2015 Mayborn Magazine

mayborn inside Alex Tizon Anne Fadiman Jeff Chang Eli Saslow Jeff Hobbs Colin Harrison

$5 | themayborn.com | 2015

We’re proud to celebrate journalism that makes a difference.

OUR JOURNALISTS ARE HONORED to serve as guest speakers at The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, presented by the University of North Texas’ Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism, as a forum to mentor, reward and inspire those who have a passion for intelligent writing.

This is The Dallas Morning News’ eleventh year to sponsor the conference. We see it as our purpose, and we are excited to be able to provide scholarships for several of this year’s attendees. We are also proud to continue sponsorship of The Mayborn Young Spurs Excellence and Opportunity Initiative, which conducts a national

Alan Pepp Alan P Peppard eppard ard Speaker

Tom Huang Huang Judge

Charles Charle Cha rless Scudder rle Scud Scud cudder der Judge

writing contest for high school and community college students. Ten winners and their teachers attend the conference each year and their work is published in The Dallas Morning News.

Our quest is to create a new generation of writers to tell stories that matter, stories essential to their communities, essential to the world.

Chris Chris Vognar Vognar Moderator

Keven Keven Ann Willey Wille Wi lleyy lle Speaker

Seema Seema Yasmin Yasmin Moderator

Dave Dave Tarrant Tarrant Tarr ant Judge

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CONTENTS

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Starting Point

22 There is a method to his

6 Q & A: Alex Tizon tells

enmeshment, which Washington Post journalist Eli Saslow reveals to Nathan D. Battaglia as Saslow goes about the business of building trust with his sources and creating award-winning narratives.

George Getschow just how far he was willing to travel to find himself.

The Great Divide 10 The wisdom of Jeff Chang, author and activist, is sought on the complicated racial issues of the day. But he is something of a reluctant visionary, telling Kyle Blankenship he sees himself as “a voice” for change rather than “the voice” for change.

16 Anne Fadiman may have been born into a literary family — her mother a famous journalist, her father a famous essayist — but to give birth to her defining work written about the edge where two cultures collide, she had to overcome one obstacle after another, she reveals to Ashley Porter.

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42 The difficulty of balancing professional and personal lives may have to do with writers living in their heads too much. But to write her two nonfiction books, Helen Thorpe had an additional persona to negotiate, she tells Amanda Ogle: being First Lady of Colorado.

Book Ends

30 To understand how writers

Narratives

74 As writers, we engage in

feel about Scribner’s Colin Harrison, all you have to do is ask them. Kathy Floyd did just that, and their answers reveal why Harrison is a living legend to those whose books he edits.

48 A car accident left Keith

all manner of ritual to set free the muse from within. Adrian O’Hanlon III surveyed Mayborn conference speakers past and present to understand just how obsessive, superstitious and downright quirky we can be.

Perspectives

36 In the gender-bended world of Jeff Hobbs, being a stay-at-home dad who drives carpool and changes diapers takes considerable time away from his pursuit of narrative writing. He tells Michele Leone the secret of how he’s managed to write two bestselling books — and keep his sanity.

Harrelson brain damaged and partially paralyzed — an outsider in his own town. Christian McPhate reveals how it took the healing power of Keith’s music and the acceptance of a few writers to make Keith feel like he belonged.

64 Michael Mooney tells Clinton Crockett Peters how he got the story of Chris Kyle, aka “The American Sniper,” and the obstacles Mooney faced when his narrative shifted after learning Kyle had been murdered.

76 “And Another Thing” from 58 Annette Nevins allows us a glimpse into a world of anguish and yearning as she and her siblings must decide what’s best for their mother after a stroke left the once proud matriarch as helpless as a young child.

Adrian O’Hanlon III, who offers us a timely Q & A with Hanna Rosin, one of the first writers to sound the ethical alarm on the controversial Rolling Stone story, “A Rape on Campus.”

2015 | MAYBORN 1

long live long form IN PRINT AND ON LINE, WE’RE BUILDING THE NEXT GENERATION OF NARRATIVE STORYTELLERS

The nation’s leading publisher of metropolitan newsweeklies is proud to be a sponsor of the Mayborn Conference W W W.V O I C E M E D I A G R O U P. C O M • 9 6 9 B R O A D W AY • D E N V E R , C O L O R A D O 8 0 2 0 3

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CONTRIBUTORS

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1 GEORGE GETSCHOW

2 DANNY FULGENCIO

is the guiding spirit who breathed life into the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference by coaxing the gods of nonfiction to speak to us mere mortals. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and Pulitzer jurist, George is the Mayborn Writer-in-Residence and was awarded the 2014 Outstanding Educator Award by the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum. In the fall, George will take a sabbatical from teaching at the University of North Texas’ Mayborn School of Journalism to work on his book, The Walled Kingdom, a nonfiction narrative about the plundering of a South Texas cattle barony.

is this issue’s Photographer-inChief, shooting our cover, and photos for “Keith’s Song” and “American Writer.” A Texasbased portrait and documentary photographer, he graduated from the University of North Texas’ Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism in 2010.

3 CLINTON CROCKETT PETERS has an M.F.A. in

nonfiction from the University of Iowa, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of North Texas. His work has appeared in Shenandoah, Green Mountains Review, North American Review, Fourth Genre, and the Denton RecordChronicle, among others.

4 ANNETTE NEVINS , who teaches journalism at the University of North Texas, has more than 20 years of experience working for three daily newspapers. As a reporter for The Dallas Morning News, she covered everything from airline crashes to trends in education.

6 G. MORTY ORTEGA

is a narrative and visual journalist who took our photos for “Writing From the Edge.” Based in Connecticut, he works for numerous editorial clients, works in the realm of video and is the communications director with The Alexia Foundation for World Peace.

5 CHRISTIAN MCPHATE

graduated from the University of North Texas with a Master’s of Journalism. He works as an award-winning reporter at the Denton Record-Chronicle, and teaches journalism at the University of North Texas. His work has appeared in the Dallas Observer, The Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Weekly.

7 MARK DONALD is on the faculty of the University of North Texas’ Mayborn School of Journalism. A firm believer in the power of reinvention, he has been an attorney, a magistrate, a playwright and a journalist with more than 30 years experience. He also edits this magazine.

2015 | MAYBORN 3

Journalism that makes a difference.

In January 2012 Texas Monthly executive editor Pamela Colloff reported on the case of Hannah Overton, a mother sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a foster child she and her husband hoped to adopt. Soon after the conviction, doubts about the verdict’s fairness emerged among parties involved in the case, including jurors, physicians, and prosecutors. Shortly after the story was published, the Court of Criminal Appeals took notice and called for the case to be reexamined. The court overturned the conviction in September 2014 and Hannah Overton was released on bond in December 2014 after serving eight years in prison.

In April 2015, all charges against Hannah Overton were dismissed.

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EDITOR’S LETTER

When I was younger I was living a vagabond life and encountering a lot of people who were living outside all the systems. That’s very important for writers because we are really outsiders, and we have to maintain our outsider perspective. —Poet Tony Hoagland, The Writer Magazine One of the many great things about being a narrative journalist is that we have the perfect excuse not to contribute to every political campaign that comes knocking. Rather than say, “Sorry, I gave at the office,” it’s more like, “Sorry I can’t give at the office.” It’s not just that it appears improper, like we’ve taken sides. Many of us prefer outsider status, choosing to be detached from the communities we live in or write about. How else can we do the heavy lifting, turn over rocks big and small, and call bullshit on strangers and acquaintances alike?

Small wonder we identify with those who live on society’s margins — the impoverished, the disenfranchised, the outcast — and feel drawn to tell their stories. But in narrative nonfiction, ours is a unique charge.

Not only do we write about those on the edge, we embed ourselves inside their worlds and become a bridge between those who have and those who don’t, between those who feel accepted and those who feel alienated, between those who work the system and those who get worked over by the system. We work at these divides using the tools of our trade — words, meaning, emotion — to bring together source and reader to make the world a more compassionate place.

This year, on the 11th anniversary of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, we celebrate those narrative nonfiction writers and journalists who through their amazing work have helped bridge our culture’s great divide. We are privileged to profile their lives in these pages.

We lead off with insights from Alex Tizon, who recently wrote a memoir, Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self. In our interview, he explains how his search led him to make hard choices about the depths to which a memoirist should dig in revealing his own turmoil. Author Jeff Chang has written three defining works about race in America and believes the artist must play a key role in changing society. Anne Fadiman says she likes writing where the edges of cultures and people meet. Her seminal work, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, chonicles one such edge, the struggle

between Hmong refugees and their Western doctors. Our story about Washington Post wunderkind Eli Saslow will reveal his techniques for narrative immersion, only coming up for air to nab the occasional Pulitzer Prize.

Next up is our “Perspectives” section, which includes three profiles — the first is about Scribner editor Colin Harrison, followed by inside looks at Jeff Hobbs and Helen Thorpe, respectively, two of the talented writers in the Harrison stable. This section is our own bridge between the world of the editor and the world of the writer.

Two Mayborn alums grace our pages with their compelling narrative tales: the first, an intimate portrayal of a man whose challenges have marginalized him in his own hometown; the second, an intimate essay of a daughter confronting the hard choices presented by her mother’s decline.

There is more, of course, much of it made possible through the commitment of George Getschow, who brings the country’s best narrative nonfiction writers to Texas each July. Next year, however, George will go on sabbatical, turning over the conference reins to Mayborn School of Journalism Principal Lecturer Neil Foote, as well as Getschow protégé Michael Mooney, whose profile also appears on Page 64 of this issue.

Special thanks also goes out to Mayborn School of Journalism Dean Dorothy Bland for her unwavering support of the conference and this magazine. The extra pair of eyes she lends to our production process is as appreciated as it is helpful.

Just as George will cast a giant shadow over next year’s conference, Cathy Booth Thomas’ presence can still be felt in this year’s magazine.

She was the Mayborn’s co-founder, and for seven years its editor-in-chief.

She retired last year, after which I was awarded the tough job of continuing what she started. My job is made even tougher by the standard of excellence she demanded from her graduate students and the magazine’s history of award-winning journalism: Cathy has been invaluable to me during my rookie run — a bridge, if you will, over the great divide between mentor and protégé. She will be missed in class and in these pages.

Mark Donald Editor-in-Chief

Published by Frank W. Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism Frank W. and Sue Mayborn School of Journalism Director and Dean

Advertising Director

Dorothy Bland

Nathan D. Battaglia

Mayborn Writer-in-Residence

Staff Writers

George Getschow

Nathan D. Battaglia | Kyle Blankenship Aaron Claycomb | Michele Leone

Special Assistance

Editor-in-Chief | Mark Donald

Amanda Ogle | Adrian O’Hanlon III

Junebug Clark | Bill Ford

Copy Editors

Contributing Writers

Mike Mooney | Annette Nevins

Cover Photo | Danny Fulgencio Photographers Danny Fulgencio | G. Morty Ortega

Bill Marvel | Christian McPhate Kyle Blankenship | Adrian O’Hanlon III Photo Editor | Amanda Ogle

Kathy Floyd Christian McPhate | Annette Nevins

© 2015 Mayborn Graduate

Clinton Crockett Peters | Ashley Porter

Institute of Journalism | themayborn.com 2015 | MAYBORN 5

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STARTING POINT

THE SEEKER

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Alex Tizon was willing to travel the world to answer the question: What does it mean to be male and Asian in America? He found the answer in the most unusual place: himself.

Interview by George Getschow

Tizon on assignment in Alaska, January, 2015.

Photos courtesy Alex Tizon.

6 MAYBORN | 2015

Alex Tizon, a bronze-skinned son of Asia, never thought he’d amount to much. His Filipino parents told him Asians were small, weak and easily vanquished. He could not stand up to the “white-skinned gods” who marched through history, conquering everything in their path. So he tried to become a white man.

He slept with a clothespin over the bridge of his nose to unflatten it. He put masking tape over his lips to make them look thinner. He swallowed prodigious quantities of protein supplements to build muscle and bone. And he hung from a bar attached to the top of a doorway for 30 minutes a day, trying to get taller by stretching the spaces between his spine.

But all his attempts to transform his scrawny, 5-foot-7-inch frame into the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar ended in failure.

By the time he reached college, Tizon says he “accepted his fate.” Then, a decade later, as a reporter for The Seattle Times, he traveled to an island in Southeast Asia to visit the beach where Lapu Lapu, an Asian warrior, had slaughtered his childhood hero, the great European explorer Ferdinand Magellan.

Lapu Lapu’s triumph brought a whisper of validation to Tizon’s sense of self, and set in motion a quest to track down the stories of other Asian men suffering from the same shame, stereotypes and racial envy. His quest would eventually give birth to Big Little Man, his taboo-busting narrative, published last year to rave reviews. The Library Journal lauded the book as “revelatory and sobering.” Kirkus Reviews called it “a deft and illuminating memoir and cultural history.” The New York Times hailed it as “an unflinchingly honest, at times beautifully written, often discomforting examination of Tizon’s remarkable, yet thoroughly relatable, life.”

Each week, Tizon’s inbox is stuffed with letters from Asian readers who, after reading Big Little Man, feel liberated from the chains of feeling inferior and impotent. Tizon responds to every reader. We caught up with the Pulitzer Prize–winning author between his teaching duties at the University of Oregon and his speaking engagements across the country.

“I believe I am here on this planet to continue the conversation that I started,” says Tizon.

The Mayborn recently joined the conversation between Tizon and his passionate tribe of fans across the country. The following is an edited version of that interview.

Big Little Man began as one thing and became something else. Even your title changed, from Big Little Man: The Asian Man at the Dawn of the 21st Century to Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self. Could you talk a bit about the origins and evolution of the book?

When I trace the origins of this book, there are several points where I could begin.

The earliest one was in the early ’90s, when I was a staff writer at The Seattle Times, and I proposed to my editor: ‘Hey, how about I take six months, I travel the world and I write stories about brown men and their lives. And in the end of the series, I can compile it into a book.’ That didn’t go anywhere, because it’s an outrageous proposal for a staff writer to ask for six months and $75,000. Then, in 2007, I proposed another book about Manny Pacquiao, a [Filipino] boxer bursting onto the scene at the time. I wanted to tell his story while addressing these same kinds of issues about how Asian men are perceived as weak but emerging into something new and more powerful. He was the embodiment of that idea at the time. I proposed that book, but it didn’t go anywhere either. The problem wasn’t the publisher’s interest. It was Manny Pacquiao’s people. They didn’t want anyone poking into his life, because he’s got stuff in his life that he doesn’t want the whole world to know. And his people were wanting money for the right to tell his story, a lot of money. So that idea died. And then a friend of mine at the Los Angeles Times, Terry McDermott, talked to me. ‘Hey, look, why don’t you just write your own story?’ he suggested. That was the birth of Big Little Man. The first version of my proposal was much more historical and sociological, and that’s where that first title comes from.

Was that the journalist in you influencing that kind of approach?

Yeah, it was the journalist in me. I find those things fascinating and interrelated to my personal story. But it became even more of a memoir, and less sociological, as I went through the editorial process with my publisher, who identified the most powerful way to tell this story, which was through a personal narrative.

A narrative about me.

While European explorers like Magellan earned your admiration, you grew up in a family that believed ‘men of Asia were small and weak and easily vanquished,’ as you put it in your book.

By the time I graduated high school, I couldn’t name a single preeminent Asian male figure who was a force for good — a hero.

When you watched the news, you saw the North Vietnamese as the enemy, and you saw pictures of these tiny little men in flip-flops.

They were small, cunning, hard to kill, hard to beat, wily enemies. There wasn’t a force in American society that gave me the impression that, well, there are different kinds of Asians and different kinds of Asian men. There weren’t any portrayals of strong, good, benevolent, muscular, powerful Asian men portrayed anywhere in the media that gave me a counter image to the images I saw on the news.

You wrote in Big Little Man that your parents had an adulation for all things white and Western.

You had to be white or have some whiteness in you, because whiteness and greatness went together. Brownness and greatness didn’t necessarily go together. My parents were like many, many Filipinos and many people who lived in former colonies. They were almost worshipful of our colonizers.

Of course, your parents’ attitude would have influenced you in profound ways.

As a kid, unconsciously, I believed that the pinnacle of humanity were white faces, European faces. The faces of accomplishment and achievement and conquest were European.

They were the standard that we should strive for. Both my parents lived through World War II, and even though hundreds of thousands of Filipino soldiers and guerillas fought in that war, the only person who they talked about was Gen. Douglas McArthur, the American general who liberated the Philippines. The face of victory in World War II was an American face.

Filipinos were the victims who were rescued.

You and your parents were immigrants.

How different is life for Asian immigrants today than it was for you when you migrated to America?

I have nephews who are world-beaters.

There’s nothing in their way. They don’t have any vestige of colonialism in their brains. They don’t have difficulty getting dates. They don’t have the kind of self-doubt that I had most of my young life. For them, I’m a relic from a different time. And yet, I have other nephews who are grappling with the exact same things I did. My story is their story. So the answer to 2015 | MAYBORN 7

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STARTING POINT your question has two layers to it. Yes, much has changed. Things are generally better. But there are still Asian men who walk around the world feeling like they rank very low in this hierarchy of manhood, feeling that they are the most undesired people on earth.

You set out on a search of an answer to a paramount question in your life: What does it mean to be male and Asian in America? Did you find an answer?

It’s the question I began the book with, and the answer I got wasn’t a simple answer. The idea of Asian maleness — being an Asian and a man in America — is undergoing pretty rapid evolution. There are still many young AsianAmerican men who grapple with the same issues that I did as a young man, because the conditions for them still exist. For example, the portrayal of Asians in cinema still creates these perceptions. In the new movie Entourage, for example, the portrayal of one of the main characters, Lloyd, is the stock Asian character: the wimpy, tiny, feminine Asian character.

So the forces are still there and they’re still powerful. On the other hand, it wouldn’t shock me if an Asian-American or an American with some Asian lineage got elected president of the United States within 50 years.

What were some of the most important lessons you learned about race from doing your book?

That we have to be careful how we talk about race. For example, one thing I learned, if you look at scientific advancements in the human genome and DNA research, scientists are finding differences among population groups.

But can we really talk about those differences?

I say our society can’t, and isn’t ready to have a candid talk about it. There are people out there who will use it to their advantage and inflict some kind of suffering on other people.

Are you talking about the bigots of the world who would use data that shows a distinction between races and ethnicities?

Yes. But I don’t like the word bigots. I like the idea of tribalism. We all see ourselves as members of certain tribes. And one tribe will use information to gain advantage over another tribe, and those tribes very often do align with the way people look on the outside — racial differences. Probably the biggest thing I learned through the whole process is the very slippery nature of the word ‘race,’ particularly how it’s used in popular discussions. It’s a tiny word. Four letters. And yet it means so many 8 MAYBORN | 2015

different things. There are people throughout Asia, including parts of Japan and the subcontinent of India who, anthropologically speaking, have the same skeletal structure as the Caucasians of Northern Europe. Skeletally, they’re white, but their skin can be as dark as sub-Saharan Africans. The simple labels we have — Asian, black or white — don’t get at the infinite variations of people. Our racial labels can be utterly misleading.

You spent much of your book looking through the lens of race and interpreting your own experience. Now you’re eschewing race as something to use to discuss distinctions in humanity because these labels are limiting and can do harm.

I know. What a ridiculous thing to do.

Why do you want to rid all vocabularies of the word ‘race’?

Because it has far outlived its usefulness, and I think it has become a toxic term. I listen to the news coverage of Ferguson and Baltimore and Cleveland, and they’re still using the same narrative that I heard in the ’60s and ’70s of the oppressor and the oppressed. The racist white cop is a stock character. The black thug is a stock character. If we really want to address what’s going on in Baltimore or Ferguson, let’s think of a different narrative that will lead to a different ending [other than] talking about the racist white cops and black thugs and instilling these ideas in the heads of a whole new generation of kids. I see more places like Baltimore in the future if we don’t change the way we think about these differences in people.

How can we as journalists cover racial issues like Ferguson without resorting to those labels and stereotypes and, in effect, contributing to the problem rather than resolving it?

I don’t have the definitive answer for that.

The one thing I know we should do, and can do, is for each of us to be aware of this outdated narrative that we all perpetuate. That’s the first step. I’ve been watching the coverage of Baltimore and Ferguson. I get mad at these reporters. They go back to the same old narrative.

What I hear you calling for is almost a new narrative, one that isn’t going to cover complex stories in simple terms, but will be layered and nuanced and provide a depth and an understanding of the situation that goes beyond the easy stereotypes.

You just said it much better than I could.

As a journalist, you’ve written profiles on murderers and oddballs and cataclysmic events such as Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet you say the hardest and most perilous thing you’ve ever done is look deeply into your own experience. Why? Because you’re crossing this sort of infinite ocean to get to the other side, to see a glimpse of something you think will finally give you the right answer to yourself. And so you just keep rowing and rowing, farther and farther. Was it Carl Jung who said that the self is the hardest thing to fathom? And yet, despite all this mystical stuff, you have a deadline and an editor saying, ‘Is it coming in anytime soon?’

Did you find the process of self-examination, of really being honest with yourself, of looking inward and exposing yourself, a perilous undertaking?

Oh, yes, on many levels. It was painful to examine parts of myself that aren’t that easy to look at, parts that I discovered I’m ashamed of. And to really spend time there, not just to think about it for an hour. But to spend weeks and months fleshing out and remembering the stories associated with the shame that I felt or the aloneness that I felt put me in a very antisocial frame of mind. It put me in what you could say were mild depressions. Maybe not even mild. I went into some deep crevices and my mood went with me. The other peril is that you could actually tell a story that humiliates yourself, embarrasses yourself for no good reason and alienates people that you care about because you told a part of their story. Those are some of the perils that anyone who is thinking about writing a memoir has to bear in mind.

Going into the book project, did you have trepidation that some of those things you did reveal, humiliating things, would be misunderstood by critics? One reviewer wrote that you had a bad case of penile dysmorphic disorder.

Wesley Yang [of the Los Angeles Times].

I remember him.

How did you feel when you opened the paper and read a review like that?

I felt terrible when I read his review. I felt unfairly ridiculed. But my wife reminded me: ‘Remember, you were ready for this. Remember, you said this would happen. Remember, you were not going to take it personally.’ And it’s true. I knew it was going to happen. But when it did happen, it still hurt. I think most reviewers missed the bigger point of the book.

Tizon on assignment in the Philippines, September, 2009.

There was so much attention to the penis chapter that they didn’t get my using penis size as a metaphor for size in all things. Size intellectually. Size economically. Size geopolitically. Size in domination of one culture over another. So the penis represented something. The book wasn’t about penises. And yet, some of the reviewers took great pains to describe my preoccupation with penises and penis size. Come on! I think they missed it.

They didn’t get the metaphor?

Or weren’t interested in it. But I have to take responsibility for it. I guess I didn’t write it in such a way that made that metaphor clear. Of all the chapters, the most important chapter was the one on “wen wu,” Chapter 10. That was the crucial chapter of the whole book. But no one ever brings it up. I wish I could write it over and make it better.

You wish you could write the wen wu chapter over again?

Yes, because it didn’t seem to make an impact on people. None of the reviewers mentioned it. The Western conception of the Asian male as weak or wimpy is because of wen wu, the philosophy that proscribes a certain formula for manhood that idealizes restraint. Restraint from using violence is a much more powerful thing than actually using violence. But to the people in the American West who ran into these Asian men, they thought, ‘They must be wimps.’ It was a misreading of Asian maleness. Do you see what I’m saying? The Asian men who came here were living up to the Asian ideals of manhood.

But they were not the same as the Western ideas of manhood. And so it was easy to say, ‘Those chinks must be weenies.’

It’s one thing to write about your own experience, quite another thing to write about someone else’s experience. What were the challenges of doing that, of writing about women?

I spoke to a lot of Asian women, including my sisters, Asian-American women, colleagues. I had to write what I could live with. That chapter could have been rated R or X, too. But it was PG in the sense everyone could read it.

I can certainly see why reviewers would have a field day with your penis chapter and ignore the more complex issues of wen wu.

If you were a magazine editor and you had a choice, what headline would you use: a headline that contains the word penis or a headline that contains the word wen wu?

When you spend a chapter talking about penises, anybody reading your book would assume you actually did rip yourself open and told it all in a raw, unfiltered way. And yet you say you gave the PG version. So what did you hold back?

I held back lots and lots of details. You only have a certain amount of space. Chapter 8, the penis chapter as my friends call it, was quite a bit longer. In fact, originally there were two chapters (on penises). It has more to do with, not the penis, but with love in general.

Romance. And that I winnowed down quite a bit. My editor, thankfully, saved me from myself.

How did you decide what details to leave out and what to leave in?

I had one rule: ‘What can I live with?’ So I didn’t want to write anything that would dishonor my father too much. I didn’t want to write anything that would alienate and embarrass any of my family members. So I left out details that I think might have caused that.

What about the chapter “Seeking Hot Asian Babes,” and the next chapter titled “Babes Continued?” What motivated those two chapters?

I didn’t want to be the whiny Asian man saying ‘Poor me!’ Part of the reason for writing those chapters about Asian babes was to bring up the idea that Asian women have it just as hard or harder. It’s just that their challenges are different.

Did you allow any of your sisters to read the chapter before it was published to get their input?

No. I talked to them about it. They all had different responses. Two sisters got slightly defensive explaining to me why they married white guys. One sister said, ‘I just thought Asian guys weren’t interested in me.’ I have other sisters who, every time they find a hot Asian guy on the Internet, they send me the picture with a note that says, ‘See?’ Why are your sisters sending you photos of hot Asian guys — to debunk the stereotype that there are no hot Asian guys?

Partly that. And partly that they themselves notice them, because a great part of the chapter described how many westernized Asian women don’t like being with Asian men.

Would you say that some of the stereotypes about Asian women have a ring of truth to them?

There’s the stereotype of Asian women as submissive, Geisha dolls that live to fulfill the needs of men. Then there’s the reverse stereotype — the ruthless dragon lady who will do whatever it takes to get what she wants. I’ve never met an Asian woman who fits either one of those stereotypes. That’s why stereotypes are something to avoid.

So what’s going to be your next book, Alex?

I fantasize about writing a sequel to Big Little Man. One of the criticisms of the book is that I was much more compelling in laying out the problem and not so compelling about the solution. I think there’s a whole other book about this. I lived an incredibly blessed life. But I had a hard time writing about the good stuff because it sounded self-serving.

So the short answer is, one fantasy is to write a sequel in which I make the tail end of my life more compelling, the part that’s full of triumphs.

But who wants to read that? m

2015 | MAYBORN 9

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THE GREAT DIVIDE

STORY AND PHOTOS BY KYLE BLANKENSHIP

10 MAYBORN | 2014

THE CHANGE AGENT 2015 | MAYBORN 11

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THE GREAT DIVIDE

JEFF CHANG SITS BEHIND A PLATE OF GREEN CHILE MIGAS in the restaurant at the swanky Lumen Hotel located just across the street from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The Lumen, with its cold, modern industrial chic, makes for an odd pairing with Chang. Older couples and young businessmen in suits idle past in the quiet midmorning hours, mostly white, seemingly rich. Chang positively exudes chill in his low-key outfit of a black polo, cardigan and jeans, sipping hibiscus tea and elaborating quietly on the constant evolution of racial incidents in the U.S. while waiters scuttle by in their slick uniforms. Suddenly, a concerned look passes over his face as he asks with a pointed finger, “This happened in Dallas? This is in Dallas?”

A shaky, silent video plays on the nearest flat screen over the bar running along the far end of the restaurant. The camera, capturing the scene from the body camera of Officer Andrew Hutchins, holds for a moment on the image of an older black woman in the doorway of her home. A large man, his face obscured in shadow, stands behind her in the darkness of the entryway, twirling a metal object in his hands.

The woman steps over the threshold and chaos erupts. Both Hutchins and his partner, John Rogers, repeatedly command the man to drop his weapon before pulling their firearms. Five shots ring out. The man stumbles to his left and crumples face down in the driveway with two bullets in his chest as his mother jumps away, screaming “They killed my child! They killed my child!”

Chang watches the video in silence before digging back into his breakfast with a resigned shake of his head. It’s one more thing to add to the list, one more event proving that things are still not right in this country.

The author and activist, who has been speaking to audiences all over the country after the release of his most recent book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, says that Ferguson and other headline-grabbing killings of people of color by law enforcement have made discussion of his book more challenging, 12 MAYBORN | 2015

forcing him to repeatedly edit his presentation to capture the shifting racial landscape. But for the Berkeley activist turned hip-hop label cofounder turned best-selling writer, change is a familiar companion. In fact, change is what Chang is all about. “As long as I’m alive, I’m going to change.”

While most writers aim only to describe their world, he wants to fix it. In the written word, Chang has found his tool. But making repairs is difficult when the world won’t wait.

The death of Jason Harrison — the 38-year-old, mentally-challenged black man videotaped as he was shot by two Dallas police officers on his mother’s doorstep in June 2014 — is one of many breaking events to be incorporated into Chang’s speech later this March evening at SMU. In a chaotic period defined by the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and other men and women of color, audiences have begun looking to Chang for guidance.

Chang will finish his breakfast and, as he always does before a speaking engagement, go somewhere quiet and reflect on what he knows and what he doesn’t. He doesn’t know all the troubling details of Harrison’s death — his history of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, the fact that two white officers shot a black man to death for brandishing a screwdriver — so he spends his afternoon catching up as much as he can, making sure he’s on top of the issue if it’s brought up at the presentation.

Chang’s three books and numerous articles on hip-hop, arts, politics and race, featured in publications such as The Nation, The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Vibe, and The Village Voice — have received high praise from critics, earning the author a designation

by Utne Reader as one of the “50 Visionaries Changing Your World.” His first book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, won both the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. Chang also directs the Institute of Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, working at the cut-

ting edge of race, music and the arts, educating the next generation of artists and activists and utilizing his unique past to analyze the racial turmoil currently embroiling the nation.

But despite his accomplishments, Chang points to his mentors, his peers and the young generation of artists and activists still developing their world as the real pioneers of racial harmony. This is no great surprise.

Chang remains characteristically humble and deferential despite his trials by fire, failures and many successes.

You would think that writers are individualists, tied to their writing desks, desperately trying to show readers their unique vision of the world. But then again, you haven’t met Jeff Chang.

“I’m not out to be the voice,” he says. “I’m out to be a voice.”

“WHAT DO WE DO NOW?” Chang hesitates

for a moment while the young woman in the third row leans forward. She seems unaware that this is not Chang’s favorite question, but her request is well meaning. She looks to Chang, like so many other young activists do, for a nudge in the right direction. Before he has time to answer, another audience member cries out from across the room.

“Join Mothers Against Police Brutality!”

The Dallas advocacy group has partnered with the families of those subjected to police brutality in a call for more effective oversight on law enforcement. Chang claps his hands together with a laugh.

“Great, problem solved! Next!”

The 200-seat auditorium where Chang is presenting on the SMU campus is mostly full, and despite the thin walls and the adjoining comedy club hosting an open mic night, the mixed audience of differing ages, gender and ethnicity hangs patiently through Chang’s circuitous presentation. He leads them past the Civil Rights era, through the rise and fall of multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s, and toward 2042 — the year demographers predict the U.S. will become a “majorityminority” nation. Depending on whom you ask, this controversial date represents hope or holocaust. Chang predicts, looking back at his own history, that a new generation of activists will play a central role in shaping the direction that controversy takes.

Raised in the multicultural oasis of Honolulu, Chang never expected to become an activist. He arrived on the mainland in

HEAD OF THE CLASS Jeff Chang speaks at Southern Methodist University in March.

1985 at the age of 18 to attend school at the University of California-Berkeley with few big ideas in his head. Chang was a hip-hop lover as a kid, dazzled by the style of the blossoming street movement out of the South Bronx. He had buddies in high school who were graffiti writers and rap lyricists and breakers. He was in the mix as early as he can remember and Berkeley’s hip-hop scene held a powerful allure. “I would leave my dorms and go up to Telegraph Avenue, and every weekend there would be kids cruising up Telegraph,” he recalls. “You know, rap ciphers, dance ciphers, people with boomboxes, people driving up with these massive subwoofers in their trucks playing Too Short and RUN DMC and Beastie Boys, and this L.A. stuff. So it was really, really happening.”

For the Chinese-Native Hawaiian teen working toward a parent-pleasing degree in economics, Chang found his new home was more racially conflicted than he could have imagined. In his first few weeks, he experienced what he terms “microagressions”— reduced to being called a chink, a gook, being tossed around by wasted frat boys and told by street-side hippies to “go the fuck back where you came from.” He began to comprehend the challenges of just getting by as an Asian-Ameri-

can in a culture that felt stacked against him.

The block parties on Telegraph soon came to an end, a casualty of the battle for Berkeley’s cultural soul, and Chang started to rail against the school’s unspoken cap on Asian-American admissions, a lack of ethnic studies, all of the injustices that he and his Asian-American friends experienced daily.

Chang had known about the growing antiapartheid campaign on UC system campuses, one of the largest student movements in the history of the U.S. He had even started to see a connection between the racism of the South African regime and the inequality at his doorstep. But in April 1986, when he decided to tag along with two friends to a shantytown erected as a protest on campus, he had no experience in actual protesting or activism, just an emerging notion of injustice and pent-up anger.

He chatted with those in the camp, learning more about their call for the UC system to divest billions from the South African government. Those conversations ended with the arrival of police officers in riot gear ready to break up the protest. Chang, in an act of defiance, sat down and others sat down around him. He now says that it was all accidental, he didn’t expect people to follow him.

As the police violently broke up the sit-in,

Chang grew horrified. While watching young men and women clubbed on the head and dragged away, he remembered his mother, who worked in the police department back in Honolulu, and the detectives he looked up to as a kid. What was making these men act this way? Chang escaped that evening without a scratch — a friend and veteran protester pulled him from the fray — but he witnessed many others beaten and incarcerated for what they believed to be a noble cause. His outlook didn’t change in a moment, he didn’t have a vision of his future, but he was seeing for the first time what being an activist was all about and what he could achieve.

AS ANOTHER AUDIENCE MEMBER speaks,

Chang nods his head in agreement.

“I feel as if at times the media has a way of embellishing stories and magnifying situations and forgets the accomplishments that we’ve made,” the young African-American man remarks. “I think that is very frightening because we’ve grown so much.”

That same feeling of hopelessness in telling stories about minority communities is one that Chang confronts directly. He says that watching television news as an Asian-American man can be a disheartening experience and that commu2015 | MAYBORN 13

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THE GREAT DIVIDE

nities of color need to reclaim their culture.

“I like to talk so much about the imagination, that we have to maintain the imagination,” he responds. “Even when it’s impossible to see the images that are going to help us to figure out what a new world can be like.”

Through extensive interviews and research, Chang’s books weave artists and activists at the margins of society into mosaics of cultural change, flying from the hectic dance halls of 1970s Jamaica in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop to the work of artists of color on the quiet museum walls of the Met in Who We Be. He is a cultural archaeologist, telling stories that are buried in history. It’s through the power of storytelling, Chang believes, that communities can reclaim their past.

Chang got his first taste of writing after composing a column for a local magazine as a senior at UC Berkeley during his time as student body president — the first Asian-American to hold the post in more than 20 years. But he never thought his writing would come to anything. During community organizing training, however, with the Center for Third-World Organizing at Berkeley, Chang discovered an ear for narrative — often at the expense of his training. “I was really bad, because all I wanted to do was sit with the organizers and hear their stories. I wanted to learn their stories. I think I realized later that this is why I would be a better writer than an organizer, because I was like really into the narrative of it all.”

After graduation and a failed stint lobbying the California Legislature in Sacramento, he took a job at KDVS, the student radio station at nearby UC Davis. Chang had worked as a DJ for a hip-hop show at Berkeley and felt at home behind the controls, playing the music he wanted and crewing up with the hottest musicians in the area. He fast-tracked his way into hosting a show and brought his new friends on air, performers like Lyrics Born, DJ Shadow and Blackalicious, even a few big names like Cypress Hill and Michael Franti.

His connections to these artists gave him a huge advantage in the booming hip-hop journalism industry. When Chang started graduate school at UCLA in 1991, URB, a hip-hop and rave magazine out of Los Angeles, offered him a column. Chang wasn’t sure that he had the writing chops. “I learned on the run. I mean, I was a shitty writer,” he laughs. “I was like faking it. I was totally faking it, man.”

Despite his lack of confidence, he brought national publications such as Vibe and The Vil14 MAYBORN | 2015

lage Voice the one thing their staff writers could not get: a way into the hip-hop community. He learned from editors way above his pay grade, mentors who were teaching him about the basics of the inverted pyramid and circle kickers.

One piece stands out for him. An early column for URB covered the Ice Cube song “Black Korea,” an outburst of hostility to Korean shop owners in the aftermath of the 1991 shooting of African-American teen Latasha Harlins in Los Angeles. It felt like an omen of more violence to come in the city that had yet to face the 1992 Rodney King riots.

Chang found that hip-hop was firmly rooted in a South Bronx community rocked by racism, police brutality and societal neglect. Hip-hop’s birth was a story that intertwined protest, community pride and a cultural and aesthetic revolution. Writing the stories of the movement’s heroes and leaders helped him crystallize the connection between art and activism.

It’s also a story of change. When Chang finally sold the book in 2001, only weeks before 9/11, his own life had changed drastically since the seeds of the project took root. After cofounding the SoleSides Records label with

“WRITING AND TALKING ABOUT RACE IN THE U.S. IS SO DIFFICULT. THERE’S ALWAYS A DANGER THAT YOU’LL BE MISUNDERSTOOD, THAT YOU’LL BE MISINTERPRETED. THERE’S A DANGER THAT YOU’LL BE PEGGED. MAYBE THE WORST OF ALL, THERE’S THE DANGER THAT YOU’LL BE IGNORED.”

The song caused an uproar, as did Chang’s column, the only Asian-American perspective on the song at the time. The hip-hop journalism industry was young enough that AsianAmerican voices were unique, and Chang was a rare figure in the business. For him, writing that column introduced the notion that art and protest were intertwined in a more challenging way than he had thought. Ice Cube, like other hip-hop acts at the time, toyed with politics and aesthetics in a difficult way. For a writer intrigued by complicated narratives, this was an intellectual goldmine in what was seemingly the least likely of places.

When the idea for Chang’s first book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, began to germinate, he looked back at the “Black Korea” article as its template. A central question dominates the book: What is the untold story of hip-hop? The more the book’s premise took shape, the more

a group of Bay Area musicians in 1992, he was unceremoniously released after the label’s failure to secure a domestic deal in 1998. Looking for his next break, he chose to uproot his family in 1999 to work as an editor for a hip-hop and political website headquartered in New York that tanked spectacularly after blowing through $20 million in about eight months.

Watching that website and another opportunity implode, he spent every free hour either poring through museum and library archives of 1970s New York or hitting the block to hang out with the original cultivators of hip-hop in the South Bronx — gang leaders and community organizers.

In looking at the change hip-hop had made from a community movement to a global phenomenon, he could see the changes within himself, the skill to mesh individual lives into bigger narratives, the ability to take stock of his

own life and move ahead. When he left New York to head back to the Bay Area in 2002 with his wife and two sons, he knew he had a book.

CHANG SLOWS IT DOWN for a moment.

“What if we thought of change as this process that’s never-ending? That never stops moving, like the ocean itself.”

Eyes widen around the room, a few of the younger audience members visibly settle back into their chairs as though thinking in unison, here we go.

How would you explain to audiences what culture is? Establish that, and then explain that culture acts like a wave, a product of chaotic forces that build and crash in a history — a consuming loop. Try telling a room full of streetbeating activists lobbying for new legislation that cultural change always precedes political change, that the real roots for change are in our shared ideas and visual images rather than in our laws. Wrestle with these issues for years, constantly editing your ideas, your words, your critiques and you can begin to appreciate the struggle of writing Who We Be. The book had a troubled birth. A claim by Chang’s editor that “no one gives a shit about multiculturalism,” shook him to the core. It seemed that the story he wanted to tell about the birth and demise of the multicultural movement and the victories of the past generation of artists and activists didn’t have an audience. But Barack Obama’s rise on the political scene after his powerful speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention greased the wheels for the book to take form.

In this century’s opening years, however, there were roadblocks to talking about race.

Chang remembers it as a time that “post-racial” fervor had taken hold of the nation. Even hinting at institutional racism drew accusations of inflaming seemingly dead racial differences.

From the conversations that he was having with other scholars and friends, he knew there was an undercurrent of racial tension that was difficult to crystallize. Despite signs of trouble, Obama’s election in 2008 appeared for many a victorious moment for racial equality. Chang planned to end the book on an unexpected high note.

But Trayvon Martin’s death in February 2012 tossed that hopeful narrative out the window. The culture wars of Chang’s youth began again, and he went back to the drawing board to rewrite almost a third of the book. It was just another addition to a challenging and self-conscious writing process. He had been so

consumed by the voices in his head — readers, editors, supporters and detractors — that he put up a quote by Toni Morrison on the wall in his writing room telling him to keep the voices out and write truthfully. He found it impossible to be free from the weight of his subject matter, spending years toiling over single passages. Even finishing the book brought little relief. “Writing and talking about race in the U.S. is so difficult,” he says. “There’s always a danger that you’ll be misunderstood, that you’ll be misinterpreted. There’s a danger that you’ll be pegged. Maybe the worst of all, there’s the danger that you’ll be ignored.”

By focusing on the human faces hidden in history — visionaries, artists, writers, leaders, many of color, many crushed beneath the weight of change — Chang slices through the difficulties of misunderstanding and misinterpretation, relating the human toll of racism.

In the ashes of multiculturalism, Chang sees the future generation of activists and the challenges ahead for racial harmony and discourse.

He recognizes that the reins are already being passed to the next generation of Americans and he wants each of his books to keep the past alive and reinvigorate the American dream for those to follow. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that “it would behoove anyone who has an interest in what it means to be an American to read [Who We Be].”

Who We Be also reveals another evolution in Chang’s life and his development beyond hiphop scholarship. It was for Can’t Stop Won’t Stop that Chang earned distinction as a visionary, being one of the few writers treating hip-hop as a serious field of study. But he is always trying to challenge himself — being on the cutting edge is important to him — and in the aftermath of Who We Be, Chang faces a pivotal moment in his writing career.

In addition to the continued critical praise for his book and a rigorous speaking schedule — sometimes as many as 12 events in a 10-day span — Chang has been under pressure to alter his writing plans to capture the current demand for authoritative voices on racism. He continues to research two future projects — a book of essays on youth culture in the U.S. and a biography of martial artist Bruce Lee — while he and his editor discuss working on a more polemical book on race, a sort of “Jeff’s take” on the issues that Who We Be introduced. He is hesitant to pursue this idea, asserting that he does not have all the answers that so many seek.

Although he calls for collective action, the battle is personal: he has kids and works constantly with the younger generation at Stanford. He wants a better world for them.

As his writing has developed, so has his eye for narrative. Like other tragedies in history, racial injustice always has a way of coming back around.

“One of my kids, who’s already in college, just started this year, and I have another one who’s in middle school, about to go to high school next year,” he explains. “It makes me very sad that all of these things that you thought in your 20s that you might be able to solve, change, are still the same kinds of things that they’re dealing with now.”

AS THE NIGHT comes to a close, the audience

begins to shuffle in their seats anxiously. The comedy club drones on and the questions have begun to dissipate. Chang shows a bit of fatigue, slumping ever so slightly behind the podium. While answering a final question from the audience, Chang makes a plea to those in the crowd, telling them that they hold the solutions, not him.

“I believe in the power of folks coming together and figuring it out together. That’s eventually what I would like to see us move toward,” he tells them. “All these different kinds of forces are working really to divide us, to segregate us, to atomize us, to make us feel like we have no agency in our lives, that we should kind of sit back and accept. All we need for things to get worse is for nobody to step forward and say, ‘that’s not right.’”

The group warmly applauds and filters out of the room. Chang takes a seat outside to sign copies of his book and chat with those who still have questions. Most of the audience members mill about, talking amongst themselves. Despite the late hour, electricity moves through the crowd, a spark that draws them together and gets them talking about change. Chang fits right in, a bit of that spark seems to energize him as he joins the discussion and laughs with the group swirling around him.

Chang can’t read the future — or if he can, he doesn’t want to tell us. But in moments like this, in the darkened basement of a building on the pristine SMU campus, conversation is happening. Chang will be on a plane to Alaska the next day, preparing for a new audience and a new set of expectations, but tonight he can sit back and participate in the group — not as the voice, but as a voice. m 2015 | MAYBORN 15

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THE GREAT DIVIDE

16 MAYBORN | 2015

WRITING FROM THE EDGE Anne Fadiman carved out a brilliant career for herself writing about the creases where cultures converge. Now she is asking her students at Yale to explore the seams in their own lives.

STORY BY ASHLEY PORTER

PHOTOS BY G. MORTY ORTEGA

2015 | MAYBORN 17

STARTING POINT

Anne Fadiman took her first leap into the writing life at age 7, penning a 20-page tale about a family of wild dogs who lived in the woods.

In one of the more dramatic moments of the story, one of the dogs crawled off the end of a log and fell into a murky river. There was some “risk of ingestion by alligator,” Fadiman recalls, though she can’t remember the details or how, exactly, the story ends. All she knows is that it was “a long story.”

The wild dogs and the alligator were Fadiman’s first literary versions of “edge species,” idiosyncratic creatures that reside in habitats on the edge of civilization, often where two different worlds converge. As a self-proclaimed literary edge species, Fadiman still likes to tell stories today that surface where two different worlds collide. “That’s where I like to lurk, the places where habitats come together,” Fadiman pointed out to her audience in a speech at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

Fadiman spent a decade lurking in one peculiar habitat. She embedded with Hmong refugees who emigrated from Laos to California, and reported on the cultural divide between Western doctors and a Hmong family whose child suffered from epilepsy. Her research gave rise to The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (the literal translation for epilepsy in the Hmong language), a 1997 National Book Critic’s Circle Award winner that thrust Fadiman into the national spotlight. This sort of literary acclaim must have made Fadiman blush. A Kirkus Review called Spirit “a vivid, deeply felt, and meticulously researched account of the disastrous encounter between two disparate cultures.” The Washington Post Book World called Spirit “superb, informal cultural anthropology — eye-opening, readable, utterly engaging.”

More than 15 years after its birth, Spirit remains a literary phenomenon. It’s sold more than a million copies. It’s become a bookin-common at more than 25 colleges and universities. Journalism classes use Spirit as a casebook for cross-cultural sensitivity. And medical practitioners use it as a resource to better understand how to effectively care for 18 MAYBORN | 2015

patients from other cultures.

Years before Spirit’s phenomenal success, Fadiman had already distinguished herself as an essayist and literary journalist, winning National Magazine Awards in both genres. Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire and The New Yorker.

She has been an editor at two respected literary magazines, Civilization, The Magazine of the Library of Congress and The American Scholar, and she has authored two books of essays; Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader and At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays.

Today, when she is not teaching writing at Yale University, Fadiman is spending as much time as she can holed up in a cabin in the woods of Massachusetts writing a book about her late father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned author, editor, and radio and television personality.

Among his many literary achievements, Clifton was chief editor at Simon & Schuster for 10 years and later became The New Yorker’s book critic. Clifton had two passions: literature and wine. And today, his widely published quotes on both subjects are considered part of his cultural legacy. On reading classics, few are quoted more often than Fadiman’s father.

On the subject of wine, Clifton’s provocative quotes continue to make the rounds among oenophiles. “To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.” Fadiman is titling her book The Oenophile’s Daughter, which seems fitting for a memoir about her father.

Fadiman says the journalist side of her comes from her mother, Annalee Jacoby, the first female war correspondent in China and co-author of Thunder Out of China, a book recreating a decade of upheaval in a country caught in the grip of revolution.

Following in her mother’s footsteps, Fadiman immerses herself in the topics she writes about, spending weeks, months, even years doing

research and filling up binders with page after page of notes, complete with a table of contents.

Once she has completed the research, Fadiman tucks herself away in a quiet hideout, writing in a linear fashion from one sentence to the next, sometimes working through the night until the story is done. “Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping,” she writes in her essay “Night Owl.” “I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write.”

Fadiman’s enchantment with writing began with reading literary giants like Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway. Her parents helped cultivate in her an insatiable curiosity for anything related to what Fadiman calls “the family business” — writing, reading, journalism and other intellectual pursuits. “I was surrounded by shelves that held 7,000 books,” Fadiman told one interviewer. “My brother and I built castles from our father’s 22-volume set of Trollope; our parents both read to us; the Fadiman dinner-table conversations were larded with long words and literary references.”

In her adolescence, Anne spent many Sunday afternoons on the living room sofa inside her home in Los Angeles engaged in a family ritual. Just for the fun of it, the Fadimans would compete against college teams on television in a weekly round of the GE College Bowl, the 1960s program where students played for scholarship grants from General Electric.

Representing Team Fadiman U. were Anne’s father, hyper-intelligent in history and literature; her mother, a maven of national affairs, politics and sports; and her brother, sapient in science. “I rarely knew anything that another member of Fadiman U. didn’t know as well,” Fadiman writes in her essay, “The Joy of Sesquipedalians.” But she possessed faster reflexes than her parents, allowing her to slap the arm of a nearby chair (the Fadiman version of the GE College Bowl “buzzer”) before the show’s host could finish his sentence.

Their track record, a mere two losses in five years, demonstrated the strength of the foursome. While no financial rewards came with a Fadiman U. win, “the pleasure was in the experience of watching together and competing as a humorously conceived ‘team,’” she says.

Fadiman parlayed her fascination with literature and journalism into the pursuit of a writing career at Harvard University. Her English classes expanded her literary horizon.

But her first encounter reading John McPhee’s “Encounters of the Archdruid,” a three-part

Fadiman became a staff writer for Life magazine in 1981, spending time outdoors hunting down stories, writing about polar bears in Manitoba, Canada, and muskoxen in Alaska.

Courtesy Anne Fadiman

series in The New Yorker published in the spring of Fadiman’s freshman year, left Fadiman awestruck.

McPhee’s nonfiction narrative was unorthodox, blurring the traditional lines between fact and fiction. McPhee, a pioneer of a new genre called creative nonfiction, chronicled the conflict between David Brower, an environmental activist, and his adversaries by bringing them together to wage their ideological battle inside three of the nation’s ecological wonders: Glacier Peak Wilderness in Washington state, Cumberland Island in Georgia and Glen Canyon, a vast canyon and reservoir spanning parts of Utah and Arizona.

As an outdoor enthusiast, Fadiman was smitten by the subject and by McPhee’s novel method of storytelling. “I remember thinking … Whoa! That’s what I would really like to do with my life,” she says.

“Encounters of the Archdruid” inspired Fadiman to enter an anonymous competition to become a columnist for Harvard Magazine.

Facing a hard deadline, the self-described “night owl” pulled an all-nighter writing a piece about how Harvard students decorated their rooms. She won the contest and was the first woman to be named the sole undergraduate columnist of Harvard Magazine.

McPhee’s brand of literary journalism felt like the perfect fit for Fadiman. While she enjoyed the process of crafting sentences and describing scenes, she didn’t think she had the sort of ample imagination needed to succeed as a fiction writer. It turns out she was exceptionally good at writing about the real world,

particularly places where she could lurk like an edge species on the outskirts of civilization.

In 1981, she landed a coveted job as a staff writer at Life magazine. Life let her spend a lot of time outdoors hunting stories. She’d head out into far-away wilderness regions, pitch her tent and search for stories about edge species.

She usually got her prey. She wrote about muskoxen in Alaska, polar bears in Manitoba, Canada, and other edge species that her more sedentary colleagues couldn’t care less about.

Fadiman’s stories in Life, whether exploring edge species in the wilderness or a young couple bridging the chasm of communication in the deaf culture or the events leading to a suicide pact between Louise and Paul Martin (“The Liberation of Lolly and Gronky”), catapulted her to the top of journalism’s hierarchy.

She earned a National Magazine Award, the magazine equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, for “The Liberation of Lolly and Gronky.” But none of her encounters with muskoxen or polar bears prepared her for the project she was about to undertake.

FADIMAN SUBMITTED several story ideas to Robert Gottlieb, the editor of The New Yorker.

One of them grabbed his attention. It involved a conflict brewing at a county hospital in northern California between Hmong refugee patients and their doctors. Gottlieb accepted Fadiman’s pitch and agreed to pay her reporting and translating expenses.

She would later recall in an interview at New York University that when she arrived at the scene of the conflict in 1988, she felt

she was a “black hole of ignorance.” Yet her instincts told her to settle in at the edge of the friction between the Hmong community and the health care providers who were supposedly taking care of them. Her quest was to lurk inconspicuously on the edges of the two cultures and figure out what was creating the fissures in their relationship. “That’s what I think being a reporter is all about,” Fadiman says.

She sat silently on a red folding chair in a small apartment in May 1988 and watched a mother caress the cheeks of her motionless 6-year-old child. She was Lia Lee, the daughter of Foua and Nao Kao Lee, Hmong immigrants who in 1980 were relocated by U.S. Immigration Services from Laos to Merced, California.

Misunderstandings in language, differences in cultural beliefs and difficulties administering medication had set in motion a series of traumatic events leading to Lia’s removal from her family’s home and her placement in foster care a month before her third birthday. With help from a social worker assigned to Lia’s case, and the support of her foster family, Lia returned home to her parents a year later. But one evening, only a few months following Lia’s return, she began to convulse in a seizure that refused to stop. The lack of oxygen to her brain left her in a vegetative state.

Being perched at the edge of the conflict, interviewing characters on both sides of the divide, was frustrating at times for Fadiman.

She made plenty of faux pas, such as using “an older male interpreter to compensate” for her lack of status as a younger woman. That advice, which she writes about in Spirit, was a misstep; at that time, few Hmong males spoke English well, resulting in linguistic challenges and inaccurate translations.

Finally, Fadiman found a young, female cultural broker who assisted her in understanding the gulf between the Hmong family and their adopted country. Fadiman spent long days wedged between these two worlds, trying to comprehend the deep rifts that developed in the communication between the Lee family and the doctors in Merced. Lia’s parents, for example, were convinced Lia’s seizures sprung only after her older sister slammed the front door of their apartment, causing Lia’s soul to 2015 | MAYBORN 19

STARTING POINT

Fadiman was raised in a literary family, her parents cultivating a love for literature at an early age.

She is writing a memoir about her father Clifton (pictured here), a renowned author,editor, TV personality and oenophile.

leave her body. But Lia’s doctors believed her epileptic seizures were caused by an abnormal surge of electrical activity in her brain.

In the midst of grasping the culture clash between the Hmong immigrants and their doctors, Fadiman encountered upheaval in her other world: her editor at The New Yorker was fired. The new editor, Tina Brown, wasn’t interested in publishing her work. Who would want to read a three-part series about a Hmong toddler with epilepsy?

The New Yorker officially killed the story a year after Brown took over. “It seemed like a big failure,” Fadiman says. But instead of giving up on her story, the indefatigable writer became determined to turn her rejected New Yorker series into a book. She recalled that in the early ’70s, Jonathan Galassi, a young editor at Houghton Mifflin, had invited her to lunch after reading her work in Harvard Magazine.

He told her that one day, she would write a book and he hoped she would give him the chance to publish it.

Two decades later, she decided to take Galassi up on his offer. He was now editor-inchief of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Fadiman’s favorite publisher, in part because the house published John McPhee. Fadiman wasn’t sure Galassi would remember her, or his offer, but he did. And after reading the draft of her rejected work, he offered Fadiman a small advance for the rights to publish Spirit.

But then another crisis intervened in the life of Spirit. After the birth of her first child with her husband, writer George Howe Colt, Fadiman suffered several miscarriages. Pregnant again, her doctors ordered Fadiman to stay in bed during her pregnancy. That meant there would be no lifting and sorting through all the boxes, binders and tapes of her Hmong research.

Four months after her son’s birth, Fadiman resumed work on her book. She alternated between the book and writing essays, spending six weeks on Spirit and two weeks writing an essay for her column in the magazine she co-founded, Civilization, The Magazine of the Library of Congress.

In 1997, nine years after she landed in Cali20 MAYBORN | 2015

fornia to report on the clash of two cultures, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down was published with modest expectations. Then reviewers read it. The New York Times crowed how “Ms. Fadiman tells her story with a novelist’s grace.”

The New Republic said there wasn’t another book “by a non-physician that is more understanding of the difficulties of caring for people…or of the conditions under which today’s medicine is practiced.” Even The New Yorker heaped hosannas on Spirit. “Fadiman describes with extraordinary skill the colliding worlds of Western medicine and Hmong culture.”

Fadiman was surprised by her turn of fortune. She calls it an accident. “I think that accident is usually responsible for all of the most important turning points in your life,” she noted in her speech at Whitman College.

With awards and accolades pouring in over Spirit, Fadiman faced another turning point in her literary path in 2004. The American Scholar, the magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society that she had edited for seven years, asked her to resign. She was stunned. During her tenure, the publication had received 12 National Magazine Award nominations, winning three for General Excellence, Feature Writing and Essays, as well as four Utne Independent Press Awards. But when Fadiman, stubborn and independent as always, refused to resign, she was fired.

Less than a week before her dismissal, she received a phone call from Richard Brodhead, the Dean of Yale College. Yale’s English Department was seeking a distinguished writer to serve as the Francis Writer-in-Residence, the college’s first endowed appointment in

nonfiction writing. If she had been working full time at The American Scholar, Fadiman’s busy schedule would have prevented her from accepting the position. Now, thanks to getting discharged, Fadiman could consider accepting the literary coronet.

WITH A VIEW OF Branford Courtyard, Fadiman’s office looks out on what Robert Frost once called the “most beautiful courtyard in America.” With gothic structures, heavy iron gates and the iconic Harkness Tower stretching into the sky, time seems to stand still within the walls of the 18th-century campus.

On High Street stands the Romanesque structure of Linsly-Chittenden Hall. Inside Room 103, a group of undergraduates chat, laugh and arrange furniture to create a round table to discuss writing with their professor.

Fadiman, dressed in tennis shoes, a casual sweater and minimal makeup, looks like she’s ready for a hike in the nearby woods. Instead, she makes her way to a sprawling blackboard.

Reaching into backpacks, her students settle into sturdy wooden chairs, stacking books on the makeshift roundtable.

“Who do you write for?” Fadiman asks in a clear, strong voice.

“For friends,” says a young woman with glowing skin and short brown hair.

A male student chimes in. “The common reader… and my dad,” he says, running his hand through his dark hair. “One should not write for oneself. How would that be perceived?”

“William Zinsser thinks you should write for yourself,” Fadiman says, smiling.

Writing about Oneself, also known as “WaO,” was born at Yale in 2005, when Fadiman arrived on campus. Each week she takes her students to the intersection of old and new, much like the structures on the campus where they live. They study the work of two writers — one from the late 18th to the mid-20th century, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Clarence Day, Virginia Woolf and James Thurber.

The other work is “new,” including authors like Christopher Buckley, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Cheryl Strayed and Nora Ephron.

Fadiman engages her students in an exercise examining the seams between two opposing eras of literature, each week focusing on a different theme such as family, food, love and — this week — joy. Pages rustle as students open their course packets to the Robert Louis Stevenson essay “The Lantern-Bearers,” written in 1888. The essay is Stevenson’s account of an autumn he spent on the New Berwick coast when he was 12 years old.

“Why is [the piece] not called just ‘The Lanterns?’” Fadiman asks.

“It humanizes it,” a male student wearing a brown sweater responds.

“It provides an empathetic quality,” a curly haired co-ed adds.

“What do you know about the structure of the piece?” Fadiman asks.

Several students weigh in on their professor’s question.

“Each part is shorter than the last.”

“The lengths of the sentences change as well.”

“All of the senses are used.”

Fadiman tells them to look at the last word in each sentence. “How many are nouns?”

Voices ring out.

“All of them!”

Fadiman holds up two color printouts; a map of the United Kingdom and a close-up of North Berwick. The students pass the maps around to gain a better understanding of the geographic locations where the story unfolds.

The conversation morphs into a discussion of romanticism versus realism.

“What are the life and writing lessons we can learn from this essay?” Fadiman asks.

A young man with dark, curly hair responds, “You can choose the way you see something.”

Fadiman poses a question to the students that some may find unsettling, as if asking them to dwell on the edges in their own lives where expectation meets reality.

“Will I become the person my parents expect me to be?”

Stevenson was born into a family of lighthouse keepers, a tradition his father expected of him. “Though [Stevenson] took a different road than was expected of him, he found joyful pleasure in life,” Fadiman tells the class.

Similar to Stevenson, William Zinsser, the 20th-century author of Writing About Your Life, the second reading required for the day’s class, was the heir to the family shellac business.

Zinsser gave himself permission to “not take the road [he] was expected to take.” He made his own choices, despite others’ expectations.

A former writing instructor at Yale, Zinsser was legendary. Attending his class in the 1970s inspired one of his students, Paul Francis, to support nonfiction writing at Yale. Thus, the Francis Writer-in-Residence position now held

by Fadiman wouldn’t have happened without Zinsser. Understandably, Fadiman holds Zinsser in high esteem, striving to mirror his virtues of availability and openness as a teacher, even

say her former professor was being modest.

“She is invested in her students both personally and academically to a degree I’ve rarely encountered elsewhere.”

Ruby Spiegel, an accomplished writer and playwright, says she signed up for Fadiman’s “intense” essay writing class to learn from the master storyteller how to use her own life “as the content and main character” for her work.

Another undergraduate student, Jesse Schreck, says he learned a great deal from the “guru” about writing — from microscopic details (end sentences with strong words) to the broad structural questions (make sure your beginning and ending are related). “But what’s especially amazing is that Anne doesn’t want you to write like her,” he says. “She wants you to write like yourself, only better. So, one at a time, she hands you each tool in the shed, teaches you how to use it, and lets you decide for yourself whether it’s helpful. As a result,

“Anne doesn’t want you to write like her. She wants you to write like yourself, only better.” though she claims “no one will ever equal him in those and many other virtues.”

As Zinsser’s eyesight began to fail around 2010, he extended an invitation to friends and students who wished to discuss writing to join him at his office in midtown Manhattan.

Fadiman passed on Zinsser’s offer and phone number to her students.

More than 100 undergraduates applied to take Fadiman’s class this semester. Class enrollment is 12. The lucky dozen include established playwrights, screenwriters and actors.

Some have had plays performed off-Broadway and at the Yale Dramat, others have published articles in The Yale Herald.

Former students of Fadiman’s are currently working as journalists for The Huffington Post, Bloomberg Business, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and National Public Radio, to name a few. Fadiman insists her students’ success stories have little to do with her. “They are not [in these jobs] because they took my classes,” she says. “They were great when I admitted them to my classes. All I gave them was a few more tools and a little more confidence.”

Recent Yale graduate Rachael Lipstein, whom Fadiman advised on her thesis, would

Anne’s was some of the most empowering teaching I have ever experienced.”

Such approbation may explain why Fadiman was awarded the Richard H. Brodhead Prize for Teaching Excellence from Yale College in 2012. Despite her success as a writer and editor, “teaching is the most enjoyable,” Fadiman says. “It wins hands down.”

Fadiman maintains a close relationship with many of her former students, editing their stories, attending their plays and serving as their ongoing mentor after they’ve left the ivory tower.

After two full days at Yale, Fadiman hugs one of her students goodbye and hustles aboard an Amtrak train in New Haven headed to her home in Massachusetts. As the train pulls into the Springfield station, Fadiman’s husband is waiting inside. “We are a good team,” she says, greeting George with a smile.

“I am very lucky.”

The sun is almost down as they slip into the car. Fadiman settles in for the drive home. As soon as she can squeeze in the time, she’ll take off to the isolated cabin in the woods to practice, in silence and solitude, what she teaches — writing for herself. m 2015 | MAYBORN 21

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THE GREAT DIVIDE

22 MAYBORN | 2015

STORY BY NATHAN D. BATTAGLIA

LESSONS IN THE ART OF HANGING OUT AS TAUGHT BY AWARD-WINNING WASHINGTON POST REPORTER ELI SASLOW

Photo Courtesy Pete Souza, The White House

2015 | MAYBORN 23

ELI SASLOW SAT IN HIS RENTAL CAR,

lingering outside an unassuming five-bedroom house in the woods near Newtown, Connecticut, concerned how the family inside might perceive him. It’s not like he was arriving unannounced this spring morning. He had laid the groundwork for the interview, waiting a few months before contacting the Barden family after the tragic loss of their 7-year-old Daniel, slain along with 19 other children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the deadliest mass shooting at a primary school in U.S. history.

When the carnage occurred in December 2012, Eli’s bosses at The Washington Post sent him to cover the murderous rampage of 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who also killed his own mother before killing himself. Eli wrote a few short narratives in the aftermath of the mass murder, about the funerals for the victims, about the return of the surviving children and teachers to school. But he never let go of the story.

He watched TV interviews of six of the victims’ families who seemed to engender the collective grief of the nation, hoping to wring meaning from the pointless deaths of their children by lobbying to change the nation’s gun laws. If the gut-wrenching murders of 20 innocent children didn’t stir to action the emotions of people across the country, what would?

After it became obvious there would be little change to U.S. gun policy, Eli realized the timing was right to do a longer narrative on a Newtown family. But exactly which family?

Often for him, this is the most critical stage of the reporting process, funneling from among the many choices the right person, the right character, the right family, in this instance, through whom a story should be told. He felt particularly drawn to the Barden family, who were in every TV interview and at the forefront of the lobbying efforts. Unlike some families of victims, they had remained in Newtown, where they were raising their two other children, ages 11 and 13. By spring, their determination had turned into despair, but they refused to give up hope that their son’s death could make a difference.

Eli’s pitch to the Bardens was simple: “I want to be able to make readers feel in some small fractional way what it’s like to be you,” he told them. “If I can do that, people will understand why all this matters to you and why this is important.” But to do justice to what they daily experienced, he wanted to 24 MAYBORN | 2015

immerse himself in their lives, whether that meant arriving at their home when they awoke in the morning, or watching them send their children to school on the bus, or lobbying the Delaware Legislature as they brought the battle for change to the states.

But the Bardens weren’t sure they wanted to open their doors to another reporter whom they feared would only reopen their wounds.

They weighed the decision for days before agreeing to see Eli. In the rental car in front of their house, Eli turned his thoughts from his own life to theirs.

He needed to understand what they were going through, how they were feeling, how they might react to a stranger at their door. It’s that kind of empathy that helped him identify with a swimming pool salesman whose life had unraveled in the pursuit of the American Dream in his 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist story, “The Life of a Salesman”; the kind of compassion that enabled him to relate the feelings of food stamp recipients — among them, the elderly, the sick, the impoverished — in his Washington Post series that brought him the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism.

As a Post staff writer and an ESPN Magazine contributor, Eli reports from the margins of society — about an undocumented immigrant abruptly deported to Mexico and unable to communicate with his wife and daughter in the U.S., about the torment of an NFL football player who as a child watched his mother getting arrested in their home for dealing drugs, about a young graduate from a prestigious college who can only find work as a waitress — stories that capture the hope and despair of those on the outside looking in. He takes weighty public policy issues such as immigration rights, welfare reform and gun control, and reduces them to simpler narratives, he told an audience at Syracuse University, his alma mater, by making them “real on a human scale.”

The sources he develops into characters of his real-life dramas open up to him as they might a good friend. But Eli realized that gaining the trust of the Bardens wouldn’t happen automatically. It would build slowly after he knocked on their door, and presented himself as he genuinely is: an empathetic everyman who posts a pleasant smile on his pleasant face.

He would introduce himself by his first name only and dress comfortably in a flannel shirt and worn jeans. He would play soccer with the Bardens’ son; help the Bardens’ daughter

set up her lemonade stand; and would forge a bond with their family that Mark Barden now says “will last a lifetime.”

As he reported what would become the emotionally engaging, “Into the Lonely Quiet,” which won the 2013 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest, he would never interfere or stage a scene or become a player in the story, choosing instead to observe the Bardens as their lives unfolded. That meant a lot of waiting around for things to happen — waiting to capture the right detail, the right emotion, the right scene, the right snatch of dialogue, as he masterfully engaged in one of the purest forms of narrative journalism; what Gay Talese calls, “the fine art of hanging out.”

BECOMING AN ACCLAIMED NARRATIVE

storyteller was not a boyhood fantasy. In 2000, when he graduated from Heritage High School in Littleton, Colorado, Eli was simply hoping to get into a college. He got into two of them – the University of Colorado at Boulder and Syracuse University. Because Syracuse offered more financial aid, that’s where he went.

At Syracuse, he found a job chopping vegetables in a cafeteria — not his childhood dream either. The son of two English teachers, he began reading The Daily Orange, Syracuse’s independent student newspaper. When he found out the paper actually paid students to write for it, he applied and got the job.

Because Syracuse was and is a nationally renowned basketball school, Eli turned his attention to the sports beat. DeShaun Williams, a basketball star at the university, had a reputation as a “bad dude” who would party all night, skip class and degrade women publicly. The jerk in Williams inspired the reporter in Eli. “That was the first time I really thought ambitiously about an article,” he says. He and fellow Orange staffer Chico Harlan interviewed 30 people and hung out with Williams over several weeks, scooping up as much dramatic detail as they could find to build their narrative. Eli says the experience taught him “a really valuable lesson: Stories get exponentially better when you invest more and more time.”

The story reflected his early ease with narrative structure. The opening anecdote had enough dramatic pop to pull in even the most blasé of student readers. Williams had locked himself in the restroom of a bar, unresponsive to the pleas of men desperately needing to use the facilities.

“Within a minute,” wrote Eli and Chico,

For “Into the Lonely Quiet,” Eli immersed himself in the lives of Mark and Jackie Barden, whose son Daniel was murdered in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Eli watched as the Bardens hugged their daughter and put her on a bus headed for school. Linda Davidson / The Washington Post

“two bouncers thump-thump-thumped on the door, demanding whoever was in there to get the hell out. The shouts were ignored. Inside, DeShaun Williams heard the pounding — he’s no idiot; he knew people were waiting. Too bad. They’d wait a little longer. He’d leave when he was finished receiving oral sex.”

The cub reporter was hooked, sniffing out stories no one else was telling at The Daily Orange — and telling them in a way no one else told them.

But narrative wasn’t his sole obsession at the Orange. There was Rachel Beckman, who also worked for the paper. During their junior year, Rachel, the assistant feature editor, and Eli, the sports editor, were assigned offices across the hall from one another. Within a few weeks, they were dating. Several years later, they were married. Rachel, who would become a magazine writer in her own right, became Eli’s front-line editor. She would listen to his stories as he read them to her and was sophisticated enough in narrative to know if they would engage the reader by the second or third paragraph.

Graduating from Syracuse in 2004, Eli landed an internship covering the high school volleyball beat for The Washington Post. Sports

stories taught him to write fast, “because the game ends, and sometimes you’ve got to file, like, 10 minutes later,” he says.

Sports reporting also taught him that good writing doesn’t have to be done at a desk.

While some writers have sacred spaces and writing rituals, Eli claims no special place where the mystery and magic of conjuring up well-chosen words takes place. “I sort of have to be able to write wherever.”

Even during his early days at the Post, he wanted to do more than crank out game recaps. He wanted “to find the more hidden moments and places,” as he puts it, “the people we should be paying attention to but often don’t.”

Still on the sports desk in 2005, Eli wrote compelling profiles of Dexter Manley, a former Washington Redskins player once addicted to crack who campaigned against teen drug use, and Joe Forte, a failed NBA megastar. Eli’s instinct for finding stories rife with irony, conflict, contradiction, complex characters and graphic detail got him noticed by his editors.

“These were hang out stories where I spent a lot of time with people, and I was drawn to them because they seemed rich and complicated and about tensions larger than most of the sports stories I was writing.”

His Post editors took Eli off the sports desk in 2008, and assigned him to write feature stories about Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. After Obama was elected, Eli began writing narrative stories about a side of the White House often hidden from the public. His narrative in March 2009, for example, tracked the behind-the-scenes exploits of Norm Eisen, the White House’s ethics adviser. When top advisers to the president wanted to hire a former lobbyist, accept a gift from a former client, or brief a Cabinet member on Obama’s ethics policies, Eli reported, the White House powerbrokers would call “Norm.”

Eli told C-SPAN’s Book TV that seeking private moments with Obama in order to write personal narratives about the president was no easy task. The president was isolated behind a wall of press secretaries and staffers. “It only took me like a week of doing that job to realize that the president doesn’t really have personal, intimate moments,” he says.

But something Obama said in a speech helped Eli scale that wall. Obama spoke about his policy of reading 10 letters a day out of tens of thousands dispatched to the White House.

The letters inspired Obama to escape his leash and reach ordinary Americans. He began an2015 | MAYBORN 25

swering handwritten, personally signed letters that touched him. “I realized pretty quickly that was something that seemed personal and real and genuine,” Eli told C-SPAN, “something that I wanted to try to write about.” The Washington Post granted Eli a yearlong leave to write Ten Letters: Stories Americans Tell Their President.

His first book was published in 2010.

Although his early attempts to interview Obama for the book were swept aside, he was caught off guard when the president invited Eli to the Oval Office. The interview only lasted 30 minutes, but Obama was candid about his frustration with his handlers and his scripted life inside “the bubble” — a frustration that the writer shared.

Researching Ten Letters took Eli across the country and out of the media-averse mindset of inaccessible politicians and sports figures.

Writing 10 long-form narrative pieces about a broad spectrum of letter writers who inspired responses from Obama deepened Eli’s ability to immerse himself in the lives of others. It would take a week, maybe two, for him to build the kind of trust that enabled them to feel comfortable enough to share the more intimate details of their lives — a gay man who was bullied in high school and contemplated suicide, a “cleaning woman” who had lived cancer free for 11 years but could no longer afford health insurance, a staunch conservative who berated the president for not listening to all Americans. “Across the board, these people were brave and gracious and welcoming,” Eli said in an interview with Nieman Storyboard.

“So much of narrative reporting is navigating interpersonal situations and building trust and building relationships that are really very complicated.”

When he returned to the Post from his book leave, he was assigned to the National Enterprise desk and attached to a team of roving narrative writers whose mission was to find big stories anywhere in the United States. The team works under editor David Finkel, winner of the MacArthur Fellowship — better known as “The Genius Grant” — and a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Finkel says editing Eli is the easiest job in the world. “[It’s] about as good as it gets,” he says. “He was great to begin with. He’s only gotten even better.”

In the months before the 2012 presidential election, Eli says his editors were searching for a big narrative that captured the hard times many Americans were still experiencing. In researching the book, he had encountered swim26 MAYBORN | 2015

ming pool salesmen and grew fascinated with the notion that despite the downturn in the economy, they remained optimistic peddlers of the American Dream. He read countless swimming pool brochures and industry publications. And he began hanging out with swimming pool salesmen, “funneling,” as he does, among several in search of the right story to tell. He focused on Frank Firetti, the co-owner of the Blue Haven Pools franchise in Manassas, Virginia, who had severely downsized his business but not his optimism. It took Eli a full

What sets Eli apart from other reporters is his ability to get readers to care deeply about the people he writes about. summer to “wear down” Firetti, he says, and to build trust between them. Every week, they would hang out together, and every week they would have the same “big conversation,” says Eli. Why was he writing about him? Firetti wanted to know. And why did he need to go on another swimming pool sales call when he’d already been on so many?

Eli’s response was similar to the one he gives all his sources: “I want to be there for long enough and get to know you well enough that the story can be as complete and honest as I can do,” he tells them. “That means I’m going to get to know you well enough that when people read it, it feels like you, and it feels right.”

All his hanging out must have felt right to the judges of the Pulitzer committee. “The Life of a Salesman” became a 2013 Pulitzer finalist in the Feature Story category, and it won First Place in the 2012 Best American Newspaper Narratives contest from the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.

What sets Eli apart from other reporters is his ability to get readers to care deeply about the people he writes about. He succeeds at this, his editors suggest, because he cares so deeply about his characters.

Take the millions of Americans relying on

government assistance to feed themselves and their children. Eli transformed what in less empathetic hands might be a complex, issue-driven piece into an emotionally engaging six-part series of those deeply affected by the issue. In 2013, he traveled to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where 40 percent of residents received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, more commonly known as food stamps. Food stamps had become so important to the local economy that businesses in Woonsocket relied on their customers’ SNAP payments to stay open. Many employees hired by such businesses relied on these benefits to feed their own families. To tell the story, Eli followed a young working father who received food stamps, walking with him down Privilege Street in Woonsocket to his job at a grocery store.

Eli developed other stories in the series, traveling across the country to illuminate the hidden lives of people living on society’s margins. He found a bus driver who delivered meals to poverty-stricken children in Tennessee, a congressman who worked to eliminate SNAP benefits because of his belief in the dependency it creates; and a Florida recruiter who signed up the aged for SNAP — elderly people who had worked their whole lives but lost everything during the Great Recession.

For Eli, reporting on these desperate families proved challenging, both emotionally and ethically. He wrote about one Washington, D.C. family, the Richmonds, whose SNAP benefits weren’t sufficient to feed them through the month. To make up the difference, they depended on food pantries, but because they didn’t have a car, the family would have to walk to them. And if they didn’t arrive early enough to beat the long lines, they might still go hungry.

On a frigid morning in late November 2013, Eli planned to accompany the Richmonds on their hike to the food bank. The air was biting.

The streets were icy. So the family asked Eli if he would mind driving them. The Richmond’s request meant they realized the reporter had compassion for their family, which made Eli’s decision all the more excruciating. He explained that he couldn’t drive them to the food bank because he needed to experience firsthand the harsh reality of their lives so readers could enter into their experience, too.

“If they were starving, I would help them,” he says. But unless a person’s life is in danger, he does not allow himself to interfere with a story and impact what he observes.

After winning the Pulitzer Prize for his six-part series on hunger in America, Eli shared his thoughts with the Post newsroom.

Katherine Frey / The Washington Post

The Washington Post published his series in an e-book titled American Hunger. For his efforts, he was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. In keeping with tradition, he was asked to address the Washington Post newsroom. Instead of talking about the challenges he faced in reporting the story, he recalled the plight of the Richmonds, who arrived late at the food bank between Thanksgiving and Christmas to find all the turkey gone.

Only sweet potatoes were left. Using old family recipes, the Richmonds managed to feed their family on little more than the sweet potatoes.

They even invited Eli to sit down and eat with them. But he knew he would have plenty to eat that day, like he does every day, and couldn’t bring himself to accept the Richmonds’ generosity. In telling the Richmonds’ story to his colleagues, Eli fought back tears. “I hope that some of the attention goes to the people who are letting us into their lives, where the attention belongs.”

LAST YEAR, THE SASLOWS relocated to Portland, where Rachel grew up, to raise daughters Chloe, 2, and Sienna, 4. They settled into a two-story house a few miles from Downtown Portland across the Willamette River.

Crossing the bridge, Eli sometimes looks at majestic Mount Hood in the distance and wonders whether moving close to an active volcano was a responsible decision.

He offices in an unstructured and unconventional building called Hatch, a space that could easily double as the set for the TV show Portlandia. It’s communal, meaning there are no assigned offices, no assigned seating, and on most days Eli has no idea with whom he’s rubbing elbows. The office dog, like the office workers, comes and goes as it pleases.

Unknown by his officemates, Eli toils away in obscurity, his national renown not a matter of record here.

He reaches for his bulky, black backpack and pulls out the tools of his trade. One 4-by 8-inch reporter’s notebook follows the next as he flips through pages scribbled in handwriting even he has trouble deciphering. He mostly runs tape for politicians or athletes when he is on the clock, he says, choosing instead to take notes for the sources with whom he embeds, finding it less obtrusive, easier to blend into the furniture and let life happen.

That’s what happened when he immersed himself with the Bardens for a week, taking notes by day as he hung out with the family,

going with them to Costco, going out for ice cream, careful not to miss any moments while they were awake unless he sensed they needed time alone. At night, he would return to his hotel room and type up his notes, using the photographs he shot with his iPhone to aid his recollection — photos of the menu at the diner where Mark and Jackie had gone to escape the pain of their memory, only to stumble on the birthday celebration of one of Daniel’s classmates who had survived the gunman’s bullets by hiding in a closet. Photos of Daniel that his father kept in their basement to keep his son’s memory alive: Daniel as a 4-year-old wrapped in his mother’s arms, Daniel dressed as an elf for Halloween, Daniel with a new haircut just two months before he was murdered.

The telling photos, like the unobtrusive note-taking, like the artful hanging out, would help Eli set the scenes for his storytelling, enabling him, as he does with much of his work, to take on the enormity of an issue like gun violence in America. But rather than focus on NRA lobbying or Tea Party posturing or liberal handwringing, he can reduce the story down to one image, one family, one son — and make his narrative “real on a human scale.” m

2015 | MAYBORN 27

As writers of literary nonfiction, we must enter the world of our characters and view it through

perspectives

the prism of their perspective, seeing what they see, feeling what they feel, hearing what they hear, to recreate that world for our readers. It’s a rare thing at the Mayborn when we have the opportunity to view the lives of those who touch the same manuscript, both author and editor, from different perspectives, but we do just that in our next section. Enjoy our profiles of Scribner’s editor extraordinaire Colin Harrison, and two of the most talented writers in his remarkable stable, Jeff Hobbs and Helen Thorpe.

2015 | MAYBORN 29

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PERSPECTIVES

STATE OF TH E BOO K DO CTO R IS I N

30 MAYBORN | 2015

Scribner’s Colin Harrison is more that just an editor for his stable of writers — he’s a collaborator, a wordsmith, an architect and a hand-holder who pours sweat equity into every book he buys. story and photo by kathy floyd

Colin Harrison grabs the brown butcher paper covering the table at his usual dining spot in midtown Manhattan’s Café Un Deux Trois, and roughs out rows of boxes. He’s not doodling or passing time while waiting for his food at the French bistro. He’s drawing a chronological chart of the principal characters and events for his lunch partner, Jan Jarboe Russell, who is hung up on structural issues in writing her book about German, Japanese and Italian families interned in South Texas during World War II. Harrison’s diagram helped Russell solve her structural puzzle and complete her book, The Train to Crystal City, which attracted critical acclaim after its release earlier this year. She has since packed up her research and notes, but not the brown paper diagram. It still hangs on the storyboard in her office, a cherished keepsake. Seeing her editor scrawl the book’s structure on the restaurant’s table covering demonstrated to Russell that they shared a vision for the story. Removing the butcher paper covering also revealed that the penne gorgonzola and goat cheese crepe were the last things on his mind. “He’s in it with his sleeves rolled up, ready to work,” Russell says.

Just around the corner from the cafe, on the 12th floor of the Simon & Schuster building on Sixth Avenue, Harrison answers his office phone with a three-syllable “Hel-lo-o”— as if calling out to see if anyone is home. On the other end of the line is a first-time writer who has done something rare in Harrison’s world: turned in a manuscript four months early. The anxious writer seeks some assurance that he has done well, but Harrison, vice president and editor-in-chief at Scribner, explains that it will be a few weeks before he can give the manuscript his full attention. He looks forward to settling down with it and will let him know what he thinks as soon as he can.

Earlier in the day, Harrison had the opposite problem. He urged an agent to get his writer to turn in something, anything. It could be revised later. “He doesn’t understand the process,” Harrison says of the wayward scribe.

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Harrison is referring, of course, to the process of making a book — something he and other Scribner editors know well. After all, Scribner is home to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway and other literary giants.

Bringing a book into being involves more than just guiding a writer from first page to last. It’s a symphony of story, reporting, structure, art, design and politics — and Harrison is a master conductor. “We’re making something that’s never been made before and won’t be made again,” he says, “so we have to do it as best we can.”

Harrison and author S.C. Gwynne discussed their collaboration on Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon during a session at the 2010 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. Gwynne drops the “L” word — legendary — when talking about Harrison’s mastery of narrative structure.

“He is a big deal. Just look at the list of writers he’s worked with.”

During his 12 years at Harper’s Magazine, Harrison edited David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Jane Smiley, Sebastian Junger, Barbara Ehrenreich, David Quammen, Bob Shacochis and Joyce Carol Oates. Today, at Scribner, his stable of authors and titles includes Kevin Fedarko’s The Emerald Mile, Jeff Hobbs’ The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, Carol Sklenicka’s Raymond Carver and Helen Thorpe’s Soldier Girls and Just Like Us. Gwynne’s Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson and Hobbs’ The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace made the shortlist for the PEN Literary Award for biography, and Craig Nelson’s The Age of Radiance was shortlisted for the PEN Literary Award for science writing — a rare accomplishment for an editor to have three books in one year up for PEN’s prestigious awards.

His own success as a writer of crime fiction — he has seven novels to his credit — gives him a nose for good narrative, says agent Jim Donovan, “a strong sixth sense for a great story, and how it should be told.”

Harrison shrugs off comparisons to the editor who made early Scribner writers famous — Maxwell Perkins — but they are hard to escape.

Perkins was known for the friendships he formed with his writers; Harrison too feels a genuine affection for the writers with whom he works. And while Harrison has great respect for Perkins, and for his role in Scribner’s history (the publisher is celebrating the 90th anniversary of The Great Gatsby this year), he doesn’t feel the ghost of Perkins looking over his shoulder. “There are a lot of great editors in our building. There are a lot of great newspaper editors and magazine editors in the city. I’m more concerned with being like those editors.”

When Harrison’s writers talk about him, they speak in metaphor, one comparing him to a gentle handler of an inexperienced racehorse. Shacochis calls him “brilliant.” Russell calls Harrison an “artful man.”

Because Russell had so many characters inhabiting her book on the World War II internment camp, she struggled with transitioning between government officials and the different families sent to the camp. Harrison suggested she think of the structure as different musical keys, with each character striking a different tone.

After he bought Russell’s book, Harrison was surprised to learn that his own grandfather played a part in its story. Earl Harrison Sr. was the United States Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization under President Franklin Roosevelt from 1942 to ’44. Harrison traces his love of language back to this earlier generation. His maternal grandfather, George Young, who was raised in Texas, was confined to bed for months in his early 20s because of a health condition. To pass the time, he memorized the dictionary and would become a gifted speaker and writer who 32 MAYBORN | 2015

traveled frequently to Europe. For Christmas 1972, Young sent Harrison a dictionary with a letter, now framed, explaining that he chose that particular dictionary for his grandson because of its clarity and readability — important attributes for a young man’s dictionary to possess. He died two weeks later.

After his grandmother’s death, an aunt called Harrison to ask if he wanted to look through the books that were in his grandparents’ house.

Among these books, many of which were obtained in Europe, was an early edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses published in the 1920s by Paris’s famed Shakespeare and Company bookshop. Harrison laughs at the thought of a good ol’ boy from Kemp, Texas, buying Joyce in Paris in the 1920s.

Harrison recalls growing up in a “bookish” house. His mother, Jean, loved plays and writing, and would quiz Colin about Latin words. For a time, she worked as an assistant at The New Yorker. His father, Earl Harrison Jr., became the headmaster at Sidwell Friends School, a private

Bringing a book into being involves more than just guiding a writer from first page to last. It’s a symphony of story, reporting, structure, art, design and politics ­­— and Harrison is a master conductor.

Quaker school in Washington, D.C., which counts among its students the children of presidents. Sidwell also is home to the Earl G. Harrison Jr. Quaker Rare Book Collection, more than 900 items documenting Quaker history and philosophy dating back to 1655.

It’s no surprise that Harrison’s office is filled with the books of his writers. What is surprising, however, is that his bookshelves are not made of well-polished walnut or maple. They’re planks of lumber supported by metal brackets attached to a newly painted wall. Boxes are stacked on the floor, collected clutter that has not been returned to its proper place since the office face-lift. Some stacks are bound with crisscrossed rubber bands, others with binder clips. The manuscripts — both edited and unedited — and printouts of photos cover every inch of his desk.

Harrison peers across the stacks of manuscripts through his rimless glasses with a gaze that stops short of intimidation. He keeps his favorite dictionary on a box close to his desk, with more dictionaries stacked on the wooden shelves. He also loves thesauruses, “a great smorgasbord of language,” he says. His mastery of words is borne out by the authors with whom he works. Says Jeff Hobbs, “If a word was on page 78 and repeated on page 200, he’ll know it.”

HARRISON EARNED HIS MASTER OF FINE ARTS from the University

of Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1986, studying under the tutelage of Bob Shacochis, who says that Harrison’s classic good looks earned him the nickname “Jack Armstrong,” a reference to the radio series popularized in the 1930s, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. In Iowa, Harrison met Kathryn,

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a fellow student who would become his wife and a successful author.

Harrison and Shacochis continued their friendship after he began working for Harper’s Magazine in New York, sometimes discussing narrative writing until 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. “His grasp of structure was great,” says Shacochis. “He’s brilliant at all levels of publishing, the writing, editing and the politics.”

While he was at Harper’s, Harrison gave a young, gifted writer an assignment to cover the Illinois State Fair. A second assignment followed: Harrison told the writer to cover a luxury cruise, one from which Harrison had just returned. The writer was David Foster Wallace, and those assignments resulted in stories that were included in Wallace’s 1997 essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, now a classic in the narrative nonfiction genre. Harrison says Wallace would turn in a 40,000-word piece instead of the 6,000 words he had been assigned.

“They were fabulous words, but he understood at the end of the day that some had to go.”

In acquiring book projects at Scribner, Harrison still looks for the perfect match between story and writer, one that mixes a great story with the one writer who should be telling it. He found those writers in Kevin Fedarko, Jeff Hobbs, S.C. Gwynne and Helen Thorpe. And just as importantly, they found him.

When first-time author Fedarko began shopping his book about an epic race down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, it only took a five-minute phone conversation for Harrison to set himself apart from other editors.

Most editors wanted to talk about the marketing or the publicity of what would become The Emerald Mile. Harrison honed in on the men at the oars. He asked pointed questions about the characters, and wondered if the main character had a complicated relationship with his father. “He had an engagement with the story that others didn’t,” Fedarko recalls.

As Fedarko dug deeper into the story, he learned about the efforts of a group of engineers trying to save a dam from raging floodwaters. This second narrative began to overwhelm the first, but Harrison kept his writer in check, knowing when to encourage Fedarko to explore and when to insist he move on.

When Fedarko missed deadlines, Harrison was gentle but firm. “I’ve been around the bush,” Harrison says. “Problems come up, I know that.”

Hobbs’ problem with The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was research — and the fact that he was a novelist, unschooled in the ways of nonfiction. Harrison understood Hobbs’ emotional attachment to the story of his college roommate at Yale who was subsequently murdered in a drug-related incident.

But accuracy in the reporting process was imperative, and Harrison talked to Hobbs about it over lunch at Cafe Un Deux Troix. “I could tell from his questions that his mind was on another level,” Hobbs said. “He put faith in me.” Harrison encouraged Hobbs to learn more about Peace’s father, which was complicated by the fact that Skeet Douglas had been incarcerated since Peace was 7. As with Emerald Mile, Harrison felt that the father-son relationship was key to the story and insisted Hobbs visit the prison where Douglas had been housed before his death. “He steered me to get that down,” Hobbs says. “That was 100 percent Colin.”

Harrison’s talents go beyond the ability to structure narrative; he must also have a discerning eye for book design and packaging. When his assistant, Katrina Diaz, walks into his office, she brings him the book jacket 34 MAYBORN | 2015

for a new release, Jason Matthews’ Palace of Treason. But the background on the jacket is more gold than the orange of the advance copies, and they must make a call on whether it will suffice. They decide the gold will work — it’s just as striking as the orange — and Harrison tells Diaz to express mail the new cover to Matthews. Harrison quickly turns his attention to the photos for another book. This one won’t have blurbs on the cover, so the art must grab the eye — transforming the book into an “objet d’art.”

That’s what Harrison called Gwynne’s Rebel Yell, a biography of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, the second successful collaboration between the writer and editor. Their first began in 2007, after Gwynne was faced with a difficult choice between Scribner and a second publisher when selling the manuscript of what would become Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. Gwynne and Harrison both came out of magazine careers, so they spoke a common language. That shared background was the reason Gwynne chose Harrison.

Harrison made two significant changes to what Gwynne had written. Gwynne had spent months researching the history of the Parker family (Quanah Parker’s white ancestors), which he included in his early draft. “Colin looked at that and said he was bored. I had gone too deep,” Gwynne recalls. So he flushed 40 pages out of the book. “It was the right thing to do.”

Toward the end of the process, Gwynne says he had “get-there-itis.” “I was tired and ready for it to end.” But Harrison told him he had shortchanged the book’s hero, Quanah Parker, so Gwynne spent a couple of additional months researching Parker. That extra reporting helped the book’s structure, giving greater significance to Parker’s story as it alternates with the larger story of the Comanche Nation.

Harrison also helped Gwynne find his voice for the book. “I had used a more breezy magazine language,” Gwynne says. “Colin wanted me to speak in the voice of God, not the small magazine voice. Something more in the way of 18th-19th century language.”

Gwynne’s next book will be a departure from the historical narratives of Summer Moon and Rebel Yell — it’s about football — but he’s sticking with Harrison as his editor. “Editors can do a lot of harm and they can do a lot of good,” Gwynne says. “Colin can be passive when he needs to be and active when he needs to be. It’s a fine line.”

Helen Thorpe needed the active Colin Harrison after she finished the first draft of her first novel, Just Like Us, the story of four MexicanAmerican girls whose parents had entered the country illegally. She knew something was off structurally. “It was all over the map,” she says.

“But Colin read it and put his finger right on the problem.” The issue was chronology, and he recommended a simple fix with some rearrangement and verb-tense changes.

After Just Like Us, Thorpe says Harrison kept in contact, holding her hand as she decided on her next project. She had interviewed three women who had served in the same National Guard unit and were deployed to Afghanistan, and Harrison said he had never read a good book about women in the military. The result was Soldier Girls, which Thorpe admits she still might be reporting today if Harrison hadn’t insisted she call him monthly to discuss the pages she had written.

Thorpe’s writing process grew even more complicated with a highprofile separation from her husband, the governor of Colorado. “I needed someone who had faith in the project, and Colin did. He cared that I was toiling away on this.” Their many sessions at Café Un Deux Trois resulted

in many sheets of scribbled table coverings. Thorpe has kept them all, she says. “I live by those.”

EVEN THOUGH HARRISON’S computer dings with incoming e-mails every few minutes, he mostly communicates by phone, using an oldschool Rolodex to make his calls. His e-mail correspondence is short — “loved it,” “great,” “we’ll talk.” Diaz maintains a computer print out that tracks his 25 or so ongoing projects by name, due date and status (overdue, blurbs needed, afterword just in).

Because of interruptions at work, Harrison prefers to read manuscripts at home in Brooklyn, a 30-minute subway ride away from the office. In his comfortable chair with a good light overhead, he clears out a mental space so he can pay attention to each manuscript. If it’s a book in process, he will try to identify factors that need to be discussed immediately, and those that can wait until later — manuscript triage, he calls it. “I try to pour the whole thing into my head and understand it in all

Sometimes writers just need more time to contemplate their work , causing Harrison to suggest they relax, step away from their work, go smoke a cigar on the back porch. the ways it can be understood — structure, holes, arc, drilling down into language, interpretation, the writer’s stylistic tics. I mark up as much as I can on the first time through.”

Harrison, the self-described “crazed structure nut,” diagnoses any dilemmas. Is it a process problem? Is the writer getting enough access?

Getting enough time to report? Is the structure working? Is the story compelling? Is the author’s voice confident and clear? “Sometimes stories end up in a cul-de-sac,” he says.

Editing happens on many levels — from the highest architectural level to what’s happening in a short sentence, and it’s a different process for each writer and each book. Some need line editing. Some need structural conversations. Some need a discussion of sources and reporting.

Harrison says more experienced writers usually can pinpoint their own problems. “They figure out the instrument they need to play,” he says. Talking through issues can help the writer identify the challenges each face. “Then they can say, ‘Ah yes, I understand the problem now, I can attack it.’”

And with many writers unfamiliar with the politics of publishing, they need a champion, an editor who can push their project forward. “Even if a writer turned in a letter-perfect manuscript,” Harrison says, “the writer still needs an advocate in the house and beyond, someone who can talk passionately to the publishing machinery.”

Sometimes writers just need more time to contemplate their work, causing Harrison to suggest they relax, step away from their work, go smoke a cigar on the back porch.

Harrison understands the need for down time: he maintains a house

on Long Island and escapes the world of books with physical activity. He can be seen manning a wood chipper to clear away brush, or building a wall around his garden, working past the point of exhaustion in his battle to keep deer out of his garden. “It’s a good antidote to working in an office all day long, working with words, working with abstractions, working in a small space.”

WRITERS WHO TALK ABOUT how good Harrison is at cobbling

together their stories attribute it to the fact that he himself is a writer, which gives him the acute ability to empathize with their struggles. His seven novels are gritty crime fiction, usually set in New York City. His 1996 book, Manhattan Nocturne, is being made into a movie starring Adrien Brody and Campbell Scott.

Just listen to the first line of Manhattan Nocturne. “I sell mayhem, scandal, murder, and doom,” and just like that you’re sucked in like a forgotten cookie crumb under the dining room table flying up the nozzle of a Hoover.

As to why a fiction writer would edit primarily nonfiction, Harrison explains: Nonfiction projects are works in progress, and he enjoys the sense of discovery that comes with delving deep into something he can help shape. And it’s not as if he doesn’t write nonfiction, though it’s generally shorter magazine stories — humor, op-eds and memoir pieces.

His editing position just doesn’t afford him the time to do the reporting a nonfiction book requires.

Harrison’s writing process also helps him identify with readers. “Every time I write a book, I have to teach myself how to do it,” he says. “And you have to teach the reader how to read it. That’s an interesting transaction that takes place early on in a book.”

Some readers love a rich style, others don’t. Some love a spare, elegant style, but that may be too dry for others. “That’s why some people pick up a book and completely fall into it,” he says. “That’s the thing about a book.

It needs to be intriguing and informative. It’s a performance. The book is the end when the process is over.”

In this grand process of publishing a book, Harrison says he can do the most good in making the book the best version of itself. His focus is on what’s between the first page and the last. “As time goes on, an editor only has limited control, so we try to make sure the goodness is baked into a book.”

Each book release is different, with its own media blitz and promotional activities. But Harrison engages in his own private ritual. He takes the first hardcover and writes a personal note to the author. And it’s likely that the author has returned the honor, using the book’s acknowledgement pages to thank Harrison for his guidance and faith.

“My editor, Colin Harrison, is just about perfect at doing what he does,” writes Hobbs in The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. “Whether you were answering my questions, steering both my research and my writing with a gentle but unrelenting hand, editing text with attention paid to every single word or simply leaving me alone to work — I don’t believe the editorial experience could have been more satisfying.”

Harrison hasn’t finished reading the manuscript of that eager author — the one who turned it in four months early —but he is confident he won’t be disappointed. “I can smell it. It’s good,” he says. And Harrison will soon be ready to work with him, and once again begin the process of making a book. Table for two at Café Un Deux Trois, please. m

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PERSPECTIVES

36 MAYBORN | 2015

FA M I LY G UY In the hectic world of Jeff Hobbs, there’s always another story idea to mine, and another diaper to change. story and photo by michele leone

Jeff Hobbs takes a hike through the Santa Monica Mountains near his West Hollywood home with his children, Lucy and Whitman.

As the windy two-lane road rises past the brick wall fortifications obscuring celebrity mansions, Jeff Hobbs’ nostrils fill with the hint of crisp mountain air. His mind wanders. He imagines meandering through shady oak and sycamore trees, and arriving at the summit — the sprawling city of Los Angeles below, the sun glinting off the Pacific Ocean, and the solitude, mainly the solitude.

“Are we there yet?” squeaks Lucy, his 5-year-old.

His intense green eyes widen and focus on the road as it steepens, twists and narrows to one lane.

“Where should we park if we are taking the hike?” he asks, hints of an East Coast accent creeping into his deep voice.

“Daddy, are we there yet? Daddy? Daddy?”

Jeff and crew are on their way to the Santa Monica Mountains for a midday trek. It’s just another day for the T-shirt-and-jeans-clad 35-year-old father of two.

Typically, he amuses the children in their toy-littered living room until noon, when he begins to go stir crazy.

Then, he drags them out the door on some sort of expedition. When daughter Lucy asks, “Why?” he spouts the benefits of exercise and fresh air, but he knows it’s really about him — and his sanity.

2015 | MAYBORN 37

Top: Jeff proposed to Rebecca within six weeks of meeting her. They married in 2005. Middle: Jeff (third from right) had not seen Rob Peace (third from left) since Rob was a groomsman in Jeff’s wedding. Bottom: In March, Jeff gave a speech to Clairemont McKenna College in California, where he spoke about Rob Peace. Courtesy Jeff Hobbs 38 MAYBORN | 2015

He glances over his shoulder, admiring his ability to optimize the limited real estate of his silver Ford Fusion. Lucy is strapped into her car seat by a five-point harness. Her shimmery princess dress billows over the plastic armrests. Green flip-flops dangle from her feet, and her face is slick with a pasty coating of Banana Boat sunscreen. She is inches from her 1-year-old brother, Whitman, who is inches from Noah, the family dog — an elderly brown and white shepherd mix.

“Wahhhh! Wahhhh!” Whitman wails uncontrollably. Jeff takes his hand off the steering wheel, reaches behind his back and fumbles blindly for anything to quell the outburst — a baby bottle, a biscuit, a Metallica CD. Seconds later Whitman is quietly sucking a pacifier.

It’s a 20-minute drive to the mountains from their home in West Hollywood. Eleven minutes to go.

“Are we there yet, Daddy?” re-pleads Lucy, almost on cue.

Jeff is the quintessential stay-at-home Dad — if there is such a thing.

He packs lunches, changes diapers, arranges play dates, manages babysitters, repeatedly watches Pocahontas movies and writes best-sellers — two to be exact; one fiction, one nonfiction. He celebrated success early when his first novel, The Tourists, was published in 2007, five years after his graduation from Yale.

On May 18, 2011, a single devastating event sent his life on a different trajectory. Soon, the self-proclaimed introvert found himself drawn into the extroverted world of narrative nonfiction. For three years, he immersed himself in reporting the story of Robert Peace, his college roommate at Yale who was found murdered in the basement of a home outside of Newark, New Jersey.

The reporting left him with a profound respect for the process of narrative nonfiction — and another best-seller, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. For his efforts, he received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and made the PEN Literary Awards short list for biography. Success, however, has left him feeling conflicted and guilty, as though he mined his best friend’s tainted memory for his own literary achievement, profit and desire to be a “writer who mattered.”

Jeff began to resolve that conflict as his book became something of a catalyst for racial dialogue, with readers debating the conundrum of Robert’s life story. How could an intelligent, charming black man who rose above the impoverished circumstances of his birth return home after graduating from an Ivy League school, only to fall victim to the trappings of his past? That conversation encouraged the otherwise reserved author to spread the book’s message of empathy to college campuses, community centers, high schools and juvenile detention halls in an attempt to help others learn from his roommate’s life.

In the gender-bending role that marks the contours of Jeff’s life, he must negotiate the quiet from the crazed, the computer from the kids, stealing precious moments for writing in his garage where his mind can focus without close encounters of the preschooler kind. Despite the push-pull of his two selves, he seems to master competence at whatever activity defines him: runner, hiker, surfer, thinker, seeker, author, husband and dad.

His days are long and challenging, beginning at 4 a.m. where the only available writing time is in his cluttered garage. After 7 a.m., he is bom-

barded with phone calls, text messages and failed attempts to keep up with a toddler, who makes sport out of pulling books off the living room shelf. While craving adult conversation, Jeff would like nothing better than to retreat to his writer’s cave; yet, he embraces kid chaos easier than he does literary limelight.

Today’s expedition has the three of them high above L.A. for a hike, a snack, a ride on Daddy’s shoulders and a relentless barrage of questions.

“Daddy, can I climb out of the car?” Lucy asks from her backseat perch.

“You mean right now?” questions Jeff. “100 percent not.”

“When I’m getting out, can I climb out of the window?”

“No,” he says.

“Why?” He resorts to reason. “It gets your dress dirty and mom gets mad … nobody wins.”

She resorts to begging. “Pretty please?”

“No,” he repeats flatly.

“Pretty, pretty please?”

“Lucy stop!”

But she remains undeterred. “Pretty, pretty, pretty, please?”

A single devastating event sent his life on a different trajectory.

Soon, the self-proclaimed introvert found himself drawn into the extroverted world of narrative nonfiction.

IT WAS CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT when Jeff’s cellphone vibrated. He wedged the foamy toothbrush in his mouth and tapped the screen. The blue and white Facebook logo glowed. He scanned the message: “Rob Peace”... “Regret to inform you …” He stiffened like he was on the receiving end of a bucket of ice water. “He passed away.” Immobilized, Jeff read the message over and over and over.

Jeff had not seen Rob since Jeff’s wedding six years earlier. He felt badly about losing touch, and even worse when another Facebook post said that Rob died violently — shot in what was likely a drug-related turf war. But in May 2011, amid the endless mountains of laundry, piles of dirty dishes and fossilized mashed potatoes embedded in his daughter’s blonde hair, Jeff was settling into his new role as a father. His wife, Rebecca, felt guilty about spending time away from Lucy, but her work for a TV director kept them financially afloat, enabling Jeff to keep writing and the family to move from a one-bedroom apartment to a small house.

Suddenly, they were surrounded by seven-figure homes, six-figure cars

and the likelihood of expensive private school tuition. Jeff was feeling the financial weight of parenting and the possibility of being a failed writer.

It’s not like he hadn’t known literary success. He’d been writing since he could remember, growing up in eastern Pennsylvania, the quietest of four children; not liking social gatherings or parties, he preferred books.

His father, a surgeon, found 10-year-old Jeff’s first foray into fiction — a short detective story — a bit inappropriate and objected to its steamy scenes. He encouraged Jeff to take up sports, and, much like his father, Jeff ran track for the private prep school he attended, resonating with the individualism of the sport as well as its simplicity. “You run your run and whoever gets there first, wins. It’s a pretty pure thing.”

During summers, Jeff ran hurdles for the Wilmington Track Club and hung out with black sprinters who attended public school and adopted Jeff as one of their own. On weekends they would pile into vans driven by volunteer coaches, Salt-N-Pepa blaring on the radio, and hit the road for regional competitions. They schooled him in their lingo and bestowed upon him the title of “honorary black man.”

In the fall of 1998, Jeff followed another family tradition and set off for Yale University with plans to major in English and run track. Moving into his assigned room on the fourth floor of Lanman Wright Hall, he met his new roommate, Robert Peace, an accomplished water polo player who also graduated from a challenging private school. Rob had grown up in East Orange, New Jersey, a densely populated, deteriorating black neighborhood nicknamed, “Illtown.” His father, an inmate serving a life sentence for murdering two women, had been absent from Rob’s life since his son was 7.

College roommates for four years, they grew to be best friends, and Jeff found solace in Rob’s good counsel, his ability to “tell it like it is” and his judgment-free world. That Rob was stoned every day or sold pot out of their dorm room seemed almost incidental to their friendship. More important was that Jeff could share his highs and lows from track competitions, his heartbreaks with women and his dream of being a writer of substance.

That dream was realized sooner than anticipated. After graduating from Yale in 2002, Jeff wedged himself into a 200-square-foot flat in Manhattan, working as a grant writer by day and a fiction writer by night.

The idea for what would become his first novel came from his brother, who had just broken up with a girlfriend who was trying to change him.

His characters, though fictional, are loosely based on composites of his Yale classmates, and they find themselves living in Manhattan seven years after graduation. With his sister in banking and his brother in fashion, Jeff tagged along with them and observed their worlds. “Sexy and hip isn’t my personality, but it was a time and place where I paid a lot of attention to that.”

He also paid attention to a green-eyed woman from Brooklyn named Rebecca, whom he met at a party and proposed to six weeks later. A few weeks before their wedding in 2005, he sold to Simon & Shuster what would become The Tourists and a national best-seller. The Boston Globe called the work “an impressive debut in which keen insights are often strewn amid the narrative like shiny pennies on a dirty sidewalk.”

The day after their wedding, Jeff and Rebecca moved to Los Angeles for Rebecca’s job. Jeff, thinking about a second novel, knew he didn’t 2015 | MAYBORN 39

want to be cast as the second coming of Jay McInerney, writing only about young, urban angst. Instead, he spent three years writing a long family novel loosely based on the lives of Rebecca’s mother and her four aunts that he titled The Five Sisters. It got a good reception from one publishing house, but the marketing department rejected the deal: How were they supposed to sell a story about five middle-aged women written by a 27-year-old man? “It’s probably not something I should have been spending my time on,” he says.

There were other writing jobs that helped pay the bills: editing self-help books, writing ad copy on social media. But nothing with the kind of pop expected from being a best-selling author. He did make some money adapting The Tourists into a screenplay but no movie has been made yet. And living in Hollywood, where everyone has a screenplay, he was encouraged to write another, but collaboration just wasn’t in him. “That work is so social, and there are so many cooks in the kitchen, and I just love my garage so much.”

Rejection left him sad, not bitter, and he began to question his worth as a writer — that is, until he received the cellphone message that would compel him to investigate the story of a good friend who had been murdered.

CERTAIN THINGS ABOUT Rob’s funeral in Newark remain fixed in Jeff’s mind: the embalmed body of his best friend lying peacefully in an open casket; a view of Rob’s mom, Jackie Peace, the strong, stoic single mom, who had borrowed books from the local library to read to her small son; a high-pitched wail that cracked the silence in St Mary’s Church before the priest’s fiery sermon; an open mic encouraging Jeff to say a few words, though he can’t remember exactly what; shocked friends going to a bar and spending the rest of the day drinking and trying to understand the why and how of what happened.

It wasn’t as though Jeff came away from the funeral with any idea of writing a book; instead he returned to his garage and began writing essays about his memories of Rob — six months’ worth of personal essays. “I carry so much guilt thinking back to so many dorm room conversations. If I had just been less distracted

by English papers or track or girls,” he says. “If I had asked a more nuanced question or a harder question that was safer to avoid asking. I don’t think I could have changed anything, but, at least, I could have been aware.” And if enough 40 MAYBORN | 2015

people had been more aware, he adds, maybe Rob would still be alive today.

After some prodding from Rebecca, he called Jackie and asked for her support to tell Rob’s life story. Her son had influenced so many people in his old neighborhood, at Yale, at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, his old high school where he taught for a few years.

He wanted Jackie to have a record of her son, even if it was written on loose-leaf paper, even if it was just something she kept in the attic.

He doubted anything that tragic would ever be published, but if it was, he promised to dedicate some of the royalties to fund a scholarship at St. Benedict’s. She said, “OK.” For someone with no history of interviewing sources and turning them into realized characters, who for his last birthday present from his wife received “a month of no social gatherings,” who hated leaving his comfort zone, much less his garage, a first foray into nonfiction seemed a daunting task. Added to these obstacles was the realization that along the way, he would encounter hostility from those who felt it presumptuous that a white man from Jeff’s background would dare try to tell the story of a black man from Rob’s background.

Facebook made matters easier for those who were eager to be interviewed: Rob’s friends from Yale and his first cousins from New Jersey. From these contacts, Jeff broadened his search, returning to New Jersey time and again to interview Rob’s childhood friends, his drug connections — those he had bought from and sold to. Many of his friends seemed overly possessive of their memories of Rob, as if only they owned the truth. Jeff learned that if he could keep his interviews less formal, more conversational, people would be more likely to open up. And if he could meet with them in small groups, over dinner or in someone’s home, it brought out the storyteller in people who shared their memories more vividly. And if their stories sounded far-fetched or exaggerated, others in the group were more likely to “call bullshit.”

Navigating between the unfamiliar and the dangerous, Jeff once walked up to a bungalow, knocked, but no one answered. He called his contact, who asked if he was in front of an apartment building. He said, “No,” and he was told, “Get back in your car, stay on the phone with me and lock your doors.” He started his car and four guys pulled up next to him, looking him over. As he drove off, he thought to

himself, I would rather be in my garage talking to my dog.

He asked his sources many of the same questions he’d been asking himself: Why didn’t they do something, intervene, get in Rob’s face and tell him that he was about to lose everything he had worked for? “His Yale friends felt they couldn’t give him advice because he was this hard guy from New Jersey,” recalls Jeff. “And his people back home felt like they couldn’t give him advice because he was this intellect that had gone to Yale.”

Over the next year and a half, Jeff learned how Rob touched many lives — Yale professors, Newark drug dealers, St. Benedict’s clergy — and how he devoted significant time to visiting his father in prison and attempted to overturn his murder conviction.

Eighteen months and 1,000 pages of interviews later, Jeff wrote a 150-page book proposal and submitted it to 25 publishing houses. All but three turned him down, saying the story was “too dark” or that “no one would read it.”

Of the three houses that wanted the work, Jeff chose Scribner because he felt its editor, Colin Harrison, would make him go deeper with his research, even at the expense of Jeff feeling awkward or uncomfortable. Harrison insisted, among other things, that Jeff visit Trenton State Prison where Rob’s father had been housed before his death. Among the lifeless eyes of its inmates, the smell of disinfectant and the sound of steel doors clanking shut, Jeff would learn about Rob’s relationship with his dad. “There was a need to dig diligently to learn things he didn’t already know, information that was absolutely essential to the book,” says Harrison. “And he got it.”

Although Jeff found the interview process therapeutic, helping him assuage lingering guilt over not being there for Rob, a piece of him still felt as though he was exploiting his best friend for money and recognition. “I wish it could simply be sadness in missing a friend, but, once you bring in the business stuff, it all gets twisted around.” These conflicted feelings bubbled to the surface at awkward moments: at a New York book expo celebrating him as an undiscovered author, during a congratulatory lunch at an upscale New York restaurant with his publisher and editor, and while signing hardcover books with a $27 price tag.

WHEN JEFF READ THE REVIEW of his

book in the The New York Times in midSeptember 2014, he was offended, not with

what the reviewer said about him — “a solid writer with considerable empathy and gifts for narrative” — but with the way she wrote about Rob’s neighborhood. “There are places in America where life is so cheap and fate so brutal that, if they belonged to another country, America might bomb that country to liberate them.”

If Jeff was upset, Jackie was livid, phoning Jeff about the harsh way the reviewer had characterized her son. Rob would have never wanted this and she never would have agreed to it. Never. Jeff apologized repeatedly, saying he couldn’t control the review, which had oversimplified what he had written.

to Rebecca about being a writer, not a public speaker. But she encouraged him to accept and consider it a privilege to connect Rob with more people. Jeff would rehearse in the alley behind his garage, “orating to the ether” about empathy and perception — about how we experience each moment in our own unique way.

Two months later, Jeff agreed to a speaking engagement, his first of many. It was held in the basement of a public library only four blocks from Jackie’s house in East Orange. But she refused to come, said she couldn’t handle it. Jeff was nervous, his palms sweaty, and it didn’t help that the largely African-American

Although Jeff found the interview process therapeutic, helping him assuage lingering guilt over not being there for Rob, a piece of him still felt as though he was exploiting his best friend for money and recognition.

In his fiction, this would have never happened, but the world rendered in nonfiction exists beyond the margins of its pages, and there were messy, real-life consequences to what he wrote. Jackie was one of those consequences. “It was probably one of the worst days I had ever had in my life — thinking that I had caused her more pain.” She seemed inconsolable, even after he told her he still hoped something good would come out of the book.

That uneasiness remained when they met with the headmaster at St. Benedict’s in late September to discuss setting up a scholarship in Rob’s name. Jackie expressed reservations about donating money to a religious school from royalties earned from her son’s death.

But Father Ed would hear none of it. “Whether it’s $500 or $50,000 isn’t what’s important,” he told her. “That book is going to save lives.”

Jackie nodded and smiled, even began to loosen up. She later drove Jeff to the train station, where he told her that her story of being a single mom, who worked as kitchen help to ensure her son had the education that she never had, made her the real hero of the book.

Others felt the same as Father Ed, as invitations to speak about the book came rolling in.

Jeff, the introvert, resisted at first, grumbling

crowd seemed hostile. Jeff thought they didn’t want some white guy coming into their neighborhood and talking about something he knew nothing about. One woman stood up — and appeared angry, insulted, claiming that Jeff must have somehow enabled Rob to use drugs. She wouldn’t ease up — not until another man jumped to Jeff’s defense. The man was Reggie Miller, a former college basketball player and community activist who had grown up in the neighborhood. “I know this is about our community,” he told the crowd. “But it’s for the kid in Ohio and the kid in Texas. Read this book and save their lives that way.” The crowd quieted and a more civil conversation ensued.

Jackie was there; she had decided to attend after all. At the end of the evening, she stood up as the audience applauded her. She told the group, her eyes reddened and tearful, that she was pleased that her son still had a strong impact on the lives of so many. It was the kind of evening Jeff had hoped for, and its message would be repeated time and again.

IT’S NOT MUCH of a writer’s cave, really: a small windowless garage just off the living room, its interior cluttered with floor-to-ceiling industrial shelves, cardboard boxes, a metal

file cabinet and a baby stroller. But for Jeff Hobbs, it’s downright palatial, the place where he prefers to write.

He sits behind a desk wedged against the wall, among more shelves and a piece of exercise equipment. Lucy opens the door, Disney’s Pocahontas blaring from the living room, a bread and butter sandwich in her hand.

“Daddy, can I have a drink of water?”

He gets it for her, then looks toward the back alley, which not only serves as Jeff’s openair venue to rehearse his speeches, but also as the ballpark to a homeless man who mimes all nine innings of an imaginary baseball game.

Jeff’s been frustrated of late by his writing. After the success of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, he searched for another nonfiction project and thought he had found one in the story of two former University of Michigan football players — good friends who had reached the pinnacle of their success in college but were unable to make it in the pros.

How they handle that failure was the theme of the story, one using it to mentor other college players about life after football, the other committing suicide. Jeff spent eight months interviewing the mentor, before the man stopped returning his calls without explanation. Jeff figured he had gotten “the jitters,” opening up to a total stranger, sharing his innermost thoughts with the outside world — it came easier to some than others.

Never suffering from a paucity of ideas, Jeff has turned his attention to another nonfiction narrative: it’s the story of two girls who attend different schools, one public and underfunded with passionate teachers; the other private, preparatory and “grotesquely expensive.” He got the idea when Rebecca insisted they tour a private school for Lucy.

“After seeing that, “ he says. “Everything else makes it seem like if you don’t send your kid there, you don’t love them.”

He is only ankle deep into the research, hopes to do more over the summer when school isn’t in session, but wonders if he will ever find a story that is as significant to him as Robert Peace. And yet he knows he is fortunate to have the situation he does: a supportive, loving wife, the solitude of nearby mountains, a secluded room in which to write — though life does have its moments.

“And maybe next time you do bread and butter, Daddy, maybe you should only put one chunk of butter,” lectures Lucy. “I don’t want to ask you this again.” m 2015 | MAYBORN 41

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PERSPECTIVES

A WRITER’S PATH

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Despite life’s turns, both private and public, Helen Thorpe refuses to lose sight of what she always wanted. story and photo by amanda ogle

Helen Thorpe sips water from the blue plastic tube connected to her magenta-colored backpack as she prepares for her hike through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains outside Denver. The remains of winter can be seen in the distance, where snow blankets the trails of the upper slopes.

Still a minor hazard to trailblazers, the snow is packed tight by the cycle of bright days and freezing nights. But it’s spring now, warming faster each day, and the mountain air breathes crisp and fresh. Helen requires no adjustment to its thinness as she begins her ascent up the rusty red path that crunches beneath her Keen hiking boots. She pulls her graying blonde hair into a bun in the back of her blue baseball cap with a focused look on her face. She’s a slight woman with thin lips and a button nose. Though anything but frail, she might be mistaken for a school librarian.

This taste of the Rockies offers a slow-rolling creek meandering between towering spruce and willow trees, an outdoor playground for Denverites trying to get in a run or bike ride before rejoining the grownup world. But for Helen, it’s more than just a place to hike, it’s a writer’s sanctuary. Writers need time to be alone with their thoughts, and these mountains enable her to slip into what she calls “musing mode,” a twist of mind where she can access her creativity, think bold thoughts and shape big ideas — which, she frankly admits, is the hardest part of her writing process.

A speeding mountain biker whirls by as she hugs the inner edge of the trail and smiles, knowing these moments sometimes must be shared. She has shared them with others — many of them writer friends with whom she has surrounded herself since moving to Denver more than 13 years

Helen Thorpe hikes in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains outside Denver, where she muses about her writing.

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ago. During these mountain moments, whether alone or with others, she wrestled with how to structure the narratives in her first book, Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America, which won the Colorado Book Award and was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. And it’s moments like this that helped her figure out what to include in her second book, Soldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War, which was named the No. 1 nonfiction book of 2014 by Time magazine.

Although Helen has never known poverty — except perhaps as an aspiring young poet settling in Boston after college — each of her works shares poverty as a common theme. In Just Like Us, poverty takes the face of four young Hispanic women, two legal, two undocumented, as they experience life from their senior year of high school through college. In Soldier Girls, poverty looks like female recruits who use their National Guard enlistment as the means of escaping the poor circumstances of their lives.

Yet despite their similarities, each book presented Helen with its own unique writing challenges. With Just Like Us, Helen dove deep into the world of immersion journalism, structuring her narrative by following her sources for four years of their lives. She also spent four years reporting and writing Soldier Girls. Only this time, she reconstructed the scenes of her book from the recollections of three women who had soldiered through the ravages of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars only to face the harsh reality of coming home.

Whereas many writers struggle to negotiate precious time between two halves of their lives, personal and professional, Helen’s dance was trickier. She also had a public self, married for 10 years to John Hickenlooper — former brewpub owner turned mayor of Denver turned governor of Colorado. Although she was the first lady of a city and then a state, she came into her marriage with an impressive journalistic pedigree as a writer for the New York Observer, The New Yorker, and Texas Monthly. And while married, she became a celebrated writer of narrative nonfiction — but she did it on her own terms, immersing herself in parenting as well as story, refusing the distractions of public life and allowing ideas to simmer while hiking over that next rocky ridge. How did she manage this personal narrative? The writer in her has always run strong.

ZIGZAGGING UP THE TRAIL towards its peak, Helen pauses from

her hike and looks at the red rocks in the valley below. These stratified rock formations pop out of the rugged terrain like boulders, and are similar to the ones found at nearby Red Rocks Amphitheatre. The historic open-air concert venue has hosted the performances of rock royalty such as the Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and Jethro Tull, whose 1971 concert led to a near riot and a five-year ban on rock concerts there. Helen gazes across the blue horizon, breathing in the calm and reflecting on how even as a young child, she knew she wanted to become a writer.

Born in London and raised in New Jersey, Helen was the child of Irish immigrants who lived within a community of immigrants from Europe and South America. Among them was Helga, an Austrian artist who gave Helen an old typewriter for her seventh birthday. She began writing poetry on her prized typewriter, often during “poetry dates” with Helga. She loved the experience of putting words on paper, and like many writers, the approval she received from those who read them — like her father.

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Like many immigrants who come to the U.S. in search of a better life, her parents were practical people and tried to instill that pragmatism in their daughter. At Princeton University she first chose to study physics, but the poet in her wouldn’t be denied, and in 1987 she graduated with a degree in English literature.

She moved to Boston to pursue her poetry and became a waitress to pay rent, receiving one rejection letter after the next, still hungry for approval and success. But writing about her inner life, she says, fed her introversion, and to get outside of herself she decided to turn to journalism, becoming an unpaid intern first with The Boston Phoenix and then with The Atlantic Monthly. Then it was onto New York, where she attended graduate school at Columbia University, and then to the New York Observer, a weekly newspaper that hired her as a mail opener and package deliverer until she convinced the managing editor she could write. Her work on a media column called “Off the Record” was strong enough to catch the attention of the celebrated editor at The New Yorker, Tina Brown, who hired her to contribute to its “Talk of the Town” section, where she wrote short narratives about topical subjects such as abortion legislation and the Bill Clinton campaign. But when a new section editor was hired, he let go of its entire staff, Helen included, and replaced them with his own people.

She wanted to write longer stories about ordinary people in situations that said something about the times in which they lived.

Helen turned to freelancing in New York, a highly competitive market, which demanded long-form home runs for long-term success. After her friend, Evan Smith, became deputy editor of Texas Monthly in 1993, she began to write for the magazine and moved to Austin a year later to join its editorial staff. For five years, she roamed Texas and wrote about a broad range of topics, from the assimilation of Texas Muslims trying to convince their neighbors they weren’t terrorists, to a profile of Norma McCorvey, the Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade, to the fall of a political patrón in a South Texas county.

She loved the work, but when a promised raise never materialized, she left the magazine and became a freelancer. For The New York Times Magazine, she wrote about the transformation of Austin, Texas, from a funky college town to a bustling high-tech metropolis; for the Texas Observer, she wrote about a Dallas hospital’s fight to keep infectious diseases out of the country, and she practically made a cottage industry out of George W. Bush, writing about his presidential bid for New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar and George.

She loved Austin and developed a close network of friends, many of them writers, most of them invited to her 37th birthday party. John Hickenlooper, however, was not invited, but crashed the party anyway after learning about Helen from an old college friend. The 48-yearold Denver brewpub owner, who helped gentrify the LoDo district in

Downtown Denver, made knowing Helen his next project, the one right before his successful run for mayor of Denver.

Over the next two and a half years, Helen’s life would change dramatically. She would leave Austin and move to Denver. She would become a wife and a mother. And she would become a first lady while fiercely trying to maintain her identity as a writer.

AS SHE BRACES HER HAND on the giant auburn rock above her,

strands of her bobbed hair fall loose underneath her baseball cap. The sun is stronger now, brighter. She adjusts her tortoise shell sunglasses, pushing them higher on her nose. She begins her ascent on the toughest part of the trail, and she does so with conviction, pushing off one rock to get to the next. It’s clear she has done this before, negotiating obstacles placed in her path.

When John became mayor of Denver in July 2003, Helen became a public figure, her perspective broadening from writing about the news to being in the news. While many first ladies have pet projects to complement their husbands’ policy agendas —Michelle Obama with her childhood obesity campaign, Laura Bush with her childhood literacy campaign — Helen refused those who wanted to involve her in their causes. “I am not prone to distraction,” she says. “I love writing and know that is what I want to do with my life, so I just said no to everything else and stuck to what made me happy.”

While John was doing up to 10 public events a week, Helen was only managing a couple a month. She did, however, prove a valuable asset when it came to honing his public image, helping craft his speeches, offering feedback on TV ads, dealing with media relations. “Helen had an incredible and well-deserved career before John,” says Patricia Calhoun, editor of Westword, a Denver news and entertainment weekly. “She’s managed to walk a difficult line and do it well.”

Rather than political handlers and hacks, she surrounded herself with writers, forming a group that met at least once a month for coffee or a hike. Among the collective, who would read their work out loud, offer each other critiques and even write side-by-side to make the process less lonely, were a science writer, a memoirist and a first-time novelist.

“It’s a tough world being a writer,” says group member Lisa Jones. “It’s great to have friends who know how hard it is. Our group is where we get our support.”

With success and failure, marriage and divorce, the members of the group would come and go, but for more than a decade Helen drew support from this community of writers — and approval.

Keeping her public life a safe distance from her professional life was relatively easy; it was her personal life that sapped time from her writing. Before her son was born, she would get up each day and write, taking the “shortest time between pillow and computer as possible,” she says. Then came Teddy, and she struggled balancing motherhood and manuscript, particularly during his early years when she didn’t want to be away from him. She had more room to write after he started school, her workday defined by the hours of his school day. She wrote a personal essay about becoming a mother for 5280, the Denver city magazine, and a piece for Westword about an undocumented student.

But writing on a tight deadline didn’t suit her lifestyle, and she began to search for something larger, a book project or documentary she could live with for a while. She wanted to write longer stories about ordinary people in situations that said something about the times in which they lived, people she could get to know intimately so readers could imagine

themselves in their situations.

Being the child of immigrants, she had little trouble imagining the immigrant experience, finding the story of people uprooted to be rich with emotion. “Nobody makes a move like that lightly,” she says. “Immigrating involves a wrenching shift in cultures that makes a person see the old country and the new one with fresh eyes.”

By the mid-2000s, Colorado had become the unlikely epicenter of the contentious national debate on immigration. Colorado conservatives, alarmed by the growing Hispanic population, sought to limit government services to undocumented immigrants and insisted that laws remain on the books that restricted driver’s licenses to those residing in the country legally. Helen wondered what it would be like to come of age and be prohibited from driving. She remembered her own teenage years and the badge of independence that came with getting her driver’s license. Those recollections gave her the germ of an idea: What would it feel like emotionally and socially not to have legal status?

Helen began her research by conducting what she calls “informational interviews,” gathering string to get a sense of the issue and those most deeply affected by it. She would interview four high school girls, and was struck by the cultural and political storylines that drew them together as friends but might inevitably lead to their separation. All four girls were “A” students in the same Denver high school whose parents had entered the U.S. illegally from Mexico. Each grew up in this country, but only two were here legally. Helen was drawn to how their lives might be altered by this distinction, one placed on them by society but not of their own making.

For four years, Helen immersed herself in their lives, shadowing them to senior prom, high school graduation, college visits, witnessing their actions in real time and gathering vivid detail to bring their stories to life. Together, these scenes would become the narrative for Just Like Us, allowing readers to experience each girl as she came of age in a time marked by great political turmoil that cut to the heart of her very identity.

Their stories were not without consequence for Helen, who would later write in the introduction to her book that stepping into the girls’ world was often “a relief” from her public obligations as first lady. When she went to their neighborhood, few people had expectations of her being the mayor’s wife, and she felt freer to be herself. The girls taught her how to text and she dressed less conservatively, getting in touch with her “origins,” she says, as well as her youth.

This welcomed distance between her public and personal selves collapsed in May 2005 when an undocumented immigrant was arrested in connection with the murder of a Denver police officer. The suspect briefly had worked as a busboy at a restaurant co-owned by Mayor Hickenlooper, who was suddenly thrust into the forefront of the fiercely partisan immigration debate.

Helen frequently worried her work might have a negative impact on her husband’s political career, that something she had written might be used against him. She gave serious thought to dropping the project altogether, and sought advice from writing friends who reminded her she was a writer long before she was a “political spouse.” Helen could have continued with the same narrative about four “A” students, but decided that including the story of the murderer offered a more balanced perspective of the immigration experience. For the sake of the story, and with John’s OK, she would write about the murderer, his trial, her husband and herself.

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Her first-person voice didn’t come off as jarring or out of context as she fluidly wove what might otherwise have been the fraying braids of narrative into a carefully coiffed tapestry.

“My husband had chosen to run for office, and now the public saw me as the mayor’s wife,” she would write. “I still saw myself as a journalist, and could never accept that I would be defined by the actions of my spouse, just as the girls could never accept that they would be defined by the actions of their parents.”

The change in voice worked for The Atlantic Monthly book reviewer: “By casting the girls’ experiences, and her own, against the larger policy debate, Thorpe personalizes an often generalized problem, and delves into questions of opportunity and identity to examine the intersection between the terrible mystery of our being and the inevitably flawed fashion in which we govern ourselves.”

And John’s career didn’t sustain any permanent damage; if anything his popularity grew after the book’s release in 2009, as rumblings of him making a gubernatorial run began to stir.

Helen, in the meantime, would return to her mountain trail, slowly musing about her next big idea. With the rapid draw down of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, she grew intrigued by the large concentration of veterans coming home to reclaim their lives.

She conducted about a dozen or so “informational interviews” and found women more forthcoming about their struggles adjusting to civilian life than men. Being embedded in a male-dominant culture where they were viewed as both different and desired seemed a story worth telling. Particularly compelling were the stories of those women who had joined the National Guard — units whose ranks historically had swelled with ordinary citizens interested in avoiding overseas combat. The three women whom Helen decided to write about became close friends during their first deployment to Afghanistan, never imagining their Indiana National Guard unit would send them into a Middle East war zone.

Helen took her time with the interviews, giving the women time to open up. Her patience paid off as they shared the intimate details of their deployment and its aftermath 46 MAYBORN | 2015

— a decade marked by camaraderie, roadside bombs, brain injury, illicit affairs and substance abuse while deployed; and broken relationships, depression, alienation and posttraumatic stress after coming home.

She used the same sticky note system in Soldier Girls, but her second book proved even more of an organizational challenge. Whereas the interviews in Just Like Us unfolded in linear time, the interviews in Soldier Girls

Her first-person voice didn’t come off as jarring or out of context as she fluidly wove what might otherwise have been the fraying braids of narrative into a carefully coiffed tapestry.

Whereas Just Like Us rendered its narrative through immersion journalism, Soldier Girls would be structured from events reconstructed from the memories of the women. Two of them had trouble recalling the kinds of detail necessary to recreate the emotional reality that narrative nonfiction needs. Missing were the kinds of sensory descriptions that make a narrative show rather than tell. So Helen gathered other sources to document this detail, poring over the women’s photographs, diaries, therapy notes, Facebook posts and emails to jog their memories, digging through their battalion newsletter which revealed daily weather conditions, examining secondary resources both online and in novels that chronicled the grit and gruesomeness of the war.

When she wrote magazine pieces, Helen could keep the entire story in her head, but a book was too big and she needed to systematize her interviews to manage the material.

For Just Like Us, she marked key scenes relevant to each girl or the murder or the political debate with different colored sticky notes. To visualize the story’s structure, she placed the colored-coded notes on her office wall as the scenes unfolded chronologically. If she had too much red or blue in one section, she knew she was spending too much time away from her other characters.

were gathered over a four-year period, and “were wildly achronological,” says Helen. The women didn’t remember things in any certain order, moving backward and forward with little regard for time.

To tame her transcripts, she pulled apart the interviews, making different piles on her office floor, placing the material in three-ring binders, not in the order the information was told to her, but in the order it actually happened. From these, she created a mega-timeline on a whiteboard in her office, a looming chart detailing the events of the book as they happened in chronological order.

While Helen was working on Soldier Girls, John waged a successful campaign for governor of Colorado, taking office in January 2011.

Eighteen months later, the couple jointly issued the following news release: “After years of marriage that have added tremendous love and depth to both of our lives, we have decided to separate. This decision is mutual and amicable. We continue to have the utmost respect for each other, and we remain close friends. We intend to continue functioning as a family that spends a great deal of time together.” Helen would remain in their Denver home and John would move into the governor’s mansion. “Please feel free to include both of us in social gatherings as we will not find it awkward,” continued the

Jon Stewart raved about Soldier Girls when Helen appeared on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show on August 5, 2014.

statement. “Our chief concern right now is the well being of our son.”

A January 2013 New York Times op-ed column titled “Love, Marriage and Voters,” mentioned Gov. Hickenlooper, who expressed how the endless spin of political life never really suited Helen. “There was just always somebody interrupting. She’s someone who just thinks so deeply and feels so deeply — it was just so distracting for her. I didn’t appreciate that properly.”

The New York Times also wrote about Helen a year later with the release of Soldier Girls.

Its favorable review exclaimed, “Ms. Thorpe’s sharply drawn portraits are novelistic in their emotional detail and candor,” and her handling of “highly complex issues” such as women in combat, and the stress of multiple deployments “are all made palpably real through the prism of this book’s three heroines’ lives.”

Days before the review, Helen traveled to New York to appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote her book. Despite a frenzied, traffic-stalled limo ride that caused Helen to almost miss the show, she collected

herself and seemed a picture of poise, looking well appointed in her black dress, dangling silver necklace and aqua-framed glasses.

Stewart, being the biting political satirist that he is, could easily have brought up her history as a reluctant first lady, her marriage to the governor of Colorado whose name was being bandied about as a future Democratic candidate for president. Instead, he treated her like the writer she always insisted on being. “What a wonderful book,” he said, holding a copy for a close up. “You know, war stories are so difficult to tell beneath the tent post or caricature vision that people have for it. To tell the story of women at war, such a different place to go with it, and really, the book feels very fresh in that way.”

Helen smiled slightly and nodded, appreciative of his approval. “Thank you,” she said.

“Thank you.”

IT’S NEARLY 4 P.M. and a slight chill returns to the thin mountain air. Helen works her way down a bend in the trail, about to complete the lollipop loop that pours into a parking lot and will end her two-hour hike. White noise

from the highway can be heard in the distance and two rapidly descending cyclists whiz by.

The promotion for Soldier Girls has been going well. Being the former first lady of the state has made her something of a local celebrity and hasn’t hurt book sales. She does a monthly show on public radio called The Book Club and has given speeches and interviews about her book, but now it’s time to focus on the future. She’s been approached

by Regis University in Denver about teaching a creative writing class. She volunteers in the library of Teddy’s school and can also see herself as a librarian —the work would be fulfilling surrounded by books, she says, though not financially rewarding.

And there is always another writing project to work on — some big idea slowly percolating in her head. Actually, she’s been writing about being a mother, and how she takes Teddy to the same lake every summer in New Hampshire, how what happens at the lake charts the course of his life. It’s nothing formal really, mostly for her own satisfaction, but thinking about it on this last stretch of trail, she knows she is in the right place to figure it out. m 2015 | MAYBORN 47

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NARRATIVES

KEITH’S SONG TO FEEL A PART OF HIS TOWN, HE WOULD DO JUST ABOUT ANYTHING—PICK UP TRASH, POST FLYERS, GET DRUNK. BUT ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS SING. STORY BY CHRISTIAN MCPHATE PHOTOS BY DANNY FULGENCIO

2015 | MAYBORN 49

IT’S JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT ON A SATURDAY, AND THE MONTHLY DANCE AT THE AMERICAN LEGION POST 198 WILL BE ENDING SOON. Keith Harrelson stands in the corner of the room, alone, waiting for his chance to step behind the microphone. The bandleader has told him that after one more song, he could join the country-and-western group on stage. That was 30 minutes ago. So Keith busies himself, clearing away beer bottles and plastic cups, and if no one is paying attention, draining what’s left of their contents.

The Saturday night dance is a monthly tradition in the small North Texas ranching community of Archer City, a rowdy gathering of beer-swilling, boot-scooting two-steppers — cowboys and cowgirls, roughnecks and truck drivers who party as hard as they work. Keith can’t afford the cover charge, but tonight is no ordinary dance. New Year’s Eve has come to town a few nights early to accommodate those folks who will spend the first day of 2014 on the back of a horse, on top of a drilling rig or in the seat of a semi.

Tonight the writers from the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference are returning to town to hear him sing — writers who treat Keith differently than many of the townspeople, who make him feel special by listening to him and the songs he’s written. Keith hasn’t seen them since summer when they spent a week at the Spur Hotel, a gathering place for storytellers who immersed themselves in Archer City’s culture, combed the town searching for stories to tell, and shared their work, their lives, their brokenness — and included him in their sharing.

Ever since the legendary Larry McMurtry 50 MAYBORN | 2015

published his 1966 novel The Last Picture Show, which was set in Archer City, book lovers and writers have been traveling to McMurtry’s hometown, hoping to soak up his creative spirit. They take photographs of one another in front of the Royal Theater, The Last Picture Show incarnate. Many try to get a glimpse of McMurtry himself, who at 78 spends less and less time in Archer City where he owns a massive store of rare and used books. Not long ago, the bookstore boasted a stock of nearly half a million titles — by far, the biggest literary enterprise in this part of the country. But in 2012, he decided to reduce his inventory and auctioned off 300,000 titles.

McMurtry, the author of some 40 novels and screenplays who once bestrode Archer City as a national icon, a sort of Mark Twain on the prairie, is hard to find these days. Advancing age, fading health and changing times are overtaking him — as they have overtaken Archer City, as they have overtaken Keith.

Keith has been talking about the New Year’s Eve dance for weeks now, staring at the flyer announcing the dance as he’s walked past the poster dozens of times. Several years ago, veterans at the post made him an official member of their brotherhood, although many seem weary of him now, hardly tolerating him. Yet Keith considers the post his second home. He cleans up the parking lot, picking up cigarette butts and beer bottles, thinks about the people dancing, the band playing, about singing a favorite country song — one he would only sing in his apartment, a rundown wreck of a place

where he belts his heart out. The only time he stops is when his next-door neighbor bangs on the wall. Music’s all he’s got to ward off the loneliness.

Not so long ago, it was Keith’s job to hand out those flyers. He’d walk to Center and Main, past the vacant lots and the boarded-up storefronts, posting them in antique shops, the bank and in Archer City’s few remaining cafés.

It might take him several hours, especially in the summer when the temperature soared into triple digits. He only earned a few beers for his troubles, and the Legion would sometimes waive his $10 entry fee to the dance.

He didn’t mind working up a sweat for the sake of the brotherhood. He sweats a lot anyway. Stumbling and sweating and stumbling again, with the left side of his body mostly paralyzed. “It’s like lockin’ a door you can’t open,” he says. A teenager had barreled into his mother’s car when Keith was 5, hurling him across the backseat and slamming him into the passenger door. Doctors didn’t think Keith would walk again, but he surprised everyone.

Now, at age 33, Keith is still walking, but in a manner some locals can’t bear to watch.

To keep his balance, he tucks his withered left arm close to his body, puts pressure on his right leg and drags his left, his head bobbing as he steps. He stops long enough to dip snuff, pick up trash or pull up the basketball shorts he wears all summer. Keith’s been tottering down the pot-holed streets of Archer City for so long, his feelings about it have worked their way into the lyrics to one of his songs.

Walkin’ on this ol’ road seems to get old Sometimes just tryin’ to get from one place to another just won’t ease my mind tryin’ to get from my house down to the school just ain’t what it seems to be Walkin’ the streets of this old town is just killin’ me.

Tonight, Keith’s destination is the stage at the American Legion post, where he’s determined to sing a country cover song. With his handlebar mustache, long and dark, and his cowboy hat, gray and pulled low over his brown eyes, he blends into the corner’s shadow near the bar, going unnoticed if not for his slight sway as he shifts his weight from bad leg to good. He wears an old gray suit jacket with food-stained lapel — the one he picked up at a thrift store in Wichita Falls — the one he’s real proud of. It’s missing a couple of buttons, but he still fastens it, making one side higher than the other. It’s still nice enough to distract from the rest of his clothes — faded T-shirt, wornout jeans, beat-up tennis shoes.

Keith has spent most of the evening waiting in his apartment, checking his wristwatch for midnight to strike. That’s when the folks who

charge admission at the dance stop guarding the door and pack up their cash box. Not long ago, the Legion started charging Keith admission to its dances. It was an added expense he couldn’t afford. His disability check barely covers his necessities: rent, utilities, frozen pizza, cold beer. Their intent seemed clear: to keep him away.

But that isn’t going to happen tonight. A few couples leave the dance floor and enter the bar area, close to the corner where he’s standing.

His smiles and nods largely go unanswered.

He tries not to bother folks, but if he sees someone he knows, which is just about everyone in town, he can’t help but start a conversation. He can sense though when the “brothers” would prefer to hang out with other brothers— those who actually served in the armed forces.

If he lingers too long, they know how to make him move on: Slip him a few bucks for a beer.

“Go enjoy yourself,” says one, patting him on the shoulder. Keith stutters a “thank you” and heads straight to the bar. He grabs a beer, looks for someone to talk to, but no one returns his smile. His grin disappears, his head drops and he withdraws to his same corner, waiting, forever it seems, for the band to finish its last country song.

A COUNTRY SONG WAS PLAYING on the

dashboard radio that morning in 1985 when a teenager’s car sped through the stop sign and slammed into Keith’s mother’s Chevy Impala.

The impact crushed the driver’s door and tossed Keith from one side of the backseat to the other, the blunt force nearly impaling his head on the door lock. When the paramedics arrived, he just sat in the car motionless, staring off into space. With no blood pouring from an open head wound, no one realized the extent of his injuries. “I thought he was fine,” one paramedic told the Times Record News.

Twenty-eight days later, Keith awoke from his coma in a crisis unit at Wichita Falls General Hospital. Despite the doctor reassuring his mother that Keith could hear her voice, he didn’t recall much while in the coma. There was this one monster though who came to him in a dream. He had long brown hair, a long mustache, fangs and dry painted skin. He might have been more menacing if he hadn’t been a guest at his aunt’s house for Sunday brunch. The monster left when Keith awoke, but his brain injury remained.

That injury left Keith paralyzed at first, unable to walk, speak or hold a fork. It took 2015 | MAYBORN 51

months of physical therapy before he could stand on his own, and several surgeries to unclench his left hand. Nearly three decades after the car crash, his fingers still curl like a deflated hook.

The accident shocked Archer City. A sign on the courthouse lawn asked people to donate money and offer prayers to the Harrelsons in their time of need. “We are so thankful to the Lord for Keith’s miracle of life,” his father told the Record News. Keith’s kindergarten class made him a get-well card and held a bake sale to help with medical bills. More than 2,000 people from Archer and Wichita counties

Keith suffered from “distractibility” as well as “organize affective syndrome,” a common symptom for people with a bi-frontal disturbance, according to his psychological evaluation. “He reacts to all things with a lack of filtering ability,” wrote Dr. Vincent A. Escandell, a Wichita Falls psychiatrist. “His performance will be as mature as the last act he witnessed. His morals and judgments are based on the most immediate need of his impulses. Situations that are new or require novel responses will be in the impaired range.

He requires routine and structure for almost all successful performances.”

When the paramedics arrived, he just sat in the car motionless, staring off into space. With no blood pouring from an open head wound, no one realized the extent of his injuries. bought blue wristbands with the words “I’m Backing a Fighter” printed in bold letters.

Each wristband sold for $20. Pop singer and Easter Seals spokesman Pat Boone even helped solicit money. Keith became a poster child for the organization, which targets children with disabilities. Despite these efforts, the funds raised only covered a fraction of the medical expenses, but the outpouring of support seemed a neighborly way for the town to care for its own.

The Harrelsons had been living in Archer City for generations. Keith’s grandfather was a retired city employee. He ran heavy machinery, checked the water meters and made repairs.

Keith repairs things, too, but not for the city.

Recently, he bought a busted TV for $10, took it back to his apartment and tinkered with it until the sound came on.

Keith’s father also worked for the city; he was a watchman for the pump house at Archer City Lake. He would often take his son and his old acoustic guitar to work, strumming a country song during his downtime as Keith moved his head to the beat. But that was before the accident.

After the accident, Keith went to physical therapy in Wichita Falls, driving the 25 miles with his father, listening to the same country songs on the radio that his father would play on his guitar. But that was before the money for therapy ran out.

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In Keith’s life, country music provides that routine and structure; he uses it to recall memories that might otherwise be long forgotten. George Strait, Garth Brooks, Alabama, Jerry Jeff Walker, Merl Haggard, Conway Twitty, Hank Williams Sr. and Jr., these aren’t just heroes plucked from his childhood, they are the connections in his brain that help him recollect. He knows the lyrics to every popular country song, not just every word, but also every nuance, beat and twang. But when he sings, he doesn’t just mimic their sound, he transforms it into something heartfelt and soulful, as if his loneliness “walkin’ the streets” bleeds through each song.

Elementary school also offered Keith the routine and structure he needed. He learned at a slower pace than his peers in a special-needs classroom located in a small shed behind the building that housed the town’s elementary and high schools. Keith was mainstreamed in high school and gained a certain notoriety as the equipment manager for the football team.

But after graduation, Keith’s life stood still while other students left to attend college or work in the oilfields. While his days would be spent walking around town, his nights would be spent in his bedroom at his parents’ house singing with Willie and Waylon and the boys.

His father, whose relationship with Keith had deteriorated since the accident, was ready for him to move out. He found a cramped

one-bedroom apartment for his son at Robin’s Gardens, a fixed-income community. Keith had never cared for himself and knew little about cooking or cleaning. His mother would check on him weekly, but over time, her visits grew less frequent until she finally stopped coming altogether. Keith said he didn’t mind. He was a “Freebird,” he would say, like the Lynyrd Skynyrd song. On his white walls, he hung a cardboard cutout of two models — a blonde and a brunette — wearing Budweiser bathing suits, a clock advertising chewing tobacco and a few signs he’d collected walkin’ the streets of Archer City.

And each day, he followed the same routine: walking by day, singing at night, writing songs that explored his confused, solitary life — a life of loss and longing for love and acceptance.

Few friends visit him. The church member who came to clean his apartment quit months ago. So Keith sits in his sparsely furnished living room and sings his cover songs and writes his own lyrics with titles like “This Ol’ Cripple Boy,” “Girl That I Knew” and “State of Confusion.” One year, he picked up an old karaoke machine from a friend and recorded a CD of cover songs. He sang tunes by the Beach Boys, the Oakridge Boys and, of course, Alabama.

He’s thought about recording his own songs, but he hasn’t found the right music to accompany his lyrics.

Occasionally, Keith may visit his Uncle Carl, who lives a few blocks away and keeps beer in the fridge and in a cooler. Last year, Uncle Carl bought an old fire truck, intending to restore it. He promised to take Keith cruising down Main Street, even said he would let him blow the siren. Keith is still waiting for him to restore it, but took a photo of the truck in the meantime. He’s shown the photo to people at the gas station, the library and the American Legion. Sitting in his apartment, he’ll look at it and smile. It’s a good picture.

Keith got his first taste of singing beyond the confines of his apartment in early 2000, when the bandleader at the American Legion dance said he could join in for a song. Keith took the stage and grabbed the mic — didn’t feel nervous at all, cuing the band to begin, just like he’d done a thousand times in his living room. As he made his way through chorus and verse of “Unwound” by George Strait, people began to dance, spinning and twirling, two and three-stepping.

He didn’t officially join the Legion until 2008, when Curtis Nelson, the post com-

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mander, told him he could become a brother as long as he had a family member who’d served in the military. It was enough that his grandfather had been a mess sergeant in World War II. Keith received his membership card in the mail two weeks later, the first of seven he keeps in his wallet. He’ll pull them out sometimes, showing them off as though he’d received a combat medal.

Last year, a Legion post in Wichita Falls gave him an old motorized wheelchair. He shined the torn seat, dusted the armrests and fixed the footrests. He fired up the red machine and cruised slowly down the street — made it as far Allsup’s gas station a few blocks from his apartment. That’s when it died. Now it just sits on his back porch, the casualty of a bad battery and no money to replace it.

The only money Keith makes is when someone pays him to clear trash from a business parking lot or a city park or a remodeled home under construction. He’s pretty good at cleaning up after people—that, and singing.

HE CAN RECALL MEETING LARRY McMurtry only once: Keith was in high school. It was late in the afternoon, and he was walking toward the golf course when McMurtry stopped him. “We had a little conversation about our own lives,” he says. “McMurtry told me about his son, James, who’s a singer-songwriter, and I told him I wrote songs. We chatted for a few minutes, and we went about our own way.”

It’s because of McMurtry that Keith met a contingent of writers — graduate students and professionals who attended the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, and each year made a pilgrimage to Archer City. Like an expectant father, Keith awaited for their arrival at the historic Spur Hotel where they stayed during a weeklong seminar.

His Uncle Carl, then the mayor of Archer City, introduced him to the group in 2004.

But Keith had trouble understanding them as they talked about the elements of nonfiction storytelling. He had no trouble drinking beer with them, never knowing when to quit, or joining them on their back road adventures across Archer County. Over time, he began to mimic them, keeping a journal the writers had bought for him— but rather than write on its precious pages, he would paperclip scraps of paper inside.

It was late July 2012 when he met Kensy, a down-to-earth grad student who could brighten up a room, said Keith. “Don’t you 54 MAYBORN | 2015

think she looks like one of them Budweiser models on my wall?” They were at the bar in the Legion hall, and Keith admits it wasn’t his finest moment. He wore his blue basketball shorts, a stained T-shirt and a bruise on his right eye the size of a man’s clenched fist. Keith denied someone took a poke at him, said he’d run into the bathroom door, fell flat onto the floor. Either way, Keith couldn’t take his eyes off Kensy, whose gesture of a simple hello sent his imagination spinning. Attractive women never paid attention to him. Oh, he’d claim he had girlfriends in high school, but when he broke it down, they were just girls who would talk to him when their friends weren’t around.

Keith spent the week hanging out with the writers, even when they went “backroading.” That’s when they would pull to the side of an old dirt road, hunker down in the beds of their pick-ups and drink lots of beer. And then, for the benefit of their writing, they explored their own personal narratives, sharing their painful stories: a grandfather who murdered a grandmother, a daughter who felt confined by her religion, a father who was found dead.

Keith listened intently, then shared his own tragedy about the accident, the coma — how at 5, he woke up as some “ol’ crippled boy,” disabled for life through no fault of his own. As he listened to the others, all these people with their sad stories, stories just like his, it made him feel like he wasn’t so alone, like he belonged.

On the last night of the seminar, the Legion held a dance and invited the writers. Keith arrived early after trading his faded T-shirt for his Hawaiian one, his blue basketball shorts for his red basketball shorts. Several pieces of tissue covered the cuts on his face from shaving; he’d even brushed the snuff from between his teeth. He wanted to be with Kensy, but she was already drinking and playing pool with a few cowboys who congregated around her — moths drawn to a flame. Keith tried a game of pool, but it was too hard to balance the pool stick with his emaciated left arm. Instead, he headed to the dance floor, waiting for Kensy to dance with another cowboy.

He didn’t mind that he couldn’t dance with her; he just enjoyed watching her two-stepping across the floor and imagining he was spinning her around. He waited for those few moments when she’d glance his way, smiling as she twirled by. The bandleader interrupted Keith’s stare when he called him up to sing.

He wouldn’t start until he was sure she was watching him. Then he began to sing “London Homesick Blues” by Gary P. Nunn, and she began to dance, splitting her attention between the cowboy in her arms — and him.

After the song, Keith joined the writers at their table, and Kensy came up and patted him on the back. “Wow, Keith, good job,” she said, heading to the bar where the cowboys awaited her arrival. “Hey, did you hear that?” Keith told the others. “She liked my song.”

KENSY DIDN’T SHOW UP for the New Year’s

Eve dance like Keith had hoped, but he was

So Keith sits in his sparsely furnished living room and sings his cover songs and writes his own lyrics with titles like “This Ol’ Cripple Boy,” “Girl That I Knew” and “State of Confusion.” pleased two other Mayborn writers arrived from Denton to hear him perform. It’s past midnight when the band finally invites Keith to join them. Even though his suit jacket still looks awkward, he manages some swagger walking toward the band. His head bobs once,

and he takes his place behind the microphone, bright stage lights bouncing off his face, as if God himself has finally taken notice.

Keith turns to the band. “All right, boys.”

And with that, the acoustic, electric and bass guitars kick in, and then the keyboard and

drums join the fray. A few heads start to move with the beat of the band as Keith begins his rendition of “London Homesick Blues,” Kensy’s favorite song. His deep voice tinged with sadness washes over the small crowd still nursing their last few beers.

“When you’re down on your luck, and you ain’t got a buck, London you’re a goner,” Keith croons. “Even the London Bridge has fallen down and moved to Arizona.” He looks at the guitarist and smiles, mimicking the way his hero, Gary Nunn, smiled at Jerry Jeff Walker when they performed the song back in 1992.

Then the band joins Keith’s vocals: “And now 2015 | MAYBORN 55

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I know why.”

Keith shakes his head, grins and continues the first verse, hitting all the notes just like his hero: “And I’ll substantiate the rumor that the English sense of humor is drier than the Texas sand. You can put up your dukes, and you can bet your boots that I’m leavin’ just as fast as I can.”

As the band plays a short instrumental bridge, Keith sways to the music, no longer looking like a broken character from the pages of a Larry McMurtry novel. He commands the stage, and the band gladly follows as he leads them into the chorus: “I wanna go home with the armadillo. Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene, the friendliest people and the prettiest women you’ve ever seen.”

As the band picks up the tempo at the end of the second verse, most of the people lingering at the tables or standing at the bar don’t understand what this means to Keith. They never pay much attention to him anyway. “And of the whole damn lot, the only friend I’ve got is a smoke and a cheap guitar.” He turns his back to the crowd, again smiling at the band. “My mind keeps roamin’, and my heart keeps longin’ to be home in a Texas bar.”

Tonight, Keith doesn’t mind the near empty dance floor or that some people are talking through his song, or that only two of the 10 writers who promised they’d come showed up at the dance. He’s happy both are sitting at a table, tapping their feet, and feeling the urge to sing loudly, drunkenly, as he hits the chorus again. “I wanna go home with the armadillo.

Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene, the friendliest people and the prettiest women you’ve ever seen.”

For these three minutes while Keith sings on a cold December night, it doesn’t matter that Archer City is becoming a forgotten wisp of a town on the North Texas prairie. Or that Kensy is living out of state. Or that Larry McMurtry, for all his renown, will probably not write many more books. Or that McMurtry’s bookstore, with all its allure, will someday go the way of The Last Picture Show.

For these three minutes, Keith forgets his loneliness and loses himself in his song. No longer does he feel like an outsider in his own town, a “crippled boy” who drinks too much for his own good. He is Keith Harrelson, whose body no longer betrays him, but instead, through his soothing sounds and mellifluous melodies, feels as though he belongs. m

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NARRATIVES

Here’s Mom and Dad on their wedding day on Nov. 8, 1952, at St. Leo’s Catholic Church in San Antonio.

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A PERSONAL ESSAY BY ANNETTE NEVINS

VOYAGE AROUND MY MOTHER She was our family’s matriarch — energetic and independent — but her stroke brought us to a moment of reckoning that none of us wants to confront.

“Let her go.”

The doctor’s words hang in the air amongst beeping alarms and purring machines. A bedside pump clicks, spurting chocolate-colored nutrients through a nasal tube snaking down my mother’s throat.

I reach for her hand, as I had so many times as a child. But our roles have switched. My mother, at 87, needs comfort I’m not sure how to give.

A stroke in the left ganglia portion of her brain has weakened her right side and diminished her speech to a whisper of jumbled words. The muscles in her throat are too weak to swallow solid food or water.

Over the last few years, I’ve watched the limitations of old age gnaw at my mother’s independence. The last place she wanted to be was in a bed depending on others for help. Now, as the pillar of my family lies in a tangle of sheets and tubes, I realize how much she continues to teach me.

I know the days ahead won’t get easier, but I find myself clinging to the lessons they are bringing.

My mother’s blue eyes search mine for answers I don’t have.

“Everything will work out,” she used to tell me. Mom — her friends call her Anne — was usually right. Now I’m not so sure.

It’s almost midnight, but the rush of caregivers hasn’t slowed. A nurse straps a blood pressure cuff on Mom’s arm and an assistant rolls her over to change wet bed linens. Mom becomes agitated. Although she is too frail to stand or walk, she uses what little strength she has in her hands to pull out her IVs. My mother doesn’t like being tied down.

She’s not sure how she got here and she can’t understand why she can’t leave. A few days earlier she was singing at church, her walker parked as usual near the front pew. The next day she didn’t answer her phone, and my younger sister, Louise, became concerned. My older brother, Paul, rushed to her house and found her on her living room floor, unable to get up.

The doctor says she will likely have another stroke. Therapy to help her walk, talk more clearly and eat on her own will be slow and frustrating.

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Her fight against the infections that may settle in her airways will exhaust her. He warns that every step forward will feel like two steps back.

He recommends hospice so her last days can be peaceful, not filled with drug interactions and invasive procedures, not spent in paralysis and pain. If we pull the feeding tube, he says, death will take her in a week.

“Let her go.”

The physician doesn’t waver in his prognosis.

“What would you want, Mom? Do you want to let go?” I want her to know there’s an alternative. “Do you want to keep trying?”

I’ve asked my mother these questions over and over in the hours I’ve spent at her bedside during the few months since her stroke in March.

Each time, she takes a deep breath and shrugs. It’s hard to tell whether she doesn’t know what she wants or she fears I won’t like her answer.

I’m pretty sure I know what she would say.

It’s what she said when my father died of a heart attack next to her in bed on a Saturday morning 40 years ago: “At least he died in peace at home.”

I remember her emphasizing “home.”

How could we take her home?

FOR MY MOTHER, home is the white house with green shutters surrounded by towering pecan trees where she has lived for 62 years south of downtown San Antonio. Her five children moved away long ago as houses aged and crime crept into the neighborhood. Even after scrubbing graffiti from her front porch, after finding her house ransacked after choir practice one night, my mother refused to leave the community she loves. She locked herself behind burglar bars and ignored our pleas to move.

She drove to Mass most mornings. Grocery shopping was a two-hour venture, leaning on the cart for support. She mowed her own grass until a few years ago, when osteoarthritis began to twist her spine and shrink her 5-foot-10-inch frame. Shuffling through pain, she relied on a cane, then a walker, falling more frequently.

Six months ago, we discovered her car’s side mirror wrapped in duct tape and dangling.

We took away her keys, but that didn’t stop her from asking about her car. “We all have to die somehow,” she would say when we talked about the importance of eating right and staying safe. We never really explored what that “somehow” would look like. Now it’s staring us in the face as my sister, three brothers and I gather at the hospital.

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Mom yanks the oxygen tube out of her nose and drops it on the bed. Is she saying she wants to give up or that she wants to go home? As Catholics who believe in the sacredness of life, we are having a difficult time accepting the doctor’s advice. Some effects of the stroke are irreversible, but we hope that with therapy her ability to talk and eat can improve.

Along the way, we are learning: DNR, living wills, palliative care. It’s a new language, forcing us to make choices. But it’s complicated.

She motions for us to sit. Although she can no longer swallow food, she wants to make sure we have eaten. She always had a meal ready for us when we visited her at home.

We tell her she will be going to a nursing home.

Silence.

Growing up, we were too busy to put much energy into hugging or voicing love for one another. We just knew how we felt. Now that Mom’s ability to talk has diminished, we

My siblings and I take turns spending nights in the hospital, sleeping in a chair next to her bed, holding her hands and stroking her hair like she once did when we were sick.

She is old and has lived a long life. We worry that she wants to keep fighting because she thinks that’s what we want, or need. Her voice is gravelly and weak. We fear she could be misunderstood.

Complicating it further are finances. Her house needs repairing and she has little savings. Home care in a poor neighborhood would cost considerably more than care at a nice facility close to her children. Unable to pay for either, we apply for Medicaid, still not in agreement with what we want for our mother.

One thing we do agree upon is our love for Mom. We want her to enjoy her last days, weeks, months or years. Even though she can’t talk clearly, her smile lights up whenever one of her children or 18 grandchildren walks into the room. We agree: No one has the right to take that away.

Nursing aides try to lift my mother into a wheelchair. When she waves them off, we are convinced. “She’s too strong and independent to give up,” my brother, Tom, tells the doctor.

We begin to look for a nursing facility.

I PAGE THROUGH photo albums hoping to elicit a memory or a smile.

“We love you, Mom.” My siblings take turns bending close and talking loudly in her ear.

Her hearing aids broke a while ago and she could no longer afford to fix them.

My mother isn’t used to so much attention.

She was always doing for others. As a young girl, she raised chickens and picked cotton and grapes. She quit school at 16 to keep up the family farm after her father died.

are finding the power of touch more important than ever to communicate. We rub her forehead and caress her hands. “We love you, Mom.” We tell her again almost in apology for where we have to take her.

Her response comes slowly, one word at a time.

“I… love… you.” I reach out to hug her.

AFTER A WEEK IN THE HOSPITAL, visitors

come less frequently and reality sets in for my mother. She weeps every day, often ripping out her IVs. After tugging the feeding tube out of her throat, she undergoes surgery to reinsert it.

Since her agitation is worse around sunset, doctors say she may have “sundowners,” a form of dementia that exhibits symptoms as evening arrives.

She hikes her legs over the edge of the bed as she tries to get up, setting off alarms. The doctor prescribes Haldol and Ativan to calm her down.

But the sedating effects are interfering with the rehabilitation she needs to recover.

“Anne. Can you try to sit up for me today?”

The physical therapist tries to work with her, but Mom can hardly hold her eyelids open.

“Anne, can you wake up?”

Mom isn’t sleeping well. She’s been busy pulling tubes and removing clothing.

After consultation, doctors lower the medication dose, leaving it up to the vigilance of nurses and family, and big white boxing mittens, to prevent her from pulling tubes and disrobing. My siblings and I take turns spending nights in the hospital, sleeping in a chair next to her bed, holding her hands and stroking

her hair like she once did when we were sick.

When we can’t be there, we hire a sitter.

She sobs and pushes my hands away. We are concerned she’s getting worse. The nurses detect a slight fever and a catheter check shows she has a urinary tract infection, which may contribute to her agitation. After a regimen of antibiotics, she begins to respond.

But the strain of all-nighters takes its toll.

Tensions flare between siblings. In-laws feel slighted. It’s just past 9 at night. I feel the tension as Louise enters the room and I rush out to protect Mom from seeing us argue.

My phone pings as I head for an empty waiting room.

“You have been judging everything I do,” Louise’s text message reads. “You don’t trust the nurses and doctors. Just let them do their job.” Earlier that week, I criticized Louise for not getting Mom to the hospital sooner. Once she was admitted, I began Googling every diagnosis and questioning the side effects of every medication.

I thought I was being vigilant. Since I can’t control what’s happening to her, perhaps I am trying to take control of her care.

The argument spills into the waiting room.

“You have a guilt trip and you’re trying to make up for it,” my sister shouts.

Maybe I should have visited Mom more often, but my home is six hours away near Dallas.

Louise has carried most of the weight during the last decade when our mother’s health began to decline, driving 45 minutes across town when she fell, taking off work for doctor appointments, making sure Mom had something to eat.

We all have done our best to be with our mother, rearranging work schedules while caring for our own families. Tom has taken her into his home for weeks at a time. But my mother was always in a hurry to leave.

“This isn’t a contest to see who does the most for Mom,” I yell.

“I’m fed up,” Louise shouts. Her husband closes the door to the waiting room and tells us to get some rest. They drive home. I stay longer and tell Mom goodnight as a thunderstorm rolls in. Rain beats against the window and lightning flashes through the blinds. My brother Don, the youngest of my siblings, gives me a ride to his house. I splash water on my face to clear the urine smell clinging to my nostrils. I sleep in my clothes.

Over the next few days, Mom is more alert.

A physical therapist gets her to sit up in bed.

Mom’s legs shake as she reaches for a walking

The Proud Matriarch Mom in October of 1996 with 17 of her grandchildren.

An 18th grandchild would be born nine months later.

frame. She rocks her body back and forth until she swings into a standing position. The cheers of therapists and nurses can be heard down the hall.

Mom tries to say a few words.

“Go…home.” Her voice is raspy and hoarse, but the words are recognizable. “Go home,” she repeats.

MOTHER TAKES GREAT SOLACE in her faith. She opens her mouth in a wide smile as she recognizes the brown hooded robe and hanging beads of a Franciscan priest from her church.

“We are all praying for you and we miss you,” says Father Tony, the pastor at Mission San Jose, who comes to visit.

All five of us were baptized at the Old Spanish mission where our entire family once sang in the choir. Several of us were married there.

On Sundays, my mother would sit in her car sometimes waiting an hour for Mass to begin.

She didn’t want to be late.

Father Tony begins to pray: “Hail Mary, full of grace.” My mother moves her lips and follows each bead of a rosary with her bone-thin fingers.

“I’ll pray for you,” my mother often told us when we needed reassurance in life. Now that she needs our prayers, I ask myself if my faith is strong enough. Just before my mother’s stroke, my 23-year-old son was hospitalized for mental exhaustion as he tried to make it on his own while going to college. I couldn’t help

but ask God what He was doing. As I swab my mother’s dry mouth, I reflect on what I have learned about letting go and trusting. I cherish these moments for bringing me closer to my God. “Thy will be done.” I’ve said it so many times I feel like I’m in the audience watching a drama unfold. I only wish I knew the outcome.

Mom’s recovery depends on her ability to talk more clearly and eat again. The therapists feed her a pureed sample to assess her ability to swallow. But she fails the test. Mom undergoes a procedure to transfer feedings from her nasal tube to a permanent incision in her stomach. After recovering from the surgery, she is released to a nursing home. An ambulance arrives, the technicians strap Mom into a rolling bed and transport her to her new home.

Photos of Dad and our family are there to greet her, but the surroundings are unfamiliar.

She scans the parade of nurses, the sliding curtain, her roommate.

“The policeman tied me up in the ambulance,” Mom says.

She points to the flowers and cards on the side table.

“Take those down,” she says. “Hurry up.

Let’s go.”

How do we tell her she probably will never go home again?

THE PORCH LIGHT IS STILL ON at Mom’s house despite her usual vigilance about saving electricity. During summers, she would often 2015 | MAYBORN 61

turn off her window air conditioning units and sit under a ceiling fan.

Her bed is not made, unusual for the meticulous housekeeper my mom remained despite a stiff back. Old prom dresses she sewed for her daughters hang in the closet.

Her sewing machine sits dusty in the corner, idle since arthritis began stealing nimbleness from her fingers. “Pain sucks the energy out of you,” she would say.

We caress a throw blanket, a pillow, anything that still holds a hint of her presence.

The noon church bell tolls a few blocks away.

My mother has a few friends she met in the church Altar Society where she helped iron linens. But she doesn’t see them often. It’s too hard to get around. We encouraged her to go to the senior center for bingo or lunch, but she refused. “Too many old people,” she retorted.

A leaky faucet drips in a bowl left in the kitchen sink. My mother took great joy in preparing roasts and mashed potatoes, sharing and savoring Thanksgiving dinners, baking a cake in the shape of a giraffe or a bear for her children.

Now we try not to eat in front of her. She cries when she is rolled past the nursing home dining room. But she seems content when nurses come to provide her bolus feedings five times a day, filling a syringe with formula and draining it into her stomach. She knows she has to do this to keep living.

The horn of a distant train draws us to the chain-linked yard where we grew up. Baskets of flowers and ferns hang from a rusty swing set. An old tractor tire that was our sand box is filled with purple-heart plants my mother rooted from cuttings. Bluebonnets sprout from an old baby bathtub. My father’s workbench in the garage remains untouched. A vice still grips a piece of wood.

My mother is dedicated to the memory of her husband, who died four decades ago. She used to visit his gravesite weekly, then monthly. When she could no longer drive, she placed his name in the church weekly intentions.

My father died when I was 20. Afterward, my siblings and I helped my mother study to earn her GED. To pay bills, she went to work in a school cafeteria, then a department store dressing room and a lumberyard office.

Before we lock up her house we collect some important papers, a few photos and clothes, careful not to disrupt too much, in hopes — though distant — that someday she may return.

In her mumbled mix of words, Mom asks 62 MAYBORN | 2015

about her house every day.

“Don’t worry, Mom, we picked up your mail.” Louise talks loud so my mother can hear.

“We watered your plants and Don is caring for Goldie” (the stray cat she began feeding).

A nurse’s aide lifts my mother out of bed and positions her in her wheelchair. Mom leans to the right and is propped up with a pillow. We bring her some clothes from home.

“Where are my black shoes?” she asks in a guttural voice. She is beginning to form more sentences. “Did you come to pick me up?”

cough from the phlegm she can’t clear from her throat. The doctor hasn’t seen her yet. It takes about an hour to find two overburdened caregivers to help move my mother from the wheelchair to bed. We have to remind the nurse to reconnect the feeding tube. Frustrated, we decide to look for another care center.

As we prepare to leave, my mother’s roommate, Mary, a 97-year-old hospice patient, presses the call button. It goes unanswered. “I need something, but I don’t know what it is,” she says in a sweet voice, reaching for me. “Can

“I’ll pray for you,” my mother often told us when we needed reassurance in life. Now that she needs our prayers, I ask myself if my faith is strong enough.

OVER THE NEXT TWO MONTHS, Mom

moves to two different nursing homes. She is sent to the emergency room four times. We wonder whether the doctor was right, telling us to let go.

She’s having a rough day. A team works all morning to get her to move her legs. A therapist urges her to do more, but she begins to cry.

I push her around in her wheelchair to keep her occupied. Louise walks in and we show her pictures of her new great-grandson. We talk about our families and our work. But therapy has drained her. She begins to nod off.

Later in the afternoon, we return to her room where the night shift begins an hour-long bedtime ritual: diaper change, nightgown, an elastic binder around her stomach secured with Velcro to hold the new feeding tube in place.

Padded cushions are strapped around her ankles to prevent pressure sores. An oxygen tube is placed in her nose and a nurse hangs a bag of fluid to drip into her feeding tube.

Louise and I join Mom for her favorite part of the day. My sister pulls up a chair next to my mother’s bed, holds her hand and turns on a rerun of The Lawrence Welk Show. We hum along to the big band sounds. My mother reaches for the necklace hanging from Louise’s neck. She touches my earlobes to examine my earrings. For once, the conversation is not about medications and clinical charts. Mother and daughters talk like they used to when Mom waited up after our Saturday night dates.

Finally, she dozes off.

Later that week, Mom develops a gurgling

you tell me what it is I need?”

I wish I could tell you, Mary. I wish I knew.

THE ROOM IN MY MOTHER’S new nursing

home is bright and overlooks a gazebo. Mom is showered. Caregivers clean her mouth.

But the new staff is not accustomed to my mother’s impatience. Soon after moving in, she pulls out her feeding tube. She is rushed to a nearby emergency room where her tube is reinserted.

The setback only makes her more determined to show she can do more for herself.

She pushes her legs to scoot her wheelchair.

Biting her lower lip, she digs in her heels to pull herself along the hall rails and inch toward her room. “Ándale!” a patient shouts in Spanish to coax her down the hall.

Another patient approves.

“Arriba.”

My mother seems proud of herself for moving down the hall without our help. As I leave, she lifts two fingers to her lips and blows me a kiss.

I get a phone call that same week. A nurse notices my mother’s cold hands and rushes her to the hospital with low oxygen levels. A CT scan identifies a blood clot in her leg. A daily shot of blood thinner is prescribed.

Over the next few days, Mom forms more words and is given trials of applesauce.

“Flashlight. Cloth. Spoon.” She identifies each flashcard correctly. She misses the year of her birth, but she gets the date right. Most

Mom and me at her nursing home about three months after the stroke.

She loves looking at the gardens because it reminds her of home.

importantly, she passes a swallow test.

She is fed small portions of mashed potatoes but turns down the broccoli. She can’t drink thin liquids, so they thicken her coffee with honey nectar.

She stands for 10 minutes with a backboard, looking good as she mugs for a camera phone in her lavender polyester pants and blouse printed with glittery birds. Louise has ordered a jumpsuit with snaps in the crotch to prevent her from pulling her tube. A wisp of Mom’s white-permed hair falls against her silken skin, making her blue eyes brighter than usual.

But as the doctor predicted, for every step forward she takes two back. She pulls out her feeding tube again. Is this her way of saying she’s had enough?

Louise is frustrated. “I hope we are doing the right thing for Mom.” It’s back to the emergency room where the wait lasts more than an hour. The hole in her stomach closes up before the doctors could reinsert the tube. So another incision has to

be made. Blood levels are below average. A CT scan shows bleeding in the back muscle. The blood thinner shots are stopped.

Her arms are placed in cuffs tied to hospital bed rails, limiting movement to an 8-inch range to prevent her from pulling her tube. She undergoes surgery to insert a tiny wire basket below her heart to strain large clots. It’s Mom’s birthday. She turns 88, pulling through with light sedation.

Back at the nursing home, she enters a depressed slump. The doctor orders antidepressants. Fearful that overly aggressive efforts to save my mother may harm her, he recommends we consider a “Do Not Resuscitate” order in the event her heart stops. Unable to agree, we put off the decision.

Reflecting on my mother’s struggles, I think about how each of us ages differently. I recall a woman I had written about — Lona Lewis, who at 104, with the aid of a walker, still goes to lunch every day at the community center in Archer City, Texas. I wish my mother could be

that strong. “The hard part about getting old is seeing other people die,” Lona told me. “God is keeping me here for a reason. I just don’t know what it is.”

Perhaps it’s to teach us about slowing down and living.

Before my mother got sick, I used to talk on the phone with her almost daily. Now I am writing her heartfelt letters. They’ve become my prayers for her.

In physical therapy, Mom no longer reaches for balloons tossed her way. Her lack of progress is forcing therapists to scale back their treatment. I take her to activities, but we leave when she won’t stop crying.

A psychologist tells us Mom needs more touch and expressions of love. “She has gone through a lot of changes, and she needs to be reassured that everything is going to be OK.” My brother, Don, says he is trying. “One thing I struggle with is that even though I hug and kiss her, maybe even because I do, it seems it makes her even more sad,” he writes in a group text. “She wants so much to go with me when I leave. It seems it might almost be better if I didn’t even come. But I know in the end it’s certainly better to be there. It’s just hard.”

I comb my mother’s hair, sitting next to her wheelchair. I turn to wrap my arm across her body and our cheeks touch. She pulls her arm across my back and rests it in a loose embrace.

Tears trace my face and Mom lets out a relaxing sigh. These have been some of the most difficult days with her, and some of the most meaningful.

The physician explores whether Mom is suffering from Pseudobulbar Affect, fits of involuntary weeping caused by the stroke. She starts another medication, which works to relieve her crying.

She seems more content. She begins taking an interest again in reading the newspaper comics. She likes looking at tomato plants in the center’s garden. Perhaps Mom thinks that one day she will plant some in her own garden. It’s a dream neither of us are prepared to give up.

As I wheel her back to her room, Mom places her hand on the door jam.

“Turn around,” she says.

She points to the outside.

“Take me to see my house.” m

2015 | MAYBORN 63

mayborn

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BOOK ENDS

AMERICAN WRITER

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A right-wing pundit, a contentious preacher, a legendary sniper— how Michael Mooney gets the ungettable story Story by Clinton Crockett Peters

64 MAYBORN | 2015

Photos by Danny Fulgencio

2015 | MAYBORN 65

¶ MICHAEL MOONEY PLANTS HIMSELF ON A PLUSH BAR STOOL AT THE LOCAL OAK, a 1920s, speakeasy-era haunt with creaky hardwood floors and dim lighting that makes it difficult to see faces clearly. The bar seems antiquated, like a real-life sepia photograph, which matches Mooney’s antebellum beard and gentlemanliness. He turns with a smile, and sips some whiskey. “Best Old Fashioneds here in Dallas-Fort Worth,” he says, “and I’ve had most of them.”

Mooney wears a ball cap, flannel shirt open to mid-chest, thick beard and a lion’s mane of russet hair cascading down his back. He stares with nervous penetration, the analytical gears whirring away behind his eyes as he describes how he manages to convince sources — the apprehensive, the inaccessible, the politically extreme or religiously fervent, those who live on the fringes as well as the forefront of our culture — to sit down with him for an interview, and maybe even an Old Fashioned.

“He’s disarming,” Mooney’s editor at D Magazine, Tim Rogers, would later say. “He is one of those rare very good writers who doesn’t invest too much of his ego into his writing.”

In his pursuit of story, Mooney spent two years hounding Glenn Beck’s publicist for an interview with the ultra-conservative TV and radio personality, who is famously shy about interviews. He followed former Texas Rangers manager Ron Washington to his home in New Orleans just to knock on his door and have a few words with him, something the Rangers head of communications already had forbidden. Another source, a victim of rape, torture and kidnapping, refused to talk to any other reporter after the trial had ended, but she caved after Mooney drove to her country home and left her Belgian chocolates, purple flowers and a letter. For Robert Jeffress, the zealously anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, Mooney 66 MAYBORN | 2015

coaxed the church’s public relations people into meeting him in the coffee shop below the D Magazine office to feel him out before allowing access. Still skeptical, they let the reporter they considered a descendant of David Crosby — the heroin-carrying former convict and singer-songwriter with Crosby, Stills & Nash — through the door. “David Crosby, not Bing Crosby,” Mooney recalls. “For these conservative people, that’s not a good thing.” He spent months researching a profile of Chris Kyle, aka “The American Sniper,” but refused to give up the story, even after Kyle had been murdered.

Where other writers might pack up, go home and drop to the next idea on their story list, Mooney redoubles his efforts and refuses to go away. Even after publication, some of his sources want to keep talking, stay in touch, grab a meal. He received baked flan from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s dad, took a Craigslist prostitute up on her offer of a “real girlfriend experience” (they went bowling as part of the story), and he regularly has lunch with Robert Jeffress in his church office.

It would be easy for him to write about his subjects as caricatures rather than characters.

But instead, he finds their humanity, plumbing their lives with enough empathy that no matter how outrageous or extreme they might seem to some, in his voice, with his modulation, they sound almost reasonable — or at least understandable. Take Kyle, for instance.

It would be simple for Mooney to validate the Navy SEAL’s accolades, but instead Mooney threaded his D Magazine piece, and later his book about Kyle, with a mysterious story of Kyle’s involvement with a gas station shooting as well as the hardships he faced making the transition home after four tours of duty in Iraq.

Because of this, Kyle becomes something more than a war hero with a big gun.

Why spend so much time circling his subjects like a Mako shark? Sure, it wins him awards, prestige from his inclusion in anthologies such as the Best American Crime Reporting and Best American Sports Writing. His “The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever” is among D Magazine’s “40 Greatest Stories.” But his fascination with his subjects as cultural lightning rods makes him want to get to know them and reveal who they are. “I’m not interested if somebody’s politics are hypocritical. That’s a one-word story. I’m interested in who somebody is. That’s a 7,000-word story.” His record of reporting on figures like Beck, Jeffress and Washington has made it easier for others in the limelight to trust him, and his body of work for publications ranging from The Dallas Morning News to GQ reflects that his writing can be a bridge over the cultural divide.

MICHAEL GREW UP IN TEXAS, raised by

a single mom to whom he dictated stories about cows and ninjas before he could read.

She wrote them down in construction-andnotebook-paper books, which he illustrated in crayon. “I’ve just always enjoyed stories and storytelling,” Mooney says. “My mother always valued writing, reading, and intelligence.”

Becoming a writer was his way to make her proud. “Plus, my mother always stressed that I should do something I love.”

While attending the University of Texas at Austin, Mooney wrote a few editorials for the school newspaper, but it wasn’t until coming to the University of North Texas’ Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism that he found his love for narrative reporting. After graduating with his master’s degree, he began writing for The Dallas Morning News. A profile he wrote for the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference so impressed the Miami New Times that the

2015 | MAYBORN 67

newsweekly offered him a job.

While living close to the Florida beach, Mooney wrote on such subjects as professional gamblers, racing greyhounds, spring break and a group of real-life vampires, who Mooney showed were actually nice people who just happened to enjoy sipping each other’s blood.

Meanwhile, he freelanced for D Magazine and landed a staff writing position with the city magazine four years ago. He is, at 34, “the best of the best of the narrative writers out there,” according to George Getschow, the Mayborn Conference founder and Mooney’s former professor.

Mooney also has freelanced for Outside, GQ, BuzzFeed, Grantland and ESPN The Magazine.

His prolonged obsession with Chris Kyle marks the apex of his commercial success as he parlayed the D Magazine piece he wrote about Kyle into a New York Times best-selling e-book and a Little, Brown and Company print paperback entitled, The Life and Legend of Chris Kyle: American Sniper, Navy Seal. Mooney didn’t just piggyback onto the success of Kyle’s autobiography, which later morphed into a blockbuster movie, he worked hard to make the story his own, spending a year relentlessly running down one bizarre twist in the famed Navy SEAL’s pro-

68 MAYBORN | 2015

file, a pursuit that outlasted Chris Kyle himself.

While Mooney starts on his second Old Fashioned, he relives his first interview with Kyle who made him feel like a small boy hanging out with a real-life GI Joe. Kyle stood 6-feet2-inches tall with hands as big as bear claws, but to Mooney he seemed even bigger. “I don’t know how much of that was in my mind or in reality, ” he says. “But part of me — it was complicated — felt American.”

Mooney says work on the Kyle story actually began as soon as he arrived at D Magazine in 2011. “A couple of people at the office had heard the story about a Special Forces guy who had come back from the war.” Then on a lonesome highway near Cleburne, Texas, the veteran fell victim to a two-man stick-up. Until that is, quick as a rattlesnake, he turned the tables, shooting both assailants dead. “Who was that guy?” Mooney wondered.

The answer began to take shape in January 2012, when Kyle published his book, American Sniper, and went on publicity tours, capturing attention by telling the story of punching out former professional wrestler and Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, for insulting Navy SEALS. When Mooney realized Kyle lived near Dallas,

he reached out to him and his publicist. Immediately, both were open to a sit down and the chance to promote Kyle’s book. Mooney first visited Kyle in April of 2012 for a lengthy interview. “I was interested in a lot of stuff. But I was interested in one question: Was he the guy?”

Mooney met the retired SEAL in Kyle’s office overlooking American Airlines Center near Downtown Dallas. In the building’s lobby was a rare, circa 1661, English translation of Galileo’s Dialogue. Inside Kyle’s office, Mooney found a collection of large-caliber guns hanging on the wall, the kind you’d see in 1980s Schwarzenegger films. “It was kind of freaky, being in that nice office with Galileo and all the guns, I was thinking, Where am I?” Mooney peppered Kyle with questions, gauging his responses, redirecting, following up and clarifying. Even if the gas station shooter wasn’t Kyle, Mooney figured he still had a good story about the struggles of a veteran whose life had been pitched in violence and was now trying to live in peace. “It was essentially going to be an epilogue to his book,” he says. But at the end of the two-hour interview, Mooney grew the gumption to ask him about the fatal highway shooting, and Kyle told

Mooney found Kyle’s collection of largecaliber guns in a toney Dallas high-rise office “kind of freaky.”

Photo by Misty Keasler

He Do What He Do

After taking the Rangers to the World Series, Ron Washington retreated as he does every winter to his humble house in New Orleans, where he’s lived in anonymity for 25 years.

If you knock on his door, you’ll find out what a jerk he is. Why? It’s simple.

B Y M I C H A E L J. M O O N E Y // I L LU S T R AT I O N B Y M A R T I N A N S I N

R ron washington is not happy to see me. i wasn’t supposed to come here. Not to New Orleans, the place where he was born, the place he has called home his entire life. Not to his neighborhood in the notorious Ninth Ward, where he and his wife, Gerry, have lived for more than 25 years. And certainly not to his front door, which, after a knock, is opened wide enough for him to peer out, but not so wide that I can see in. John Blake, the Nazi head of media relations for the Rangers had told me not to try to talk to Washington. Blake protects his precious manager in the off-season like

Washington is a crazed Middle Eastern dictator who refuses to let his subjects look him directly in the eye.

So when Washington opens his door, I can tell he’s pissed. He doesn’t care that I’ve flown all the way to New Orleans to talk to him, he says. Is that liquor I smell on his breath? It’s hard to tell.

He tries to slam the door in my face, but I wedge my foot in the door frame to stop him.

“Mr. Washington?” I say. “Can I just ask you one question before I leave? Why are you such an asshole?”

His response comes fast and furious. It’s one of the most

6 0 A PR I L 2 01 1 / DMAGA ZINE.COM

i r T h e S av i o i

him, “Yeah, that was me.”

A flood of adrenaline coursed through Mooney. “The feeling not just when you think, but when you know you have a story.”

Kyle claimed a security video of the incident existed, and Mooney knew he had to track down that footage, not merely to set a scene in his narrative, but to confirm that the shooting had, in fact, occurred. Mooney spent months searching for that video, speaking with Texas Rangers officers and combing small town police agencies, county sheriff’s departments, and 20 gas stations around Cleburne. And yet he could find no video — not even a police report or other public record to substantiate the shooting. That aspect of the story, it turns out, was impossible for Mooney to verify. Except for Kyle and his friends, no one had heard of the incident. And it became the stuff of legend.

But why lie? Why would the most decorated solder in modern American military history need to make up one more story of valor for an interview? “I left that [first interview] believing it had happened,” Mooney writes in his D Magazine story. “Other people — probably most people—will believe the story, because it was about Chris Kyle. He was one of the few men in the entire world capable of such a feat.”

While he was digging, he did more interviews with Kyle, tagging along on his book signings, a trip to his office again, to the VA, a trip to a gun shop.

Mooney was driving on I-75 in Dallas in early February 2013, working on a story about baseball for BuzzFeed, when he received a text: Kyle had been murdered. “I really thought it was a hoax at first.” Then came a stream of texts telling him the same thing. At a shooting range outside Stephenville, Texas, Kyle and his friend, Chad Littlefield, had been shot dead by a 25-yearold former Marine with a history of mental illness—a veteran Kyle was trying to help.

Mooney felt terrible for Kyle’s family, sad for all the people who loved him, especially his widow, Taya, whom he would later interview.

But as with any journalist, his thoughts turned to the work. “That day I probably would have been relieved if the story had died, but instead it was a panic. What were we going to do? Does this become an obituary? What do we do?”

First Baptist pastor ROBERT JEFFRESS says that Mormonism is a cult and gays are “filthy.” But he says it because he really, truly doesn’t want you to go to Hell.

By M I C H A E L J. M O O N E Y // Photography by E L I Z A B E T H L AV I N

PASTORIZED: Jeffress at his 10:50 Sunday morning sermon

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NEW GLENN BECK THE

SINCE MOVING TO NORTH TEXAS, THE CONTROVERSIAL TALK SHOW HOST AND TEA PARTY ICON HAS GOTTEN A LITTLE QUIETER, A LITTLE KINDER, AND A LOT RICHER. B y M I C H A E L J. M O O N E Y P h o t o g r a p h y b y T R E V O R PA U L H U S

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University of north texas Press 2014 Mayborn Book Award Winner

Shoot the Conductor:

Too Close to Monteux, Szell, and Ormandy

by Anshel Brusilow and Robin Underdahl Raised in Philadelphia by Russian Jewish parents, Anshel Brusilow soloed with the Philadelphia Orchestra by sixteen, studied at Pierre Monteux’ summer conducting school, and served as associate concertmaster at the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell and in Philadelphia under Ormandy. At Philadelphia, Brusilow couldn’t resist conducting on the side, to Ormandy’s displeasure. By forty, Brusilow formed his own chamber orchestra in Philadelphia. Later, he conducted the Dallas Symphony and shaped the orchestral programs at Southern Methodist University and the University of North Texas.

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Death on Base: The Foot Hood Massacre

by Anita Belles Porterfield and John Porterfield

When Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan walked into the Fort Hood Soldier Readiness Processing Center and opened fire on soldiers within, he perpetrated the worst mass shooting on a United States military base in our country’s history. Death on Base is an in-depth look at the events surrounding the tragic mass murder that took place on November 5, 2009, and an investigation into the causes and influences that factored into the attack.

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2013 Mayborn Winners of Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest

The Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 2 Edited by George Getschow

This anthology collects the twelve winners of the 2013 Mayborn Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest.

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THEY STOOD FOR HOURS in the rain and the early morning chill to honor a fallen hero. Seven thousand mourners, former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and sportscaster Troy Aikman among them, lined up at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, to pay their respects to a legend whose casket was placed on the star at the 50-yard line.

Mooney was there, trying to make sense of it all, for himself and for his story. He listened to Kyle’s former SEAL teammates as they eulogized their comrade, to his wife who told a bittersweet tale of her husband’s return from combat only to be taken from her after coming home, to country music star Randy Travis, who played “Amazing Grace.” After the ceremony, a funeral procession 200 miles long followed the casket to Austin, the longest in U.S. history, or so Mooney believes. Along the

and in Kyle’s case, help make sense of a divisive, decades-long war with no clear winners and losers. Chris Kyle, with his 160 confirmed kills, the most deadly sniper in U.S. military history, was a winner, at least on the battlefield. He seemed an idealist to Mooney, killing for country and to protect his brothers in arms.

“It’s an American story; he is the most undisputed, celebrated warrior of my lifetime,” Mooney says. “People feel really bad about the country and the times we live in. People want a hero and to feel good about something. It really is a big fabric of our society.”

To weave that fabric, Mooney knew he had to go deeper, and logged in hours of interview time with dozens of people who knew Kyle, many of whom didn’t make the story’s final cut. His interview subjects included Kyle’s former SEAL teammates and commanders, his

it was a responsibility of war.

Of course, some readers weren’t pleased with what they saw as the glorification of Kyle.

One reader calling himself “Paul” wrote in the magazine’s comments section: “Chris Kyle is not a hero. … He was an effective killing machine and he was very good at what he did. … That is all.” Many disagreed. Others thought Mooney didn’t do enough to honor Kyle.

Rather than endearing Kyle to conservatives or liberals, Mooney sought to treat Kyle as he did Glenn Beck, Robert Jeffress or Ted Cruz’s father — without pandering to political inclination. “Thinking about him neutrally,” Mooney says, “you begin to see this shape of his life and the shape of what makes him.”

Some readers, says Mooney, saw the unverified gas station attack as evidence of Kyle’s fallibility (an inability to adjust to civilian

“I’M NOT INTERESTED IF SOMEBODY’S POLITICS ARE HYPOCRITICAL. THAT’S A ONE-WORD STORY. I’M INTERESTED IN WHO SOMEBODY IS. THAT’S A 7,000-WORD STORY.” way, they passed small towns and thousands of people waving American flags.

Mooney knew the arc of his story had to change. Suddenly the truth about whether Kyle had killed two men trying to hijack him didn’t matter as much. What mattered was that people needed to believe it happened, just like they needed to believe in heroes like Kyle. But to reveal the legend, Mooney would have to reveal the contradiction; on the one hand, no evidence existed that a shooting had occurred; on the other, why would there be evidence?

Not if you bought into the kinds of conspiracy theories gaining traction on the Internet: That Chris Kyle was a warrior so vital to our national esteem that phone calls were made, and the CIA contacted: that all records of the double killing had vanished without a trace.

Mooney became interested not only in Kyle the person, but also in Kyle the myth—and the cultural moments that created both. In his magazine article, and later, in his book, he explored why people need legends, cultural heroes in whom Americans can invest patriotic pride,

business partners, childhood friends, golfing buddies and, of course, his widow. In the aftermath of Kyle’s death, Mooney put in 20-hour days, driving around and talking to people who poured out their stories. “They all wanted to honor him in their own way,” Mooney says.

From this additional reporting, Mooney felt a more balanced portrait of Kyle emerged as this excerpt from the D Magazine story reveals: He was a brutal warrior but a gentle father and husband. He was a patient instructor, and he was a persistent, sophomoric jokester. If he had access to your Facebook account, he might announce to all your friends and family that you’re gay and finally coming out of the closet. … He said he didn’t enjoy killing, but he did like protecting Americans and allies and civilians. He was the angel of death, sprawled flat atop a roof, his University of Texas Longhorns ball cap turned backward as he picked off enemy targets one by one before they could hurt his boys.

Mooney shows us how Kyle, a good ol’ boy from Texas, was able to joke and love and kill— not for the thrill of it, but because he believed

life), while others saw it as a covert cover-up (immaculately handled by the CIA). “But all we have are the facts, and we just don’t know,” Mooney explains. “I would do anything to go back and ask him about it. But we can’t, and I hate it. It’s a weird question mark that lingers.”

BRANTLEY HARGROVE, a Dallas writer and

J-school comrade of Mooney’s, joins him at The Local Oak and orders an Old Fashioned, the same as his friend. Hargrove is the surfer dude to Mooney’s grunge guitarist: muscled, clean-shaven, with Greco-Romanesque locks.

The two begin arguing immediately about Mooney’s fascination with Jeffress, who recently preached his support for storeowners who refuse service to gays. Although Mooney says he disagrees with “maybe, everything Jeffress says,” they still have lunch together. Hargrove thinks Jeffress is “a scourge on society.”

Mooney, ever the one to see something deeper, disagrees. “I think he’s a decisive figure, and I’m not comfortable with our culture’s willingness to regulate morals.” He hopes Jeffress 2015 | MAYBORN 71

will come around and open his doors. “I have hope for him. As he does for me,” says Mooney, deftly turning the conversation. “He thinks I’ll be the next C.S. Lewis.”

Following the publication of his D Magazine story in April 2013, Mooney’s agent approached him with the idea of a book about Kyle, which Mooney didn’t want to do. He was exhausted on the subject, and, importantly, so was his fiancée. “If I mentioned it, she just went crazy.”

Then the agent suggested a shorter e-book of 20,000 words, only twice the length of the material Mooney already had for the story. Thanks to Mooney’s reporting diligence, he had left many odds and ends on the cutting room floor.

“So there was almost no more reporting. It was just putting in those things, the context of the story and working them in,” he says. The book took off. “It was on the e-book best-seller list, and I didn’t even know that existed.” With that success, the publisher suggested a paperback print version, which was released in March 2015. The e-book is still picking up steam.

To what does Mooney owe this success? No doubt it’s his obsession with finding character-

72 MAYBORN | 2015

revealing detail that shade his subjects with nuance and make them come to life. Also, it’s his ability to recreate life-cut scenes and allow readers to enter the world of his characters.

But maybe luck played a hand. His e-book was sold on Amazon and other online bookstores for more than a year and half before Clint Eastwood’s movie came out in January 2015. When American Sniper was released, the book was propelled to best-seller status within the same month. Mooney acknowledges that the movie’s success, one of the highest grossing war movies of all time, helped his sales mushroom.

Is Mooney done with Kyle? Never one for chasing breaking news, he chose not to cover the trial of Kyle’s killer, Eddie Ray Routh, who was convicted of murdering Kyle and Littlefield, and sentenced to life without parole. But Mooney still feels a sense of proprietorship about Kyle, as though he remains his literary asset. “When you really talk to somebody and work with somebody and think about something for a really long time, you feel like you want to keep going with them.”

Until that happens, Mooney is off telling other true tales while making regular visits

to The Local Oak. That a person who thinks and looks like Mooney — his editor says he resembles “a mix between a Civil War hero and someone who just walked out of the shire” — can forge strong relationships with sources is a testament to his ability to connect with people.

His own larger-than-life presence and unflinching eyes can at first seem a bit dark and unknowable, that is until he begins to speak, and his face warms in response.

The waitress at The Local Oak is hard pressed to remember when Mooney first started coming in, but like Kyle and Jeffress and Beck, she feels a similar connection. “He just walked in and started treating us like people,” she says. “Of course, we liked him.” m Editor’s Note: Mooney grew up in Grapevine, Texas—coincidentally, the location of the annual Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. “It’s odd,” he says. “I kind of feel like a host to all the writers who come here.” Which makes him a natural for his upcoming role as impresario of the July gathering of nonfiction writers, assisting George Getschow as the program’s co-director.

congratulates

The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference on another successful program.

IRE and Mayborn both share a passion for reporting and in-depth storytelling that reveal truths, right wrongs and hold the powerful accountable.

To learn more about IRE and our many IRE and our many resources for reporters, editors and authors, visit www.ire.org.

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS AND EDITORS

2015 | MAYBORN 73

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BOOK ENDS

ON SUMMONING THE GODS Think it’s easy staring at a blank screen in a lonely room while waiting for the muse to move you?

No wonder we need our rituals to coax out the words.

What civilians might consider unorthodox or bizarre or flat out superstitious makes perfect sense to narrative writers. From Balzac, who was known to consume up to 50 cups of coffee a day, to Maya Angelou, who wrote anonymously in hotel rooms, to John Cheever, who composed mostly in his underwear, writers engage daily in a wild assortment of compulsive behaviors to access their muse, to get right with their creativity, and — dare we say it — to break through their writer’s block.

LINDA TIRADO Street Cred: Former night cook, overnight Internet sensation for her essay, “Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or poverty thoughts,” whose virability led to a book deal: Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America; 2015 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference speaker.

Ritual: “Wake up, determined to write, get tea.

Get distracted by the news, write something genius on Twitter. Remember I was supposed to respond to an 74 MAYBORN | 2015

We surveyed Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference speakers past and present — as well as other members, friends and family of the “tribe” — about their rituals, routines and regimens. These quirks might run the categorical gamut: environmental (a remote, hopefully tropical writer’s cave), timing (midnight mania), behavioral (pre-game rituals such as meditating, exercising or howling at the moon) — even in-game habits such as writing while standing or drinking copious amounts of Mountain Dew.

email. Edit whatever I wrote yesterday down to five salvageable paragraphs.

Decide not in a good spot to write just now, drink more tea. Decide a beer might help. Make dinner. Switch to whiskey. Wait for kids to go to bed, read news again. Give up as a bad day.

Try to sleep. Struck with inspiration. Get up and write frantically for five hours.

Declare self a genius. Pass out in comfy chair in front of keyboard.”

Please note: any writer wishing to replicate Linda’s ritual must “take their tea with milk and sugar,” she says, “eat cheese fries for snacks and drink Jameson Irish Whiskey at any time.”

Pre-game warm-up entails “curating playlists, then listening to jazz when writing about emotion—or Bad Religion and Anti-Flag when writing about the economy.”

Not wishing to encourage the weak willed or faint of heart, we excluded risky behaviors such as stock car racing, crowd surfing and cock fighting. After collecting the responses and locking them away with a first edition of The Elements of Style autographed by both Strunk and White (don’t we have a right to our own rituals?), we tabulated the results and present them for your edification with the idea that you might incorporate them into your own rituals, as needed. - Adrian O’Hanlon III

JAMES MCGRATH MORRIS Street Cred: Acclaimed biographer, journalist and high school teacher who has spent a decade as each.

Writes a column exploring the changing world of publishing, hosts a monthly radio show; past president of Biographers International Organization; 2015 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference speaker.

Ritual: James offers a simple solution to getting unstuck: move on to something else.

“If I suffer a writer’s block, I simply start working on another part of the project.”

For different stages in his writing process, he picks different kinds of music: For note taking, organizing and filing, he wants music with words; for crafting sentences and structuring story it’s music without words.”

CALEB HANNAN Street Cred: Former editor of the Seattle Weekly, award-winning Denverbased freelance journalist, 2015 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference

to the University of North Texas’ Mayborn School of Journalism and frequent lecturer at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.

speaker addressing the breach of ethics he is accused of committing in a story that still haunts him: Grantland’s “Dr. V’s Magical Putter.”

Ritual: Not every writer feels the need to remain open to the universe. Caleb’s writing regimen is much duller than the heated controversies his writing generates. No interesting obsessions, superstitions or fetishes.

He will cop to one vice shared by many writers— “stress eating.” His drug of choice: Tostitos Hint of Lime Flavored Tortilla Chips.

Ritual: Says he writes best working in extreme solitude—no phone, no Internet, no windows, no interruptions. “A sealed lead box at the bottom of the ocean would be ideal.” His remedy for writer’s block: pushing himself away from his desk and walking around.

Upon his return, he needs to refuel the muse: a bag of jelly beans or candy corn will suffice. What works for him may not work for others: “Even if writers manage to avoid any distractions while working,” Bill says, “they eventually come to a point in their process where they start to spin their wheels in the mud, stuck on an idea or a transition to the next one. Frustration may build until a writer flings pages of rewrites across the room and buries his face in his hands.

Or the writer may down the last of her beer and mumble to herself as she pours a shot of whisky.” See Linda Tirado

SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH

BILL MARVEL Street Cred: Journalist with more than 45 years of experience; former senior staff writer with The Dallas Morning News specializing in long-form narrative; collaborator on Island of the Damned, published by Penguin in 2010; “friend”

Street Cred: Texas Monthly Executive Editor; awardwinning journalist, recognized for his true crime in Best American Crime Writing; three TM articles turned into TV movies, a fourth became a feature film: the 2011 black comedy Bernie, which he cowrote with director Richard Linklater; frequent lecturer at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference and the University of North Texas’ Mayborn School of Journalism.

Ritual: When the political yammering of MSNBC’s Morning Joe doesn’t jump start his muse, Skip grabs his laptop, hops in his car and guzzles his own morning Joe at his favorite Starbucks in North Dallas. Between the noisy grinders and the distraction of friends, he manages to pound out the pages. “To misquote Pascal, the hardest thing for a writer to do is to sit quietly in his own empty, TV-less room and get something accomplished. It is my lifelong challenge.”

AMY SILVERMAN Street cred: Phoenix New Times Managing Editor; two-time Arizona Press Association Journalist of the Year; memoirist, blogger, playwright and adjunct professor teaching magazine writing at Arizona State University; contributor to publications such as Child, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Travel + Leisure, salon. com and Playboy; 2015 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference speaker.

Ritual: If God is in the details, the divine is certainly present during Amy’s writing ritual. She does most of her writing in the front room of Lux, a Phoenix coffee shop, often in her favorite chair, always after ordering an unsweetened hibiscus iced tea, always with a pink straw.

Lux does offer orange, green and yellow straws — but if there has been a run on pink straws, “I get very upset.”

Even after settling into her Lux front-room chair, with pink straw a-slurpin’, she must write in Times New Roman font and 14-point type. Always.

KEN WELLS Street Cred: Bloomberg News Editor-at-Large; former Wall Street Journal reporter and Page One editor; Pulitzer Prize finalist; author of five works of fiction, two works of nonfiction and the editor of two journalism anthologies; frequent lecturer at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.

Ritual: If ritual stories were ever anthologized in say, the Best American Ritual Writing, Ken’s ritual story would certainly be included: Despite a brilliant career as a journalist, Ken wanted to write novels, spending 12 years in pursuit of one and only getting halfway done.

Then he became an editor for the Wall Street Journal in Manhattan, making the daily commute from Hoboken, New Jersey, a 45-minute train ride each way. Rather than read the paper, he decided to spend the time working on his novel. He bought an expensive laptop, and immediately suffered buyer’s remorse, thinking “a crowded commuter car would never be a viable office.” Although he made progress on his novel, he decided to shelve it and began a second, coming up with a first draft in 20 days — all aboard the train.

“Surprisingly, I actually started writing, head down, every day, and found I liked the rhythm of the train as I typed,” he says. “And unsurprisingly, when you start typing on a schedule, the pages begin piling up.”

He composed four more novels, and would return to the first one and finish it. All of them would be published, and all of them written, save the revisions, while commuting. m 2015 | MAYBORN 75

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AND ANOTHER THING

ETHICS 101 GATHERING MOSS ON THE ROLLING STONE Author Hanna Rosin thought she’d booked a timely interview last November when she invited Rolling Stone contributor Sabrina Erdely to join her weekly podcast, which she co-hosts for DoubleX, an online magazine she helped create for Slate. Erdely’s story “A Rape on Campus” graphically detailed a vicious gang rape through the eyes of its alleged victim, a University of Virginia student, given the pseudonym Jackie. To protect her source, Erdely didn’t interview the fraternity members accused in the article of perpetrating the assault, nor did she interview three friends of Jackie’s in whom she had purportedly confided.

The published story provoked an ethical firestorm that led to its retraction by the Rolling Stone and an investigation by the Columbia Journalism Review concluding that the author and the magazine failed to engage in “basic, even routine journalistic practice.” But that was six months after Slate’s podcast, which became one of the first media sources to question the article’s veracity. We interviewed Rosin about the podcast. The following is an edited version of that conversation.

What was your plan heading into the Sabrina Erdely interview?

The night before, I read [the story] closely and I noticed a bunch missing. One thing, there wasn’t any sentence saying, ‘We tried to reach [those accused], they didn’t want to answer’ — nothing. There was a name of a fraternity, a person named ‘Drew,’ and then nothing from them.

76 MAYBORN | 2015

That’s really unusual. The second thing I noticed was the conversation with [Jackie’s] three friends was very damning to them, but there was nothing from them.

Did that change your approach to the interview?

I was in this odd position of doing what is normally a promotional-style interview. …

I couldn’t bring myself to be like ‘This is wonderful,’ because I felt so queasy about the story.

Did you go into the interview thinking the story would blow up like it did?

Oh, no, but I was really suspicious of it. I just had a really bad feeling about it.

And did Erdely’s answers help that feeling?

Her answers were terrible — the ones that actually made me more suspicious were not the ones about the reporting [she had done] because I started to realize there must be some deal with Jackie. It was the one about [why she didn't question] the frat: ‘They’re so powerful, they have fathers who work in government.’

That seemed odd to me. That’s the view of the world that can get you in trouble.

So did you give her any warning beforehand? Or did you just get into it?

I didn’t even perceive it as that confrontational. In retrospect, you could see it open the floodgates, but at the time I was trying to be inquisitive.

She slams the book on herself when she says she didn’t know whether [the alleged rape] happened, because she wasn’t in the room. And then, when you ask her if she can prove her case and she says, ‘I’m not a lawyer, I’m a journalist.’

Yeah, what’s with that? You have a huge responsibility here … a journalist has to have proof of a higher standard than a lawyer, who’s being paid to represent his side.

So how do you balance loyalties to the story with loyalties to a source?

In an ideal world, you slowly educate your source to the idea that it is mutually beneficial for the truth to be told. But experience tells me that I have led sources down that path and still,

Hanna Rosin

they’re wounded by something in the story. This is what [Erdely] didn’t get. We control the narrative. That’s a very powerful thing. And so if we are controlling the narrative, some people will feel betrayed by that narrative because they didn’t write it themselves.

Is there a simple formula for not breaking that trust and still getting the story?

I follow the rule of transparency—like constantly reminding them that ‘I’m a reporter, this is my job.’ Because it really is a human relationship, and you really are trying to win people’s trust, and so it’s a constant tension. Like ‘trust me, I’m the enemy, trust me, I’m the enemy.’ m — Interview by Adrian O’Hanlon III

To the Tribe!

Jeff Chang

author of the upcoming Bruce Lee biography and Who We Be

MARION ETTLINGER

James Donovan author of The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo—and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation

TARA NIEUWESTEEG

Michael Mooney

author of The Life and Legend of Chris Kyle

Little, Brown and Company salutes our attending authors and the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference on its 11th year. littlebrown.com

Hachette Book Group