{"id":1046,"date":"2013-07-02T14:37:23","date_gmt":"2013-07-02T14:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/07\/02\/annotation-tuesday-leslie-jamison-and-the-imprisoned-ultradistance-runner\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T19:13:08","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T19:13:08","slug":"annotation-tuesday-leslie-jamison-and-the-imprisoned-ultradistance-runner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/07\/02\/annotation-tuesday-leslie-jamison-and-the-imprisoned-ultradistance-runner\/","title":{"rendered":"Annotation Tuesday! Leslie Jamison and the imprisoned ultradistance runner"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n Leslie Jamison<\/strong><\/a>\u2018s \u201cFog Count<\/a>,\u201d which ran in the spring issue of The Oxford American<\/em>, is hard to pin down. Its subject matter is, ostensibly, jailed ultramarathon\u00a0runner Charlie Engle \u2014 whom\u00a0Jamison has profiled once before \u2014 but it\u2019s also a meditation on incarceration and a dirge for a ravaged planet. Jamison<\/strong><\/a><\/b>, who is also an accomplished novelist<\/a>, manages to blend these separate strands together to the point of invisibility. For this installment of \u201cAnnotation Tuesday!\u201d she chatted with me about how, exactly, she pulled this off. My comments are in\u00a0blue,\u00a0Jamison\u2019s in red. A couple of questions, to start:<\/span><\/span>

Storyboard<\/b>: How did you sell this story to an editor? How did it end up at The Oxford American<\/em>?<\/b>

\"Leslie<\/a>

Jamison<\/b>: An editor at Oxford American <\/em>got in touch with me after reading an essay I\u2019d written<\/a> about an ultramarathon in Tennessee. He liked that essay and wanted to know whether I would write something for OA<\/em>; as it happened I very much wanted to write a piece about Charlie Engle \u2014 who I\u2019d met at that very same ultramarathon \u2014 and I realized the subject would be a perfect fit for them: The journal is interested in the South (Charlie is from North Carolina and was incarcerated in West Virginia) and is open to structural creativity and hybridity in their longform nonfiction. I knew I wanted the freedom to see how this piece developed. It became a mixture of travelogue, memoir, profile, and rumination. There was some surprise built into the essay for me \u2014 I knew I needed to take the journey and see what I found \u2014 and OA<\/em> was willing to give me that flexibility, without demanding that I prophecy the shape or terms of the piece before it was written. <\/b>

Did you have a particular model for this piece? I\u2019ve never read anything like it. It\u2019s gorgeous, unbearably depressing, and somehow reads briskly.
<\/strong>

I didn\u2019t have one particular model for this piece but I can tell you some of the writers\/essayists who are constantly haunting me, and maybe that list will get us somewhere. I\u2019m a big fan of Charles D\u2019Ambrosio\u2019s collection Orphans<\/em>, in large part because it recounts the world with unapologetic bias and manages to excavate surprising veins of importance from all sorts of disparate corners \u2014 Mark Kay Letourneau and pre-fab housing \u2014 but feels fundamentally committed to encountering all sides of a question. I also admire Jo Ann Beard\u2019s \u201cThe Fourth State of Matter\u201d because it takes on something \u201cunbearably depressing\u201d (in her case, a mass shooting) and isn\u2019t afraid to talk about that tragedy in the same breath as her own divorce, or her attempt to get rid of the squirrels in her house \u2014 which is how life works, huge things jostle for elbow room with little ones. Further back, I was \u2014 have been, will probably always be \u2014 deeply affected by James Agee\u2019s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men<\/em>, which is obsessed by the project of trying to confess its own culpability, its biases, the limitations in its perspective, but is also deeply grounded in research and careful observation. Confession doesn\u2019t entirely obstruct documentation. My piece doesn\u2019t compare to that epic, though it\u2019s probably a quicker read.

What was most challenging about the reporting or writing?<\/b>

Visiting the prison was hard in many senses. It was emotionally overwhelming \u2014 an emotion lodged deep at the heart of the essay \u2014 and it was embarrassing to get the rules wrong \u2014 but logistically, as a writer, it was incredibly difficult not to be able to record my interview with Charlie in any way. I wasn\u2019t allowed to bring in pen and paper, much less a tape recorder. So I went from having total access to our exchange \u2014 our letters, printed and preserved \u2014 to nothing but memory. I basically raced back to my car as soon as I left the prison and starting writing down everything I could remember from our conversation, and then \u2014 when I felt like I had to leave the prison parking lot because visitors\u2019 hours were done \u2014 I pulled into the closest fast food restaurant (I think it was a chicken place) and kept writing. But memory\u2019s capacity to deform and distort comes into play almost immediately \u2014 I knew that, and had to accept it. What the piece was about (the many ways in which incarceration limits our freedom) was also dictating the terms of how it could be written.

Can you tell us a bit about your background? What led you to writing? Where and what do you teach?\u00a0<\/strong>
I was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Los Angeles, where I felt different the way that many people feel different growing up, wherever they’re from. It was only once I left L.A.\u00a0that I began to feel protective of it.\u00a0I’ve loved to write since I was little, but for most of my life I’ve identified as a fiction writer. As a little girl, I wrote stories about princesses in perilous situations \u2014 that often didn’t end well \u2014 and I felt sure from early on that writing was what I wanted to do. I got my MFA in fiction from Iowa, moved to New York \u2014 realized I couldn’t find much time to write around the constant struggle to pay rent in New York \u2014 and then moved back to L.A., got a job as an innkeeper, and plunged into the book that would become my first novel<\/a>. It feels so important to me that I circled back to my hometown to write that book. Since then I’ve lived in Nicaragua (briefly) and New Haven. I’m moving to Brooklyn in a few weeks.
Many nonfiction writers come to essays from more journalistic pursuits, but I was somewhat the opposite \u2014 I came to the essay from fiction, without much formal journalistic training, so things like scene and detail are familiar to me \u2014 the crafting and whittling of narrative \u2014 but I always have to constantly contain the part of me that wants to be fully in control of the story. For the past eight years I’ve been writing and gathering the essays for my first collection, The Empathy Exams<\/em>, which will be released by Graywolf Press in April of 2014. The essays have assembled quite organically into a collection \u2014 though their subjects range from silver mines to strange diseases, murder trials to painted corsets, they are all preoccupied with how we try to find meaning in pain, our own and others’.

Though I’ve loved the process of experimenting with nonfiction, it was also hard for me initially to accept that I wanted to lay aside the pursuit I always felt defined by (fiction) in order to pursue this new form that felt so electric, so charged, so full of energy. The lesson in that \u2014 from my perspective \u2014 is that you have to be willing to follow the energy whenever and wherever it emerges, even if it wasn’t part of your plan \u2014 inside a piece or on the broader scale; you have to stay flexible and brave about listening to what’s working \u2014 what’s alive \u2014 and what isn’t.

I have an active life as a teacher and I feel pretty grateful for it. In addition to teaching fiction, nonfiction and literature classes at Yale (where I’m also a doctoral candidate in English), I’ve taught fiction for a few years at Wesleyan, and currently teach both fiction and nonfiction at the Southern New Hampshire University low-residency MFA. In addition to focused correspondence work, the MFA program involves staying at a beautiful resort in the White Mountains \u2014 where we get to talk about craft and inspiration and all the other good stuff all day, every day, twice a year. I love working with those students because they represent a broad range of ages and backgrounds. Many are juggling their projects \u2014 novels or memoirs \u2014 alongside a couple of jobs, a couple of kids, a bunch of debts. It’s inspiring to watch them fit their writing into these dense lives; it’s the struggle for all of us.

\u201cFog Count<\/a>\u201d
<\/strong>By Leslie Jamison
The Oxford American, Spring 2013<\/em>
\"Screen<\/a>It\u2019s early morning and I\u2019m hunting for quarters. Downtown Fayetteville is quiet and full of stately stone buildings: mining money, probably. We\u2019re in the heart of coal country. The corner diner isn\u2019t open yet. The \u201cOnly Creole Restaurant in West Virginia\u201d isn\u2019t open yet. City Hall isn\u2019t open yet. One of its windows displays a flier raising money to build a treehouse for a girl named Izzy. <\/a>A startling opening. It\u2019s a series of negatives: no quarters; closed establishments; and Izzy lacks a treehouse. What was the narrative and thematic intent in beginning this way?<\/span>I love that you noticed this pattern of negatives. When I was wandering around Fayetteville that morning, I was struck by a sense of marginality \u2014 that being downtown earlier than anyone else (all these shuttered doors) felt like being inside of the world and outside of it at once; and the ghost town feeling was simultaneously lonely and privileged. It felt apt, in a way I hadn\u2019t expected, because I knew I was headed even deeper into the margins (the prison itself). I focused on quarters because it was a tiny detail about prison I hadn\u2019t expected \u2014 that this ritual of the vending machines would play a large role in visiting hours \u2014 and I wanted this piece to explore the fine-grain texture of prison life, those details too small to earn a place in more sensational accounts. Also, prison made me feel powerless in almost every sense \u2014 and getting quarters, making sure I had enough, was one of the few things I could do. <\/em>I couldn\u2019t bring Charlie any kind of gift; I could only buy him a microwave burrito if he wanted. (He didn\u2019t.) But Izzy\u2019s treehouse? Who\u2019s to say why it belongs, except it was there \u2014 it became part of my day, the unknown story of this girl (sick with something, I think) and her desire, and a community\u2019s desire to help her. Part of the truth of essays is simply allowing things to coexist because they do, <\/em>in the world, and not forcing metaphor to connect everything, letting pieces stand in unknown relation.<\/span><\/span>

I\u2019m looking for quarters because I\u2019m headed to prison, and I\u2019ve been told they will be useful there. <\/a>The first time through this piece this line really shocked me. I assumed (I guess I was meant to assume?) you were doing a stretch.<\/span>I was so focused on how to introduce Charlie that I didn\u2019t even consider the moment of suspense or misdirection embedded here \u2014 between these two sentences, that it would seem like I\u2019m serving time.<\/span><\/span> I\u2019m going to see a man named Charlie Engle. <\/a>Why \u201ca man named\u201d? That suggests you don\u2019t know him well, which isn\u2019t the case.<\/span>I was thinking of this as the moment when readers are meeting Charlie for the first time \u2014 so even if I\u2019m already on a first-name basis with him, they\u2019re not.<\/span><\/span> We\u2019ve been corresponding for the past nine months. He has promised that if I bring quarters we can binge on junk food from the vending machines while we talk. Visiting hours are 8 to 3. It makes me nervous to think about talking from 8 to 3. I\u2019m afraid I\u2019ll forget all my questions or that my questions are wrong anyway. I\u2019m plotting my meals in advance: vending machine breakfast, vending machine lunch. I\u2019m already thinking about what I\u2019ll do \u2014 what I\u2019ll eat, who I\u2019ll call, where I\u2019ll drive \u2014 once I\u2019m out. <\/a>Lovely foreshadowing of the rigidity of Charlie\u2019s days and night \u2014 all planned out, too. We readers get a sense of Charlie\u2019s life before we even meet him.<\/span>Yes, I like that you found that sense of claustrophobia and rigidity in this moment \u2014 I very much wanted it to be there. I wanted to introduce the seed of what I say explicitly later, which is that even though Charlie and I were occupying the same physical space \u2014 for some stretch of hours, in that visiting room \u2014 we were occupying it in such radically different ways (partially made different by the fact that I had the ability to imagine an afterward full of freedom and logistical choice). Our encounter was never free from that difference. In this moment, I\u2019m also starting to give a readers a sense of my narrative voice \u2014 not a professional journalist but an essayist, a human voice with clearly confessed daydreams and stomach, a woman who is thinking about where she\u2019s going to have dinner at the same time she\u2019s thinking about the role of prison in the American imagination. This simultaneity \u2014 big thoughts and petty ones lying side-by-side \u2014 is a big part of how I try to be honest in my essays these days.<\/span><\/span>

Charlie and I met two years ago at an ultramarathon in Tennessee, several months before Charlie was convicted of mortgage fraud and sentenced to twenty-one months at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Beckley, in Beaver, West Virginia.

Charlie is a cat of many lives: once-upon-a-time crack addict, father of two, professional repairer of hail damage, TV producer, motivational speaker, documentary-film star, and\u2014for the past twenty years\u2014one of the strongest ultra-distance runners in the world. Charlie started running in eighth grade: I was awkward and gangly and self-conscious pretty much all the time, except when I was running,<\/em> he wrote to me once. Running made me feel free and smooth and happy.<\/em>

Charlie\u2019s accomplishments are well-known in the ultra-running community: he\u2019s run across Death Valley; he\u2019s run across the Gobi; he\u2019s run across America. <\/a>I like the repetition of run \u2014\u00a0<\/em>suggestion that even Charlie\u2019s pre-prison life was filled with its own kind of monotony. Or am I reading too much into this?<\/span>I definitely wanted to create that sense of running as constancy, a fixed point between other places\/stages\/eras \u2014 run, run, run \u2014 to suggest his attachment grammatically as well as explicitly, so that I could pose the dilemma more forcefully: What happens when he has to stay put? I tried not to completely buy into ideas about running as substitute addiction \u2014 something in that vein \u2014 which is a popular\/available model for thinking about ultrarunning, but also limited, or too easy. And this last reason is really simple \u2014\u00a0but I also just wanted to give a sense of how badass Charlie is; why I was so fascinated by him.<\/span><\/span> He has trekked hundreds of miles through the jungles of Borneo and even more through the Amazon. He\u2019s climbed Mt. McKinley. In 2006 and 2007, he ran 4,600 miles across the Sahara. The journey was documented in a film and it was this film, incidentally, that set his legal nightmare in motion.

The story of Charlie\u2019s arrest and conviction is long and harrowing, but here are the basics: an IRS agent named Robert Nordlander started wondering about Charlie\u2019s finances after watching the Sahara film. He wanted to know: how does a guy like that support all his adventures? I\u2019ve tried to understand Nordlander\u2019s curiosity as vocational instinct. Perhaps he wonders how strangers pay their taxes the same way I wonder how strangers get along with their mothers, or what secrets they keep from their spouses. <\/a>Did you attempt to interview Nordlander?<\/span>I didn\u2019t. This isn\u2019t a piece of investigative journalism but an account of my encounter with Charlie \u2014 and I like to think the piece isn\u2019t pretending to be anything it\u2019s not, that it\u2019s honest about its limitations.<\/span><\/span>

\"Questions\"<\/a>
a page from Jamison\u2019s notebook<\/figcaption><\/figure>

Nordlander opened an investigation, and he didn\u2019t find anything wrong with Charlie\u2019s taxes. But instead of closing the case, he pushed further. He authorized garbage dives. He authorized tactics that wouldn\u2019t have been possible before the Patriot Act. He started looking into Charlie\u2019s properties. He sent a female undercover agent\u2014rigged with wires\u2014to ask Charlie out to lunch. Charlie was single at the time. He said yes. He tried to impress. He said his broker had filled out a couple \u201cliar loans\u201d\u2014standard shorthand for stated-income loans\u2014and that non-confession pretty much sealed the deal. <\/a>Is this information culled from news accounts?<\/span>My account is based on Charlie\u2019s version of the story, but also draws on two pieces written about him in the New York Times<\/em> by Joe Nocera. I don\u2019t offer anything close to a fully researched account, but that\u2019s because the thrust of the piece isn\u2019t digging into Charlie\u2019s legal ordeal; it\u2019s trying to document his experience through my own \u2014 highly subjective, highly confessed \u2014 gaze. For me, in this vein, the most important thing is to be clear with readers about what you\u2019re offering them.<\/span><\/span> In October 2010, Charlie was convicted of twelve counts of mail, bank, and wire fraud. Nordlander had won his case at last. <\/a>You refer to Charlie by his first name and the IRS agent by his last \u2014 is that formality meant to nudge the reader towards Charlie\u2019s corner?<\/span>Perhaps it does that! But it was simply meant to express my own relationship to both men (again: highly subjective, highly confessed) \u2014 to me, Charlie was Charlie and Nordlander was Nordlander. I knew one and not the other; I had more sympathy for one and not the other. It\u2019s funny, there\u2019s something that might have felt disingenuous about calling Charlie \u201cEngle\u201d \u2014 like I was trying to seduce readers into forgetting the stance\/intimacy\/proximity the piece was being written from.<\/span><\/span>

Charlie\u2019s case was also part of a much larger story: the fallout of the American subprime mortgage crisis. His conviction, one imagines, was largely fueled by the general knowledge that things had gone terribly wrong and the sense that people should be held accountable. So Charlie was held accountable. He was held accountable for something millions of people did, something he still alleges\u2014with compelling evidence\u2014he didn\u2019t do. He became a convenient scapegoat for the inevitable collapse of a system fueled by recklessness and greed. <\/a>Charlie seems to be at the mercy of several forces here: a financial crisis brought on by easy money; a broken prison system; and a dying planet. This imbues his story \u2013 your story \u2013 with great tension. What was your intent here?<\/span>Part of what fascinates me about the essay form is that it seems to acknowledge \u2014 in its structural fluidity, its capacity \u2014 that phenomena in the world are ruthlessly \u2014 often surprisingly \u2014 connected; I wanted this essay to posit some of those connections between various societal structures of sentiment (the crutch and comfort of blaming<\/em>, for example). I hate rhetorical hinges that pose clever but ultimately hollow connections between things \u2014 and am sure some readers feel I\u2019ve done some of that in this piece \u2014 but I really did feel like the impulse to self-soothe by way of accusation \u2014 that feels like an important sentimental wire running between what happened to Charlie vis-\u00e0-vis the subprime crisis, and what happens with incarceration more generally.<\/span><\/span>

At the time of his arraignment, Charlie was engaged. His engagement didn\u2019t survive the trial. He was imprisoned a state away from his teenage sons in North Carolina. <\/a>Did you interview Charlie\u2019s fianc\u00e9e or sons?<\/span>Nope. Partially because of the scope\/scale\/intentions of the piece, as mentioned above, and partially because Charlie was interested in preserving privacy for his family. Not to say that the job of the investigative reporter is\u00a0to fulfill the emotional wish list of his subject, of course, but my role in this situation was more personally involved, and I felt more personally beholden.<\/span><\/span> He lost his corporate sponsorships. He lost two years of racing. He lost the right of motion. He lost\u2014as he\u2019d tell me later, quite simply\u2014a lot.

***

I first wrote Charlie a letter because I was fascinated by his life. It gave me a sense of vertigo to know that when we\u2019d met, in the hills of Tennessee, he\u2019d had no idea what was about to happen, how everything was going to change. I wondered what incarceration was like for him. Running made me feel free and smooth and happy.<\/em> His body was a body that found solace in moving itself across territory\u2014across deserts and jungles and entire nations. The core of his life pointed its finger at the very fact of what incarceration does, which is to keep someone in one place. I wanted to know: what happens when you confine a man whose whole life is motion? <\/a>His body was a body that found solace in moving itself across territory… <\/em>This reads more like poetry than prose. Do you have a background in poetry? And when you write, do you read your work aloud?<\/span>Yes, and yes. I wrote a lot of poetry in college \u2014 divorced innkeepers and their sad parrots, etc. \u2014 and finding the right cadence to carry a piece of sense or sentiment is still one of the most sublime parts of writing for me; when I hit the right groove and feel things start to sing. I have to be vigilant not to keep things I can\u2019t conceptually stand behind simply because they sound good. I read everything aloud, many times. I wrote this essay alone in a cabin in rural Maryland \u2014 didn\u2019t talk to anyone for days \u2014 and was constantly reading it aloud there.<\/span><\/span>

One thing that happens is you turn him into a good pen pal. Over the course of our correspondence, Charlie was smart and funny and honest. <\/a>Why assert that Charlie was honest with you upfront? Why not allow the reader to make up his own mind?<\/span>Fair point. It gets back to what I was saying earlier \u2014 I am offering a highly subjective account of how I experienced Charlie and his story. I found him honest; I\u2019m telling you \u2014 my reader \u2014 that\u2019s how I found him. For a piece like this \u2014 largely single-sourced, as you say \u2014 confessing bias and limitation feels particularly important. Doesn\u2019t the reader always still have the chance\/right to make up his own mind? To disagree? It\u2019s a mistake to understand the nonfiction narrator as anything but unreliable, and a mistake to assume that this unreliability isn\u2019t open to pushback from a reader\u2019s own sensibility.<\/span><\/span> He steered himself away from anger about his incarceration, but he did so with such intentionality, such earnest and visible effort, that the anger itself emerged as a negative shape carved in the margins. Charlie described it as a cliff; he had to pull himself back from the brink. My anger is immense and I hate the feeling that I am losing control, which happens mostly when I let that anger breathe.<\/em> He looked for what he could salvage: Like all difficult things, if we can remain open … something positive will come. That said, I am still a bit baffled about what good will come from this for me. I lost a lot.<\/em>

He wrote about his mother, who was slipping into dementia: I miss her. I can say that it\u2019s unfair for me to be away from her and it would be true. <\/em>He wrote about women: I have never gone this long in my adult life without sex. I don\u2019t think I could have ever gone a year alone out there. <\/em><\/a>You do not specify when you received various missives. Was he always this candid, or did he open up gradually?<\/span>Our letters did get more candid as our correspondence progressed, and as it became clear \u2014 to both of us \u2014 that my letters to him were going to be personal and revelatory as well.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cOut there,\u201d incidentally, was a phrase I heard frequently at the Barkley Marathons, the ultra-run where I first met Charlie. It\u2019s a brutal race through more than one hundred miles of briar-studded Tennessee hills. At Barkley, \u201cout there\u201d meant in the wilderness, on the course, getting lost or getting found or whacking your way through underbrush. \u201cOut there\u201d meant you were in motion, doing the thing, winning or getting beaten. \u201cIn here,\u201d in prison, was the opposite of all that; it was never getting lost, never going where you hadn\u2019t already been.

Some weeks Charlie\u2019s letters were written from a low-down place: My mother is getting worse, my knee is getting worse, my attitude is getting worse. <\/em>Or: Today I awoke full of fear.<\/em> <\/em><\/a>At what point did Charlie agree that you could quote his letters? Was this is condition of doing the story? And do you believe he wrote with an eye toward\u00a0the piece you would inevitably write?<\/span>From the beginning, I was clear with Charlie about the fact that I wanted to write about him, and that our letters were \u2014 among other things \u2014 part of that project. I talked to him more explicitly about using the letters once the piece was finally taking shape, but I do think he wrote the letters with some eye to their eventual public appearance. As did I. Dan Chiasson wrote a great New Yorker <\/em>article about the collected letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, in which he makes the point that they were writing for each other and <\/em>for immortality; these horizons weren\u2019t mutually exclusive, intimacy and posterity. Not to say that my correspondence with Charlie is destined for immortality, just that it was genuinely personal and public at once.<\/span><\/span>

He was forced to stop running on the prison track because of an injury that turned into a Baker\u2019s cyst, a huge swelling behind his knee. He wrote about the incredible frustration of trying to get treatment: I have spent more than 90 days just trying to see the doctor. <\/em><\/a>Did you confirm this with the prison? How was this piece fact-checked? On the face of it, it\u2019s single-sourced.<\/span>Single-sourced. Just a quote from Charlie. Though as my conversation with the guard indicates later, there was a sense amongst others in the prison that he had been waiting a while to get this taken care of. This piece was fact-checked by a wonderful woman at OA<\/em>, though most of the substantive changes had to do with ways I was framing\/presenting West Virginia economic issues. Most of the material about prison we took as Charlie\u2019s account of prison experience \u2014 framed that way, rather than incontestable fact. But the process of fact-checking information about West Virginia was incredibly useful \u2014 it forced me to rethink some of the points I was making \u2014 and my friend Cat was a wonderful resource as well, in helping us check facts and think about the larger framing of West Virginia in the piece.<\/span><\/span> The neglect here is almost unimaginable<\/em>.

At Christmas, he sent a photocopied cartoon: a bearded Santa behind bars staring at a puny tree. \u201cWish You Were Here\u201d was crossed out and replaced by \u201cWish I Was There.\u201d

Writing to Charlie often made me feel guilty. I wrote about something as simple as walking around my neighborhood, with its methadone clinic and its blossoming pear trees, and felt like there was no way to communicate my world to Charlie that wasn\u2019t rubbing salt into the central wound of his life. <\/a>This may be the first story I\u2019ve ever read where the writer professes to be aware of \u2014 and sensitive to \u2014 a subject\u2019s feelings. It\u2019s not very Janet Malcolm-y.<\/span>The Journalist and the Murderer <\/em>is a brilliant and disturbing book that had a huge effect on me when I read it. It still calls to the surface a lot of guilt and anxiety I have about turning people into characters (as nonfiction necessarily does) but also makes me glad I write pieces that don\u2019t profess to be standard journalism; I can write about the process of caring about the people I write about; there\u2019s space for that. That said, my editor at OA<\/em> was very <\/em>clear with me about not showing Charlie the piece once it was written and before it was published (which I had wanted to do). He said he\u2019d kill it if I did that. It was sort of a dramatic moment for me, actually, though it was old news to everyone else.<\/span><\/span> I wrote about running in the rain\u2014by the end I was so soaked I didn\u2019t even feel separate from it<\/em>\u2014and how running in New Haven rain reminded me of running in Virginia rain with my brother, past a fish factory on the Chesapeake, after our grandfather died. <\/a>This is wonderful, the way you weave in details from your own life without jarring the reader out of the story.<\/span>I preach specificity to my students at every turn. There is no impact when you say, \u201cI wrote about my life\u201d or something similarly general \u2014 that kind of vague statement dissolves immediately into the ether. You have to give the texture \u2014 the fish factory, the Chesapeake \u2014 to turn the details into splinters; and weirdly being more detailed gives you the freedom to move quickly, if you trust that your details were good enough to be vivid in a single short breath. You asked about my relationship to poetry \u2014 I think that some of my fixation on details (though it\u2019s shared with the legacy of the New Journalism) comes from having been a fiction writer most of my career. My first book was a novel. Details are the fun part. Though in Salvador<\/em>, Joan Didion has a lovely passage condemning her own impulse to make too much of details, find their easy ironies.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019m an asshole to write to you about running,<\/em> I wrote, but sent the letter anyway. <\/a>To repeat the question posed above, but about you: Did you<\/em> write letters to Charlie with publication in mind?<\/span>Yes I did. Would be so totally dishonest to pretend otherwise. That said \u2014 if I\u2019m in a confessional moment \u2014 I should say that I write most of my letters\/diaries with some secret shameful dream of someday having archives. I just read Blake Bailey\u2019s biography of Charles Jackson, who carbon copied all his letters to others \u2014 anticipating his own archives \u2014 and I found that very poignant; especially since I\u2019ve spent some time at those archives, and it was moving to me that Jackson might have once daydreamed about the attention I \u2014 a stranger \u2014 would someday grant him. At a certain point I started photocopying my letters to Charlie, which is about as \u201cpublication in mind\u201d as things get.<\/span><\/span> I thought it might connect to something Charlie had mentioned about running around the prison\u2019s gravel track during a storm. It was the best time to run, he\u2019d written, because everyone else went inside. It was the only time he got to be alone. Talking on the phone with Charlie was even stranger: a voice announced, at even intervals, You are talking to an inmate at a Federal Correctional Facility,<\/em> and I walked down Trumbull Street in the twilight while he sat somewhere\u2014in a little plastic booth? I couldn\u2019t even picture it\u2014and when we got off the phone, I ate roasted trout at the nicest restaurant in town while he headed off for another stretch of top-bunk reading into the late night.

I liked when we wrote about the past, because it meant we were on equal footing\u2014or rather, he had more past than I did. As he put it, more life experience under his singlet. <\/a>Why isn\u2019t this in quotes, or italicized?<\/span>Free indirect discourse, I guess.<\/span><\/span> We both wrote about drinking and using, and stopping drinking and using. Charlie wrote about being an addict with twenty years of sobriety in a prison where he suspected no one else\u2014out of more than four hundred men\u2014had gotten clean before arriving. In his twenties, Charlie ran a hail-repair business that took him all over the country\u2014chasing nasty weather and its comet trail of damage, chasing eight balls in the worst neighborhoods of shitty Midwestern cities. He hit bottom getting shot at by angry dealers in the wrong part of Wichita. He would have gotten more time for what he was guilty of back then than he got for what he\u2019s innocent of now.

I wrote about the one-legged traveling magician I\u2019d met in Nicaragua, years before, who was a drunk and whose drinking made me unspeakably sad; how I thought of him years later when I tripped, drunk, on a pair of crutches of my own. I wrote about trying to take a girl, newly sober, out to a raptor refuge near Iowa City\u2014to see the wounded owls! I\u2019d promised her, as if these broken birds were some wonder of the world\u2014and how I\u2019d gotten lost, and driven in circles until we finally sat on a bench smoking cigarettes instead, and how I felt like a failure because I wanted to make sobriety seem full of possibility but instead I\u2019d made it seem full of disappointment. <\/a>A canny move; the reader learns about you, and gets a sense, perhaps, of why Charlie is candid with you. With the truly great stories \u2013 of which this is one \u2013 you get a sense that only that <\/em>writer could have produced it.<\/span>Thank you! It\u2019s clear you\u2019re a sharp and sensitive reader for this essay \u2014 very attentive to its emotional core as well as its strategies. I needed sobriety to be in this essay, but I didn\u2019t want to make it central \u2014 it was one truth among many truths, and the most important ones to illuminate (here, at least) were other ones. But you\u2019re right; it was a connective glue \u2014 it made other illuminations possible.<\/span><\/span>

For a week, in the spring, Charlie and I wrote letters every day. We made a ritual out of noticing. We focused on particulars. He described an argument about an unpaid debt, a bigger guy approaching a smaller guy: \u201cBlood on my knife or shit on my dick, I will collect what I\u2019m owed.\u201d <\/a>This is apparently common slang<\/a>.<\/span>Yes, well it was the first time I\u2019d heard it!<\/span><\/span> He wrote about the evolution of his Fridays: draft beers for a quarter in his drinking days, prerace rest days in his sobriety. In prison they were something else entirely: Every Friday for 15 months, lunch has been a piece of square fish of unknown origin, along with too-sweet cole slaw and potato chips I won\u2019t eat. Friday means very loud inmates late into the night, playing cards or dominos. Fridays mean there will be another movie shown, a movie I refuse to watch because I never want to even pretend that I am comfortable here. <\/em><\/a>I love this passage because Charlie, like you, employs the language of repetition. Friday \u2026 Friday \u2026 Friday \u2026\u00a0<\/em><\/span>I think Charlie was committed to finding patterns in his life \u2014 it\u2019s a way to keep from going crazy when things that feel incredibly unfair have happened to you \u2014 and that Fridays were one way of making sense. And you\u2019re absolutely right \u2014 refrain becomes an important mode of sense-making for the essay as a whole, too.<\/span><\/span>

Charlie wrote about buying FireBalls and instant coffee at the commissary, about the correctional officer at lunch who yelled when inmates couldn\u2019t decide quickly enough between cookies and fruit. He described how Beckley felt on Mother\u2019s Day: Mother\u2019s Day creates a prison full of zombies, walking around in a daze, hoping the day passes quickly.<\/em> Mother\u2019s Day reminded those men of how they were failing to be sons. Every holiday was an invocation of \u201cout there,\u201d the life none of them were living.

Charlie invited me to come visit. He put me on his visitation list and told me the rules: You probably shouldn\u2019t wear Daisy Dukes or a tube top. Also best not to bring in drugs or alcohol. <\/em>A woman once came in a skirt without panties. She was, he wrote, visiting a very young man with a very long sentence.<\/em> <\/em><\/a>This story succeeds, in part, because Charlie is an excellent writer. If he\u2019d been only mediocre, would you have quoted him so extensively? Would the structure of the story have changed? Would there have been a story at all?<\/span>Glad to hear you acknowledge this \u2014 Charlie\u2019s writing is powerful in its own right. I think there could have been a story with someone who wasn\u2019t so naturally fluent, but it would have posed a different dilemma for me as writer \u2014 I\u2019d risk that note of condescension creeping in if I was quoting writing that wasn\u2019t terribly strong, and then holding it up as artifact for analysis. I think I might have done more paraphrasing, but then the essay would have lost so much \u2014 wouldn\u2019t have had the relief\/breathing room\/minor chorus of another voice.<\/span><\/span>

I found more guidelines online: I wasn\u2019t allowed to wear camo gear or spandex or green khaki that looked like Beckley khaki, or boots that looked like Beckley boots. If there was too much fog, I might get turned away. Beckley gets strict in the fog. The inmates get counted more often. I pictured this fog\u2014this mythic, West Virginia fog\u2014in vast, billowing ripples, fog so thick a man could ride it to freedom like a wave. Every fog count is an act of protest against unseen possibility; Beckley clutches men close\u2014tallies them up, keeps them contained, seals them off. <\/a>Why anthropomorphize the prison?<\/span>To evoke some of the psychological experience of prison \u2014 at least, as I got this experience through Charlie \u2014 that the prison itself starts to feel like an agent with some sort of affective\/emotional intention. The institution of prison is an aggregation of human impulses\/desires\/errors, anyway.<\/span><\/span>

I found the commissary sales list online in a grainy pdf. You could get Berry Blue Typhoon Drink Mix, Fresh Catch Mackerel, Hot Beef Bites, or a German Chocolate Cookie Ring. You could get Strawberry Shampoo or something called Magic Grow or something else called Lusti Coconut Oil. You could get mesh shorts or a denture bath. You could get Religious Certified Jalape\u00f1o Wheels. You could buy Milk of Magnesia or Acne Treatment or Prayer Oil. <\/a>Do you find a certain power in lists like this? The reader is confronted with the sheer oddity of what\u2019s on offer.<\/span>I think this gets back to the power of specificity. It forces a reader closer to the position of someone actually choosing between items on this list, whereas generality (cookies and meat snacks and shampoo!) keeps the whole thing more abstract, more distanced. It\u2019s like zooming close enough on wood to see the grain, the texture, rather than simply the larger shape or cut of the thing. I was actually so <\/em>attached to this list that I fought for it against the probing of the fact checker. The commissary list changed between the time I wrote the essay and the time it was published. I felt it was more accurate to use the list that Charlie had had, rather than the one that happened to be accurate when OA<\/em> was running the essay. But really I couldn\u2019t stand the thought of losing Lusti Oil.<\/span><\/span>

I found rules. There were rules about movement and rules about hygiene and rules about possession. Too many possessions could be a fire hazard. You were allowed five books and one photo album. Hobby craft materials had to be disposed of immediately after use. Finished hobby crafts could only be sent to people on your official visitation list. There would be no postal harassment by hobby craft.

I saw what happens if you follow the rules: there wasn\u2019t just basic didn\u2019t-fuck-up official Good Time (Statutory Good Time) but also Extra Good Time, further divided into Industrial Good Time, Community Corrections Center Good Time, Meritorious Good Time, and Camp Good Time. Camp Good Time.<\/em> Not really. <\/a>Did Charlie provide you with this weird prison lingo?<\/span>I found it online, when I was researching prison rules and regulations, and the irony really struck me \u2014 the Orwellian quality of language whose texture evokes the opposite of its substance.<\/span><\/span>
***
Heading south down I-79, I feel the border between Maryland and West Virginia as smooth highway turning to sandpaper. The land is beautiful. Really beautiful\u2014endless lush forests, pristine and unblemished, countless shades of green on hills layered back into drifts of fog. I start thinking maybe coal mining is just a notion someone had about West Virginia; or something they like to talk about on NPR. Maybe it\u2019s just a theme for the twisted-steel sculpture garden I see to my left\u2014Coal Country Miniature Golf\u2014and not an actual series of scars in the earth. Because this place seems phenomenally unscarred, phenomenally pure. Freeway exits promise beautiful, luminous places: Whisper Mountain, Saltlick Creek, Cranberry Glades. <\/em>
I spend the night with Cat, a friend from college, who covers Fayette County for a local paper. Cat lives in a ramshackle house strung with Mexican fiesta flags and skirted by an apron of oddly comforting debris: a pile of old dresses, a bucket of crushed PBR cans, an empty tofu carton with its plastic flap crushed onto the dirt. Cat lives there with her boyfriend Drew\u2014a veteran of anarchist communal living who now works deconstruction and salvage, taking apart empty homes and selling their flooring to hip bars in northern states\u2014and Andrew, a community organizer who works on land reform.

Their home reveals itself in dream-like pieces: a pile of crusted dishes, a bone on the floor, a giant spider lurking in a white ceramic mug, a fabric owl covered in sequins, a square of vegan spanakopita catching fire in the toaster oven, a dog to whom the bone belongs, a creek out back and a giant slab of rock for sunning and a garden too, full of beets and cabbage and spinach-for-vegan-spanakopita and blossoming sweet peas curling up wire lattice and even the tiny, barely sprouted beginning of a pecan tree.

I sit with Cat and Drew in a cozy room, under a bare yellow light and its fluttering density of flies and moths. A tiny flying thing dies in my spanakopita. I ask Cat what she writes about for her newspaper. She says one of her first stories was about Boy Scouts. Leaders in southern West Virginia fought hard for the Boy Scouts to locate a new retreat center here. They offered to build roads. They offered tax breaks to local contractors. They were eager for an industry that wouldn\u2019t involve plundering the land.

The Boy Scouts built their retreat on an old strip mine. When Cat was interviewing the flocks of scouts who came to clear trails, she asked if they knew how surface mining worked\u2014the blasting of entire mountaintops, the razing-bare of the earth, the turning of forest into dirt-brown vistas. The Boy Scouts didn\u2019t know. They were horrified. But why would you\u2014?<\/em> That\u2019s when a bigger Boy Scout arrived. A Boy Scout in charge of other Boy Scouts. He said the conversation was over.

Cat and Drew tell me how to pronounce Fayetteville\u2014like Fay-ut-vul\u2014and they also tell me about bigger stuff, like how most of West Virginia\u2019s forest has been cleared at some point since the 1870s\u2014in multiple waves\u2014for the sake of salt and oil and coal and lumber and gas. But it looks so green<\/em>, I say. I tell them about my drive south\u2014those lush hills, their lovely curves receding into the middle distance.

Drew nods. Yep, he says. There\u2019s no surface mining near the highways.

Potemkin Forests! I feel like an idiot. Cat tells me to look out for what they call beauty lines\u2014rows of trees planted along hill crests to mask the vast moonscapes of mine-ravaged land beyond. I am one of the Boy Scouts. I am being told about the wrongness right in front of me. Drew says that some of the land here has been mined so much it\u2019s essentially on stilts, barely holding itself up. They call this land honeycombed. West Virginia is like a developing nation. It has so many resources and it has been screwed over again and again: locals used for labor; land used for riches; other people taking the profits.

How can I explain the magic of that house? It was a paradise on damaged land, with its fiesta flags and its flutter of moths, its sequined owl and mounds of embryonic squash rising from whatever earth was left between the stilts\u2014and Drew and Cat so full of goodness, their nerves so awake to this world, explaining it so patiently, inhabiting with utter grace their small fraction of a torn territory.

In their hallway the next morning, I find a different dog than the one I saw the night before. This dog seems friendly too. I don\u2019t feel like I\u2019ve gotten much sleep but I can remember what I dreamed: I was interviewing a man in a dingy diner and I had just gotten through my chitchat questions and was preparing to get into it\u2014though I wasn\u2019t sure what \u201cit\u201d was\u2014when the man rose to pay the bill. I woke with a feeling of panic: I hadn\u2019t asked any of the questions that mattered.

It\u2019s a dream so obvious I feel betrayed by it. It neither dissolves an extant fear nor illuminates a new one. It simply tells me I\u2019m afraid I\u2019ll say stupid things (as I\u2019m always afraid of saying stupid things), that I will ask questions that are beside the point, that my curiosity will prove little more than useless voyeurism, a girl lifting her sunglasses to peer between the bars, stuttering What\u2019s it like here? What part hurts the most?<\/em> <\/em><\/a>This whole section seems like a gorgeous digression. What\u2019s the narrative purpose?<\/span>My digression about the narrative purpose(s) of this digression could probably become an entire narrative in its own right. I never intended for Cat \u2014 or her house, or West Virginia more generally \u2014 to become part of this piece. I wanted to write about Charlie, and our relationship, and his experience about prison. But West Virginia really intruded on this essay; it felt impossible not to talk about it. I hate when writers use quasi-mystical language that obscures the actual process \u2014 invoking the destiny or intentions of a piece, or its characters, as independent of intention \u2014 so I\u2019ll try to say it simply: I was so struck by the power of West Virginia \u2014 its beauty, its wounds \u2014 that I followed a massive unfounded intuition and let myself write out what felt powerful to me about being there. Intuitively, I had a sense that things were connected \u2014 the sense of a damaged place that was largely ignored or misunderstood by collective vision, this all felt conceptually connected to incarceration and logistically connected by the fact that incarceration is a major industry in West Virginia. These correspondences are more than simply cute intellectual resonances; they are driven by powerful and unfortunate economic realities. So there was a sense that it was all connected \u2014 but I initially wrote the digression because one of my only rules about writing is that I allow myself to follow the energy (and I hate what <\/em>kind of quasi-mystical language, exactly?) and it felt like there was a lot of energy in the experience I\u2019d had with Cat, at her home. Looking back, I think that the digression does a few different things: It sets up this Edenic place that contrasts with the space of prison the next day; it pushes back against the unilateral conception of West Virginia as damaged; it allows for a micro-narrative of my own busted illusions (Potemkin forests) and gives a sense of me as an outsider trying to get some grip on this place. It also admits \u2014 yet again \u2014\u00a0that I\u2019m a human being rather than a disembodied journalistic \u201cI\u201d \u2014 I woke up in a regular bed and petted weird dogs before I went to prison; I didn\u2019t wake up inside a sleek business suit made of objectivity.<\/span><\/span>
***
I end up finding quarters in a coffee shop tucked under the gray stone wing of a church. I drive to Beaver. I watch for beauty lines from the highway. I can\u2019t pick them out, which I suppose is the point. NPR runs a segment on rural schools in dirt-poor mining counties, while local radio plays advertisements from mines looking to hire.
Mining and incarceration are both looming presences on the West Virginia landscape\u2014both willfully obscured and misrepresented, their growth slopes neatly inverted. Mining is an industry in decline; incarceration is on the rise. The number of inmates in West Virginia has quadrupled since 1990. People with political influence and powerful economic interests allow the state to be exploited by new industries in order to repair the damage old industries have caused.

In the false American imagination, West Virginia is a joke or else it\u2019s a charity case; but more than anything it is unseen, an invisible architecture of labor and struggle; and incarceration shares this invisibility, hidden at the center of everything; our slipshod remedy for an abiding fear, danger pinned to human bodies and then slotted into bunk beds you can\u2019t see from any highway. <\/a>Did you always envision this story as a multi-headed portrait: of the prison, of Charlie and the state itself? Are they necessarily entwined? <\/span>As I mentioned above, I didn\u2019t imagine this essay being about West Virginia when I first conceived it \u2014 that\u2019s just where Charlie happened to be incarcerated \u2014 but it ended up feeling important. Are they \u201cnecessarily\u201d entwined? No, definitely not. But it gets back to what you said earlier about writing an essay only you can write (also something I tell my writing students) \u2014 in this version of this story that I could tell, everything had to get involved. I was lucky to be publishing with OA<\/em> because they were very flexible with the essay including material we hadn\u2019t been expecting it to include.<\/span><\/span>
***
Charlie is one of these bodies. His story is the story of a system that strip-mined the American housing market and peeled away whatever it could, leaving the economy on stilts\u2014land on stilts, subprime-hollowed earth\u2014and balancing an impossible future on dreams and greed. Now we try to live in the aftermath. We punish where it\u2019s possible. We take a systemic tragedy and turn it into neatly packaged recompense: time served.
I follow my GPS to 1600 Industrial Park Road. I don\u2019t make a right turn into Beckley or a left turn into Beckley. The road simply becomes Beckley. I pass an empty guard\u2019s hut and find myself curving between strangely manicured banks of lawn and clusters of forest that remind me of nothing so much as a country club. <\/a>This is also true of rehab centers. Is there a correlation between these Potemkin vistas and the suffering therein? <\/span>So many connections, I\u2019d think, but it\u2019s a fascinating question and here are a few connections that come to mind first: The landscaping is the physical\/horticultural\/visual expression of the notion of \u201cgetting better\u201d \u2014 that there\u2019s some sort of hope or investment evident in that desire to beautify \u2014 that\u2019s both genuine and also a corrosive mythology\/falsification \u2014 more in the case of prison than rehab \u2014 because it disguises the fact of what\u2019s happening beyond the manicured lawns, which is sanctioned detainment. In the case of FCI Beckley it\u2019s a little harder to be straightforwardly indignant about that irony, though, because some of the prisoners have enough freedom of motion (because it\u2019s part prison camp) that they\u2019re actually benefiting from the care put into the visual dimensions of that place \u2014 or at least they have some access to that environment. But maybe being somewhere \u201cpretty\u201d just makes it worse. Sometimes empathy is really about throwing up your hands and saying, \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d I do know that so many sentences of this essay could have unfurled into much longer digressions \u2014 even if it seems like I\u2019m already following every digression possible!<\/span><\/span>

\"doing<\/a>I do everything wrong.

First, I go to the wrong prison. FCI Beckley consists of two facilities: a medium-security prison and a lower-security Satellite Camp. I know Charlie is housed at the Satellite Camp\u2014along with the other minimum-security guys, mostly there for drugs or white-collar crimes\u2014but for some reason I think I still have to get processed at the main building. This is not the case. The guard on duty shows his irritation at my ignorance. Before we discover this large mistake, however, he has the opportunity to point out smaller ones: I\u2019m carrying my purse. We\u2019ll need to put that in a locker. I\u2019m wearing a skirt. He was a very young man with a very long sentence.<\/em> I want to tell the guard: \u201cMy skirt is long! I\u2019m wearing underwear!\u201d I feel my body as an object and agent of violation. I feel suspected and imagined.

I fill out a visiting form alongside an elderly couple. I notice the woman has a plastic baggie full of quarters and dollars; I feel a kind of kinship. She is also looking ahead to the vending machines\u2014has come prepared to offer her son snacks, at least, and company, if she can offer him nothing else. <\/a>How did you know she was waiting for her son? Did you talk to her?<\/span>Nope, purely speculative. Could have been her nephew or her son-in-law or just a guy who had husband as a Boy Scout leader 20 years ago. I\u2019d like to think I\u2019ve constructed an essayistic voice where it\u2019s clear I do some speculation \u2014 I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything wrong with speculation; that wrongness only comes when you pass it off as something more certain.<\/span><\/span>

I wait while the guard gets off the phone. It seems like he\u2019s talking to someone who is about to check himself in. \u201cSelf-surrender?\u201d The guard says into the receiver. \u201cYou can bring a Bible and your medications.\u201d Strange to imagine a man at home, or wherever he\u2019s calling from, being told the terms of how he will be systematically stripped of almost every possession, a thousand freedoms.

Once he gets off the phone, the guard resumes telling me things I have messed up: I don\u2019t have Charlie\u2019s number written on the form, because I don\u2019t have it memorized. But he can look up his name, which I have also spelled wrong because I\u2019ve gotten so flustered, and that\u2019s when the guard tells me I need to go back down the road to the Satellite Camp. <\/a>This is, on some level, a reporter\u2019s nightmare taken to the extreme. Except instead of, say, forgetting a second set of batteries for your recorder, you\u2019ve gone to the wrong prison<\/em>. Why mention this stuff? Writers don\u2019t generally don\u2019t divulge how the sausage gets made. How does the story change if the reader is unaware of your missteps?<\/span>This is perfect question to ask of\/about this essay, because I think it gets to the heart of what the essay is trying to do \u2014 not offer a straight reported\/journalistic account of Charlie\u2019s trial or his incarceration, but document a process: the process of my trying to understand, as best I could, what kind of damage had happened to his life and how that damage might connect to other sorts of damage around him. For me, confessing my own missteps was probably three-fold: partially about warning readers not <\/em>to mistake my account for something absolutely seamless or objective \u2014 as if such a thing could be possible; partially about offering another emotional dimension of my own experience (I felt the burden of telling this story right, and the looming truth of how imperfectly I was telling it); and partially about suggesting that prison is an institution that puts all sorts of rules\/restrictions on anyone in its purview, not just those incarcerated in its bounds. By the way, it\u2019s impossible for me to talk about any of this \u2014 the role of confession in reportage \u2014 without acknowledging Let Us Now Praise Famous Men<\/em><\/a>, where James Agee is always telling you everything you didn\u2019t want to know about how the sausage got made: how the Burroughs family\u2019s food almost made him throw up, how he was obsessed with killing all the bedbugs on his mattress. I owe that book such debts; a lot of us do.<\/span><\/span>

At the Satellite Camp, the guards are nicer, but I am still doing things wrong: I park on the wrong side of the lot. I still have my purse and I need to put it in my car. I feel like saying: But up there they had lockers!<\/em> I want to show off my knowledge of something. Anything. My purse is a black canvas bag with a yellow dinosaur on it. Officer Jennings is almost ready to make an exception. \u201cA dinosaur exception,\u201d I say. Jennings likes this. The guys down here at the Satellite Camp seem open to speaking this way\u2014as humans, joking around. Jennings asks me whether Charlie ever got that cyst drained. I say I\u2019m not sure. <\/a>I love that you take a moment to humanize, to flesh out these characters when it probably isn\u2019t necessary.<\/span>Hey thanks. I don\u2019t really believe in villains \u2014 or maybe I think the job of the essayist is to push back against villainy, to show that every villain probably had a hard relationship with his dad, etc.<\/span><\/span> I have also failed at being a good pen pal.

I hear them call Charlie\u2019s name on the loudspeaker. I am thinking of all the families who never mess up anything, who\u2019ve got the routine down cold, have its every motion committed to muscle memory. There\u2019s a certain heartbreak in knowing this minutiae so well: the inmate number, the plastic bag of quarters, the jeans and the hard chairs and the faces of the guards, each one\u2019s particular tolerance for humor, the twist and curve of the roads, the eventual selection of barbecue chips or gummy fruit snacks; the motions of greeting and exit, how you might carry yourself differently saying hello and saying goodbye.

Charlie stands at the visiting room entrance: a handsome man nearing fifty with short silvering hair. He\u2019s wearing big black boots and an olive uniform, his number printed over his heart. I\u2019m not sure about the rules. Can we hug? Turns out we can. We do. <\/a>I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever read a story in which a writer hugged a subject. I assume there was no concern that readers might find you too close to Charlie?<\/span>Indeed \u2014 the journalist and the hugger. This gets back to the issue of being open with readers \u2014 I think of any essay\/article\/piece as a relationship between reader and writer; you\u2019re just managing their expectations. It\u2019s almost like I\u2019m saying here: Just to be upfront, I care about this guy. He means something to me. If you don\u2019t want an essay with any emotional entanglement, put this one down. <\/em>It would be worse to hug Charlie and dissimulate about it.<\/span><\/span> But there are other rules: Charlie isn\u2019t allowed to use the vending machines, only I am, so he has to tell me what he wants; and we\u2019re not allowed to sit next to each other, only across from each other, for reasons I\u2019d rather not consider. When I look at all the chairs arranged around the room I see there is often one singled out, apart from the others: the inmate\u2019s chair, facing everyone.

Over the course of our visit, my Fay-ut-vul quarters buy us the following: a block of peanut-butter cheddar crackers, a bag of M&M cookies, a bag of Cheez-Its and one of Chex Mix, a Snickers bar, a huge \u201cTexas\u201d-sized cookie as big as a child\u2019s face, a Coke, a Diet Coke, and two grape-flavored waters\u2014the second one a mistake, or else a free gift to me from the Bureau of Prisons. Our table turns into a miniature landfill.

It\u2019s a Monday, not a weekend, so the visiting room isn\u2019t crowded. Nearly everyone stays until three. We\u2019re an ecosystem. The family sitting next to the vending machines reminds me to take my leftover twenty cents. Two little girls are obsessed with the thin line of ants near the window. One of them starts telling Charlie about a sorcerer, and something about her birthday, a monologue that remains largely unintelligible until she pauses to say, quite clearly: \u201cI hate evil.\u201d

Charlie says, \u201cI do too.\u201d <\/a>Was this recorded, or are you a good note-taker? Are recorders even allowed in the prison?<\/span>No paper, no pen, no recorder, no nothing. When I can, I generally record interviews. I am a good note-taker, but I\u2019m also a good fiction-writer \u2014 and I try to be aware of my impulse (subconscious, even) to invent or embellish to serve the story. Having a recorded version of the interview pushes back even better than notes, though both help.<\/span><\/span>

When these girls first came in\u2014with their pretty, dark-haired mother\u2014Charlie told me he heard their father got reduced time for telling on an innocent man. I hate evil<\/em>. What do we call a government with marijuana laws so strict that one man has to tell on another so he can get out in time for his daughter\u2019s fifth birthday? <\/a>A few paragraphs ago, you note you could only sit across from Charlie, \u201cfor reasons I\u2019d rather not consider\u201d \u2014 forcing the reader to do the considering. The reader is prompted to silently fill in the blank here, too.<\/span>Yeah, I do think you\u2019re right to point out some of the ways this essay is subtly or not-so-subtly corralling readers\u2019 sympathies \u2014 politically, personally \u2014 but I also think the essay is pretty upfront about its desires. But I was also trying to turn the screw a bit here \u2014 Charlie came down hard on this guy for having been an informer; I was trying to think about the larger context around that act.<\/span><\/span>

The girls seem so comfortable with their father\u2014eager to sit on his lap, laugh at his funny faces, gratuitously court his already-granted attention\u2014but this ease feels deceptive. They must associate this place with long drives, nebulous fear, men in uniforms, and their mother\u2019s sadness.

Two frail old white women arrive. One hangs her pink cane on the back of a chair. The cane matches her lipstick. The women are eventually joined by a large black inmate. Charlie watches my face. He smiles, \u201cNot what you were expecting?\u201d He tells me these women are raising the man\u2019s kids. They show him photographs. They buy him a bag of pretzels. Caitlin, the little girl who hates evil, tries to grab the pink cane. \u201cNot a toy!\u201d her mother shouts. The old woman doesn\u2019t appear to notice. She calmly reaches two orange-dusted fingers into a bag of Cheetos, brings another one to her dry painted lips, and watches her tall friend stare at the changed face of his own child.
***
Charlie and I spend the first few hours talking about his case. <\/a>Rereading this story, I\u2019m struck by how little Charlie\u2019s actual voice \u2014 as opposed to his letters \u2014 is actually in it. Why is that?<\/span>A couple pragmatic reasons \u2014 I had six hours of conversation to compress, so paraphrasing was more efficient; and I didn\u2019t have any notes, so \u201cdirect quotes\u201d would have been more fabricated than summary.<\/span><\/span> He offers a couple theories about Nordlander: probably Nordlander was a kid who got his head flushed down the toilet; maybe he thinks Charlie was the kid who flushed it. I find myself growing restless. Why is that? I feel like I\u2019m in the middle of a story Charlie has already told\u2014which is probably true, but it\u2019s also the story behind his confinement. It\u2019s the story that shapes everything about his life. Of course he\u2019d want to keep telling it.
I feel a pressure to separate my stance from Charlie\u2019s\u2014to make myself author, and him subject\u2014but I also feel it as an act of violence to disagree with him about his own life in any way. <\/a>Is this internal conflict something you\u2019d experienced while working on prior stories, or was it exclusive to Charlie? <\/span>I could write about this issue forever. It\u2019s hard to imagine running out of things to say about this subject; I have confronted it whenever I\u2019ve written about anyone, ever: people in my life (in my personal essays) and subjects of other reported\/researched pieces. I think there\u2019s an abiding desire to believe \u2014 as a writer \u2014 that if you can find some core truth in a story, that truth will gleam out and everyone will feel a little dazzled by it, even\/especially the people it\u2019s about; that if you can just say something profound or beautiful enough, everyone will just feel so grateful your insight is in the world that they\u2019ll love you for it. This could not be more wrong. It\u2019s pretty brutal to represent peoples\u2019 lives in your own terms \u2014 it\u2019s a real wresting-away of power \u2014 and I\u2019ve had to reckon with reactions to that. I\u2019m a conflict avoider in real life; and fiction was easier for me in that regard. Charlie was a big fan of this piece, as it happens, but that\u2019s more the exception than the rule.<\/span><\/span> I want to talk about his life here<\/em>. I want to talk about who he has become in this place, what it has summoned from him. But I realize my interest betrays the privilege of my freedom: life in here is novelty to me; for Charlie it\u2019s day-in, day-out reality. For me it\u2019s interesting.\u00a0For him it\u2019s terrible.

Charlie indulges my curiosity. He tells me he sleeps on a bunk bed in an open room divided into fifty cubicles, like a corporate office, only the partitions are cinder block and no one can leave. He tells me about the black-market currency (stamps) and where the fights usually happen (the TV room and the basketball court). He tells me how life is different across the street, in medium-security, where he\u2019s heard footballs full of coke are tossed over the fence and guards get paid to pick them up. <\/a>Did you check this?<\/span>The fact-checker did some research but eventually we just had Charlie\u2019s word. I will say it was stated without the \u201che\u2019s heard\u201d and the fact-checker \u2014 in her quest to get some verification \u2014 eventually decided we needed that phrase. I agreed.<\/span><\/span> Across the street<\/em> guys are owned and rented. Sex acts aren\u2019t seen as gay. \u201cSuck a dick here in camp, it\u2019s because you want to,\u201d Charlie explains. \u201cAcross the street it\u2019s because you needed the money, or you were forced.\u201d He\u2019s speaking softer so the old women behind us won\u2019t hear. <\/a>This is wonderful. You seem so aware of what\u2019s going on around you and Charlie. Is sharp peripheral vision required to be a nonfiction writer?<\/span>Yes! Peripheral vision is the perfect phrase for it \u2014 so much of what makes nonfiction great, I think, are those unexpected angles\/details that illuminate the main subject from some fresh vantage. In a way, West Virginia itself \u2014 Cat\u2019s house, the forests, the highway \u2014 crept into this essay by way of peripheral vision. Once you notice things on the margins, it\u2019s a question of integration\/linkage\/collage without being too overbearing in an attempt to make everything thematically relevant or connected.<\/span><\/span>

I can\u2019t figure out if hearing all this brings me closer to Charlie or simply illuminates the gulf between us. Am I learning his world or simply perusing its memorable specifics, shopping like a tourist in the commissary? Sometimes Charlie says, \u201cI\u2019m giving you this,\u201d before offering an anecdote. <\/a>Charlie seems to be an unusually self-aware, poised subject. Did his savviness make you guarded?<\/span>His savviness made me feel aware of power dynamics in our conversation. He had a story he wanted to tell that he\u2019d told many times before \u2014 at that point, it was the defining story of his life. So I wanted to honor that, but I also didn\u2019t want to feel completely disenfranchised as an interviewer; I wanted him to know I wasn\u2019t swallowing every word without some interrogation. That said, Charlie is a bit of a celebrity and this was palpable when I was speaking to him. He was aware of creating an identity with everything he said.<\/span><\/span> His prison life is only mine at his bequest. I\u2019m giving him my attention and he\u2019s giving me something else\u2014not the currency of stamps but rather specifics, intimate access\u2014or its texture, at least\u2014granted by way of details.

Charlie is generous with specifics. He tells me he spent two days running 135 miles around the prison\u2019s gravel track back in July. He timed it to coincide with the Badwater Ultramarathon, a race \u201cout there\u201d\u2014through the flat, baked reaches of Death Valley\u2014that Charlie has finished five times. Charlie only stopped running laps for mandatory count, at four o\u2019clock, and then to sleep. These days he organizes a workout group: a guy named Adam, a guy called Butterbean, and the camp\u2019s only Jewish man, Dave, who has an incarcerated wife and a six-month-old baby born in prison. Butterbean has lost fifty pounds since he started training with Charlie, Adam more than a hundred. <\/a>Did you talk to Adam, Butterbean and Dave?<\/span>I would love to talk to Butterbean and Dave someday \u2014 but no, all this through Charlie.<\/span><\/span>

But Charlie isn\u2019t popular with everyone. He tells me some of the white guys don\u2019t like that he doesn\u2019t like their racism; and a black guy called him a \u201cwhite cracker motherfucker\u201d after UNC beat Duke last March. The guy was a Duke fan, and Charlie had been gloating. But Charlie is generally tactful. He knows he has to let the older black guys shush the younger black guys when they\u2019re playing poker too loud; a middle-aged white guy has no place telling them to be quiet. But he also tells me he\u2019s not afraid to get in another guy\u2019s face. You have to be an asshole\u2014just a little bit\u2014if you don\u2019t want to get pushed around.

Not getting pushed around is a relative concept when the government is telling you where your body can and cannot be.

\u201cI\u2019m easy to ignore in here,\u201d says Charlie. He\u2019s learned that weekends are especially difficult\u2014people are busy with their own lives and aren\u2019t in touch as frequently. He feels it most on Fridays. I remember how he described Fridays in his letter: squares of unknown fish, rowdy dominos late at night, no race to look forward to the next day. He can\u2019t do the smallest, simplest things\u2014send a text, for example, or leave a message on someone\u2019s phone, or have a conversation that isn\u2019t punctuated by the constant automated announcement of his incarceration. He lives in another world, and speaking to him always involves speaking across the border between that world and the one we call ours, the one we call outside, the one we call real.

Charlie tells me about his notion of \u201cinner mobility,\u201d something he picked up from Jack London, which involves just that\u2014going somewhere when he\u2019s not allowed to go anywhere. For Charlie, inner mobility means reading books, but it also means following his imagination into other places, other scenarios: \u201cI don\u2019t treat it like fantasy,\u201d he says, \u201cwhere I always end up naked with the beautiful woman.\u201d Instead it\u2019s something trickier, less like wish fulfillment and more like making himself vulnerable to circumstance\u2014one of the many subtle liberties this place denies: the freedom to be acted upon by many frames, many scenarios, rather than the single abiding context of incarceration. The principle of inner mobility is double-edged, opportunity and consequence: \u201cI am free to nap when I want, go for a run when I want, fall in love, jump from a building, or eat cake till I puke,\u201d he says. \u201cThe most important rule of my inner mobility is that I must follow the trail where it leads and sometimes that is not going to end well.\u201d This articulation of desire fascinates me\u2014to follow the trail wherever, not just someplace good.

Incarceration doesn\u2019t simply take away the ability to get what you want, it takes away the freedom to screw up\u2014binge on cake or jump from too high or fuck the wrong folks. <\/a>This is a jarring revelation. I mean, we\u2019re nearing the end of the story and by this point you\u2019ve given me a pretty palpable portrait of prison\u2019s terrors. Turns out, it\u2019s incalculably more awful.<\/span>It\u2019s interesting; a number of people have mentioned this moment as powerful for them \u2014 in terms of imagining what incarceration must be like \u2014 including my brother, another ultrarunner. (Perhaps ultrarunners are particularly sensitive to any form of mobility (inner or outer) that gets taken from them?) In any case, it\u2019s a nice reminder of one of the central ethical calls of the essay \u2014 to show what is already known (or thought to be known) in some unexpected way.<\/span><\/span>

Charlie tells me he stopped asking friends to come because it felt too painful to watch them leave. Wish You Were Here is just a Band-Aid over Wish I Was There; Wish You Were Here is never quite enough. When he tells how that moment of departure hurts, we both know we aren\u2019t exempt. No matter how much we talk, or what we talk about\u2014no matter how well Charlie describes prison, or how well I listen\u2014our visit will end. <\/a>How, how, how …\u00a0<\/em>There\u2019s that repetition again.<\/span>What can I say, what can I claim, what can I protest? I love anaphora.<\/span><\/span> Every moment we spend together gestures toward this horizon of departure\u2014like the perspective point in a painting, everything refers to it. Confessing it does nothing to dissolve it.

Three o\u2019clock is just another hour in the day but it is also the difference between me and Charlie, between our clothes and the dinners we\u2019ll eat that night, between the number of people we\u2019ll touch in the next week, between those liberties the state has deemed appropriate for his body and for mine. Every guy inside has a dream for when he leaves, Charlie says: one guy wants to sell workout videos based on his prison fitness regimen; another guy wants to run an ice-cream boat.

Three o\u2019clock is when one of us goes, the other one stays. Three o\u2019clock is the end of the fantasy that his world was open or that I ever entered it. When the truth is we never occupied the same space. A space isn\u2019t the same for a person who has chosen to be there and a person who hasn\u2019t. <\/a>This is such a painful line, a painful realization. Do you think this is true generally of the writer-subject relationship?<\/span>I think it is always true that two people standing in the same room are always there in different ways, and that the author and subject are always coming to their interaction with different needs \u2014 and often those needs are at cross-purposes \u2014 but I think prison makes this question of inhabiting the same physical space <\/em>particularly loaded. Malcolm has a psychoanalytic reading in which she posits that the subject opens up to the interviewer as if the interviewer were a forgiving mother, and is then judged and reported\/punished by the interviewer as a father-figure instead. I don\u2019t always agree with Malcolm but I am always mentioning her, which must mean something.<\/span><\/span>

The neglect here is almost unimaginable<\/em>\u2014and it\u2019s not just neglect from the Beckley staff but from the world itself\u2014the world that has carried on with its daily business while keeping all these men invisibly deposited elsewhere, in a slew of the nation\u2019s most obscure corners. On the outside, you can think about prison for a moment and then you can think about something else. Inside, it\u2019s every moment. It\u2019s impossible to ignore.

The fog count comes at three o\u2019clock\u2014on a perfectly clear day\u2014and some of us exercise our right to disappear and others are reminded that they no longer can. One man exercises his right to run 540 times around a gravel track. What happens when you confine a man whose whole life is motion? I guess that, those laps.

Maybe tonight I\u2019ll dream those endless acres of moonscape beyond the beauty lines. Maybe I\u2019ll meet that stranger again. Maybe he\u2019ll come back to the greasy diner. Maybe I\u2019ll buy him a Coke, or a cookie the size of his face, and he can stand for every man who\u2019s ever had a story and I can stand for everyone who hasn\u2019t listened hard enough. I\u2019m easy to ignore in here.<\/em> I\u2019ll ask that stranger every single question any person ever asked another person. I\u2019ll ask enough questions to dissolve rhetoric and cinder block partitions; I\u2019ll ask him enough questions to make him visible again, so many questions we\u2019ll have to stay in the dream of that diner forever.

Fog counts come when the sky goes opaque and movement feels possible, when the boundaries between the free and the quarantined are harder to see\u2014never dissolved, only hidden\u2014and so the tallies arrive with greater urgency: those who have done wrong are tallied, those who haven\u2019t are tallied beside them, and all around the perimeter is a border backed by guns\u2014or the threat of extended sentences\u2014and this border runs like a scar across already scarred land. Prison is a wound we keep tucked in those parts of the country that can\u2019t afford to turn it away, who need its jobs or revenue, who must endure the quiet violence of its physical presence\u2014its \u201cDon\u2019t Pick Up Hitchhikers\u201d warning signs, its barbed-wire fences\u2014the same way a place must endure the removal of its mountaintops and the plundering of its seams: because a powerful rhetoric insists that we can only be delivered from our old scars by tolerating new ones. <\/a>Conclusions are, I think, the most difficult part to write. This is perfect. Did you always intend to end on the bird\u2019s-eye view rather than Charlie? <\/span>I didn\u2019t always intend to end with the birds-eye view, though I like that you call it that \u2014 it draws out the fact that the final viewpoint of the essay only reinforces what I\u2019ve said earlier (about the difference in mobility between my vantage point and Charlie\u2019s) \u2014 the fact that I\u2019m zooming out, gazing outward and noticing everything, is only possible for me because I\u2019m not in his position. In any case, I didn\u2019t know the essay would end up being about so many things \u2014 once I started it \u2014 but I got to this ending by really putting pressure on myself to figure out how these threads were all related, to justify to myself why I was putting them in the same piece, why I felt like they belonged there. There was a feeling of purging some of this difficult material by making fugue out of it.<\/span><\/span>

\"DSC00228\"<\/a>Elon Green<\/strong>\u00a0writes for <\/em><\/em>The Awl<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and contributes to Longform.org<\/a>\u00a0and to<\/em> Storyboard. His last installment of Annotation Tuesday! looked at Amy Wallace’s classic profile<\/a> of former <\/em>Variety editor Peter Bart. For the full Annotation Tuesday! archives, go here<\/a>. \u00a0<\/em>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leslie Jamison\u2018s \u201cFog Count,\u201d which ran in the spring issue of The Oxford American, is hard to pin down. Its subject matter is, ostensibly, jailed ultramarathon\u00a0runner Charlie Engle \u2014 whom\u00a0Jamison has profiled once before \u2014 but it\u2019s also a meditation on incarceration and a dirge for a ravaged planet. Jamison, who is also an accomplished […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4372,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[136],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-elon-green"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnnotation Tuesday! 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