey a character takes when they confront a complication or challenge and have to work through it to some sort of resolution.

What I hunting for is what screenwriter Aaron Sorkin calls “intention and obstacle.” The character has a very specific dream, desire or goal. As they pursue it, their path is fraught with hurdles, locked doors or booby traps. These obstacles may be external (rejection, enemies, wrong turns) or internal (doubt, mistakes, self-sabotage) and they stymy the character’s progress toward the end-goal.

Sportswriter Gary Smith calls it the “central conflict.”

“Every person has a central conflict to their lives and a daily manifestation of that conflict. Find the central conflict, find its daily manifestation,” he says, “and it draws you closer to that person’s soul.”

I personally like the term “ordeal” because it implies drama, but the nature of that drama can be serious or comical. It might involve healing from trauma — or a middle-aged mother’s non-pivotal quest to master a wheelie.

They key is that the character must struggle in some way. The struggle creates tension, which is the engine of a narrative. It’s also a source of character development: The struggle makes a character relatable, inviting the reader to sympathize or empathize. That connection often prompts the reader to engage in the story and invest in the character’s journey: What have they gone through? How did it start? What obstacles did they overcome, and — this is critical—how did they overcome these obstacles? What did they learn? What was the resolution? How did it end?

Letting the story unfold

In this early phase of interviewing for narrative, it’s helpful to focus on broad and open-ended questions. So how did you get interested or involved in XYZ? What was that like? When and how did all this begin?

Then: Listen. Let them talk. Resist the urge to interrupt or ask clarifying questions. (The time for that will come later.) Many people have surprisingly good storytelling instincts, and if you let them talk without too much interruption, you’ll see the story start to emerge.

If I had only three questions to ask to find a person’s narrative arc, it would be these:

• What’s the hardest thing you’ve been through?
• How did you get through it?
• How did it change you?

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Kim Cross is a journalist, historian, and author of “What Stands in a Storm,” “The Stahl House” and “In Light of All Darkness.” She teaches graduate level Feature Writing for Harvard Extension School’s master’s degree program in journalism and is a founding instructor of the Hemingway Center’s Sawtooth Writing Retreat.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second post in our five-part series on the art of the interview from narrative journalist and teacher Kim Cross. In the opening piece, Cross notes the need for an interviewing approach that is different than that she learned about straightforward news reporting. He, she focuses on the pre-interviewing that’s needed for a successful story pitch.

There is no narrative writing without narrative reporting. And the first challenge of narrative writing is finding a viable story — a story that contain the elements of a narrative and allows you access to those elements. The key element is almost always character.

Here’s my simplified definition of a narrative: A character struggles through an ordeal that produces insight or change.

Ordeal implies a source of tension — the engine of narrative writing. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin calls it “intent and obstacle.” The character wants something, but has to overcome challenges standing in the way. I like “ordeal” because an ordeal can be frightening or funny, life-altering or comically inconvenient. The ordeal is something the character experienced firsthand. The character must struggle against and through that ordeal in some way.

Many pitches are rejected due to a lack of specificity. The writer wants to write about some particular topic or an issue. That’s a start. If the topic interests you enough, you are motivated to learn more. But learning about the topic is not enough to frame it as a story.

“Put a human face on it,” many editors say. Find a character struggling through the issue in some very specific way. That struggle is a source of tension, and tension is the narrative engine.

Scouting for the right character

So how do you find the character that makes the story? One who lets you follow them through a journey that engages the reader intellectually and emotionally?

Figure out where that character might gather or connect with other like-minded (or like-problemed) individuals, or with people who are affected by or care deeply about the issue you want to explore. It could be a place (the food stamps line, a drag club, a senior center, an ER waiting room) or an organized gathering (a protest march, a class, a book club meeting, a church service). As an outsider, it can sometimes be easier to approach a group of people who might be wary about the press when they’re alone alone but feel comfort and in their togetherness.

If you can’t find an organic gathering, chances are there’s an advocacy group or agency that wants to raise awareness for this issue. If your story can educate readers, those advocates or officials have a vested interest in helping you. Figure out if the group has a media contact, PR professional, marketing chief or spokesperson. Then ask for an  informational interview. Use that interview to learn more about the issue so you have your foundation of facts in place. At the same time, explain that you need to find a person who embodies the matter at hand. Often, the official will have someone top-of-mind; sometimes they have to do a little searching on their end. Either way, they are helping their cause while they help you find your story.

Useful questions for the informational interview:

• What are the biggest challenges of the issue that most people don’t understand?
• Can you put me in touch with someone who is struggling with these challenges?
• How willing might this person be to working with me? What might be their concerns?
• What else should I read/consider/know before talking with this person?

As you’re pre-reporting to flesh out your pitch, remember to ask yourself the questions your editor will be asking as they read your pitch:

• So what? (Why does this story matter? Does it address some larger theme?)
• Who cares? (To whom does this matter? Who is the audience for this story?)
• Why now? (Is there a news hook, trend, or other timely element of this story?)
• Why this writer? (What makes you uniquely qualified to write this story?)

Once you identify a central character and can answer these questions, you’ve got most of the ingredients for a viable story idea. You might have enough to weave them into a pitch. The next phase of the interviewing process may occur just before or just after your pitch.

* * *

Kim Cross is a journalist, historian, and New York Times Best-Selling author of “What Stands in a Storm,” “The Stahl House” and “In Light of All Darkness.” She teaches graduate level Feature Writing for Harvard Extension School’s master’s degree program in journalism and is a founding writing instructor of the Hemingway Center’s Sawtooth Writing Retreat.

The post The art of the narrative interview: Pre-interviewing for a successful pitch appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.