As a longtime New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv has covered some of the more fascinating topics in mental health: what happens when people reject their diagnosis, the challenges of going off psychiatric drugs, and whether suicidal students should be forced to leave college campuses.

In one of her latest stories, “Mary Had Schizophrenia and Then Suddenly Didn’t,” Aviv examines a phenomenon that doctors have only recently begun to uncover: Some people who experience psychosis are misdiagnosed with schizophrenia when in fact they have treatable autoimmune conditions that attack the brain. 

Earlier this month, Aviv’s story was named a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Feature Writing for its “extraordinary exploration” of two daughters’ search to understand why their mother was relieved of her 20-year-long psychosis and what it was like to observe her recovery. 

Aviv said she was surprised when the piece was selected as a finalist, largely because of the challenges she had writing it. “Of all the stories I've written in the last however many years, it had been the one that caused me the most grief in terms of the actual writing process,” she told me. “I had structured it one way, and then maybe five days before the piece closed, I just felt like the structure was not serving the story as well as it could, and I was in a state of despair.”

With her editor’s support, Aviv restructured the story — a process she explains in greater detail in the annotation below. As I heard her recount this last-minute pivot, I was reminded of the value in acknowledging when a story’s structure isn’t working as well as we hoped and acting accordingly — even when it requires a last-minute scramble.

The final structure that Aviv arrived at reflects a masterful blend of historical context, immersive reporting, and rich source materials that help us see how a single diagnosis can alter the course of a life and shape one’s identity. Several related questions drove Aviv’s reporting, both in terms of the science behind a new category of illness referred to as“autoimmune psychosis,” and the family at the heart of the narrative. 

“There were the scientific questions, which were pretty straightforward: Is this real? What is happening? Why don't we know about this? Why has it taken so long? How many people is this affecting?” Aviv told me. 

“And then there were the more personal questions of: What is the experience of a mother who has been in another reality for an entire lifetime for her children, and then they're coming back to her as this person who is suddenly sane? What does that feel like to be returned to consensual reality, both for the person who has been ill and for the people who loved her and couldn't relate to her in that previous state? How do you rebuild a relationship when your past feels so split in terms of perspective and memory?”

The story’s driving questions and themes dovetail with Aviv’s bestselling book, “Strangers to Ourselves,” in which she writes about the limits of psychiatric explanations and the ways in which people can feel trapped or freed by stories of mental illness. Aviv’s next book,“You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters,” comes out this summer. 

To learn more about Aviv’s writing process and interest in psychiatry, I asked her to annotate her award-winning story and offer a behind-the-scenes look at how it took shape. Her responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Mary Had Schizophrenia—Then Suddenly She Didn’t

By Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker (July 21, 2025)

When Christine was nine years old, her mother, Mary, said, “Come here. I want to tell you a secret.” They sat on a brown couch in their living room, in Santa Ana, California. Mary, who was forty-three, said that a man she had known in medical school, a professor, was sending her messages about a plan to take her away and live in a mansion together. “I remember feeling really excited, because that fit with my sense of what should be happening,” Christine said. “I was really into ‘Harry Potter’ and the idea that, if you are part of the select, you can see a bigger story happening out there.” 

Mary leaned over and began separating strands of Christine’s hair, as if searching for lice. “Does he put listening devices in your hair?” Mary asked, about the professor. “Does he ever ask you to say things to me?”

Christine, the older of two sisters, said, “I believed everything she said until she accused me of something that I knew wasn’t true.” Mary had always been tender and doting and practical, and, Christine said, “I just had this feeling in my body that she was not the same.” [annotation q="MT: How did you find Christine and Angie as sources?" a="RA: I had read a story in The Washington Post about this center at Columbia University where they were looking for other conditions (often autoimmune conditions) that were masking as more typical mental illnesses."] [Read the Washington Post story.]

[annotation a="I had called the center and just talked to them about the work they were doing, and I remember thinking they were doing something that felt close to a paradigm shift in psychiatry. Having covered psychiatry and written about it for many years, I thought it felt very new. I had asked them if there were any current or former patients who might want to speak. They got back to me and said that Christine had been wanting to tell her story."]

Her sister, Angie, who is seven years younger, learned to follow their mother’s instructions, whether or not they made sense. “I was taught the rules of her delusions at the same time as I was taught other rules and norms about the world,” Angie said. She came to view her mother’s stories about the professor, and about friends who were part of his mission, as akin to tales in the Bible. “It’s kind of like, O.K., some of these people are real, and some of these people aren’t real,” she said.

Christine was often cast in the role of the villain. Her mother would yell at her for poisoning her pizza or hiding her keys or other menacing deeds, even as Christine tried to explain that she hadn’t done them. Sometimes Mary smacked her. (Mary doesn’t remember this.) [annotation q="I appreciated this simple sentence, both because it shows the reader early on that you spoke with Mary and because it signals the importance of being transparent about memories that don't align. Why was it important to you to include this line?" a="The story felt like it was so much about memory and perspective in general. One of the most traumatizing aspects of this experience for Christine and Angie was that they felt like they were living in a reality that was very different from their mother's reality, and that their complaints for years couldn't be validated. And then they had gotten to this point when I met them, where their mother was lucid and receptive. And anytime they would mention something that had been painful for them, she would be encouraging them to share what that experience had been like."]

[annotation a="But it felt like they could never quite figure out whether she was in denial or evading painful experiences, or whether she truly had some sort of cognitive dysfunction where she could not remember. That felt like the trickiest part in the whole piece — having conversations around this memory hole."]

[annotation a="As we continued with our conversations over the course of a few months, I think we all had a clearer sense of the contours of that hole and what it was that she couldn't remember. And then toward the end, we started really talking about the actual things in that hole. There was a way in which their mother would say, 'I don't remember this' (but not as a way of saying 'I didn't do that.') And so I think with something as serious as a mother smacking her child, it felt important to make it clear whose memories these were."] Christine began to mistrust her own memory, too. “My mom would accuse me of things, and then I’d be, like, Maybe I did do these things,” she said. In fifth grade, she asked Santa Claus for a polygraph machine. [annotation q="This detail made me think about how, when reporting on people's childhoods, it could be revelatory to ask: What did you want for Christmas when you were X years old? Did you ask a question along these lines, or did this detail come about more organically?" a="That wasn't my question. That was something Christine told me about how unbearable it was to feel like her mother was doubting her — she had an excruciating desire to prove to her mother that she was reporting reality honestly. The polygraph detail captured so much about Christine's desperation — if only she could prove to her mother that she wasn't doing the things her mother was accusing her of."] “I just had this baseline sense of: I could be doubted at any time.”

She felt that people might help her mother if she could just find the right language to describe her transformation. By high school, she was spending so much time studying the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that she texted a friend that she had actually “married the dsm-iv.” [annotation q="Did you ask to see the text messages? For this story, how did you go about establishing trust so that Christine and Angie would will feel comfortable sharing personal correspondences with you?" a="They had read the previous New Yorker piece I had written about Alice Munro and the sexual abuse that was hidden in her family, and it actually had resonated with them previous to even my getting in touch. I think they were familiar with my approach, and that helped a lot. Christine had this archive of childhood materials that she'd been keeping. She jokes that it was like she had been waiting her whole life for a fact checker. She had sent me a Word document of the diary she had been keeping from that time, and she had included the text conversations in that diary."] She explained that her mother suffered from the “fregoli delusion,” a belief that strangers were disguised as doubles of people she knew. In her journal, Christine wrote, “My mom has erotomanic delusion disorder with a splash of persecutory delusions.” She asked for help from teachers and a school counsellor, but, she said, the “message I got was, basically, Everybody has their shit, and you have to just deal with it and keep getting good grades.”

Mary, who was from India and had worked as a physician there for a decade, spoke so much about the professor that her husband, Chris, who worked at the California Department of Motor Vehicles, eventually found the professor’s number and called him. “He said, ‘I am not in contact with her,’ ” Chris recalled. “ ‘I didn’t even know your wife came to America.’ ” At the professor’s suggestion, Chris scheduled an appointment for Mary with a psychiatrist. Christine sat in the waiting room, hoping that this would be the beginning of getting back the mother of her early childhood, whom she remembered as a “magical, glowing figure.” But when Mary finished the appointment she said that the psychiatrist thought she was fine. Not long afterward, Mary kicked Chris out of the apartment and barricaded the door with a desk and two heavy suitcases. Christine and Angie allotted extra time to get to school each morning so they could remove the obstacles.

Karl Jaspers, the German psychiatrist and philosopher, has described what he calls the “delusional atmosphere,” a profound alteration in the way certain people experience the world. “There is some change which envelops everything with a subtle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light,” he wrote. People in this state search for a story that explains why everything suddenly feels uncanny and ominous. The “vagueness of content must be unbearable,” he wrote. “To reach some definite idea at last is like being relieved from some enormous burden.”

Mary had landed on a story that overwrote the reality of her daughters’ lives, but they also recognized in it a kind of emotional logic. Mary had been pressured to marry Chris, in an arranged match, and, when they settled in America, he had traditional ideas about a woman’s role and restricted her freedom to pursue her career. Christine and Angie came to feel that their mother’s delusions—that her former colleagues would free her from marriage and she’d be restored to her place in the medical community—were “a way of explaining how she ended up trapped in this position,” Christine said. “We theorized that psychosis was almost a reasonable response.”

Christine moved to New York after high school, because her favorite book, “Underworld,” by Don DeLillo, was set there, and because it seemed like the city where people went to escape their homes. She lived in the Bronx, near her father’s brother, and got a job at Planet Hollywood. She wanted to be a novelist, and obsessively re-read “Underworld,” covering the pages with determined annotations: “integrated dialogue”; “meta commentary”; “sensation of young immediacy.” [annotation q="This is another great example of how you use source materials to fill in gaps and add color to the piece. Did you ask to see her copy of the book?" a="She was in London at the time, so she just took photos of her book. I thought it was so interesting that ‘Underworld’ had been such a meaningful book for her, and I couldn't quite see the line of continuity in terms of her own life. So I did ask her a lot of questions about what that book meant to her. In general, I always love to know what people are reading at particularly pivotal moments in their lives."]

Angie and her mother would text Christine asking for groceries or pizza, and she would order the food for them from across the country. Mary was still barricading the door. Chris slept in his car. (Eventually, he moved in with a girlfriend.) Christine worried that Angie, who was eleven, was growing up in a kind of folie à deux, a delusional system that structures two lives. Angie said, of her mother, “I could never figure out why she was doing these things to me, and I had this kind of emotional explanation: Other things are just more important to her. I’m only there as a vessel for the magical thinking.” After about a year, Christine arranged for her mother and Angie to move to New York, too. (Mary asked me to use only her middle name, to protect her privacy.) [annotation q="Why did you think it was important to heed this request and protect her privacy?" a="Because she was sharing very private medical information, as well as medical records, which made her feel vulnerable."]

Mary moved into an apartment in the Bronx, in the same building as her brother-in-law, and plastered the walls with tape, to prevent reality-TV shows from recording her and Angie through the cracks. Angie tried to bathe while her mother was asleep because Mary believed there was a camera in the showerhead, and had covered it with a sock. Angie felt as if she were living in a kind of urban version of “Grey Gardens,” a formative movie for her. The documentary chronicles the lives of a mother and daughter, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who live together for years, piles of trash accumulating around them, social conventions becoming remote.

After two years in New York, Mary seemed increasingly unable to care for herself, so Christine, who had enrolled at Columbia, called the city’s mobile crisis unit, a team that assesses people in psychiatric distress. The crisis unit knocked on Mary’s door, and, after a conversation in which she described receiving electric transmissions through a filling in her tooth, she was admitted to Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital, in Manhattan.

Psychiatrists there petitioned a judge for permission to hospitalize her for a month and treat her with antipsychotics, over her objections. “I believe that she has no judgment concerning the nature of her illness,” one of them wrote. On an evaluation form, another psychiatrist initially wrote that Mary had an “unspecified psychotic disorder.” Then, perhaps uncomfortable with such a vague diagnosis, she crossed out the phrase and wrote, “Schizophrenia.” [annotation q="This detail that really illustrates the uncertainty surrounding Mary's illness. Can you talk about how you happened upon this detail, and why you knew it needed to be in the piece?" a="I think I saw it upon second or third read of her medical records. The first time I didn't quite grasp how interesting it was that the psychiatrists needed to get her committed against her will, so they were looking for a diagnosis that was serious and concrete enough that, from a judicial perspective, they could justify committing her. And then they had given her this diagnosis, and it seemed like no one had re-evaluated it. Once she had that diagnosis, it just stuck, and that seemed really tragic. It stuck for a decade."]

[annotation a="There is this sense that you're being told schizophrenia is somehow part of your essence, when actually it's part of this arbitrary bureaucratic process where a psychiatrist has to come up with something in the spur of the moment, and schizophrenia feels like the least worst match."] Mary was fifty-five years old, and her symptoms had begun in her early forties, which is unusual for schizophrenia. Most people are diagnosed in their twenties or early thirties.

Christine moved into her mother’s apartment and filed a petition for joint custody of Angie. Their father, who was living in California, did not contest the petition. “I make breakfast in the morning,” Christine wrote in her journal, describing her new routine with Angie. “I wash the dishes. I lock the door at night. I have established, kicking and screaming, my own rightful place as an active agent in the universe.” [annotation q="You effectively used journal entries here, and I've seen you do it in other stories as well. When you read Christine's journal, what were you looking for as a journalist? And why do you think journal entries can be so effective in stories?" a="We discussed it fairly early. Over the course of a few conversations, Christine sent installments. Some of her journals were written for a class at Columbia, and I felt like I was looking for the less ‘written’ parts."]

[annotation a="There was a way in which, for her class, she was seeing herself as a writer seeking meaning from a hard situation. And in some ways, I was more interested in the rawer, less processed moments that she could not convert into meaning right away. Retrospective writing or talking can't capture that immediacy."]

[annotation a="I did tell her that I would check to make sure she felt comfortable with what I decided to quote, because obviously it's a very vulnerable thing to just hand over your journal."]

When Mary was released from the hospital, she stopped taking her medications. Neither she nor her daughters thought they had helped her. For about a third of people with schizophrenia, antipsychotics do not work. “I wish my mother’s delusions and paranoia were treatable,” Angie wrote, in a college-application essay. “However, she has lived with them for 12 years, and her institutionalization last year had no effect.”

Mary’s admission to Beth Israel was the beginning of a nine-year cycle in which she was sent to psychiatric hospitals for weeks at a time before being released, unchanged. Mary said that each time she was admitted to a hospital the staff “kept asking the same questions, and it never made anybody have a different outlook on the situation. Everyone stayed with the same thing. It was schizophrenia.” [annotation q="This is the first time we directly hear the words ‘Mary said.’ Was it a deliberate choice on your part to initially tell her story through her daughter's voices before introducing us to Mary's voice?" a="Somewhat, and I think there was also the issue of Mary actually not remembering. I was telling their perspective, and if I had told it from Mary's perspective during those years, it would have been very different and more confusing because her memories of that time were jumbled. I felt like it was more coherent to just start with the daughters' perspective and then bring in Mary's perspective once she's chronologically in a state where she is more lucid and able to acknowledge the difference in her daughters' experiences."]

[annotation a="In that way the structure reflects the experience of the daughters: they had a mother who was unreachable in some way, and then with this sort of accidental cure, she becomes reachable. That's the moment at which Mary enters the story and has more of a speaking presence."]

After five hospital stays, including one in which the police led her to an ambulance in handcuffs because she wouldn’t leave her apartment, Mary was transferred to the Bronx Psychiatric Center, a state facility that provides long-term care. She observed that when patients refused medications staff would sometimes call security, and the patients would be injected with drugs, a prospect that terrified her. “I would take the medication without any question, because I’m not risking fighting with security,” she told me. “These people are very sensitive to what they call ‘challenging authority.’ ” She spent her days dreading the moment when she’d be forced to swallow her pills.

Mary sometimes imagined that God had a reason for keeping her in the hospital, but, she said, “I did not even want to go there, because the reasoning mind makes you feel very nervous and uncertain.” Her daily life became so narrow that she stopped noticing the weather. “They don’t remind you about the changing season—that spring is coming into summer or the winter is coming into spring,” she said. “You just pass the days as quickly as possible.”

Christine, who spoke to her mother every week, said that Mary never articulated her sorrow at the time. “I would have wanted to engage on the level of ‘I’m sorry you’re there, do you feel sad?’ And I’m sure she was having those emotions, but she wasn’t able to express them. It was always ‘I’m being attacked. I’m being held like a prisoner here.’ ” Christine felt that her mother was safer at the Bronx Psychiatric Center than she would be anywhere else, but she felt guilty for hoping that Mary would stay there for the rest of her life.

Mary was discharged in September, 2023, after a year. [annotation q="Reading this made me wonder: Did you create a timeline of events when working on this story? And can you talk more about the structural challenges you faced?" a="Any time I write a story, I'm always writing down the dates that are relevant and creating a timeline. I had originally started the piece with Mary's cure and then had gone backwards into her daughters' childhood. But then the cure felt less meaningful without the context of understanding what they'd been through in their childhood. But if I started with their childhood, the reader had to wait a long time to discover what this story was actually about — so that was the dilemma, and I basically emailed my editor, Willing Davidson, asking him if it was OK to try switching it up last minute, and he encouraged me to try."]

[annotation a="Usually when I'm writing a piece, it's the structure that I figure out first. I had to rework it all at the last minute, and that was an uncomfortable experience."] A week later, she collapsed in her bathroom and struggled to move. She was taken to a hospital in Brooklyn, where the doctors told her to stop taking antipsychotics, because they thought her condition may have been a side effect of the drugs. Then they discovered that she actually had lymphoma, a sometimes fatal form of cancer. She began seven cycles of a treatment that combined chemotherapy with rituximab, a medication that targets antibodies involved in the body’s immune response.

When Christine and Angie visited her at the hospital, Mary responded to their questions with one-word answers. Her face had a vacant expression. Christine and Angie thought she was dying. Mary did, too. She dreamed about being a child, playing with her sister and four brothers, in Kolkata, where she grew up. “I told myself, ‘This must be the end of it,’ ” Mary said.

Angie, who was now twenty-two and had recently graduated from Dartmouth, prepared in therapy for her mother’s death. She said, “I had multiple sessions where I was just crying about the fundamental things I wish she had given me, like ‘I wish she could have told me what was going on in her head,’ or ‘I wish she could have told me she was sorry for what she did.’ ”

By Christmas, two months after beginning chemotherapy, Mary was moving a little more freely, and she had begun to carry on conversations. Christine and Angie noticed that her personality seemed different: she was calm, outgoing, and polite, and she often expressed gratitude. Angie texted Christine that Mary seemed peaceful, as if maybe she was “getting some post-life or death clarity?”

Christine, who was twenty-nine and had settled in London, having moved there for a master’s degree in psychology, was struck by her mother’s ability to watch the news and absorb the information on its own terms. For years, the television had been a source of agitation; Mary had said that people were using her ideas and repeating her lines.

One day, when Christine was visiting the hospital, Mary asked for a phone. “I sort of teased her, ‘Now you’re asking for a phone?’ ” Christine said. “I wasn’t really making much of it, but then afterward I thought, Why has she asked for a phone? That’s quite unusual.” Mary already had a phone, but it was in storage because she’d told Christine that it contained spyware.

Angie gave her a flip phone and, to be safe, covered the camera with a piece of tape. “She seemed fine using it, which was odd,” Angie said.

In May, a month after Mary finished chemotherapy, Christine and Angie asked a psychiatrist at the hospital to examine her. Christine said, “The psychiatrist was, like, ‘Why have you called me here? I don’t understand. She has no symptoms.’ And we were, like, ‘Yeah, that’s the reason we’ve called you here.’ ”

Christine had the same feeling in her body that she’d had when her mother first became ill—the sense that something at Mary’s core had changed. She tried to get the doctors to grasp the scale of her mother’s recovery. By the summer, her cancer was in remission. She hadn’t taken antipsychotics for months, and yet “her psychotic symptoms are gone,” a doctor wrote. Christine told the doctors, “She had a twenty-year psychiatric history. Have you heard of this? Could any of her medications have caused this?” She spoke with a neurologist at the hospital, but he didn’t have an answer. Omid Heravi, one of Mary’s oncologists, didn’t understand what had happened, either. “Medicine is very specialized—we don’t get involved in other fields,” he said. He guessed only that one of the cancer drugs she’d been given had had collateral benefits. “In medicine, all side effects are not bad,” he offered.

When a person recovers from an illness, it is usually seen as the end of the story. [annotation q="This line made me think about one of my favorite lines from your book ‘Strangers to Ourselves’: ‘There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which.’ What compels you to want to explore the narrative aspects of illness and recovery?" a="I think I had to justify why the story wasn't ending with this unlikely recovery, but why it kept going. I had to explain that what I was interested in was not just, 'here we have this amazing new way of seeing mental illness,' but also, 'here's an opportunity to understand what recovery means.'"]

[annotation a="We don't often get to see recovery from psychosis in this way, and, at my editor's suggestion, I was trying to alert the reader that there was still a third part coming — that there is real work to be done, after you've recovered from a long illness, to make sense of what has just happened and to integrate it into your sense of identity."] But becoming sane also causes a kind of narrative collapse, a confrontation with a personal history that is no longer recognizable. Christine encouraged her mother’s friends and siblings, whom she’d been estranged from for years, to get back in touch. She wanted to restore her mother’s sense of connection, but, she said, “I also wanted them to be able to tell me—outside of my childhood memories—if this is the person she used to be.”

For years, Christine’s friends had known little about her mother beyond the details of her mental illness. “Suddenly, I was, like, ‘Hey, my mom’s better now. Would you like to call her up and talk to her?’ And that was a shocking concept for them,” she said. “I mean, there are a lot of people who wouldn’t necessarily be open to jumping on a call without planning, but my mom was now the type of person who is quite flexible and responsive and conversationally fluid.” Christine described her as a “psychological débutante.”

Angie, who was living in Queens and working at a firm where she analyzed data on sexual violence, felt skeptical that their mother’s transformation was real. Christine said, “I felt like, If Mom can disappear, then she can come back.” But Angie didn’t have memories of Mary from before the illness, and it felt to her like she was being asked to believe that her mother had become a new person. “I tend to choose security over the process of discovery,” Angie told me. “I didn’t have a curiosity that felt worth the emotional risks.” Angie had always felt that, on some level, her mother had “chosen her delusions” over her children. She didn’t want to experience that choice being made again.

Christine searched for medical papers that might explain her mother’s recovery and allow Angie to believe in it. She read about each of the medications that her mother had taken and concluded that the key drug may have been rituximab, the immunosuppressant. “I have a new working theory,” she texted Angie, in May, 2024. “Theoretically her chemo could have incidentally cured” her.

Christine found a handful of recent case studies that documented drastic psychiatric recoveries after people were treated with drugs that dampen immune activity. A 2017 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry described a woman with a twenty-five-year history of schizophrenia. She also had a skin disease, for which she was given drugs that reduced inflammation and suppressed her immune response. Her doctors noticed a pattern: when they treated her skin lesions, her psychosis went away. They hypothesized that the rash and the psychosis had been caused by a single autoimmune disorder, and were cured by the same drugs. Another paper in Frontiers in Psychiatry described a man with “treatment-resistant schizophrenia” who developed leukemia. After a bone-marrow transplant, which reconstituted his immune system, he startled his doctors by suddenly becoming sane. Eight years later, the authors wrote, “the patient is very well and there are no residual psychiatric symptoms.”

Christine also discovered a Washington Post article from 2023 about a woman named April, who had fallen into a catatonic state at the age of twenty-one and been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Sander Markx, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, first encountered April at a psychiatric hospital on Long Island when he was a medical student; twenty years later, he was dismayed to find her at the same hospital, in the same condition. “She has not been outside for twenty years—out of sight,” he said, at a symposium at Weill Cornell’s medical school. He and his colleagues gave her an extensive workup and found that she had lupus, an autoimmune disorder that, in rare cases, can induce inflammation in the brain, causing symptoms that are indistinguishable from those of schizophrenia. After undergoing immunosuppressive therapy, including rituximab, April emerged from, essentially, a “twenty-five-year-long coma, and was able to tell us everything,” Markx said. “We don’t have a script for this. We don’t see patients coming back from this condition.”

April’s case helped give momentum to the founding, in 2023, of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (S.N.F.) Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health, at Columbia, which is working to uncover biologically distinct subtypes of illness that have been obscured by the broad categories in the DSM. Christine sent an e-mail to Markx, a co-director of the S.N.F. Center, with a brief time line of her mother’s life. “Her psychiatric symptoms disappeared and have yet to resurface months later,” she wrote. “But her current clinicians are stumped as to why it has happened.” When Markx didn’t respond, Christine, who was visiting New York, decided that she and Angie should go to Columbia to introduce themselves in person. Markx wasn’t in his office—he had just begun an ongoing medical leave—but they slipped a handwritten card in a pink envelope under his door and used inter-campus mail to send cards to the other directors of the center. They tried to think of this step, Angie said, as “the part in the documentary where the cameras go all shaky and you get the sense that someone is about to break a hole in the case.”

Emil Kraepelin, who developed psychiatry’s first modern diagnostic system, in the eighteen-nineties, defined the disease we now know as schizophrenia largely in terms of its hopelessness. [annotation q="Throughout the piece, you sprinkle in historical context related to the field of psychology. Do you outline your pieces ahead of time to figure out where to include context and research?" a="I go through every single note I have, whether interview, research, whatever other personal documents, and then over the course of several days I go from top to bottom and place each relevant detail or quote or fact into the section that I think it will appear in."]

[annotation a="When I then go to write, I am starting with all the material that I think will go in the first section. So that's how I structure it, and it always changes it, but at least I'm working with more contained material as I move to each new section. I'm always thinking about, when is the moment when the reader in the narrative needs and actively desires some context?"]

[annotation a="With this piece, there was so much research and context that I wanted to put in, and I wanted it to occur at the moment in which the reader actually wanted it, as opposed to too early when they're not ready to do that kind of work without the narrative, or not too late when they needed it earlier to understand something."] The diagnosis allowed hospital administrators to separate patients with “periodic insanities” (like depression and bipolar disorder) from those who were believed to be incurable and belonged in asylums. Kraepelin hoped that schizophrenia would eventually reveal itself to be a disease like neurosyphilis, which was then responsible for a large portion of the cases of insanity in psychiatry wards. In 1913, scientists demonstrated that bacteria had infected the brains of these patients. “The diseases produced by syphilis are an object lesson,” Kraepelin wrote, four years later. “It is logical to assume that we shall succeed in uncovering the causes of many other types of insanity that can be prevented—perhaps even cured—though at present we have not the slightest clue.”

Psychiatry and neurology were originally one medical discipline, but gradually neurologists took responsibility for diseases like neurosyphilis and dementia, in which the pathology could be seen in an autopsied brain, and psychiatrists handled the illnesses that were left behind, their causes still a mystery. [annotation q="I like that your transitions never feel forced or overdone." a="I guess the ideal situation is you do not need a transitional sentence, because you've structured the paragraphs in such a way that it feels fluid. I actually never want to find myself in a situation where I'm like, 'my job right now is to write a transition sentence,' because that sort of means that I'm juxtaposing two things that don't flow together naturally."] Schizophrenia, which affects roughly one per cent of the population, became the disorder through which psychiatry worked out its identity, in part because it seemed to embody the mystery and intractability of madness, presenting basic questions about what it means to have a self. “The history of modern psychiatry is, in fact, practically synonymous with the history of schizophrenia, the quintessential form of madness in our time,” the psychologist Louis Sass has written.

But psychiatrists struggled to pinpoint a single feature that unified the diagnosis. “The great question is what is this ‘something’ that underlies the symptoms,” Karl Jaspers wrote, in 1963. [annotation q="You do such a good job of including research that advances the storyline. Can you pull back the curtain on your process for finding relevant research for this story?" a="I spent a long time just trying to even find the small field that I was looking at and figuring out who the people who specialize in it are. So a lot of that was just searching for any terms related 'autoimmune.' Then I noticed there were a couple of researchers who had honed in on this area, and then I called them and asked them for reading recommendations."]

[annotation a="And then there's historical context, which in a way is more fun, because it's like, 'OK, now that I know what the current research is, what sort of lines can I trace in terms of the history of psychiatry?' There are certain thinkers (Karl Jaspers is one of them), and I'll think: What would they say about whatever issue I might be thinking about? I'll often look up and see if they have ever written about the issue."]

[annotation a="For this piece, because the research area was so new, a lot of it did come from interviews with researchers and then asking them to point me to whatever the most relevant recent specific research was. It often involved a very small sample size."] Three decades later, the psychiatrist Ian Brockington warned that the obsession with schizophrenia had stifled clinical curiosity. “Smaller, more homogeneous entities have been sucked in by the gravity of the big idea, and annihilated,” he wrote. For decades, scientists have been searching in vain for a biological marker that would confirm whether someone has schizophrenia. Last year, in a paper in Schizophrenia Research, seventeen international experts concluded that schizophrenia was defined by no single etiology, symptom, or biological mechanism. “It is prudent to wonder if the construct around which we are organizing this information is fundamentally flawed,” the authors wrote.

Perhaps the most vivid disruption to the idea of schizophrenia as a monolithic concept began in 2007, when Josep Dalmau, a neurologist at the University of Barcelona, started publishing papers with his colleagues which described young patients with delusions, hallucinations, and sudden changes in their behavior, like agitation and inappropriate giggling. Within days or weeks, they deteriorated, developing seizures, losing consciousness, or struggling to breathe. Dalmau discovered that they had a form of encephalitis, inflammation of the brain. Their immune systems had misidentified the NMDA receptor—a protein in the brain that affects mood and memory—as foreign and produced antibodies that attacked it. When these patients were treated with immunotherapy, the majority of them recovered completely, sometimes within a month.

Thomas Pollak, a neuropsychiatrist at King’s College London and the Maudsley Hospital, told me that treating patients with the condition was “revelatory and disquieting, because some of them looked exactly like the people I’d been seeing in the psychiatry ward. It was uncanny to see that a presumably totally different pathway could lead to this.” Their illness, which was named anti-NMDA-receptor encephalitis, usually began in their early twenties, just as schizophrenia often does. The discovery of the illness put pressure on the artificial division between psychiatry and neurology—the only two fields of medicine that focus on the same organ. “Many of the symptoms are shared, but we are using different words,” Pollak said.

In “Brain on Fire,” a memoir from 2012, the journalist Susannah Cahalan—the two hundred and seventeenth person in the world to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor encephalitis—describes how for a month, in which she swung between paranoid aggression and euphoria, some doctors treated her as if she were just a difficult psychiatric patient who drank too much. “If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step,” she wrote, “how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?”

Since Dalmau’s discovery, scientists have identified more than twenty new antibodies linked to psychiatric symptoms. In 2020, in a paper in The Lancet Psychiatry, some two dozen researchers proposed a new category of illness called “autoimmune psychosis,” which may look like a milder or incomplete form of encephalitis, the illness never progressing beyond psychiatric symptoms. Christopher Bartley, the chief of a unit at the National Institute of Mental Health which investigates the role of immune dysfunction in mental illness, said that the twenty known antibodies may be a “drop in the bucket.” There could be countless targets in the brain that antibodies attack, some subset of which may alter people’s perceptions and behavior. “We have to have epistemic humility and accept that there are alternative models of disease,” Bartley said.

To find psychiatric patients who might benefit from immunotherapy, researchers have set up centers, roughly similar to the one at Columbia, at Baylor College of Medicine, in Texas; King’s College London; Uppsala University, in Sweden; and the University of Freiburg, in Germany, among other places. Some of the best research into the phenomenon has been conducted in Germany, where it’s more common for patients in a first episode of psychosis to have lumbar punctures to access their spinal fluid, which can reveal the presence of antibodies. Bartley estimates that between one and five per cent of people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia actually have an autoimmune condition—a figure he based on his own lab’s research, which has not yet been published, and also on a German study of a thousand patients, the most extensive study of autoimmune psychosis so far. “Even one percent ends up being almost a million people in the world who should be treated with a different kind of medicine,” he said. [annotation q="I found this quote really helpful because it contextualizes a statistic and helps put it in perspective. As a journalist, what are you looking for when determining which quotes to include in your stories?" a="I really did want to make it clear that there were real stakes — that yes, this is very, very rare, but the worldwide implications are quite significant."]

[annotation a="With quotes, it's often question of, ‘What is someone else able to say that I couldn't say myself?’ either because it lends credibility or authority, or because there's a level of specificity or vividness, or emotional immediacy that just straight narration wouldn't achieve."]

The pharmaceutical treatment for schizophrenia has not meaningfully changed in three-quarters of a century. Many pharmaceutical companies have left the field entirely. To get approved for the market, a medicine that works for one schizophrenic patient must have a reasonable chance of working for another. But only blunt instruments have been effective in treating an illness that takes such varied forms. Newer antipsychotics are more refined than earlier ones, with fewer side effects, but almost all of them work in the same broad way, alleviating some symptoms, like hallucinations and delusions, but not other common ones, like lack of motivation and an inability to experience pleasure. Andrew Miller, the vice-chair for research in the psychiatry department at the Emory University School of Medicine, said that the field is haunted by the early success of antipsychotics, which were discovered by serendipity, in the nineteen-fifties. “You get lulled into this sense that, because the drugs are one-size-fits-all, the disease is also one-size-fits-all,” he said. “With autoimmune psychosis, it’s so clear that there is something different. And then you start to say, ‘Hey, is it possible that there are other clear-cut mechanisms to pathology that we’re missing because we’re lumping everyone together and saying they all have the same illness?’ ”

The S.N.F. Center is embarking on a project, beginning this fall, to screen all the patients hospitalized in the New York State mental-health system for autoimmune, metabolic, and genetic disorders, to see if there are people whose symptoms can be traced to a distinct biological mechanism. “I’ve always been aware of the possibility that there are treatable causes for psychosis lurking in chronic long-term patients,” Joshua Gordon, the executive director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and a former director of the N.I.M.H., told me. “But the notion that we could make this work practically—that we could test for it—has really only become apparent in the last few years.” The S.N.F. Center will do blood work for everyone in the state’s psychiatric institutions, offering follow-up testing, such as lumbar punctures, to those with unusual results. Gordon said that, if the S.N.F. Center identifies a few dozen patients who can be treated effectively enough to leave the hospital, “we will be able to start answering the question of whether this is worth trying across the whole population of people with schizophrenia.”

Psychiatry has a legacy of implementing drastic procedures, like lobotomies, that later come to seem like folly. But it also has a history of proffering psychological theories for illnesses that are not yet understood on a biological level. Several psychiatrists told me that they’d found themselves rereading the history of the discipline, wondering, for instance, if some of those patients of Emil Kraepelin’s whose symptoms helped define schizophrenia might actually have had encephalitis or autoimmune conditions—specifically, a subset he described as having “spasmodic phenomena in the musculature of the face” and an inability to walk without falling. There were also questions about whether these diseases could explain a condition called “lethal catatonia,” which was frequently described as a manifestation of schizophrenia: these patients became extremely agitated, and then slipped into a stupor. In 1986, in a study that inadvertently revealed the dangers of conceptual inertia, the American Journal of Psychiatry reviewed nearly three hundred cases of lethal catatonia. Nearly all the patients in the study had been treated with antipsychotics, and more than half of them died.

After reading Christine’s description of her mother’s case, Steven Kushner, a co-director of the S.N.F. Center, arranged a meeting with her and Mary and Angie. Mary was living at a rehabilitation center in the Bronx while she regained her muscle strength. She was reluctant to meet another psychiatrist, she told me, but she felt she needed to “rise up to the level of my daughters’ studiousness.” In October, 2024, Kushner and three colleagues came to the rehabilitation center and spoke with Mary for three hours. “Her psychosis was gone,” Kushner said. “There was no other conclusion. There was no way that she could have the quality of the conversation that we had and willfully suppress psychotic symptoms.”

In the conversation, Mary recounted intimate details about her daughters’ pasts—what they would eat for breakfast, their arguments at recess—but she made no reference to the delusional beliefs that had dominated their lives. When Angie told the doctors that her mother had sometimes prevented her from going outside, even to do homework with classmates, Mary offered a practical explanation: there was crime in the Bronx, and she worried about Angie’s safety. To explain why she put a sock over the showerhead in her bathroom, she said that she’d hoped to filter sediment from the water. She seemed to have filled in gaps in her memory in a way that was consistent with her current identity, as a sane person. [annotation q="I noticed you've used the words ‘sane’ and ‘sanity’ at various points throughout. It seems these words used to be more commonplace than they are now. Why did they feel appropriate to use in this story?" a="I felt it was the plainest word to use in this context. I like that it does have a bit of an old-fashioned feel; I also like that it isn’t clinical. It describes a particular way of relating to and being seen in the world."]

In 1911, the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler described how schizophrenic patients are capable of a kind of “double bookkeeping”: they may simultaneously live in two “disjoint” worlds, one grounded in shared reality, the other in private delusions. They might believe that they are the center of a conspiracy involving nearly everyone they see but also make small talk at a deli and remember to give the correct change. [annotation q="I appreciate how, throughout the piece, you introduce us to complicated concepts and then explain them comprehensibly. One of the ways you do this is by providing related examples that ground the concepts in everyday life. Do you have any tips for other journalists who want to take a similar approach in their own work?" a="I just found 'double bookkeeping,' to be a very beautiful idea. I've been drawn to it in a lot of different ways, but it's hard to understand."]

[annotation a="In general, I don't like examples that much because it takes you away from the narrative. But here, it's such a profound phenomenon that I thought a sentence would illuminate the strange contradiction in which people can live in two modes of reality, which I think all of us do in some way — but not with such starkness."] It’s as if the delusions occupy their own ontological category, sealed off from the logic used to move through the world. Now, when Mary recalls her decades of illness, it is as if she is accessing only the shared-reality side of the ledger. When she talks about her time at the Bronx Psychiatric Center, her memories sound like those of a person trapped in an environment where she doesn’t belong. “Angie and I treat it as if she had two selves,” Christine said. “But Mom describes her self as continuous.”

The S.N.F. Center arranged for Mary to have a lumbar puncture, to see if she had any antibodies associated with known neuropsychiatric conditions. During the procedure, Kushner said, he could sense that Mary had once had a “fantastic professional identity: she was holding court, telling stories about the lumbar punctures she used to perform, how many patients she used to see in a day.” The test came back negative. Kushner tried to recover a frozen sample of Mary’s cerebral-spinal fluid from when she was ill—a test done on that fluid would have been more revealing—but the fluid had been discarded. He believed that the most likely explanation was that she’d had a form of autoimmune psychosis for which the associated antibody has yet to be discovered. “I think the consensus is that we are probably only aware of the tip of the iceberg of different kinds of antibodies that can produce autoimmune diseases, and certainly that holds for autoimmune psychosis,” he said.

Some people, when they recover from psychosis, understand that the strange enemies who plagued them never actually existed. Others say that they are relieved their enemies stopped pursuing them, but do not disavow the reality of the experience. “We don’t know what happens for someone who was in a psychosis for twenty years and then they are—let’s call it ‘cured,’ ” Kushner told me. “And I hesitate to use that word, because the idea that this word is ever used in psychiatry is so exceptional.” But, he said, “the treatment modified Mary’s biology such that the disease is basically gone.”

Kushner began meeting with Mary and her daughters every few weeks, in part to help monitor for possible signs of relapse. At the meetings, they mostly avoided talking about Mary’s delusions. When the subject came up, Mary was quiet, or responded in a tangential way, changing the subject. “She has this extraordinarily pleasant way of disarming the situation,” Kushner told me. The thought of having caused her daughters suffering seemed too painful to allow into her conscious awareness. “There’s not an appointment that goes by where she doesn’t remark, spontaneously, that her daughters are doing well,” he said. “I don’t think that’s by accident.”

Kushner did not believe that Mary’s memory gaps reflected cognitive impairment—on a neuropsychological exam, her memory was better than average—but he also didn’t believe that she was purposely not remembering. “To look back and say, basically, ‘Twenty years of my life were out of reality’—that would be a fundamental blow to her identity as a physician and mom,” he said, a challenge to “one of our most primitive instincts, that we can discern what is real.” When I expressed concern about how to present the disparity in memories sensitively, he told me, “I think that is the story. How do you reconcile with, and compensate for, all those missing years?” [annotation q="This passage is striking, both because you're giving us a first-person, behind-the-scenes look at your conversation with Kushner and you're revealing the heart of the story (at least according to Kushner). I'm curious, did this conversation change or crystallize your thoughts about the deeper meaning and/or focus of the story?" a="I felt like I needed to know from him that it was OK to ask these questions of Mary, and I think Christine and Angie also needed to know that. We wanted to make sure it was safe for us to be thinking about this with someone who had been so vulnerable. And so it was very helpful to hear that Kushner, too, felt this was an integral part of the story, if not THE story."]

[annotation a="There was a lot of concern that it was this taboo subject, and that talking about it would do something harmful to their mother's mind. He really was like: No, it's OK, she can handle it; she's strong."]

When people emerge from chronic delusional states, the work of psychiatry is considered complete. They are largely left on their own, with two irreconcilable views of reality. “We need to really start thinking about what happens the morning after these disorders are treated,” Kushner said.

Christine wasn’t sure if she could call her mother “cured” simply because she lacked her previous symptoms. “She’s not fixated on things like contamination and surveillance, but at no point has she said she’s left those beliefs behind,” she said. Christine felt that it was taboo to talk to her mother about who she had once been. She suffered from the intrusive thought that if she confronted her mother with destructive things she had done, Mary would somehow revert back to the patterns from that time and become psychotic again. “It is quite a traumatized-kid thing to say, but I sort of feel like, How greedy can you get? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” she told me.

Christine didn’t know how to have an ordinary conversation with her mother. For twenty years, Mary had been suspicious when Christine asked her questions about her life. Christine now felt like an adopted child “meeting my biological mom for the first time,” she said. She bought a book by an anthropologist called “The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations” to help guide their conversations. “It says, ‘Allow them to talk about what’s important,’ ” Christine said, reading from the book, during a visit to her mother’s rehabilitation center. “If no one has ever let you speak about yourself, it can be hard,” Christine went on. “You have to kind of—”

“Think,” Mary said.

“Maybe practice—gain your voice,” Christine said.

Christine, who recorded the conversation, began with warmup questions: “When you were a kid, what was your favorite activity?”

“Running,” Mary answered immediately.

“What did you like about running?”

“It makes you feel you have wings.”

“What is your favorite TV show?” Christine asked.

“ ‘Seinfeld.’ ”

“ ‘Seinfeld’!” Christine said. “What did you like about ‘Seinfeld’?”

“The absurdity.”

Every few weeks, they tackled a new theme outlined in the book: time, identity, body, belief, possessions, memory, fear. Initially, Mary answered in few words, but eventually she became much more expansive. During one session, she offered that her views on physical discipline had evolved: she no longer thought that smacking was acceptable. Christine said, “Without relating it to me or Angie, she sort of said, ‘That’s what we were taught when we were younger, but I don’t think that’s the right way to raise a kid.’ ” Christine felt that her mother may have been reflecting, obliquely, on what had happened in their home. “The ability to say, ‘I’ve changed my mind’ felt like as much as I could ask for,” Christine said.

For years, Christine had been documenting her life—keeping a journal, saving records, recording important conversations—to compensate for the fact that she, too, had blank periods in her memories, coinciding with traumatic events. [annotation q="Prior to picking Christine as one of your main sources, did you know that she had been documenting her life so meticulously? I'm curious as to whether you ever select sources based on the kinds of access you'll have to source materials like this." a="When she told me about the records she kept, that solidified my feeling that I could write a piece about her. Sometimes it's just not possible because there just aren't enough records or material, or you're relying so heavily on someone's memory that it becomes very hard. So that is definitely a large factor."]

[annotation a="With the piece I'm writing right now, for instance, there were many different subjects I could have chosen who had gone through a similar experience, but it was the person who had kept journals who I decided to focus on — and also the person who felt he had a story to tell and wanted to tell it."] She wasn’t sure if her mother’s breaks in memory—what she and Angie called “the missing years”—were different from her own. Recently, she had come across a proverb: “The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.” She felt that maybe she and her mother had reached an impasse that was actually universal—children have always formed their identities around blows that their parents don’t even realize they inflicted.

Angie felt less accommodating: “I’m happy that my mom is normal now, that we can have a deep connection and I can share my life with her. And, at the same time, I want justice for the child who was hurt by that other mother.”

Mary’s sister, Nima, told me that before her illness Mary was “very enduring, very patient.” Mary’s recommendations from professors at medical school describe her as “kind and sympathetic,” always “willing to shoulder any extra work.” When she came out of her psychosis, Mary returned to this dutiful version of herself. She and her husband, Chris, began speaking on the phone every day. Chris told me that he felt as if he were re-meeting the woman he had known in the early years of their marriage. “How come I lived all these years of darkness, and she suddenly looks normal to me?” he said. “She gives me comfort. She gives me emotional support.”

He asked her to do things, like travel to India to resolve a family financial dispute, that Christine and Angie found inappropriate. They encouraged Mary not to comply with the request. Mary had let go of her paranoia that everyone was targeting her, but they wished she could retain a wariness about people who had hurt her in the past. “Now that she’s better, you can see how the delusions protected her from people stepping on her boundaries—and she doesn’t have a replacement strategy,” Christine said.

Mary readily agreed to speak with me for this story, but she struggled to imagine that she could be anything more than a marginal presence in it. For years, she had described how people on TV were lifting ideas and plots from her life story. “It was like she was saying, ‘I’m important,’ ” Christine said. “ ‘I have value. I have things to say.’ And now we’re saying, ‘You’re important. You have value. You have things to say.’ And she can’t access that sense of deserving to be the main character.”

When I first met Mary, on a Zoom call with her and Christine and Angie, I asked if I could read her psychiatric records. [annotation q="This paragraph, and the two that follow, are so telling — in part because they reveal how trust evolved over the course of your reporting process. Why did you think it was important to 1.) highlight Mary's ambivalence and 2.) to insert yourself in the story while doing so?" a="I think because the ambivalence felt like it was so much a part of the experience — the experience of reckoning with one's life, and reckoning with the profound impact an illness has had on a person."]

[annotation a="I also felt it was expressive of Mary's love for her children — that even though she had these conflicted feelings about it, she really wanted to do it for her children. And I did feel like she cared about the scientific record and had an altruistic desire to help others. So I thought that working through the various dynamics that were both keeping her from wanting to look at those records, and then ultimately allowing her to share them, was part of the story."] She said yes but warned that they would be very boring, adding that she couldn’t remember any of her psychiatrists. “I left the memories long before I left the place,” she said. Christine suggested that we interpret this as her mother’s gentle way of saying no.

A few weeks later, Christine told me, Mary found a pile of psychiatric records in her room: “She was, like, ‘I don’t want to see them anymore, so Rachel can have them and can get rid of them.’ And I was, like, ‘Yes, Mom, but Rachel is a journalist. She’s not just a professional shredder.’ ” She said that her mom responded, “I just don’t want to see them myself.”

Mary seemed to be working out her ambivalence about her memories through this pile of papers. After speaking on Zoom every week for two months, Mary and I met at her rehabilitation center, along with Christine and Angie. [annotation q="How long did it take you to report this story?" a="I think my first conversation with Christine was maybe in late March, and then the piece was published mid-July. We were all talking (on Zoom and in person) regularly throughout that period."] Toward the end of our conversation, she stood up without explanation, walked to a cabinet, retrieved the psychiatric records, and gave them to me. “I felt like what happened was a miracle,” she told me. “If it will give anyone else confidence, I’ll go with it.”

There is almost no medical literature about the afterlife of madness, the experience of letting go of what Jaspers called the “definite idea.” Autoimmune psychosis raises the possibility of a swift, full recovery—a trajectory not typically seen in schizophrenia—and in doing so supplies a new category of witness: a person who can describe what it feels like to look back on a self that is, in some sense, defunct. And yet sanity does not mean that a person views the past without defensiveness or distortion. (To see too clearly can lead to a different kind of insanity, depression.) One of Christine’s fears was that, in talking with her mother about what she and Angie had been through, she would “rob her of the human capacity for denial.”

During one of my visits to the rehabilitation center, I asked Mary if she’d like to know how I was writing about her daughters’ memories of her illness, or if she’d prefer not to listen to that part of the story. Christine and I sat in chairs, and Mary sat on the edge of her bed, beside a wooden table on wheels that she used both for eating and as a desk. Mary quickly responded that she wanted to know what her children recalled. “I’ll go with that, because that way it will help me to remember,” she said.

“You remember things very differently, and it might be painful,” Christine said, gently. “Do you feel comfortable emotionally with that?”

“Yeah, go ahead!” Mary said. “I’ll remember like a mother. I won’t remember from your point of view.” She told her, “This is the best time for me to relate to these memories and make amends.”

Christine shared her first memory of the illness: sitting on the couch as her mother told her that the professor from medical school was in love with her.

Mary sat straight up on the bed, holding her arms over her stomach, staring intently at Christine. She had the bearing of a diligent student determined to pass a difficult test.

“You asked if they had ever put things in my hair so that”—

“Microphones,” Mary said quickly. “Microphones.” She said that the professor and his friends kept urging her to leave her husband: “They said, ‘Don’t worry about the in-laws and all—just move away and begin on your own.’ ” The friends were trying to help, but they were also harassing her, and she had no one to confide in. “I felt like she was supposed to be there for me,” Mary said, gesturing toward Christine. “But she was talking on behalf of my friends.” [annotation q="The dialogue here and in the next few grafs helps us to better understand how Mary and Christine interact. Dialogue can be a powerful tool, but only if it reveals something about the sources. How did you decide which lines of dialogue to include in this story?" a="I initially included a lot of dialogue because when I was there, I was amazed by the experience of Mary remembering and addressing directly these memories. It was so profound to sit there, and I felt so personally invested, that I initially included too much. My editor cut some of it, which was helpful because it made me realize I was spending too many sentences sort of reinforcing, layering onto, ideas or moments that could be revealed in one or two sentences."]

“You would think that I was repeating phrases that were said to me by other people.”

“I remember that very well,” Mary said.

“As a kid, I found it very hurtful.”

“I never blamed you,” Mary said. “But my classmates—I trusted them so much.”

“I was not in contact with your classmates,” Christine said, in a measured tone. “I would explain that to you, but it felt like you didn’t believe me at that time.” She asked, “Now that I’m older, do you trust me when I say they weren’t talking to me?”

Mary said it was possible that Christine had been reading her e-mails, rather than talking directly to the classmates, or that Christine’s father was the one telling Christine what to say. “She was very articulate,” Mary said. “She would do everything he would tell her.”

Mary explained that the feeling of being harassed—sometimes by people from her past, sometimes by strangers—continued until several weeks after her cancer diagnosis. “I felt like they were working through the doctors, and I had to take the chemotherapy just to hurt me and make me bald and make me lose weight and humiliate me,” she said.

But then, a few weeks into her treatment, her dreams became uncharacteristically pleasant. She kept dreaming of her sister and brothers, and they were so sensitive and loving that she thought maybe this was the prelude to a kind of heavenly afterlife. In time, the dreams began to feel more conscious, as if she were guiding the scenes herself. Lying in her hospital bed, she tried to recall details about her childhood home which she hadn’t thought about in years. “Whatever I could catch on to, I would collect,” she said.

Her reëmergence seemed to have occurred weeks before her daughters grasped what was happening. Her muscles were so weak that she couldn’t say more than a word at a time, and she wished she could communicate to her daughters, “I’m smiling. I’m all right with this.”

The thought that people were secretly trying to punish her hadn’t completely disappeared, but it felt distant, a relic of a different era. When the thought resurfaced, she said, “I take myself out of it, and I say, ‘It’s not my burden.’ I put the whole thing, like a gift basket, to God.” She’d been taught this coping mechanism as a schoolgirl, but until recently it hadn’t worked.

Christine felt both validated and disoriented by the idea that, between her and her mother, the facts were never really in question. “It is painful to hear that she still thinks I was spying on her all those years, but now she says, ‘I am so proud of my daughters—they take care of me,’ ” she said. “Maybe her interpretation is that through the power of forgiveness she can now interact with me as her loving daughter. So can I make do with that?”

For a year, Christine and Angie had been speaking on Zoom with a family therapist, to help process the changes in their mother. Recently, Mary had begun participating in the conversations, too. During a session, Christine suggested that the three of them begin a process of sharing grievances, each taking a turn. “There were different times when each of us was a flawed caretaker,” Christine said. She knew that her mother must have felt betrayed when she called the mobile crisis unit. Mary agreed: “I felt very let down because nobody trusted me enough to share that information.” Christine began by telling her, “I did my best, and yet I’m sorry I hurt you.”

Although Christine and Angie felt they had already worked out the conflicts in their own relationship, they tried “performing a kind of play,” as Christine put it: they shared resentments—Angie’s feelings of abandonment, Christine’s sense that Angie didn’t want her help—and then apologized, “so that at some point she can say the words to us.” Each emphasized that she didn’t think the other was a bad person, and that it was O.K. that they remembered things differently. They tried any exonerating phrase they could think of, “in case these might be the mental blocks for her,” Christine said.

Mary was enthusiastic about the process, but Christine sensed that she didn’t quite know what to say when it was her turn. A lifelong student of her mother’s mind, Christine had several justifications for her mother’s failure to respond in kind: she had not grown up in a culture where regrets were aired in this way; the inability to see her daughters’ perspective was a lingering cognitive symptom; in her fragile state, apologizing required a level of confidence she didn’t yet have. “At this stage of my life, I need to feel like my mother is back,” Christine told me. Later on, maybe in a few years, she said, “I’ll deal with the fact that it was an imperfect mother who was returned to me.” [annotation q="I found this quote so striking because it's both familiar and unfamiliar; many of us know what it's like to have an imperfect mother, but fewer of us can relate to the experience of having our mother ‘returned’ to us. I'm curious to hear your thoughts about this quote and why you decided to end with it." a="A few days before the piece closed, I still felt discontent with the way the piece ended, and I decided to call Christine and talk through some lingering questions. It was in that final conversation that she said the thing about having an imperfect mother returned to her. By that point I had a much clearer sense of the tension and uncertainty that the ending seemed to point to—I'd had a friend read the piece and she left it with certain questions, and I basically relayed those questions to Christine in that last conversation."]

***

Mallary Tenore Tarpley is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the award-winning author of the new memoir SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. She publishes a weekly newsletter, Write at the Edge, featuring writing tips and best practices.

The post Annotation: Rachel Aviv on reporting and writing her Pulitzer finalist story about a schizophrenia diagnosis appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When “Fela Kuti: Fear No Man” came out in the fall of 2025, I knew I would need to dedicate real time to listen. Produced by Western Sound and Talkhouse for Audible and Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, the series — which just won a Peabody Award — is a musical biography of the prolific inventor of Afrobeat, the Nigerian Fela Kuti, who died in 1997. It’s also a history of the tumultuous, often violent post-colonial powers he challenged, and what it takes for art to change minds.

The series was reported and hosted by Jad Abumrad, the creator of WNYC’s Radiolab who’s now an independent producer. Long ago, I got to report and help produce a piece with him and his team, so I know that Abumrad’s approach to narrative audio is like no one else’s. He doesn’t work from written scripts, but rather builds stories from interview tape and sound, working the connective tissue of narration around the more musical logic of characters, emotions, and ideas.

So when I finally started listening to this new series, I expected something good. What I didn’t expect was something you rarely hear much anymore in narrative podcasts: something daring and groundbreaking.

The sequence that lit up my brain occupies much of the third episode, “Enter the Shrine.” By this point in the series, we’ve learned a lot about Fela Kuti’s impact on Nigeria, and particularly on the musicians who played with him for years. We’ve learned some about his childhood in Abeokuta, in a Yoruba-speaking region north of Lagos. We’ve learned that he studied piano in London at Trinity College, before coming to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and getting exposed to the writing of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement. And we’ve learned how he returned to Nigeria in 1970 determined to bring these ideas home, setting up a housing compound and club called the Shrine that he declared to be an independent state within Lagos.

The episode “Enter the Shrine” broadens out — and slows down the plot. For more than 10 minutes in the middle of the episode, all narration falls away and we hear only a blend of voices, music and sound design that tries to replicate the “trance” that people say came over them listening to Fela Kuti’s live performances in his club. All this happens against an extended mix of his song “Army Arrangement,” a 1985 critique of Nigeria’s military junta. 

We do not hear the names of most of the people whose voices we hear swirling around us — rather they appear as a chorus, sometimes only repeating one word, at other times entire phrases. The longer this goes on, the more it infringes on a very old taboo in radio: that speakers must be identified whenever possible.

Yes, on radio we do hear the occasional “man on the street” interviews, and there are artistic “non-narrated” documentaries that flirt with unidentified speakers. Trailers and promotional clips might contain a flurry of voices to show off what a series has to offer. But generally in nonfiction audio, it’s considered rude not to identify who is speaking. That’s both for reasons of ethics, but also to avoid disorienting the listener. 

There’s one more thing to add about montages: they are labor intensive. You have to comb through a ton of tape to find the clips that “pop.” Then you have to juxtapose them against one another, trimming and rearranging clips until everything sounds right. You may add music, you may subtract it. You probably should play each version of the sequence for others to make sure you’re not deluded about whether it works. All told, building an effective montage — especially a long montage — requires a lot alchemy, and acceptance that many of your attempts will fail.

I had to know how the montage sequence in "Enter the Shrine" came about — and more importantly, all the editorial arguments that surely went into its construction. So I called up Jad Abumrad and his editor, Ben Adair. (Full disclosure: in addition to reporting an episode of “Radiolab,” I once worked with Ben Adair at American Public Media and later gave notes on a series he produced with Pushkin Industries, “Lost Hills.” I’m also one of the editors on a forthcoming narrative series with Pushkin, Audible, and Higher Ground Productions).

Right away, Abumrad and Adair told me something I’d suspected — that the elaborate, sound-rich montage sequence that’s now in their third episode was originally intended as the start of the series.

“One of the big questions of the series was like, what is the first episode? Even as I say that question out loud, my stomach gets a certain layer of acid to it,” Abumrad said. “Because we lived with that question for so long.”

He built the montage set in the Shrine, but then the notes came back: this material was too confusing without context. Who was everybody? Why were they there? And where was Fela Kuti?

Abumrad and Adair took that feedback and moved the sequence further into the series. 

Even within the episode itself, we get about ten minutes of preparation: we hear a sonic tour of Lagos, we hear where Fela’s Shrine was situated and how it’s spoken of today, and we hear about Fela’s elaborate preparations to go on stage each night — followed by a procession to the club, sometimes on a donkey.

What follows is a transcript of the montage sequence from “Enter the Shrine,” annotated with parts of our conversation. I’d advise listening to the episode (and ideally the two that come before it), and/or reading along as you listen. This transcript starts after the first ad break in the episode, approximately at the 11:25 mark.

***

Script Annotation: Episode 3, ‘Enter the Shrine’

[~11:25] Jad Abumrad: This is Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.

Before we go back into the Shrine — well first, let me give you a picture. 

[annotation a="Jad Abumrad: I do remember we had an edit. We were sitting at my kitchen table downstairs and we had the script, and I think we had, at that point, decided this was the third episode. And Ben was like, ‘You need to talk about where (the Shrine) is in Lagos and the importance of the location.’ Ben always had a really good ability to think on the level of the series. And (about) what people need to experience at any given point of the series, so that they can go where you want them to go. This particular episode finally made sense (when) we put in context that people needed."]

It is an open-air club, fits about 500 people. There’s this tin roof over the stage, but no roof over the dance floor.

And to either side of the stage are four Studio 54-ish “cages” where dancers dance. 

[annotation a="Ben Adair: We went to Nigeria for three weeks and interviewed so many people there. We interviewed three of (Fela’s) — as far as we know — four remaining wives. Two of them had never spoken to the press before."]

Also to one side there is an altar, where Fela had a picture of his mother, a picture of Malcolm X, and a picture of Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana.

But I’ll be honest, what’s most interesting to me is not so much the Shrine itself — I mean, it was a club — but rather what happened to people when they went inside of it.

[annotation a="Jad Abumrad: This episode was born from recognizing a pattern. Which was that people talk about being at the Shrine, and the experience of falling into a kind of hail of music. We just kept hearing that, and so it felt important. That (insight) came after we had really finished reporting."]

Because — do you know how people talk about psilocybin now? Right, like we all have one of those friends who did some mushrooms and it changed their life and they can't stop talking about it. And there is a way to explain those experiences — you can say, neurochemistry, right? There’s something about these drugs, they rewire your brain. Fine.

We ran into so many people who described listening to Fela's music, at the Shrine, in the same way! That it had the same effect on them. Which is a little harder to explain. Though, I will try in a moment.

But first, let's reenter the Shrine from their perspective. 

(crowd noises)

[annotation q="Julia Barton: How many hours of tape did you have for this series?" a="Jad Abumrad: At least 200… We used (the audio and video editing app) Descript to make very, very low-res builds, just string-outs of tape. Just to hear how the voices talk to each other, and if they like the order that you've put them in. Then there was a lot of ‘Ctrl+Fing’ as we zeroed in on certain keywords that people would use. It was really easy to figure out who in our many, many interviews had said what."] 

[annotation a="Once (you are mixing) in ProTools, then you close that part of your brain and you just try to respond to the music and align the tape, so it feels like it's also music."]

[annotation a="Ben Adair: Jad is also a composer. And so there's a lot happening with the music in terms of looping and tuning the voices, tuning other sorts of sound around the sound beds that are in it."]

And as you're listening, see if you can let yourself notice: What are you paying attention to? How does that change over time?

[annotation q="Julia Barton: Was this line about noticing part of the framing?" a="Jad Abumrad: That (came from) my therapist! Because we had a whole conversation where he was like, ‘I think what you're doing is a guided fantasy. And if you're going to give people a guided fantasy, you need to instruct them about how and what to notice as they're going through it.’"]

At one AM, Fela arrives on his donkey, takes the stage with 35 other musicians and he begins a riff … that will last most of the night.

Woman 1 (Marilyn Nance):

My experience in being in the Shrine was like, like the music was like inside of me. It was all around, it was just like, you know, being hypnotized. Like you are all inside the music.

Woman 2 (Nina Darnton):

A kind of hypnotic dancing.

Man 1 (Duro Ikujenyo):

React to music, dancing and listening. (repeats under)

Woman 3 (Lorraine Animashaun):

I remember being lost in music. All the people are smoking around me and they were in a mist. So you're in a different world.

(Keyboard, chorus sings)

[annotation q="Julia: You go hard on the whole chorus, man-on-the-street approach." a="Ben: (At one point) everyone was going to be introduced during this dance party — (sarcastically) ‘Let's interrupt the party to make sure that everybody's introduced to everybody else.’"]

[annotation q="Julia: So did you do anything before the sequence to help alleviate that anxiety?" a="Ben: Yeah (we added) two episodes before it."]

Woman 4 (Rosa Cuoto):

This idea of the spiral (spiral, spiral). And circles (circles, circles). It's another way to deal with time.

Man 2 (Dele Sosimi):

I would describe it as in a swirl. You know, when, when you have a cyclone, it starts off as this little thing that builds up and it builds up. The more you allow it to circulate, it just starts to get bigger.

(Vocal montage mix begins, repeating elements from voices above)

[annotation a="Ben: We had permission to use some (of Fela Kuti's) music very liberally. We could use it to remix. Or we could remix it, and we could edit it however we wanted. A lot of artists would never allow that."]

VOICES:

(Spiral, spiral, spiral)

(Get bigger. Get bigger, get bigger, get bigger)

(Circle)

(Get bigger, get bigger, get bigger)

(Circle)

(Get, get bigger, get bigger, get bigger)

(music fades under)

[annotation a="Jad: It was really just trying to get into the internal mindscape of the people who would be lost in the trance. Like the way in which the building could start to breathe, you know, and everything could start to spiral and spin around your head. You lose track of where you end and someone else begins, which was an idea everyone kept talking about."]

Man 3 (Bode Omojola):

Fela starts his music to enchant. This repetitive pattern, the power of the musical ostinato. It's part of that enchanting strategy. You've been captured.

(Enter horn section, vocal montage interspersed)

Man 4 (Brian Eno):

I thought this is really an amazing new form of music. It was, it was almost like a field of sound that sits there for a long time. And you explore it. You kind of enter it, and live in it. This is a place, this isn't a song.

[annotation a="Ben: In the case of this episode, I do think that the audience missed a few people (in the montage) who were really important. There's a great quote from Brian Eno that comes right in the middle of it. Knowing that's Brian Eno, I think it has a little more weight to it. In the bonus episode (Episode 13), he expands on that, and it's super interesting to hear the huge effect that Fela's music had on him as a musician and as a producer."]

Man 5 (John Darnton):

And meanwhile the rhythm section’s keeping going (going, going, going).

(horn section reenters)

Man 4:

This is a place. And when you start listening to it, you are entering into that place.

Woman 1:

Hypnotized. Like the music was like inside of me, it was all around. And it was just like being hypnotized.

(Montage of multiple voices)

Man 6 (Michael Veal):

And so with Fela, you could tell that there was a different kind of intention behind this paradigm of groove. The music is so nasty, you have to dance. But that's just the ground level. 'Cause why would you play a song for 30 minutes or 40 minutes unless you really have something to say?

(horn section mixed with full vocal montage)

[annotation a="Jad: One of the members of our team, Ruby Walsh, had made a draft where she had ‘Army Arrangement’ and a couple of people (speaking) on top of it. The moment that we both heard it, we were like, is this the first episode? It had a sparkle to it, an energy that felt inviting in a way. She really fought for us to make it the first episode and that spark was us recognizing that she was right."]

Man 5:

And then suddenly —

(vocal montage repeats, begins to fade under)

Man 5:

After half an hour, 40 minutes…he starts singing.

[annotation a="Jad: The danger in this kind of thing would be to simply talk about the music, right? But the music itself is so pregnant with all of the ideas. You have to put people in it. So we had this idea of: the series was like a river, and each of the episodes was a little eddy in the river. The river was the music, right?"]

[annotation a="Ben: The producer in me was like, what? How? How is this gonna work? But we kept coming back to it, because it is exactly right: the music has to be the guiding force. Jad talks in a bunch of different moments in the podcast about this torrent of music that Fela was creating, that was just streaming out of him and around Lagos and around the world. So why not have that be the guiding principle?"]

(vocal section of “Army Arrangement” featuring Fela Kuti begins)

Whether you like or you don’t like
After you hear this true talk
Whether you like or you don't like
After you hear this true talk
If you like it good (Ge ge)
If you no like it you hang (Ge ge)
If you like it good (Ge ge)
If you no like it you hang (Ge ge)
If you hang you go die (Ge ge)
You go die for nothing (Ge ge)
We go carry your body, go police station
You die wrongfully

(song pauses)

Man 7 (Saul Williams):

When his voice came in, I was like, what the hell? There are words too?

(Fela sings):

All of them Kirikiri
Ten to fifteen years in jail
After one year inside jail
Civilian government take over

(music continues under, partly blurred)

Man 7 (Saul Williams):

Hold up, hold up. What is this?

Man 5 (John Darnton):

He sings in a gravelly, low pitched voice — and sings about things that no one else ever even mentioned. Any newspaper, any columnist.

Woman 5 (Stephanie Shonekan):

He talks about the United Nations, he talks about Thatcher, he talks about Reagan. It’s really, everything is like a history lesson.

Man 5 (John Darnton):

You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air floating from the stage, like thought balloons, and then sinking into somebody's skull.

(Music transition to celeste-like notes)

Woman 5:

I just felt, Where has my mind been all, you know, all, all my life? Complete surprise. Like —

Man 8 (Moses Ochonu):

I, I was immediately captivated.

Woman 5:

— why did we not know this? Why aren't we thinking about this stuff?

Man 9 (Lemi Ghariokwu):

When Fela sang into a microphone, I saw the — the light.

Woman 5:

I was just like, you know, like —

Man 8:

It sucks you in. And then it has that lightbulb effect on you. You come into yourself, and you know, it's a moment of, uh, introspection too, because you, you realize that you haven't been as attuned as you probably should have.

Woman 5:

All the stuff he was singing was just new to me. You know, I was just learning so much about Nigerian history through Fela, that I had not learned in school.

(music, celeste-like to an ad break)

[annotation q="Julia: Can you talk about how little tape there is of Fela in the series?" a="Jad: He’s not one of those guys that you get to know by listening to him talk."]

[annotation a="Ben: Even when he's recorded, he's usually giving a lecture or giving an interview. He is reciting political points. Even the tape that exists is not really, like Jad’s saying, tape where he reveals himself."]

[annotation a="Jad: It was a real frustration through the process. I felt like we were circling, and we couldn't get close enough. We couldn't get in his head. (After building the first episode) I realized I should stop thinking of Fela as a psyche that I need to get inside of. He's an energy source that is flowing through people. And this series is about watching the energy."]

[ad break]

This is Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. Before we go on, the voices you just heard before the break, in addition to Michael Veal and John Darnton, were Stephanie Shonekan and Bode Omojola, both professors of ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland and Mount Holyoke, respectively. Afrobeat musicians Dele Sosimi, and Duro Ikujenyo. Activist, filmmaker, musician Saul Williams. Musician and producer, Brian Eno. Artist Lemi Ghariokwu. Photographer Marilyn Nance. Designer Lorraine Animashaun, and our advisor, Moses Ochonu, who's a professor of history and my colleague at Vanderbilt University. 

[annotation a="Ben: There's that whole section, I don't know how long — a minute and a half? — of just saying the names of all the people that you heard. And that irked some people. And (at one point) they wanted us to bring that up (into the montage)."]

He was one of the last voices you heard, and I asked him –

Jad [in tape]: You said that the music made you feel like you needed to tune into things you hadn't been tuning into. Like what?

Moses Ochonu: Uh, you know, when I was growing up in Nigeria, you know, we would hear about corruption, about thousands of naira being embezzled by some politician or government officials. And we would open our mouths in shock because our brains couldn't compute how one person would make off with thousands of naira. How would the person carry this money? What, what would they put it in? In some boxes and in some cars? You know, physically, how would they move this money? You know, we just couldn't fathom it.

And then over time we started hearing about millions, not thousands anymore, then billions. And now, as we speak, the corruption numbers have entered the trillions.

That over time has had a numbing effect, a dulling effect. The shock value, the kind of shock that I felt as a child growing up in Nigeria, the moral outrage that I felt, that's gone, that's long gone.

Jad: And that is what would come back when you heard his songs.

Moses: Right. Exactly.

Moses said that Fela's music would remind him of the insanity that he had been sane-washed into believing was normal. And I think there's something really interesting about how the music can move him to that thought. 

Music is all about structure, right? Structuring the relationship between notes and chords and melodies. But here, you have structure on an entirely different level, almost like a phenomenological structure. 

[annotation a="Jad: I was talking to my therapist and I was trying to tell him the story of this episode — and he was like, ‘So why? What did they all experience?’ We ended up getting into a whole thing about that, and I was like, ‘Oh, I need to put this in.’ … This sort of music lecture, about the ostinato, that sort of unpacks what you've just experienced."]

For the first 15 minutes, it's just loops, ostinatos going round and round.

Bode Omojola (Man 3): The power of the musical ostinato.

“Ostinato”in Italian by the way, means basically “stubborn.” The loops stubbornly repeat, and at first it's not so bad. It's kind of grounding, actually. But then, the natural response is then to want some change. Like, “can we go to the next section now? Please. Please? No?”

This is what the Buddhists call our monkey mind. Our monkey mind wants distraction. It wants anything to keep us from having to live with our own thoughts. But the music doesn't give us that. It doesn't change. It only builds. 

Layers get added, piece by piece, instrument by instrument. And at some point, a few minutes in, 

(repeating music resumes)

You arrive at this mysterious moment where you stop wanting it to change. This is phase two. Now that part of you that wants novelty starts to notice things like, “Whoa, listen to all the interlocking parts of this groove.”

[annotation a="Ben: One of the first very first conversations that we had about making this show, Jad had this desire he expressed about wanting to do something that sounded just so different. And the way he put that, even in the early meetings, was: Making a documentary that you could dance to. I think that becomes the most palpable in this episode, Episode 3."]

Dele Sosimi (Man 2): Whoa, the ostinatos — they're like machine gears. They don't grind. The gears are timed in between each other, so they just subtly lift fit into the little gaps and holes like Tetris.

The way that the conga plays off the shaker, call and response, the way that the three guitar lines spin around endlessly like gears in a higher-level clock. My God, this groove is a whole world.

(musical transition, celeste re-enters)

This is the trance state. Usually when we talk about trance, we mean a kind of dulling of our senses, but actually it's the opposite. It's the state of hyper focus.

You are noticing things. You're hearing things you've never heard before, because your neurons are rewired. You are open. And it is at this very moment that Fela begins to sing.

Saul Williams (Man 7): I was like, what the hell? There are words too?

In comes his voice booming like the voice of God. This is phase three. And because you are open, you really hear what he is saying.

John Darnton (Man 5): You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air floating from the stage like thought balloons and then sinking into somebody's skull.

And in that way, as the final piece of this progression, he gives you a new conception of what your life can be —

Lemi Ghariokwu (Man 9): I saw the light.

That you can now dance to.

[annotation a="Ben: I remember like at one of our last meetings, you know, just laughing out of nowhere. And Jad's like, ‘What are you laughing at?’ I'm like, ‘Dude, you did it. You made a documentary that we could dance to.’"]

(“Army Arrangement”/vocal montage up for several beats, then running under low)

Fela Kuti: My music, my main… my main preoccupation right now, music is a small part of it.

This is a clip from an interview Fela gave in 1988 where he describes his musical form, almost as this vehicle designed to move people, step by step by step, so that they can hear what he has to say.

Interviewer: Is your music kind of a tool?

Fela: It’s a weapon. It’s a weapon to say, so I can talk when I have the chance to. consider music to be effective like a weapon, to inform people. My music is like an attraction to inform people. It is the information side of the music that is important.

[annotation a="Jad: That was one of the best moments, where you really feel like he was philosophically addressing the thing that we had just built with music. Where he's extremely insightful is when he talks about the ‘musical contraption,’ as he called it — the thing built with his music. He knew what he was doing, you know?"] 

(Music out, replaced by a swirling sound)

In that same interview, he suggested there’s something else going on here too. That has to do with time itself.

(voice: Circle, circle, circle…)

Fela: If anyone tells me 20 years is a long time, I would tell them no. Time is meaningless unless you want to understand what time is about. There is time for everything.

***

Julia Barton is a longtime audio story editor and author of a newsletter about broadcast history, Continuous Wave. She's worked with nonfiction authors including Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, Jill Lepore, and Michael Spector to create original podcasts and audiobooks. Barton completed a Nieman Fellowship in 2024. Her work can be found at RadioWright.com.

The post How Jad Abumrad transports listeners to a legendary club in Lagos for the acclaimed podcast, ‘Fela Kuti: Fear No Man’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

It started with a photograph. While doing research for an article about people trying to escape land during the pandemic, Sophie Elmhirst came across a website featuring a compendium of castaway tales from decades past. The stories were accompanied by photographs, mostly of lone men who had ventured out to sea. But there was one that stopped Elmhirst in her tracks: a black-and-white photo of a cheerful-looking woman and man. They were the only couple pictured.

“It touched various curious nerves, I suppose, and I was intrigued,” said Elmhirst, a longtime journalist.

She soon learned the incredible story of the man and woman, named Maurice and Maralyn Bailey. In 1972, the young married couple left behind their lives in England and set sail for New Zealand in their boat, the Auralyn. Nine months into their voyage, deep in the Pacific Ocean, a breaching whale struck and sank their boat. The couple was left adrift on a life raft and dinghy for seven arduous weeks and nearly died before being rescued in June 1973.

Journalists had covered the Baileys’ rescue at the time, but Elmhirst had never heard of them.

“It seemed like such an extreme, extraordinary story,” said Elmhirst, who’s based in London. “Obviously, it had been a big story in its time, but had just been completely forgotten. Or at least, whenever I mentioned it to anyone of my generation, no one remembered.”  

Elmhirst found herself wanting to change that. She started reporting on the Baileys’ story and uncovered so many details that she realized she had enough material for a book. What resulted was “A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck,” a narrative nonfiction book that became a runaway New York Times bestseller. The New Yorker, NPR, TIME Magazine, Vogue and The New York Times all named it a Best Book of 2025.

“A Marriage at Sea” is gripping not just because of the story itself, but because of how Elmhirst tells it. The book reads like fiction, with a propulsive plot that situates us side by side with Maurice and Maralyn as they fight for survival.

Elmhirst has long appreciated true stories that read like fiction and was intrigued by the idea of approaching her debut book as “a nonfiction novel.”

“I wanted it to read as smoothly and as perceptively as fiction as possible, and for it to be really rooted in character and story,” said Elmhirst, who has spent the past 10 years of her career writing longform pieces. She knew that Maurice and Maralyn’s story warranted a book, and not just a longform piece, in part because of all the access and source materials at her disposal. Though Maurice and Maralyn had already passed away before Elmhirst began writing, some of their friends and family were still alive and willing to be interviewed.  

Elmhirst also had diaries, letters, photographs, old media coverage, documentaries, and the Baileys’ own books to draw upon. These materials helped her to not only accurately piece together the story of the shipwreck but to also explore a deeper layer of interiority — hard truths around who we become under the most extreme circumstances and how we find the strength to carry on.

As Elmhirst aptly writes, “It is not so much the feats of endurance that keep people alive, so much as the absence of surrender.”

There were many times when Maurice was ready to surrender, and he considered taking his own life. But Maralyn buoyed him. She persevered, holding steadfast that they would eventually be rescued. Elmhirst sensed this determination from Maralyn’s diaries, which were filled with practical lists and aspirational ideas about all that she would one day do once back on land. A journalist’s goldmine, the diary entries had been photographed and were freely available online.

“They don't necessarily give you what you hope diaries will give you, which is that great insight into the sort of heart and soul and mind of someone … but their limitations were also their strength,” Elmhirst told me. “I loved all of the extraneous stuff that was in them that I felt like was very reflective of Maralyn as a person — the drawings that she does, the menus that she writes out, the plans that she's always making, the references she makes, things she misses. I guess it's seeing a mind at work, actually.”

Elmhirst wove the journal entries and other source materials into her descriptions of Maurice and Maralyn so seamlessly that you can’t help but wonder if she was on the same voyage, witnessing every event firsthand. This firsthand feeling also stems from the writing itself, which is never wishy-washy. Instead of couching her descriptions with qualifiers (e.g. “Maurice must have thought,” or “Maralyn likely wondered”), Elmhirst wrote with authority about the Baileys’ thoughts, observations and actions.

“This was a stylistic choice. It was being given the confidence by my editor to do it in a certain way — to write that interiority,” Elmhirst said. “You’re not saying anything that didn’t happen, but you’re doing it in a mode where you’re seeing it through the characters’ eyes. I’m sure there would be purists who would say that I pushed that maybe a bit too far, but I felt like I had enough to go on.”

Elmhirst’s reporting helped her to accurately recreate immersive scenes. She visited the places where Maurice and Maralyn grew up, the bungalow where they lived after getting married, and the garden they tended together. She also spent a considerable amount of time by the water. She would sit by the ponds near her home in London, and during a trip to Wales, she found herself “staring at the sea and trying to find different ways of describing it.”

She even applied for a grant to help fund a sailing trip off the south coast of England so she could experience life on the water.  

“I did not get the grant, which is fair enough,” she said with a laugh.

Elmhirst is humble about the book’s success, saying it’s “so crazy” to see the response it’s gotten. Her work is one of the latest examples of books that take an untold or forgotten story from the past and report it out in the present. Other examples include the bestselling books “Hidden Figures” by Margot Lee Shetterly, “The Art Thief” by Michael Finkel, “The Boys in the Boat” by Daniel James Brown, and “Seabiscuit” by Laura Hillenbrand.

Elmhirst advises writers who want to pursue these types of books to look for shards.

“You don’t find it as a perfect crystal vase. You find shards, and you have to fit them together,” Elmhirst said. “You find a lot of waste material that doesn’t fit into the vase that you have to get rid of, and you do a lot of your own work to fill out the structure — to turn that shard into something.”     

When writing “A Marriage at Sea,” Elmhirst laid out all her shards on the page. She’s the type of writer who feels wedded to source material, so much so that she compiles her transcripts and notes into a long document and then starts writing around them. During the revision process, she finesses the story and puts it in her own words.

“It all comes together in the revision,” said Elmhirst, who kept photographs of Maurice and Maralyn propped up on the window ledge in front of her as she wrote. “I’m a real obsessive reviser; I go over and over it many, many times, and that’s when my best writing happens.”  

To learn more about Elmhirst’s process, I asked her to annotate an excerpt from the first chapter of “A Marriage at Sea,” which begins in medias res, with a scene of the whale crashing into Maurice and Maralyn’s boat. Below, Elmhirst gives us an inside look at the writing behind it.

Excerpt: A Marriage at Sea, Chapter 1

One 

4 March 1973 

Maralyn looked out at emptiness. There was little to see except the water, shifting from black to blue as the sun rose. A clear sky, the ocean, and themselves: a small boat, sailing west. [annotation q="MT: This line seems to foreshadow what's to come — the shift from time as automatic to agonizing. Would you agree?" a ="SE: I was very interested in how time changed in their story, from the ultra-regulated routine of their life on the boat to a kind of formless expanse once they were adrift. I think a large part of how they survived was Maralyn's insistence on maintaining rhythm and habit, structuring the shape of the days and the order of meals when it would have been easy to surrender to the nothingness of their existence. (She determinedly imagines their future too, never abandoning the idea that they had one — which was another way of contending with the black hole of time on the raft.)"]  

[annotation a="Anyway, here I think wanted to set up the notion of that rigid routine in order to almost immediately break it apart with the collision."]

At seven o’clock, Maralyn left her watch on deck and went down to the cabin. Maurice was still asleep in his bunk, stirring a little. The morning would follow the certain rhythms of every other morning: coffee and breakfast, then all the checks and jobs a boat requires. A formula so practised after months at sea that it had become as automatic as time. 

Except this morning, in the precise moment that Maralyn put her hand on Maurice to wake him, they felt a crack, a jolt, the sound of a gun going off, as if the violence had come from her touch. The noise split the air. Books leapt off the shelves. Cutlery flew. [annotation q="These first few paragraphs are so immersive. From a journalistic standpoint, how did you go about recreating this scene, and which source materials did you rely on?" a="I was lucky: I had access to rich material and there were multiple versions of this scene to draw on. First, I turned to their own written accounts in Maralyn's contemporaneous diary, their published book ‘117 Days Adrift’ and Maurice's self-published letters written much later in life, after Maralyn died. Then there were the versions they gave to the media in press and radio interviews and various documentaries over the years. Finally, their old friend Colin Foskett (who sailed with them on a subsequent voyage and appears in the book) showed me a series of incredible photographs that Maralyn took shortly after the collision — of their boat sinking and of Maurice in the raft. These not only gave me vivid detail but also a kind of atmosphere — the utter loneliness of their situation and the emptiness around them."] 

[annotation a="As for the immersion: I wanted the opening to be as dramatic as possible to throw the reader right into the centre of the crisis. But it took me a while, if I'm honest, to give myself the permission to write it like this. The voice seemed performative, almost anti-journalistic, in that I obviously wasn't there witnessing the scene myself. I knew it would require a leap of faith for me as a writer even though the nonfiction novel, or narrative nonfiction, or whatever you want it to call it, is hardly a new form. I'm a longtime fan of it as a reader, but new to it as a writer, and it felt distinctly odd at first and dangerously (and thrillingly) close to that wavering boundary between fiction and nonfiction. Nothing is invented, but it's a stylistic decision to unfold the action in this way, without constantly caveating it with reference to sources. I think it makes the experience more pleasurable and immediate for the reader — at least I hope it does — but you have to let go of some fairly fundamental journalistic habits and guardrails along the way."]

They thought of their boat as their child. To hear her wood tear and splinter was like hearing the pained scream of an infant. 

Up on deck, they discovered the cause. A whale was next to them in the ocean, massive and alive. Water was streaming down the dark cliffs of its body as it twisted and writhed. It looked as if it were trying to climb out of the waves, hauling its dark bulk up, then smashing back down, a meteor landing in the ocean, showering spray. Its tail, ten feet across the flukes, was beating at the surface in a kind of fury. Blood poured from its body into the water. 

Maralyn couldn’t understand where it had come from. She’d just been up here, waiting for the dawn, and seen nothing but a fishing boat when she’d taken over from Maurice at three. You don’t miss a whale. 

But perhaps you do. [annotation q="You use the second person really effectively here and in later chapters. Why did you choose to use it here?" a="I'm not sure the second person is a good habit, but I think I was instinctively trying to move from a distant narrative voice into a more intimate register, and also to sidle up a little more closely to both Maurice and Maralyn's interior worlds. I wanted their different reactions to the whale to reveal not just the particular ways they thought, but something of their character and tone: her great empathy for the whale contrasted with his instinct to categorize and deal in facts."] It must have risen from the depths just after she’d gone down the ladder and broken the surface right where they were. She couldn’t bear the thought that they’d somehow hurt the creature. It seemed uncanny that in the entirety of the Pacific this would be the spot it chose. 

What did it matter? There it was. A sperm whale, Maurice could tell, from the blunt, square block of its head. He knew his whales. It was forty feet long, he guessed; a good ten feet longer than their boat. 

This close, it was difficult to take in. Whales were best admired from a distance, like certain kinds of paintings. He could identify its parts—the blowhole, the lower jaw, the pectoral fin—but they didn’t seem to add up to a coherent whole. The creature was out of proportion, unnatural in its size. One rogue swipe of its tail and they would be cleaved in two. It was monstrous, he thought. Only compared with them. 

The whale was still thrashing, as if it were trying to shake something off, or escape its own body. It was dying, Maurice realised. These were its death throes. 

And then it was gone, sucked into the unknown darkness of the ocean. It would likely die down there, blood leaking into the water, alerting other creatures to its presence. Great whites and blue sharks would gather, rip it apart, and feast on its blubber. [annotation q="In this sentence, I sensed that you likely consulted research and literature about sea creatures, including the whale you write about here and the turtles that become pivotal later on. Did you do a lot of reading about sea life, and if so, how did you incorporate your findings in ways that would enhance the narrative rather than distract from it?" a="I read a mixed bag of ‘Moby Dick’ and two wonderful books by Rachel Carson on the ocean, as well as sailing manuals and accounts of Darwin's travels to the Galapagos. I also watched plenty of documentaries about the Pacific and its wildlife so I could see how the creatures moved in the water. It's tempting to pour all your wildly irrelevant research into a book, but that's why I like the discipline of story: I tried to only use the parts that supported the narrative, or colored in a scene. I don't know If I succeeded, but the aim was for the reader never to feel like they were being instructed. Or to put it another way, I wanted to avoid having those information-heavy paragraphs which as a reader I tend to skip over. (But maybe that's just me.)"]

They stared at where it had been, the surface marked by dissolving trails of blood. Such stillness, after a performance like that. 

𛲗

[annotation q="You have visible line breaks (in the shape of a wave) here and throughout each chapter, and they usually appear after a compelling line. Why was it important to you to provide so many breaks?" a="I think it's a desire for a little pause in time or space: to allow for a jump either in perspective or in the action itself. I find a lot of effort can go into connecting things in writing which don't actually need to be connected, and you end up with a sort of artificial arrangement, or a sense of meaning being forced to keep the narrative going when it would have been much simpler and more pleasurable for the reader to come to a rest, have a break, and then start afresh."] 

[annotation a="And yes: I like the effect it has on the line before the break. The space allows that final thought to reverberate a little longer. But I suspect it's a trick that can definitely be overused. Also, I wonder if it's a giveaway sign of a slightly nervous first-time author, who doesn't quite trust themselves to say what they want to say without landing on a line and building various bits of architecture and space around it on the page to hammer it home."] 

[annotation a="To be honest, it might also just be indicative of my short attention span — I like breaks as a reader as much as I do as a writer. My brain can only hold on to a thought for so long."]

Wait. The crack. Never mind the whale. [annotation q="You do a great job of varying your sentence lengths, which no doubt helps with pacing. Why the short sentences here?" a="I like variety, I guess, and especially here where a sense of pace and drama felt important. Short sentences helped create that feeling of urgency, but also of that tight feeling of a racing mind in crisis."]

Down in the cabin, water was already coming up through the floorboards. How long had they wasted up on deck, staring at the whale! Maralyn worked the pump while Maurice splashed around searching for the damage. There it was: a hole below the waterline near the galley, about eighteen inches long, twelve inches wide, the size of a briefcase. 

Maurice was shouting. Get the spare jib sheet. Clip it to the corner of the head sail. Lower it over the bow and drag it to cover the hole, then make it fast at both ends to secure it. The pressure from the ocean should force the sheet into the hole, plugging it. He adjusted the sails to keep the boat moving at about two to three knots, and they hurried back down below deck. 

Maralyn kept pumping, hoping the water level would now go down. But the sheet wasn’t working; the water kept rising. They needed a way of plugging the leak from the inside. Maralyn found clothes, cushions, and blankets and stuffed them into the hole. That didn’t work either. Perhaps there was another hole they hadn’t found. Some unseen damage where the water was pouring in. [annotation q="You use a fragment here and throughout other parts of the book. We're often taught (in school) to avoid fragments. But as we grow older and more experienced, we learn how to skillfully break with convention, as you've done here. Why do you use fragments, and how do you think they can be effective?" a="Ha, well, now is probably the time to admit that I was never taught writing in any formal sense — I didn't do a postgrad or MFA or a journalism course. So I don't have those kind of fixed rules in my head, which can be a good and liberating thing but also, at times, a bad thing... It means I write by ear in a way — and in this example I liked the slightly breathless, urgent pace a fragment gave to the narrative."] 

[annotation a="More generally, and as a reader, I like writing that can switch between registers, that isn't overly smooth or consistent, but almost reads like a more eloquent version of speech, or at least mimics some of the irregularities of how we speak and think. Fragments can help with that, but they're a trick that can be overused. I rewrote this opening section many times — it's often the way with openings — and the result can be prose that feels a little overworked, and quite staccato. Now when I read it, I wonder if it could do with some loosening up!"] It was too late to find it now. The water was up to their knees, and the cupboards were starting to spring open, unleashing their contents. Eggs and tins bobbed around them. They looked at each other. 

Maurice fetched the life raft and the dinghy, then collected as many freshwater containers as he could find. Maralyn waded round the galley, filling two sail bags with their things. Two plastic bowls, a bucket, their emergency bag, passports, a camera, a torch, their oilskins, her diary, two books, two dictionaries, and Maurice’s navigational tools: his Nautical Almanac and Sight Reduction Tables, his chart, sextant, compass, and logbook. 

They worked fast and in silence, strangely calm as the water rose. It wasn’t easy, gathering possessions from a vessel filling with ocean. Ten minutes, it took, to gather what they could. Then they climbed off the boat into the dinghy. 

Around them the Pacific was moving gently. Maralyn watched cushions she’d spent hours embroidering float away on the waves. Their boat settled low in the ocean, then lower. [annotation q="I appreciate how you zoom out here to show us the Pacific. You do this so gracefully throughout — zooming in so we can see Maralyn and Maurice up-close, and zooming out to show the vastness of the ocean. This gives your writing a cinematic effect. Why did you decide to zoom in and out throughout this chapter?" a="I think I felt about space similarly to how I felt about time: part of the challenge of this part of their story was to create a sense of the expanse around them, of what it would be like to wake up day after day to the never-ending, blank ocean. Their world was tiny, trapped on a raft, but it was also vast. And that strange contrast demanded a kind of varying perspective, between the micro-detail of their day-to-day existence and the endlessness of the night sky and the ocean. In a way, the only way you could understand how tiny and vulnerable and lost they were was to zoom right out until you could hardly see them at all. Having that sense of scale added another layer to the intimacy and claustrophobia of their life on the raft, and this was what interested me most of all — the idea of living in such inescapable proximity to your partner while surrounded by the terror of infinite empty space."]

Maralyn found her camera and took a picture of Maurice, who was sitting in front of her, shirtless. He turned back to look at her, every muscle of his back delineated under the harsh glare of the sun, wearing an expression not of fear, not yet, but of a kind of taut blankness, as if he had not quite grasped what was taking place, the sight of their boat tipping to one side as she sank in the middle of the ocean. [annotation q="Here we have a relatively long sentence. You could have just as easily written this as two or three sentences. Was the longer sentence intentional, and if so, what effect did you want it to have?" a="Yes, I like the way a long sentence can build and gather pace, as if it can create its own drama within its clauses. There was also something about burying that ‘not yet’ in a flurry of detail and observation — to not dwell on what was to come, but to gently hint at the bleak reality they were about to reckon with. I think I tended towards short sentences in the early parts of the book and while they were on the raft — they're good for action and urgency. But an occasional long sentence allows for a different mode and tone, more of my voice I guess, and something more reflective and expansive — it can open the narrative beyond the relentless unfolding of events."]

She went down so gracefully. The solid bulk of her hull, the deck, cockpit, sails, and ropes all quietly swallowed by the water. Maralyn took a picture as the last triangle of sail and the tip of the mast disappeared beneath the surface. Frozen in the photograph, the mast looked as if it might be coming the other way, emerging from the water like a thin arm hoping for rescue. [annotation q="This line felt transportive. After reading it, I could envision the ship's disappearance and feel the desperate hope for rescue. How did you arrive at this closing line?" a="I think this line appeared somewhere else in the book for a while, but as I struggled to write this part I kept returning to Maralyn's photographs. It was extraordinary to me that she'd had the presence of mind to take these pictures in a moment of such total personal crisis. Sometimes I think a first, gut reaction to the raw material is a better guide to what might work than the over-thought 20th draft, and my response to this photo was always one of total amazement that it existed and horror at what it depicted. There was always something almost human about their boat, Auralyn — the way they named her, talked about her and took care of her. Looking at the pictures of her sinking, I think it felt natural to turn her into a sort of being, to understand their loss as a human loss, and to see that final part of her disappearing as having a human quality — the arm reaching out."]

***
Mallary Tenore Tarpley is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the award-winning author of the new memoir SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. She publishes a weekly newsletter, Write at the Edge, featuring writing tips and best practices.

The post Annotation: How Sophie Elmhirst wrote a bestselling nonfiction book that reads like fiction appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Part One: Life at Conception

Chapter 5: Yashica Robinson
Huntsville, Alabama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part Two: Taking Care

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

Yashica Robinson
Huntsville, Alabama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

The post Annotation: Irin Carmon follows the experiences of five pregnant women in the post-Dobbs era 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you always been interested in writing a book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

By Megan Greenwell 

CHAPTER ONE: LIZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Author photo by Loreto Caceres. 

***

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

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

As the Trump administration has vowed to carry out mass deportations of immigrants across the United States, thousands of decisions at every level of government can either hinder those plans or make them a reality. 

For Bloomberg Businessweek, reporters Rachel Adams-Heard, Polly Mosendz, and Fola Akinnibi focused on one private detention center in New Mexico, the Torrance County Detention Facility, to show how local government contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can bring a region's economic decision-making into conflict with moral questions about the people being held there and under what conditions. The result is the story "Addicted to ICE," published May 12. 

Adams-Heard, a Houston-based reporter for Bloomberg since 2018, says the work started with public records requests. "Fola had the initial interest in looking at these intergovernmental service agreements," she said. "Just blanket the country in public records requests at the county level, to try to get these agreements that ICE has but redacts all the interesting information." The team filed over 100 records requests.

We were watching flight patterns and all of these domestic ICE transfers, and it was becoming clear that these facilities that had typically held people who were crossing the southwest border seeking asylum, that they were starting to hold more people who were being basically flown across the country after being apprehended by ICE on the coast. 

We thought it might be more interesting and impactful to go deep on one specific place. I really enjoy stories that have a strong sense of place. It was clear that New Mexico was becoming more and more central to the immigration policy as it's currently being carried out. And it really Illustrated a lot of these issues that we're seeing across the country at these local jails in a way that we thought was helpful.

Here's the opening of the story, annotated by Adams-Heard: 

The sun is still beating down on the scrubby New Mexico dirt when an army-green bus pulls into the parking lot of the Torrance County Detention Facility in the small town of Estancia. Behind barred windows, the silhouettes of dozens of men are just visible. Many of them have never been to New Mexico before. It’s March, and New Mexico is cooler, drier, browner than Florida, where they were this morning before being forced onto a plane, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, and flown here. [annotation q="How did you decide to start here for the story, and how did your reporting and prep get you to this moment?" a="We got to Estancia early in the morning the day of the commission vote, and we had a bit of time before it started, so we had gone to the detention facility just to check it out. We had noticed two green buses that said Transcor America LLC, which is a CoreCivic subsidiary (the private company that runs the Torrance County Detention Facility). They were just sitting in the parking lot."]

[annotation a="We had had a pretty packed day — the commission vote, interviews, a tour with the Estancia mayor — and we were heading to our motel in Moriarty when we passed a green bus going toward Estancia. It looked exactly like the ones we had seen at the detention facility, so we turned around and drove straight there. Sure enough, when we got there, it was pulling into the gates."]

[annotation a="There were detention staff in the parking lot who were trying to block our view with their car, but we were able to watch the feet of the men getting off the bus from the county road leading to the facility."]

[annotation a="While this was happening, I texted someone who tracks ICE flights and he confirmed that a plane had landed in Albuquerque from Florida that afternoon."]

[annotation a="This type of transfer — of people picked up far from the southwest border and flown hundreds of miles away to a center like the Torrance County Detention Facility — has really ramped up since Trump took office. So when we were able to speak with someone who was on the other side of the barred windows we saw, we felt like it was the right way into a story about how these facilities have become critical to Trump's immigration agenda."]

They’re in New Mexico because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is running out of space. In the wake of President Donald Trump's promise to pursue the biggest immigration crackdown in U.S. history, men such as the ones on this bus are being targeted by ICE and local law enforcement in unprecedented ways. The detention facilities closer to home are overflowing. So ICE brings them here, to an ICE town.

John, who’s from the Tampa area, sits on the other side of those bars, watching the bus crawl closer to the sand-colored detention compound jutting out of the flat earth. His vision isn’t good right now; someone fell on him and broke his glasses while he was sleeping on the floor at an ICE facility in Miami. John, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym because he fears retaliation for talking to the press, was picked up at a regular check-in for a special program typically reserved for first-time offenders of nonviolent crimes. Now he’s almost 2,000 miles from home, from his grandmother, from his two dogs. He knew it was a bad sign when he overheard ICE officers talking about his impending transfer, but he didn’t know where he was going until the plane was ready for takeoff. [annotation q="How did you meet John?" a="Unfortunately I can't really get into that because of sourcing sensitivity, but I can say we spoke with multiple men who were part of different transfers. But when I spoke with John and learned he was part of the transfer we had actually seen ourselves, I knew he needed to be in the top of the story. There was something really powerful about hearing his description of the climate and the landscape and the facility — because we were looking at the same thing at the same time on the same day but we didn't know each other yet. And he had no idea what the next few weeks would have in store."]

Over the next few weeks, John will spend sleepless nights shivering in his cell. He’ll join an impromptu Bible study with other guys in his unit and watch the younger ones share their coats with older men during recreation time. He’ll eat in a room with a floor covered in feces. He’ll ask, many times, for supplies to clean it up. He’ll see a nurse for his back and his vision and his climbing blood pressure. He’ll receive nothing but Tylenol. He’ll participate in a hunger strike. He’ll watch men drink water out of a trash can brought in when the facility’s water is shut off. And he’ll gradually start to long to be deported to El Salvador, a country he barely knows, where he hasn’t lived since he was a child. He’ll want this but won’t get it, because this is an ICE jail with hardly any ICE officers. [annotation q="There is so much detail packed into this short paragraph. How did you approach your interview with John to where he shared it with you?" a="My time speaking with John was fairly limited, so we had to be pretty efficient in our interview. I found it works best in these situations to try to work through someone's experience chronologically after establishing some basics (age, where they live, etc). For John, we started with the day he was taken into ICE custody and he just explained in detail what he saw, heard, smelled, felt at each stage in his detention. The other reporters and I felt like it was important to include not just the details about the conditions inside the Torrance County Detention Facility, but also about what he and others were doing to form community and help themselves and each other."]

Maybe things could have been different. While John’s plane sat on the tarmac at the Miami airport, Linda Jaramillo sat in a jailhouse turned government building in Estancia, the county seat, discussing the private detention center that would soon detain him. Torrance County’s more than $2 million-a-month contract with ICE was set to expire unless Jaramillo and her two fellow county commissioners voted to extend it. [annotation q="I appreciate the way you use time to show how different pieces of the system are operating concurrently. How do you report and write in a way that allows you to do this?" a="On a high level, I think this is a type of story where timing is really key. We wanted to show how there are people very far from Washington, D.C., who are making decisions that have a dramatic impact on how the White House's immigration policy is carried out on the ground. And I think a lot of these more local decisions get ignored because they seem routine or boring or small compared to what happens on a federal level. And yet these are the decisions that are in part responsible for the hundreds of men being flown across the country to rural detention centers."]

[annotation a="On a practical level, keeping a running timeline really helps me. Two events may seem completely unrelated to each other until you report out the bigger context. And to weave John and Commissioner Jaramillo's stories together, we had to report it out to the minute, really. Fola and I looked back at the time stamps on our photos and videos from the commission meeting and the bus transfer, and then we were able to see when the plane took off from Miami using flight data to piece together how all these seemingly separate events unfolded throughout this one day in March."]

Immigration lawyers and advocates were there to beg them not to. The Torrance County Detention Facility is one of the system’s most troubled, they argued. It has a long history of failures that at one point led a federal watchdog to demand an immediate evacuation, something ICE declined to do after disputing the findings. At the meeting, an activist read testimony from a man detained at the facility who said he had to wait almost four hours for an ambulance to take him to get treatment for a third-degree burn he got while working in the kitchen to make money to call his family. “Please, truly, we need help from people outside,” the advocate read. “We’re human beings. Please. We’re not prisoners, we’re not animals. We’re human beings. I urge you to not extend the contract.”

No one spoke in favor of extending the county’s ICE agreement. No one had to. Since signing the contract six years ago, the Torrance County Commission has voted to approve regular extensions without much hand-wringing over its role in U.S. immigration policy. [annotation q="How did you and Polly and Fola divvy up the reporting work?" a="Fola and I split up the Torrance County reporting, and Polly focused on Cibola County, where CoreCivic's other big ICE detention facility in New Mexico is. The state legislature had also debated a bill that would have gotten rid of these types of county agreements with ICE, so Polly had been at the (New Mexico State Capitol) Roundhouse watching that debate unfold. We were really intentional about not just parroting these claims about the economic importance of these contracts without seeing the numbers for ourselves, so Fola spent a lot of time digging into the county budget and the town's tax revenue. And we filed a bunch of public records requests for the agreements themselves so we could see how the monthly revenue from ICE changed over time."]

[annotation a="We knew we wanted to turn this story around fairly quickly, so we really needed all three of us working on it to be able to get it done when we wanted to."]

Jaramillo is the newest commissioner, the only woman and the only Spanish speaker. A Republican, she came to her current job with a quarter century of experience as the county clerk under her belt, but serving as commissioner is different—she has more power now, she says. On that day she pledged to use her authority to visit the facility, to see for herself what it was really like inside. And then she voted to extend the ICE contract. [annotation q="So much of this story puts the reader in the room at pivotal moments. How much of this is planning to try to be there in person versus reconstructing what already happened through interviews?" a="We tried to do as much in-person reporting as we could outside of the actual detention facility, which we weren't able to visit. Fola and I had spoken with Commissioner Jaramillo and Mayor (Nathan) Dial multiple times leading up to our trip, and Polly had done the same in Cibola County. We had also talked to former CoreCivic employees and other people in detention to give us a sense of what it's like inside these facilities. But being there in person was really important. I remember when John explained how his nose and lips cracked after he got to New Mexico, I knew exactly what he was talking about because I had made the trip from somewhere similarly humid (Houston) that week. Even though I don't know what it's like to be in ICE detention myself, it was a small part of his experience that I could relate to because I had arrived there at the same time. The commission meetings are all online, but being there in-person for the vote was really important, because we were able to watch body language as recordings of these men in detention were played for the commissioners. We didn't really include any 'man on the street' interviews, but when we were talking to folks in Torrance County we'd ask them what they thought about the ICE contract and got a sense of some of the local attitudes toward the detention facility."]

Read the full story here.

***

Mark Armstrong is editor of Nieman Storyboard.

The post Behind the Scenes: Bloomberg examines a private detention center and a town ‘Addicted to ICE’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Thomas Curwen is one of those newspaper veterans who has done it all. During his 40-year career at the Los Angeles Times, he’s served as an outdoors editor, a Book Review editor and a features editor. He’s done news stories big and small, and was on the team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for coverage of a terrorist attack. He has a literature major’s passion for narrative nonfiction, which shows in bylined work that has been recognized with everything from the 2020 Meyer Berger Award to a being named a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer in feature writing for a reconstruction of a grizzly attack in Montana. He’s worked through the technological and economic ups and downs of the newspaper industry — most of it with the presses of the L.A. Times serving as his soundtrack.

So when contractions in the news industry reached those presses, Curwen made sure that the end of one more chapter in newspaper history didn’t go unnoticed.

Times owners announced in late 2022 that they would be closing the company’s historic Olympic printing plant — a facility that cost $230 million when it opened and had been a state-of-the-art billboard for the then-burgeoning newspaper industry. Two weeks before the plant’s last run in March 2024, Curwen reported beyond a predictable business story to produce a eulogy for a stalwart colleague. “Storied presses print L.A. Times for the last time” celebrated the plant’s history, saluted its proud, exacting workers and elegantly marked a high point in the fading industry of print.

His piece was something of a sequel to a piece he had written six years earlier, when the Times left its offices in downtown Los Angeles. “These historic moves were the result of business decisions made by the previous owner, Tribune Publishing, which, in its misguided and elusive quest to be profitable, sold its real estate holding, making the Times a tenant in the buildings it had once owned,” Curwen told me. “A story chronicling this latest chapter seemed only natural.”

To do that, he followed the press crew through a Friday swing shift — its last. He avoids clichéd nostalgia by building his story on facts: Readers learn, among other things, about how many gallons the facility’s fire-suppression tank held. He draws on terminology such as “ink density,” elicits quotes that reflect the workers’ pride and professionalism (“When you get ink in your veins, there’s nothing like the roar of the presses going at full speed”), and traces the arc of the facility’s history with a verve that could enthrall even casual readers.

But his writing lends it an aching tone that reflects a care for quality of his craft as deep as the press operators for theirs.

“This is what I aspire toward: to find the rhythm and pacing of language that captures the emotion of the moment as well as the facts,” Curwen told me.

He answered Storyboard’s questions about how he conveyed the character of a building and machines, and annotated his piece to describe his reporting and writing decisions. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Before we get to the annotation, can you give us an overview of your reporting and writing for this piece?
My reporting began with an impromptu visit to the plant in early February. Over my years at the Times, I would often drop in to pick up extra copies of various editions of the paper, so I was very familiar with the plant. I had once regularly used its gym and ate occasionally in its cafeteria.

After poking around on my own one afternoon, I began to make a few phone calls and started digging through old company newsletters. Through that, I was able to lay down a chronology of the plant’s early years and pick up memories from the people who worked there. All were eager to reminisce; their connection to this place was palpable.

Eventually I met up with Kal Hamalainen, the pressroom shift supervisor, who was critical in helping me work out how I was going to report the story. My editor and I had decided that we wanted to catch one of the last press runs, and we wanted to make sure it was a busy run. A Friday night — the last Friday night run there for the Times — fit the bill.

But first, I wanted to get the lay of the land. Often in reporting these stories, I feel like a deer in the headlights; with so much information coming at me, I like to try to slow down the reporting so I can see and think and process all that I’m learning. So I went on an escorted tour to get the big picture and help me organize my thoughts for the Friday night reporting.

When that Friday came around, I was ready. I showed up at the start of the swing shift and stayed past its end. With those 10 hours in my notebook, I had the backbone of my story. It was then a question of weaving in the various details: history, memories and general color.

Whom did you work with during the editing process, and how much was the story shaped during that stage?
I worked with my editor on the Metro desk, Cindy Chang, and with Column One editor Steve Padilla. The edits were fairly simple. I had wanted to hold off explaining the reason for the closure in order to capture more of the bittersweetness of the moment in the lede. But they wanted to bring that explanation closer to the top, so we did a little rearranging.

The day-in-the-life format is, in my mind, an easy way to organize the story because it follows a basic chronology. It answers a lot of questions that might otherwise get raised over how to shape the story.

One thing that stands out about the story is an elegiac tone. How cognizant were you, if at all, of setting a particular mood in this piece?
I like that: elegiac. Yes, that certainly was the feeling, and I work pretty hard to try and capture that feeling.

A few years back, I wrote for Storyboard an appreciation of Michael Paterniti’s “Long Fall of 111 Heavy.” That piece — especially its opening— is so powerful for bringing the melody of words into the service of meaning. This is what I aspire toward: to find the rhythm and pacing of language that captures the emotion of the moment as well as the facts. It takes a lot of reading out loud, and a willingness to play around with language in the course of revision.

Is there anything that informed or inspired your writing for this piece, such as other journalism you’ve written or read, or any pieces of fiction?
I read writers who seem to have the same goals and intention. The list is long — and readers of Storyboard will know many of them. Narratives are, in my mind, the gold standard when it comes to drawing in readers and not letting them go until the last word. That’s the real challenge, isn’t it? In this distracted age, getting readers’ attention and ensuring a good payoff at the end.

I also read fiction and poetry, especially poets who have a story to tell.

I like writers who are playful and idiosyncratic in their use of language and story structure. I’m currently reading Richard Powers’ “Playground.” So far, as a fan of his “The Overstory,” I’m not disappointed.

Did you learn anything during any part of creating this story that you’ll carry into future stories, or that may be of use to other journalists?
It’s a good question. I’ve read a lot of writing books, taken a lot of writing classes, spoken to other writers — both journalists and otherwise. I wish there were clear lessons that applied to the next story. But each story is sui generis; each requires its own problem-solving.

I’ll always remember what the wonderful writer and editor for The New Yorker, William Maxwell, said when asked if writing ever got easier. He was, at the time, in his late 70s and explained that every story is new to him, that every story raises questions that he had never considered before, and answering those questions required a different approach. I took heart that so experienced a writer felt that good writing never gets easier.

And of course, that is the joy of this occupation. There are a few tricks that help move the process along — the day-in-the-life approach, for instance— but having done this for a few years, my best advice for other writers is to be patient with the process and understand that frustration (Oh, that shitty first draft!) is normal. You will be discouraged, and you just might want to give up. But you won’t. Good storytelling takes time, and you have to have the faith that with time, you will write the story that you want.

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

Storied presses print L.A. Times for the last time as production moves to Riverside

By Thomas Curwen
Staff Writer

Photography by Genaro Molina

March 10, 2024

The swing shift is about to start at a plant that is about to close. [annotation q="There’s a pleasing repetition of “about to” in this sentence. Do you recall how you ended up crafting this opening sentence? " a="I think a lot about first sentences. I rehearse them while driving in my car. I rehearse them lying in bed at night. I rehearse them in the shower. I need to feel the music of the words, and when this opening came to me, it sounded just right. It’s a kind of iambic pentameter (“So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” as we’re taught), and yes, I love the repetition of the “about to,” especially as it captures both the start and the close. The alpha and the omega."] Late winter sunlight casts long shadows from workers crossing the parking lot, where stray cats skulk among the cars.

Only two weeks left, and the routine is unchanged: clocking in at 5 p.m., heading to the locker room, trading street clothes for work wear. If anyone feels sadness or loss, no one shows it. They have a newspaper to put out. [annotation q="This lede evokes a sense of stoicism and hard work on the part of the press crew. How did you decide to start the story with that tone?" a="I really enjoy writing color. If I can nail a descriptive passage early on, then I can establish a rhythm that will help me continue with the writing. My first draft is often overwritten, which I will pare down in successive versions.

I’m also mindful of pacing. I want to keep readers off guard by mixing the exposition with both long sentences, which capture a mood or give them something to think about, and short sentences, delivered in fast clip. If I can offer a quick recitation of facts that way, all the better. "] “We’re trying to do this with a little class and dignity,” said shift supervisor Kal Hamalainen.

Sixteen months ago, they were told that the Los Angeles Times, their employer, would outsource the printing of the paper and that the Olympic printing plant, once a crown jewel in a vast media empire, would shut down sometime in 2024.

The decision was set in motion many years earlier when the Chicago-based Tribune Co., then owner of The Times, sold its historic properties, and The Times became a tenant.

Now, six years after Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong bought The Times in 2018, the lease on the Olympic plant is expiring, and paying rent has become untenable. The paper will be printed in Riverside by the Southern California Newspaper Group, with its circulation numbers remaining the same.

“Technology and economics have changed dramatically, and we’re transitioning to a new era for our business,” Times President and Chief Operating Officer Chris Argentieri said in a statement, citing both the daily newspaper and digital platforms.

March 10 will be the last run of The Times at the Olympic plant. [annotation q="You pack quite a bit of exposition into these few paragraphs: several owners, the information on the new printing location, the key detail on the unchanged circulation. How much thought went into how much to keep and how much to leave out in this portion? " a="It’s always a question of balance, and in this instance, I needed to answer a basic question from readers who might assume that the print edition of the Times was permanently going away. But there was another opportunity here as well. By highlighting the unsentimental, almost bureaucratic details for the closure, I could set up a contrast within the story with the people whose lives were so affected by this decision, the heart and soul of the plant."]

Dressed in blue pants and blue shirts with a Times eagle patch, the workers find their places throughout the sprawling facility. Each is a crucial link in a chain of production often called the daily miracle: that alchemical transformation of words and pictures into a newspaper to be held, sold, mailed or tossed onto any driveway, any doorstep in the city. [annotation q="This may be too specific a question but I can’t resist it: You don’t often run into the word “alchemical” in the newspaper. Do you recall how you chose that adjective to describe the making of the daily paper? " a="I love this question. OK, so yes, I’m an English major, and yes, I’ve read a lot of poetry. Do you remember the T.S. Eliot poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? The opening is unforgettable.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table …

It’s that image in the third line. And it’s that word, “etherized,” that has stayed with me since I first read that poem.

So, if possible, I want to find an unusual image — or an unusual word — that readers might hold onto and remember long after finishing the piece. My goal is to write a story that doesn’t get lost in the incessant churn of daily journalism. I want readers to remember these stories well beyond the moment when they read them."]

What once was so easy to take for granted has never seemed so remarkable.

They have watched as their crews have been cut, three shifts reduced to one. They once printed other papers besides The Times, and those have gone elsewhere. But it’s hard to be nostalgic over what seems inevitable.

Newspapers have suffered many depredations over the years, from the internet to cost-cutting shareholders to skepticism and disinterest in the written word. With print readership declining in most markets, many media outlets are publishing stories online before printing them. The Times is following this trend, though it consistently ranks among the six largest newspapers in the country for print circulation.

But that’s another story. On this Friday night, Feb. 23, what’s more important is a Ukrainian woman’s search for her husband, a jury’s verdict in a hit-and-run, and in sports, a profile of UCLA’s mercurial basketball coach, as well as the obituaries, comics and horoscopes. [annotation q=" At what point did you decide to include a “snapshot” of that particular day’s stories? What purpose does it serve? " a="I like toggling back and forth between the Big Picture (“Newspapers have suffered many depredations…”) and the Little Picture (“obituaries, comics and horoscopes”). I think it’s fun, but it is also a reminder why a newspaper is such a brilliant invention for capturing not only the intensity of everyday life but also the beauty of its more mundane moments."]

Press operators gather to review the run: Tomorrow’s paper will have color on all but one of the 22 pages. They’ll start at 8:30, print a little more than 100,000 copies and be done in less than two hours.

To step inside the Olympic printing plant is to step inside a time capsule enshrining a 19th century product manufactured with 20th century technology and poised for 21st century obsolescence. [annotation q="This may be my favorite sentence, which is both an accurate summation of the newspaper industry in three combinations of adjectives and nouns. What do you recall about writing it? " a="Walking through the plant, I couldn’t help but feel the breadth of time— almost three centuries — that a newspaper covers. You feel it as you walk beneath the huge presses, mindful of not brushing up against the ink-splattered drums, then you hold a freshly printed copy in your hands and see the pallets being loaded on trucks. And to think: those stories that are being delivered in such an antiquated way are also being read on phones.

Whenever I finish reporting in the field, I sit down at my keyboard and I type my notes, scribbled in a reporter’s notebook. As I hammer away— yes, it can be very tedious— I have a blank document on the side and into that, goes the fun stuff: a few sentences at a time, riffs on what I saw and heard and felt. I’m a big fan of free writing for bringing out fresh language and ideas.

That was the origin of that sentence: a little bit of free writing from my notes, letting my imagination play around with what I saw. "]

Within these walls was the future of Los Angeles and Southern California, as once imagined by the owners of The Times. Fueled by a diverse economy — a dividend of the postwar boom years — this building, likened by one manager to the Taj Mahal, was dedicated on March 6, 1990. (The paper had been printed on the company’s aged presses in the basement of its headquarters downtown.)

“This was to be a model for the world, not just Southern California,” said Tom Johnson, 82, publisher from 1980 to 1989. [annotation q="Did you speak to Tom Johnson, or was this quote archival? " a="In 2018 when the Times left Times Mirror Square, I spoke to Tom Johnson for his memories of that building, and when I started this story, I called him back. Six years later, he’s still in Atlanta and still happy to talk about the time when he was the paper’s publisher. "]

It cost $230 million, the lion’s share of a nearly half-billion-dollar expenditure that saw the construction of a printing plant in Chatsworth and the renovation of an existing production facility in Costa Mesa. Those were halcyon days for The Times, whose parent corporation, Times Mirror, posted more than $3.7 billion in revenue in 1991.

“Come visit the 21st century,” Times readers were encouraged in an advertisement inviting them to tour the new Olympic plant. [annotation q="This detail captures the innovation and optimism of that era in newspapers. How did you dig up the advertisement?" a="I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to weaving in historical details, especially if I can use the exact language from the time and moment. So if I see an opportunity, I’ll take it. I don’t quite recall where this came from, and it might have been from a source. That’s the measure of the love and appreciation that employees, past and present, at the Times have felt toward the newspaper. They save everything from past editions of paper to commemorative swag. Plus, the Times has a wonderful historian, Darrell Kunitomi, and librarian, Cary Schneider, both of whom are indispensable in finding keys to our past. This quote, by the way, certainly helped me with that previous sentence (“… a 19th century product manufactured with 20th century technology and poised for 21st century obsolescence”)."]

Its story was told by numbers: a 26-acre site; a 684,491-square-foot building; six presses capable of printing 70,000 96-page papers per hour; a 400,000-gallon underground water tank for fire suppression; six 6,200-gallon tanks of color ink; a warehouse capable of holding a 65-day supply of paper; and a 148-seat cafeteria for nearly 500 employees. [annotation q="One thing I like about this story is how you’re able to smuggle so much background and context into something that really is a wistful feature. What do you think the effect of telling readers straightaway about all the numbers coming at them in this graf? " a=" It’s a good question, and I often debate the value of numbers. Few readers will remember any of this, but what they might walk away with is the feeling — the sense that in aggregate this is one big facility, nothing puny about it. I also remember back in the day when we’d produce graphics that told stories “by the numbers,” so I suspect that was an influence as well. I also really like lists. I like how they manage to tell a big story through a lot of small details, covering a lot of ground in a fairly succinct way and letting readers draw their own conclusion; showing not telling. "]

Beyond the numbers was the Jetsons quality of the place.

Robotic vehicles delivered rolls of paper from the warehouse to machines that fed the presses. Doors opened at the push of a button. Conveyors whisked printed papers to automated bundlers and then to awaiting pallets, hands free. [annotation q="And then you transition into a whiz-bang description of the then-futuristic presses. How deliberate were you in transitioning from the previous grafts — with all the numbers — into these? " a="I’m glad you picked up on this. It is again part of that broader theme (a 19th century product … 21st century obsolescence). I found something both epic and old-world in the building itself, which those numbers convey. But then how can you not be amazed by the futuristic automation of the place? It’s this contrast that I found especially intriguing, and I often find if I can convey my own sense of wonder, then readers will pick up on it as well. "]

At the center of it all were the six presses, three on one side and three on the other, running almost two football fields long, connected by a nearly soundproof room with windows angling overhead, providing press operators with easy line of sight and silent escape from the incessant 100-decibel thrum.

The lobby, as elegant as an art museum, was finished in marble and hardwood and featured a glass wall, three stories tall, overlooking the presses that receded far in the distance. In the floor lay a time capsule, a measure of the owner’s faith in the future, to be opened on the paper’s bicentennial: Dec. 4, 2081. [annotation q="What’s happening with the time capsule? " a="I found the time capsule to be one of the more poignant details, and when I included it, I wondered if it spoke for itself or whether it needed a little interpretation. I decided to let it be, hoping that readers would be struck by the confidence (hubris?) of the paper’s owners at a time when the future seemed so assured: that the paper would be printed in 2081, that the company would remain unchanged, that the building still belonging to the LA Times.

I’m reminded of line from the poem “Ozymandias”: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

I believe the time capsule was recently retrieved by the owner of the Times and will eventually find its place in a museum that is under construction next to the Times’ building in El Segundo."]

Bob Lampher came to work at the Olympic plant in 1989 as the presses were being installed. He had started at the Times 22 years earlier, “a dream job” after working the presses for the Anaheim Bulletin, the Downey Southeast News and the Costa Mesa Daily Pilot.

“Oly” — as the plant was known — “was the most modern pressroom around,” said Lampher, 82, a retired superintendent. “When I first got here, my jaw dropped. It was simply beautiful, and I thought it would run forever.” [annotation q="You don’t have a lot of quotes in this story, but the ones you have are impactful. How did you decide who to speak to for this story? Did anything surprise you about what was said?" a="It’s an interesting observation. My sources talk to me a lot (motivated no doubt by all my questions). But much of what they tell me is informational and I often find that can be rewritten in a more compelling, quicker manner. Also, as we all know, some sources are very quotable and others not so much. So as I’m taking notes, I’m pretty attuned to the quote that will lift off the page.

Many years ago, I wrote a piece that had no direct quotes, and I really like the effect. "]

The assumption is forgivable. The Times’ weekday circulation — spread among the Olympic plant, as well as Orange County and the San Fernando Valley printing facilities — was 1.2 million; 1.5 million on Sundays. (Today, success is measured by digital subscriptions, currently close to 550,000.)

To meet that printed volume — for a newspaper so filled with advertising that it ranged from 100 to 200 pages daily (on the Sunday after Thanksgiving 1993, the paper was a whopping 592 pages) — managers choreographed a round-the-clock dance that pushed newsprint through the presses at nearly 30 mph, resulting in close to 60,000 papers printed in an hour.

The sound was like a thundering locomotive. Ink mist and paper dust flew through the air. Margins of error were unforgiving.

“When you’re doing it, it boggles the mind,” said Lampher, who left The Times in 2002. “I would go back tomorrow just to hear those presses running again.”

His buddy and former press room manager, Jack Boethling, 77, understands. “When you get ink in your veins, there’s nothing like the roar of the presses going at full speed.”

As the swing shift gets underway, Emmett Jaime pries inked plates off cylinders. A Dead Kennedys song plays on a radio boom box, as a bell rings a brief warning each time a cylinder turns.

Jaime, 56, plans to take a little time off before looking for another job. He’d like to work eight more years, but he followed his father to The Times when he was 19 and knows only this world.

John Martin, 60, sits at an operator’s console, studying a copy of a real estate section, whose advertiser is known to be especially picky. He’s making sure the columns of type and photographs sit squarely on the page with equal margins top and bottom.

“It’s been a great, great, great, great run,” he said, describing his 43 years with The Times. When he started, his seniority number was 380. He had hoped one day to make No. 1 but is satisfied to be No. 22. [annotation q="This is a moving detail; do you recall how it came up in conversation?" a="When reporting a story like this, I try to find opportunities to simply sit with the people I’m writing about. It’s nothing more than the time-tested fly-on-the-wall technique, and it allows me to fall into the rhythm of the momen — to look, to think, to not be hurried. Often in these moments, I’m just shooting the breeze, listening and overhearing other conversations. This quote came from that kind of moment. Martin was just musing about his career, about the end of the run and what the Times has meant to him. I think he nailed it. "]

In the paper warehouse, Marcus Arnwine, 64, takes a quick inventory of the newsprint. Once a thick forest with rolls stacked five high to the ceiling, it is now a small glade as stock runs low.

“I’m going to miss the wealth of knowledge in this place,” said Arnwine, who started here when he was 20. “There was always someone here who knew something you needed to know.” [annotation q="How were you able to get time to find time to speak the crew while they were working?" a="Before I start reporting a story like this, I will take time to explain to sources how I work and how I’d like to proceed. The sooner I get this out there, the easier the reporting is. Either they can say no or yes, and I accept either. In this instance, I made the request to just sit with the press workers during this shift, watch them, talk when they had a moment. And it was green-lighted. "]

Neither Martin nor Arnwine is certain what their next step will be, whether to look for work or retire.

Later that evening, Adam Lee is in the plate room imprinting digital files, produced by editors and page designers, onto aluminum sheets. The air, bathed yellow by safe lights, smells of photographic chemicals and is filled with a rhythmic clicking and a shuttling swoosh.

Lee, 46, is one of the few who has a new job lined up. He started here 18 years ago, joining his stepmother and his uncle, as well his father, who put in 47 years before retiring.

His story is a familiar one: a pressroom of multigenerational employees banking on good benefits, good income and challenging work.

“When we first started,” Hamalainen said, “it was common for an old-timer to take a new hire aside and say, ‘Well, kid, you’ll have a job for life.’ ”

Today in the building’s growing emptiness, they are still a community kept close by their commitment to that work, proud of their craft and eager to dazzle visitors with technical explanations of a job that took years to master: the speed of the paper, the proportions of water and ink, the ability to make a fix on the fly.

They knew there were risks. Some lost fingers in the presses or wrenched knees working on the floor. Some lost marriages to the strain of an unforgiving schedule.

As often as they held history in their hands — the Gulf War, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the death of John Wooden, of Kobe and the pandemic — the work never allowed lingering, and they never missed a deadline.

They lived by the clock and by schedules defined by the vastness of Southern California. They had to know when to finish a run to make a 6 a.m. delivery to Santa Barbara, San Diego, Palm Springs.

“Old news doesn’t sell,” Lampher said. [annotation q="I love the tone of the four grafs or so topped off with Lampher’s quote. There’s a genuine sense of appreciation for the artisty and commitment of workers who don’t often receive it. What do you recall about the conception and writing of this section?" a="Not so long ago, I did a series of stories that focused on craft: I profiled a watch repairman, a farrier, an understudy. I enjoyed writing these stories (perhaps I saw a parallel with my own work), and they sensitized me to the pride that so many people take in jobs, especially if they’re somewhat arcane and challenging and mysterious to most everyone else. This certainly came across in my interviews for this story. These guys could dance circles around me for what they know — and what I don’t — about printing a newspaper."]

By 8:44, the presses are rolling at a modest clip. Crews grab from the conveyor early copies being sidelined as waste. They thumb through pages to make sure the ink density is proper, that the color is in registration, the margins are set, pagination perfect, date accurate. [annotation q="Did you know the phrase “ink density” before working on this story? " a="I certainly did not, but I like using the vernacular of the people I’m writing about. Of course, editors will sometimes question the word or the phrase if it is too esoteric, so I’m careful to pick language that is somewhat understandable, especially in context. I feel this give the piece a sense of authority and confidence that readers are looking for when they commit to reading it."]

They make refinements and by 9:15 set the throttle to a full gallop, 45,000 papers an hour. Overhead, the newsprint whips by in a blur, running through a succession of cylinders inked cyan, magenta, yellow and black, before converging into a central machine that folds and cuts it into individual papers.

They feel that familiar thrum in their chests. They breathe the moist, almost humid air, and still marvel that such brutish machinery can produce such delicate results.

“It’s like an NFL player who can also be a ballerina,” Hamalainen said. “There is so much strength, power, endurance and finesse in this equipment.”

They find it hard to believe that once they are done, the presses will be dismantled and sold for scrap. The building and the property will be turned into movie and television production studios, said a spokesperson for the owner, Atlas Capital Group.

Then at 10:31, the pitch of the whirring presses begins to drop as they slow, soon coming to a stop with 107,481 copies printed.

A few minutes later, a voice comes over a loudspeaker: “No finals.”

And they are done. A conveyor clatters as the last papers are carried to the bundlers. The first delivery truck has already left. The last truck will leave at 12:45 a.m.

The swing shift now scatters. Some of the crew strip plates off the presses. Some sit back and read tomorrow’s news, eschewing The Times’ website for the printed paper. [annotation q="I’m fond of this observation. Do you recall at what point it struck you as something that should be included?" a="This was a terrific moment in the reporting. The presses were running down; the last final copies of the paper were heading to the trucks. I was scribbling in my notebook, capturing these last details — this was after all the money moment, the end of it all — when I looked up. And there were most of the pressmen holding tomorrow’s paper, busy reading the stories, spending time with the reporters’ and photographers’ work beyond the requirements of their jobs. It gave me a sense of solidarity: that we are involved in this daily miracle.

I’d like to think they were doing the same thing the night this particular story was printed."]

A few head to the cafeteria to watch a movie on their phones or to the fitness room for a few reps before heading home.

The witching hour has begun, a disquieting moment for them to have nothing to do. Usually, they’d be cleaning presses and getting ready for another run, but today such diligence doesn’t make much sense.

Hamalainen steps out onto the balcony where some of the crew has gathered.

From this vantage, the Olympic plant has always felt vital to Los Angeles. Two miles away, the skyscrapers of the financial district light up in the night sky, windows glowing against the darkness. City Hall glows blue and yellow in honor of Ukraine on the second anniversary of the war. Distant sirens and horns and the whoosh of the nearby freeway provide the accompanying pulse.

They speak easily among themselves, their emotions masked by familiar banter, old memories and pride.

“It used to be that the quietest time was Sunday morning,” said Hamalainen, once the week’s final run completed at 2:30 a.m.

“Yeah, and in those days, Macy’s was the big advertiser,” said pressman Joaquin Velazquez, 65. He started in 1984. “Remember that? Now, maybe there will be one ad.”

“Used to be a 16-pounder on Black Fridays.”

“Yep, and more than a million papers every day.” [annotation q=" How did you capture this bit of dialogue?" a="This is one of those moments that I live for when reporting a story like this: a chance to let the characters interview one another. Well, in this case, maybe not interview each other, but riff spontaneously with each other as we all tend to do in daily conversation. I especially like how they naturally began to reminisce. And yes, I was standing there not saying a thing, just trying to keep up as I wrote down their conversation. "]

They know they’re running on habit and adrenaline. They know there will be a bit of a freefall once they’re done.

“They’re hiring at the Arizona Republic and the Bay Area News Group and the Las Vegas Review-Journal,” Hamalainen said. “There’s work, but you have to be willing to move away.”

Velazquez draws on his cigarette. Soon, he will no longer be commuting four hours a day from his home in Eastvale.

“It’s sad to see it come to an end like this, but we’re blessed to hit the finish line,” Velazquez said.

“You know, I think I’m going to sneak back in, just to see it all cleared out,” Hamalainen said. “This is going to be one big empty building.” [annotation q="How did you come to end on this line?" a=" At its peak, this printing plant was running almost 20 hours a day, seven days a week. When the presses were going full speed, it must have felt like you were standing next to a locomotive flying down the track. It’s louds, it’s fast, it’s furious. So there we are at the end of the shift, one of the last shifts for these men, and as I listened to them, I heard such disbelief, incredulity that it was all coming to an end for them. And for this building — this magnificent building.

That seemed the story’s natural ending too, coming from Kal. It allowed me to plant the seed in the readers’ mind, to let them do the work and imagine how empty and cavernous this building will be once everything is removed, shipped off and carted away. "]

* * *

Trevor Pyle is a veteran newspaper reporter from the Pacific Northwest who now works as a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.

The post A profile of a newspaper press becomes a requiem for an era appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When Ruby Cramer of The Washington Post drove up to Norfolk, Mass., it was in pursuit of a story that couldn’t be more timely — or timeless. Cramer had seen local news reports about the small town and fractures over an emergency migrant shelter to be opened in a former prison there. She wanted to learn more, and after several weeks of listening, note-taking and reporting, had a story that tapped into both current battles and ancient fears.

While there are anxious, angry outbursts from some town members opposed to the shelter, Cramer doesn’t let that tone dominate “The shelter and the storm,” instead wrapping it around a local — and normally conservative — elected official who takes a more open approach, noting: “People are afraid of change and differences.”

Cramer’s story, published Sept. 7, 2024, as a Washington Post Deep Read, includes opponents and supporters of the shelter, and those who are questioning but not strident. But the reporter didn’t confine herself to the town limits. She traveled to Logan Airport in Boston to speak to some of the migrants themselves, allowing them to tell their own story in their own voice.

All this took time, immersion and patience.

“My editor on this story, David Finkel, who understands the challenges of immersion better than anyone, says that you need to get to the point where you can be in a room with someone you’re writing about long enough so that they can feel comfortable with a long moment of silence without trying to fill it,” Cramer said. “I find it really hard to do.”

In the end, Cramer’s strides toward that state produced a deeply felt, deeply reported story that reified an issue too often painted in extreme political strokes, not nuanced personal ones. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Kurt Streeter of The New York Times took a different but equally successful approach to the same issue in a piece from Eau Claire, Wis.)

Cramer agreed to annotate her story for Nieman Storyboard. Her answers have been edited for length and clarity.

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

The shelter and the storm

What happened when the nation’s immigration crisis came to a small town in Massachusetts

Story by Ruby Cramer
Photography by Jodi Hilton
The Washington Post
September 7, 2024 at 3:05 a.m.

NORFOLK, Mass. — Here was the town where Kevin Roche grew up: empty sidewalks, a coffee shop, a pharmacy, two pizza parlors, two ambulances, two roundabouts and no grocery store. A small, quiet town, people in Norfolk said. Pleasant. Safe. Nothing much to do, and that meant nothing much changed from one morning to the next or the next, until this morning, when Kevin woke up and knew that the town would be different by the time the day was over. [annotation q="How did Norfolk’s shelter come to your attention? What made you see a story in it?" a="The stories I’m working on this year are all about the idea of anger. Anger can be an expression of so many different emotions and states of change – fear, loneliness, outrage, isolation, loss, connection or lack of connection. My editor and I knew we wanted to do a story about immigration and the anger and fear it’s brought out in cities and towns across the country over the last few years. We thought about a few big cities: Chicago, New York, Denver. Eventually I found a few local news stories about Norfolk, Mass., a small town where the state was about to open an emergency migrant shelter in a vacant prison. At the time, the shelter had yet to open and the town was still pushing for more information. Residents were asking basic questions like when the shelter would open, how many families it would house, how it would affect town services like health care and the school system. But people in Norfolk were also trying to figure out in real time how they really felt about the news and what kind of town this was going to become. It was the most appealing kind of assignment. We didn’t know what was going to happen. The story was still unfolding."] [annotation q="I happen to be reading a book titled “The Science of Storytelling” by Will Storr, and one of its topic is how wired humans are to perceive change. How did you land on this first paragraph to set a similar theme: The Norfolk its residents were used to, on the verge of perceived change?" a="I wanted the lede to be a baseline I could return to at the end of the story: the visual of a small, quiet town. I wanted to establish a familiar sense of stasis that might be associated with any small town, while at the same time suggesting that that stasis was about to be altered and complicated in the mind of the reader, just like it would be for Kevin and the rest of the people in the story."]

He got in his car and drove toward Main Street just before 7 a.m. Main Street ran from one end of Norfolk to the other, four miles in all, and it led to the auto repair shop where Kevin, 60, had worked since he was 12 years old, first for his father, and now alongside his own son. He passed the line of houses he saw every morning, which were the same, except for the ones that had new signs in the yard. “NORFOLK PRISON-SHELTER,” they read. “NOT SAFE FOR ANYONE.”

At the east end of Main Street, razor wire was being removed from a chain-link fence around Bay State Correctional Center, an unused low-security state prison half a mile from Kevin’s shop. At the foot of the fence, rows of thick coil lay in the grass. Security guards stood at the front gates. Cribs and diaper kits sat on the floor of the prison gym. Clean, white sheets lay on the beds.

Later that day, the state would reopen the prison as an emergency shelter for pregnant women and families with children, most of them migrants who had been granted parole at the border to legally enter the country and who were in the process of applying for asylum or temporary protected status. Twenty-four families, or about 75 people, would be the first to arrive. [annotation q="This is elegantly done — observing the visible changes on Kevin’s route, then explaining how they tied into the imminent opening of the emergency shelter. What do you remember about writing this opening, and what you were trying to accomplish with it?" a="There was almost too much to establish in this first section: Kevin; the prison that was about to become a shelter; the migrant crisis in Massachusetts; the auto repair shop; the protest planned for later that evening; the sense of discord in town. I wanted to just keep it as simple as possible and take it step by step, using Kevin’s route to work as a framework I could use to my advantage."]

“There’s only 24 of ’em,” Kevin told his son, Adam, when he got to the shop.

“Today?” Adam asked.

“Two buses, yeah.” [annotation q="You include dialogue throughout. How did you record and transcribe it? How challenging was it to determine what to use and what to leave out?" a="I took notes and was often recording, but not always. I needed this piece of dialogue to get the reader inside the shop, and to establish that in a matter of hours, a bus would be coming down the road and the shelter would open."]

Kevin had heard that the people coming would be Haitian migrants who were living in Terminal E at Logan International Airport, about 30 miles northeast in Boston. They had arrived among record numbers of people crossing the U.S. border since 2022 and had been placed on a wait list to enter the state’s overcrowded shelter system. In Massachusetts, caseloads of families seeking shelter had more than doubled since the year before, and now there were more people waiting at Logan Airport every day and no room for them all. The state had opened new shelters in towns across Massachusetts, but none so big in a town so small as the one planned for Norfolk, population 11,000.

By the fall, Kevin had heard, as many as 405 people could be living at the prison.

The door opened and a man handed Kevin a piece of paper about a protest scheduled for later that day on Main Street. “Signs will be provided,” it read. “Bring anyone you can.”

Kevin folded the paper in half and placed it on the counter. It had been six weeks since the state informed Norfolk about its plans, and he had never seen the town’s residents so angry, either about the shelter or at one another. Three days before the news, he’d been elected to the town’s small governing board, and since then, some of the anger had been coming into his shop. People wanted to know how the shelter would affect their school system, their taxes, their 911 call volume, their sewage, the houses and cars they liked to leave unlocked at night, and now some of them wanted to know if Kevin was going to the protest that evening at the center of town. [annotation q="One thing that jumps out is the story’s use of a “viewpoint character” of sorts in Kevin Roche. You include other people in the story, but Kevin is the clothesline the story hangs on. How did you encounter him, and how did you decide on his role in the story?" a="I love the idea of Kevin as the line the rest of the story hangs on. I hadn’t heard of Kevin before I came to town, and I was still learning what a “select board” was — an old tradition of local town government in Massachusetts. On my first day in Norfolk, someone mentioned that the newest select board member was a guy named Kevin who ran the auto repair shop just down the road from the prison where the shelter was going to open. If all that sounded “perfect” for story-telling purposes, I absolutely did not realize it quickly. But I did think an auto repair shop sounded like a fun place to hang out, so I pulled up, introduced myself and tried to explain the story I wanted to do (not really knowing what the story was yet). The auto repair shop was in fact really fun and jocular. There were always a bunch of guys there, and people in town would stop by on a daily basis not to fix their brakes or whatever, but just to talk to Kevin. After about an hour there, I realized that because Kevin was a member of the town government (and the most conservative member of the town government), there were a lot of people coming into the shop to talk about the shelter. It was, luckily for me, a big topic of discussion in town, so I didn’t really have to prompt anyone to speak about it. Another thing I noticed quickly about Kevin was that even though he’d laugh at other people’s jokes about the shelter, he very rarely offered his own opinion about it. He was such a loud guy, just in terms of volume; if you listen to the audio version of this story, produced by my very talented colleague, Bishop Sand, you can hear this for yourself! But on the subject of the shelter, he seemed reserved and quiet. That was really interesting to me. We kept in touch after meeting and when I came back for a second week in the town, I asked Kevin if I could write about him and use his shop as a home base."]

“Absolutely not,” Kevin told a man stopping by the shop.

“Let’s see how many people they can get,” the man said. “Never ends here.” [annotation q="Did everyone whose dialogue you recorded know they were being recorded? " a="By this time, I was nearing the end of my reporting, so I’d spent about three weeks in the town and already talked with Kevin and the other mechanics about the story I was doing and the methods I was using. I’d also learned a lot about their lives and talked with each of them individually."]

“You think they’re getting some walking-around money when they show up here?” Adam asked.

“Where are they gonna walk to?” a mechanic named Jack said.

“They’re gonna walk up to Dunkin’ Donuts and Walgreens,” Adam said.

Another mechanic who had been listening said, “Imagine if there was a sign saying, ‘Jesus loves you and so do we.’ You think the warm welcome will —” [annotation q="Sometimes you identify speakers; other times you just use brief descriptions but no names. What determined that? " a="There was one mechanic at the shop who didn’t want to be named. Of course, I wanted to respect that, so we used this bit of dialogue anonymously. I wanted to include it because Jack’s quick and sort of waggish response gives you an immediate sense of how the guys are with one another. That was really important."]

“Shut up,” Jack said.

“Norfolk Auto, this is Kevin speaking,” Kevin said when a customer called. In the garage, the car lift screeched, raising a truck toward the ceiling. “The wheels are junk?” Kevin asked, before the door opened and another customer walked inside to talk about a woman who had accused him of spreading paranoia and fear about the shelter. “She said, ‘We don’t need conspiracy —’ and, um, what did she say? ‘Xenophobia.’ Using all the right phrases.”

Kevin laughed but said nothing.

“You gotta go to the tribal model,” the man went on. “You take care of your own first, right?”

Again, Kevin said nothing. He kept his eyes on the window. Here was the town, about to make room for 24 new families. [annotation q="One facet of this story I appreciated as a reader is how the factual information about immigration, the shelter, etc. is parceled out in small doses. There’s no sense of running up against expository paragraphs. How deliberate were you in how you sprinkled the drier — but still important — information throughout the narrative? " a="Thank you! I don’t like nut graphs and find them difficult to write, so I avoided one. Sorry to all my past and future editors."] He watched the cars pass by, scanning the road for signs of a bus.

***

THREE WEEKS EARLIER, Kevin had looked out across an auditorium as people began to yell. He had told himself that as the newest member of the Norfolk “select board,” composed of three elected officials who set the policies for the town, his job at that night’s town meeting was to remain neutral and open. Seated on the stage, he tried to keep a blank expression on his face as a panel of four state officials took questions about the plan to convert the prison into a shelter.

In the aisle, people lined up for a turn at the microphone. “I am angry,” one woman said. Her son, who was disabled, had lost his health insurance, she told the state officials on the stage. “I’m an American citizen. Americans should get help first.”

Shouting filled the room.

Before the panel could respond, the next person approached the microphone and began to speak. “Answer the first question,” the woman who’d just spoken yelled from her seat. “Answer my question!” On the stage, the chair of the select board, Jim Lehan, rose from his seat. “Ma’am. Ma’am, please,” he said. “We’re gonna get nowhere if we act this way.” But the meeting went on just like that, for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, for more than an hour. Now another person was at the microphone, telling the state about her own son, who was 5 years old and allergic to bees. “What happens if Lucas gets stung?” she asked. What if the ambulances in Norfolk were busy at the shelter instead of tending to the town? “What do I say: ‘I’m sorry, Lucas, we tried’?” [annotation q="You capture this scene vividly. What do you want readers to understand — or feel — when they read this recap of the select board meeting? " a="I wasn’t present for this meeting. The local coverage of the meeting was the reason I found Norfolk in the first place. The entire thing was available on YouTube and I later talked with all the characters mentioned to get a sense of what they were feeling at the time. I wanted readers to feel tense as they read it, and to hear the noise and anticipate it building. It was also important to us to present people’s concerns about the shelter as legitimate and to treat those concerns fairly."]

“At this stage in the game, they’re coming in two weeks,” a man said. “And you can’t tell us —”

“— ANYTHING,” someone else shouted.

But there were some things the state officials onstage had been able to tell them: that these were families who “really have nowhere else to go.” That the site would be reserved for pregnant women and families, including children up to age 21. The occupants could include a combination of people seeking asylum and homeless Massachusetts residents. And the shelter being set up for them at Bay State Correctional Center would be temporary — open for six to 12 months.

“It’s a simple yes or no,” a woman at the microphone said now. “Can you, today, guarantee every single person in this room that within 12 months, this site will be closed?”

“Our plan is to close it within six to 12 months,” one of the state officials repeated.

“So that’s a no,” the woman said, and more yelling began.

“That’s a no,” one person shouted. “Well?” another said. “Yes or no?” another said. [annotation q="There’s a lot of yelling, a lot of cross talk, a lot of sheer verbiage from this meeting. How much did you work with an editor, if at all, to capture it?" a="My editor really helped tighten this section. He helped me see that as tense as the meeting was, the scene needed to unfold with a sense of ease. I had originally spent way too much time introducing the other characters in the piece, like Taiese and Ron."]

A few rows back, Taiese Bingham-Hickman, 41, decided to say something. She was a Black resident in a town that was 85 percent White, and she’d been reading more and more racist comments on the town’s community Facebook page. [annotation q="Where did you find the demographic data for Norfolk? " a="The census."]

She wondered what kind of language the kids in town might be hearing from their parents. She thought of her own two sons, and worried that they, along with the children at the shelter, might be bullied at school. [annotation q="You’re able to get an insightful summary of how Taiese was feeling; when were you able to speak with her?" a="Taiese was the first person I reached out to in Norfolk. I had seen her speak up at a bunch of town meetings online and we had many conversations."]

Now she faced the panel on the stage. “I just want to apologize for the disrespect that you’ve received thus far,” she said. Behind her, some people began to clap and nod. Then shouting and booing broke out across the room.

The next woman to speak approached the microphone and turned around to face the town. “I would, as a White person, ask that this majority-White room think before we boo the single Black resident who has said that we have been extremely disrespectful,” she said.

Now there was groaning, and more booing, and a few people stood up to leave.

“I’m truly disgusted,” the woman at the microphone said.

People yelled back at her.

The meeting was nearing the two-hour mark. The select board chair stood again. “If we can’t be more respectful of each other, we’ll call this meeting off,” he told the crowd.

“People are angry,” someone shouted.

From his seat, Ron Tibbetts, 70, an Episcopal deacon, thought he’d heard the words “rapists” and “pedophiles” from somewhere in the crowd. When it was his turn to speak, he told the officials onstage that despite the anger in the room, there was a “quiet group of people” who were ready to welcome the families to the town. “They have decided to stand up and say, ‘These are families like our families, children like our children,’” he said.

“They’re not,” a man in the audience said, cutting him off.

“They are,” Ron said.

He turned to the audience now and asked that quiet group of people to stand up — “if you are courageous enough.”

In the back of the room, another man began to yell. “Anyone who doesn’t agree with what’s going on here, stand up,” the man said, and people across the room rose from their seats.

Through it all, Kevin watched from the stage. Then he felt the eyes in the crowd shift. A man in the audience was talking to him.

“The new selectman?” the man said. “Time to step up and fight.”

Some people started to clap.

“Any comment to that?” the man asked.

“Nope,” Kevin said. “Not one.”

[annotation q="Tell me what the reporting process was for this story — and any challenges that existed specific to it." a="I think my editor and I discussed the Norfolk idea for the first time on a Monday, and on that Wednesday, I drove to Norfolk. From watching a few news clips of local town meetings, I was able to reach out to a few people in town to meet with me. But we left it open-ended. The first week I was there, my only goal was to try to get an understanding of the town and meet as many people as I could. The good thing about a relatively small town (population 11,000) was that I was able to get around easily and establish relationships quickly. Eventually, people who were vocal about the shelter came to know me and even expected to see me around. I think most of them understood that I was trying to capture something in-depth and treat the town humanely. But it took a while to get there. The first week, I had no idea who I would end up writing about. The second week, I had a sense of who the characters in the story might be, but no clue as to what would come of it. By the third week, the shelter was about to open, and we had a good sense of the loose shape of the story and who we wanted to structure the piece around."] [annotation q="Did this story change much from your first conception to what it eventually became?" a="It did, in the sense that we left it so open in the beginning. At first, we thought the story would be set before and after the shelter opened. Eventually we made the decision to limit it to the three weeks leading up to the shelter opening, because it offered a natural structure for the piece and a lot of emotional possibility. I think if we went in with any idea of what the story might be, it was this idea of the “angry town.” Once I met Kevin, and especially once I spent time in Logan Airport, where dozens of migrant families were staying, it became (I hope) something more than that."]

***

A FEW DAYS LATER, at the auto shop, Adam, Kevin’s son, pulled up a video clip about the meeting on his phone. Kevin leaned over the counter to watch, and saw himself seated on the stage, silent.

“Both of the other select men spoke and pissed people off,” he said, talking about his two colleagues on the town’s select board. “I sat there and was quiet the whole meeting.”

When he was at his shop, Kevin was loud. All the mechanics were, but Kevin was the loudest. “Hey, dumbass,” he would say, or “Hey, jackass.” In the garage, the mechanics had to speak over the sound of the radio that was always playing, or the hammering, or the car lift going up and down, or the bells that sounded every time the door opened or the phone rang. Kevin’s father, who’d started the business in 1977, had been even louder. If he had a disagreement, he’d throw people out of the shop, screaming mad, but Kevin didn’t do that.

“There’s a difference,” he said.

“There’s a difference between what?” Adam said.

“Being loud and screaming.” Kevin said.

“I’ve heard him scream,” Jack said.

“But not often.” [annotation q="I like this little bit of dialogue. Why did you choose to include it?" a="I loved this exchange. I heard it from the other room (again, Kevin speaks very loudly, so that helped) and knew it could accomplish something useful. For me, it’s about the difference between being loud and being angry (“screaming”). Or between listening and reacting. I think Kevin was someone who was trying to navigate that line."]

Kevin did not think of himself as an angry person, and he did not share the outrage he’d heard in the auditorium that night, though he knew there were some in town who assumed that he did.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have concerns about the shelter. He worried about how it would affect the already overcrowded school system. He didn’t know how teachers were supposed to accommodate dozens of new students who didn’t speak English. And he didn’t know what might happen to the town’s tax revenue if people decided to move away because of the shelter. Taxes were already high. People who’d lived in Norfolk their whole lives, when it was still a town of dairy and chicken farms, were being priced out.

But the migrant families themselves — “I wouldn’t really say it worries me.”

“I don’t feel they’re gonna be walking down the street with knives,” he said. “There are White people from America that are just as much of s—heads. But people are afraid of change and differences.”

When it came to politics, Kevin considered himself a conservative. He had run for office to keep taxes from going up year after year, and to stop what he saw as unnecessary spending. Now he figured he was probably the most conservative member of the select board. But his idea of government in a town this size wasn’t political. Kevin was attracted to the idea of service. He volunteered at town service clubs and did fundraising walks for breast cancer almost every year, once flying to 10 states to walk 600 miles at different Susan G. Komen events. He didn’t want to be known as “the Republican” on the select board. If he represented one side and not the other, he thought, “you’re not representing all the people,” and that was one reason he’d been so quiet at the public forum.

But now his silence had led to another invitation to speak. He had been asked to meet with the Norfolk Republican Town Committee, and he had agreed to the meeting, so long as they knew there wasn’t much more he wanted to say about the shelter, at least not until he had more information.

“I’m gonna talk about myself and all that. They want to know Kevin Roche.”

***

EXCEPT THAT WASN’T what they wanted to know. Instead, the Norfolk Republicans wanted Kevin to talk about why the state had “railroaded” and “handcuffed” the town. They asked whether the migrant families moving to Norfolk would be able to “just go out and roam the streets and all that,” and they wanted to know what Kevin was going to do about it. “We do not want this going on,” the chair of the Norfolk Republicans told him. “So, I mean, just don’t roll over and die.”

“Well, we’re not,” Kevin replied.

“We want somebody in there fighting for us.”

“Well, we are fighting for you, but we can’t fight out in the street,” he said. [annotation q="Tell me how you got into this meeting, and how you recorded dialogue there. Did you get any resistance?" a="I had heard about the meeting when I first got into town and asked Kevin if I could go with him. Once I got there, I also introduced myself to the committee chairwoman and asked for her permission to be there."] [annotation q="Journalists are often criticized for “parachuting into” a story that’s outside their geographic coverage area, but this story reflects that you took time to immerse yourself in the community. What steps did you take to understand as many facets of it as you did?" a="I think you are always parachuting into a place, to a certain degree, even if it’s on the beat you cover every day. Your presence alone as a reporter affects your surroundings, no matter how much you try to disappear. I tried to immerse myself in the town as much as possible. I talked to plenty of people who never made it into the story, to try to understand the town and how it’s changed over the years. I spent hours at Kevin’s shop, so that he and the other mechanics there got used to me."]

Now Bill Crane, 83, a man Kevin knew, stood up to address the room. He ran a local talk show on the town’s public-access television channel, and before that had been a teacher at a church, where the older students used to complain all the time about Norfolk. “It’s a stupid little town, and there’s nothing to do,” they would say, and he would tell them, “Now just hold your horses. You’re gonna grow up and, God willing, live here in Norfolk again and raise your family here — and you will find that this stupid little town with nothing to do is a safe oasis.” There was no crime here, he said. There were safe, open spaces.

“We want to keep Norfolk the way it is. We don’t want to see it degraded.”

Kevin nodded. “I agree,” he said. “We don’t want crime coming to town and everything else and all that.”

Bill seemed satisfied with the answer, and Kevin walked away from the meeting thinking that maybe all the town needed was another opportunity to air its frustrations. The next day, he drove to the town hall building to see Kate O’Brien, 39, Norfolk’s assistant town administrator.

“Is there any way we can schedule another public forum?” he asked when he got to her office.

Kate looked at him from across her desk.

“I mean, I can always bring it up,” she said.

“I feel we have to,” he said.

Kate, who had been onstage next to Kevin during the first meeting, had seen her job go from balancing budget items for a town of 11,000 to managing a small corner of the nation’s immigration crisis. At the meeting that night, she’d noticed herself shaking, and the physical response had surprised her. She had never thought of Norfolk as a liberal town, but that had never mattered before. It had been 10 years since she’d started to work her way up the ladder of municipal government, attending graduate school at night to get her master’s degree. [annotation q="I like that you included a small, relevant background sketch of Kate to place her reluctance in context; when did you have the opportunity to speak to her? Why did you choose to include the background you did?" a="Similar to Taiese, Kate was someone I spoke to quite a bit. She had an office at the town hall building and I would stop by every few days just to say hi. I liked that she was someone who dealt with the nuts and bolts of running the town. She told me that she was a “West Wing” fan and pursued a career in local government because she really believed in it. I was interested in the way her ideals were being tested by what was happening in town."]

Now the questions she was asking herself surprised her, too. “Why am I so affected by this? Is this worth it for me, mentally? Is this what I want? Do I want to be screamed at?” The morning after the forum, she’d found a voicemail waiting for her at the office. It was another angry voice, but instead of screaming, the man on the tape spoke calmly as he used racist slurs to talk about migrants and described scenes of sexual violence. “My mom always taught me not to wish bad things on people,” Kate heard the man say, “but I hope it comes out to every one of you motherf—ers.”

“I hear you,” she told Kevin now, but Kate did not want to hold another forum yet. It would just be one more opportunity for the people in Norfolk to show how angry they had become.

Across town, other people were getting messages, too.

Taiese Bingham-Hickman was home with her two sons one night when she got a call from an unknown number. When she answered, she heard a man yelling, “Get on your knees,” and then she heard him say the n-word, and then she hung up and called the police. When her kids asked why a squad car was parked outside the house that night, and the next day, and the day after that, Taiese didn’t want to tell them the truth. “Never in my life have I received or experienced anything like that,” she wrote on Facebook afterward. [annotation q="Did you learn about these slurs on Taiese from her Facebook page or from somewhere else? " a="I heard about it while I was at Ron Tibbetts’s house talking with him about something else; he’d just seen her post about it on Facebook, and he told me what happened. I called Taiese as soon as I left Ron’s house."]

The days passed, and across town, more Facebook posts came, followed by fights in the comments sections.

— “This ‘not safe for anyone’ business is a barely disguised anti-immigrant trope.”

— “Don’t lock your doors. It’s up to you.”

— “Thank you for clarifying your real issue is the nationality and skin color of those coming.”

— “Excuse me? Do you know how to read? Where did I say anything about skin color?”

A new feeling of anticipation and tension settled over the town. “If people want to reduce anger, which could lead to hate or crime, be nice,” one woman wrote online, suggesting people start offering one another a conciliatory smile or wave. Ron Tibbetts liked that idea, but when he’d written his own Facebook post about remembering to “see the people in all of this,” someone else accused him of “performance kindness,” a phrase he’d never heard.

Among the most vocal in town, two groups formed.

On one side, the Concerned Citizens of Norfolk began selling “Not Safe for Anyone” yard signs for $10 apiece. On the other, the Norfolk Welcome Wagon decided they should have signs, too, except no one could agree on a design. One person said they should be red, white and blue, because the “Not Safe for Anyone” signs were red, white and blue. Another person said that might appear adversarial. Another said a neutral color might be better. Another suggested that instead of making new signs, they should pull out the other signs in the middle of the night. [annotation q="This graf has a jaunty, the frogurt-is-also-cursed rhythm — this is a Simpsons reference, sorry — and ends with a morbidly funny sentence. What impression did you want readers to get from this paragraph? What do you remember about writing and organizing it? " a="100% on the reference! You’re right that the tone of this graph sort of stands out from the rest of the piece. I didn’t want to be flippant about it, but I also wanted the graph to have a sort of spiraling, tripping-over-itself feel. The shelter is about to open, whether the town is ready for it or not. There’s also the sense that even the “non-angry” people in town, those who were ready to welcome the shelter, had moments of becoming caught up in emotion or resentment."]

Rumors were spreading that the shelter would open soon, but state officials still wouldn’t tell the town a date or time. They told Kate they were worried protesters might try to block the roads.

At the prison, contractors began working overnight. Razor wire began to come down.

More signs went up. Plans formed for a protest in the roundabout on Main Street.

Everyone had their own idea of who was about to come to town, including Kevin.

He imagined “a bunch of pregnant women and children,” mostly from Haiti, a country he didn’t know much about, except to think that it was a dangerous place. He didn’t know what language the families would speak, except to think that it wouldn’t be English. And he had only heard a few things on the news about what was happening at Terminal E in Logan Airport. But he had seen the inside of the prison. He knew it had a gym, a cafeteria and bedrooms that looked like dorm rooms, not cells, so he could at least imagine that, for anyone, it would be a better place to sleep than the floor of the airport.

“You know, it might be just totally fine,” he said.

***

THIRTY MILES AWAY, on the ground floor of Logan Airport, Terminal E, travelers were passing through a long alcove with floor-to-ceiling windows. There was not much in the alcove, except for a bathroom, two hand sanitizer machines, three trash cans and, along the wall, a row of crowd-control stanchion posts with retractable belts. The floors were clean and polished. Flight attendants passed by. An employee pushed a rack of luggage carts through the hall and disappeared through a back door. Everyone who entered was either arriving or departing, until a man, a woman and a boy walked into the alcove and stopped.

They put their luggage on the floor and sat on the radiator against the wall. The boy ran to and from a trash can. A few minutes later, another family entered and stayed. They took two of the stanchions and extended the retractable belts to create a border parallel to the wall. A few minutes after that, another family arrived and did the same. Soon, three families became three dozen. They opened their suitcases. They pulled out blankets and spread them in neat rows on the floor. They unrolled foam pads. They unpacked pillows, sleeping bags and more blankets. They dragged more stanchions into place, until they connected to create an aisle down the center of the space.

These were the people headed to Norfolk, and this was the place where they were living. Every morning, they woke up at the airport, packed everything they owned and were driven to one of the state’s “family welcome centers,” where they spent the day. Every evening, they returned to the airport, unpacked their things and slept. “Welcome to Massachusetts,” the governor’s voice said on a loop through a loudspeaker one level above. [annotation q="The “Welcome to Massachusetts” line is a great environmental detail. Do you recall when you realized it would make a worthwhile inclusion? " a="I heard it on a moving walkway. I wanted it to be a discordant note – and a familiar one. It’s the sort of thing you hear in airports. The rest of what you read is not usually the sort of thing you hear in airports."]

Along the wall, a 16-year-old girl named Nika watched the nightly routine unfold alongside her mother, her father, her younger sister, several suitcases and three layers of blankets spread out on the floor. She had been at the airport for 18 days now, she said. Her family had left Haiti for Brazil, and they had lived there for five years before beginning a journey she described as harrowing — north through the Darién Gap, across the U.S. border and eventually to Boston, where she had no idea what would happen to her next, outside of life in the airport and the cordoned-off living area that was erected each night and put away again each morning.

“Let’s say we are living a monotonous life,” Nika said.

At night, Nika sat against the wall or played cards with the other families at the airport. Or she stared up at the skywalk overhead, where she often saw travelers lean over the railing, taking pictures to post on the internet. Sometimes, she saw the posts on Instagram or TikTok, with “horrible comments” about “dirtying their country” and being “beggars,” she said. She knew that in life, there were people who tried “to make you believe that you’re not normal and you don’t fit into their world,” she said. “And when it happens, you kind of need to walk away.” But there was nowhere to go at the airport, so she found other ways. She liked to read romance novels and listen to music. She wrote her own stories and practiced her English by watching videos online.

When she saw the posts about the airport, she tried to believe that every person was inherently good, and that she was, too. Everyone was good at something, she said — only “maybe we are not in the right place to develop our talent.” Albert Einstein might be considered the most intelligent man of all time, but “think if he went to a city where he needs to fish to survive,” she said. “If he doesn’t know how, will he be considered an idiot for not knowing how to fish in a city where even children know how?”

Nika’s father placed her sister’s head on a pillow. At night, the airport got cold, and many of the kids staying there, including Nika’s sister, were sick, she said. “People are here out of necessity. It wasn’t a choice — ‘Then I woke up one day and I’m going to have an adventure and live in an airport.’” She hoped to get a job to help them. And she had other hopes, too: to go to school and to one day learn nine languages. She already knew Portuguese, Creole, Spanish, and some English and French, and she wanted to learn Italian and Mandarin next. Most of all, she wanted this trip to end, and for her, that meant “when I can finally sleep in peace. [annotation q="I was grateful when I realized you’d included Nika as one of the voices in this story after so much speculation, fearmongering and assumptions about the people on their way to Norfolk. How did you report this section? What do you remember most vividly about writing and editing it?" a="I went to Logan a few times to try to understand the rhythms of the day for the people staying there. Every night, this remarkable transformation occurred every day from an empty terminal to a vast array of people and blankets and suitcases. It was difficult to find someone who spoke some English. A few other kids directed me to Nika, and she agreed to talk. We spoke for several hours. At points, when she had something longer she wanted to say, she would write down her thoughts in Portuguese. She was incredibly wise. The editing of this section was a big lesson for me. My editor understood, again, that the section and Nika’s story needed to unfold gradually."]

“A house where I know I’ll rest after the rush of the day, you know?

“But I don’t think about it too much.”

Now it was dark outside, but the lights in the airport stayed on. Nika’s sister was asleep.

People walked to and from the bathroom to wash up. Flip-flops and sandals lay scattered on the floor. Pizza boxes were passed around. It was almost 9 p.m. Amid the sprawl of suitcases and backpacks, there was a boy holding a balloon. A girl lying on her stomach, her feet dangling in the air. A toddler rolling on the ground, trying to crawl. A man with pages of documents spread out in front of him. A mother and father lying down, a child between them. All around, there were families trying to get to sleep, and in the midst of them, a 16-year-old girl sat alone against the wall. “Some call me lonely,” Nika said, “but I feel more lonely when I’m in a place where I don’t fit in, so I prefer to be left alone, because true loneliness is when you’re surrounded by people who don’t value you.” [annotation q="Did this quote jump out immediately?" a="Yes. Originally I had it higher. My editor suggested we end the section with it to give it time and space to make a deeper impact. He was right."]

***

“HEY, JACKASS,” Kevin said.

“There’s only one jackass in this room, and it’s you,” a mechanic said back.

“Oh yeah,” Kevin laughed.

The phone rang. The car lift went up. The radio was on, as usual, as a bus pulled up at the prison.

Kevin didn’t see it, and if anyone else did, no one called or came by to let him know. Too far to be seen from the road, the bus came to a stop, and the families stepped off and looked around. No one could say for sure how long they would be in Norfolk. The families’ stays would be determined case by case, with families leaving and new families arriving on a rolling basis. The one certainty: The first of the migrants were here.

At the shop, Kevin kept working. He glanced out the window now and then, until it was late afternoon, and two miles away, at the center of town, people opposed to the shelter began to gather for their protest.

Some held “Not Safe for Anyone” signs. Others held new signs that read “No K!ds in Prison.” The plan was to stay until rush hour was over, then drive to the shelter to finish the protest there. People honked as they drove by. Local news cameras arrived.

There were several dozen people now, and across the street, on a hill overlooking the roundabout, Kevin stood, watching. He had decided to come after all. Some of the people in the roundabout he recognized. Some he didn’t. Some he heard yelling. Others stood quietly, waving to cars as they passed. There was a woman driving by, holding up her middle finger. “Bye, moron,” a protester said. There was a young man, waving through his open car window. “Love it! Love it!” he shouted. There was Taiese Bingham-Hickman, walking toward a police sergeant she spotted on the lawn to ask him for an update about the anonymous call. There was Ron Tibbetts, driving by with his wife, taking it all in. There was Kate O’Brien, driving away from town in the other direction, hoping to avoid the protest altogether.

On it went, and Kevin kept watching, reminding himself once more that however the town might change, it might be totally fine.

Now he turned away from the protest and looked up. He saw dark clouds gathering.

The rain fell lightly at first. Then harder. Heavy rain washed over the town.

It came down on the protesters’ signs, which they held above their heads for protection.

It covered the roundabout, Kevin’s shop and the prison down the road.

It pounded down on the roofs of cars parked nearby, where people at the roundabout were retreating. Some walked. Others ran. Cars drove off. The honking stopped. The protest never made it to the prison. As the migrants were settling in for their first night, the roundabout was empty. There was only rain now, and a few abandoned signs on the ground in a small, quiet town, where everyone was seeking shelter. [annotation q="What do you remember about developing this last line? What impression do you hope it leaves readers with?" a="I knew I wanted to return to the image of the small, quiet town from the beginning of the story. I also wanted the pacing of the line to force readers to slow down, almost to a standstill, until it ends with something basic: the idea of shelter."]

* * *

Trevor Pyle is a veteran newspaper reporter from the Pacific Northwest who now works as a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.

The post Finding a quiet voice in the center of America’s screaming immigration debate 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.”

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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.

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