John Hammontree knows a good story when he hears one. Hammontree, the Murrow Award-winning head of podcasts for AL.com and current Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, says the idea for a podcast about domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph initially came to him following the events of January 6^th and the fall of Roe v. Wade. 

During a lunch outing with some of his newsroom colleagues in Birmingham, Alabama, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and 2021 Nieman Fellow John Archibald held the table rapt with the story of his trip to North Carolina in search of Rudolph, who bombed Birmingham’s New Woman All Women Health Care Center in 1997. 

Rudolph was eventually convicted in connection with bombings across the South from 1996 to 1998, including the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

After that lunch, Hammontree decided to reach out to Becca Andrews, a Western Kentucky University journalism professor and author of “No Choice: The Destruction of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect a Fundamental American Right.”

Together, they got to work on making an eight-episode serialized podcast, “American Shrapnel: The Weaponization of Eric Robert Rudolph,” which was released in July and tells a story of domestic terrorism and extremist political ideology that still resonates today. 

“I knew Becca through Reckon, and through her work with Mother Jones. Her deep history of knowing the history of abortion rights, abortion access, anti-abortion movements, was a piece that we needed for this story,” Hammontree says. (Hammontree, Andrews, and I were all colleagues at Reckon News, the now-shuttered digital publication that grew out of AL.com).

Even with the right team in place, producing a podcast on Rudolph and the bombings was no easy feat — and no one had anticipated production taking three years. I chatted with the team about a familiar issue to journalists that has grown more challenging as our nation’s politics have grown more fractured: getting sources to speak on the record. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

I clocked at least six reasons various people gave you for not wanting to be interviewed: it was too long ago, privacy, fear of being targeted for speaking on the record about controversial topics, concern about their careers, faulty memory, concerns about what their families might think. To some extent, this just comes with the territory as journalists, but it seemed like for this specific project, there was an overwhelming number of refusals to speak on the record. Would you agree?

John Archibald: There were a lot, but that also comes with the fact that we interviewed a whole lot of people. There were people who were never going to talk to us. [Jeff Tickal], who was instrumental in getting [Eric Rudolph’s] car tag number in Episode 1, said, in some ways, the case is still active, and “if I said something that didn’t match up with what I said, I could jeopardize the case.” But what he would never say out loud, I think, is that he’s a Republican sitting judge in Alabama and he would rather hang on a cross than talk about abortion, than how he helped catch a killer.

Becca Andrews: We have this person that I’m trying to talk to right now who has been very back-and-forth. She’s just genuinely terrified of this moment. She’s a private person and the political climate is not helping her feel safe to tell her story that is critical of white supremacy. And even though her experience is her experience and has nothing to do with politics, she’s just like, “I don’t know that I even want to consider touching that.”

As a journalist it’s frustrating because … I feel it right now in my position as a professor, this chilling effect of, “Can we speak freely…? What’s going to happen?” I think it’s affecting us in journalism too with our sources.

John Hammontree: Jermaine Hughes [the University of Alabama at Birmingham student who witnessed Rudolph leaving the scene of the crime and followed him] is a whole separate category of person. He hasn’t spoken to the media since [the bombing] happened. He’s just the true definition of a Good Samaritan and a hero. There’s something almost noble about it. I mean, it’s frustrating, don’t get me wrong, but he has this principled stance of … never going to try to seek out credit or anything for this story. I wish he had talked to us, I wish we were the exception, but there’s something to be said for the fact that he’s never spoken to the media.

We’ve spoken off the record to some people who knew Eric directly. One of them was an old Army buddy of his, who initially was interested in going on the record, and then called back the next day [after] he’d spoken with his wife and he just didn’t want to get his name dragged into all that, which I understand. I wouldn’t want to be on the record of being an old friend of a serial bomber. But some of those conversations did give us the chance to learn more about Rudolph, which, on deep background, did affect the way we told the story.

We reached out to everybody in his family: his brothers, his sisters, his mother. Some people talked to [Rudolph’s mother, Patricia] back then, but since then, they’ve gone cone of silence. The family’s not talking. Maybe that’ll change when [his mother] passes, maybe not.

And then Eric, we each wrote multiple letters. We don’t know if he got them, we don’t know if he read them, but we never heard from him.

Archibald: For everybody in the story that made the final cut, there were many more who didn’t get that far, who had other reasons for not wanting to talk, and a good many of them were trauma. 

It’s like one of those things with Jermaine Hughes, the witness who followed [Rudolph], the hero. We didn’t get to talk to him, but when we found that transcript of his police interview from two hours after the [Birmingham clinic] bombing, in some ways, it seemed even more perfect because he was telling his story fresh in that moment. And what we found from so many people is when they talk about things they remember — like me — they remember things wrong, and through their own particular filter in that moment.

Hammontree: And there were some mundane things like people not checking their Facebook messages or not checking their emails. We had about three — they responded two weeks after the podcast went live.

How did you care for the people you interviewed? Some folks got quite emotional during their recollections.

Archibald: [Chris Eidson, a paramedic on the scene featured in Episode 1] comes to mind on that. We just let him talk. I think some of that’s in the final tape. He was obviously very shaken by [the Birmingham clinic bombing].

I think I said something about, “I’m sorry to put you through it again,” and he said, “No, no, no, that’s what I think is supportive.”

We had a lot of conversations you didn’t hear with him about how it was going to be portrayed. He said he came to us because he knew we would tell it in a sensitive way. And then we talked about what that sensitivity looked like. And that’s what you end up with.

We basically said, “We just want you to tell your story, and you tell what you’re comfortable telling.” And he just opened up. And John and I, honestly, just sat there in an emotional state of wonder because he was summing up things that I thought were so extremely powerful and that we had never heard before. I think he understood that.

Hammontree: Some of the details he provided affected things like sound design or the music we would play. He talked about the ringing in his ears, and we tried to bring that to life for listeners.

One of the things I love about podcasting is just how intimate it is as a medium. If you’re just reading Chris Eidson’s words, it’s not the same as hearing the catch in his voice. It’s a great way to [practice] journalism because it takes audiences into the room with you. You can hear the timbre in [police officer] Jeff Postell’s voice, and you can hear [The Otherside Lounge bombing victim Memrie Wells Cresswell’s] birds tweeting in the background. You can hear [former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama] Doug Jones banging on the table for emphasis. I think, in some ways, that’s unique to the form.

Talk about Memrie, Becca.

Andrews: I’m still shocked that we got through the phone conversation, because the first phone conversation she was like, “I Googled you and you’re a liberal.” And because I’m human, I sometimes make assumptions about people too. I was taken aback because I was like, “Oh, you’re queer — you wouldn’t be conservative!” So it took us a minute to be like, “Okay, look, I’m not telling the story as someone who typically votes Democrat. I am telling the story as someone who cares about the story, we care about the story, and we care about what happened to you and we care about the societal repercussions that are echoing in our present moment.”

It was clear that she was still dealing with some of this trauma. Basically everyone who has been through a bombing is dealing with that trauma for the rest of their lives. I took that really seriously and tried to prep for the interview with that in mind: What’s going to make you comfortable? Do you want your partner there? How do we do this in way that makes you feel safe?

I just remember that interview and feeling so lucky to be able to sit there and listen to her talk about her experience and share. It’s a thing we feel as journalists, right? When you’re in an interview and someone’s sharing with you and there’s this intimacy and you feel so fortunate to do this work in the first place, but also to just be trusted with that kind of experience. The whole interview was like that. I just felt like I was holding my breath and awed by it, by her.

The other dynamic with [Memrie] specifically was she had also been traumatized by the media. She had been outed by the media. That was another thing that was very present in the dynamic, that I think that we all felt was important to be sensitive to and thoughtful about. And we were all horrified that that happened to her.

Hammontree: When we were structuring the podcast, we wanted to make sure that we built episodes around her perspective, around Diane [Derzis, owner of the New Woman All Women Health Care Center in Birmingham, Ala.] and Emily [Lyons, the nurse injured in the bombing there] so that it wasn’t just the story of Eric Rudolph. He’s a vehicle, and this is the story of dozens of people who were affected by him, and it’s also the story of the people trying to make a whole army of Eric Rudolphs. So we wanted to try to set aside specific episodes to broaden the scope of the story.

How were you all able to take care of yourselves? You all spent three years researching and recording the podcast.

Archibald: I’ve been doing this a long time and covered a lot of these things … but we’re in a fortunate situation in that anytime we come across this stuff, we get to write it down. And when you write this stuff down, you process it in a different way than when you let it sit and fester. I honestly believe, whether it’s executions or bombings or disasters, the fact that I’ve always had to do obits for people … you get to process it, and you give them some kind of honor with the way you do it, and you get to figure out how you think about it.

And having two other people in this situation to share it all with, and bounce it all back and forth, and hear them — even when they’re wrong — tell you what they think about it, and to just check yourself … has been really valuable.

Andrews: The group dynamic really helped. None of us can take ourselves seriously because the other two are there to check that. That’s a gift.

Hammontree: Doing this deep dive back into the history, about the rise of some of these violent movements, in some way made the current moments scarier — the assassination in Minnesota [of state Rep. Melissa Hortman], the [Charlie Kirk] assassination, January 6^th, the bombing of an IVF clinic, the bomb threats in North Carolina — you could just see the continuum of them. But I think it also helped us, or at least helped me, to understand that this is not brand new. This is something that’s been building, and that there have also been people kind of pushing back, and getting in the way. When you hear Memrie or you hear Emily or Diane, you hear that they’re still fighting 20, 25 years later, and it gives you resolve.

***

Minda Honey is the author of the dating memoir "The Heartbreak Years" and writes a weekly newsletter, Writing for Fakers, at mindahoney.substack.com.

The post How the team behind the ‘American Shrapnel’ podcast helped their sources feel safe appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

As a child in Kentucky, my father always told me my granddaddy and my great-grandmother Neenaw were part Blackfoot Indian. “That’s why they got all that land out there.” 

Then I went to college and learned about the “Cherokee Princess trope,” in which people frequently claimed to have Native ancestry. I soon discovered that the Blackfoot Nation was primarily located in the Great Plains, nowhere near Kentucky. And since my granny had told me my great-grandparents had come up to Kentucky from Alabama, that bit of family lore began to make less sense.

Long before U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren offered up an apology to the Cherokee Nation in 2019 for her dubious claim of Native ancestry, I’d accepted that I needed to stop whipping this tidbit out like a party trick. When you’re Black and Filipino, American colonialism and chattel slavery robs you of history on both sides of your lineage. It can feel good to feel like you know something about your people, but not at the expense of A People.

Whether or not there actually was some distant Native relation in my family tree is beside the point, as Irvin Weathersby Jr. learns while attending a Lakota reading in the Black Hills in South Dakota in his book, “In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space.” Weathersby's book, which takes him across America, is a potent example of a travelogue that weaves in personal storytelling with history. He serves as the reader’s guide to the history of his hometown of New Orleans, to museums and historical sites around the world, and to his experiences with racism as a Black man. His approach is curious, humble, and open to correction, as demonstrated when he attends the Indigenous Writers’ Festival in South Dakota: 

After the reading, possessed by a spirit of kinship and lubricated by glasses of red wine, I told the site’s director that I had a Cherokee ancestor, and he paused before telling me how the suggestion offends. He said it frankly, without injurious intent, and I made space for the lesson. Most Americans have Native blood, he said, which was to say that kinship is beside the point. 

Weathersby shared with me what he took away from that moment:

OK, kinship is beside the point, which means that I'm actually more connected to you, because the idea of our blood lineage is not significant. How can I show up for you? How can I show up for people? That's the most important thing. … We can show up for each other, for other cultures. We don't necessarily have to be members of them to show up for each other in real ways. 

Weathersby’s book opens with a scene in which he confronts a crew of white supremacists guarding a New Orleans monument scheduled for removal. He writes: 

I didn’t know what to expect and fixed my gaze on the statue as I walked slowly around the perimeter, afraid to meet their eyes. Shaking, my adrenaline pumping, I settled on the lawn off to the side so that I could still see them in my periphery.

I had never met white supremacists face-to-face, at least none who were so shameless, and I knew my stunt, the exercise of my right to occupy any public space, had the potential to further enshrine the memorial with my blood. I should tell you that this happened two months before Charlottesville, when [anti-racism protester] Heather Heyer was run over by a car in August 2017. I should also tell you that her murder wouldn’t have turned me around, at least not then. I couldn’t just retreat after everything I had already seen, after every one of us they had killed, so I took a deep breath and collected myself.

Weathersby says that when people ask why he felt it necessary to confront these white supremacists, he tells them his ancestors had been preparing him for this moment — and many other moments in the book — for his entire life. 

One of a writer’s primary responsibilities, I believe, is to tell the truth. So I spoke with Weathersby about how he defines truth-telling. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your relationship to truth in your writing.

The goal of art is to seek out something pure and true and to convey it. I think about Langston Hughes and “Theme for English B.” His professor says, “Go home and write a page and whatever you write, that page, it will be true.”

The idea, when you come to the page, is to strip away all the artifice, strip away all the noise, and get to the true essence of some sort of feeling, some sort of idea to convey to readers.

What is your truth-telling process? Does your work become more honest the longer you sit with it or does this happen through different levels of revision? How are you drilling down to the truest thing in your writing?

I read different histories, whether it's firsthand accounts or other kinds of historical texts — memoirs, other people's reflections — to see, “Am I getting this right?” That feeling that I had, how is that in communication with the actual truth of what happened here at this place or what happened in the timeline of history? As I go through revisions, what I think of then is, "What is the best way to convey this truth?"

A good writer friend of mine told me something that was really helpful. When I'm thinking about writing about people or subjects or content that has been written about so much, how do I approach this freshly or how do I offer something new? It's really about reframing those ideas, or those things that we already know, and offering a slightly different slant. So for example, thinking about Philando Castile and his life and how I remember breaking down and mourning the loss of his life as my own. That's so singular in my own experience. I think many of us can point to a Trayvon [Martin] or a Tamir Rice, somebody that does that for us as well. Breonna Taylor.

We don't know why but we are just so overwhelmed by that person's circumstances and how they collide with ours. 

So many people have written about Philando, people have done paintings. But one thing that really moved me is, I wanted to slow down the time, and think about how many times he was shot within a certain window. I hadn't read that, I hadn't seen “This experience had lasted X amount of seconds or X amount of minutes.” Really drilling down on particulars made it fresher for me and offered a new slant, a new perspective. Even thinking about Breonna Taylor, many people have written about her portrait, but being there in her city [of Louisville, Kentucky,] offers something slightly different. Going to her home offers something slightly different. Just even recognizing how my reactions are slightly different.

I lead with the feeling, the emotion, go to the actual objective text, and then figure out what's the best way for me to say this, how am I going to say this? I hate reading history that is flat and it's just a recitation of figures and people and doesn't necessarily engage with the ideas and doesn't necessarily engage with language. I'm always interested in language. And so that's what I think about when I get into revisions.

I think it's interesting that you say that you start with the feeling, because in this first scene, your fear of the white supremacists is never far from the page. It would have been really easy for you to write that retelling like, “I told them what was what!” But you say your voice was shaking. There's so many times throughout that chapter, where you bring it back to how you were feeling in your body while engaging with them. To me that was very honest. And I think that when we’re honest in our work we carve out this space for the reader to be honest with themselves, too.

Exactly. That first scene is me mirroring what you can do in your own life, wherever you are. How do you face that fear? How do you do what needs to be done? Even later on in the prologue, I was like, “Look, we can't all do everything. But we can all do something. And it's up to you to figure out what that something that you can do is.”

And going back to South Dakota, I think that [was] what those folks were trying to tell me: you can't be us but you can be with us.

In your writing, you’re transparent about your failures. In your book, I believe the opening scene with the white supremacists and the scene at the multipurpose center for Native American communities echo each other.

In that first scene I'm coming to it with apprehension, but also a general openness to who these people are. Afterwards, my family was kind of castigating me, “Are you stupid? Why would you do that? How could you risk your life like that?” I felt compelled. I had to. I couldn't just look away. I couldn't just be a coward. 

And in many ways that courage is what propelled me throughout the whole book. Even in that scene in South Dakota, I walk into this room with all of these Native women, and I could have easily been like, “All right, I'm out. This is not for me.”  But that discomfort, that tension is really where you can learn and grow. If you can sit with it for a second and move beyond it, then there's opportunity for growth. 

Both of those moments offer that. If I could take a step back and take a deep breath and try to let the fear wash away … what could be gained? And from both of those experiences I gained a whole hell of a lot.

Those white supremacists welcomed me into conversation and seemed to even be listening to me. These Native women and artists … also welcomed me in ways that I hadn't expected.

I was trying to be very mindful of being an outsider but also trying to assess my own kind of place and situate myself. That's what the book’s about in general. How can I situate myself within these current moments but also within the timeline of history? To engage in general conversations and being very mindful of the things that I don't know and being OK with asking questions and being OK with my own ignorance.

***
Minda Honey is the author of the dating memoir "The Heartbreak Years" and writes a weekly newsletter, MID., about the adventures of midlife at mindahoney.substack.com.

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The post The Craft of Memoir: Irvin Weathersby Jr. on truth-telling in a travelogue appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Just one day after New York magazine dropped a story package about people secretly subsidizing their Big Apple lives with generational wealth, I took a train into New York City for the book launch of Edgar Gomez's “Alligator Tears,” a memoir-in-essays about a very different experience: growing up poor in Florida. Gomez was joined by bestselling novelist John Manuel Arias (“Where There Was Fire”), who praised Gomez for their ability to make us look at and interrogate class on every page.

In "Alligator Tears," Gomez writes about the many low-wage jobs they worked: as a sales assistant at the Flip Flop Shop, Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, and JCPenney; as an intern at Telemundo; as a receptionist at a bathhouse; and selling bootleg CDs alongside their older brother at a flea market. 

It's a scene Gomez constructs at the flea market that I keep returning to, both as a reader and writer of memoir. 

The scene appears in the memoir's titular essay, which recounts the joy and community Gomez found as a queer person at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, before an attacker stormed into the venue in June 2016 and killed 49 people in one of the worst mass shootings in American history. In the middle of the essay, there's a sudden and brief flashback to the time when Gomez, age 12, purchases a baby turtle at the flea market and attempts to set it free into the world, an episode that recalls an earlier essay in the memoir:

It was the pet guy's booth. From my seat, it had looked fun, all bright and primary colors and parakeets chirping from their shiny cages. Up close, however, there was something off. A heavy, rotten stench hung from the parakeets' scrawny bodies. They banged their beaks against the metal bars, their feather coats riddled with bald spots. The pet guy — a man with a sleeve of naked lady tattoos and saggy pants covered in stains — moved around the booth, showing customers his assortment of snakes, chickens, iguanas each one in a bleaker state than the last.

But the baby turtles were the saddest. The pet guy kept them in a fish tank full of murky brown water with a green plastic island floating inside, a little fake palm tree stuck to the middle.

After Gomez’s failed attempt to rescue and release the turtle from its dank, crowded confines, the baby turtle is swooped back up by the pet guy and returned to the tank. "I watched him poke his head out, look up at his siblings, thrashing above him, then retreat into his shell again, regretting having set him free. Maybe it hadn't been so bad before, when all he knew was the water and the island and the fake tree. But now he'd know everything he was missing."

I invited Gomez — who is a friend and also in my writing group — to chat with me about their craft choice in this essay. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So tell me about these turtles.

I'm so touched that the people who have read the book so far, they always talk about this turtle anecdote that, for me, was something that I used to think about constantly as a childhood memory that would make me laugh. Like, Oh, my God, you're so naive and trying to do this good thing! But you didn't really know that the world doesn't always let you. And that it's a lot messier. But I tried. 

It's  a very common thing where in Florida they sell baby turtles. They sell them on the side of the roads. At the flea market where I was working, there was this pet booth, and it was just one of the many, many pets that they had there. The reason that I chose that anecdote was because I was thinking about what I wanted the larger story to say. And it's obviously a story that's about Pulse.

When I was in my early 20s and first started going to Pulse, I, like a lot of people who are in their early 20s, was just dealing with a lot of shame and a lot of insecurities specifically around my queerness. I just felt like I couldn't be myself in a lot of places. I mean, this is Florida; it's still the South. And Pulse was a place where once I discovered it for myself, once I started going with my friends, it was just like letting go of a breath that I didn't realize that I was keeping in. It was this perfect, freeing place where people looked like me, people sounded like me, especially on Latin night.

I could hear the type of music that I dance to. I didn't necessarily have to be afraid, or so I thought. It was a place where I was finally letting go of that shame and learning how to be proud, and learning what it means to be free, and what kind of life I wanted to have. At that age, I guess I was also a little bit naive and optimistic. I was like, "Oh, my God, I found my people. I found my place. This is my happy ending. I'm free."

But again, life doesn't always work out that way.

Just when I am learning how to be unafraid, this man steps into Pulse and kills 49 predominantly Latinx people. And I don't want to say that it took me fully back to that place of shame that I used to live in, but the fear was real. There were a lot of days where I was like, "I don't know that I want to be out anywhere in public. I don't know what's going to happen."

The [turtle] anecdote works so well because it talks about this kind of essential part of who you were that hadn't changed from when you were a kid — this kind of naïveté [that] you could make a change by doing this little thing, then realizing it's more complicated. You're still that Edgar at Pulse. But you're also the turtle, too. You're letting us know, because we have read this whole book up until this point, we've seen all the hardships you faced, all the rejection you endured, [how] now you have this taste of freedom and how sad it would be to have that freedom taken from you, because now you know what it is to feel free. 

Thank you. You just gave me goosebumps.

You said that you had a gut instinct that this was the right place for this anecdote. Was it intentional the way you dropped it in? There was no transition into it, transition out of it, no callback. You love a callback at the end of an essay. No callback to the turtles. There was no turtle scuttling down the sidewalk.

You know that I do love a callback. It's a really effective strategic tool. But I don't think you always need a callback. Sometimes you just have to be confident and let a moment have its moment. And also in a way, it is a callback to something that happens earlier in the book, so in that way, it still scratched that itch. But I think I just wanted to completely come out of the story that I was telling and transport the reader somewhere else for a little bit. 

Though I don't think it's necessarily the saddest story, I did try very hard to insert as much humor or just absurdity or lean into a celebratory voice. I still was like, "The reader needs a 15 right now." That was me trying to give the reader their 15-minute break, and just take them somewhere else where they can sort of relax a little bit into this anecdote. Within the context of the larger story, it's sad, but just reading the anecdote on its own, it's a little bit funny, like, "Oh, my God, this silly little kid was trying to save the turtles."

I like that, this intentional caring for the reader. You can do that so quickly, because we are already familiar with the flea market — we saw it, we know this world. So if you had tried to take us to Alaska or something I don't think it would have worked. The reader would have been lost. We knew the flea market. We know young Edgar.

That's a really good point. I was really inspired by the essay “The Greeter,” by T Kira Madden. She talks about working at [shoe retailer] Steve Madden. And in that essay, she does have an anecdote about — I think it's going fishing with her mom or going fishing — and at the end, she does call back to it. It's such a beautiful, haunting image. It works really well to call back. 

I think I got a lot of inspiration because I'm writing about working at the mall, she was writing about working at the mall. It's one of those essays that I revisited. And I think I took the idea of, you can take the reader out of that present moment and plop them somewhere else, and it can be meaningful, and it can be strategic. I was like, "I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna steal this."

And then I read it and was like, "I'm gonna steal this."

***

Minda Honey is the author of the dating memoir "The Heartbreak Years" and writes a weekly newsletter, MID., about the adventures of midlife at mindahoney.substack.com.

The post The craft of memoir: queer joy, turtles, and caring for the reader in Edgar Gomez’s ‘Alligator Tears’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.