{"id":1472,"date":"2017-02-28T16:00:23","date_gmt":"2017-02-28T16:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2017\/02\/28\/annotation-tuesday-christopher-solomon-and-the-detective-of-northern-oddities\/"},"modified":"2025-01-21T15:21:44","modified_gmt":"2025-01-21T15:21:44","slug":"annotation-tuesday-christopher-solomon-and-the-detective-of-northern-oddities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2017\/02\/28\/annotation-tuesday-christopher-solomon-and-the-detective-of-northern-oddities\/","title":{"rendered":"Annotation Tuesday! Christopher Solomon and “The Detective of Northern Oddities”"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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Profiles are hard. Too often they’re drenched in the writer’s attempts to make the subject seem larger than life. But good profiles have the opposite effect: Through their honesty and attention to perhaps mundane detail \u2014 and, as Outside Magazine contributing editor Chris Solomon notes, the “small ridiculousnesses of situations” \u2014 they show us an ordinary person peeling away at life’s extraordinary circumstances.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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For veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek, death is one of those extraordinary circumstances (the kind that requires a playful stoicism). The subject of Solomon’s recent Outside piece, “The Detective of North Oddities,”<\/a> spends her days “slicing open furry dead animals”; she’s a character in a mystery novel that features climate change as the primary suspect. But climate change is rarely the obvious, solo culprit.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I have met writers who don\u2019t have anyone read their work before they hand it in. This seems to me unwise. <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Beautiful language aside, Solomon’s story has two major merits I’d like to highlight before I dive into the interview and annotation. First, it gives voice to a vibrant personality using very little dialogue. Second, it folds climate change into an environmental story in a way that is nuanced, thorough and responsible. Keep those two points in mind as you read.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A former reporter at the Seattle Times who’s now a freelancer, Solomon<\/a> is a contract writer for Outside, where he is a contributing editor. His freelance work has been anthologized twice in “The Best American Travel Writing” and also has appeared in “The Best American Sports Writing.” I talked to him by email in Seattle, where he lives; the answers have been slightly edited for flow.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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How did you hear about this story, and what was the reporting process like? Across how many days\/months did you “shadow” Burek? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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 <\/strong>I had come across Kathy Burek\u2019s name several years ago while reporting a story<\/a> on sickness in a warming Arctic for Scientific American. Burek never called me back. I forgot about her. That first piece was straight news, and it was dry as toast. I wanted to revisit the topic. A few years later a good friend and very gifted journalist for National Geographic named Craig Welch had dinner with Burek and other scientists while reporting his own story about the Blob. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to do a story on this woman,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It actually took Burek some time to warm up to me. As often happens with scientists, she had had some bad experiences with reporters in the past; as a result, she\u2019d kept a very low profile in the media for years, almost never appearing in the news. She wasn\u2019t keen to have a story done about her. At the same time, and as with many scientists, she wanted people to pay attention to what is going on up there. She had a message to get out. Finally, perhaps two months after we\u2019d first talked, and there seemed a little bit of rapport built, I asked her, \u201cCan I come up for two weeks and shadow you?\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cThree would be better,\u201d she said. The reason, she said, was that Death isn\u2019t always accommodating, and she never knew when she\u2019d be doing her necropsies, or going out into the field.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Once I got to know Burek, she turned out to be an amazing person: warm, smart, funny, passionate about her work, quirky and extremely quotable. Basically a writer\u2019s dream. This is often the way it works, isn\u2019t it? Once we knock down the initial barriers between reporter and subject, some fun and meaningful stuff can happen.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Reporting on climate change is tough nowadays, and I’m sure this assignment was no exception. What’s interesting to me is that you very deftly wove uncertainty <\/em>into the piece, explaining that in recent years, Burek has encountered animal deaths that are “more intriguing and odder and more frustrating for their open-endedness.” What role did you want uncertainty to play in this piece? Do you have a personal philosophy regarding climate change reporting that informs how you approach your work?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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This is a great question. A story like this could easily be too sensational if it ignored the uncertainty. The frustrating truth is that scientists just don\u2019t know the answers to why so many things are happening up there. As a result, uncertainty had to be a major presence in the story.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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At the same time, we\u2019ve watched over the years as \u201cmerchants of doubt\u201d have exploited this kind of uncertainty to paralyze our decision-making processes about climate change. That\u2019s dangerous. Just because scientists aren\u2019t certain why some things are happening doesn\u2019t mean they don\u2019t have educated guesses about what\u2019s causing problems\u2014and those guesses frequently finger climate change. So I wanted to be true to the stubborn question marks that are out there while also showing that there are increasing amounts of circumstantial evidence. And even circumstantial evidence adds up.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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One thing I do try to work on a lot is pacing: keeping the narrative moving, especially in a piece with a lot of science, where boggy spots lurk everywhere. I think a background as a newspaper reporter has helped a lot in this regard. A long story really needs to maintain a nice rhythm and momentum; readers can feel when the story loses its sense of the music, its forward progress.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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How did you choose to make otter 13 the central (animal) figure of the lede? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Readers care about animals, but they like living<\/em> animals. And there was so much dead stuff in this story. I worried, frankly, that readers wouldn\u2019t feel a connection to the work Burek is doing. How do you establish that empathy?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Another friend happened to mention that he always liked the introductory minutes of the former HBO show \u201cSix Feet Under.\u201d Every episode of that show began the same way: The camera would follow one person as he or she moved through her day, doing whatever. Just as we begin to connect with that person\u2014BAM!\u2014she gets hit by a car, or drops the hair dryer into her bathtub. Whatever. And the next scene begins with the person now dead and laid out on a slab at the family\u2019s mortuary. The rest of the episode takes off from there, with the main characters\u2019 stories spinning off from there. That first person\u2014alive, then dead\u2014is a bit of an entry to, and a framing device for, the episode.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Once I knew I wanted to try this, I worked backwards, excavating details of the sea otter\u2019s life\u2014which, in this case, I knew existed because the otter had been radio-tagged and there were fun details about its life.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It seems like a lot of research was involved in putting this together. Where did you begin, and how did your digging evolve?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The nugget of this story began from that 2014 Scientific American story. There were several anecdotes of sickness in a warming north that got left on the cutting-room floor that I felt were too good to throw away. So I was able to start there. (Save those old notes!)<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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During the time I had been writing that first story, these Unusual Mortality Events involving seal and walrus had been going on. True to their name, they were odd and unexplained. At the time, they were too open-ended to mention. Years later, I realized that the uncertainty wasn\u2019t an inconvenience; the uncertainty was part of the story itself. So I knew I needed to dive in and understand the UMEs. So that gave me another chunk of the story.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The Blob\u2014this huge warming event\u2014seemed to exacerbate the oddity up in Alaska, with a bunch of deaths of birds but also whales in the summer of 2015. As it lingered, summer 2016 promised to be busy for Burek as well, with the promise of lots of dead stuff. That\u2019s when I knew I needed to get up there and spend some time in person, with the possibility of seeing her at work.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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How did you figure out how to structure the piece?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I like writing sentences, but structure gives me fits. I currently have about four books on structure sitting around the house, in various states of half-read-ness. For this profile, I knew I wanted the story generally to contain these elements:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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