In writing, everything counts, and even something as inherently short and seemingly inconsequential as a title requires heavy lifting. It is often the final order of business, finding a title that works, ideally on more than one level, functioning as a metaphor and a mini poem. Titles are the first selling tool for a book and, as such, the publisher retains veto power, often just as well because authors are sometimes too close to the material to pick a snappy title on their own. The original title for Anita Shreve’s novel The Weight of Water was the less lilting Silence at Smuttynose.

Examples of titles that work, from fiction and memoir, include A Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, thanks to their sass and their originality. Reading Lolita in Tehran shakes up the gene pool of our expectations. Variations have followed, such as Lipstick Jihad and The Kabul Beauty School. Running With Scissors has brilliant generic quality; it applies to any childhood narrative filled with risk and danger. Mary Karr’s memoir, Lit, works on three levels, describing the author when she was drunk, describing her as she sought spiritual insight, and as shorthand for the business at hand: literature.

Often, one well-chosen word can do the trick. Atonement. Waiting. Prep. Monkeys. Lucky. Saturday.

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How about Jaws? Peter Benchley had been mulling the idea of a shark terrorizing a resort community for years, carrying in his wallet a newspaper clipping about a 4,500-pound shark that had been captured off the coast of Long Island in 1964 to prove to any potential publishers that the story was not so preposterous: It had an antecedent in the world of fact. He kept a running list of possible titles, each more clunky than the next, including The Edge of Gloom, Leviathan Rising, and Tiburon. He also envisioned Jaws of … Despair, Anguish, Terror (take your pick), shortening it at the last minute to the one-word wonder by which the book (and the movie) became world famous.

Among my favorite student-generated titles is that of a memoir written by a young man about the struggle to acknowledge his sexual orientation. For years he struggled to articulate out loud the simple sentence, “Mom, I am gay,” feeling that until he did he could not move forward in his life. His title: Four Words. Another title, about a father who was always on his way out the door: Going, Going, Gone. An older returning student wrote about how as a child in the sixties in an African-American community in Boston, hers was the only family to go on camping trips. Everyone else she knew traveled by train or by car to see relations in the South or in Chicago or Harlem, but her father loved his pop-up camper and all the equipment it entailed and for weeks before they left each summer, he fussed over his lanterns and his mess kits and his two-burner grill stove, much to the amusement of neighbors who took borrowed pleasure in the tableau and saw his enthusiasm as an annual marker in their lives as well as his. Every year when the family set forth, with fewer and fewer black people in sight until finally there were none, the student remembered being befuddled by the road signs as she traveled north to New Hampshire, especially one sign in particular.

Why did her father keep speeding by it? Why didn’t he get in trouble? The title of her memoir: No Passing.

As for my books, the title of my collection of journalism, The Heart Is an Instrument, came from one of my subjects, Tennessee Williams, who said to me during a series of interviews over three days in Key West in February of 1979:

I used to be kind, gentle. Now I hear terrible things, and I don’t care. Oh, objectively, I care, but I can’t feel anything. Here’s a story. I was in California recently and a friend of mine had a stroke. He is paralyzed on the right side and on the left side and he has brain cancer. Someone asked me how he was doing and I explained all this and the person said, “But otherwise is he all right?” I said, “What do you want? A coroner’s report?” I never used to react harshly, but I feel continually assaulted by tragedy. I can’t go past the fact of the tragedy; I cannot comprehend these things emotionally. I cannot understand my friend who is sick in California and who loved life so much he is willing to live it on any terms.

Sometimes I dream about getting away from things, recovering myself from the continual shocks. People are dying all around you and I feel almost anesthetized, feel like a zombie. I fear an induration, and the heart is, after all, part of your instrument as a writer. If your heart fails you, you begin to write cynically, harshly. I would like to get away to some quiet place with some nice person and recover my goodness.

The title In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle was also inspired by a writer, Emily Dickinson, the poet who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, the setting of the high school basketball team whose championship season I covered. Her famous poem claims “hope is the thing with feathers,” though Woody Allen has a joke about that thing with feathers is his nephew in Zurich who thinks he is a bird. I, obviously, had my own definition.

For Uphill Walkers, a family memoir, I had two goals — to avoid body parts (“heart,” “muscle”) and to be less verbose. As children, we walked to school (not very far, definitely wearing shoes). We were designated, on the way home, as part of the uphill patrol. Given my family’s slow trudge upward after receiving a devastating blow (my father died suddenly leaving my mother with five children, eight and under and one on the way), the trajectory seemed to mirror our fate. In our hometown we were the mysterious Other — the frequent target of whispered conjecture, “How do they manage, after all?”

My most recent memoir is about the loss of a beloved summerhouse on Martha’s Vineyard, hardly the stuff of tragedy. And yet when it came time to part with this ramshackle dwelling surrounded by water (“blue gold” in realtor’s parlance) I was filled with that deluge of mixed emotions that signals something worth writing about. The book, published on July 4th, 2017, contains the following passage:

The new owners could of course imagine their own future happiness, but they could not see, and therefore could not appreciate, the human history preceding the purchase, all the lives that grazed ours and the ones that truly intersected, the noisy arrivals and departures, the arguments and the recipes, the ghosts and the guests, crabs caught and birthdays celebrated, clams shucked, towels shaken, lures assembled, bonfires lit, the dogs we indulged, the ticks we cursed, the pies we consumed, and, through it all, both close by and in the distance, the moving waters (as a poet put it) at their priest-like task. They could not see the depth of the life lived here during the summer for all those years.

The title, To the New Owners, comes from that excerpt. I must confess, to my amazement: Everyone connected to publishing who hears the title claims to love it. Why? I don’t know. I do know that my son said if he had written the book it would have been called Not for Sale and the entire text would have consisted of two words, “The end.”

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Fall 2017 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Madeleine Blais is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, where she teaches memoir, journalism literature, and non-fiction writing. Her 1995 book, In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in non-fiction. She is also the author of The Heart Is an Instrument: Portraits in Journalism (1992), and Uphill Walkers: Memoir of a
Family (2001). She holds a bachelor’s degree from the College of New Rochelle (1969) and a master’s from the School of Journalism at Columbia University (1970).

Read: David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar on Titles

Titles are no doubt a great source of stress for writers — a quick Google search will turn up pages and pages of articles offering advice on the subject. Much of the advice is conflicting, and the only general consensus seems to be how important a good title is. Titles have to sell the book by sounding good while also giving the reader an idea of what’s to come; they have to be catchy, short, and informative, all at the same time.

To make matters more complicated, it’s not always possible to know before publication how well a title will work. We can laugh now at the fact that The Great Gatsby was originally titled Trimalchio in West Egg or that Of Mice and Men was originally titled Something That Happened, but we can’t know how F. Scott Fitzgerald or John Steinbeck felt about those working titles.

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, a publisher whose Little Blue Books pamphlet series sold hundreds of millions of copies, knew well the power of a good title. He would pull books from his list when their sales weren’t meeting his expectations. Then they’d go to “The Hospital” to be rejuvenated with new titles before rerelease. A few editorial assistants would brainstorm a potential list, and one of those would be tried.

The process could work quite well: Fleece of Gold sold 6,000 copies in 1925 but the following year, rereleased under the title The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, it sold 50,000 copies. Sometimes, even Haldeman-Julius’ young daughter would help; after reading the book Privateersmen, she summarized that it was about seamen and battles, so it was retitled The Battles of a Seaman.

How enticing those titles seem point to something else that can’t be predicted: how well a title will age. Eighteenth-century novel titles were short summaries in themselves, such as the full title of Daniel Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, All Alone in an Uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, Wherein All the Men Perished but Himself. With an Account How He Was at Last as Strangely Deliver’d by Pyrates (1719). The greater detail was necessary at a time when novels were still entering the cultural mainstream, and it would take more than a word or two to pique a reader’s curiosity.

More recent classical works often have titles derived from other works. Popular sources include Shakespeare (Brave New World; Pale Fire), the Bible (The Sun Also Rises; Absalom, Absalom!), and the works of major poets (Of Mice and Men; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings). Now, it’s common for works to have single-word titles — but the pressure to summarize, or least capture the essence of, the work within nevertheless remains.

Those articles online do offer a few modern suggestions to creating titles, but take any or all of the advice at your own risk. Methods range from A/B testing to random title generators (which can generate titles as inane as The Missing Twins to as nonsensical as The Teacher in the Alien).

Common title structures make something like a random title generator possible; the titles can sound real, albeit not always. And because there are no copyrights on titles, some small subgenres of fiction do see titles recycled every few years. But picking a title that truly fits takes a bit more work.

One thing the experience of writing each of my books has in common is this: I remember exactly where I was when I found their titles.

In the first case, I was in the Middle East, conducting fieldwork, and writing at the same time. That day I was at a friend’s apartment, working on the fourth or fifth chapter of a book that very nearly wrote itself. It took me three months to write, a rare state of grace I have never since recaptured. It was early evening, mid-autumn. The sun had set and I was working by lamplight. I had gone to look for a pair of scissors, for what purpose I have no recollection. I had just picked them up and turned back toward whatever task I had in mind when the title appeared, seeming to me to be as much a physical object as the scissors. This Heated Place. That was what I was writing about: the Israel-Palestine conflict, the view from the ground for those who lived it. I had just written a line that included that phrase: “Conflict is the leitmotif of this heated place.” As a title it seemed both literary and quiet, like the book itself. It stuck, as did most of what I wrote in that first draft. The book was published, with that title, one year later, though at the time I had no inkling of its ever finding a publisher.

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Second books are said to be the hardest to write. The next one took five years, not including a year and a half of fieldwork. The book is about the arrest of my fixer in Syria while I was with her, and my search for her. The numerous drafts stacked on the floor of my office attest to the effort it took for this book to coalesce: They reach well above my knees.

For the first several years the book had a title I loved. But as the book evolved, I found that the title required increasingly long explanations, since it no longer made sense to anyone but me. The book had outgrown that working title — but still, I wasn’t prepared to abandon it. It had been with me each day of the journey, like the old gray sweater I wrote in for years despite the elbows wearing through and the sleeves coming unraveled. That I don’t wish to divulge it, despite queries from this journal’s editors, illustrates how attached I remain — part of me maintains that I will use it for another work.

I remember the day the new title came. I was walking home from the university where I teach. It was mid-afternoon, and I was watching the trees signal the change of seasons. I wasn’t thinking about writing, I was simply absorbed by the world around me, which is often when ideas come. As I was about to turn a street corner, four words appeared: A Disappearance in Damascus.

A disappearance is an event that is at once action and mystery. It bespeaks narrative momentum, and a certain edge-of-your-seat suspense. There was a sense of drama to the title that reminded me of Gabriel García Márquez’s non-fiction book, News of a Kidnapping, which a friend had given me when I confessed I was having trouble with my own book. The new title had what the original title lacked, or might have had before the book was written: a quality of inevitability.

Scarcely a single line in the book itself came with such ease. Writing, my second book taught me, is mainly work. But as you do the work, there are sometimes moments of serendipity, moments of grace.

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

Join for Free and Never Miss a Story

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Fall 2017 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Deborah Campbell is a writer who has published in 11 countries and six languages. Her literary journalism incorporates extensive fieldwork in places such as the Middle East, Russia, Cuba, and Mexico, and she has won three National Magazine Awards. Her 2016 book, A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War, won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, the largest literary award for non-fiction in Canada, and was
selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia, where she teaches creative non-fiction.

Read: David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar on Titles

Titles are no doubt a great source of stress for writers — a quick Google search will turn up pages and pages of articles offering advice on the subject. Much of the advice is conflicting, and the only general consensus seems to be how important a good title is. Titles have to sell the book by sounding good while also giving the reader an idea of what’s to come; they have to be catchy, short, and informative, all at the same time.

To make matters more complicated, it’s not always possible to know before publication how well a title will work. We can laugh now at the fact that The Great Gatsby was originally titled Trimalchio in West Egg or that Of Mice and Men was originally titled Something That Happened, but we can’t know how F. Scott Fitzgerald or John Steinbeck felt about those working titles.

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, a publisher whose Little Blue Books pamphlet series sold hundreds of millions of copies, knew well the power of a good title. He would pull books from his list when their sales weren’t meeting his expectations. Then they’d go to “The Hospital” to be rejuvenated with new titles before rerelease. A few editorial assistants would brainstorm a potential list, and one of those would be tried.

The process could work quite well: Fleece of Gold sold 6,000 copies in 1925 but the following year, rereleased under the title The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, it sold 50,000 copies. Sometimes, even Haldeman-Julius’ young daughter would help; after reading the book Privateersmen, she summarized that it was about seamen and battles, so it was retitled The Battles of a Seaman.

How enticing those titles seem point to something else that can’t be predicted: how well a title will age. Eighteenth-century novel titles were short summaries in themselves, such as the full title of Daniel Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, All Alone in an Uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, Wherein All the Men Perished but Himself. With an Account How He Was at Last as Strangely Deliver’d by Pyrates (1719). The greater detail was necessary at a time when novels were still entering the cultural mainstream, and it would take more than a word or two to pique a reader’s curiosity.

More recent classical works often have titles derived from other works. Popular sources include Shakespeare (Brave New World; Pale Fire), the Bible (The Sun Also Rises; Absalom, Absalom!), and the works of major poets (Of Mice and Men; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings). Now, it’s common for works to have single-word titles — but the pressure to summarize, or least capture the essence of, the work within nevertheless remains.

Those articles online do offer a few modern suggestions to creating titles, but take any or all of the advice at your own risk. Methods range from A/B testing to random title generators (which can generate titles as inane as The Missing Twins to as nonsensical as The Teacher in the Alien).

Common title structures make something like a random title generator possible; the titles can sound real, albeit not always. And because there are no copyrights on titles, some small subgenres of fiction do see titles recycled every few years. But picking a title that truly fits takes a bit more work.

The title for my 2015 book, Spectacle, came to mind early in the process of researching the story of a young African who in 1906 was exhibited in the Bronx Zoo monkey house. The title, I believed, not only captured the shocking exhibition in a world-class zoo of Ota Benga, the caged African boy, but also the ravenous public response. During the month of September 1906 nearly a quarter-million people flocked to the zoo to see Ota Benga, who was taunted and at times attacked by raucous crowds. The exhibition provoked sensationalized headlines across the country, including at the New York Times, where editors defended zoo officials against the handful of outraged critics. The spectacle set in stark relief the prevailing bigotry of the era and of the city’s leading men of science and public affairs.

However, as we neared publication my editor was unhappy with the title. She argued that it was too vague and instead proposed one that indicated that the book was about a man who was exhibited in the zoo. Among the suggestions were: Man in the Monkey House, Scandal in the Monkey House, An Unnatural Event in the Monkey House, and A Man Amongst Monkeys.

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I countered that the book was not merely about the weeks Ota Benga spent at the zoo. The book explores his life and the racial attitudes embedded in science, history, and popular culture that culminated in his exploitation. I believed that the shameful episode was merely a microcosm of race during the era. For weeks we tossed around other titles and subtitles but none, to my mind, were as fitting as Spectacle. She finally relented and we agreed that a subtitle was needed to give readers a better sense of the contents. After weeks of brainstorming we agreed on “The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga,” which evoked the stranger-than-fiction story of Ota Benga’s remarkable life that went beyond his captivity at the zoo.

The working title for my first book was The Color of News, which examined how race overtly and covertly influences news coverage. The book more specifically explored the uphill battle of black journalists to integrate mainstream newsrooms and present more balanced portraits of black people. The book, based both on archival documents and interviews with more than 100 journalists, took readers behind the scenes to uncover some of the contentious newsroom debates around race and news coverage.

I opened the first chapter with a quote by W.E.B. Du Bois that read: “Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.” I thought the quote conveyed my aim to lift the veil on newsroom operations to tell the untold story of the battles waged by black journalists to more fairly depict black life.

My agent at the time honed in on the words “within the Veil” which she said could signal that the book was a behind-the-scenes look at race in the newsroom. The full title became Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media.

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

Join for Free and Never Miss a Story

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Fall 2017 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Pamela Newkirk is a professor of journalism and director of undergraduate studies at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (2015), her latest book, won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Nonfiction and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award. Her 2000 book, Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, won the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Media Criticism. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from New York University and graduate degrees from Columbia University.

Read: David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar on Titles

Titles are no doubt a great source of stress for writers — a quick Google search will turn up pages and pages of articles offering advice on the subject. Much of the advice is conflicting, and the only general consensus seems to be how important a good title is. Titles have to sell the book by sounding good while also giving the reader an idea of what’s to come; they have to be catchy, short, and informative, all at the same time.

To make matters more complicated, it’s not always possible to know before publication how well a title will work. We can laugh now at the fact that The Great Gatsby was originally titled Trimalchio in West Egg or that Of Mice and Men was originally titled Something That Happened, but we can’t know how F. Scott Fitzgerald or John Steinbeck felt about those working titles.

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, a publisher whose Little Blue Books pamphlet series sold hundreds of millions of copies, knew well the power of a good title. He would pull books from his list when their sales weren’t meeting his expectations. Then they’d go to “The Hospital” to be rejuvenated with new titles before rerelease. A few editorial assistants would brainstorm a potential list, and one of those would be tried.

The process could work quite well: Fleece of Gold sold 6,000 copies in 1925 but the following year, rereleased under the title The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, it sold 50,000 copies. Sometimes, even Haldeman-Julius’ young daughter would help; after reading the book Privateersmen, she summarized that it was about seamen and battles, so it was retitled The Battles of a Seaman.

How enticing those titles seem point to something else that can’t be predicted: how well a title will age. Eighteenth-century novel titles were short summaries in themselves, such as the full title of Daniel Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, All Alone in an Uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, Wherein All the Men Perished but Himself. With an Account How He Was at Last as Strangely Deliver’d by Pyrates (1719). The greater detail was necessary at a time when novels were still entering the cultural mainstream, and it would take more than a word or two to pique a reader’s curiosity.

More recent classical works often have titles derived from other works. Popular sources include Shakespeare (Brave New World; Pale Fire), the Bible (The Sun Also Rises; Absalom, Absalom!), and the works of major poets (Of Mice and Men; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings). Now, it’s common for works to have single-word titles — but the pressure to summarize, or least capture the essence of, the work within nevertheless remains.

Those articles online do offer a few modern suggestions to creating titles, but take any or all of the advice at your own risk. Methods range from A/B testing to random title generators (which can generate titles as inane as The Missing Twins to as nonsensical as The Teacher in the Alien).

Common title structures make something like a random title generator possible; the titles can sound real, albeit not always. And because there are no copyrights on titles, some small subgenres of fiction do see titles recycled every few years. But picking a title that truly fits takes a bit more work.

In the summer of 2016, Gay Talese, who has been credited by Tom Wolfe as the founder of the New Journalism, appeared at the center of a controversy. The author of 14 books, including such literary journalism classics as The Kingdom and the Power (1969), Honor Thy Father (1971), Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1980), and the magazine article some consider to be the best ever, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (Esquire, April 1966), Talese’s reputation had a long way to fall. Novelist Mario Puzo declared him “the best nonfiction writer in America,” Barbara Lounsberry called him “a reporter’s reporter who is revered by fellow writers,” and Robert Boynton declared him the “poet of the commonplace” who has demonstrated “that one could write great literary nonfiction about the ‘ordinary.’” Lad Tobin has praised Talese’s approach to his deeply investigated subjects, which involve “an industriousness and integrity too often missing in the work of the new generation of writers of creative nonfiction.” In particular, Talese has been cited as an exemplar of the long-haul investigation, “the Art of Hanging Around,” where the writer immerses him- or herself into the lives of subjects.

All of Talese’s lauded journalistic accomplishments, however, were called into question over his latest investigative work, The Voyeur’s Motel, published in 2016. Based on the journals of the self-confessed voyeur of the title, the book claimed to chronicle Gerald Foos’ observations of copulating couples from a viewing platform in the Aurora, Colorado, motel that he purported to own from 1965 to 1995. Foos also recorded witnessing criminal behavior: domestic abuse, drug dealing, an episode of incest, and even a murder. A long extract appeared in The New Yorker in April of 2016, attracting widespread media attention, with producer-director Steven Spielberg purchasing the film rights, and a planned national book tour.

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However, a Washington Post investigation, conducted shortly after the New Yorker article appeared, revealed major discrepancies between events in The Voyeur’s Motel and information found in public records. Foos had, in fact, sold the Colorado motel in 1980 and only reacquired it eight years later. The Post also uncovered that the murder Foos recorded in his journal bore a striking resemblance to the unsolved case of Irene Cruz, who was murdered in November of 1977, not in Foos’ motel but in a Denver hotel. These inconsistencies cast doubt on Foos as a narrator even though Talese had, in part, verified his claims by joining him on the viewing platform during a research trip to the motel in January of 1980. Confronted with these discrepancies, Talese told the Post, “I should not have believed a word he said,” adding that he would not promote the book because its “credibility was down the toilet.” However, Talese quickly retracted his public regret in a statement from his publisher: “I am not disavowing the book, and neither is my publisher,” it read. “If, down the line, there are details to correct in later editions, we’ll do that.”

Aside from the factual inaccuracies in the book, criticism also focused on concerns about the ethics of including Foos’ observations of the couples without their consent. If Talese, this exemplar of the form — whose books belong to the canon of literary journalism — admits to the fallibility of his methods, questions may then arise about what we can learn from his mistakes. Inevitably, further questions arise about the enduring value of his previous works. Even the method, the “fine art of hanging out,” might be called into question. Or perhaps Talese, for once, had merely let down his guard and provided valuable insight into his approach.

Reviewers had raised similar questions in 1981 about the narrative reliability and lack of ethical boundaries in Talese’s research and writing of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, a social history of America’s sexual revolution. In an epilogue to this 512-page volume, Talese admitted both to having sexual relationships with female subjects interviewed during his investigation and to managing a Manhattan massage parlor. Fellow journalists, authors, and feminists were excoriating in their comments. Talese said of the experience: “I was made to feel like I was an essentially wicked, perverted person…. It was my version of a scarlet letter.” However, despite this critical lambasting of his process and its final product, Talese returned to the subject of sexual practice in The Voyeur’s Motel. Here he included the journals in which Foos recorded his own voyeuristic experiences, some of which Talese had originally considered including in Thy Neighbor’s Wife. While Talese questions his reactions to the material throughout the 2016 book, even pondering his own voyeurism in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, he proceeded to publish descriptions of the couples, without their knowledge, and whose consent could have been sought because Foos possessed their real names and addresses. Another concern was whether Talese had been complicit in Foos’ crimes, not only by failing to report them but by providing the voyeur with a media platform and thereby escalating his compulsive behavior. While Thy Neighbor’s Wife was a much longer, more considered — albeit problematic — book, The Voyeur’s Motel, while a complement in subject, fails the test of being in the public interest. Moreover, both may have caused harm to the investigated subjects.

There are lessons here for literary journalists and scholars of literary journalism interested in the practices and ethics of immersion. Broadly, they are issues related to the necessity for a journalist to consider the impact that a journalist’s status and behavior may have on the subjects of investigation. If the journalist is not transparent about how his or her very presence frames the relationship to the group or individuals studied, the result may be an unreliable text. If the motives are falsified, the testimony may become manipulative and the resulting narrative may fail that of public interest. Both Thy Neighbor’s Wife and The Voyeur’s Motel faced fierce criticism that, I will argue, was rooted in a perception that these problems were inadequately addressed. Before turning to the details of these two volumes, however, it is instructive to examine how journalists describe their practice and how immersion reporting relates to the field of classical or traditional ethnography, a form of social science research that explicitly draws upon journalistic practice but with its own shared, ethical consensus.

Immersive Journalism

Walt Harrington describes journalists as the “junkyard dogs of ethnography,” and while the suspicion may be mutual, these respective practices share many characteristics, and a history. Robert Parks, the former journalist turned sociologist, employed journalistic techniques to develop his pioneering center for participant/observer-based fieldwork at the University of Chicago. The traditional approach to ethnography that grew out of this hybrid tradition is defined as “a practice in which researchers spend long periods living within a culture in order to study it.” Journalists who employ immersive techniques also involve themselves in the on-location lives and events of their subjects. Wolfe identified this emerging trend in 1973, of which Talese was the exemplar, where writers provided their readers with a “full objective description” but added details about “the subjective or emotional life of the characters.” According to Norman Sims, writing a decade later, the immersive process “begins with emotional connection” and “in its simplest form, [it] means time spent on the job,” “trying to learn all [you can] about a subject,” and is “the journalism of everyday life.” The method includes the writer living with his or her subjects, letting the action unfold naturally, collecting material through the observation of sensory details, recording overheard dialogue and watching for small events and details that evoke their stories’ themes. However, despite the intimacy of the experience, according to Anne Hull, the journalist must “minimize your presence,” remembering that “you are not one of them,” “you are ever the infidel” who must preserve the need to “check people out.”

In acknowledging these shared principles, new hybrid terms were developed, such as ethnographic journalism, anthro-journalism, literary documentary journalism, and cultural journalism. Anne Kirstine Hermann argues for the seemingly inherent relationship between long-form literary reportage and public ethnography, with journalists employing social-scientific immersion strategies and, in the process, remodelling journalism’s epistemic norms. Dominic Boyer, however, notes that, while journalists and ethnographers share many characteristics, they operate under different institutional and temporal conditions that influence their working practice.

Although literary journalists’ reflections on their approach are insightful, the development of an agreed set of ethics to accompany this practice is more elusive. As Sims has argued, writers in this genre “follow their own set of rules” to produce long-form narratives that focus on their specific experiences and encounters with subjects. Meanwhile, Robin Hemley and others, while acknowledging the individual aspect of this practice, argue that the immersive writer must still pass the test of public interest in making decisions about his or her process and in gauging its potential consequences for subjects upon publication. Underpinning the public interest justification is an understanding that the journalist’s primary responsibility is to the reader and to the author’s employer, rather than to the investigated subject. This is a crucial distinction, as ethnographers (who normally remain anonymous in their research reports) employ similar practices but define their responsibility as primarily to their subjects, which, in turn, justifies the intimacy of their access. This creates a complex set of decisions, as journalists may regard their loyalties as split, especially where subjects make themselves vulnerable through disclosure, through actions witnessed by the journalist, or through their interactions with them.

Another critical difference arises from the role of the narrator, or narrative voice. The journalist searches for meaning on the reader’s behalf, through what is experienced, and therefore operates as a “stand-in for the countless souls whose everyday existence she is investigating.” The writer’s access to the subject is usually contingent, temporary, and circumscribed by being insulated from the consequences of publication. The journalist relies on scenic description rather than the “thick description” of the ethnographer, leaving the readers to draw their own conclusions rather than continuously probing for meaning. Instead of representing the views of a given group or community, journalists aim to accurately report on what they have heard and seen.

Throughout an immersive journalistic investigation, a writer will attempt to preserve a formal distance (Hull’s notion of remaining “ever the infidel”) in order to construct the narrative. In this scenario the writer must become separate from the subject in order to view the experience for the consumption of the imagined reader. Hermann challenges this assumption of distance, however, arguing that the journalist in the field “cannot remain a detached observer and narrator, but must become an immersed partaker.” The hybrid of “ethnographic reporters” inevitably transcends “not only professional conventions and reporting habits but also their own demographic profiles” by “exchanging the traditional skeptical attitude with an empathetic one.” This may feed the sense of divided loyalties for journalists left to patrol their own ethical boundaries. According to Harrington:

When you add the word literary to journalism or documentary or ethnography, you cross a line. You are no longer attempting only to describe other people’s experiences. You are now taking responsibility for describing them through your own sense of those other people’s experiences. The egoist in us emerges because we now take pride in the way we tell a story, in the cleverness of our inquiry, the uniqueness of our insight.

Harrington articulates perfectly the tensions inherent in a participatory investigation where journalists must balance a respect for their subjects’ vulnerabilities while retaining control over the final copy: the journalists’ version of what they witnessed, how they have understood it, and what it means. As writers grapple with these questions, they must also ask whether their presence, like that of an ethnographer, has changed the story itself.

Talese reflects on his process of immersion in his essay, “Origins of a Nonfiction Writer.” Here he describes how a childhood spent observing his mother’s exchanges with her female customers at her dress boutique in Ocean City, New Jersey, provided the impetus for his journalistic career. The shop was “a kind of talk show,” he writes, where his mother’s “engaging manner and well-timed questions” drew out intimate confessions from her clients. Talese “used to pause and eavesdrop ... to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt,” techniques which he later parlayed into interviews. His mother also exemplified the “trustworthy individual” in whom her customers could confide. Taking this exchange as his model, Talese writes that he is motivated by his curiosity about “‘ordinary’ people” and analyzes their behavior through the lens of “a small-town American outsider whose exploratory view of the world is accompanied by the essence of the people and place I left behind.” Immersion, for Talese, involves both a considerable amount of time and the writer’s physical presence. “I also believe people will reveal more of themselves to you if you are physically present; and the more sincere you are in your interest, the better will be your chances of obtaining that person’s cooperation.” Once consent is obtained and subjects agree to have their real names used, Talese is free to describe a group or individual’s behavior through his own idiosyncratic perspective rather than as a representative of the subject or group.

Turning to the two books in question, there are several examples where Talese’s description of his immersive process seems to contradict his subjects’ experience of it. Their critical responses reveal challenges inherent to the immersive process for a journalist with Talese’s high public profile, and to his apparent lack of transparency about his approach to research and reporting. As a celebrity journalist, Talese was an asset to the Sandstone community, a “growth centre” in Topanga Canyon, California, which he visited in 1973 while researching Thy Neighbor’s Wife and whose managers were hoping to boost their membership. In the case of Gerald Foos, the voyeur’s desire to access the vast readership that a writing collaboration with Talese would offer may have driven him to falsify his journal entries. In these cases, the ambiguous nature of the relationships Talese fostered with his subjects raises questions about what he actually observed and his motives for observing it. Criticism, expressed in the form of contemporary reviews and critical articles, also suggests that the lack of self-reflection and transparency about his methods may have led readers to question his reliability as a narrator and to cast the process of immersive journalism into doubt.

Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1981)

At the time Thy Neighbor’s Wife was published, Talese enjoyed an enviable public profile among Manhattan’s literary elite, both as a writer and as the husband of Nan Talese, one of New York’s most powerful publishers. A trawl through issues of the New York Times of 1980 shows him mentioned in gossip columns, quoted in articles, and endorsing books in publishers’ ads, and by 1981 even reported as appearing as the aptly named “sexual adventurer” in Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip. His financial ranking was also newsworthy. Following The Kingdom and the Power (1969), his “human history” of the New York Times; and his expose of a New York mafia family in Honor Thy Father (1971); Talese’s publisher Doubleday paid him a $1.2 million advance for a two-book deal, of which Thy Neighbor’s Wife was the first. In October of 1979, United Artists offered Talese the then-record sum of $2.5 million for film rights to the book.

Expected to be what Clarence Petersen of the Chicago Tribune called “the most controversial book of the year, and one of the most provocative books about sex since the first Kinsey report,” it was also, Peterson reported Talese as saying, “the most important story I’ve ever written.” The author, however, seemed unprepared for an onslaught of negative reviews, including Peterson’s reports of John Yardley’s description of it in the Washington Star as “a genuinely dreadful book” and “a slimy exercise,” and, in The New Republic, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s dismissing it as “boring … pious and self-righteous.” Harrison’s sentiment was echoed by novelist Mordecai Richler: “Thy Neighbor’s Wife is an impoverished book; it succeeds like no other I know of in making of sex a mechanical bore.” It was as deep as a “skin-flick,” according to Joan Beck in the Chicago Tribune. And in the Washington Post, Robert Sherrill decried it as “constructed mostly from the sort of intellectual plywood you find in most neighborhood bars: part voyeurism, part amateur psychoanalysis, part six-pack philosophy.” Aside from their misgivings about the book’s literary qualities, some critics thought the subject, borne of the counterculture, by 1980 had arrived too late for serious consideration. The party was over. The critics’ objections to the book’s potted social history, however, were mild in comparison to their comments about Talese’s revelation that he had enjoyed sexual encounters at the nudist Sandstone Retreat in Topanga Canyon. For several chapters in Thy Neighbor’s Wife he describes a nirvana where ordinary middle-class couples experimented with unconventional (and largely heterosexual) relationships.1 There are graphic descriptions in Thy Neighbor’s Wife of orgies, and of couplings, that reveal the subjects at their most publicly uninhibited. This theme of “freedom” runs throughout the book with many characters described as having escaped from puritanical parents and restricted childhoods, from poverty and from oppressive ideologies. Sex operates as a form of rebellion against orthodoxy, against restrictions and religious control, while the Sandstone residents seek enlightenment through new philosophies, such as Abraham Maslow’s concept of self-actualization.

Given the sensitivity of the investigation, Talese explains his approach in an author’s note at the end of Thy Neighbor’s Wife. He describes how he conducted hundreds of interviews, with some subjects more than 50 times, and established “such trusting relationships with the interviewees that they would allow the use of their names in connection with the intimate stories they told me about themselves.” Talese assured his subjects that their stories would be relayed accurately and in “the same non-judgemental tone that characterized my previous work.” Despite this neutral tone, Talese discloses only in a final chapter, in which he writes about himself in the third person, that he engaged in a sexual relationship with Sandstone’s cofounder Barbara Williamson. By concluding, rather than opening the book with this admission, Talese obfuscates the reality of his role in the story and his methods for obtaining information about his subjects. The book is, quite simply, read differently without this knowledge.

The descriptions of the residents’ sexual libertinism are written in a tone of detached interest that enables Talese to maintain his “small-town American outsider perspective.” In this passage, he gives an eye-witness account of the basement “ball-room,” the regular Saturday night party where residents, and guests, were granted entry to a pleasure-seeker’s parlor”:

There were triads, foursomes, a few bisexuals: bodies that could belong to high-fashion models, linebackers, Wagnerian sopranos, speed swimmers, flabby academicians; tattooed arms, peace beads, ankle bracelets, ankhs, thin gold chains around waists, hefty penises, noodles, curly female pubes, fine, bushy, trimmed, dark, blond, red valentines…. Everything that Puritan America had ever tried to outlaw, to censor, to conceal behind locked bedroom doors, was on display in this adult playroom, where men often saw for the first time another man’s erection, and where many couples became alternately stimulated, shocked, gladdened, or saddened by the sight of their spouse interlocked with a new lover.

On the floor above the “ball-room,” prominent literary and counterculture guests gathered, ranging from psychologists Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, to New York Post columnist Max Lerner, actor Bernie Casey and the former Rand Corporation employees responsible for the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo. Cofounder John Williamson’s vision for the community’s eventual membership was a “cross-section of upper-income California businessmen, artists, actors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and people with a creative drive.” According to Barbara Williamson’s records, only 5 percent of Sandstone’s membership was “blue-collar” and 90 percent “upper-middle class.” This suggests, along with Talese’s list of prominent guests, that far from offering an outlet for “ordinary” people — the neighbors of the book’s title — Sandstone’s real aim was to attract those with high status and money.

Talese arrived at the community as a “big-shot very prominent journalist” Williamson hoped would publicize their cause and continue to attract an elite membership. After Talese’s initial visit in 1974, he provided Sandstone with national television coverage by promoting its lifestyle on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. He later appeared at a public event for Sandstone, along with the author of The Joy of Sex (1972), Dr. Alex Comfort, Playboy magazine’s managing editor Nat Lehrman, and Screw magazine publisher Al Goldstein. Talese gave numerous radio and print interviews about Sandstone, most notably to Aaron Latham for New York magazine:

Sandstone had institutionalized the orgy so that it was always there when you needed it. Sandstone stood as a monument to prostate power. Many of the openly copulating residents practiced the reverse of fidelity: they were strict about not making love to anyone to whom they had made love to before … Gay told a reporter for Coast magazine: “I’m not that young anymore, and lately the most I’ve been doing is about once a day. But I’ve been engaged at least four times a day since I’ve been here. After a hundred times, it gets a little wearing.”

Although Talese indulged his sexual fantasies on his first visit, when he returned for a longer research period he was committed to becoming “part of the family.”2 But his refusal to share domestic tasks such as cooking and cleaning set him apart from the group and reinforced his celebrity status. Tom Hatfield claims the writer spent his days playing tennis, interested only in interviewing the Williamsons and participating in the Saturday night parties where “he took women into his own bedroom,” violating the community’s rules.

Williamson realized that Talese was struggling to establish a rapport with the other residents and describes him as someone “used to getting his own way” and sulking because the other residents refused to speak with him. To remedy the situation, Williamson describes in her memoir how she visited his cabin one afternoon. In Talese’s version, Williamson was “a sexually aggressive woman” who demanded his sexual favors in return for an interview. “After she had finished, and only after she had finished [italics in original], Barbara Williamson began to talk freely, confiding in him for the first time since he had arrived at Sandstone….” Thus he appears to justify his sexual experience as an extension of his journalistic method, an argument he continued to make in 2009 following the re-publication of Thy Neighbor’s Wife. As he explained to Katie Roiphe (who wrote the preface for the new edition) in an interview for the Paris Review:

I also wanted to emphasize [in the final chapter of Thy Neighbor’s Wife] my distance from the events surrounding me, even when I was within them. I might be in a sauna, but I’m also apart from that sauna. I’m always thinking what it looks like from across the street, or I’m eavesdropping on other conversations. As a reporter I disassociate. It seemed the most obvious way to put myself into the book. I am an observer at all times.

Williamson, however, contradicts Talese’s account, claiming she initiated sex to soothe Talese’s “crushed ego” and that her seduction was calculated to salvage his pride. She led him to the bedroom saying, “Come on, let’s get you better.” Their physical exchange also casts doubt on Talese’s insistence that he remained an ever-vigilant observer, an idea that ignores what Ken Plummer describes as “the complex social processes” involved in the telling of sexual stories.

In the Roiphe interview, Talese, reflecting on Sandstone, justified shedding his clothes and engaging in sex as a means to establish trust with his subjects. “The point is that they had to trust me and I had to trust them. I couldn’t have done it any other way.” But Talese struggled to establish a rapport with John Williamson, partly by insisting on interviewing him at a Malibu Beach restaurant rather than at Sandstone, a demand the Williamsons perceived as a “power play.” Since John Williamson was such a key figure, Talese asked Cynthia Sears, “a well-respected female writer,” to conduct the interview. Barbara Williamson noticed a marked difference in their styles. “[Sears’] whole approach was a radical departure from Gay’s journalistic sense of propriety, his macho pushiness, and John’s response was instantly positive…. Throughout the entire interview, Gay wore an expression of disbelief.” Sears is credited in Talese’s book only as his “research associate” who “tape recorded my conversations” with the Williamsons and “carefully transcribed these dialogues that gave me an additional record so that I could play back and hear again what was said about events and emotions involved.” Barbara recalls that other members found Talese’s interviewing style “overly aggressive, pushy,” which suggests that, despite the months living in the community, Talese had failed to establish the trust vital to an immersive investigation.

Another contrast between Talese’s articulation of his method and his subject’s experience of it arises in considering his attitude toward the female residents. In Thy Neighbor’s Wife, he claims that the Saturday night parties provided women with a safe space in which they could experiment sexually. As he describes the scene:

There was no need for coquetry or traditional feminine coyness at Sandstone, no thoughts about one’s “reputation” nor the legitimate concerns that most women had about their physical safety whenever conversing with male strangers in bars or other public places … women were protected by those around them from being victim of one man’s hostility.

However, while Williamson shared Talese’s conviction that the orgies were liberating for women, she resented the way he rejected any lover who became emotionally attached and his tendency “to treat women as objects, denying them their full expression as individuals.” One woman commented, “he treats women like paper towels: tear one off, use it and throw it away.” Hatfield even remembers a female guest making a rape allegation against “an honorary member,” with Talese as the prime suspect and who, when confronted, “became very angry and accused me [Hatfield] of “power tripping.”

Talese’s lack of clarity about the extent to which he engaged in sexual relationships seems an important oversight in the construction of this narrative. Had he used the first person throughout the Sandstone chapters, the reader would have been alerted to the highly subjective mode in which he was writing and this in itself would have offered greater insight into his stated objectives. By including only a highly edited version of his experience and leaving this crucial information to a final chapter, he obscures and distorts the story. The narrator’s reliability is cast even further into doubt when the Sandstone residents’ memoirs are considered. Talese’s high-profile status and volatile temper also appear to complicate his role as a “part of the family,” raising doubts about his acceptance by and his ability to understand, meaningfully, the community and its individual members.

The Voyeur’s Motel (2016)

Despite the opprobrium heaped upon Talese for Thy Neighbor’s Wife, it became a bestseller and was the topic of television and radio talk shows across the country. Talese’s experiment with inserting himself into the text prompted him to employ this technique in a memoir about his Italian heritage, Unto the Sons, published in 1992. In his essay, “Origins of a Nonfiction Writer,” he writes that the memoir enabled him “to expose … myself and my past influences, without changing the names of the people or the place that shaped my character.” His turn to a deeply personal story anticipated the memoir boom, which, by the early 21st century, saw “more than 150,000 new titles [released] every year.” In keeping with the trend toward a first-person narrative, where the writer provides greater transparency about his or her methods, Talese, in his most recent book, offers more detail about his practice, writes in the first person, and is reflective throughout. Because Foos originally contracted Talese as a possible subject for Thy Neighbor’s Wife, it might be regarded as a companion volume that deals with the same intimate subject matter. If these rhetorical devices address the concerns voiced by past critics of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, they fail, however, to satisfy fully a fresh set of ethical concerns.

Meeting the Voyeur

Voyeurism was not a novel theme for Talese. He made reference to it in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, summing up his observations of how the different genders consume sex, in Europe and in the United States: “Men were natural voyeurs; women were exhibitors. Women sold sexual pleasure; men bought it.” In The Voyeur’s Motel he compares his journalistic motives and methods in Thy Neighbor’s Wife to those of the voyeur, making the distinction that “the people I observed and reported on had given me their consent.” He makes a comparison, perhaps unconscious, in “Origins of a Nonfiction Writer,” where he describes himself as “overhear[ing] many people discussing candidly with my mother what they had earlier avoided” in the dress shop, another form of observant watching that is central to his evolving identity as a journalist.

With the link between voyeurism and journalistic investigation firmly established at the outset of the book, Talese describes how, after receiving a letter from Foos, he agrees to meet him in Denver on January 23rd, 1980, as a possible subject for Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Here Talese describes how he translates his curiosity about — and reactions to — a subject into prose. After their first meeting, Talese writes up his daily impressions about his encounters, a long-established practice. He provides a detailed physical description of Foos, his mannerisms, and his character, even though Talese wonders, “What could I see in his attic that I had not already seen as the researching writer of Thy Neighbor’s Wife and a frequenter of Sandstone’s swinging couples’ ballroom?” Just as Talese is present as a first-person narrator, describing his investigation techniques in detail, he is also self-reflective about his process and his relationship with Foos. There are several examples where he contemplates the ethics of publishing Foos’ observations of his guests from the platform in his motel, justified by Talese as his subject “indulging his curiosity within the boundaries of his own property, and since his guests were unaware of his voyeurism, they were not affected by it … there’s no violation of privacy if no one complains.” As if emboldened by this justification, Talese joins Foos on the viewing platform (and returns “a number of additional times”), where he observes couples engaged in sex. Talese here admits that this activity is “very illegal” and wonders about his own complicity “in this strange and distasteful project.” He eventually decides that because Foos would have to remain anonymous, he cannot use this material and returns to New York to begin his promotional tour for Thy Neighbor’s Wife.

Between 1980 and 1995, when the motel was sold, Foos sent Talese his journals that documented, in great detail, years of his surreptitious recordings from his attic platform. Over that period, Foos became increasingly frustrated with his inability to share his findings — he compared himself to professional sexologists such as Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson — while his fantasies, and behavior, became more florid. For example, he performed an “experiment” where he planted sexual paraphernalia and pornography in a motel room and recorded whether his “subjects” used them. He also describes occasions when he followed female “subjects” back to their homes, even making inquiries about one from a neighbor. Reading this material, in New York, at a geographical and psychological distance, Talese wonders if “voyeurs sometimes need escape from prolonged solitude by exposing themselves to other people (as Foos had done first with his wife, and later me), and then seek a larger audience as an anonymous scrivener of what they’ve witnessed?” This statement seems to raise the question of Talese’s role in aiding Foos’ criminal behavior. The possibility exists that a celebrated writer who considered publishing his accounts — which would satisfy the voyeur’s stated desire for “a larger audience” — may have driven Foos to take greater risks with his “subjects.”3

Critics of The Voyeur’s Motel argued that the author had, indeed, violated journalistic ethics in his treatment of Foos. Dick Lehr, writing in the Huffington Post, in response to the Foos controversy, suggests that, while Talese was correct in his refusal to notify the authorities about violations of privacy, the book fails the test of public interest. “Promises reporters make to sources are a very big deal,” Lehr writes “It’s a matter of trust, a promise so sacrosanct that many reporters would only consider breaking it in the rarest of exceptions.” But, he continues, concerns for the violation of the couples’ privacy should have taken precedence over Talese’s loyalty to his informant. For Lehr, the more troubling aspect of the book is why Talese, who makes repeated references to Foos’ unreliability, chose to believe him.

The second ethical issue arises over whether Talese, as the voyeur’s constant reader and who holds the promise of an international readership for his “research,” encouraged his criminal behavior. Kim Walsh-Childers argues that, by respecting their confidentiality agreement, Talese allows Foos to subject hundreds, even thousands more guests to his voyeurism, judgment, and scorn. Their years of correspondence affirmed Foos’ behavior, “helping him maintain the myth that his actions served some higher purpose, some noble societal goal, rather than simply satisfying his own sexual desire.” More disturbing is the possibility that, through Foos’ reference to his increasing frustrations and references to experiments with his guests in which their privacy is further violated — the sexual paraphernalia planted in their rooms, the stalking of female guests — that his activities escalate. Voyeurism, according to psychologists, is rarely a discrete clinical entity: many studies have found that perpetrators of voyeurism also engage in other forms of sexual deviance, including rape, paedophilia, exhibitionism, and sadism. Earl Ballard, who purchased the Manor House Motel from Foos in 1980, raised this possibility. He told the National Post that, during the 1970s, Foos invited him and another man to join him “multiple times” in the annex to look in on guests. This seems consistent with psychologists’ descriptions of voyeurs as suffering “a general deficit of control over deviant sexual behavior” and contradicts Talese’s image of Foos as suffering from periods of “prolonged solitude.”

Not all of the commentators on the controversy surrounding The Voyeur’s Motel, however, agreed that it cast doubt on the genre and practice of New Journalism. David L. Ullin, writing in the Los Angeles Times, argues that Talese probably relied too heavily on Foos as a narrator simply because of the author’s “desire to believe” this “too good not to tell” story. Ladd Tobin, writing more broadly about Talese’s methods in his Esquire article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” also concludes that, however conscious, the author’s fascination and identification with his subject is a primary framing device. I would argue that Talese’s references to his own voyeurism — as a boy in his mother’s shop, as a journalist at Sandstone, with Foos in the motel — “[seep] into almost everything he sees and says” in the book. Ullin’s view that Talese is motivated by a desire to relay Foos’ “too good not to tell” story ignores what Tobin uncovers: that the author’s unconscious, over-identification with his subject causes him to suspend his critical judgment. Moreover, Talese’s unresolved and conflicted feelings about his own sexual desires are played out in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, another case where his ability to maintain distance — and judgment — collapses.

Conclusion

Tobin’s observations are especially helpful in considering the broader lessons to be learned from Talese’s immersive techniques in writing about his own, and others’, sexual experiences. Thy Neighbor’s Wife and The Voyeur’s Motel appeared to be vehicles for the writer to work out his own obsessions, thereby “telling us as much about himself as he does about his subjects.” However, if immersive journalism is a practice in which the writer may strip him- or herself bare, then this must be done with brutal honesty; otherwise, the text becomes manipulative and the truth claim with the reader is broken. Talese, I have argued, disappoints by failing to appropriately frame his Sandstone chapters in Thy Neighbor’s Wife as the experience of a celebrity whose presence colors his intimate relationships with his subjects. The confessional author note, left to the final chapter and written in a distancing third person, seems self-serving and casts doubt on the book’s message.

Talese’s self-reflective mode in The Voyeur’s Motel, however, fails to fully address these concerns. Here the ethical questions are even more sharply focused because of Talese’s complicity in the crimes perpetuated by the subject and by the possibility that his attention may have prompted the voyeur’s sexually deviant behavior to escalate. The unconscious over-identification with the subject, which goes unacknowledged, seems paradoxical given Talese’s stated ability to “disassociate” and to remain ever “an observer.” Perhaps the most vital message in this exploration of these journalistic investigations into the fraught territory of sexual intimacy is the need for psychological insight and an ability to face up to the brutal honesty of our motivating psyches. As Phillip Lopate has written about the essential requirement for good personal writing, “Remorse is often the starting point … whose working out brings the necessary self-forgiveness (not to mention self-amusement) that is necessary to help us outgrow shame.” Whatever Talese’s motivations that lay behind the years he has devoted to writing about sex, perhaps this self-understanding might have been a better, and more ethical starting place.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Fall 2017 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Julie Wheelwright is a senior lecturer in narrative non-fiction writing at City, University of London. She is the author of Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Crossed Dressed in Pursuit of Life Liberty and Happiness; The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage; and, most recently, Esther: The Remarkable True Story of Esther Wheelwright. A former journalist and broadcaster, her research interests include the transmission of history in popular media, gendered readings of women at war, and memoir as a historical source text.

Read: Footnotes

The search for a perfect title is, of course, collaborative. It’s you and your editor, but it’s also your best friends and the publisher’s sales team. The search for the title of my first book, about riding freight trains with hoboes, lasted for months — for the entire time I wrote it. And the night I mailed it in — the typewritten manuscript, pre-computer — my mother had me to dinner in Denver. The good news: I was finished! The bad: except for the title.

Over dessert we brainstormed. I knew my ideas weren’t working and soon she could see that I didn’t like hers, either. “So tell me some titles of actual books that you do like,” she said. (Dialogue here is reconstituted to the best of my ability.) I told her I liked the title of Jack London’s story collection about hoboes, The Road. I liked Hard Travelin’, a biography of Woody Guthrie, and I liked a book of photos and interviews called Riding the Rails. Of all the books about hoboes I’d read, I said, getting distracted, the best was a collection of semi-autobiographical stories from the Great Depression by a man who had been homeless named Tom Kromer. I told mom how the book was dedicated “to Jolene, who turned off the gas.”

“What was the book called?” she asked.

“Waiting for Nothing,” I answered. “Doesn’t that say it all?”

The wheels were turning in mom’s head. “How about Rolling Nowhere?” she suggested. It struck me as perfect — the railroad-specific version of Waiting for Nothing. I added the subtitle, Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes. Coffee was poured; such was my relief that it might have been champagne.

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By the time the book came out, I was in graduate school in England. The Viking Press airmailed me two early copies. Holding that first book of mine in my hands was one of the highlights of my life, except … for the subtitle. The publisher had changed it from “Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes” to “A Young Man’s Adventures Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes.” I got on the phone to New York.“What’s with ‘A Young Man’s Adventures’?” I demanded. “That’s not what we agreed on.”

My editor, who otherwise had done a great job, sounded defensive. “We just thought that described it better,” she said. “You were young then.”

The book came out a year later as a Penguin Travel Library paperback. A few years after that it went out of print. But with the success of Newjack, Vintage Books, my new publisher, agreed to bring Rolling Nowhere back. That’s when I learned that you can sometimes change a subtitle. So for many years, the complete title has been what it was meant to be all along: Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes.

Coyotes wasn’t my first choice for my second book, which recounts a year of travels with Mexican migrants; my first choice was Mojado, which means “wet” in Spanish. It was slang used jokingly by Mexicans themselves, which is why I liked it. But my editor put the kibosh on that. “How do you pronounce it? Mo-JAY-do?”

“Mo-HA-do,” I corrected him.

“Well, forget it. Books with foreign titles don’t sell.”

I don’t remember how we came up with Coyote, except that it had the benefit of being a word in English as well as Spanish. That it didn’t refer to the migrants but instead to the smugglers didn’t bother my editor, who thought it conveyed an atmosphere — and finally I agreed.

A few months before publication, he sent me the Vintage Books catalogue. There was my book, with an evocative photograph by Sebastião Salgado on the cover, and the word coyotes, plural, emblazoned across the top. Again I called New York. “What’s with Coyotes, plural?” I asked.

“Oh,” said my new editor. “It turns out that a novel is coming out at the same time from another house called Coyote. We added the ‘s’ so there wouldn’t be confusion.”

“Why didn’t they add an ‘s,’?” I demanded.

“Don’t worry, Ted — it’s basically the same,” he assured me.

My next book, about Aspen, was with the same editor. We agreed on that title, Whiteout, with its connotations of loss of perspective, of wintertime, and of cocaine. There were no surprises except for the first cover art he showed me: a photo of two women in bikinis and fur coats standing near the Little Nell gondola. After my flat rejection, he sent another one, of a photo of a snow globe they had commissioned just for the occasion. Inside the globe was the title of my book, chiseled out of a snowy mountain. I was very happy.

Newjack, about my 10 months as a New York State corrections officer, got its title from inmate slang for a rookie officer. That’s an idea I like: a title derived from the argot of a subculture. My new editor and I agreed upon it immediately. The only problem it has ever caused: Occasionally a reader confuses it with the movie Newjack City.

I had a new editor again for my next book, about roads. We struggled and struggled until one day I blurted out the idea I’d been husbanding for a while but was afraid to say out loud. “How about The Routes of Man?” I said.

There was silence. “Did you just pull that out of your hat?” he asked.

No, I said — I’d had the idea for a while. But I was afraid it might sound sexist. He didn’t think it did. And like me, he appreciated the echo of the classic photo book by Edward Steichen, The Family of Man, and the double-entendre with “roots of man.” The only hitch with it has been that some people pronounce routes as “routs,” and miss the double meaning. Ah well.

For my most recent book, which is about how to research and write the immersive non-fiction that I’m best known for, we considered the titles In Deep, Inside, The Art of Immersion Writing, and The Deep End. But after a long discussion over the phone, my editor and I agreed on Going Deep. As I hung up, I thought it might be a good idea to check online for books with that title. Already there was a memoir about football called Going Deep, as well as romance novels, gay and straight. So we moved the phrase to the subtitle, settling on a simple label for the title: Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Fall 2017 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Ted Conover is an author who combines anthropological and journalistic methods to research social groups. His research has led him to experiences such as riding freight railroads across the western United States and working as a corrections officer. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2000), based on his time as a corrections officer, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general non-fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Read: David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar on Titles

Titles are no doubt a great source of stress for writers — a quick Google search will turn up pages and pages of articles offering advice on the subject. Much of the advice is conflicting, and the only general consensus seems to be how important a good title is. Titles have to sell the book by sounding good while also giving the reader an idea of what’s to come; they have to be catchy, short, and informative, all at the same time.

To make matters more complicated, it’s not always possible to know before publication how well a title will work. We can laugh now at the fact that The Great Gatsby was originally titled Trimalchio in West Egg or that Of Mice and Men was originally titled Something That Happened, but we can’t know how F. Scott Fitzgerald or John Steinbeck felt about those working titles.

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, a publisher whose Little Blue Books pamphlet series sold hundreds of millions of copies, knew well the power of a good title. He would pull books from his list when their sales weren’t meeting his expectations. Then they’d go to “The Hospital” to be rejuvenated with new titles before rerelease. A few editorial assistants would brainstorm a potential list, and one of those would be tried.

The process could work quite well: Fleece of Gold sold 6,000 copies in 1925 but the following year, rereleased under the title The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, it sold 50,000 copies. Sometimes, even Haldeman-Julius’ young daughter would help; after reading the book Privateersmen, she summarized that it was about seamen and battles, so it was retitled The Battles of a Seaman.

How enticing those titles seem point to something else that can’t be predicted: how well a title will age. Eighteenth-century novel titles were short summaries in themselves, such as the full title of Daniel Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, All Alone in an Uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, Wherein All the Men Perished but Himself. With an Account How He Was at Last as Strangely Deliver’d by Pyrates (1719). The greater detail was necessary at a time when novels were still entering the cultural mainstream, and it would take more than a word or two to pique a reader’s curiosity.

More recent classical works often have titles derived from other works. Popular sources include Shakespeare (Brave New World; Pale Fire), the Bible (The Sun Also Rises; Absalom, Absalom!), and the works of major poets (Of Mice and Men; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings). Now, it’s common for works to have single-word titles — but the pressure to summarize, or least capture the essence of, the work within nevertheless remains.

Those articles online do offer a few modern suggestions to creating titles, but take any or all of the advice at your own risk. Methods range from A/B testing to random title generators (which can generate titles as inane as The Missing Twins to as nonsensical as The Teacher in the Alien).

Common title structures make something like a random title generator possible; the titles can sound real, albeit not always. And because there are no copyrights on titles, some small subgenres of fiction do see titles recycled every few years. But picking a title that truly fits takes a bit more work.

Working a manuscript, I try to keep an eye out for a good working title, a word or phrase I can hang on the wall of my mind, reminding me that my job is to capture the essence and nature of the topic or the collection of characters I’m writing about.

You don’t find such a title; it finds you. As I’m writing or sifting notes or reading for background, I’m subliminally asking myself, “What is this book about?” Then, when I have hundreds of answers to that question, most of them unsatisfactory, I narrow the question and ask: “What is this book really about?” And the answer to that should be the working title. Simple, right?

Of course not. A title should also be much more than a description of the book’s contents or a statement of its theme. It should be a suggestion, a powerful prompt to readers that the well-crafted work of narrative non-fiction they have in front of them is also about the universe just beyond the book. It urges readers to look for more and think about more than what’s in the pages.

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All of this takes place in that private space where writers struggle through the process of creating a book. It’s a wonderful place, that space. Quiet, insulated against the rest of the world. Plenty of room for grand ideas, room to let the narrative mind wander until it happens upon on the perfect title.

Then you finish the final polish and hand the manuscript to the publisher, and the wonderful place where you created the book is gone. The “book” becomes a “product.” From the writing room to the factory floor. For me, the title has always represented a kind of tipping point between those two states of mind, or to put it in more scholarly terms, the two phenomena.

Every professional writer wants sales. Writers know that to help achieve those sales, their books should carry an intriguing, powerful, elliptical, punchy, shocking, salacious, clever, or otherwise engaging title. Sometimes that title is the working title, or a refinement thereof, and sometimes it’s an editorial directive. Often it’s a conflation of both.

Here are two examples of the effort to find a perfect title.

My first book was a memoir, a look at my time serving as a young man in a Marine Corps combat unit in Vietnam. The title: These Good Men. I was wary of the title at first because, at the time, the Corps was using the advertising slogan, “We’re looking for a few good men.” But the phrase “good men” interested me. What did it mean? “Good,” how? At killing people? There was no goodness on the battlefield. I was thinking of “good” in other, more philosophical terms. So I started reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Lo and behold, there was my “good”: The feeling of comradeship that is as powerful as love. That’s what the book was about. I simply added a demonstrative plural pronoun — short for “these particular men” — and These Good Men: Friendships Forged From War became the title. The subtitle, as I recall, was the publisher’s. And I wasn’t thrilled with it.

My aim is to avoid clichés and threadbare idiomatic expressions, easy titles I call them, and the subtitle Friendships Forged From War struck me as clichéd, wrong-headed, and melodramatic. Friendship does not, in any sense, arise from a blast furnace. And war is not a caldron. It’s a funeral pyre. A broken metaphor all around. The only thing the subtitle had going for it was the alliteration. When all else fails, call for the cavalry of assonance and consonance.

I was an English poetry major in college, so I also thought about the poetics of the three words — the phonemes, the meter, the images. To me the substrata of music produced by the words in a title (or in any phrase or sentence, for that matter) can be as important as the meaning. The title is the reader’s first encounter with the book, and it should have the power of a siren song, one that suggests the essence of the book and acts as a powerful invitation to engage it — which is to say, buy it.

A title can be a summary or coda or an elegant suggestion of what is to come. For me it was also a way to introduce the idea of many characters as well as a characterization of them as a group. I think a writer has to consider the conflation of purposes a title represents and explore the implications of the title for each of those purposes. Again, my first consideration was literary.

I came to my title early, which is to say as I was about to sit down and begin the manuscript. If the title reflects all or most of the themes in the book (conflation without confusion), it helps to keep me on track. It’s like standing on a precipice for a moment, surveying the full landscape of the book just before you sit down to write.

I work hard to come up with a title early, rather than let the publisher begin the process of the title search. On my second book, a co-writer and I spent months wrangling with our editor, going through hundreds of titles; yes, hundreds. And here’s the kicker: The title we ended up with (Tears in the Darkness) was the very first title we had proposed.

The book is a cross-cultural look at America’s first land battle in World War II, a battle that turned out to be the largest defeat in American military history. The book took on the myths of war and tried to unmask them. (Tears in the Darkness, by the way, came from one of the hundreds of interviews we did for the book, a war book with a shifting point of view.) One Japanese character, describing his commander’s reaction to mass casualties, used the word anrui. Japanese expressions often have literal and figurative meanings that serve as complements. In this case, the idiom of anrui was “a broken heart,” but the literal translation was hidden or unseen tears, hence Tears in the Darkness.

Not perfect, but it works.

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

Join for Free and Never Miss a Story

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Fall 2017 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Michael Norman is an associate professor emeritus of journalism at the New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. His co-authored book Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (2009) was picked by several reviewers as one of the top 10 books of the year. He has also published These Good Men: Friendships Forged From War (1990). Previously, he was a reporter and columnist for the New York Times.

Read: David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar on Titles

Titles are no doubt a great source of stress for writers — a quick Google search will turn up pages and pages of articles offering advice on the subject. Much of the advice is conflicting, and the only general consensus seems to be how important a good title is. Titles have to sell the book by sounding good while also giving the reader an idea of what’s to come; they have to be catchy, short, and informative, all at the same time.

To make matters more complicated, it’s not always possible to know before publication how well a title will work. We can laugh now at the fact that The Great Gatsby was originally titled Trimalchio in West Egg or that Of Mice and Men was originally titled Something That Happened, but we can’t know how F. Scott Fitzgerald or John Steinbeck felt about those working titles.

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, a publisher whose Little Blue Books pamphlet series sold hundreds of millions of copies, knew well the power of a good title. He would pull books from his list when their sales weren’t meeting his expectations. Then they’d go to “The Hospital” to be rejuvenated with new titles before rerelease. A few editorial assistants would brainstorm a potential list, and one of those would be tried.

The process could work quite well: Fleece of Gold sold 6,000 copies in 1925 but the following year, rereleased under the title The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, it sold 50,000 copies. Sometimes, even Haldeman-Julius’ young daughter would help; after reading the book Privateersmen, she summarized that it was about seamen and battles, so it was retitled The Battles of a Seaman.

How enticing those titles seem point to something else that can’t be predicted: how well a title will age. Eighteenth-century novel titles were short summaries in themselves, such as the full title of Daniel Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, All Alone in an Uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, Wherein All the Men Perished but Himself. With an Account How He Was at Last as Strangely Deliver’d by Pyrates (1719). The greater detail was necessary at a time when novels were still entering the cultural mainstream, and it would take more than a word or two to pique a reader’s curiosity.

More recent classical works often have titles derived from other works. Popular sources include Shakespeare (Brave New World; Pale Fire), the Bible (The Sun Also Rises; Absalom, Absalom!), and the works of major poets (Of Mice and Men; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings). Now, it’s common for works to have single-word titles — but the pressure to summarize, or least capture the essence of, the work within nevertheless remains.

Those articles online do offer a few modern suggestions to creating titles, but take any or all of the advice at your own risk. Methods range from A/B testing to random title generators (which can generate titles as inane as The Missing Twins to as nonsensical as The Teacher in the Alien).

Common title structures make something like a random title generator possible; the titles can sound real, albeit not always. And because there are no copyrights on titles, some small subgenres of fiction do see titles recycled every few years. But picking a title that truly fits takes a bit more work.

It’s worth thinking about other writers’ really good titles when you start brooding about naming your own book. Why do they work?

Here’s a title for all time: The Way We Live Now. A novel by Anthony Trollope, true. But it can be repurposed for narrative non-fiction, anthropology, political science … and it has been. It’s endlessly useful, because it’s empty, yet urgent (that Now), and we all want to have our lives explained to us.

Here’s another: War and Peace. Again empty and waiting to be filled with the meaning of the book, yet gigantic and important. We care right away. Some writers, feeling self-important and at the top of their game, choose titles with just one abstract word, as in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. And at the end of the book one is left wondering why, other than the drumbeat repetition of the word within the text.

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But other times, a one-word title happens to be just right, such as William Shawcross’ brilliant Sideshow, about the desolation and killings associated with the war in Vietnam that did not take place in Vietnam. To be fair, Sideshow has an explanatory subtitle — Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia — but non-fiction often does.

My favorite title for a novel (other than the idiosyncratic and inimitable Moby-Dick — which has a much ignored explanatory subtitle, or, the Whale) is Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. In Bleak House, you barely notice Bleak House itself, and when you do see what Bleak House is, you realize the house isn’t bleak at all, it is bright and beautiful and reflects the lovely soul of its proprietor. It is the site of happiness, and a reconstituted family, and an unbreakable but profoundly assaulted love. Bleak House is where the main protagonists of the book gather and we see them there in their best light. Dickens could have called the house and the book Sunnyvale, but Sunnyvale wouldn’t have interested us, and more important would not have conveyed the darkness and power of the novel. It wouldn’t have made you feel, on putting the book down, finally, that all England, and especially London, is in the grips of an oppressive system that grinds humanity down. Bleak House does that.

And plus: the title sounds good. Real estate almost always provides good title. Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia comes to mind, or Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.

Depends on the place, though. Mississippi is evocative, Patagonia is mystical. But not all places work. Try In Rhode Island. No. Life in Staten Island. I don’t think so. D.J. Waldie, who wrote a great book about suburban anomie, had the sense not to call it In Lakewood, but rather Holy Land. With the explanatory and seemingly contradictory subtitle, A Suburban Memoir.

When I am writing a book, I’m always trying on titles as if they were eveningwear for my workmanlike piece of writing. One is too elegant, another too transparent, another too old-fashioned, another, somehow, boxy or too contemporary.

When I was writing my first book, I was living in Haiti and reporting on Haiti and writing about Haiti. I had this little apartment in a small complex for foreigners that was expanding daily. I was alone when I wasn’t out reporting, and I had a Hermes Rocket typewriter, white plastic, very small, that clacked and binged a lot. I’d put it on the “dining room” table, facing a big window that opened on the canyon at the bottom of which I lived, amid garbage and birds and rats. I was working my way through reporting and note taking. Every day then in Haiti (and every day now) was filled with event. I was pushed and pulled from one thing to another, always exhausted, always underfed. For years, I couldn’t figure out how to feed myself in Haiti.

And all the time, like a little gnawing anxiety, I was wondering what I should call this thing that, as I grew thinner and thinner, was growing fatter and fatter, into a sizable pile at the side of my Rocket. Whenever I looked up from my work, I could see the house gecko eating trails of ants. He wasn’t hungry. The “kitchen” was behind me, old coffee sitting on the “counter” in a silver Italian espresso maker. There was nothing in the “fridge,” a machine that must have dated from the 1960s and suffered frequent lapses for lack of electricity.

On Friday afternoons, drums outside my window announced dances or get-togethers or religious services. I’d be writing up my notes from the day, and the drums would get going, evening settling in, the smell of cooking charcoal burning, and then a rainstorm would come pounding down on us, whipping the palms and the banana trees. I loved that moment because I was inside. The ceiling was tin and thunderous. I’d get up from my chair of labor and go stand at the window, watching the rain and wind make everything dance, including the garbage, as the waters turned the dribble of the canyon into a broad river carrying mango leaf and banana refuse and plastic and glass and bones.

One evening, standing there, watching another flood go by, I said to myself, ah: the rainy season. And then I said to myself, ah: The Rainy Season. And the title was born, and thus the feeling of the entire book.

Of course, the book wasn’t about the rainy season or any particular rainy season. Its subtitle was Haiti Since Duvalier, and it was about a time of doubt and struggle in the country, during which it rained in a way that was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It rained dramatically, unabashedly, violently, brilliantly, passionately. And the title seemed to express something I’d felt about Haiti: how the rains disoriented me the way the place did; because they and it were foreign to me, and not yet arranged in my mind to be known and navigable.

It always takes me time to come to a title. Martyrs’ Crossing is my novel about an emergency faced by a Palestinian toddler and his mother at a checkpoint between Jerusalem and the occupied territories. I finished it before I had a title.

The working title (there’s always a working title, or three…) was Checkpoint, but I felt that that made it sound like a thriller by Michael Crichton. Although it did have elements of a thriller, that title was too limiting and — worst sin of all for a title — promised something other than what the book delivered.

I offered my editor many possible titles for this book, titles I culled from the Old Testament (hey, I figured, it’s a book about the actual holy land). But my editor was having none of it. I said to her, “Hemingway did it.” She replied, in her tart way: “Are you Hemingway?”

I wasn’t.

Then one night my husband, who had been a reporter in the Middle East while I was writing the book, said, “How about Martyrs’ Crossing?” And I had that moment one can have, with a good title, where everything seemed to come to a stop, and it was clear that this was the title the book had been waiting for.

I tried to ignore the fact that it sounded, to my American ear, just a bit like a highway warning sign. Also: Martyr is hard to spell. Also, I hate having any punctuation in my titles. But it seemed to me to sum up the problems raised and the story told in the book.

This was in the spring of 2001. It was in the early days of Amazon ratings for books, and I used to go on to Amazon to see what the book’s number was and what people were saying about it. Then I thought, “Let’s see if it appears anywhere else on the Internet,” and I Googled the title. (Maybe I Internet Explorered it … it was early days.)

After a few references to the book, another listing appeared. I clicked on that: It was a story about the infamous Israeli Army shooting, captured by French television, of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura while in his father’s arms at a checkpoint in Gaza the Israelis called Netzarim junction — and the Palestinians called Martyrs’ Crossing. I remembered being so sad about this kid when he was killed, and feeling his connection to the boy in my novel; but I had no idea that he’d died at a crossing point that shared its name with my book. History made the title deeper, more political, and just plain better. Not that anyone knew the connection but me. Still, I knew it.

I can’t give pointers for titles of books. It doesn’t really work that way; it’s all about inspiration and a feeling for the totality and broad meaning of the book. My most recent title, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, came to me as an inspiration. At the Monnin art gallery in Pétion-Ville, just outside Port-au-Prince, I had seen a very moving and beautiful flag of the kind used in Vodou ceremonies, a huge green sequined thing with a forest god depicted on it, waving. As I stood before this sweet, friendly little god of Vodou, I was still in the middle of reporting my book, and writing it (I tend to do both simultaneously) and standing there in front of the flag, I thought of the early reference in my book to “Fred Voodoo,” which was what British journalists used to call the Haitian man in the street, affectionately, but disparagingly too. Outsiders should stop seeing Haitians as Fred Voodoos, was one of the points in the book. The book also, I’d started to notice, had begun to take on a kind of valedictory flavor, as I wandered the rubble-strewn streets of a city I had once known so well, notebook in hand, and contemplated what my life would be, would have been, could ever be, without Haiti.

Hello, the little Haitian god seemed to be saying with his wave. And bye-bye. Farewell, Fred Voodoo. So there was the title, in a flash. He welcomed me in and pushed me away; that was Haiti for me. If you ever see the book you’ll notice that that little god is on the cover, waving to you too.

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

Join for Free and Never Miss a Story

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Fall 2017 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Amy Wilentz is the author of four books and teaches literary journalism at the University of California–Irvine. She has won the Whiting Award in non-fiction, the PEN/ Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Award. Her 2013 memoir Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (1990) was nominated for the award in non-fiction.

Read: David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar on Titles

Titles are no doubt a great source of stress for writers — a quick Google search will turn up pages and pages of articles offering advice on the subject. Much of the advice is conflicting, and the only general consensus seems to be how important a good title is. Titles have to sell the book by sounding good while also giving the reader an idea of what’s to come; they have to be catchy, short, and informative, all at the same time.

To make matters more complicated, it’s not always possible to know before publication how well a title will work. We can laugh now at the fact that The Great Gatsby was originally titled Trimalchio in West Egg or that Of Mice and Men was originally titled Something That Happened, but we can’t know how F. Scott Fitzgerald or John Steinbeck felt about those working titles.

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, a publisher whose Little Blue Books pamphlet series sold hundreds of millions of copies, knew well the power of a good title. He would pull books from his list when their sales weren’t meeting his expectations. Then they’d go to “The Hospital” to be rejuvenated with new titles before rerelease. A few editorial assistants would brainstorm a potential list, and one of those would be tried.

The process could work quite well: Fleece of Gold sold 6,000 copies in 1925 but the following year, rereleased under the title The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, it sold 50,000 copies. Sometimes, even Haldeman-Julius’ young daughter would help; after reading the book Privateersmen, she summarized that it was about seamen and battles, so it was retitled The Battles of a Seaman.

How enticing those titles seem point to something else that can’t be predicted: how well a title will age. Eighteenth-century novel titles were short summaries in themselves, such as the full title of Daniel Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, All Alone in an Uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, Wherein All the Men Perished but Himself. With an Account How He Was at Last as Strangely Deliver’d by Pyrates (1719). The greater detail was necessary at a time when novels were still entering the cultural mainstream, and it would take more than a word or two to pique a reader’s curiosity.

More recent classical works often have titles derived from other works. Popular sources include Shakespeare (Brave New World; Pale Fire), the Bible (The Sun Also Rises; Absalom, Absalom!), and the works of major poets (Of Mice and Men; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings). Now, it’s common for works to have single-word titles — but the pressure to summarize, or least capture the essence of, the work within nevertheless remains.

Those articles online do offer a few modern suggestions to creating titles, but take any or all of the advice at your own risk. Methods range from A/B testing to random title generators (which can generate titles as inane as The Missing Twins to as nonsensical as The Teacher in the Alien).

Common title structures make something like a random title generator possible; the titles can sound real, albeit not always. And because there are no copyrights on titles, some small subgenres of fiction do see titles recycled every few years. But picking a title that truly fits takes a bit more work.

This essay discusses the real possibility of an Indigenous literary journalism by examining the work of Mohawk journalist Dan David, specifically two magazine features (and cover stories) he wrote. Taken chronologically, the first, “Anarchy at Kanehsatake,” was published in This in 1996. It won a Canadian National Magazine Award in the category of Reporting. The second, much lengthier story, “All My Relations,” was published the year following, also in This. It, too, won a Canadian National Magazine Award in the category of Public Issues: Social Affairs (it also received an honorable mention in the category of Personal Journalism).

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This, the periodical for which David wrote, was launched by a group of Toronto school activists 30 years before, in 1966, as This Magazine Is About Schools. By the early 1970s the publication evolved into a left-wing general interest magazine with strong ties to unions and union culture. By the 1990s, while still supporting unions, its focus on them waned (although, ever loyal, unions still placed advertising in the magazine). Identity politics began to dominate the concerns of the left — especially the next generation of activists. Its most famous editor, Naomi Klein, took over the publication at age 23, in 1993. At this juncture her resume would have included editor-in-chief of the Varsity, the University of Toronto student newspaper, and a brief stint reporting for the Globe and Mail. She was not yet an international activist brand and author of a succession of influential books, including No Logo (1999), The Shock Doctrine (2007), and This Changes Everything (2014). Other luminaires of Canadian culture who have contributed to the magazine over the years include poet/novelist Michael Ondaatje, of In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and The English Patient (1992) fame, and the near incomparable Margaret Atwood, who lately has gained, or regained, international acclaim for the television adaptation of her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and whose name continues to sit among the editors at large on the This masthead. So, judging by history, David’s stories were published in a small but influential Canadian magazine that recently observed its half-century birthday.1

Perhaps we might see this essay as a case study of a particular kind of literary journalism, the pointedly political kind, and so here is the story of David’s two (and only two, actually, at least so far) major magazine features.

Growing Up Kanienke:haka

David was (and is) primarily a broadcast journalist. He is Kanienke:haka, or Mohawk, and was born in the United States, in Syracuse, New York. He moved with his family to what was then known as Oka Reserve (now Kanehsatake) when he was four years old, in 1956. His Mohawk mother, Thelma, was born on the Canadian side of the border in Kanehsatake, a Mohawk territory in southern Quebec, south of Montreal. (Kanehsatake is called a territory because it is not legally a reserve. It’s on the lac des Deux Montagnes.) His Mohawk father, Walter David Sr., was born on the Canadian side as well, in Akwesasne, which straddles both U.S. and Canadian territory. (Already we can glimpse a stark difference in the way Mohawks demarcate territory from the French in Quebec, the English in Ontario, and the U.S. in New York State.)2

The first article came about when David met This’ then-editor Clive Thompson — whose name some may recognize as a major technology feature writer based in New York — for coffee. David told Thompson about a story he had to get out of his system, a story about his home, Kanehsatake. Thompson listened and then said, “OK, send me a draft.” David never expected the draft to be a cover story.

Mohawk society is matriarchal, so what vexed David and a lot of people was that it was being run, or overrun, in a decidedly anti-democratic manner by Chief Jerry Peltier, a self-styled mayor for life, and his band of “critters,” the nickname for his goon squad, who were terrorizing the community, the women, the children, getting kids hooked on dope, filming teen girls having sex with critters and then selling the results, firing warning shots at any of the women who were trying to talk to the English police, the French police, the provincial government, the federal government — all to no avail. No one would help the women:

My sister has a friend named Wanda Gabriel. She is one of the women who has signed an affidavit against the council, and both she and her sister Cindy have also been targeted. Cindy lives down on “the avenues,” along the shores of the Ottawa River, near the school. The “critters” pulled up late one night and started shooting at her house. She called the SQ (Sûreté du Quebec, the Quebec provincial police) liaison officer who is responsible for crimes in the territory.

“The woman [who answered the call] could hear the gunfire over the telephone,” says Wanda, with a roll of her eyes. “The SQ told my sister the liaison officer wasn’t there: ‘Could my sister call back on Monday?’”

Imagine the university being run by a despot with gun-toting brown shirts driving around terrorizing everyone, firing shots through schoolroom windows — the school rooms of anyone brave enough to try to make the area inside the campus perimeter a sanctuary for freedom of speech and movement for everyone. Or the Hell’s Angels, say, setting up shop in the town hall and riding roughshod over the locals.

“Anarchy at Kanehsatake” is an angry, potent feature. David gets at the frustration inside this world by seeing it through his older sister Linda Cree’s eyes, by looking at her calendar on the wall, looking at the itemization of police intrusions, of critters’ warnings, of television helicopters hovering low over Mohawk land scaring children, a station from Montreal trying to capture footage of suspected marijuana fields on video for the six o’clock news:

[You] may remember Kanehsatake as a Mohawk community outside Montreal and the site of the 78-day armed stand-off known as the “Oka Crisis” of 1990…. [T]hen again, you may have heard about Kanehsatake in the headlines this summer, after the media exposed the existence of huge marijuana plantations on the territory.

My sister has seen all this and more, marking it down on the calendars hanging on her kitchen wall…. Hasty scribblings of her children’s hockey practices … are intermingled with death threats.

Names, dates, places…. Many of her notes spill over into the margins and run down the edges of the page. “You should see the other side,” Linda says, flipping to the previous month. “Look at that.”

September 22: 3:10 p.m. — Blue/white helicopter hovering over sweat lodges, gardens — talking to Pam at the time — left 3:23.

Life Changing Events at Kanehsatake

David wrote “Anarchy at Kanehsatake” to get the bile out of his system. Then Don Obe, a longtime magazine editor who at the time was a professor of journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, talked to David about writing another piece. At the time David was in the second year of a three-year stint teaching a journalism course on diversity at the school. Obe, in addition to his duties at Ryerson, was also a senior editor at the literary journalism program at the Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, located inside Banff National Park. Obe told him, Dan, listen, why don’t you come to our writing program — you should be able to write a story on anything you want. Obe offered David the chance to go really long, 10,000 words long, affording him a precious month of not thinking about anything except working through what had happened behind the barricades several years previous, when David went home to Kanehsatake after an armed standoff between police and Mohawks began. David went behind the barricades as a journalist — he wanted to get the story from the inside, and he had the sort of access many others did not, that is, to feel the anger, confusion, and fear from both sides in the dispute — but still, to have such a personal stake in the matter, as these were his people, including family members, who were under attack.

Obe’s father George was also a Mohawk, from Oka, so Obe may have implicitly understood a bit of what David had gone through behind the barricades during the 78-day, armed standoff between the Canadian government and the Mohawk Nation in the summer of 1990. And the writing program at Banff, at the time and to this day, emphasizes the journalist’s personal stake in the story. In other words, it is possible that Obe was asking David to reach deeper inside his psyche than he had ever done before in order to expunge the true toxicity of the story.

Relations between the government and the Mohawk Nation have never been peachy, but there was a trigger to the standoff. The mayor of the town of Oka wanted to raze the forest above the town site, called “the Pines,” and bulldoze the graveyard, the Mohawk graveyard, to extend a whites-only golf course from a nine- to an 18-hole layout. If one were in a mood to empathize, one might venture to say that the Mohawks had a point when they put the barricades up. David drove for three hours from Maniwaki, a reserve north of Ottawa, where he was living at the time, to Kanehsatake to be with his family, his people. He writes:

Once in the Pines, I find people from all over the territory, all ages, all families, all factions, walking around in elation, confusion and fear. Most people are caught up in the euphoria of the moment; they’ve survived the police raid and driven the attackers off their land. Others just wander around, aimless and dazed. A few prepare themselves in personal ways to kill or to die….

There was a firefight between Mohawk Warriors and SQ. It lasted 30 seconds. One police officer died. The forces of government rolled in. The Mohawks put up their barricade, expecting something, maybe retaliation.

The second police attack never really materialized. The cops didn’t swarm into Mohawk territory but, as David reports, they disrupted any Mohawk wanting to leave:

The police pull a young couple from their car, force them to strip at gunpoint in the middle of the road in front of dozens of people. Little kids in the backseats of cars cry while cops hiding behind sandbags shout insults and aim assault rifles at their parents. The police tear groceries out of people’s arms and throw them into the ditch. I won’t pick up a gun. I become a food smuggler instead.

In terms of the Truth and Reconciliation Report (TRC) and its recommendations, which were published in 2015, David said what happened in 1990 cast a long shadow over reconciliation and the commission’s many worthy Calls to Action.3 The next generation, which suffered the trauma of witnessing the brutalizing of their parents from the back seats of cars, would grow up wanting to have nothing to do with white authorities, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with reconciliation. This makes reconciliation difficult, for instance, with something like Call to Action 43, which states, “We call upon federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments to fully adopt and implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the framework for reconciliation.”

As noted, David arrives at the standoff as a journalist, intending not to choose sides, but these were his people under attack. And so, once he crossed into Mohawk territory, perhaps in retrospect inevitably, there is a turn in the storytelling: David writes, “I become a food smuggler instead.” He admits he is not an objective journalist in this situation, and maybe cannot be one, but this revised approach sounds like one a literary journalist might take. Recall John Hartsock’s aesthetics of experience: David re-examines his experience and turns it into an aesthetic exercise.4 It may also be therapy for David to be in Banff, in one of the writing cabins, thinking about and reliving exactly how it goes down, this latest skirmish in the ongoing discord between two civilizations.

When David does make the turn, he leapfrogs over the hard-news, objective, just-the-facts kind of reporting onto new terrain, and it is exhilarating for him:

It may sound strange, but I feel I’ve found home for the first time in a long while. I left years before to get away from people grown used to silent resignation. I’ve returned to find people filled with pride, hope and even dignity. Inside the barricades, people who haven’t spoken to each other in decades over long-forgotten arguments, hold hands and stand together in one great circle under the Pines…. There is such peace behind those barricades. It’s easy sometimes to forget the stone-throwing mobs outside…. I listen under those trees while my soul dances to the sound of Mohawk, Mi’qmaaq or Kwakiutl voices weaving themselves into the beat of a drum…. My summer is like that: periods of tremendous peace and hope punctuated by flashes of anger, fear and deep despair.

This turn in David’s journalistic approach also recalls David Beers’s concept of the “personal reported essay.” David examines his family history. He examines the after-effects of being personally involved with people behind the barricades, and of dealing with sleep-deprived, bitter, armed people on both sides of the conflict. And he reports, reports, reports — after all, it is his boots that are on the ground doing the reporting, and his years of experience ensure that there is a no dereliction of duty in this regard.

Finally, David’s choice to go behind the barricades and be with not only his family members but also the Mohawk warriors recalls Tom Wolfe’s concept of saturation reporting from inside a subculture.5 David used his sister’s testimony as an entrée into the nightmare rule that had engulfed Kanehsatake to write his “Anarchy” story, and his reporting skills to ferret out the rest of information. For “All My Relations,” he himself became the agent inside the subculture, showing us a world we might not have otherwise ever known, at least in such personal terms. The eye-opening part of the story is the fact that, despite the perception from the outside that David must have been in the tank for the Mohawks — David couldn’t find work with CBC after he left Kanehsatake, even though he had the experience and the knowledge — inside the barricades he had to wrestle with the posturing and double dealing he knew only too well from past reporting experience:

I know there’s no turning back once I cross that imaginary line at the roadblock. I worry about what the Warriors will do when they see me behind the barricades. I know them from the civil war between Warriors and anti-Warriors at Akwesasne, near Cornwall, the summer before. They know me from the stories I write about the smuggling, the guns and the violence that seem to follow them. Some have threatened me….

David had already flushed the bile out of his system with “Anarchy at Kanehsatake,” so now, in Banff, Obe, Lynn Cunningham, and Barbara Moon were encouraging David and giving him advice on how to make it better, to be more reflective, take a longer look at history, at the history of his family in particular, looking backward, then looking forward. After all, his great-grandfather was one of the souls buried in the Pines. His great-grandfather had stood up to the Canadian government, time and again. His great-grandfather had sailed to England to get an audience with the King Edward VII, wanting action. The situation was urgent. The Seminary of St. Sulpice and the federal department of Indian Affairs were conspiring to take away more Mohawk land:

For the seminary to have clear title to the land, the Mohawks must go…. This suits the department just fine since it has embarked on an inflexible policy of assimilation. In the words of the poet, the bureaucrat, the deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, the aim is to remove “every vestige of Indianness” from the Indian until there are “no more Indians and no more Indian problem.”

David even echoes his great-grandfather’s visit to England when he must travel there to receive a Commonwealth Fellowship. Like his forebearer, he finds himself embroiled in another crisis over identity: Is he American, Canadian, Mohawk? David is not about to allow himself to be given the fellowship as an American, and the requisite brinksmanship ensues before he prevails. Indeed, David has a lot to mull over in his story.

Conclusion

Considering the force of these two stories, it is puzzling that David has not written more literary journalism-format features. He told me those were the two stories he had to get out of his system. Once they were published, life took over. He was in South Africa, on and off, 1993–1999, helping to evolve the South African Broadcast Corporation from government mouthpiece to independent public broadcaster. He said that was a lot more satisfying than living through the Oka crisis. Then, back in Canada, he was appointed the first director of news at the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, 1999–2001. Then there was more broadcast journalism, journalism training, and teaching, along with research, writing, and consulting jobs at Indigenous organizations.

Strangely, this past winter, 20 years after “All My Relations,” David said he had been thinking of going back to writing at feature length. In a recent email he wrote: “I pulled out a dusty draft or dozen and brushed them off. Then I wondered why we, Indigenous artists and writers, have no (none I could find) shared literary spaces of our own. I’ve started asking others (Indigenous and non-) ‘Why not?’”

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Spring 2018 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Bill Reynolds is a professor of journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. His teaching focus is narrative feature writing. He and John S. Bak co-edited Literary Journalism Across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).

Read: Footnotes

This essay examines two books about Native American life in the United States. The first book, The Good Red Road, published in 1987, was a collaboration between University of California–Los Angeles professor Kenneth Lincoln and his Cherokee graduate student, Al Slagle. The second book, Rez Life, by the Ojibwe novelist David Treuer, was published in 2012, 25 years later. Both books are presented as journeys into Indian Country in the United States; both are long-form, non-fictional efforts to document and explain Native Americans and Native American culture to non-Native readers. In the following paragraphs, the two books are described and critiqued in an effort to understand how these writers investigated and made sense of Native people and Native culture at these two points in time.

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The inquiry was guided by several research questions. How did these writers approach Native Americans and Native American life? How did they portray Native Americans? What stories did they emphasize or ignore? Finally, how successfully did these writers make sense of the Native American people and life? One way or another, these questions reflect four centuries of fraught relations between Native Americans and Euro-Americans in the U.S. To put it more plainly, non-Native Americans have been mostly wrong about Native Americans and Native American lives since the English settlement of Jamestown in 1607. From then to now, Euro-American ideas about Native Americans have been shaped by racial myths and misinformation, most of which have been produced and perpetuated by media and popular culture. In the 18th and 19th centuries, ideas about Indians were shaped by newspaper stories and illustrations, captivity narratives, dime novels, popular literature and poetry, art and advertising, and Wild West shows. In the 20th century, Indian stories were dominated by romantic, action-packed Hollywood westerns, a genre that later migrated to television. These stories and images helped make the armed and dangerous Sioux warrior — his feather headdress blowing in the prairie wind — the most popular Indian of them all. These distorted stories also explain the continuing need for the kinds of thoughtfully produced examinations of Indian life presented in The Good Red Road and Rez Life: in-depth reports that emphasize the Indian voice in the centuries-long debate over the place of Indians in the U.S.

Field Studies, Literary Voice, and Narrative

The Good Red Road grew out of an “on-the-road seminar” that Kenneth Lincoln taught on the northern plains where he grew up. More formally, Lincoln describes his journey as “autobiographical ethnography,” a fusion of “interdisciplinary scholarship, field studies, literary voice and narrative structure in a text addressed to specialists and general readers alike.” In fact, Lincoln’s Red Road journey was an extended trip, starting with the original on-the-road class in 1975 and continuing with Slagle through five more years. The final text weaves together all of these trips into one journey and a single narrative voice, a literary construction that simplifies the story but alters the time line of these experiences and sacrifices some of the story’s literal accuracy.1

For Lincoln, an English professor who specialized in Native American studies, the class was a way for him to reconnect with his Nebraska roots and introduce his students and readers to the Native people and places of the plains. Although Lincoln had a long-standing connection with a Lakota family in his Nebraska hometown, he was well aware of his outsider status among the Native people.2 This was one reason he collaborated with Al Slagle, a Cherokee graduate student who brought a Native identity to the project.

The result of Lincoln’s traveling classroom is a highly personal narrative into the lives of Lincoln and his students, including personality conflicts within the group and Lincoln’s confession of an affair with one of the women in the class. More to the point, The Good Red Road offers detailed descriptions of the group’s encounters with the Native people of Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and other reservations. The strength of this method is immersion, which allows the authors to develop a level of intimacy with their subjects. Lincoln, Slagle, and the other students travel extensively and spend time with a variety of Indians in a variety of settings, observing, listening, asking questions, trying to understand the people, places, and cultural traditions they encounter.

For example, Lincoln introduces readers to Mark Monroe, his Lakota “brother” in Alliance, Nebraska. Monroe runs a community Indian Center in Alliance, where he deals with alcoholism, housing, unemployment, hunger, and health care, as well as local racism. Indians in Alliance, Lincoln discovers, have struggled for years to live as Indians in the white world. Lulu Lone Wolf tells Lincoln: “We lived 22 years in L.A. … It took me a long time to get over feelin’ Indian in a bad way, y’ know? When I came back here, then I got to go the opposite way, be a dirty Indian again.”

Later, Lincoln and his students spend time in the home of a Lakota elder named Luther Clearwater and his family, a visit that reveals a generational dispute about traditional Lakota ways, including the powers of a sacred pipe. The students also meet with Benjamin Crow, director of a Rosebud alcohol rehabilitation center and himself a recovering alcoholic. Crow described alcoholism on the reservation in stark terms. “Probably 90 percent of all deaths here are alcohol-related,” Crow tells the class.

At another point, Lincoln is invited to participate in a sweat lodge ceremony, an invitation that causes him to reflect on his role as a scholar and as an outsider: “I come as they asked me, a white man, asking for brotherhood. I come with my own pipe for blessing and instruction….” As the ceremony continues, Lincoln shifts to an insider perspective, becoming a spiritual participant alongside his Lakota brothers. Lincoln prays: “May we cross the desert between us and find the courage to heal ourselves. I ask that we help bring this land, the body of our people, back to life.” Lincoln is deeply moved by the experience. “I seemed to drop down beneath thought, to let my mind focus on nothing, interrupted by the blend of prayer and play, of communal support and the spirits’ abandon,” he writes. “The people prayed with me, I sang with them; we were in accord under this dark Dakota night.”

Lincoln’s achievement in this scene is based on physical access — his invitation to participate — as well as his deeply felt spiritual connection that allows him to shift from outsider to near-insider. That is, Lincoln is able to shed his detached, academic self in favor of a more open and responsive presence within the ceremony. This shift is useful for his readers, providing them with a first-person account of a Lakota spiritual experience usually closed to non-Indians. This and similar situations in the book render Lakota life in evocative and dynamic ways, revealing its spiritual beauty as well as its fragility.

To their credit, Lincoln and Slagle are sensitive to the dangers inherent in their telling of Lakota stories. Their literary method, Lincoln writes, involves “dialogical” anthropology, which “requires letting ‘others’ speak among themselves and with us in print.” This effort gives them a way to “dispel [Indian] stereotypes, often the cultural baggage of out-dated or faulty ethnography.” Lincoln and Slagle also worked to protect cultural and tribal knowledge, and insist that their narrative “invades no tribe’s secrecy nor any person’s privacy.” This is possible, they note, because they published with the permission of their sources and allowed a variety of readers to review the manuscript before publication. All of these efforts lead to a nuanced and deeply felt portrait of Native life on the northern plains, warts and all. In The Good Red Road, Lincoln and Slagle open a pathway into Native American life in the last quarter of the 20th century that is by turns insightful, troubling, and ultimately hopeful.

The Personal Grounded in Reporting

Like The Good Red Road, David Treuer’s Rez Life is a highly personal narrative, a memoir grounded in Native history and extensive on-the-rez reporting. Starting with his friends and family around Leech Lake, the Minnesota reservation where he grew up, Treuer sets out to dispel stereotypes, explain the love/hate relationship many Indians have with reservations, and investigate the convoluted history and disastrous consequences of federal Indian policies. “Most often rez life is associated with tragedy,” he writes. “We are thought of in terms of what we have lost or what we have survived.” That’s a mistake Treuer intends to correct. “[W]hat one finds on reservations is more than scars, tears, blood, and noble sentiment. There is beauty in Indian life, as well as meaning. … We love our reservations.”

Writing about contemporary Ojibwe life as an Ojibwe, Treuer qualifies as an insider, an Indian who knows rez life because he grew up there. But Treuer is also an outsider of sorts. His parents were not typical on the rez — his father was an Austrian immigrant (and Holocaust survivor); his mother, a Leech Lake Ojibwe with a prestigious law degree. Treuer himself was well educated, first at Princeton, where he studied anthropology and creative writing (and worked on a senior thesis with Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison), and later at the University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in anthropology. Treuer’s insider/outsider position allows him to locate and tell intimate stories of the Ojibwe and other reservations using local knowledge as well as his deep reservoir of legal, political, and anthropological information. Moreover, Treuer uses his novelist’s gift for storytelling to make Rez Life a compelling read.

Treuer takes an unsentimental approach to reservation life. One of the book’s opening scenes, for instance, recounts his grandfather’s suicide. A veteran of D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, Eugene Seelye was “a hard-ass,” as Treuer puts it. Treuer continues: “He was not one of those sweet, somewhat bashful elderly Indians you see at powwows … willing to talk and tell dirty jokes; not the kind of traditional elder that a lot of younger people seek out for approval and advice….” More grimly, Treuer describes his sudden, intense anger at the blood-stained bedroom carpet he finds himself cleaning after his grandfather’s suicide. “That carpet,” he writes, “that cheap cheap carpet, that carpet the same color as the reservation is colored on some maps of northern Minnesota. And just as torn, dusty, and damaged. Just as durable. Just as inadequate.”

Treuer is equally unsentimental about the challenges of growing up on the rez. He writes, for instance, about the chaotic life of Jeffery Weise, the teenager who killed his own grandfather and eight others before killing himself on the Red Lake Reservation in 2005. Treuer reports that Weise’s father committed suicide when Weise was a child. “Two years later his mother, Joanne Weise, went out drinking, crashed her car into a tree, and suffered massive brain damage,” Treuer notes. Neglected and depressed, Weise fell apart. Treuer quotes one of Weise’s Internet postings: “I’m living every mans [sic] nightmare and that single fact alone is kicking my ass. … This place never changes, it never will.”

Treuer follows this story with a more uplifting report about Dustin Burnette, a Leech Lake Indian whose life was equally troubled. “Yeah, I got all the bad stuff about being Indian and none of the good. I got the bad teeth and the instability and the alcoholism and all that,” Burnette says. Burnette’s mother died of an aneurysm when he was 16; he was raised by his grandmother. He was smart, though he didn’t care for school. One day a new Indian counselor showed up and confronted Burnette, prodding him to get serious and eventually helping land him a full-ride college scholarship. In 2009, Burnette, a college graduate, returned to Leech Lake to teach the Ojibwe language in a tribally run immersion school. “I found a family, at ceremonies, in the language,” Burnette tells Treuer. “I’ve got a purpose, people who rely on me. It feels good, man. It feels great.”

Beyond individual stories, Treuer critiques federal Indian policies, explaining long-running disputes over fishing rights, tribal membership, law enforcement and tribal courts, boarding schools, gaming and more. One of the most misunderstood topics, he writes, is Indian sovereignty, the right of tribes to control their own territory and affairs. Although the government paid lip service to tribal sovereignty and signed hundreds of treaties with Indian nations, most tribes lost much — if not all — of their traditional lands. In addition, federal Indian agents regularly worked against the interests of the Indians they were pledged to protect. “Fraud, cronyism, nepotism, double-dealing, skimming, and outright murder were common,” Treuer concludes.

Treuer’s solution to the problems facing Indians today is something he calls the “new traditionalism,” an idea that combines the old ways of Ojibwe life — ricing, tapping maple trees, fishing, hunting, speaking Ojibwe — with the contemporary world of technology and popular culture. Revival of the tribal language is at the center of this idea. For Treuer, a language activist, “the language is the key to everything else — identity, life and lifestyle, home and homeland.” The new traditionalism, Treuer explains, embraces and reorients the old ways so that Indians can live fully and well in the 21st century. With fluency in the language, Treuer argues, the Ojibwe can choose “to live their modern lives, with all those modern contradictions, in the Ojibwe language — to choose Ojibwe over English, whether for ceremony or for karaoke.”

Much like Lincoln and Slagle, Treuer immerses himself in reservation life and builds his story around a variety of Ojibwe and other reservation sources. This method allows Rez Life to highlight a variety of powerful Native voices from “ordinary” Indians rarely heard in contemporary American non-fiction, a literary achievement in itself. Unlike Lincoln and Slagle, however, Treuer uses no pseudonyms or hidden identities. He writes that he obtained permission from all of his sources and quoted every person exactly as recorded, and not quoting anyone from memory. Treuer also avoids what he calls the “loose historicism” of assigning feelings to his sources, a practice he believes would distort the truth of his narrative.

Treuer’s principal goal in Rez Life is to report the bitter but largely forgotten truth about Indians and reservation life to non-Indian readers and to make the case for the importance of American Indian culture in the 21st century. “To understand American Indians is to understand America,” he proclaims. Indians, after all, were the first Americans and they have something to contribute to the larger American story. But first, Treuer makes clear, they must find a way to thrive in a massive, unrelenting, technologically advanced and homogenous consumer society that easily dominates Native culture and language.

Treuer, for one, is guardedly optimistic. He concludes his book with a scene on a reservation lake in Minnesota: “While spearing walleye on Round Lake that April I felt this [Native] way of life and the language that goes with it felt suddenly, almost painfully, too beautiful to lose. … And I thought then, with a growing confidence that I don’t always have: we might just make it.”

Conclusions

It is almost impossible to overstate the problem of the Indian in the American popular imagination, where knowledge about Native American life — that is, accurate historical and cultural information — has been largely diminished or neglected in favor of stereotypes and clichés produced and perpetuated by the mass media and popular entertainment. Taken together, The Good Red Road and Rez Life provide a powerful response to this misinformation. Both books offer valuable insights into modern Native American life and both books give Native speakers a voice. The books differ in emphasis and tone, but they both succeed in revealing the complicated realities of Native American life. Lincoln and Slagle are more autobiographical and more romantic; they focus more on Native spiritual life. Treuer is more attuned to Indian-white relations, reservation history, and the practical social, cultural, economic, and racial issues of reservation life. Despite these differences and the 25-year gap between these books, both narratives are good-faith efforts to explore and explain American Indian life honestly and in greater depth than routine daily journalism can provide.

Although neither book was written by a journalist and neither is billed as literary journalism, both books employ some of the key practices of literary journalism, including subjectivity, immersion, direct observation, and extensive interviewing. As previously noted, Lincoln, Slagle, and Treuer immerse themselves in Native life, spending many months among Native people, gaining experience in Indian country by observing, interviewing, and listening. In the case of Lincoln and Slagle, these methods allow them access to Lakota ceremonies, where they participate alongside their Lakota sources in search of spiritual deliverance. Lincoln captures the deeply human spirit of a Native ceremony: “People were coming together: to pray, to cry, to sing, to think, not to think, to lose themselves to the spirits of one another and the petitioned powers of a nurturing land, old family spirits, the comforting darkness.”

For Treuer, writing about the rez is an intensely personal experience involving his own reservation upbringing as well as the lives of his Ojibwe family and friends. Treuer also conducts more formal research into Native American history and the history of the federal reservation system. As an Ojibwe writer, Treuer also advocates for such issues as tribal sovereignty and the revival of Native languages. Finally, Treuer places his Native American story in a national context: “Indian reservations, and those of us who live on them, are as American as apple pie, baseball, and muscle cars. Unlike apple pie, however, Indians contributed to the birth of America itself.”

In all these ways, The Good Red Road and Rez Life apply the tools of literary journalism to render Native American life in a personal, culturally nuanced, and deeply observed narrative. As literary journalism, these books live up to — and perhaps exceed — the standard articulated by Richard Lance Keeble that literary journalism “engages readers imaginatively in the aesthetics of experience and the search for understanding, meaning, and insight.”

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

Join for Free and Never Miss a Story

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Spring 2018 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

John Coward is professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa. A former newspaper reporter, he completed a Ph.D. at the University of Texas–Austin. Coward’s books include The Newspaper Indian, published in 1999, and Indians Illustrated: The Image of Native Americans in the Pictorial Press, published in 2016.

Read: Footnotes

You could be doing so many other things besides reading this essay: You could be shopping online, updating social media, or responding to text messages. You could be playing Words With Friends or asking your electronic assistant to add milk to your grocery list. You could be watching the next episode of your favorite television series through a streaming service on your tablet or giving in to the urge to check your email.

If you really do feel like reading, you could be Googling any work of literary journalism and likely finding it — or some part of it — at Longreads.com, some other publisher’s website, or even on Google itself.

It has never been easier to read anything you want to read — and it’s never been harder to actually find the time.

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While choosing to spend time in a more instantly gratifying way online is not an acceptable excuse for putting off doing the Hiroshima assignment, it is a believable one. Many people are sacrificing things they need to do in order to shop online or scroll through Facebook.

In Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technologies and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, Adam Alter outlines the biological, cultural, and behavioral reasons so many of us find it difficult to distance ourselves from our devices. Yet, technological advances also allow access to more knowledge than ever before, freeing us from having to rely on memory, personal experience, and in-person networks. In Smarter Than You Think, Clive Thompson argues that technological changes are more positive than negative, and that by learning to use technology we can learn more and do better. None of the five books discussed here is examined as literary journalism. Rather, this essay explores the effects of technology on literary journalism. These books will be of interest because of the authors’ takes on the cultural shifts technology has set in motion, and how those shifts may impact literary journalism in an era of unprecedented access, communication, and distraction.

Literary journalism requires a commitment from both writer and reader. The reporting and writing demands exceed those of most other kinds of journalism. The reader must summon the attention span needed to engage with written works that are both long and meaningful. The fictional equivalent is not the airport novel but the work of literature. An investment in literary journalism presents its own rewards for readers. In his 2016 IALJS keynote address, William Dow explained this succinctly and well: “Literary journalism is foremost a pairing of literature and journalism — a combination perhaps more intimately related than any other two narrative genres because it is a way of posing problems and pursuing solutions in ways that no other paired or interfused genres can.” Literary journalists have always taken on the social, cultural, and political problems of their times, captivating their readers with exhaustive reporting and innovative approaches to writing. They take us into the experiences of people living through difficult things, such as war (cue Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey, and Michael Herr), poverty (so many from which to choose, from Jack London to Barbara Ehrenreich), even guarding prisoners (enter Ted Conover and Shane Bauer). Through these true tales comes an understanding of pressing issues as well as of the human condition, one that can’t be achieved through poems or novels, inverted pyramids or data visualization.

Among the positive developments of technology, Longreads.com and startups, such as Latterly and Catapult, deliver excellent works of long-form and literary journalism to your inbox. Facebook makes these works easy to share. When stumbling across an intriguing article while browsing social media or clicking a link on another web page, free tools, such as Pocket, allow you to save the story, as does Facebook, to read later. In this fast-moving, technologically enhanced world, however, “later” may never come.

This essay pulls from Nicolas Carr’s landmark work, The Shallows, in which he examines research into neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change in response to one’s environment and experiences. Carr explains that the brain continually changes in response to environments. Early humans adapted to the use of tools. In the current age, our brains are becoming adept at dealing with environments developed by technology, becoming better at skills such as multitasking and worse at focusing attention. As a result, our brains might be changing so it is becoming harder to read longer texts. The average person’s attention span was 12 seconds in 2000; it was only eight seconds in 2013.

“Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning,” Carr wrote. “Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

In Irresistible, Alter writes an even darker conclusion. Not only is technology making us shallow, it is making us addicted. In our tech-immersive culture, the signs of addiction creep up slowly and are easy to miss. According to Alter, the six ingredients of behavioral addiction are “compelling goals that are just beyond reach; irresistible and unpredictable positive feedback; a sense of incremental progress and improvement; tasks that become slowly more difficult over time; unresolved tensions that demand resolution; and strong social connections.” Behavioral addictions have increased rapidly over recent decades, thanks to entrepreneurs’ electronic engineering for increasingly addictive behaviors propagated by the psychological and social rewards that come with the swiping, feedback, and fun experiences provided by an ever-evolving galaxy of affordable gadgets. While companies that make these devices continually promote the impression that the consumer is in control and that life is better because of the ability to look up anything, watch anything, and communicate with anyone, the personal and social costs of the near-constant interaction with screens are irrefutable. Alter is sure the technology entrepreneurs who have engineered truly addictive digital devices and activities knew what they were doing. Some of their greatest innovators, he notes, including Steve Jobs and Evan Williams, kept their creations out of the hands of their own children.

Alter draws a parallel between behavioral addiction and chemical addiction. How easy it is to look back at the early proponents of cocaine, including Sigmund Freud, with superiority. Today we know of the drug’s dangers. “But perhaps our sense of superiority is misplaced,” Alter writes. Just as cocaine charmed early adopters a century ago, “today we are enamored of technology. We’re willing to overlook its costs for its many gleaming benefits: for on-demand entertainment portals, car services, and cleaning companies; Facebook and Twitter; Instagram and Snapchat … and the rise of a new breed of obsessions, compulsions, and addictions that barely existed during the 20th century.”

Proponents of literary journalism should also be concerned about findings Alter relays about the decline in empathy among college students. Instances of online bullying and harassment are well documented, with teenage girls being especially cruel to one another on social networks. Literary journalism requires an interest in other people’s lives. Whereas the New Journalists of the 1960s “called attention to their own voices” in pushing the boundaries of journalistic writing, as Robert Boynton has noted, the “new, new journalists” distinguished themselves from the literary journalists of Tom Wolfe’s heyday through their reportorial feats, some of which included spending months or even years with their subjects. Conover spent nearly a year as a prison guard for New Jack, and Adrian LeBlanc spent almost a decade reporting Random Family. With online communication and texting overtaking face-to-face interaction, it is unclear how the changes in communication patterns will affect empathy: that is, can it develop adequately in the digital world? How will the next generation of literary journalists work in a culture that places little value on trying to understand other people’s experiences? Will the next generation of literary journalists have the conviction to pursue such deeply reported work?

As did Alter, Matthew B. Crawford in his book, The World Beyond Your Head, characterizes technology, especially the creators and marketers of technology, as a threat, but not because of technology’s addictive nature. Crawford believes technology is making the world too easy for us. In The World Beyond Your Head, he describes the disturbing forms many technological advances are taking, separating who we are from what we do in the world. Autonomous automobiles, near-constant electronic stimulation, and on-demand entertainment distract us from the difficult work of becoming individuals who make things and make mistakes. “Silence is now offered as a luxury good,” Crawford writes.

To realize one’s potential as an individual, each person must engage with the world. Crawford gives examples of individuals who mastered their environment, reaching their potential: The motorcycle driver who develops connections to both the motorcycle and the road, the short-order cook who achieves a well-orchestrated arrangement of ingredients and implements, and the hockey player who wields the stick as if it’s another body part. As engineers and other technologists develop more ways for people not to engage with the real world, however, easiness, not excellence in our individual areas of aptitude and interest, becomes the goal.

In The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford cites his own inability to focus on Aristotle when he knows he could just watch Sons of Anarchy, a television series he could talk about the next day with friends. “There is, then, a large cultural consequence to our ability to concentrate on things that aren’t immediately engaging, or our lack of such ability: the persistence of intellectual diversity, or not. To insist on the importance of trained powers of concentration is to recognize that independence of thought and feeling is a fragile thing, and requires certain conditions.”

Dan Lyons and Antonio García Martínez, in their respective memoirs, further the argument for not surrendering our culture to the whims and whiz-bang products of technology companies. Despite the appearances and hype, they learned that the technology startup world does not champion independent thought as much as it rewards moxie and marketing. Their accounts characterize the leaders of technological innovation, not as people with altruistic intentions nor, for the most part, remotely deserving of the hero status contemporary culture bestows on them. Instead of being evangelists for social and intellectual progress, the people at the helm are, in Lyons and Martínez’s experience, opportunists seeking personal wealth and status.

In Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, former Newsweek writer Lyons chronicles his experiences while aspiring to become a “marketing wizard” at a Boston-area software startup. Lyons’ hopes crest and fall in this classic fish-out-of-water story as he realizes the hip, venture capital-infused company with candy dispensers in the walls was more cult than business. “HubSpot is like a corporate version of Up With People, the inspirational singing group from the 1970s, but with a touch of Scientology. It’s a cult based around marketing. The Happy!! Awesome!! Start-Up Cult, I began to call it.”

Lyons came to HubSpot after being laid off at Newsweek. “I think they just want to hire younger people,” his boss had told him. “They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college.” He finds a job at HubSpot after a stint at a technology news website. He makes it through several rounds of interviews, including with the company’s cofounders, who seem excited by his ideas and hire him to help improve the company’s place in the marketing world. Or so he thinks. “The work I’m doing will exist in a gray area — a mix of journalism, marketing, and propaganda. Halligan and Shah don’t know what this will look like, and neither do I. But it could be an interesting experiment.” Along with the work, he anticipates his stock options will turn into lots of cash once HubSpot goes public at some point in the future. What he finds is a company built on smoke and mirrors — and run by “bozos” who now “hire bozos.” Its product is sold to businesses the owners have decided need marketing software. Lyons finds that HubSpot’s sales and marketing workforce outnumbers that of its software development staff. He becomes a recorder of the hype — from the trainer who tells him and the other new hires, “HubSpot is changing the world,” to Fearless Fridays doing arts and crafts or anything, as long as it’s not their actual job.

This is the kind of company Lyons and Martínez see attracting venture capital in the United States today.

Other kinds are chronicled in Martínez’s memoir, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. While Lyons gives an outsider’s look at start-up culture, Martinez immerses us in the sausage making at the factory floor level. But Martínez makes sure the readers know he’s not the typical technology entrepreneur: Lacking fortuitous “happenstance” or “membership in a privileged cohort” — paths others have taken to success in Silicon Valley — he succeeded through pure “skullduggery.” His views on just about everyone in that space, from venture capitalists to his old boss, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg, are cultural-myth shattering. His is a tell-all, no-holds-barred, in-your-face memoir with lots of explanation breaks. (This is how Google makes money selling ads. This is the definition of a derivative.) Martínez’s Silicon Valley is a haven for sociopaths with work addictions, a mostly male bastion of ego-infused tech culture where women are either hot receptionists and/or sexual conquests.

Chaos Monkeys is part ego trip, part how-to book. Although Martínez doesn’t seem to be a trustworthy sort of person who has the reader’s best interest at heart, his approach to his subject matter is lively, authoritative, and unconventional. His book is definitely a worthwhile read.

Both memoirs make clear that tech culture doesn’t reward introspection, empathy, or other attributes required for literary journalism to be written and read. Of the five books reviewed here, only Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think is hopeful, making the argument that technology may be changing us for the better. Humans can use — and are using — technology to enhance their thinking, communicating, and problem-solving skills. He rightly points out that new technological shifts in media have always caused anxiety. Scholars worried the printing press would result in huge quantities of books without any way for the truly great ones to stand out. Instead of imperiling writing, however, the Internet has led to more people doing it. “They were all writers who were reading each other’s stuff, and then writing about that too.”

Thompson qualifies this rosy picture with an acknowledgement that he is choosing to focus on the positives technology offers. He agrees with Carr that new digital tools are making it more difficult to concentrate, that it’s up to individuals and institutions to know when and how it’s most beneficial — and least destructive — to use them. “At their best, today’s digital tools help us see more, retain more, communicate more. At their worst, they leave us prey to the manipulation of the toolmakers. But on balance, I’d argue, what is happening is deeply positive.”

Among the positive developments for literary journalism has been the explosion of multimedia-infused, long-form journalism sparked by the New York Times’ “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 2013. Over the years, developers have streamlined these presentations for easy viewing on mobile devices, where news consumers, especially Millennials, are spending much of their media time. But the phone is a distracting technology, especially when used in public spaces filled with other electronic stimuli, such as television. Crawford says we need an “attentional commons,” urging us to fight for distraction-free zones with the same urgency with which we preserve public spaces like libraries and parks.

To “reclaim the real” in a more general sense, however, Crawford recommends shifting focus from technology to “the intention that guides its design and its dissemination into every area of life.” As we learn more about the siren song of addictive technology, we are becoming more suspicious of it. For literary journalism, the warnings sounded by authors such as Alter bode well. He believes the answer to behavioral addiction lies with consumers reining in their own use and that of their children. Digital tools can still benefit their users as long as they do not overpower personal relationships and social bonds. Corralling technology’s reach is also important on a personal level. While we often watch, swipe, and interact with social media to amuse ourselves, we read literary journalism and other thoughtful, well-crafted texts to achieve greater things. “It matters,” writes literary critic Harold Bloom, “if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves.”

It’s not more time we need to get to that great read, or even fewer devices. It’s a different outlook.

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Spring 2018 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Jacqueline Marino joined the journalism faculty at Kent State University after spending more than a decade writing non-fiction stories and essays for magazines, newspapers and alternative newsweeklies. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Plain Dealer, and the literary journal River Teeth, among other publications. She is a former associate editor of Cleveland magazine and the author of the book White Coats: Three Journeys Through an American Medical School.

Aaniin! Aankwadaans n’dzhinikaaz. Maiingan n’dodem. Chippewas of Georgina Island n’doonjiba. Anishinaabe n’dow.1

This is a traditional greeting, in the language of my people. It’s how I identify myself among my people: my name, clan, community, Nation. But, like many people, I have multiple identities. I recently became a visiting journalist at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism in Toronto. This essay arises from a question Bill Reynolds, my colleague at Ryerson, asked me. In an effort to help Indigenize the curriculum at Ryerson — which, in fact, is happening across Canada right now in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report’s Call to Action 86 — Bill approached me and said, “Can you recommend any literary journalists that I can discuss in my class?”2

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I said, “That’s a great question, Bill.”

Initially, I couldn’t come up with any names. There are a few, such as Dan David, but there were so few that I thought to myself, What’s up with that? Why are there so few Indigenous writers who have taken up the form of literary journalism? So I would like to walk through my thinking process after I asked myself that question.

I’m also going to talk about my own book, The Shoe Boy, my venture into literary journalism outside my CBC career. The book itself I won’t talk about too much, but rather the challenges I faced. There were two.

My primary struggle was simply recalling the story. The Shoe Boy is about the five months I spent hunting and trapping with a Cree family in northern Quebec, near the community of Chisasibi on the shores of James Bay. I’m Ojibway, so this is a different tribe among whom I lived. The trip occurred in 1988, so writing the memoir was a search-and-rescue mission in some ways, writing when I was in my forties about my 17-year-old self. That was a typical challenge that anyone writing a memoir would face.

The second challenge, as an Indigenous author and journalist, was to deconstruct the two-dimensional, imaginary portrait of the Indian that, unfortunately, still exists in North America. When I start to think about Indigenous voice I have to go back to Canadian literature itself. Historically, in Canadian fiction, the Indian has been a pretty conventional figure. There are lots of them and they share one common trait — they have little or no voice. For example, Duncan Campbell Scott’s work is often included in the canon of Canadian poetry, yet his writings about Indigenous people portray a noble yet vanishing race whose ways of life were doomed. When Indigenous characters literally spoke they often used florid, romantic language. Consider, for example, the fearsome Iroquois in E. J. Pratt’s long poem, Brébeuf and His Brethren: “I have had enough… / Of the dark flesh of my enemies. I mean / To kill and eat the white flesh of the priests.” Indigenous people in these works are often subordinate characters because their movements are always in relation to the white figures in the story — their existence, in other words, is contingent upon the white person. The Indian is either shown as a kind of faithful friend (Tonto the sidekick, speaking in monosyllabic grunts), or the savage foe (“the Indians are coming to surround the wagon trains!”).

In Canadian literature we see the denial of Native voice, all of which helped the colonial project, which ultimately was about land dispossession. So, when Margaret Atwood wrote her seminal survey of Canadian literature, Survival, she did not include or comment on any Indigenous authors. Fortunately, since the early 1970s, when Survival was published, Indigenous authors are becoming increasingly well known to readers in Canada and around the world: Tomson Highway, Thomas King, Drew Hayden Taylor, Eden Robinson, Katherena Vermette, Lee Maracle, Tracey Lindberg, Richard Wagamese, and Richard Van Camp, to name but a few. Thanks to them, we are now beginning to see Indigeneity expressed in more full and complex ways as they give Indigenous perspectives on human relationships, on relationships with the land, on relationships with the spirit world.

Turning to Canadian journalism, sadly, many journalists in this country have continued the same tropes that we’ve seen in Canadian literature. Indigenous people certainly have been underrepresented in journalism — there is a lack of stories about Indigenous people and their communities — but they have also been misrepresented. Many journalists — ostensibly in the pursuit of truth — have presented Indigenous characters as nothing more than pitiful, penniless, and powerless.

Over and over again, on the front pages of our newspapers and leading our news broadcasts, the stories of Indigenous peoples are presented through a narrow lens by journalists who fail to identify or appreciate the complexities of Indigenous culture, history, or politics. First Nations in the news are often cast only as burdens upon Canadian taxpayers, or impediments to Canadian progress.

For me, The Shoe Boy was about getting beyond news coverage that, in Canada, so often rehashes those tired victim and warrior narratives. Let me briefly use my experience writing The Shoe Boy to illustrate some important tenets of Indigenous literary journalism, and perhaps you’ll see how they dovetail with some key principles of literary journalism.

Pablo Calvi has described concerns about journalists being “extractive” in gathering their information from Indigenous peoples. The way I describe it to students is that journalists have often been not so much storytellers as story-takers.

As an Indigenous journalist, I could not be a story-taker when it came to The Shoe Boy. The book is about a real family, a Cree family, who are very much still alive. Robbie Matthew, Sr., is still very much a well-respected elder in the Cree community. And so, unlike my practice with my CBC work, I shared the text with him and his family and asked for their blessing to publish it. That was important — to be part of the circle, to share the story, to gain consent.

In the work of Indigenous writers, we see Indigenous peoples presented not as a homogenous group but heterogeneous, with as many differences as similarities. As an Ojibway writing about the Cree community in The Shoe Boy, it was important for me to convey the diversity among Indigenous peoples. I ventured to the trap line in James Bay to learn more about my own Indigenous heritage, but not being able to communicate in the Cree language of my hosts, I was a fish out of water. The irony of being the Other during this cultural journey wasn’t lost on me, even as a teenager.

Another aspect of literary journalism as practiced by Indigenous writers is an exploration of duality. In my own work I see splits between urban and rural, contemporary and traditional life, Indigenous spirituality and Christianity. These splits aren’t problematic; they’re part of Indigenous life. Where non-Indigenous writers may interpret such divisions as antagonistic, Indigenous writers are more apt to explore Indigeneity as a broad spectrum of experiences.

Finally, when we begin to examine Indigenous literary journalism, more humor shows up in the representation of Indigenous people. There’s a scene in The Shoe Boy where I receive some letters from my girlfriend, who lived far away, near the city of Toronto. I’ve been in the bush for four months — I’ve had no contact with her. Robbie looks over at me and smells the scented Coco Chanel that she has dabbed all over the letter — which was quite exciting to a 17-year-old — and he says, “Those videos — all the kids wanna do it doggie-style now.” For the record, this is not how a traditional elder typically talks — but that sense of humor is common among Indigenous people.

If I were to apply an analytical lens to the few examples of Indigenous voice in Canadian literary journalism, I would use debwewin, an Anishinaabe word that roughly translates to “truth.” Truth is one of the Seven Grandfather Teachings, a set of principles my people believe help ensure the survival of our communities by teaching us the important ways to live as a human being.3 I don’t speak Anishinaabe myself, although I am learning. When I think about debwewin I look to the writings of Basil Johnston, a famous Anishinaabe writer, storyteller, language teacher, and scholar. In addition to publishing 16 books, from novels to memoirs, Johnston was a foremost authority on Anishinaabemowin (the Ojibway language), who produced numerous language resources, teaching guides, thesauruses, and dictionaries. Johnston said that, when you literally translate the word debwewin, it means that you “speak from the heart” and, he said, “a speaker casts his words and his voice only as far as his vocabulary and his perception will enable him.”

The elders often say, “Don’t talk too much.” That’s a common teaching among our people. The point is not to keep children quiet, but to talk about things that you know. That’s what Johnston is getting at when it comes to debwewin. That’s at the heart of David Treuer’s work as well, in his first work of full-length nonfiction, Rez Life. Treuer turned his eye for detail as a novelist upon his own people, the Ojibwe of northern Minnesota, to produce a work that combines history, journalism, and memoir. In examining his own reservation, Treuer in Rez Life delivers representations of the Ojibwe as a complex and humorous people who defy stereotypes.

When we look at truth and literary journalism and the whole narrative framework, debwewin means there is no absolute truth. The best a speaker can achieve, and a listener can experience, Johnston tells us, is a very high degree of accuracy.4

I believe we will see more Indigenous literary journalism in the future, as Indigenous writers and journalists continue to grow and flourish. And, if we begin to apply debwewin as an analytical lens to Indigenous literary journalism, then we’re heading for a very exciting place indeed.

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

Join for Free and Never Miss a Story

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Spring 2018 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Duncan McCue has been a journalist at CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) for almost 20 years, as a television news correspondent and, more recently, as host of the national phone-in radio show Cross Country Checkup. He also teaches a course called Reporting in Indigenous Communities at the University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Read: Footnotes

“That’s good thinking there, Cool Breeze.” I was hooked the moment I read these words way back in 1982. I was a cadet journalist on The Age in Melbourne, Australia, when a respected senior colleague said if you want to know about the LSD scene in the sixties, if you want to see what can be done with journalism, read Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

It’s not journalism, it’s a book, I thought, but I bought a copy and read that opening sentence. It just drops the reader right into the middle of the San Francisco heads scene, poking fun at Cool Breeze’s paranoia about the law while he is garishly dressed and riding in the back of a pick-up truck. “Don’t rouse the bastids. Lie low.”

Closing the book 370 pages later, I had had a mind-expanding experience of my own. That journalism did not have to stop at hard news — “A family of four has been killed in a car collision…” — was the first revelation. Wolfe’s book opened a door in my mind; I glimpsed a house at once larger and designed in ways I’d never imagined before. What I really loved, though, raised on a diet of newspaper columns, bland, formal, and parental, was how Wolfe, who died at age 88, in 2018, talked directly to me as a reader. And he wrote with a frankness unheard of in newspapers — “I pick it up and walk out of the office part, out onto the concrete apron, where the Credit Card elite are tanking up [their cars with petrol] and stretching their legs and tweezing their undershorts out of the aging waxy folds of their scrota.” Once seen, that’s an image I’ve never quite been able to unsee.

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Ask most readers their first impression of Wolfe’s journalism and they will mention his highly individual voice, his “wake-the-dead prose style,” as David Price put it in an aptly vivid phrase for a Nieman Storyboard piece. Reading more of Wolfe’s work over the years evidenced other things — his fascination with trends, his zest for ideas, his obsession with status, his eye for the satirical, his use of a range of narrative methods, his interest in journalism’s history, and, finally, his politics, which I have to say I found unappealing. But what has stayed with me is the distinctiveness of his journalistic voice, and I have often wondered where it came from.

Unlike many journalists, Wolfe has always been happy to discuss his own work. In “Like a Novel,” one section of the long essay, “The New Journalism,” that introduces the landmark anthology he co-edited with E.W. Johnson, that bears the same title, The New Journalism, Wolfe writes that he would try anything to capture the reader’s attention when, early in his career, he began writing for a new Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune. The status of this and other supplements was then “well below” that of newspapers: “Readers felt no guilt whatsoever about laying them aside, throwing them away or not looking at them at all. I never felt the slightest hesitation about trying any device that might conceivably grab the reader a few seconds longer. I tried to yell right in his ear: Stick around!”

It was hard not to stick around, given the audacity and inventiveness of devices Wolfe employed to keep readers’ attention. He opened a piece about Las Vegas for Esquire magazine in February of 1964 with the word “hernia” written 57 times, mostly in lowercase but sometimes as “HERNia,” before asking the question that must have been on every reader’s mind: “What is all this hernia hernia stuff?” The answer is that if you say the word hernia quickly, repeatedly, it sounds like the spruiking of craps table dealers in the casinos. Other journalists might have noted that the hubbub in a casino sounds like the word hernia, but few would make what is actually a slight observation the focus of their opening paragraph, and none other than Wolfe would have magnified it into the playfully intriguing, attention-seeking device it is. Nor is the wordplay gratuitous; the question “What is all this hernia hernia stuff?” is actually asked by a man named Raymond who exemplifies the impact Las Vegas’ surreal, never-closed atmosphere has on the senses. Wolfe reports that Raymond has been awake for 60 hours, continually gambling, eating, drinking, and taking drugs: His senses were “at a high pitch of excitation, the only trouble being that he was going off his nut.”

As the repeated use of the word hernia was unmissable, so was Wolfe’s idiosyncratic approach to punctuation, which included abundant use of exclamation points, ellipses, parentheses, and dashes, partly as a way of breaking up gray slabs of text on a magazine page and partly because, as he told George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review, in a 1989 interview, he was emulating the novelist Eugene Zamiatin (whose name is sometimes spelled Zamyatin): “In We, Zamiatin constantly breaks off a thought in mid-sentence with a dash. He’s trying to imitate the habits of actual thought, assuming, quite correctly, that we don’t think in whole sentences.” Wolfe uses ellipses sometimes to leave an implication dangling and sometimes for emphasis. For instance, in “The New Journalism,” he writes that those who don’t believe journalism is important should take up other work, like becoming a “noise abatement surveyor….” In the next paragraph, extolling the pleasures of saturation reporting, he writes “‘Come in, world,’ since you only want … all of it….” Sometimes onomatopoeia is deployed, as in his description of Baby Jane Holzer in a 1965 article, “The Girl of the Year,” whose brush-on eyelashes sit atop “huge black decal eyes” that “opened — swock! — like umbrellas.” At other times, flouting George Orwell’s dictum, “Never use a long word when a short one will do,” Wolfe chooses rarefied words, such as “gadrooned,” as he did in his article “Radical Chic” to describe the decorative motif on the cheese platters being served the Black Panthers because, he says, it gave the piece “bite” and because it was less important the reader might be unaware of the word, as they could be “flattered to have an unusual word thrust upon them.”

As the love of wordplay suggests, for Wolfe there is a strong performative element in his journalistic voice. In “The New Journalism,” he derides the virtue of understatement in journalism as “that pale beige tone” which is accompanied by “a pedestrian mind, a phlegmatic spirit, [and] a faded personality.” He, of course, exhibits the polar opposite, for better and for worse. The essay overflows with the journalistic equivalent of soaring rock star lead guitar solos, everything from denunciations of newspaper columnists’ “tubercular blue” prose to fond evocations of desperate competitiveness in the feature writers’ “odd and tiny grotto,” and from amazement at Gay Talese’s storytelling feats (“I’m telling you, Ump, that’s a spitball he’s throwing…”) to heralding the arrival of the “accursed Low Rent rabble” with their “damnable new form” that was set to dethrone the Novel as “literature’s main event.” Sometimes, Wolfe extends his performance by adopting what he calls a “downstage voice,” mimicking the tone and vernacular of, say, Junior Johnson, the stock car racer from Ingle Hollow, North Carolina, or, in The Right Stuff, of test pilot Chuck Yeager.

What characterizes Wolfe’s journalistic voice, then, are: exaggeration, energy, inventiveness, playfulness, a keen sense of performance, and a wickedly satiric eye. His voice has won glowing praise and sharp detractors. William McKeen, author of the one of only two book-length studies of Wolfe’s work, calls him the Great Emancipator of Journalism for his contribution to expanding the possibilities of non-fiction writing. Norman Sims, author of True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism, recalls how Wolfe’s voice astonished and captured him as a student in the 1960s, not least because Wolfe appeared to have access to interior lives of the people he reported on. John Hartsock, author of a respected history of literary journalism in the United States, notes that what “most attracted readers to Wolfe and created a critical furor around him were his linguistic pyrotechnics that seemed to pose a taunt to advocates of standard English usage.” On the other hand, James Wood, the literary critic, has frequently lambasted Wolfe’s work, especially his fiction, but also mocked his “screeching italics and arrow-showers of exclamation points, and ellipses like hysterical Morse code.” Whatever Wolfe’s critics might say, his journalistic voice is instantly recognizable, widely copied, and has been so influential over the past four decades that it is hard to recapture its sheer freshness when Wolfe burst onto the scene back in the mid-1960s.

A Look at the Beginnings

Despite Wolfe’s standing as a leading figure in the loose group known as the New Journalists and the attention from scholars his work has attracted, little work has been done on the origins of his journalistic voice. What attention there has been has accepted Wolfe’s own version of how he discovered his journalistic voice, partly because Wolfe is as good at telling stories about himself as he is at telling others’, partly because he has told it so often in interviews, and partly because to date much of the primary source material has been unavailable.1

Wolfe laid down what Tom Junod called “his own origin story, his own creation myth” in the introduction to his first collection of journalistic pieces, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. By the time the book was published in 1965, Wolfe was 35 years old and had been in journalism for nearly a decade. He described his growing frustration with the totem newspaper’s way of reporting the lives of anyone outside officialdom, which is to say, “the totem story usually makes what is known as ‘gentle fun’ of this.” Wolfe was fascinated by the minutiae of people’s lives and the meaning they invested in their interests, such as hot rod and custom cars. Taking an assignment from Esquire magazine, he trekked to California and collected a welter of material. After returning to New York, he found himself blocked for a week, whereupon his editor, Byron Dobell, with a photo of an exotic car already laid out and deadline looming, told him to type up his notes and Dobell would knock them into shape. Wolfe takes up the story:

So about 8 o’clock that night I started typing the notes out in the form of a memorandum that began, “Dear Byron.” I started typing away, starting right with the first time I saw any custom cars in California. I just started recording it all, and inside of a couple of hours, typing along like a madman, I could tell that something was beginning to happen. By midnight this memorandum to Byron was 20 pages long and I was still typing like a maniac. About 2 a.m. or something like that I turned on WABC, a radio station that plays rock and roll music all night long, and got a little more manic. I wrapped up the memorandum about 6:15 a.m., and by this time it was 49 pages long. I took it over to Esquire as soon as they opened up, about 9:30 a.m. About 4 p.m. I got a call from Byron Dobell. He told me they were striking out the “Dear Byron” at the top of the memorandum and running the rest of it in the magazine.

It is a story that is at once neatly shaped — the only editorial change required was deleting “Dear Byron” — and evocative of Romantic-era myths surrounding writers with a capital W. Wolfe recycles it in his introductory essay in The New Journalism. Other than noting Wolfe’s penchant for self-promotion, most of those who have written about Wolfe’s work have repeated this story uncritically, including McKeen; Brian Ragen, author of Tom Wolfe: A Critical Companion; and Marc Weingarten, who, in From Hipsters to Gonzo: How New Journalism Rewrote the World, added little more than that Dobell had cut Wolfe’s repeated use of the phrase “for Christ sakes” and written the “throat-clearing headline.”

New knowledge about the origins of Wolfe’s voice became available in 2014 when a rich source of primary material, Wolfe’s papers, was deposited in the New York Public Library. There are eight audio files and 219 boxes of documents. The bulk cover the period from 1960 to 1998, comprising, among other things: correspondence with family, friends, colleagues, and sources; drafts of stories, clippings, research files, reporter’s notebooks, photographs, drawings, and miscellany, such as invitations to events, tickets, and invoices from tailors in Savile Row, London, for various bespoke items Wolfe had ordered.

Initially, the archive was not digitized and put online, so the materials were available for use only in the library. Staff in the library’s manuscripts and archives division are discreet about the identity of researchers, but at least one is known because he wrote about the papers in Vanity Fair. Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short, is probably as big a name in journalism today as Wolfe was in earlier decades. In a lengthy piece headlined “The White Stuff” (or, in the online edition, “How Tom Wolfe Became … Tom Wolfe”), published in November of 2015, Lewis sieves the mass of material to find out how the man whose work first inspired him to write did what he did. It is a fascinating piece, which would be expected from a journalist of Lewis’ caliber, but equally intriguing was how Lewis has, by and large, reinforced Wolfe’s “origin story” and how he underplayed the impact of an important event in Wolfe’s life, namely that he initially failed his Ph.D. thesis and has rarely, if ever, discussed that publicly. There is ample material in the archive that, first, suggests a longer, subtler, and, yes, less dramatic origin story for Wolfe’s journalistic voice; and, second, a connection between the revised origin story and the gap in how Wolfe has represented his time as a postgraduate student at Yale University.

With only limited time to examine the Wolfe papers during a visit to New York in 2016, this research draws on nine of the 219 boxes, mostly those covering his childhood and early writings, but there is more material that shows just how early Wolfe was exhibiting signs that were to become his signature during the 1960s. His penchant for $10 words surfaced early. In one story written during high school at St. Christopher’s in Richmond, Virginia, when stock car racers came to town, he wrote about the “revered, calorific drivers,” later describing how one of them drove with “an even wilder, more sulphurous zeal than ever before.” His teacher questioned the appropriateness of this usage but graded the story 83 percent. Fellow students also noticed his vocabulary: In an issue of Washington and Lee University’s monthly magazine, the Southern Collegian, an article by Wolfe carried the following precede: “Verboze T.K. Wolfe redeems himself with this sterling sports recapitulation of the Class of ’51.” It is verbose; Wolfe drops the words “nabobs” and “verdant” into the opening paragraph.

Wolfe wrote a column called “In the Bullpen” for St. Christopher’s school newspaper, the Pine Needle, in 1946-47, which is filled equally with original phrase-making and sporting clichés. More important, one column is cast in the form of a “scene” inside a gym where a football coach is talking to his players before the game. Headlined “Carnage, Inc.,” the piece opens with “Scene: A quaint, docile gymnasium tucked in among the pines of a peaceful community.” It soon becomes apparent the scene is imaginary; the coach is trying to calm his bloodthirsty charges, one of whom has a giant plaster cast on his arm that flattens a section of wall that he has inadvertently brushed. The interaction between coach and players is recorded as dialogue, complete with stage directions:

Coach: Boys, boys, I’m beginning to doubt your intentions in Saturday’s game.

DeVanport (cleaning his fingernails with a three-foot ice pick): Now, now, Coach, don’t worry — everything we do is for the honor of Alma Mater.

Welterflood (sharpening his cleats): And besides, who knows, a few scalps might do wonders for the study hall.

Coach (taking a bottle of aspirin tablets out of his pocket): This skull practice is getting me down. Come, little monsters, out we go to the playing field.

Yes, the scene is imagined and adolescent, but what is striking in light of Wolfe’s famous listing of narrative devices in “The New Journalism,” is how he deployed two of them — scenes and dialogue — decades beforehand as a teenager for a school newspaper column. His response to the world around him, even in the narrow confines of student journalism, is to construct and dramatize what he sees.

At university and then at graduate school while studying for a doctorate, Wolfe tried his hand at fiction, poetry, and journalism. One short story entitled “Goddam Frozen Chosen” and written in 1955-56 has signs of Wolfe’s hyperkinetic approach to sentence structure. Set in Seoul during the Korean War, the story aims to capture the chaos and boredom of military life and portrays U.S. soldiers stumbling around naively in brothels or drunk while on duty:

They are laughing so hard, so pointlessly, the words come out only between various wheezes, sighs, gasps, moans, shrieks, hiccoughs, all manner of inscrutable convulsions and suspirations: “My god” — gasp, wheeze, shriek, moan, sigh, whistle “another god—” — snuffle, wretch, pule, slobber, roar — “goddamn frozen Chosen [hotel] — DON’T LET HER GET AWAY!” — blam! — a plug of elm tree explodes out amidst the essential elements, blood, fire and urine. Only Lt. Woods can hit the trees, however. Lt. Glassock is so drunk, he can barely get the rifle out the window, besides that this swivel chair in here is … a … real … mother! Blam! — wah- whwahwahwahwahwahwah, gasp, shriek, moan, sigh, oh scrogging frozen Chosen.

And so, it goes on. Wolfe, perhaps inspired by Zamiatin, whose work he read while at Yale, aims to imbue his story with a linguistic style that mirrors the chaos of the soldiers’ experience, but he does not yet have the control to make this passage seem much more than a word salad. Overall, the story is hard to follow and not especially engaging.

It was in his doctoral work in American studies at Yale University, though, that Wolfe made his first sustained attempt to marry fictional techniques with non-fiction material. For his dissertation topic, he investigated how the Communist Party of the United States during the 1930s and early 1940s set up, controlled, and manipulated the League of American Writers, an organization whose 14,000 members included some of the nation’s most respected authors. The topic, and Wolfe’s argument that members of America’s literary establishment were susceptible to communist control, prefigures Wolfe’s continuing preoccupations — and his battles — with liberal establishment leaders in literature, art, and architecture, especially over his works “Radical Chic,” The Painted Word, and From Bauhaus to Our House.

Alongside conventional methods of academic research and writing, Wolfe presented his findings in what looks like an early version of the New Journalism. A draft chapter entitled “Beaux Arts on the Barricades” opens with a brief narrative reconstruction of a North American artist leading “a band of guerrillas in an unsuccessful machine-gun raid on the Cocoayan, Mexico, home of Leon Trotsky,” before moving to what readers of Wolfe’s later work would recognize as his popular sociological style: “Legions of less famous artists were clogging the stale corridors and second-story flats of lower Manhattan where, grimly, vicariously, with veins popping out on their necks, they spent the decade arguing those issues so intimate to them all.”

After the awkward use of an archaic word, “shatterpating” (meaning to shatter, or scatter your brain), Wolfe cranks up his rhetorical armory to dismiss the relevance or legacy of socially realistic art and writing of the 1930s: “What happened to all those starveling workers, lardiform politicians, billy-happy policemen, eroded landscapes, hookwormy sharecroppers, humble-shouldered mestizos, unbound proletarian Prometheuses, and poor old hemp-collared colored men which filled up such vast wall and canvas space barely 15 years ago?” In style and sentiment this passage would not look at all out of place in Wolfe’s so-called breakthrough Esquire piece about custom cars.

In a draft of another section of the thesis, Wolfe reconstructs a session of the House Committee on Un-American Activities from 1947, complete with stage directions for an exchange met with “applause and boos” between the chair and a writer:

The scene was actually a good deal more uproarious than the transcript of the hearing reveals. Thomas [the chair] was shouting at Lawson [the writer], hailing police officers, and battering his desk top. Lawson was holding the witness table in chancery before him, crouching like a Greco-Roman wrestler behind it, and shouting into his microphone. Press photographers were ricocheting off one another at close quarters and setting off flash bulb explosions. Three hundred public spectators there in the caucus room of the old House Office Building were whooping, hollering, hissing, whistling, laughing, stomping on the floor — like any Friday night boxing crowd at the Uline Arena 18 blocks away.

The examiners of the thesis did not exactly warm to Wolfe’s approach. Michael Lewis thinks that is because they were a bunch of stuffed shirts.

Maybe they were, but that may be only half the story. A fidelity to factual accuracy is a bedrock of both long-form journalism, or literary journalism, as it is also known, and scholarly research. As Norman Sims has noted, many literary journalists research their topics as intensively as a doctoral student.2 University faculty who have both professional journalism and scholarly research experience are able to see many continuities as points of contrast between the two activities, especially in research and the practice of long-form journalism, or literary journalism. If that is the continuity, then yes, the contrast is in the prose. For anyone with literary aspirations, the form of the conventional Ph.D. dissertation can be frustratingly rigid.

It is easy to see why Wolfe would have chafed against it. But if Wolfe had simply engaged in hijinks for his Ph.D. dissertation, that is not what most concerned the examiners. They all actually believed that he wrote “very skilfully.” Further, they found his argument convincing: “The literati were indeed manipulated by the communists,” wrote the American studies graduate supervisor, David Potter, on May 19th, 1956, summarizing the three examiners’ reports in a letter to Wolfe. What the examiners also found, though, and it is worth quoting at length, was that the thesis was:

Not objective but was consistently slanted to disparage the writers under consideration and to present them in a bad light even when the evidence did not warrant this; second, that you had relied on a one-factor explanation, which, in the opinion of the readers, may be valid but has not been proved and probably cannot be proved as a single operative factor. There was a third criticism which I had not anticipated, and which seems to me more damaging than either of the other two: this was the criticism that you misused your sources, giving incorrect quotations, misstating evidence, etc. All three readers checked various sources (a routine duty of readers) and all three made this criticism.

They had indeed; the three examiners’ reports make scarifying reading. One examiner wrote that Wolfe’s polemical rhetoric colors every page. “His use of pejorative and biased qualifiers and terminology seems at times to be little better than what he properly critiques on the part of others.” Another provided two pages of notes unfavorably comparing Wolfe’s descriptions with the primary source material. For example, Wolfe wrote: “At one point ‘the Cuban delegation’ tramped in. It was led by a fierce young woman named Lola de la Torriente. With her bobbed hair, leather jacket, and flat-heeled shoes, she looked as though she had just left the barricades. Apparently she had. ‘This is where our literature is being built,’ exclaimed she, ‘on the barricades!’” There was no description of her in the sources and the quotations did not appear in the references, the examiner found.

The reports presciently lay out evidence of later criticism — and praise — of Wolfe’s work. He does, of course, write “very skilfully.” He had an uncanny ability to pluck out an essential kernel about an issue or trend: identifying the self-expressive impulse behind the creators of custom cars, or the quasi-religious nature of the Merry Pranksters’ acid experiments, or the pretentiousness of many liberals’ identification with the Black Panthers, or the special bonds forged among the early astronauts in The Right Stuff.

Wolfe does tend to try to stretch his brilliant insights into an entire argument, though. Throughout his work, status is portrayed as not only the most important, but almost as the only source of motivation in people’s lives. That is, he relies too heavily on a “one factor explanation.” James Wood has consistently criticized Wolfe’s fiction, and one of his main points applies equally to Wolfe’s journalism: “The kind of ‘realism’ called for by Wolfe, and by writers like Wolfe, is always realism about society and never realism about human emotions, motives, and secrecies. To be realistic about feeling is to acknowledge that we may feel several things at once, that we massively waver.”

Finally, Wolfe has been criticized for his inaccuracies and for his misuse or misrepresenting of sources, notoriously over his two 1965 articles about The New Yorker, but also by eminent early literary journalist John Hersey and by various scholars. These criticisms were spurred in part at least by Wolfe’s ringing assertion that the New Journalism sat atop a bedrock of accurate reporting — “All this actually happened,” as he famously put it.

The essential elements not only of Wolfe’s journalistic voice, but of his overall journalistic and intellectual approach are already in place by the mid-1950s while he was still in graduate school. The importance of the Ph.D. thesis episode, then, is, first, that it undercuts the tidiness of Wolfe’s presentation of his own “origin story” and, second, that Wolfe’s response to Yale prefigured a series of fights he has had with people in the worlds of journalism, literature, art, and architecture, which reaches its apotheosis in his unedifying brawl with those he dubbed “My three stooges” — John Irving, Norman Mailer, and John Updike. On the first point, we can take Wolfe at his word that on the night he wrote the “Dear Byron” memo he experienced a sense of creative release when he broke through his writer’s block, but a read of the custom car article again today shows it actually does read, in many ways, like a very long memo. It is certainly ambitious for a magazine piece of 1963 in outlining a historically informed argument about the culture of custom car enthusiasts, but most of the piece stays close to the conventions of magazine journalism at the time. There is surprisingly little evidence of the fictional techniques that had so electrified Wolfe the year before when he read Gay Talese’s brilliantly evocative profile of former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis and exclaimed, “What inna namea christ is this.”

Wolfe’s use of fictional techniques is actually more evident in “The Marvelous Mouth,” a profile of Cassius Clay, as he was then known, that was published in Esquire in October of 1963, a month before “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” It is not clear, however, whether “The Marvelous Mouth,” was written before or after the custom car piece. Certainly, “The Marvelous Mouth” lead has the kind of journalistic conceit that Wolfe made famous with his “Las Vegas!!!!” piece, mentioned earlier, and reprints dialogue between Clay and his entourage. It also has a scene, more vivid than any in the custom car article, in which the dazzling boxer who was to become heavyweight champion the following year is forcibly reminded of his roots in racist Louisville, Kentucky.

A middle-aged white southerner shoves a train ticket receipt in front of Clay, saying, “In a voice you could mulch the hollyhocks with: ‘Here you are, boy, put your name right there’.” Asked if he has a pen for the autograph, the man says he doesn’t but is sure some of Clay’s people would. Clay has been staring at the piece of paper without looking up. After about 10 seconds, his face still turned down, he says: “Man, there’s one thing you gotta learn. You don’t ever come around and ask a man for an autograph if you ain’t got no pen.” Why would Wolfe not choose this piece for his “origin story,” especially as by 1965 when he told the story in the introduction for his first collection of articles, Clay had become heavyweight champion, defeating the seemingly invincible Sonny Liston, and shedding his “slave name” to become known as Muhammad Ali? Perhaps that had something to do with it; Ali was an extraordinarily popular (and unpopular) figure whose fame would have overshadowed that of the just-emerging young journalist. Ali was also an extraordinary individual whose approach to everything from race to self-publicizing to boxing challenged conventions and U.S. society and was less susceptible to Wolfe’s sociological approach. Perhaps, too, Wolfe knew this. In a 1966 interview with Vogue on the back of his first collection of journalism, Wolfe told Elaine Dundy that he never felt he had connected with Ali and admits that “I missed the important story about him: that he was getting involved with the Black Muslims at the time I was seeing him.” That he was still insisting on calling Ali “Clay” in 1966, two years after the boxer had changed his name, may offer a clue as to why he missed that particular story.

To understand the second point of importance requires knowing Wolfe’s response to the examiners’ reports on his Ph.D. thesis. And before that, requires knowing that Wolfe was brought up in a genteel, well-to-do family in Richmond, Virginia. Even well into his thirties he would address his letters home to “Dear Mother and Daddy” and sign them “Tommy.” The tone and vocabulary of the letters, indeed, vary little from adolescence right through to when he was making his name as a journalist in New York. His letters home, many of which are in the archive, are unfailingly polite, solicitous, and bland. They carry so few traces of Wolfe’s public voice that a reader begins to wonder what on Earth his parents made of his journalism. Writing to them on November 4th, 1963, that Las Vegas is “a monument to all that is grossest and flashiest in modern American taste,” is just about the strongest opinion he expresses in letters to his parents. It is a long way from “Hernia, hernia, hernia.”

In the archive’s holdings of letters to friends, Wolfe’s language is more colloquial and forthright, as might be expected, but his letter to “Chaz,” on June 9th, 1956, almost three weeks after he received the letter from Yale, fairly jumps off the page:

These stupid fucks have turned down namely my dissertation, meaning I will have to stay here about a month longer to delete all the offensive passages and retype the sumitch. They called my brilliant manuscript “journalistic” and “reactionary,” which means that I must go through with a blue pencil and strike out all the laughs and anti-Red passages and slip in a little liberal merde, so to speak, just to sweeten it. I’ll discuss with you how stupid all these stupid fucks are when I see you.

Wolfe is enraged; he doesn’t see, or want to see, what, if any, were the merits of the examiners’ findings, but he did revise the thesis and it duly passed so that he was graduated in 1957. From that point on, there appears to be no time when Wolfe publicly discusses the humiliating experience of initially failing his dissertation submission. In “The New Journalism,” he compares graduate school to being imprisoned. So “morbid” and “poisonous” was the atmosphere that it defied the many student inmates who promised to satirize it in a novel, Wolfe writes. Similarly, in the many interviews Wolfe has given over the years, a generous selection of which have been gathered by Dorothy Scura in Conversations With Tom Wolfe, he has little positive to say about the Yale experience other than it was where he was introduced to the work of social theorist Max Weber. In one interview, with Toby Thompson for Vanity Fair in 1987, when Wolfe’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published, Wolfe again recalled graduate school as “tedium of an exquisite sort,” while a friend of his, the novelist Bill Hoffman, was quoted saying, “The professors didn’t know what to make of him…. He was supposed to present scholarly papers, and he would write them in this fireworks style of his and just drive them crazy.”

It is true that some find graduate school a stultifying experience, just as it is true that others find it liberating or energizing. What is curious is that Wolfe has not publicly discussed the criticism made of his Ph.D. dissertation even though he clearly disputed it. It is one of the few episodes in his life where he has refrained from a public fight; usually he relishes them. Wolfe’s father held a Ph.D. from Cornell University. In his letters home that are held in the archive, Wolfe does not mention what happened at Yale other than to say the Ph.D. was a “horrible experience.” When Michael Lewis asks Wolfe in 2015 what he thinks about initially failing the thesis he submitted for the Ph.D., Wolfe says he harbors no ill will toward his examiners and thinks, in retrospect, that “Yale was really important for me.” It was 60 years later but it appears to be at least a tacit acknowledgement that the Yale professors may have had a point.

A Different Perspective on the Origins

The search for the origins of Wolfe’s journalistic voice in his papers at the New York Public Library sheds light on both how it developed and how Wolfe chose to represent it, and himself, in later years. Wolfe was celebrated initially for the zest and flair with which he plunged into 1960s U.S. culture, but what the material in the archive makes clear is how developed his ideas and style were by the time he found a congenial medium — the Herald Tribune’s Sunday supplement and magazines — and creative editors such as Byron Dobell and Harold Hayes at Esquire and Clay Felker at New York (which originated as the Herald Tribune’s Sunday supplement). There is evidence to suggest Wolfe had long had a penchant for the $10 word, which he deployed with an inventiveness that belies or at least qualifies Orwell’s dictum; he loved to dramatize events he wrote about and impersonate voices in print; and, as a result, he would understandably feel constrained by the rigid conventions of academic writing and, later, news reporting. As one colleague said of Wolfe’s time at the Washington Post between 1959 and 1962: “Every time he turned out something fresh and original, he found himself assigned to a story on sewerage in Prince Georges County.”

Nothing in the library’s archives dims that memory of the first rush of excitement at reading Wolfe’s work. His journalistic voice remains highly original even though a reading of George C. Foster’s journalism via Thomas Connery’s Journalism and Realism shows that other journalists experimented with capturing the rhythms of speech in newspapers as long ago as the mid- 19th century. The archive does, though, diminish the sense that his voice was first and foremost a response to what he described as “the whole crazed obscene uproarious Mammon-faced drug-soaked mau-mau lust-oozing” scene in the 1960s United States. Wolfe’s journalistic voice is actually a good deal more constructed than was apparent to a young journalist, for better and for worse. That is clearer now, to someone who has since then read a lot more literary journalism and studied it closely. As an older academic, too, I can appreciate the critique of Wolfe’s work by those crusty old examiners at Yale, even if describing his writing as “very skilful” is correct but utterly juiceless. It would be as if Wolfe had simply written in that passage in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that some drivers had got out of their cars and filled their petrol tanks. That’s accurate but not exactly something you see in your mind’s eye — let alone something you can’t unsee.

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The Postscript

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Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Fall 2018 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Matthew Ricketson is an academic and journalist. He has worked on staff for newspapers and magazines in Australia and led journalism programs at three universities, including Deakin University, where he is a professor of communication. He is the author of three books and editor of two.

Read: Footnotes

Ted Conover delivered this address on May 17th, 2018, at “Literary Journalism: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy,” The Thirteenth Annual Conference for Literary Journalism Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Austria.

First, thank you to Isabel Soares for the kind introduction, and thanks to David Abrahamson and the board for the invitation to speak to you today. And thanks to Tobias Eberwein for organizing everything.

As I don’t need to tell this audience, Tom Wolfe died the day before yesterday. Would any of us be here if Wolfe had not been? It’s hard to know. He was not only a founding practitioner of this literary craft, he was its chronicler and analyst. His analysis of what he said were its constituent parts — scene, dialogue, point of view, and status detail — strikes me as accepted orthodoxy now. I’d read most of Wolfe’s books over the years — my favorite is The Right Stuff — but until I was writing up the bibliography for my book Immersion three years ago, I had never read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. My friend Jay told me I had better, and so I did. What a joy to read.

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Wolfe was doing what is now often called “immersion writing” — identifying a fascinating group of people, getting to know them, and then setting off with the group as, to some degree, one of them. He called it “saturation reporting” — another water metaphor, but it’s the same thing. (Harper’s Magazine titled its collection of first-person immersive pieces Submersion Journalism).

I had not known that I was an “immersion journalist” until maybe 10 years ago, when my colleague Robert Boynton of New York University suggested it. It’s a label I accepted, though it doesn’t apply to much of my work. Nor had I considered my background in ethnography to be a constituent element of this tendency until Boynton suggested that this was a way I might engage in a conversation with the academy. I am glad that the study of literary journalism includes both practitioners and theorists. My mind works basically on the level of experience and narrative, but I appreciate it when others take a step back and think about the underlying issues of experientiality and narrativity. I will leave it to experts who are here to decide if my remarks today do anything to advance the academic discussion.

Typically, when I’m at a podium, telling stories is what I’ve been asked to do. So let me start out with some early stories, and then share some thoughts on how I’ve come to value and pursue experience as the basis of my writing.

In junior high school and high school in Denver, Colorado, I wrote for the school newspapers. And I took long-distance bicycle rides with friends. We started out mainly riding into the Rocky Mountains and back, sometimes for several days at a time. At age 15, my friend Lane and I took a three-week trip by ourselves through New England. At age 18, my friend Ross and I rode from Seattle to the East Coast, to begin college in Massachusetts. Riding across North America, we liked to say, was our way of getting to college.

The coast-to-coast journey was somewhat grueling, but at the same time it was exhilarating. My freshman year of college was harder. High school in Denver had been an easy place to earn an “A,” but writing essays for my courses at Amherst College was demanding, perplexing, even excruciating. In my “spare time” I wrote an account of the bicycle ride that had brought me there. My goal was to publish it in the school paper, which I did. To write about that experience was easier and more enjoyable for me than to write the papers my professors wanted. For one thing, I could write in the first person, which has always felt most natural to me. For another, I could write about something I had felt or seen myself rather than just read in a book. Experience was a topic that was genuine, and writing about my own experience put me in a position of absolute authority.

(Just as an aside: Journalism, at this point, was something I practiced and valued, but it was separate from writing about my experience.)

A year or two after I published about my bicycle journey in the weekly student newspaper, I wrote about it again in a class on personal essay (back then called “autobiography”). The assignment was to describe an occasion of celebration. What had I celebrated? How had I celebrated?

I had recently read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a travel book and a book of ideas, many of which perplexed college-age me, but one of which stuck in my head. A college instructor is trying to help a student who is having trouble writing. Narrow it down, he tells her: Instead of writing about the whole town, write about one building. Instead of writing about the whole building, write about the front of the building. “Start with the upper left-hand brick.”

I decided to write about not the general experience of celebrating crossing the country on my bicycle, but about the final hour of my bicycle odyssey. The professor really liked it, and so I tweaked it and sent it to one of the handful of publications I subscribed to at the time, Bicycling! magazine (with an exclamation point!). They bought it, to use in the column that comprised the final page of each month’s issue. And they paid me $100! Now we were getting somewhere.

A year later, I left college to spend a year as a VISTA Volunteer in Dallas. I worked as a community organizer for a poor people’s group that published its own bilingual newspaper, People’s Voice/La Voz del Pueblo. While I was there, the Hare Krishnas bought and moved into a former motel complex nearby; the decrepit units filled an entire block. I decided to write an article about the community for People’s Voice. So I made an appointment to stop by. I was ushered into the office of a young man whose head was shaved except for a ponytail in the back and who was barefoot and dressed in a saffron-colored robe. As I entered the room, this man stood up from his desk, took the long, heavy carnation garland from around his neck, and placed it upon mine. Whoa! What’s the journalistic rule about that? I tried to refuse the gift and so I lifted it back over my head, but he looked shocked and upset when I did, so I put it back on. Later I marveled over it: They were proselytizing a community newspaper reporter!

I ended up spending three days in the community, during which I got up before dawn, chanted, helped to prepare vegetarian food, etc. The piece I ended up writing was a regular feature story, only lightly first person, but in retrospect I think the material I’d gained would have justified a deeply first-person piece about recruiting by cults, with my experience in this community an example.1

Not long after, I returned to Pamplona, Spain, where I’d spent five weeks as an exchange student in high school. You see, there was a girl there. And the local coordinator of the program said he thought he could get me a job in a big sausage factory, translating technical manuals. He helped get me the job, but I never did translate technical manuals — I simply worked on the different assembly lines, packaging aged chorizo, putting cans of meat products into cardboard boxes for shipping, etc. During the Festival of San Fermín, I got up at dawn, joined a group of my co-workers who all were wearing the same blue-and-white-checkered shirts, and ran with the bulls.

For years, I didn’t write about it … until one Norman Sims, a professor of journalism at University of Massachusetts—Amherst, whom I think some of you know, asked, along with his editor David Abrahamson, if I’d like to write a foreword for True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism. Then finally, I got to write about that.

The most important watershed for me was the experience that began as ethnographic field work for my undergraduate anthropology thesis. It differed from my earlier experiences in important ways:

• It was a lengthy and difficult and unusual thing for a person my age to do.

• It was done explicitly for schoolwork (though my college wouldn’t give me credit), so I had to pay really close attention and carefully document everything that happened.

• It was about something other than myself — real people, living in a way freighted with historic, mythic meaning. I wanted to understand how they looked at the world.

• And while it had an adventuresome aspect, like the bike rides or the summer in Spain, much of it felt more like a trial.

My advisors insisted that the first-person voice remain segregated from the rest of my thesis, in a final chapter that I titled, “A Field Experience in Retrospect.” Writing that final chapter felt a bit like writing about my long bicycle journey had during the first semester of my freshman year. I wanted to do more of it and, as some of you know, I soon did, in what became my first book, Rolling Nowhere.

My next books followed that pattern: imagine an unusual social world that I could take part in, insinuate myself in, find a place for myself in it. The goal, as in the projects I’ve just described, was to have an experience. Approached in a self-aware fashion, an experience produces scenes, characters, dialogue, point of view, and even, as Wolfe put it, status detail. If the people whose lives I visited were connected in some way to important issues (homelessness, immigration), then the experience could be topical, the book (or the writing) might be considered journalistic. My next projects, mostly books, were about a year of travel with undocumented migrants from Mexico; wealthy people in Aspen, Colorado; East African truck drivers and AIDS; prisoners and guards in New York’s Sing Sing prison; and the way people interacted with a variety of roads around the world, from woodcutters along a mud track in Peru’s Amazon rainforest to Israeli soldiers and Palestinian students in the West Bank, to freshly minted middle-class drivers in China to an ambulance crew parked inside a highway cloverleaf in Lagos, Nigeria.

First Person an Earned Perspective

Wolfe is present as a first-person narrator in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test but just barely. It’s now a frequent strategy in narrative non-fiction: The writer uses “I” not because she’s important to the story as a character, but rather to help set a scene, to give the subject somebody to talk to. Over time Wolfe moved away from that — there is no first-person narration in The Right Stuff, for example.

But I don’t think this prefigured the current trend. My observation is that journalism, and our written culture generally, has been moving in the direction of more first person over the past 30 or 40 years. Increasingly, journalism is making room for personal accounts. Memoir and personal essay began their boom in the 1980s and 1990s, and from there the rise of the internet lifted and carried first-person writing to new heights — or lows, according to your point of view. Among the reasons I see are:

• The move away from a presumption that journalists can be objective, and toward a journalism that is subjective but aims to be fair.

• The proliferation of first-person voices on the web, the lowered bar to publishing, alongside the decline of the primacy of a few main news companies or providers.

Finally, society’s evolution away from a positivist model of knowledge — where to be worth mentioning, propositions must be provable — also seems relevant. In my mind, the traditional, 5Ws style of journalism reflects the positivist tradition, and literary journalism the humanist. So you have the “just the facts” tradition engaging in a conversation with a room full of poets; and literary journalism, at least sometimes, is the result.

The first person is something I’m open to, and even encourage in my teaching. But I tell students that in journalism the first person must be earned. It must be justified by the value it adds, generally in terms of interest. I explain to them that, while they should include details of their life experience that are relevant to their journalism, they should be careful about using too much because we are not memoirists. Writers of memoir have for raw material their remembered stories of life-as-it-happened-to-me. Writers of literary journalism have as their raw material their reported stories of life-as-I-sought-it-out. Our raw material is reported. We may borrow the memoir’s “I,” which, as Vivian Gornick observed years ago in her seminal book, The Situation and the Story, is different from an “I” in fiction. She wrote:

A novel or poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. Into those surrogates will be poured all that the writer cannot address directly — inappropriate longings, defensive embarrassments, anti-social desires — but must address to achieve felt reality. The persona in a non-fiction narrative is an unsurrogated one…. The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.

In memoir or literary non-fiction, the “I” must be sincerely inhabited, believed in, and ring honest and natural.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading the manuscript of a new book by Shane Bauer, the writer for Mother Jones who got a job as a private prison guard in Louisiana in order to write about the experience. His 35,000-word piece was something of a sensation — it won the National Magazine Award for reporting, the Goldsmith Prize for investigative reporting, the Hillman Prize for magazine journalism, and many others. In the new book, to be titled American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment, Bauer essentially adds to his long article by interleaving a historical story of U.S. prisons, particularly plantation prisons in the South. These historical chapters alternate with the present-tense, first-person story of Bauer’s four months as a corrections officer for a private prison company. He makes a persuasive argument that the prison farms, an outgrowth of slavery, led organically to the growth of corporate prisons, whose use is growing in the United States under President Donald Trump after shrinking under President Barack Obama. He tells the story, for example, of T. Don Hutto, who was warden at plantation prisons in Texas and Arkansas before becoming a cofounder of the Corrections Corporation of America. It’s a very good book.

I found American Prison particularly interesting not just because I worked undercover as a guard for my book Newjack, but because I’d read Bauer’s first book, a memoir entitled A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran. Bauer was one of three hikers who, in 2009, with his wife and a friend, inadvertently crossed the border from Iraqi Kurdistan into Iran and got arrested. Bauer, in other words, is one of the few people on Earth who has been a prison guard, and a prisoner, and can write.

There was little mention of Iran in his story for Mother Jones about working as a CO in Louisiana, and I wondered if there would be more in the book. The answer is yes, but not a lot — I would have welcomed more. What there is, though, is very effective. As he nears four months on the job, he finishes a 12-hour shift during which he has found a prisoner carrying a packet of marijuana and sent him to solitary confinement for it. According to the terms of the job, of course, it’s the right thing to do. But Bauer is conflicted about, as he puts it, “sending someone off to the dungeon for drugs.”

The inmate’s face is full of guilt. He says nothing. I put it in my pocket, walk out of the tier, and feel something heavy and dark pour over me. What am I doing?

When I get home, I draw a bath. I pour a glass of wine, then another, and another. I try to empty my mind. Inside me there is a prison guard and a former prisoner and they are fighting with each other, and I want them to stop.

I decide I need to end this. Four months is enough. I’m going to quit.

The research strategy called immersion writing can be wonderful for producing literary journalism. It turns experience into research. It can turn an interview into an encounter. It suggests there’s a place in journalism for a journal, a diary.

But let me suggest some contraindications. Immersion is not sufficient in and of itself, because not all experience is interesting. I’m a lifeguard at a swimming pool — so what? I’m driving a taxi — big deal! A writer who would attempt this approach needs to appreciate that sometimes experience is a story, while other times it is merely boring. That can be true even if a subject is in the news. Working in a prison? Thousands and thousands of people can tell you it’s one of the most mind-numbing, uneventful jobs there is. You can grow old and unhealthy working in a prison. The would-be immersion writer needs to consider whether her presence in that world, or her focus on it, might be inherently interesting.

Bauer’s stories and mine both benefitted from the tension of secretive reporting. Would someone suspect our true identity? Might we inadvertently give ourselves away? Could liberal, college-educated us make it in that milieu? Also, notably, both of us sought out difficulty. I found work in a famous old prison known for its present-day chaos. Bauer found work in a newish private prison that few outside of Louisiana had ever heard of, a place where conditions were so bad (and wages so low) that they had trouble finding enough employees to keep it running. This is where a background in journalism helps one to judge the potential in a story. The journalist asks: Is there conflict, is there challenge? Is there urgency, are there links to larger issues? Is there a way for me to meaningfully participate in that world?

What a good immersion journalist appreciates, I think, is that unpleasantness and adventure can go together. Difficulty is often interesting. Of course, it doesn’t need to be unremitting difficulty: Readers need a break now and then, and so do we.

A good immersion journalist, also, is not passive. Yes, you need to look and listen and be patient. Sometimes you need to be a fly on the wall. But if you are that fly, and nothing is happening in that room, then sometimes you need to relocate. You need to buzz over to a room that is more interesting.

Finally, like all journalists, in my opinion, a good immersion journalist should not think too highly of him- or herself, particularly when writing in the first person; which is to say, his or her narrative persona should not. He is not the subject. Rather, the subject is the subject, and the first person a way of writing about it, a way of telling a story. The writer might be crossing the border, he might be working undercover, but he is not the hero.

This is where empathy comes in. For if we are visiting the worlds of our subjects, and trying to understand them, we need empathy. Bauer and I direct ours in different directions. In both our books, the first-person writer is interested in the prison (as an institution), in the prisoners, and in the guards. But Bauer, I think it’s fair to say, is a bit more interested in the prisoners, and I am a bit more interested in the guards. The why is an intriguing question. Part of it may be that Bauer himself was a prisoner for over two years in Iran. He has feelings about guards and prisons that are different from my own. Another part of it is probably that the guard cohort I was part of has a real culture, reinforced by a union and a long history of families and communities doing the same line of work. In Louisiana at the Winn Correctional Center, the guards may very well have been working at a Home Depot last month. And if prison doesn’t work out for them, they might be at Walmart next month.

Also, I think we’re different because of anthropology, which helped to form my journalism. While Bauer works firmly in the tradition of the undercover exposé, I’m more interested in an inside look at secret worlds, at interior understandings — by rituals, by relationships of dominance and submission, by the division of space, by the shared lingo of the keepers and the kept.

And not just an inside look, perhaps, but an inside feel — I want readers to know the dread I had most days when dressing for work, to understand the fear I repressed when I walked inside. And I want to share the aftermath of that repression, the dreams of being a prisoner that I had months later.

Anthropology also taught me reflexivity, pausing to consider the ways I was and was not “like them.” The ways that I could and could not understand their lives. Bauer expends his energy in other directions. He wants to show the dangerous negligence of the Corrections Corporation of America, the moral bankruptcy of the profit motive.

And we differ in our information gathering. Bauer writes about his use of a ballpoint pen that is also a voice recorder, and a watch that is a camera. The voice recordings let him produce substantial conversations — dialogue that is not merely recreated, as in most non-fiction, but actually transcribed. I spurned this kind of surreptitious note taking — to me it felt too invasive, the kind of thing a federal agent would do when trying to bust up the Mob. It would have made officers into my quarry, rather than my teachers, as in the ethnographic model. But wow, some of what Bauer captured is just stunning.

Both of us aim to show the impossible nature of the job: how hard it is to preserve one’s humanity, one’s better self, the corrosive effect of weeks and months of locking men in little boxes, of spending all day saying “no.” Bauer does this in his own way: He has passages on the discomfort of being gay-baited, of being treated like a sex object, that I would be proud to have written.

All of which is to say: There is no single way to do immersion reporting. How you do it will depend on your own predilections, and on the situation. Bauer and I both resolved not to lie when taking on our prison jobs. We had no problem with letting people draw a wrong impression, but we would not invent backstories or otherwise actively deceive. And we both shied from reporting on our subjects’ personal lives outside of work, as that seemed beyond the pale, and extremely hard to justify. Both of us, while being willing to write a fair amount about ourselves, included in those disclosures stories of how we messed up. For me, at least, the goal is to connect with readers via transparency and, again, to not puff myself up as the hyper-competent, and confident, hero of my own tale.

But I hesitate to offer this approach as a universal prescription. There is no single way to report literary journalism. I think we agree that the one indispensable ingredient is journalism, some kind of fact-based writing about events of the day. But that superstructure of the 5Ws can be adorned with all manner of humane sensibility, stories told in all kinds of ways — many of them, I’m quite sure, yet to be revealed.

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the Fall 2018 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

As a journalist, Ted Conover has written for a smorgasbord of periodicals, ranging from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to National Geographic, not to mention The New Yorker. For sociologists, he might be described as the epitome of the participant-observer. For enthusiasts of journalism with a literary flair, he is the renowned author of books such as Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails With American Hoboes (1984), Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders With America’s Illegal Migrants (1987), and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2000), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Price. His most recent work, Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep (2016), explores the very essence of literary journalism.

Read: Footnotes

On several occasions I have been asked by our community of literary journalism scholars about the specificities of the Belgian branch and which household names featured prominently in our national pantheon. The question always left me perplexed, if not flummoxed, because in our Belgian academic world we often look upon the Anglo-American, and increasingly French, heritage for inspiration, both at education and research levels. In a tiny country straddled between two main cultures — Flemish-speaking in the north, French-speaking in the south — and with a capital city that is a true Tower of Babel, a home for many Eurocrats and expatriates — identifying a homegrown literary journalistic tradition and commendable writers proved more complicated than expected.1 I was at a loss for names — until I came across Pascal Verbeken’s reportages.

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His dedication to collect voices unjustly unheard, to bear witness to events we are unaware of, and to share heart-breaking testimonies from both survivors and dreamers, is inspirational. Verbeken tells stories of a country through its unsung heroes, be they Flemish, Walloons, or Brusseleirs.2 His reportages are imbued with human substance. They are enlightening chapters on the history of Belgium nobody ever bothered to teach us, albeit vital to the understanding of who we are as a nation, with Brussels as its epicenter, the heart of the European project that is currently given a rough ride. Not only does Europe fear the seismic fallout from an impending Brexit, the United Nations Global Compact for Migration has also prompted a planetary commotion. And Belgium is not immune to the rise in populism and nationalism, which adds to its own political aggravations.

Pascal Verbeken was born in Ghent in 1965. He studied germaanse filologie (Germanic Philology, i.e., Dutch and English linguistics and literature) at Universiteit Gent, and later became a journalist. He has written and been part of the editorial teams of some of the greatest national papers publishing in Dutch, such as De Standaard, De Morgen, and Humo, and has also worked as a documentary filmmaker for the two national public channels, VRT (Vlaamse Radio-en Televisieomroeporganisatie) and rtbf (Radio Télévision Belge Franco- phone). He has been a freelance writer for several years and was a member of the jury of the Stichting Verhalende Journalistiek (Foundation for Narrative Journalism) in the Netherlands. Today he devotes most of his time to non-fiction and benefits from the official status of nonfictie schrijver (non-fiction writer), a unique initiative of the Vlaams Fonds voor de Letteren (Flemish Fund for Literature), which promotes literature in Dutch both at home and abroad.

Verbeken has penned several books, often shortlisted for prizes in non-fiction literature. While his first book also exists in French, the others do not exist in translation — a regrettable omission — which is why I take a few lines to present his work. Indeed, Verbeken deals with subjects that are of particular interest to an international audience. Albeit rooted in Belgium, his stories have a much wider appeal. All of them are the result of long hours spent crossing the country, in search of the lived experiences of common people. His first book, Arm Wallonië: Een Reis door Het Beloofde Land (Poor Wallonia: A Journey Through the Promised Land), published in 2007, documents the massive Flemish exodus to French-speaking Wallonia in the early 20th century.3 The contrast between the then-poverty-stricken northern part of the country and the rich south interrogates the clichés that are dying so hard in a country where the economic situation has been radically upended.

Walking in the footsteps of his predecessors, be they anonymous witnesses or well-known figures, has become Verbeken’s signature. Tranzyt Antwerpia: Reis in het Spoor van De Red Star Line (Transit Antwerp: A Journey Following the Red Star Line), published in 2013, started with the memoirs of Benjamin Kopp, a Jewish adolescent who migrated to the United States in 1911 from his village of Nowe Miasto nad Pilica in Poland. The author reflects on the brave journey of one young man to reveal the story of millions of people en route to America aboard the Red Star Line ships. This testimony is Verbeken’s conduit to documenting the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe, some of whom never made it to the New World. In Grand Central Belge: Voetreis door Een Verdwijnend Land (Grand Central Belge: Walking Through a Disappearing Country), first published in 2012, the author crosses Belgium, a land of promise and industrial power that ranked second only to Britain before the 1960s. Verbeken collects testimonies from the witnesses of Belgium’s past glory and current decline.

Duistere Wegen: Reis naar Vincent Van Gogh in De Borinage (Dark Ways: A Journey to Vincent Van Gogh in the Borinage) is Verbeken’s 2015 book that takes the form of a travelogue through the region, beautifully illustrated with sketches by the painter himself, as well as postcards and documents of the period. Verbeken writes about the life and times of Van Gogh, who ended up in the poor region of the Borinage. The darkness of this coal-mining territory is reflected in the artist’s work and is featured prominently in the text. The narrative is a tour de force, which provides rich historical substance to understand a devastated region too often despised and ignored. As for Brutopia: De Dromen van Brussel (Brutopia: The Dreams of Brussels), the journalist’s latest book is an invitation to discover the ambivalent and cosmopolitan European capital through its cultural, historical, and human patrimony.4

Verbeken’s narratives strike a sensitive — and sensible — chord. He looks at the few droplets that reveal the ocean. His micro-stories, the products of time well spent with sources, relentlessly walking the roads of the country, reflect a bigger picture and fill the cracks of grander narratives that ignore the plight of the disaffected and downtrodden.5 To help us navigate these turbulent waters, he generously offered his time to discuss his inspirations, epiphanies, tools, and techniques, his past and present projects, and his indefatigable wanderlust. The conversation was typically à la belge — multilingual — yet mostly in French, in which the author is highly proficient, with occasional questions, comments, and references in Dutch and English. The interview, transcribed in English, is complemented with additional notes from previous research and suggestions from the author himself.

This moment of grace took place on March 13th, 2019, at Monk Café in Brussels.

Isabelle Meuret: Literary journalism has often been labeled as an American genre. As a well-established Belgian journalist, what or who are your main influences? Has your writing been molded by the New Journalism and its stable of exceptional writers?

Pascal Verbeken: There has always been a particular distrust of the New Journalism in schools, but most people are clueless about what it really means. Tom Wolfe and his like were perceived as narcissistic dandies indulging in some sort of inchoate, non-rigorous journalism, with the author taking precedence over the text. Sure, Hunter S. Thompson and his guns, shooting at his typing machine, that was part of the pizzazz, the glamour. But these guys were excellent writers.

Meuret: Thompson was indeed an outstanding political journalist.

Verbeken: Sure. Think of Hell’s Angels, for instance. That type of journalism was of great interest to me also due to its connection to music. One of Thompson’s buddies was Warren Zevon, a fascinating American storyteller. My influences are not only writers and journalists, but significantly also musicians. Bruce Springsteen’s “Youngstown,” for example, is a song about an industrial town in Ohio, exactly as Seraing, a central location in Arm Wallonië.6 “Youngstown” had itself been inspired by Dale Maharidge, this famous reporter, whose books I devoured, in particular Journey to Nowhere on hobos, and Homeland, about a fast-changing America.7 Stories told by ordinary people had a tremendous impact on me. Maharidge has also written And Their Children After Them, a sequel to James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Maharidge returned to the very places visited by Agee and Evans back in the ’30s to see what had changed. All this was an incredible revelation to me: It all started with “Youngstown” on my preferred album — The Ghost of Tom Joad — which itself hails from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. You see, this journalistic genre does not come out of the blue, it does not rest upon the ego of some self-infatuated New Journalists. The genre is rooted in the societal substratum. At least that is clearly the case in the United States.

Meuret: What about European roots? Is there such a tradition of literary journalism in Europe?

Verbeken: The roots in Europe are to be found in literary works, fiction novels from the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries. Germinal by Émile Zola, or Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, one of my favorite books, to which we can add travel writing by Gustave Flaubert.8 So, I wouldn’t say that the genre was invented by the Americans.

Meuret: In Transyt Antwerpia, you make numerous references to Ryszard Kapuściński and Joseph Roth, notably at critical moments, after your visits of Treblinka, Auschwitz, and the Warsaw ghetto.

Verbeken: At the time of Transyt Antwerpia, I was only discovering Roth. Besides being a novelist, he was an incredibly talented journalist. In my own work, the literary element is limited. What I am doing is first of all reportage, or récit du réel (literature of the real), which I prefer to the term literature. The latter immediately conjures up the imagination or some aesthetic effort to produce ornamental or affected effects, which I definitely resist. This is why I avoid the use of literary journalism, although of course style, composition, selection matter. The license to create in the non-fiction writing I’m doing now is indeed impossible in traditional or mainstream journalism. For instance, Arm Wallonië starts with a letter addressed to Auguste de Winne, another journalist, who wrote in 1902, in whose footsteps I walked and worked.9 Similarly, Brutopia begins with angel Saint Michael, a statue adorning the top of the Hôtel de Ville (town hall) in Brussels, addressing the reader and then returning in the conclusive chapter. Such imaginative techniques, I admit, are literary.

Meuret: Can you elaborate on your tools and techniques? What can you tell us about your writing process?

Verbeken: Transyt Antwerpia differs from my other books because it was commissioned by the Red Star Line Museum.10 They had a coffee table book with the story of the museum, but they wanted a volume that would tell the stories of some two million refugees from Eastern Europe that transited through Antwerp with the hope to start a new life in the United States or Canada. I had access to some existing migrant stories and chose that of Benjamin Kopp, a young 16- or 17-year-old man, who left his village near Warsaw, Poland, and embarked on this long adventure to Antwerp, and then America. So I did Kopp’s journey again, through Europe, and took notes of the changes in all the places and villages he crossed. His past story is intertwined with and mirrored in the present. This journey took us — me and Hermann Selleslags, the photographer — to Auschwitz, where the Red Star Line had a travel agency, believe it or not.11 The Red Star Line had agencies everywhere. Decades later, the trains that went from Auschwitz to Belgium took the opposite direction, this time from the so-called Kazerne Dossin (Dossin barracks) in Mechelen, to the death camps.12

Meuret: It is such a well-researched story, substantiated with copious facts and detailed figures about deportation and executions. The documentation in Transyt Antwerpia is impressive: maps, photographs, official documents, register pages, illustrations. Paradoxically, visualizing the dry, factual data — the names on the passenger lists, leaving Antwerp or arriving at Ellis Island — makes the story all the more moving. And the sketches and posters drawn by artists at the time, as well as the photos by Selleslags, are not merely aesthetic — they also bear witness to this tragic chapter in history. How do you organize your research, before traveling and writing?

Verbeken: It’s a mixed approach. I do some prior research and also visit archives when I travel. In Warsaw I visited a Jewish records office. What struck me the most is that this whole Jewish story was an absolute taboo in the village where Kopp was originally from, because the Jews who did not leave the village were stranded in a ghetto in 1942 and then all deported to Treblinka. On our visit to the village, we were alone. It was snowing. We took a taxi at the station in Treblinka, about 80 kilometers from Warsaw. Everything was closed in the camp. Nobody was there. No one.

Meuret: Transyt Antwerpia sheds light on devastatingly dark moments, which you document thoroughly, starting from only one human destiny but with a view to reveal the magnitude of the tragedy. It is the harrowing story of one young adolescent leaving his village in Poland, escaping a doomed future. At the same time, it is a universal narrative, the story of extermination.

Verbeken: Right, but there are always limitations to a story. My own journey had to come to an end, in Antwerp, and not, ideally, in New York, where obviously Kopp still had a niece.

Meuret: On a very different account, Arm Wallonië also features the lives of ordinary people and the tragic moments they went through. Why was this chapter of Belgian history, with starving Flemish workers migrating to French-speaking Wallonia … silenced for so long?

Verbeken: That story was an eye-opener for me too. When the documentary was shown on television, the reactions were always the same: How come we did not know about this? My explanation is that every village has its secrets.

Meuret: The book is also a way to rediscover areas that are totally disregarded today, like the Borinage, a poor region in the Hainaut province of Belgium.

Verbeken: Arm Wallonië, and also Grand Central Belge, have deeply altered my perception of Belgium. The added value of reportage or non-fiction is precisely this: storytelling — récit du réel — makes it possible to show the ambiguities of a reality and to have access to the humanness of such realities. This is what I call an eye-opener. I’m thinking of this 98-year-old woman, Clarine Trossaert, probably deceased today, who arrived in 1918 with her parents from Scheldewindeke (a village in Flanders) in Marchienne-au-Pont, near Charleroi. For the first time in her life she had seen electric lighting. That was such a change from the poor village where she came from in Flanders. All her life she worked in industry. In her old age, while staying at a residential home, she saw on television that her home village had become the richest commune in the country. It was such a shock, as her new surroundings, where she had migrated, had gone through a completely different evolution and had notoriously one of the highest unemployment rates. This anecdote shows that everything changes so fast, in just one life, without people having any power to impact their realities. Such massive changes totally escape ordinary people. Politicians are speaking above common people; they are so far from the realities experienced in difficult milieus. It is too easy to blame ordinary people. In politics there is this myth that you can change society, but reality is a whirlwind and the real capacity of people to alter their environment is limited. In this café, we are now talking, but next week we may be in a different reality. We realize that Europe is going down a dangerous slope, but we do not know where it will end. At some point in the past we thought that, thanks to social security, the welfare state, everything was safe, and would be safe forever.

Meuret: Your books are timely: They make us think about the consequences of migration.

Verbeken: Yes, they show the similarities and also the differences. Migration has always existed, but the social security is certainly a major difference. Getting back to my influences, beyond the literary sphere, I would certainly mention Alan Lomax. He crossed the United States to record old songs, like an anthropologist. His American Recordings constitute an enormous archive of blues music.13 This is a major influence: The old miners in their eighties or nineties whose voices I was collecting in the tradition of oral history were also the last witnesses of a certain reality. Grand Central Belge is a reservoir of incredible stories, and few people see the value of these stories.

Meuret: The final lines in Transyt Antwerpia read as follows: “Het bestaat. Het is verteld. Het is opgeschreven.” (“It exists. It is told. It is written.”) It reads like a promise held — a job accomplished. You are collecting an invaluable patrimony.

Verbeken: I was biking the other day and drove past the oldest oak tree in Liernu, Belgium. It is supported by a complex scaffolding. We are making all these efforts for this tree, but not for those who are wasting away in old people’s homes. In many of these places no one comes to visit them.

Meuret: You were also a member of a jury for non-fiction writing in the Netherlands [Stichting Verhalende Journalistiek]. Can you tell us more about non-fiction writing in Dutch, this time in the Netherlands?

Verbeken: I was a jury member until last year — I did it for three years, not just for writing, but also in radio, television. There is a difference between the Netherlands and Flanders. The “true” narrative reportages (with sketches, scenes, etc.) do not really exist, or are rare, in Flanders. In the Netherlands, Chris de Stoop or Lieve Joris are major authors.14 Joris lives in the Netherlands, but she is the grande dame of Flemish non-fiction. Sure, Flemish papers De Standaard and De Morgen certainly feature longform reportages, but you won’t find innovative narrative techniques, as in the Netherlands, where non-fiction prevails and is connected to the Anglo-American tradition. Reporters used to crisscross the country on foot for magazines such as Vrij Nederland in the ’90s and ’80s. In the heyday of such journalism in Flanders, of so-called feuilletonists (serial writers) in the ’50s and ’60s, Gaston Durnez [born 1928] followed Flemish workers in Wallonia. He published 13 grands reportages on a daily basis in 1954. This would be unthinkable today.

Meuret: You write longform narratives in reaction to Twitter and fast news?

Verbeken: Not deliberately. It is just the rhythm I prefer. Some literary journalists may like to write in a “higher genre,” but I also appreciate short articles that are straight to the point. And that is rare today. What irritates me the most in journalism today is the mix of genres: opinions, or moral lessons, which you find in articles that are supposedly informative. I don’t get it. It is very much the case in the French-speaking press in Belgium, and much more in Belgium, paradoxically, than in the Netherlands, a Calvinist country. The Dutch would find moralizing in the newspapers not appropriate at all, not even serious. I don’t want to give lessons; I like to present an ambiguous reality. Talking to extremists or Islamists is a non-issue: If you write on reality, you need to talk to everyone.

Meuret: Your books are the results of long conversations, interviews.

Verbeken: Yes. The life lived by ordinary people. The problem of the current press is that opinion pages, both in Flanders and in the French-speaking part of Belgium, are written by academics and journalists. Universities, the media, are a subculture. To describe the changing reality in Cureghem or Sint-Joost, citizens are the real experts.15 Newspapers and magazines make too few efforts on that account. When you see what happens in Europe today, there is this malaise, from Stockholm to Athens, where people do not feel they are being heard. It goes well beyond the gilets jaunes.16 A large proportion of the characters in my books are common people, but it’s no dogma, because my books also feature people like Philippe van Parijs, an intelligent Belgian thinker and academic. Still, in the media, there is a glaring omission of testimonies by ordinary people.

Meuret: Local stories are also missing in the current press.

Verbeken: You’re absolutely right. They are too expensive. News articles about cities, towns, are increasingly the products of media circles. When I worked for Humo, as part of the editorial team, and until 2010, I was conducting interviews with politicians and ministers. I lost so much time, for three or four years. I regret that period of political interviewing that did not teach nor bring me anything. Increasingly interviews are made in advance. Most of the contents is pre-packaged. Politicians have a script, prepared by spin doctors and communicators who have their catchy sentences at the ready. Their sound bites hit the headlines. They know the content of the interviews before you do. As a journalist, I felt I was just a copywriter. That’s the reality of interviews in Belgian papers today.

Meuret: Hence the kind of narrative journalism you are doing now. Is “Charles Baudelaire à Bruxelles: Une Capitale de Singes” (“Charles Baudelaire in Brussels: A Capital of Monkeys”) published in Wilfried, a foretaste of Brutopia?

Verbeken: Yes. At the time I was writing that chapter on Baudelaire.

Meuret: You write that “Baudelaire was the spiritual father of flânerie. Wandering in the city with no aim, nor direction; observing from a distance; recording modern, kaleidoscopic urban life; breathing with your heels, as Chinese wisdom has it.” Are you such a flâneur?

Verbeken: I don’t see myself as a flâneur, which evokes the image of a dandy pacing up and down the grands boulevards. I am a promeneur (stroller). When you walk you see the right scale of things; there is a slowness in wanderlust. That’s also a subgenre in non-fiction. I recommend the remarkable Wanderlust, by Rebecca Solnit.

Meuret: Brutopia is divided into 10 chapters. Each chapter is devoted to one utopia?

Verbeken: Ten chapters, each devoted to a utopia invented in Brussels. Karl Marx wrote his Manifesto of the Communist Party here. Communism is a utopia. The Quartier Nord (northern district) was an architectural utopia. The Forêt de Soignes (Soignes Forest) was a magnet for all kinds of utopists, including a community of libertarian anarchists, called l’Expérience (The Experiment). Today Stokkel is a neighborhood of embassies, big villas, gated communities. Somehow it is also a community of anarchists, people who don’t pay taxes, avoid taxation altogether. At the time, libertarians wanted to establish a new society. Expo 1958 (Brussels World Fair), the creation of the social security, these were other utopias. The red years, with their garden cities, maisons du peuple (people’s houses).17

Meuret: The Maison du Peuple in Brussels, a jewel of Art Nouveau designed by Victor Horta, was destroyed in 1965.

Verbeken: Exactly, this precisely symbolizes the demise of a utopia. The chapter thesis is that socialism, which started developing in the second part of the century, stopped there, with the demolition of its own temple. Total nonsense. Nobody was under pressure, it was self-inflicted. So, yes, Brutopia presents 10 utopias related to Brussels, including, of course, the European Union.

Meuret: Is Brutopia an attempt at rehabilitating Brussels?

Verbeken: Brussels is a city with enormous potential, and the utopias are evidence thereof. Brutopia is not anti-Brussels, but the book asks an implicit question: How come Brussels, a city that lived for so long at the forefront of cultural life in the 19th century, is now lagging behind, compared to Amsterdam, for instance. When you arrive by train from Amsterdam Centraal (the main station) to Brussels and get off at the North Station at night, you are in the Third World. The surroundings are totally derelict. The implicit question foregrounded in Brutopia is somehow a throwback to Antoine Wiertz’s Bruxelles Capitale, Paris Province (1840): We are the capital city, but Brussels has lost it.18 Now the distinctive feature of utopias is precisely that they are bound to die the moment they should be materializing. The social security is a good example. It is taken for granted today, and few people are aware of how hard it has been fought for.

Meuret: What are you working on now? What is your next project?

Verbeken: I’ve just started this project on Sabena (for Canvas), a series of five documentaries to be completed in 2020, for the airline company’s anniversary in 2021. It’s a collective project, initiated by Margot Vanderstraeten for Diplodocus, a production company. The project is essentially oral history: We are talking with former pilots of Sabena. The story of the company is the mirror of Belgium. Congo is naturally very important in it, as well as sex cases, and how women were treated. Sabena is also a style, that of la Belgique de papa.19 For long, and until the 1970s, the company only had first-class travelers. I still have ideas for books, but I need time to read pieces by other journalists and learn more from their techniques. In Dutch, there exists an equivalent to Robert Boynton’s The New New Journalists. In Meer dan de feiten, edited by Han Ceelen and Jeroen Van Bergeijk, Dutch and Flemish writers talk about their works. I’m now reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I’m also a fan of Dave Eggers and Svetlana Alexievich. In Brutopia my reportages are fairly simple. An analogy with music would be “three-chord songs.” What I have not written yet is a more personal story. It’s something I have in mind, to write about my grandparents’ district in Ghent, and how much it has changed. In just seven years it has become a Bulgarian district. Through a personal point of entry — my office is in the street where my grandfather, a postman, used to live — I want to tell that story of a changing district. I’ll see what I can discover from there. Maybe the main reason behind Brexit was the entry of Bulgaria and Romania in the European Union. It was estimated that 15,000 people per year would come. As a matter of fact, 1.5 million left for the United Kingdom, above all to poor northern cities in England, the hotbeds of Brexit. There has been a dramatic change in populations in just a few years.

Meuret: Getting to know a Flemish writer is important. When can we read your books in English?

Verbeken: The London book fair is taking place right now. De Bezige Bij, my publisher, is well represented, and they have a strong network overseas. They showcase writers such as David Van Reybrouck, Stefan Hertmans. I think the future will be specialized websites. PCs and tablets will become marginal. Only smartphones will survive, which will have an effect on longform and how youth may access the genre. In the Netherlands, de Correspondent, the equivalent of the French Mediapart, whose business model is based on membership with no advertising, is a huge success. They have more than 50,000 members and are now starting their venture in New York. They publish instructive articles by journalists such as Arjen van Veelen or Rutger Bregman, who caused quite a stir at Davos when he addressed taxation and the fact that no one was confronting this contentious topic head on. His talk went viral on the web.

Meuret: Longform or creative writing is not taught at schools or universities over here.

Verbeken: We can certainly teach creative writing, and I regret I never attended such courses. Teachers in schools of journalism are rarely reporters; guests are invited for talks or conferences. There is some aversion towards the non-fiction genre in the academy. Investigative journalism is now the new fad, with investigations to unmask the powers that be. Unfortunately, narrative journalism has a false image, fashioned by people who are clueless, who do not know what they are talking about. Literary journalists do not necessarily write in an ornamental style or with overdone pathos. The American tradition simply rests on good writing. I had an opportunity two weeks ago to teach a class to sociology students at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. It was part of a project in which students must cross the city, observe, and describe what they see, work in an organization. The border between journalism and sociology was tenuous in the 1930s, for instance, with the Mass Observation Movement in the U.K. Humphrey Jennings, Humphrey Spender, among others, documented life in Bolton, a small industrial town, using sociological tools, including photography. To me, this discovery of the genre also came with music. Back in the 1980s I bought the album Love Not Money by Everything but the Girl. The jacket of the disc was a photo by Humphrey Spender: Two kids peeing on an industrial site — such a revealing picture. Literature, music, photography — everything is connected. All this got me into writing.

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

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The Postscript

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Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the June 2019 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Isabelle Meuret is associate professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Her research interests are comparative literature and literary journalism. She has published several articles in Literary Journalism Studies and was the guest editor of its special issue devoted to reportage in the French language.

Read: Footnotes

Mark Kramer’s “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists” may very well have been written with an Elinor Burkett in mind. A U.S. journalist with nine books to her credit, Burkett’s narrative journalism tackles social and cultural taboos with rigor, integrity, and a good dose of investigative reporting that serves as a study in how to intimately tell a story, while grounded in facts that are, as Kramer suggests, comprehensive and detailed. I interviewed Burkett over WhatsApp (an in-person meeting wasn’t possible), shortly after she arrived back in the United States from a visit to Zimbabwe, where she has made a second home and where I first met her nearly a decade ago.

Burkett’s journalism has also led her into other media-related areas: documentary filmmaking (one of which, Music by Prudence, earned her an Oscar in 2010 in the best documentary short subject category), longform journalism, general and specialized reporting, and the odd disquisitory op-ed.1 She made the switch to journalism in the 1980s. Already in possession of a Ph.D. in Latin American history, and on faculty for 13 years at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland, she went back to school to earn her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. This resulted in her somewhat cautious, by her own admission, entry into journalism in the late 1980s as an intern for the Miami Herald. The internship paid off, and she was hired by the newspaper, writing features for five years. Since then, Burkett has written for any number of publications, including the New York Times and Rolling Stone, while also holding Fulbright professorships in Zimbabwe and Kyrgyzstan, seamlessly blending scholarship and journalism.

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Burkett is no stranger to controversy. Some would argue that she courts it quite intentionally as a journalist. Her first foray into narrative journalism, co-authored with Frank Bruni, was their 1993 book A Gospel of Shame, which focused on the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church. Two years later saw her excoriation of the AIDS industry that highlighted how politics and greed rode roughshod over the prevention of what was still very much a deadly disease. In 1998, she turned her gaze both inward and outward, trying to make sense of why women would subscribe to conservative politics. The result was her 1998 book, The Right Women: A Journey Through the Heart of Conservative America. Burkett’s most telling (and perhaps prescient) narrative journalism is her 2004 text, So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All the Wrong Places. This is a story that provides insight into how at least one part of the world (the different -stans of the old Soviet Union, as well as Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Russia, China, and Mongolia) viewed the U.S., and how Burkett navigated the tensions and politics of a post-9/11 world that harked back to the Reaganesque views of the old evil empire, even as the term “axis of evil” became the new shorthand for places cast in the roles of villain by a good portion of the Western world. At the same time, she seems to relish the messiness that must come with having a big heart and being compelled to tell a complex story with integrity. Because Burkett, for all her toughness, tenaciousness, and contrarianism, is someone with a heart as big as the sky — ask the many young people from Zimbabwe who have gone on to great things academically with her support. She somehow always has place for one more person who wants to learn. With this in mind, I asked Burkett what propelled her into giving up academic tenure to pursue a career in journalism.

Elinor Burkett: When I turned 45, I realized that I was bored. At that point I had been in the classroom 18 years, teaching pretty much the same thing every fall and spring. I felt like I was getting stale. I had a sabbatical year coming up and decided to try out something new. I wasn’t sure what, so I asked everybody I knew what they thought I should do instead of academia, and a friend of mine, who was a journalist, said: “You’re curious about everything and like to do research. Give journalism a try.” I had no sense at that point that that’s where I would wind up. I just went to journalism school to try it out. But I liked it and then took an internship at the Miami Herald, which I loved. I don’t believe in burning bridges, so I took leave from my academic job and quit only after I’d been at the Herald for a year. Friends in academia were horrified. Who gives up tenure? But tenure felt like a trap. Too many people stay teaching because they have tenure, and it gives them job security, not because they love it. I no longer did. So why would I keep teaching just because I had job security?

Callie Long: Your Wiki page describes this move as a dramatic turn. Is that how you would describe it?

Burkett: No. I don’t know who wrote that, but I didn’t. It felt almost like a natural progression. I am a storyteller. That’s what a historian is. That’s what a teacher is. So, becoming a journalist wasn’t a dramatic break. It just led me to tell different kinds of stories — more immediate ones — in a different way.

Long: In So Many Enemies, So Little Time, you write that journalists at heart are storytellers. But what I really like is that you own up to the fact that stories tend to get messy on you. What do you mean by that?

Burkett: What I mean is that journalism is the first draft of history. But it’s only the first draft. It’s time sensitive, so you can’t do the wider research. You don’t — you can’t — know where the story is going to end, which is the great advantage historians have. You’re just capturing a moment. So, for example, just after the U.S. pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan, I flew into Kabul. There was a moment — I write about it in So Many Enemies — where I was going to interview a woman for the fifth or sixth time. I’m walking up the steps of her apartment building with my interpreter and another woman in the building opened her door and quietly asked my interpreter whether or not it was true that I was an American. When he said yes, she came out and kissed my hands in gratitude.

In the very first draft of the American invasion of Afghanistan, women were really grateful. But the story doesn’t stay stuck there. The story developed. People came to resent the U.S. To be angry with the U.S. Six months later, that same woman might have spit at me. But I was capturing an early moment that was true for its time. When I’m writing history, I’m working from documents that tell me what happened after the moment a journalist would have captured.

Also, as a historian, I work from material that is not changed by my intervention. When I’m interviewing a real human being, that person has emotions toward me as the interviewer, and that changes what the story is. Maybe the person wants to please me. Maybe the person is angry with me because of my nationality. Maybe the person just doesn’t like the color of my hair, or whatever. So, it’s harder to account for the prejudices that can creep in either by time or by personal intervention when you’re doing journalism.

Long: You have this narrow window in which you are crafting the story. If you’re doing regular reporting, that narrow window isn’t such a constraint. In longform journalism — and I’m thinking for instance of your opinion piece in the New York Times, “What Makes a Woman?” — you still have a big enough window to get the story done. But when you set out to write a book, and time just marches on relentlessly, then that window opening is very narrow. Can you talk me through the transition from regular reporting to writing a book?

Burkett: Any journalist who goes into a story without personally accepting the possibility or even the likelihood that you might be overtaken by events, and thus be wrong and have egg on your face, is being ridiculous. Because it will happen. And there’s nothing you can do about it. So, the most you can do is do the best you can do and grin and bear it if you if you’re overtaken by events. Think about all the people writing journalism who anticipated that Hillary Clinton would become the president of the United States and then they got a dramatic egg on their face because every poll was wrong. You just have to accept it as something that happens.

Long: Has that happened to you?

Burkett: Has it ever happened to me? Not that I can recall, but if my memory serves me well, it’s an accident. It’s not because I’m the world’s greatest journalist. It’s because I’m lucky. Avoiding being overtaken by the movement of history is not necessarily a matter of being good or persistent, which is what gets you great stories or interviews. Things happen. You cannot do anything to insulate yourself from that reality. My attitude always has been, you do the best you can, you make the best call that you can, and sometimes the call is going to be wrong.

Long: Listening to you, there’s a good dose of the historian in there, not just the journalist talking.

Burkett: That’s one of the things that’s always been different for me. When people interview journalists for jobs, they [the journalists] are often asked if they think of themselves more as writers or as reporters. I have always objected to this question, because my answer is, neither. I think of myself as a thinker. When I am asked to estimate how long a piece will take me, I always put in thinking time. Not just writing time and reporting time, but thinking time. So, any time that I am working on something, I give myself a good amount of time to think about it, to reread, to reconsider it. And that’s the historian in me. And the academic in me too.

Long: You mentioned earlier the notion of emotions in play and how people respond to you, and it reminded me of Mark Kramer’s “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists,” in which he discusses eight rules, one of which is that “literary journalists develop meaning by building upon the readers’ sequential reactions.” Do you have your readers’ [reactions] in mind when you’re writing and not only the people you are interviewing or writing about?

Burkett: Absolutely, as a narrative journalist. My goal is to serve my readers. If I am writing something and don’t consider who they are, then I am not serving them very well. So, for example, when I worked in Miami, I was dealing with a group of pretty conservative readers, and I needed to make sure that I wrote to them in a way consistent with who they were. If I know what your prejudices are, then I am in a better position to elicit the reaction that I want.

Long: What would you say to those who say that it’s manipulative, given the trend to disparage mainstream journalism?

Burkett: What’s wrong with manipulation? No, I’m sorry. That’s a little too facile. My goal is to communicate. If I speak French to a Greek speaker, I am not communicating. Why is what I do any more manipulative than speaking French to a French speaker? All I am talking about is using language and techniques to communicate more effectively with people. I have a real example. When I was writing my book about Golda Meir, I had to decide going in whether I was writing for people who knew a lot of Israeli history or people who knew nothing about Israeli history, because Golda is the history of Israel. Is it manipulative to make sure that I’m writing in a way that will make sense to people? I was very careful in that book to balance how much I told readers about Israeli history because I didn’t want to bore them. Or, if I’m writing for people whom I know will be instinctively anti-Israel, I’m going to be a little bit more thorough in explaining things in a way that might make them more sympathetic to what I’m writing about because I know that they have prejudices that they might not even know about that need to be addressed. That’s being hyper-conscious of who your audience is and communicating in a way in which they can understand you.

Long: Is this about keeping faith with your readers?

Burkett: They might not see it as keeping faith with them, especially in this new hyper-partisan era in journalism where keeping faith with your readers seems to mean telling them only what they want to hear. But it’s not my job just to tell people things that they want to hear. I am a kind of contrarian — both by nature and professionally. My job of keeping faith with them is often to show them that their views are too narrow or show them where they are wrong. I don’t know whether or not readers will always consider that I’m doing them a favor. But that’s my definition both of my job and of keeping faith with them.

I experienced that most keenly when I was writing about conservative women — conservative intellectuals, militia women, ordinary right-wing women for The Right Women. How was I — a New York Jewish leftie — going to gain their trust? And I did it by telling the truth. I introduced myself, opened up about my background and beliefs, and explained that I didn’t get how, in the 21st century, a woman could be not be a progressive. Then I asked them to help me understand. And these women opened up and spent hours with me, not trying to convince me but trying to help me understand. And they succeeded to a remarkable extent. That doesn’t mean they brought me around to agreeing with them. But they opened up a window into their lives, their world view, their thinking. And my job was to record and transmit that.

I don’t think I could have done any of this if I weren’t confident enough in my own beliefs to be able to move past them and if I didn’t believe in my very core that their stories have the right to be told.

Long: You identify yourself as a contrarian. One of the questions that I had for you is that you’re absolutely not afraid to touch and even of grab hold of the third rail when it comes to contentious topics. Are you compelled to do this? And I’m thinking specifically about your narrative journalism on HIV, on consumerism, and on the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. These are all third-rail concerns.2

Burkett: It just feels to me that if I am not trying to make the world a better place, then what is the point of being a journalist? Why not just go out and, like, find some job making a lot of money? I am from a family tradition where the notion of doing something to better the world was actually important. So, I guess I could write about fashion, if I knew anything about fashion, which I don’t. But who would that help? What would that change? And I know that at the end of the day, when I’m [lying] on my deathbed, I need to be able to say to myself, well done. And I am not sure how I could wind up saying that if all I’d done was report about fashion.

And it’s not just about the topics I hone in on. I am a lifelong kind of lefty liberal, but it annoys me and always has when people come up with facile assumptions about things or come to facile conclusions. I have always thought that it was my job to disabuse them of facile thinking. That’s what makes me a contrarian in the eyes of many.

Long: And opting for narrative journalism certainly isn’t the easy road to follow, because it is hard work.

Burkett: It is a huge amount of work … if you do it well. If you’re intent on being thorough, it’s a gigantic amount of work. But I need to add that it is also immensely, emotionally rewarding; and it’s really, really, really fun. We don’t talk a lot about fun. But if you look at my life and the things that I’ve done, and the places I’ve gone and the people I’ve met, who’s had more fun than me?

That overwhelms the moments when I wondered whether I would get out of Afghanistan alive or my days being followed by the secret police in Mauritania or the gazillion times I’ve been blasted by readers of so-called experts for not crafting my work in keeping with their agendas.

Long: If you have to recount one particular story that stands out above all other stories, do you have a story like that? What is that that one story that just kind of makes your heart race?

Burkett: That’s a good question. I don’t think there’s one. There is the AIDS story I did in Cuba. There was a professional satisfaction to it of having been able to do something that no journalist had done, which was talk the Cubans into letting me go into a sanatorium for HIV patients. It was both that kind of ego satisfaction, the fun of meeting very interesting people, and because the story itself was morally and politically complicated. Here was a situation where, as an American with my American prejudices, I was horrified that they were locking people up just because they had HIV. But then I got to Cuba and couldn’t help but feel that things were complicated. It wasn’t just that there were many people in the sanatorium who agreed with what the Cuban government had done to them, but that in the context of a relatively poor island with few resources struggling to contain a potential epidemic, it actually made sense, especially given that the patients were living much better than most Cubans on the streets and being cared for better than most Cuban-American HIV patients I knew in Miami. So, I wound up thinking that the answer to my question about what this all meant wasn’t easy. That was extremely gratifying, and it was an important article.

I guess the other story that stands out was Afghanistan. Just after the Taliban left, I went to interview educated women who had been trapped behind the burqa. I wound up spending an extraordinary afternoon with a woman who’d been a news anchor on TV before the Taliban took over. She admitted to having gone a bit crazy after she was forced off the air and into isolation at home. But she told the story of waking up the morning that the Taliban left. Music was playing, which was shocking. But she didn’t quite believe the nightmare was over until an engineer from the radio station knocked on her door and said: “They’re gone and there’s no one to announce it on the air. Do you dare?” And she said, “Let me get my coat.” Giving voice to the realities these women lived was a real privilege.

Long: Both these stories speak to what you said earlier, that there are no easy answers, and that they both push back against what you term “facile thinking,” given how complex they are.

Burkett: Yes. No easy answers [is] important to me. You really have to buck the tide to get them in print. They demand more reporting time and more length for writing. So, complexities are a real battle these days.

Long: How would you describe your voice for the scholars and journalists who may read this Q&A? I can think of some adjectives. But how would you describe it?

Burkett: How would I describe my voice? It’s pretty personal. I have friends who are journalists who try to have a very impersonal voice — to as much as possible not be there. I have never tried to do that. I, as a person, am in a sense very present.

I also think my voice is nuanced and that, over time, I got better and better at making things complicated. I have had many editors who criticized me for this. But I like complications because they are essential to the truth. Readers are not stupid, and we do sense that if something’s complicated that it’s probably more likely to be true, because they know that [everybody’s] life is messy.

Long: It strikes me as a deeply reflective voice, one that is underpinned by courage. I’m thinking specifically about your book about the AIDS industry, The Gravest Show on Earth.

Burkett: That’s a lovely compliment.

Long: I do think it takes enormous courage to write about the kinds of things that you write about.

Burkett: Neither the topics, nor my take, was likely to win any popularity contests in certain circles. But if you want to win popularity contests, don’t become a journalist.

When I moved to Miami to work at the Miami Herald, I knew before I got there as an intern that I wanted to report on AIDS. I had done a lot of work reading the newspaper and I thought that they were undercovering AIDS, and Miami was, as you know, hit hard by the epidemic. It took me two years to convince them to let me do this. So, it was not exactly a great career move. And then I wrote plenty of things that people within the world of AIDS would have preferred I ignore. But I had the advantage of age. I wasn’t a 22-year-old just starting in journalism. It’s easier to be courageous when you’re a little older and don’t care whether you are popular, either internally or externally. Obviously, I had to keep my bosses happy enough that they would let me do my work. You do that by excellence rather than by pandering.

The greatest challenge for a journalist like me has always been sussing out and then conveying the truth. But the question always is: Whose truth am I looking for, since the Truth, with a capital T, rarely exists. In Afghanistan, I wasn’t looking to tell the truth of the male leaders of the Taliban. I was trying to tell the story of educated women trapped behind their burqas. I told their truth. But that wasn’t the Truth of the men, or even of many other women.

And then there’s the problem of keeping my truths from overwhelming the truth of the people whose stories I am trying to tell, and that’s both a problem of my own personal biases and my cultural biases. I’ve been lucky to have lived and worked in numerous different cultures. That experience, in addition to my training as a historian, makes me keenly sensitive to the difficulty journalists from a given era or culture have in keeping the prejudices of their times and backgrounds out of their work. So, when I was writing about the AIDS camp in Cuba, for example, I felt a typically American revulsion at the idea of treading on individual liberty. But my job was to overcome that revulsion because I was dealing with a society in which the collective good weighs much more heavily than it does in my society. What, then, did the decision of the Cuban government look like to Cubans? How did that decision affect Cuban society? Those truths had to weigh more heavily than my prejudices.

Getting to those truths, obviously, isn’t always easy because people don’t necessarily know what their truths are, or they have more than one truth, or because they are suspicious of interviewers. I’ve been successful because I believe that people like telling their stories and feel that I am really interested, which is not a pretense on my part. I really am interested. And people sense that I really want to tell their stories, not their stories filtered through my biases.

Long: Does this still hold true for you?

Burkett: There are things I’d like to write about but can’t. For example, I would love to be writing about Zimbabwe since I’ve spent much of the last 15 years there. But courageous or not, I cannot do it because it has implications for too many people. In Zimbabwe you could get hurt. There are times that I cannot be courageous. So, I am not doing a lot of reporting now.

But I still write some opinion pieces, and I’m perfectly content if they make me unpopular. I am thinking of my op-ed about Caitlyn Jenner, “What Makes a Woman?” I knew I would get blasted for it, and I didn’t care. Too many journalists and opinion writers are not willing to say things they believe because it’s politically incorrect. And political correctness is dangerous both for journalism and for society.

But this is a terrible time to be a journalist. Everything is so ugly at the moment that I don’t know how I would be responding if I were writing daily journalism now. I watch my friends who do it, and it’s pretty ugly. It is not unusual for my friends who are working journalists to get death threats from readers. Or just vile emails. Heaped with vile emails. Or, I hope you die. I don’t know how you work in that environment. I’m not doing a lot. I mean, I do the occasional piece if I feel strongly about something, but I’m not doing much anymore.

Long: But you’re still training journalists? What do you tell them, given our so-called, and still-contended, post-truth society that relies and appeals to emotion at the expense of truth and facts?

Burkett: I’m pretty much retired, but I still, in an ad hoc way, train and teach journalists. I get many calls from young people, or I meet them, and some say they want the life I’ve had and ask how to get it. And my response to them — because I’m a person of brutal honesty — is you can’t. The world has changed too much, and journalism has changed too much, and I don’t think I do anybody any favors by encouraging them to think that they can have the kind of career that I had. It’s not open to them. Outlets simply don’t have, or won’t spend, the money necessary to do my kind of work.

When it is a more formal situation, talking about how you do journalism, I preach old-fashioned values. The truth has gone out of fashion in journalism — you’re not supposed to talk about the truth because there is no one truth. But you strive for the closest thing you can possibly get to it. That is the biggest thing that I emphasize. I’m not sure that we are doing ourselves or anyone else any favor by giving in to the difficulty of finding the truth. We have to try.

My other major piece of advice for young people is: Shut up and tell the story. Stop worrying about crafting things to emphasize your perspective. Trust your readers. So, get out of the way of your story and let its power rise.

Ultimately, what has guided me is an abiding belief in the power of well-told stories to move the world. They move ordinary people to change their attitudes, to donate money, to pressure their political representatives. They reshape how individuals think about themselves. That power is why those with political agendas try to censor stories or rewrite history. Stories can be dangerous, after all.

Not all journalists think of themselves as storytellers, of course. A growing number are entrenched in advocacy journalism, which I don’t think of as journalism. I’m also trying to change the world, but I do it by showing readers how complicated the world is and by taking them inside the lives and the realities of people they don’t know and experiences they haven’t had.

Long: And where does narrative journalism fit into this picture?

Burkett: To my mind, narrative journalism is the best vehicle when properly done. I can write a story that includes every fact about HIV, from how it spreads to how many people have died and the current medical thinking. But bland information doesn’t move people. On the other hand, if I take you inside the life of one person, then I can give you all that information and simultaneously help you identify with people who are struggling. When I was in Miami, I spent a lot of time writing pieces about populations of people with HIV that my readers hadn’t thought about. I did a piece about young people struggling with HIV by focusing on a single young man named Pedro Zamora who went on to be quite a famous person because he was on the first season of the Real World. I did a piece about elderly people struggling with HIV. And those people, those pieces, had an enormous impact. Those were forms of narrative journalism that not only give people information but help reshape their attitudes. It’s the same reason that people like novels. Narrative journalism gives people the chance to experience somebody else’s life and thus to feel empathy.

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the December 2019 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Callie Long is a second career Ph.D. candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. Working with people living with HIV, first as a journalist, and later as a media development practitioner, as well as a communicator in the field of global HIV advocacy and policy, led to this academic career shift. Long’s research focuses on the stigma associated with pan/epidemics. She is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Studies fellow and in 2018 was awarded the IALJS Norman Sims prize for best student research paper in literary journalism studies for her essay on Jonny Steinberg’s Three Letter Plague.

Read: Footnotes

Raquel Ochoa is a lawyer by profession and a passionate travel writer by avocation. A true globe-trotter, she contributes regularly to newspapers and magazines, posts monthly travel crónicas on her blog, O Mundo lê-se a Viajar (One Can Read the World by Traveling), and has been a creative writing teacher since 2008 at Escrever Escrever (Write Write). In 2009, she was awarded the Prémio Agustina Bessa-Luís for her novel, A Casa-Comboio, the story of an Indo-Portuguese family from Damão that doubles as an untold history of Portuguese India. Ochoa started traveling at the age of 16, and nomadism has been her inspiration for writing and living. She says a travel experience is good when “we destroy the minimum, we do not change the natural silence of a place and we start a friendship, maybe a love.” She adds: “If there are lessons to be learned from so many leagues, it is this: ‘It takes patience. There are trips that take years to tell us what they meant to us.’” The travel literature genre has the “ability to surprise everyone because it reflects the world, and the world is never tight, never completely discovered.”

Travel writing and literary journalism, where this study seeks to locate these crónicas, are intersections, both embracing the traveler’s personal account and the journey itself as one of the topics covered. As with other literary journalists who “have traveling as their journalistic interest,” the two activities, touring and writing about their trips, are inseparable for Ochoa. O Vento dos Outros (The Wind of Others), began as a travel notebook on a six-month journey across the Andes, from Costa Rica in Central America to Patagonia in South America. The book is divided into four parts: Atlântico e Pacífico, o Mesmo Mergulho (The Atlantic and the Pacific: The Same Immersion) (Costa Rica); Terras Altas (Highlands) (Peru); Com Rumo e sem Norte (On Track Without Bearing) (Chile); and Entrar na Patagónia (Entering Patagonia) (Argentina).

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Ochoa makes the topic of these crónicas the journey itself and the ways she is deeply transformed by it: “[O]nce we’ve trodden certain places, you will never be the same person again,” she writes. The greatest advantage of traveling aimlessly “on track without bearing” is that plans just happen, without a watch, and the sun that “eradicated the will to think” becomes a guide. Mark Kramer and Wendy Call in Telling True Stories highlight that the reporter should take the chance to walk the same tracks as the object of his investigation. Pursuing true immersion, Ochoa follows the farthest, harshest, most deserted, least touristic tracks, covering off-road, stone-laid trails and “waiving the most comfortable journey along the coast that most would choose,” thus transporting the reader to the world of the Other, that is “the foreign: the one who does not belong to a group, does not speak a given language, does not have the same customs; he is the unfamiliar, uncanny, unauthorized, inappropriate, and the improper.” Some of these harsh moments of inevitable yet desirable solitude, which Ochoa describes, of “quiet and selfish contemplation, away from all, easily addicting to silence” are lasting and fulfilling for “at any moment, even now, if I close my eyes, I can easily go back, as if I had lived there all my life, as if I had never left.” This engagement situates this woman’s experience within a specific context that reveals the limits and possibilities of contemporary travel writing. Taking into account Mary Louise Pratt’s argument in Imperial Eyes, the patriarchal and imperialist undertone of most travel writings is being adapted and adjusted by modern writers like Ochoa. In her crónicas, Ochoa locates two dualities, one of the Other and one of her own culture. Her travel narratives are not looking for a romanticized place but for a genuine, authentic, and alternative space that allows for a dialogue between cultures and genres. At the same time, Ochoa’s writing is the triumph of a woman’s spirit over cultural difference, not just an anthropological or historical approach but a humanistic one. Ochoa’s descriptions, personal details, and introspections reveal a desire to enter an unknown social system alone and experience the metaphysical wind of the existential journey. Maureen Mulligan writes:

The solitariness of Western life, the alienation of cities, the breakdown of the family: these are the classic tropes motivating romantic travel writing, often juxtaposed with the glorification of the close physical and relational solidarity evident in poorer societies whose members stick together in ways that have been forgotten in the consumerist divisive West.

A deliberate expression of the writer’s state of mind, when the writer is in a different geographical location, can transform an unknown culture into a new understanding of Self and the Other. As such, the writing is not just about the journey but about the landscape and the people. It is not an escape from what seems a civilized known world but an encounter with a distant Other. It is an intellectual and cultural displacement with a purpose. In this sense, O Vento dos Outros can be categorized as literary journalism for its blending of autobiographical description, philosophical reflection, spiritual enquiry, and the experience that becomes timeless and immortalized, which Manuel Coutinho argues is characteristic of the form. Ochoa reveals alterity — that is, a sense of being in a world that is totally different from the known self and culture — and thus offers the Portuguese audience a vision of Latin America as the simultaneously close and distant, known and unknown, transatlantic Other.

Travel Writing and Literary Journalism

Scholars over the years and across countries have described literary journalism, which began to emerge before the 19th century as a phenomenon, form, style, genre, and as a discipline. The International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, and its scholarly journal, Literary Journalism Studies, attest to the growing worldwide interest in this form of journalism, which is now more than a hundred years old. Literary journalism, also called narrative journalism, as non-fiction, factual reporting that resorts to stylistic strategies and narrative techniques, was the name chosen by John Bak and Bill Reynolds to refer to the genre at an international level, as exemplified by their volume Literary Journalism Across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences. Isabel Soares argues that, from the perspective of its tone, this form of writing is a narrative kind of journalism, from the perspective of its style, a journalism with a literary flair, a journalism of embellished writing. This is journalism that reads as literature and for which the main aim is to stay true to the storytelling of reality through the personal imprint of the journalist. John Hartsock notes that literary journalism makes use of techniques related to literary discourse, such as scene construction, dialogue, and concrete detail. In literary journalism the author or narrator tells real stories, making use of the author’s senses and point of view. Norman Sims notes that the main features of this genre of journalism are immersion, structure, precision, voice, responsibility, and symbolism. Literary journalism is different from conventional journalism in its use of real subjects and literary writing techniques such as mise-en-scène, detail, and description. This journalism is also found under the forms of non-fiction known as narrative, reportage, documentary, and crónicas. In her book of travel crónicas, Ochoa deals with the “look” and the “feel” of the world and takes the time to travel, meet, and tell the story.

To situate Ochoa within literary journalism in Portugal, one must go back to the end of the 19th century, for, Soares argues, the first “new” journalists in Portugal were Eça de Queirós and Ramalho Ortigão, who wanted to break away from the constraints of conventional journalism. Batalha Reis and Oliveira Martins followed in this path by not being impartial, using humor and irony to disclose the political, social, and economic plight of the underprivileged. Committed to report the truth, and using immersion reporting, their writings maintained an intimate dialogue with the reader. Coutinho argues this form of journalism knows “a distinct emancipation through the writing of great names of national journalism who seek to face reality in a more humane, immersive and descriptive manner.” In fact, in 21st century Portugal, many well-known journalists are also writers, and vice versa, as exemplified by the following:

Sílvia Caneco is a Portuguese journalist who became known for her two reports in the newspaper Jornal i in 2002, for which she was awarded the Literary Journalism Award, Prémio Jornalismo Literário Teixeira de Pascoaes-Vicente Risco, and from which is highlighted “Preso Duas Vezes. A Vida No Hospital-Prisão” (Stuck Twice. Life in the Prison Hospital). Paulo Moura’s “A Menina Que Amou Demais” (The Girl Who Loved Too Much) is a tragic episode which was reported in a very sensitive and human way and which appeared in the newspaper Público, and was later published in the 2014 book Longe do Mar (Far From the Sea). Susana Moreira Marques immersed herself for six months in the rural, isolated, poor northern region of Portugal to hear and tell the stories of terminally ill patients, caretakers, and families, which resulted in the 2008 book, Agora e na Hora da Nossa Morte, translated and published in 2015 in English, as Now and at the Hour of Our Death. Pedro Coelho is known for his 2007 book, Rosa Brava, Pastora de Sonhos e Outras histórias (Rosa Brava: Shepherd of Dreams and Other Stories), a compilation of several feature stories and the result of years of immersion in the peripheries of the Azores islands, the rural north of Portugal, and the Portuguese prison system. Miguel Sousa Tavares’ book Sul, which consists of travel crónicas from Brazil, and José Luís Peixoto’s travel crónicas for Volta ao Mundo magazine, are true cases of contemporary travel writing that share a kinship with Ochoa’s work.

Closing the Gap Between Writer and the ‘Other’

Stripped of all European or first-world luxuries, Ochoa stays in poor households, modest hostels, even a lightless cubicle, carrying only a backpack, experiencing the earthly existence of these distant, as Alice Trindade writes, “different, eventually exotic” Other(s), immersing herself in their cultures and environments. On an alterity path, to discover the identity of the Other and of the Self, the author becomes, in Soares’ words, the “‘I’ that writes about personal experience as a way toward both self-discovery and the discovery of the ‘Other’ with whom the ‘I’ engages.” Ultimately, Ochoa discovers that she is “the Other, for the Other.” That is, she, as a traveler and guest in their country, is revealing her own Otherness to her hosts and hostesses, even as she becomes aware of their Otherness to her.

Ochoa portrays Latin American landscapes and peoples through sharing her new understandings, empathies, impressions, feelings, and emotions, thereby making the reader a witness to her experiences. Fear and despair, and love and passion, are so naked that the distance between the subject and the object is narrowed, as Hartsock describes the reader’s experience. The writer and the reader are immersed in the experience of the Others’ different, unknown, exotic cultures, traditions, and identities: “I was now in loco, I could feel their smell, understand the mode of living of this so different people,” Ochoa writes. Her literary style — “I left that place with tranquility injected into my arms” — engages and touches the reader. Everything is voiced in the personal tone and intimate familiarity of a sensitive woman, involving the reader as closely as possible. The whole captures what Hartsock refers to as “writing subjectivity.” Ochoa takes the reader to Machu Picchu, where she reflects, “the impact one feels before such intense scenery intensifies the awareness of the site’s hidden myths and history.” The writer’s detailed, first-person accounts of real, day-to-day adventures, dangers, relationships, friendships, passions, encounters, departures, and losses are a mark of her genuine involvement with the Other in what Roberto Miguel Herrscher calls the “theatre of reality” and of literary journalism itself. Unbelievably beautiful landscapes are experienced — by Ochoa and, through her words, the reader, through the senses — colors, tonalities, odors, sounds, and temperatures. As well as giving personal understandings of Ochoa’s surroundings, these travel crónicas are an emotional and intellectual journey deep into the self where, Ochoa writes, “my own mental travels carried on, unsupervised.” This is the travel of identity and self-discovery: “At that moment, I finally understood the spiritual onus of the others’ wind.”

Raquel Marques Carriço Ferreira argues that personal motivations, determination, and curiosity motivate the travel journalist to walk a certain path, while at the same time portraying “a state of mind, an attitude, a behavior, a personal and collective experience full of meanings” and revealing a humanistic perspective. Indeed, the journalist’s journey corresponds to what Claudio Magris defines as a wandering around the world, letting oneself pass, passively, through the flow. Ochoa displays a deep understanding of the Latin American reality, its social and political contexts, as Luís Fernando does with Angola or Miguel Sousa Tavares, with Brazil. In O Vento dos Outros Ochoa shares the historical, geographical, and political backgrounds of Latin American peoples and their cross-cultural civilizations (which are a mix of European and Indigenous peoples). She presents local stories and legends as well as photographs she took of real people and livelihoods as sources of inspiration, as have been noted by researchers such as Coutinho and Trindade. Ochoa uses code-switching, alternating her use of two languages, Portuguese and Spanish, in the crónicas and thus shows a cultural and linguistic encroachment of the Other on the Subject, and is the case of a language, Spanish, being added to voice as noted by Trindade.

Traveling Is a Little Like Being the Wind

David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar note that book titles can “sell the book by sounding good while also giving an idea of what’s to come” and lead readers to search the world beyond the pages. The title O Vento dos Outros and some of the book’s subtitles — “Pura Vida, um cão e uma vida” (Pure life, a dog and a state); “Espaço neutro” (Neutral space); “Montanhas mareadas” (Nauseated mountains); “Continuo a exercer o meu direito à abstracção” (I still have the right to abstraction); “A besta branca” (The white beast) — are carriers of message. O Vento dos Outros is not simply about the way the wind became baffling: “suddenly, I was not just on the land of the wind, I was on the land which became the wind!” Along foreign and unknown Latin American landscapes, Ochoa describes the wind as the “unsettling,” relentless, and humanized companion “full of character, it passes but never stays.” It is the “lord of those lands which could be felt, seen and heard as it smelled of independence,” and the “fool, never seen, ripping me off the ground if it wanted.” Powerfully, it “authorizes the first drops of daily rain,” and “only allows the strongest to resist.” Its sound is music “flying through the ends of the gorges which don’t exist,” followed by “thousands of sounds, sometimes like voices that would make me look back, as if someone was calling, cursing, purring or simply whispering.” Patagonia is “addicted to its orchestra of wind, which flees ties and roots, homes and countries.” Its absence of noise is also noted: “the silence of a dead volcano, inhabited by a green lake, changes your conscience,” and “never has a silence taken over me. Never had I heard such a mute silence. Breathing became strange.” The wind bonds people and language. Orlando, a native American Indian, “replicated opening his mouth before beginning as if he was going to blow wind instead of words” and inserted reading into his life like “an upsetting gale.” O Vento dos Outros is the carrier of their identity.

Traveling Is Losing People

A recurrent leitmotif of literary journalism is the disclosure of social plights, inequalities, and injustices endured by real people in real places where “poverty reigned the streets,” and, Soares notes, on the “margins of social ostracism.” These hardships belong to ordinary “citizens whose everyday lives are mostly ignored,” Trindade argues, “by both the local and international press,” belonging to “sectors of the population that had, so far, attained no public recognition.” An unknown or inconvenient truth known to the public only through Ochoa’s telling of the story is that “Latin America is a land of social inequalities where the boiling point took place many years ago and still exists.” Literary journalists add their point of view and poignant criticism: “I traveled without the ambition of wanting to know more than was possible but with the evidence of the social and cultural inequalities,” as the following example, in which Ochoa describes South America as “a continent of volcanoes and a society of social unrest.” It is an intense criticism of the real world where real people live and where “there are demands and accusations of systematic violation of human rights on behalf of the Chilean and Indigenous Mapuche authorities. They don’t keep quiet.”

Ochoa’s crónicas describe the social, cultural, and political environment of some South American countries where “religious displays are intimately linked to social and political displays.” Contemporary Peru, for instance, is a “troubled nation” whose “portrait is bleak due to human rights abuses, corruption, and violations of law. Economic modernization has benefited only a small sector while the majority of the population makes enormous sacrifices and hundreds of thousands of families live on the edge of poverty.” Ochoa travels with the locals to work at five in the morning on old, uncomfortable, overloaded, and irregular buses where “it smelled bad, the seats were dirty, of sweat, of dust, of food leftovers.” She describes Peruvians as hardworking, nice, well-bred people, but closed and with no interest in foreigners. The urban populations differ from rural peasants, who do not seem to bathe, wash their clothes, or clean their hands and nails. They spit on the floor of the bus and throw litter out the window — simple people bound to the earth.

Social changes and the current worldwide state of affairs, such as how tourism, international commerce, and brands have devalued local handicraft and products, are exposed: “How far does the goodwill and values of those who consider themselves more Indigenous coincide with the global challenge forced on almost everyone in the world through globalization and its ways? Don’t they sometimes run over human dignity?” Social criticism is cast on the enduring, imposing leftovers of colonialism and imperialism emphasized by words such as “running over,” “submissive,” and “animal” when referring to the United States’ undesirable presence in the country. Historical buildings, such as churches and cathedrals, are solemn, “but even that colonial beauty makes the touch of oppression implicit.” In Cusco, Peru, the U.S. presence shows two conflicting worlds, exploiter and exploited, “the best and the worst that everyone can see. As if the Inca offspring mixed with the Hispanic culture were sold to tourism with anger, self-disdain, sold, money and business, survival and work, rich and poor.” The past and the present invaders mingle while “there’s a decolonizing silence amongst Peruvians. A silence I do not grasp or is not for me to grasp. I’m just another trespasser” in what Soares describes as a “place where tourism has distorted the landscape.”

Pure Culture Shock

The mix of peoples and cultures in some Latin American countries has generated complex and somewhat turbulent societies. All countries are developing and suffering from great social and economic injustices and inequalities, and this is reflected in people’s hostile attitudes toward foreigners, as the people do not benefit from tourism. The foreigner is the Other: “the presence of outsiders is easily felt, you are frequently the point of convergence of dark eyes. They assume you are European or North American.”

Awareness “of how different human beings can be from each other” sometimes entails what Ochoa describes as a pure culture shock. The author states that, “against common belief, Indigenous movements still subsist consistently in Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Paraguay and in Bolivia [representing an] ethnic hotchpotch.” The different reality and cultural environment of Limón, Costa Rica, is shocking as “we find a city of mounted houses, aggressive traffic where people were suspicious, if not violent,” and ultimately “annoyed by our presence there: our simple stroll on the street made them angry.” In Chosica, Peru, “people are very closed, we never meet foreigners and the level of kindness toward a foreigner in simple things like sharing public transport was that of total indifference, as if we were invisible. Invisible beings don’t have the same rights as normal people.”

Immersion in cultural and religious festivities highlights differences: “a spit, a push, a theft, a feeling of insecurity were things that made me as alert as a clean bed.” At the end of the (self) journey, Ochoa views Central and South America as a large bowl of bloods and races with individual countries, each with its own cultural heritage, peculiarities, and ethnic borders. The word “different” gains a new dimension. In many of these Latin American territories, ethnic multiculturalism and confrontation date back a long time. Today, many Indigenous groups face extinction. The montaña region (the poorly populated, Eastern Amazon plains), for example, sometimes functions as a “safety valve for social tensions,” welcoming landless peasants and, as Soares notes, “documenting the difficult survival of illegal Latin immigrants.” Ochoa writes: “People should leave because they want to, not because they are trapped in a country with no opportunities. This is what we must fight against.” Dialogues with the Other, along with detailed description and perspective, set the scene and, in this case, introduce identity and alterity, as Trindade notes, “by giving voice to unusual narrators and doing that in different styles.” Orlando, the Native American Indian friend, left his village at 16 to see the world and was not welcome on his return: “It was in my own home that I understood the prejudice of intolerance.” Orlando sees the European woman as different and belonging to “a culture which stimulates independence.” Immersion changes Ochoa, leaving her torn between two worlds. The European lifestyle, where “men in suits run to work under the same stress that grants any yuppie in Europe his credibility,” becomes senseless. First-world lifestyle feels inadequate, causing the sensation of being “in-between, neither here nor there, I needed time to understand this new world, still feeling the Andes’ air in my lungs.” The culture shock that Ochoa describes finds echo in Edward Said’s analysis of modern Orientalism: “a vision of the contemporary Orient, not as narrative, but as all complexity, problematics, betrayed hope.”

Pachamama: A Woman’s Sensitive Insights

This female narrator, a traveler, and a writer, who Jonathan D. Fitzgerald might describe as “simultaneously sentimental and subjective,” embarks on this emotional journey and strongly identifies with Mother Nature: “everything you give Pachamama, she gives back to you.” This relationship is always portrayed through the sensitive look of a woman who reveals a true love for the landscape. Closeness to the mountains causes strong feelings and sensations and the distance generates saudades (longing) and the feeling of the “condor’s breast syndrome.” An ordinary daybreak or nightfall is described in a sensitive and literary style: “the day already shaking on the other side of the night and we fell asleep without resisting,” and, “the daylight bugs changed guard with the night bugs, you could hear it.” Feelings of wonder, marvel, and astonishment incite physical reactions: “I felt invaded, such energy handcuffed me,” and, “at each gesture I could feel the Andes in my body, I had them in my body aches.” Intimacy with nature encourages isolation: “I felt like running, far away, as far as possible, the farther the better. I knew the landscape was very strong.” This hermit experience of isolation and immersion generates the contradictory and desperate need for company and the adopted dog, the backpack, or fatigue itself, become Ochoa’s travel companions.

Love is described in a romantic and feminine manner, like a love story that when it “appears it is forever, then it passes.” Regardless of how long it lasts, love is experienced as “my place …. to feel this is the first time we love, although we have loved so many times before.” Love-making becomes “those moments (where) human beings forget all constraints, emptying all thoughts and entering for seconds in the other’s intensity, which already is your own,” in a “night (when) we burned with such passion that we fell asleep inside each other’s dreams.” A passionate and sensitive style links, as Trindade says, a “sentiment to an event.”

These travel crónicas are descriptive, factual, subjective, consisting of humanistic literary writing, portraying real people with real lives deserving a place in Portuguese literary journalism. To read O Vento dos Outros is to travel with the heart and the senses.

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

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The Postscript

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Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the August 2020 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Authors

Raquel Baltazar is assistant professor at the School for Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, where she teaches English for the social sciences and Portuguese as a foreign language. She is a research fellow at CAPP (Centre for Public Administration and Policies). Her research interests are in the fields of cultural studies, Portuguese contemporary literature, Iberian studies, identity studies, Portuguese as a foreign language, travel literature, and literary journalism.

Rita Amorim is assistant professor at the School for Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, where she teaches English for the social sciences. She is a research fellow at CAPP (Centre for Public Administration and Policies) and CEAF (Centro de Estudos Africanos). Her research interests are in the fields of English language teaching, English as a Lingua Franca, code-switching, language and education policy, travel literature, and literary journalism.

In the introduction to their anthology of Australian author Miles Franklin’s journalism, Jill Roe and Margaret Bettison describe her work as “topical writings.” Quoting the Macquarie Dictionary, Roe and Bettison define topical as: “‘matters of current or local interest.’ Such matters are inevitably diverse, and their treatment usually ephemeral. Thus ‘topical writings’ is a convenient umbrella term for a wide range of occasional pieces, mostly published in newspapers and magazines.” Within this umbrella definition Roe and Bettison include Franklin’s reviews, opinion writing, and the “occasional sketch and serial,” all of which are represented in the anthology. The mention of the sketch, however, teases that there are unrecognized works of literary journalism by Franklin blurred under the catchall “topical writings,” as the sketch is a historical indicator of the form exemplified by Stephen Crane’s writing. Accordingly, a closer read of the anthology reveals sketches that can be considered literary journalism: “San Francisco: A Fortnight After,” written when Franklin visited the earthquake- and fire-ravaged city en route to Chicago in 1906; and “Active Service Socks,” which describes the World War I camp in the Balkans where Franklin was stationed as a volunteer orderly.1 But most intriguing is “Letter From Melbourne,” published in the Australian periodical, the Bulletin, in March of 1904. The letter is not literary journalism; rather, it points to a book-length unpublished work, When I Was Mary-Anne, a Slavey, which chronicles Franklin’s immersion in domestic service in Sydney and Melbourne for a year.

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Roe, in her definitive biography of Franklin that follows the anthology, describes Franklin’s Mary-Anne as a characteristically adventurous episode in Franklin’s life and situates the immersion as a “personal turn-of-the-century social experiment” and “participant investigation” that further opens the literary journalism door, given the form’s relationship to ethnographic practices.2 Roe briefly details Franklin’s time as a domestic servant, laments the resulting manuscript from the Mary-Anne research was not published, then moves on to Franklin’s years in Chicago.3

If Roe is a lighthouse for Franklin’s life, this research places a spotlight on Franklin’s unrecognized literary journalism, especially Mary-Anne, in the context of her performing what Sue Joseph identifies as “gonzo advocacy journalism.” Joseph charts gonzo advocacy from Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903), to George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), and then to contemporary authors Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001), and Elisabeth Wynhausen’s Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market (2005). The focus of Joseph’s taxonomy is immersion in poverty, but Franklin’s Mary-Anne joins a lineage of gendered performance of gonzo advocacy that illuminates feminized low-wage labor emerging with Elizabeth Cochrane’s (Nellie Bly), Eleanor Stackhouse’s (Nora Marks) and Elizabeth L. Banks’ immersions in domestic service in the late 19th century. Roe suggests Banks may have inspired Franklin, as Banks had in 1902 released her autobiography that detailed her immersion as a maid in London, first published as the series “In Cap and Apron,” in 1893. In 1914, Swedish journalist Ester Blenda Nordstrom immersed as a maid on a farm to expose the conditions; and in 1935, Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke posed as women for hire in the “Bronx Slave Market” where unemployed women of color gathered for underpaid day labor as servants. In 1950 Cooke returned to the market for the New York Daily Compass, and in 1979 Atlanta Constitution reporter Charlene Smith-Williams worked as a motel maid.4 Early in the 21st century, Ehrenreich, then Wynhausen, “utilized the ethnographic immersion methods” of her predecessors to “‘perform’ as gonzo advocacy journalism,” working in minimum-wage positions. Wynhausen acknowledges Ehrenreich as the inspiration for investigating the Australian experience, and Jan Wong followed suit in Canada for the Globe and Mail series, “Maid for a Month” (2006). Together this lineage of gonzo advocacy performed through a feminized and feminist lens amplifies the inequality women experience in the low-wage service labor of cleaning, maids, and waitressing.

This research affirms Franklin’s place in gonzo advocacy journalism and further recognizes literary journalism as the “submerged half of the … canon” in Franklin’s prolific early writing career, rather than “topical writings.” While Franklin’s published article, “San Francisco: A Fortnight After” (1906), is the most accessible exemplar of Franklin’s little-known literary journalism, Mary-Anne is important for its gonzo advocacy and critique of the myth of equality that resonates today with women employed in low-wage service roles.

Miles Franklin

Born in 1879, Stella Miles Franklin grew up in rural southern New South Wales, Australia. She sent the manuscript for her debut novel to Australian poet and short-story author, Henry Lawson, who championed it to his London agent, and My Brilliant Career was published in 1901.

Franklin, 21, was hailed as an emerging literary star, but manuscripts for her sequel to My Brilliant Career — “My Career Goes Bung” — and another novel, On the Outside Track, were both rejected.5 Franklin then turned to literary journalism in 1903, immersing as a domestic servant for a year. Franklin left Australia in 1906 to work with Australian expat and feminist Alice Henry in Chicago, editing the journal Life and Labor, produced by the National Women’s Trade Union League of America. Franklin then moved to London, and during World War I joined the Scottish Women’s Hospitals as an orderly and cook. After the war, Franklin’s fiction gained prominence again with her 1936 award-winning novel, All That Swagger, and a series of six novels written under the pseudonym Brent of Bin Bin, beginning with Up the Country: A Tale of Early Australian Squattocracy in 1928. Roe describes the series as “The Brent of Bin Bin Saga.”

Upon her death in 1954, Franklin bequeathed the Miles Franklin Literary Award, which remains Australia’s most prestigious literary prize for novelists. Because of this legacy, her literary journalism remains largely unknown.

‘Mary-Anne, a Slavey’

From April of 1903 to April of 1904, Franklin immersed as a domestic servant seeking “literary material,” and throughout the year kept a diary of all her experiences. Some of these are excerpted in the Mary-Anne manuscript and pre-date Franklin’s collected published diaries that begin in 1909, adding to the manuscript’s importance both to literary journalism and epistolary scholarship around Franklin.

Franklin began her “Mary-Anne immersion in Sydney, presenting herself in need of employment. As Nora Marks did in Chicago in 1888 when she investigated domestic service conditions for the Chicago Tribune, Franklin emphasized her country innocence. Bar a few trusted confidants, Franklin told her social and writing circles that she was traveling overseas, and no one in 1903 expected an Instagram post. Franklin initially answered newspaper ads but found the experience fruitless, so turned instead to an employment registry office that placed her as a “General” in a private house in Waverley, near Bondi. There, she encountered a romantic milkman to whom she revealed her emerging feminist views on marriage:

“Do let me talk to you, just a minute.”

“Certainly, if you talk sense, but don’t begin to invite me out at night as I’ve made an inflexible rule to do so with no man.”

“You’ll be an old maid at that rate,” he said.

“There are worse fates than that in matrimony,” I retorted as I scampered off with my jug.

Upon leaving Bondi, Franklin endured a short stint with a difficult employer whom she characterized as caring more for her dogs than her family; then a popular boarding house on the harbor where she worked as a parlor maid, and a politician’s home. She concluded her year working for a society family, a merchant, a doctor, and a country family in Melbourne.

Despite this year of immersive research, plus months writing, “Miles’ manuscript still awaits its publisher.” The Mary-Anne manuscript is now held in the State Library of NSW as part of the voluminous Miles Franklin Papers and comprises two volumes of handwritten “sketches,” but the final draft is missing. Roe writes: “What happened to the completed manuscript is unknown, except for a passing commiseration from Sir Francis Suttor, president of the Legislative Council and a new patron in Sydney, that Mary-Anne ‘did not take on’ with the publishers.” Franklin succeeded in publishing only the short article in 1904 for the Bulletin, “Letter From Melbourne,” describing her year as a servant, and written as she concluded the immersion; a Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece in 1907 in which Franklin reflects upon her “practical experience” in domestic service to argue for better working conditions; and a small, similar article in the Chicago Tribune while she lived in the United States. Then Mary-Anne disappears. Norman Sims reminds: “Literary journalists gamble with their time…. The risks are high. Not every young writer can stake two or three years on a writing project that might turn up snake-eyes.”

Franklin biographer Colin Roderick describes Bulletin literary critic A. G. Stephens as having thought the manuscript’s sketches were better suited to a series in the Sydney Morning Herald, but Roe and Bettison’s companion index of Franklin’s topical writings, many of which were not included in the anthology, do not list any Mary-Anne-related articles for the Herald beyond the 1907 opinion article. Roe mentions that in 1905 Franklin told the editor of the Herald that she’d finished the “servant book,” suggesting there may well have been a conversation about serialization that never eventuated. Roe believes Franklin’s Mary-Anne has enduring value, and implies that publishers’ wariness of Australia’s strict defamation laws contributed to derailing publication of the manuscript in whole or part: “For various reasons, such as length and the sensitivity of the approach (Grandma Lampe characteristically thought it deceitful), it could hardly have been published at the time.” Roe further alludes to one of the reasons for the manuscript of Franklin’s sequel to My Brilliant Career being initially rejected was her penchant for skimming characters too closely from life for a publisher’s comfort.6

Gonzo Advocacy or Stunt Journalism?

From the 19th century to contemporary practice, women literary journalists have been criticized for performing gonzo advocacy that investigates low-wage service labor. Cochrane (Bly), Banks, and Stackhouse (Marks) were known derogatorily as “girl stunt reporters” who practiced participatory immersive research, including domestic service, to prove their worth to publishers, and became a fixture of sensational yellow journalism in the late 19th century. The practice has since been viewed as privileged women slumming for a story who were in turn exploited by commercially driven publishers, or in contemporary iterations for their own profile and profit. Fellow Australian journalist Ellen Fanning was critical of Wynhausen’s immersion working as a waitress, cleaner, and factory worker, arguing that Wynhausen could have anticipated the cushioning effect of the Australian minimum wage “before she headed out of Bondi.” The deliberate mention of the fashionable Sydney beach suburb in which Wynhausen normally lived reiterates Fanning’s critique of Wynhausen’s privilege. Reviewer Monique Rooney counters that Fanning misses Wynhausen’s more subtle illumination of the impact of deregulation on low-wage work security, particularly for women. Likewise, the media historian Randall Sumpter refutes the stunt is entirely sensationalist. Discussing Banks, he argues “this genre in the hands of an experienced practitioner could range beyond the predictable topics and locations, incorporating balanced sources and employing ethics-based decision-making.” His argument aligns with Ted Conover’s view of ethical participatory immersive practices.

Was Franklin an aspiring stunt journalist? She did not have a career in women’s pages to escape, or a commissioning editor to impress. Although Roe suggests that Banks may well have been an inspiration, it seems Franklin’s Mary-Anne is self-conceived outside any external publishing pressure. At the turn of the 20th century, the so-called “servant problem” was discussed at length in the Australian press and the Mary-Anne title of the manuscript popularly referred to a woman working in domestic service.

In a summary of her immersion, “Concerning Maryann,” Franklin writes she was interested in investigating the servant-question debate:

Some people wonder what domestic servants have to complain about. To satisfy my own curiosity on the point, I determined under the name Mary- ann Smith, to follow the calling for 12 months. No one could understand the depth of the silent feud between mistress and maid without, in their own person, testing the matter.

Franklin’s rationale and resulting manuscript align with Robert Alexander’s view that “Gonzo [journalism] is a fiercely political style of reportage with a powerful commitment to what … we call socio-political intervention.” For Franklin, both the novelistic style of literary journalism and the sociopolitical interventionist aims were instinctive. Franklin’s Mary-Anne fits Joseph’s view of gonzo advocacy journalism and Orwell’s aim to make political writing an art form. Joseph argues that London, Orwell, Ehrenreich, and Wynhausen all “engage in a form of Gonzo ethnography, ultimately critiquing issues of poverty, social divide, and a certain voicelessness of social subsets in order to bring them into mainstream consciousness, with an often self-deprecating, satirical, but definitely intense, lilt and performance.”

On the latter point, Franklin’s Mary-Anne is self-deprecating and has a “satirical but definitely intense” lilt; Franklin gives parody names to the homes and boarding houses where she immerses, such as “Geebung Villa,” and critiques the absurdity of the middle-class Australian household mistress: “The running of this midget establishment is like playing cubby house….” Rather than a short-lived stunt, Franklin is determined to experience the domestic servants’ “lived reality” that supplies “new lines of evidence, context and attempts at understanding disadvantage in relation to the dominant culture and power structures.”

Franklin exhibits “ethics-based decision making” in her disclosure to fellow maids that she was immersing in domestic service for book research purposes, although she stopped short of telling them that she was the author of My Brilliant Career. Reflecting the aims of performing gonzo advocacy, the maids that Franklin confided in urged her to give voice to their realities of domestic service. Franklin also writes that, “I deliberately told several of my mistresses I was really ‘maryanning’ for ink writing purposes … they kindly let pass the trifling dementia…,” and she disclosed that she was a writer to guests from the United States, whom she befriended while working at a boarding house.

That Franklin was ambitious for publication in book form places her more securely in gonzo advocacy, given that Joseph emphasizes book-length literary journalism in aligning the work of London, Orwell, Ehrenreich, and Wynhausen. Matthew Ricketson argues there are six qualities evident in book-length literary journalism, beginning with the obvious: writing about “actual events and people living in the world, and concerns the issues of the day,” and extensive, time-consuming research. Franklin uses pseudonyms but underlines the actuality of her narrative in “Concerning Maryann,” which is bolstered by Roe citing the locations and employers of her domestic service posts. Franklin writes:

I am not so colossally conceited as to think in one 12-month, or in one book compiled from the diary I carefully kept during that period, I could give a recipe for the satisfactory adjustment … [I] state the facts that I collected, in a straight way regardless of consequences….

Ricketson’s next three elements continue tenets familiar to literary journalism, in that they take a narrative approach, employ a range of authorial voices, and explore the underlying meaning of the event or issue. In Franklin’s Mary-Anne, narrative structure is evident in the scene setting, dialogue, literary devices, and independent sketches that work as chronological chapters. The underlying meaning is recognized through Franklin’s performing gonzo advocacy, and her authorial voice of satirical outrage and vulnerability radiate throughout multiple points of view. The existing manuscript draft begins with Franklin posing as Mary-Anne in the first person — “I am ill with fear of failure” — that sets the participatory tone. From the fourth sketch, Franklin changes to limited third person to become the characters, “Mary-Anne,” then “Jane.” Analyzing Norman Mailer’s similar third-person, limited point of view in Armies of the Night, James E. Breslin posits the technique as “inflating the self,” which seems Franklin’s intention in Mary-Anne. Arguably the first-person sketches are more successful for their intimacy and authenticity, but without Franklin’s final directions or final manuscript it is difficult to ascertain which point of view she ultimately preferred, if any. Perhaps she kept them both.

Whatever the point-of-view decision, Franklin’s voice has parallels with John Stanley James (“The Vagabond”), who, Willa McDonald argues, concentrated “on powerlessness rather than poverty as the driving subject matter.” Franklin’s voice gives insight into brittle domestic sphere power relations in post-colonial Australia that are supported by structural inequalities:

The biggest blot on the household arrangements was the maids were brutally overworked but the blame of this rests on society at large rather than upon the individual. This Mrs. Bordinghaus was not violating any civil laws in regard to her maids — she was doing the usual thing.

Yet Franklin’s voice also retains a self-awareness of her privilege. She recognizes that she can, and does, take refuge with wealthy friends whereas her fellow “Mary-Annes” cannot. After a particularly difficult day, Franklin observes:

Oh, my blistered hand and jangled nerves! What of the girls who have no home awaiting their return when they fail in these battles? Who, if they wanted to, save enough for board while they searched for another engagement would be compelled to endure weeks of this Billings-gated slavery!

The final element identified by Ricketson is the impact that gonzo advocacy inevitably accrues upon publication. While a series rather than a book, it is worth noting that Banks’ “In Cap and Apron” sparked a debate in letters to editors about the servant question in London. Ehrenreich received letters from low-wage workers, one of which read: “I appreciate the fact that you were willing to experience first hand what many of us live with day to day…. You witnessed the ‘pariah’ syndrome the working poor experience daily.” Although Mary-Anne was never published, Franklin wrote about Mary-Anne in the Bulletin’s “Letter From Melbourne” and was interviewed by the national women’s magazine The New Idea, known now simply as New Idea. The work in progress was mentioned in the feminist journal the Australian Woman’s Sphere. The full impact of Franklin’s Mary-Anne may be yet to come.

Ricketson’s qualities of book-length journalism do not specify empathy. However, John Hartsock identifies empathy as a necessary quality in narrative literary journalism. Hartsock elaborates, arguing that discernment between literary journalism and sensationalism can be found in literary journalism’s “attempt to narrow the distance between the subjectivity of the journalist and reader on the one hand and an objectified world on the other.” Lack of empathy is a main consideration of Hartsock’s reservations about Jack London’s The People of the Abyss, primarily: “[H]is inability to understand empathetically the subjectivities of the Other….” But empathy, it seems, is in the eye of the literary journalism scholar. Unlike Hartsock, Joseph sees empathy in London’s text and argues it is all the more powerful for its “savage look at ignored social destitution and deprivation within mere kilometers of untold wealth and entitlement.”

Franklin empathetically immerses herself in the “inferior” experience, so her advocacy is strengthened by its presence. She does not hold herself apart from the maids but respects the domestic servants she works alongside as colleagues and conspirators. Yet she retains perspective, such that she is able observe herself retreating into the silence of servitude:

With the exception of necessary remarks I am utterly silent, for this intangible something has gripped my feelings in a hand of ice and so frozen my individuality that only the mechanical part of me is in evidence. By doing some necessary work in another man’s home instead of in my own, I have become an inferior creature….

Gonzo Advocacy and Bodily Sacrifice

In her study of girl stunt reporters, Jean Marie Lutes argues that their performative journalism meant that they endured “bodily sacrifice,” and Pablo Calvi critiques a similar physicality in the contemporary writing of literary journalist Gabriela Weiner. Calvi observes: “Gonzo puts the entire perceptual body — and not just the disembodied eye — into the flow of the world.” It follows that bodily sacrifice is a defining characteristic of gonzo advocacy in Franklin’s Mary-Anne. Franklin emphasizes her physical appearance in appraisals by prospective mistresses, employment registry agents, and experienced servants. Franklin is repeatedly called too sensitive and slight for the demands of domestic service and admonished to be tougher by her peers lest she be worked to death. Tellingly, Franklin’s friend, the feminist Rose Scott, warns Franklin to protect herself from bodily sacrifice upon learning she is working as a servant:

My dearest Stella, I was glad to hear from you — but dear one — do you only get an hour on Saturday? Have you no arrangement for an afternoon and evening out? A day a month? Or any outings? Because if so you will hurt the girls you want to help — they will think if you do not want times out, why should other girls! Think of this point — for the sake of others, you must not be a slave…. I do not say this out of selfishness and because I want you—

Little time off was soon the least of Franklin’s bodily sacrifice. In the first sketch of the manuscript, written while working at Waverley, Franklin details how she suffered a near blinding injury when the gas stove blew up in her face, only to have to continue working in a haze of blistering skin and pain:

That stove! That infernal stove! … [T]he oven was filled with gas, which, when I opened the door, rushed out, and igniting by the lighted cooking jets on top enveloped me in flames…. The extent of my injuries were the loss of my eyelashes, the charring of my eyebrows and a band of front hair, my face was mostly in blister and my fingers painfully burned. The pain was so intense I had difficulty in suppressing a scream but instead had to fry the eggs and bacon warm potatoes and make the toast.

Franklin must have confided in Scott or other trusted confidants, as a small news article appeared in 1903 reporting her facial injuries as a result of a gas explosion, but it does not say the accident happened because Franklin was working as a servant. At the conclusion of the year, she mentions her “Gretchen like locks” and scalp were still scarred from the burns.

Her physical injuries flow into an undercurrent of harassment that Lutes identifies as a hazard and bodily sacrifice. As a maid, Franklin negotiates flirtatious men, which she treats as humorous, but the undercurrent is evident. In a diary excerpt, she writes of a maid’s necessary qualities with the survival of the power relations of harassment in mind: “She must be sufficiently comely to be smart, yet not so attractive as to win any stray admiration from the male members of the family she serves.”

Franklin’s Literary Journalism: After ‘Mary-Anne’

In the drought of her novels and the Mary-Anne manuscript rejection, Franklin turned to shorter works of literary journalism to earn a writing income. Roe estimates that, between 1905 and 1906, Franklin contributed over 30 articles to the Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph, as well as periodicals such as the New Idea and Steele’s Magazine. Of these, the forensic Roe leaves a trail of literary journalism breadcrumbs in Franklin’s biography that suggest other literary journalism articles not collected in the “topical writings” anthology. Roe highlights that Franklin participated in “A Mountain Cattle Muster” in the Australian Snowy Mountains, and wrote another work of travel literary journalism, “A Kiandra Holiday,” “both described in such a way that the reader wishes they had been there.”

The strength of the “Muster” article is Franklin’s reportage of the Australian landscape and her capturing of the characters of the bush. Describing, in the second installment of the two-article series, the horse ride through the rugged high country, Franklin writes: “the rattle of the horses’ hoofs among the hard, water-worn boulders was enough to make one shudder, as it seemed as if they must be bruised and split to pieces…. In the same article, Franklin characterizes the lead stockman as “triumphantly driving the steers before him with the crack of a 15-foot stockwhip, and holding a heavy pipe between a set of false teeth, where it had remained through all the action.”

Franklin wrote these articles and other pieces for the Herald under the pseudonym “Vernacular.” She would display a liking for pseudonyms throughout her career.

The following year, and tellingly under her own name, Franklin also wrote for the Herald, “San Francisco: A Fortnight After,” which chronicles the Great Earthquake damage she witnessed upon arriving in the city. “San Francisco” can be repositioned historically as a companion piece of literary journalism to Jack London’s far better known story, “The Story of an Eyewitness,” which chronicles the city in the hours after the disaster. Far more than simply “topical,” Franklin’s evocative, finely observed scenes show a ruined city revealing itself in the dawn and struggling to survive its new reality. Franklin writes:

Shortly after midnight on Monday, April 20th, the Golden Gate was entered, and the liner cast anchor down stream at about 2 a.m. … Right ahead gleamed acres of city night eyes, giving the impression that there was a great deal of the city yet standing. … As the daylight strengthened it looked like a series of vast rubbish tips cut out in squares where the streets had been, and from it all arose the odour of a great burning.

Franklin observes: “The first landmark to catch the eye of the traveler was the tower of the Ferry Building, with its flag-pole bent and out of plumb, and its big clock pointing to a quarter-past 5, the fatal hour on the morning of April 18th, when the earthquake occurred.” She sees tangles of pipes in apartment buildings, and notices silence where there should be “the hum and rattle of street cars.” Always a horsewoman, Franklin takes special note of the exhausted horses replacing suspended steam and electric transport: “Some of the gaunt and sweated creatures ran for 48 hours without rest.” “San Francisco” also exhibits Franklin’s perennial eye on equality as she describes the disaster reducing class distinctions to rubble.

Upon arriving in Chicago, Franklin continued freelancing for Australian newspapers and periodicals. Her article, “Letter From Chicago,” shows her eye for social observation: “It was a traveler’s party, and after we had eaten our ice creams (it is impossible to conceive of the Americans conducting anything from a prize fight to a mission service without the aid of ice cream)….” Her writing for Life and Labor in the years after falls more into reports and feature-style profiles but is informed by her previous year-long immersive research for Mary-Anne. Although Franklin seems to have shelved the Mary-Anne manuscript, Roe notes that she surveyed employment agencies as research for her Chicago Tribune article, “No Dignity in Domestic Service.” According to Roe, there is a school exercise book cover filed among her unpublished plays with a penciled heading, “The Misdemeanours of Mary Anne,” suggesting she rewrote it for an unrealized theater production while living in Chicago. There is also an undated, unfinished manuscript, Untitled Novel re Mary, a Servant Girl, that carries similarities to “When I Was Mary-Anne, a Slavey.” Later, the main first-person character in Franklin’s satirical drawing room mystery novel, Bring the Monkey, poses as a maid to attend a society party, evoking Franklin’s real-life Mary-Anne.

In 1915, Franklin moved to London. To support the war effort, she served as a volunteer orderly and cook in the Balkans, where she wrote the work of literary journalism, “Active Service Socks.” She describes the camp and again exhibits her ability to capture place: “The winds rushing down the valleys between the ancient, denuded hills, carrying heavy rains, which make camp existence a soggy thing and cold….”

Conclusion

Franklin remains revered in Australia as a novelist. Yet this reputation over-shadows her unrecognized contribution to early 20th-century literary journalism. Revisiting Franklin’s non-fiction writing in the early period of her writing career reframes her relevant work as literary journalism, and Franklin as a literary journalist, rather than a fiction writer dabbling in occasional “topical” writings.

“San Francisco, A Fortnight After” is the most accessible of Franklin’s literary journalism. It is a companion piece to Jack London’s “The Story of an Eyewitness” and, more widely, literary journalism writing on natural disasters. However, the unpublished book-length Mary-Anne is arguably a more important work, as it establishes her as a contributor to literary journalism’s tradition of performing gonzo advocacy, which Joseph traces from London and Orwell to Ehrenreich and Wynhausen.

Franklin takes her place in a more gendered gonzo advocacy that examines low-wage service labor through a feminized lens that amplifies the inequality women experience in these roles and challenges myths of meritocracy. The 19th-century works of Cochrane (Bly), Stackhouse (Marks), and Banks are tangled with the historical tags of stunt-girl reporting that hides their gonzo advocacy. Rather than also be dismissed as an aspiring stunt-girl reporter, Franklin meets Ricketson’s requirements for book-length literary journalism. Her work’s contribution is strengthened by Hartsock’s additional view that literary journalism is characterized by empathy, and empathy radiates throughout Mary-Anne. Franklin’s work enlivens the debate about gonzo advocacy by stunt-girl reporters and is a historical counterpoint to both early 20th century and more recent immersions in service by women literary journalists.

In the contemporary labor market, the rise in women’s employment in Australia is dominated by low-wage caring roles, such as childcare. According to the NWLC, in the U.S., “women represent nearly two-thirds of the workforce in low-paid jobs,” many of which are cleaning and waitressing. More than a century after her immersion, Franklin’s performance of gonzo advocacy in her exploration of the “servant question” endures.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the December 2020 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Kerrie Davies is a lecturer at the University of New South Wales’ School of Arts and Media in Sydney, Australia, where she teaches journalism. A former journalist, she is the author of A Wife’s Heart (University of Queensland Press, 2017) — a biography of Australian poet Henry Lawson’s wife, Bertha Lawson, and memoir on single parenting — and a contributing researcher to the Colonial Australian Narrative Journalism database.

Read: Footnotes

Susana Moreira Marques was born in Porto, northern Portugal, in 1976, and currently lives in Lisbon. She worked for the BBC World Service and lived in Great Britain for a number of years, where her work was published in newspapers such as the Guardian. Her career as an author — the designation she likes to use for people who engage in writing, as it is the term that puts aside any differences between journalist and writer — has undergone different phases. She has worked for national newspapers such as Público and Jornal de Negócios, and more recently she has been with the Portuguese national public radio, RDP, where she hosts a weekly crónica. Moreira Marques’ work with the BBC until 2011 allowed her the freedom to research and reach different publics and outlets in places as varied as Hong Kong and Australia.

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Moreira Marques is a person whose demeanor is as graceful and observant as her writing. Elegant and delicate, she produces powerful texts based on information acquired through immersion research, handling difficult topics such as migrants’ rights, sickness, and death, as well as easygoing texts that can be read on her blog, Bay Window, which she wrote for two years about her experiences while living in London. As an observer, her gaze comes from the outside, but she allows her senses and feelings to gather impressions that allow her to write within her own construction of mood. While all writing involves making a wide range of choices, Moreira Marques’ reflects the delicateness of topics and her own response to them. In her point of view, Moreira Marques is exact, yet unobtrusive. Characters and stories appear in a manner that neither imposes on them nor on the reader. The latter has the freedom to read and interpret at will, and the former are handled with respect for their individuality. The stories always have an author’s touch in the ordering and rendering of events and, invariably, they become Moreira Marques’ stories.

Isabel Nery and Alice Trindade interviewed Moreira Marques at her home in Lisbon, on April 9th, 2018.

Isabel Nery & Alice Trindade: In 2012, you won the Journalism Prize for Human Rights and Integration, promoted by the Portuguese Media Office and the Portuguese UNESCO Commission, for a series of reports, titled Novos Portugueses (The New Portuguese). You were also awarded a prize, Jornalismo Contra a Indiferença (Journalism Against Indifference) for the same series by Assistência Médica Internacional (International Medical Assistance). In 2016, you were given an honorable mention for a series of texts, “Armas e Bagagens” (All Packed Up), “Quando as Palavras Libertação e Independência Conspiraram” (When Words, Liberation, and Independence Conspired), and “À Procura de um Território Comum” (In Search of Common Ground), published in Jornal de Negócios. How did the translation of your book Now and at the Hour of Our Death change your work?1

Susana Moreira Marques: As strange as it may seem, I’ve traveled more with the book and had more events with the English translation than with the Portuguese one. I’ve had more invitations to dialogue with other authors. In Portugal the book had wonderful reviews, but it didn’t make it to festivals and conference circuits like the English version.

Nery & Trindade: Could that be because it deals with the issue of death?

Moreira Marques: Yes and no. In England, I went to several events where authors also published on the same topic. In Portugal, festivals usually don’t include non-fiction. Besides, they are rather closed, inviting the same authors. In Portugal, if you don’t write novels you are not considered a writer. You are just a journalist, which is a level below the writer. In English the word author includes everything, from fiction to history. Even festivals have a different mindset. They are book festivals, not literary festivals, as in Portugal.

Nery & Trindade: How was the reception of your book at the Edinburgh festival?

Moreira Marques: The Edinburgh International Book Festival is where I launched the book in English in 2015. It’s the largest book festival in the world, with 800 authors in three weeks. They call all kinds of writers. Some were doctors, some were writers, and some were people who had written memoirs. But also, musicians, philosophers, and politicians. One of the issues they focused on was old age and dying. In some cases, I was invited to talk because of the subject, but also about the writing, the relation between literature and journalism. Other events were about writing from reality. The process of writing fiction and non-fiction was part of the literary discussion in a way that doesn’t happen in the Portuguese-speaking world.

Nery & Trindade: The mixture of literature and journalism in this genre was probably something that you didn’t think of. For you, is this book journalism, literature, or both?

Moreira Marques: It’s a difficult question. When I wrote it, I wasn’t thinking in those terms. I was thinking of doing the best book I could. I was aware that I had material that was very rare and special and that I could write something that could be special as well. What I had in mind was to do something that could live longer than an article. Because the subject was so strong, though not that explored, I knew it was exceptional. In that sense it can be seen as literature.

Nery & Trindade: Kevin Kerrane, who writes about literary journalism, says literary journalism is “news that lasts.”2

Moreira Marques: I wanted to write something enjoyable to read, that I would like to read as a reader. When the book came out, almost all reviews mentioned the fact that it had a mix of genres. It was journalism, but it had oral history and diary style. But this mixture wasn’t on my mind. I was just looking for the right way to tell it, and it came naturally like this. Maybe this happened because this mix was already in my universe.

Nery & Trindade: How so?

Moreira Marques: I read journalism, fiction, and poetry. I’ve always struggled with language, trying to make a piece that was not just information but that could convey something through language. It was a part of me already. Maybe it was kind of condensed in the book. One journalist from Expresso, José Mário Silva, did a very good review of the book.3 He told me that he used to read my pieces in Público, and this was surprising.4 I would not be able to publish something like this in Público. But I had been thinking and writing like this, sometimes just for myself, for a long time.

Nery & Trindade: How did those other articles prepare you to write this book?

Moreira Marques: It was more the style. I wrote a piece about an elderly surrealist artist who lives in Paris, for Colóquio Letras.5 I spent a lot of time with her. I slept in her house. I felt I had the time to get to know her. I could do that kind of work that you don’t get to do for a newspaper. In terms of structure it was also very fragmented, which was possible because it was for a literary magazine.

Nery & Trindade: Immersion reporting is often said to be a literary journalism technique, like anthropological work.

Moreira Marques: Yes. People will see my book as they want: journalism or literature. I understand that some people still don’t have a clear notion of what literary non-fiction can be. A writer told me: “Your book is a novel.” What he meant was that my book didn’t sound like journalism, but like li erature. If under the title I had put the word “novel,” people would have accepted it and the problem would have been solved.

Nery & Trindade: Except, you did write journalism. Did you at any time refrain from writing something that didn’t happen exactly like that?

Moreira Marques: I didn’t do the field work as if I was to write for a newspaper, because I knew I was doing a book. I knew I wanted another kind of depth and relation with those people.

Nery & Trindade: Do you remember any constraints while doing field work that you wouldn’t have if you were doing a novel?

Moreira Marques: No. The constraints were more in the writing process, not in field work. If they do come in the field, they are in your mind. I didn’t do field work as a regular reporter, not with that mindset.

Nery & Trindade: How are the mindsets different?

Moreira Marques: I was working with a completely different time frame. I wasn’t in a hurry to get the information. The first time I met people I never recorded anything. Every day I got a lot of information I knew I wouldn’t use. But it was part of the process for people to get to trust me and engage. At the beginning people saw me as another health professional. They wanted to complain and talk about doctors. I needed to go through all that. I also talked a lot with the doctors to know the cases they had, to be able to choose. It’s completely different from the story for a newspaper where you need to fit information into an expected output.

Nery & Trindade: So, time would be the biggest difference you felt in the field?

Moreira Marques: Yes. I wanted to go in a more anthropological way. Before I started to do journalism, I worked in cinema for some years. I spent a lot of time with people who worked in documentaries. I did a documentary on retornados, returnees, families from Angola and Mozambique.6 It’s not a good film — I was young — but it was a good experience. Looking back, I came out of it with the clear idea that people who worked in documentary film do a lot of field work.

Nery & Trindade: Time is usually an issue for journalists. How long did you have to do your book?

Moreira Marques: Almost a year. For field work, one month. Because I got the money from a Gulbenkian fellowship, I could, for the first time, write a story where I could spend time with the people involved.7 I’ve always suffered with lack of time in journalism. I had a built-up desire to do something not in a rush. It’s possible to write a book in two weeks. All the writers are different and if you’re honest in your writing, that’s not a problem. But this is not how I want to work, because of the superficiality it entails. If you read a 6,000-word piece in The New Yorker, you see that it couldn’t have been done in two weeks.

Nery & Trindade: You state in an interview for the newspaper Público that your occupation consists of “positioning words on a piece of paper.” How do you go about it? Tell us some of your writing habits.

Moreira Marques: In the case of the book, first I read about the subject, palliative care. I read non-fiction but also novels or even history that could be references for me. I invited a photographer to come with me, because the first edition had photography. I went to Trás-os-Montes for the first time in June of 2011.8 I stayed for two weeks, then went back later in the summer for a week and in autumn for another week.

Nery & Trindade: Was that deliberate?

Moreira Marques: Yes. I wanted to be able to follow people through time. I also like the idea of seeing things through the seasons of the year. The landscape, but also the atmosphere. If you go in August, it’s completely different because of the festas.9 The first trip was to do a reconnaissance. I met a lot of people and traveled a lot around the villages. I was shadowing the doctor, going where she was going and talking to whoever she was talking to. I was aware that, as families who were dealing with their losses and the different stages of illness and grief, they would feel different things and say different things. I wanted to follow the process. This is why I decided not to go for a month in a row.

Nery & Trindade: How did you decide to write about this topic?

Moreira Marques: I lost two of my grandparents in 2010. They both died alone in the hospital, and this is something that is very hard to forgive yourself — the people you love dying alone. My grandmother was like a second mother to me. She brought me up, so it was quite hard to deal with her death, with the way she died, and the lack of support and information from doctors. That made me very aware of all the difficulties, silences, and taboos that surround dying.

Nery & Trindade: You were influenced by your own experiences, as it often happens with literary journalism.

Moreira Marques: By coincidence, a very good friend of mine, whom I met in London, was working in palliative care. She started researching in this area, at a time when the Gulbenkian Foundation decided to support projects on the topic. I interviewed the director of the foundation’s health department, Jorge Soares, a doctor and a scientist. He told me about the project in Trás-os-Montes and in the Alentejo.10 He sent me a lot of information and told me he always wanted to do something about the project that could remain. So, I made a proposal to write a book. That was that. It fell from the sky. Everything was easy from the very beginning.

Nery & Trindade: Did you try to publish the story in any mainstream media?

Moreira Marques: That’s a funny story. I tried a prepublication, but I was told that it wasn’t fit to be published in Pública. They told me it was too literary, and they couldn’t publish it. I’ve always been a collaborator for Público, but I think that, if I had been a writer, instead of a mere journalist, they would have published it.

Nery & Trindade: So, it was only published in book form?

Moreira Marques: Yes.

Nery & Trindade: Was it because of the topic: death?

Moreira Marques: I don’t know. Yes, in a way. The first thing my editor told me was that it was not going to sell. Anything about death doesn’t sell.

Nery & Trindade: She prepared you for failure?

Moreira Marques: Yes, basically.

Nery & Trindade: So, the difficulties didn’t come only from the topic but also from style?

Moreira Marques: Yes. But they don’t mind if it’s a writer. If it’s a journalist they will ask: “Why are you writing in the first person? Who cares about what you think?” There were a couple of pieces that I wanted to write differently, for instance, using the first person, and it was a struggle. I had to fight.

Nery & Trindade: Would it be different if newsrooms knew more about literary journalism in Portugal?

Moreira Marques: Yes. But in recent years I think that has changed. Nowadays I read more carefully written pieces. I think journalists today can communicate with other journalists and read them. You are not confined as in the past. We have very good journalists.

Nery & Trindade: What do you feel about literary journalism in Portugal and in Portuguese language? Some people say there is no literary journalism in Portugal. Despite that, are there any influences from other authors you would like to share?

Moreira Marques: I was influenced by readings, but also by journalists who I have met and inspired me, like Alexandra Lucas Coelho and Paulo Moura. They were wonderful influences because I could see that the journalism they were doing was lived with such passion and engagement with the world, and that interested me. It was beautiful and romantic. The way they did it made me think that I could do it as well. It wasn’t the kind of journalism that I had studied at school.

Nery & Trindade: Portugal is described as a poet’s country. Can that also contribute to this lack of interest in non-fiction?

Moreira Marques: Maybe. I was never very good at writing news. I wrote about everything, from politics to sports, but I know I’m not a very good news journalist. I don’t get a thrill from breaking news. My thrill is to tell stories.

Nery & Trindade: Did your experience at the BBC have an influence on that?

Moreira Marques: I was also influenced by my readings in London. Not only the papers. It made me think about the way we do things in Portugal. Why can’t we use the first person? Who made that rule? I started questioning things. Today my library is half Portuguese and half English. I obviously knew some of the New Journalists but maybe I wasn’t aware that the world of literary non-fiction was so large. I read Joan Didion and was completely taken aback. When I read those kinds of things I think: “Wow! I want to do it. I want to be able to write like this.” She shows you that you can write about reality and do literature. And that can often be more interesting than literature. In the United Kingdom there is a large market for non-fiction. There are also many good memoirs. I keep discovering things.

Nery & Trindade: We are now in a more mature state of our society, after the dictatorship. Maybe we can think about reality with more detail nowadays.

Moreira Marques: Possibly. A couple of years after the book came out in English, an Australian magazine did a reading list for experimental non-fiction and put me in it. There’s a large world of non-fiction out there, and I really think that, right now, non-fiction is pushing more boundaries than fiction. I feel fiction is a bit tired. There’s a lot of repetition. Whereas in literary non-fiction there’s a sense of newness. That’s really exciting. I love that.

Nery & Trindade: Can you give some examples of Portuguese literary journalism authors?

Moreira Marques: Besides Alexandra Lucas Coelho and Paulo Moura, we have some very good things from the 1950s and 1960s, like Raul Brandão’s Os Pescadores (Fishermen), at a time when people were very preoccupied with reality. Maybe they felt a duty to talk about reality. There’s also Bernardo Santareno’s Nos Mares do Fim do Mundo (In the Seas at the End of the World).11 It’s a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. We’ve had literary journalism before, but it wasn’t tagged like that. Maybe authors sort of lost that habit, as the novel became the big thing. I often prefer to talk about literary non-fiction than literary journalism.

Nery & Trindade: Researching your published work, it is clear that you have national and international careers, on multiple platforms: you write for Público, contribute to Jornal de Negócios in Portugal; and in the United Kingdom you worked for the BBC and published with the Guardian and Granta. Your non-fiction book Now and at the Hour of Our Death was published in Portugal and the U.K. You now have a weekly, Thursday radio crónica with the Portuguese public radio station, and contribute to the online platform Buala that publishes contents from Portuguese language authors.12 Your journalism is multifaceted, so where do you feel best? Do you have any particular sense of belonging to a specific journalism subgenre?

Moreira Marques: There’s a lot of interest in reality. Even in film, you see young filmmakers doing documentary or a mix between documentary and fiction — like trying to catch something that is about to disappear. My book is about dying, but it also ends up being about the dying of places and cultures. A lot of the journalism I have done since has to do with this.

Nery & Trindade: You also have a weekly spot on the radio. Has it been a good experience?

Moreira Marques: Yes. I’m not a radio fan, and I hadn’t done radio before, but it’s very interesting. Two years ago, I got this invitation from Antena 1. I found out that I like to use my voice more than I thought. At the beginning it was strange because there is so little time to do it: about three minutes. But it was quite an experience to feel every word counts. There’s a tenderness in radio. I’ve grown into it.

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the August 2020 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Authors

Alice Trindade is an associate professor with the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas at the University of Lisbon, serving as vice dean since 2012, and a member of one of its research centers, the Center for Administration and Public Policies, CAPP. Trindade is one of the founding members of IALJS and served as president from 2010 to 2012. She has most recently published on Portuguese language African literary journalism and the adoption by Angolan journalists of crónica as a tool for active citizenship and engagement, especially since the end of the Civil War. In 2018 she co-edited, with Andrew Griffiths and Audrey Alvés, Literary Journalism and Africa’s Wars, part of a series edited by John Bak at the University of Lorraine.

Isabel Nery is a Portuguese journalist. She has worked for Lisbon magazine Visão since 2002, and has won a number of awards, including the Jornalismo pela Tolerancia (Journalism for Tolerance) prize in 2003, which is awarded by Portugal’s High Commissioner for Immigration and Intercultural Dialogue.

Read: Footnotes

“She interviews hundreds of people. Lets them tell their stories through her. Soldiers. Nurses. Nuclear technicians. She doesn’t speak for them, but she uses her talent and way with words to let them speak for themselves. It’s not easy, and she’s one of the few who can do it without screwing it up.”1 This pronouncement, followed by the phrases Nobel Laureate and Cold War documentarian, produces blank stares from a normally enthusiastic group of budding literary journalists.2 Yet it is necessary to press on because the work of Belarusian literary journalist and historian Svetlana Alexievich embodies an issue of primary importance to the instructor of literary journalism: the responsibility and difficulties of telling the stories of those who cannot tell the stories themselves.

Whether it is a language barrier, a class barrier, or simply a lack of platform, the lives of others often need telling by someone who is not intimately familiar with their lives, communities, and milieux. This often comes as a shock to Generation Z students who commonly insist that journalists should tell only their own stories and not dare to speak for anyone else.3 In part a noble idea rooted in an aversion to cultural appropriation, the notion also stems from a self-centered belief that first-person journalism is more literary and more real and more valid than any other form of non-fiction writing.

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When confronted with the notion that banning reporters from writing about anything but their own lives and communities would likely produce thousands of articles about petty problems but few if any multi-faceted stories about the residents of Ugandan slums, intersectional narratives about the Hong Kong protests, histories featuring sources who are no longer living, many students tend to quiet down. Moreover, they already know some stories require the perspective of multiple sources across class, race, and ethnic lines. At this point in the semester, the students in the literary journalism class have read Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man” and Alex Perry’s “The True Story of the White Island Eruption,” both of which are stories that contain the perspectives of multiple sources, though those perspectives are presented in the third person rather than the first.

How, however, can a writer do this? How can a writer bring to light and life the lives of people radically different from the writer’s self? This is where Alexievich’s work can be highly instructive. The Cold War might be distant history to the students, and their initial reaction might be to recoil, but they do come around once they have been presented with captivating passages from Alexievich’s work and given some context. It is especially effective to start with her account of Chernobyl, because younger students know of the disaster through countless YouTube videos and Instagram accounts that document journeys into the exclusion zone. Once students have a taste for her prose, however, the now-distant fall of the Soviet Union becomes vivid and real: “Pretty soon, I’ll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that’s left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is … I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you firsthand: paper lies even more than people do.”

Alexievich earned the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for her books chronicling dark events in the Soviet Union, from World War II to the Soviet-Afghan War to the Chernobyl catastrophe. The selection of Alexievich and her work marked a rare case of a person winning the literary prize for reportage. Given the dearth of English translations of her work and the relative rarity of any literary journalism being taught in many universities, the announcement may have been the first time many readers had ever heard of her. While her previous lack of fame was unfortunate, her rise to worldwide prominence came at a crucial time, especially as an army of sophisticated propagandists infected worldwide media with the fiction of Soviet innocence. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his supporters were some of the few people who did not approve of the Nobel committee’s choice. However, first-time readers of her work not only discovered her uncompromisingly detailed accounts of the failure of the great Soviet experiment, they were also treated to a specific style of polyphonic literary journalism rarely seen — one that can and should be held as a model for avoiding some of the pitfalls of some forms of literary journalism.

This is not to say that Alexievich’s techniques should or could replace the conventions of much literary journalism. There are several reasons why her methods might be difficult for literary journalists to apply. One reason is that conducting dozens, possibly hundreds, of interviews is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly. It is simply beyond the budget of most publications, especially student publications. Another stumbling block is that it requires an enormous amount of self-discipline for the author not to project him or herself into the subject’s story and change it to better match what the author wants the story to say.

However, scaled-down versions of Alexievich’s techniques, where students interview five to six sources and present the sources’ stories in the sources’ voices, are within reach. In the literary journalism classroom, students are instructed to think of each source and voice as a different side of a prism, and each should be an equal facet of the narrative. The results have been mixed, but there are usually a few students eager to do the required legwork. Moreover, the discussions of how to go about this work often focus on neglected journalistic skills, such as listening to and having empathy for the subject.

Yet, if a student is to hold up Alexievich as a model, it is helpful to articulate what precisely she does, what her books are — among them Zinky Boys (1989), Voices From Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (2013) — and why they work so well. This has been, for many critics, a challenge as elusive as defining literary journalism itself. Students, once they grasp what is different about her approach, relish this challenge. Discussions of her work often crystalize some of the more esoteric problems of voice and perspective in non-fiction. Contrasting Alexievich’s writing with the non-fiction work of Truman Capote or Tom Wolfe tends not to diminish any of the authors, but rather illustrates the particular genius of each one.

Students Must Ask: Are Her Books Journalism? Non-Fiction? History? Oral History?

What distinguishes Alexievich’s work from that of many U.S. literary journalists (and other cultures as well), is not just her polyphonic or multi-voiced journalism, but the way in which her own authorial perspective is subsumed in favor of the perspective of the subject’s perspective. Her meticulously factual prose reads as though it is the voice of the interviewed subject, not the journalist’s. She is “translating” — or perhaps, more accurately, “ghost-writing” — the raw interviews into her own elegant prose. In this way, she gives voice to the voiceless, allowing her own gifts to be used by those who cannot speak as beautifully themselves. A Russian soldier’s experience of the Afghan War comes alive in his brutal words: “Fear is more human than bravery, you’re scared and you’re sorry, at least for yourself, but you force your fear back into your subconscious. Well, I admit it. I had the greatest respect for the Afghan people, even while I was shooting and killing them.”

Students tend to delight in such honesty, and they crave the ability to tease such a pronouncement from their own sources. They want to know how Alexievich does it, and suddenly become engaged in the specifics of technique. Alexievich’s descriptions of her processes have been sparse but consistent. She does dozens, if not hundreds, of interviews with many witnesses to whatever crisis about which she is writing. In her books, her often humble subjects speak with consistent grace and style. For example, in Voices From Chernobyl, an account by the wife of a fireman named Lyudmilla Ignatenko, who watched her husband Vasily die from radiation sickness, reads:

On the very first day in the dormitory, they measured me with a dosimeter. My clothes, bag, purse, shoes — they were all “hot.” And they took that all away from me right there. Even my underwear. The only thing they left was my money.

He started to change; every day I met a brand-new person. The burns started to come to the surface. In his mouth, on his tongue, his cheeks — at first there were little lesions, and then they grew. It came off in layers — as white film … the colour of his face … his body … blue, red, grey-brown. And it’s all so very mine!

In a later passage, chemical engineer Ivan Nikolaevich Zhykhov speaks of the astounding folly he encountered during the haphazard clean-up:

We dug up the diseased top layer of soil, loaded it into cars and took it to waste burial sites. I thought that a waste burial site was a complex, engineered construction, but it turned out to be an ordinary pit. We picked up the earth and rolled it, like big rugs. We’d pick up the whole green mass of it, with grass, flowers, roots. It was work for madmen.

The fact that the words themselves are not the subjects’ own can and does provoke discomfort from journalists. An audience member at a panel discussion expressed concerns about Alexievich’s use of the perspective of her sources, as well as what he observed as the obviousness of the two passages from Voices From Chernobyl, from two different sources, having been written by the same writer.

Students generally do not notice the consistency of the prose, until it is pointed out to them. Even when it has been pointed out, they tend to praise the elegance and effectiveness and do not see a problem with it, until they attempt to replicate the technique. Questions such as:

• “Am I allowed to change the source’s words?”

• “What if the source doesn’t like the way I write it?”

• “How can I be accurate if I wasn’t there?”

Answering these questions usually leads to complex ethical discussions, the kind that are a cornerstone of the literary journalism classroom.

The resulting conclusion is most often that there is real potential for abuse using this translation technique, but there is potential for abuse in many other areas of journalism as well. Bad journalists routinely cherry-pick facts to back up their theses, put thoughts into the heads of their sources and edit quotes in misleading ways. The solution is, in these cases, the same as for those using Alexievich’s translation technique. Train journalists in ethics and demand they not engage in malfeasance.

Concretely defining the technique proves even more difficult. There is something fictive and illusory in presenting prose that did not come from the source’s mouth as the source’s voice, because it pushes against the boundaries of what journalism is. Language translators can manipulate word choice in the same way, and there is much scholarly debate as to if or when a translation is not the same as the original. The risk in employing Alexievich’s technique is, in fact, less of a risk than translation, because the subject has the language skills to fact check the journalist’s work. Yet, if executed with discipline and a lack of bias, it can work much as translation does when a person cannot speak a language. But is translation the right word? At this stage, students can start to look for and read similar translations in their own language publications, seeing how the authorial technique can vary even when the basic premise remains the same.

The ghost-writing/translation technique is not unknown in U.S. journalism. Studs Terkel, the late chronicler of U.S. life, employed a similar method to create his oral histories of grand topics such as urban life in Division Street and the Great Depression in Hard Times. Much like Alexievich, Terkel was hailed for giving voice to marginalized communities and populations. Unlike Alexievich, he more deftly created an illusion that his subjects were speaking for themselves. He did, however, field criticism for indulging in primitivism by letting their poor grammar and regional accents exist in what was still his prose.

Even as they are often compared, the way the two authors’ works read is remarkably different. In his preface to an interview with Alexievich for LitHub, John Freeman summed it up:

Unlike Studs Terkel, whose oral histories of American life arrange themselves like transcribed radio interviews, Alexievich’s books are strange creations. They never ask the reader to imagine their subjects are representative individuals. When she won the Nobel in 2015, Alexievich described them as novels — which is a fair comparison given the meticulous arrangement required to create such clear and evocative pastiche. Whatever they are, her books are as eerie and beautiful as overheard voices on a crowded train car traveling through the night.

At the other end of the spectrum, polyphonic ghost-writing also remains a common practice in U.S. women’s magazines such as Marie Claire or Cosmopolitan, and thus can be a familiar structure to some students, though the prose style and subject matter can vary wildly. Marie Claire leans heavily on direct quotes when telling the stories of women who successfully run for office, while the magazine’s regular feature telling the stories of reunions between exes, that is, people who were previously married, is decidedly not literary. “In spite of all the ‘Miss Independent’ and ‘Girl Power’ books I had read — and was planning to write someday — I fell in love. Fast and furious.” Recently, Cosmopolitan reached toward the literary when writer Anna Louie Sussman tells the story of a young woman from Texas who self-performs an abortion during the COVID-19 pandemic: “They try to tell you, ‘We’re going to help you do this, we’re going to help you do that.’ I’ve had friends say they told them that too. But once the baby was there, there was no help. So I was just scared, just thinking, I’m really going to have to give birth.”

As with Alexievich’s work, these writers seek to elevate each individual source’s narrative, sans authorial commentary. However, this technique must be employed with care and caveats, especially in terms of the multiplicity of sources. The more sources a writer includes in the story “translation” of sources’ voices, the more journalistically sound the story becomes.

Multi-sourced narratives are inoculated against a single narrative or single perception bearing the weight of an argument. If one of a writer’s sources turns out to be wrong, whether via deception, delusion, or mistake, it simply becomes an example of the chaos of a situation, if there are dozens of other, accurate voices shoring up the thesis. In a less multi-voiced story, such as the disastrous Rolling Stone exposé of rape culture at the University of Virginia, a bad source destroys the credibility of the thesis.

Even in a small-scale classroom situation, students notice the contradictions between their sources and wonder if they should include them. They push back against the notion of writing down anything that they perceive to be incorrect, even when reminded that the source being incorrect can be an essential part of the story. They push back against making their sources look like fools or liars, rightfully fearing backlash. They push back at annotating the work, fearing it will ruin the narrative. The real breakthrough comes when the students realize that the solutions do not come easily, the facts are not always apparent, and sometimes they must write the truth even if it hurts the source.

The translation process also requires an authorial distance. One that is often the opposite of the approach of some U.S. literary journalists, who thrive on self-insertion and advancing their own points of view. This kind of author-centered journalism is not necessarily a bad thing, and it has given some of the greatest literary journalism. Classic works that do the opposite of what Alexievich does, such as Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and Joan Didion’s The White Album unfold their stories so the reader sees the subject through the author’s eyes, observing everything the author observes and most times absorbing the author’s brilliant perceptions of the subject. Even more extreme examples can be found in the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer, as they take their readers on a journey through their own consciousness, a journey that often completely subsumes whatever subject about which they are writing.4 When presented with these contrasts, one group of students concluded that Talese and Didion write about their subjects, Thompson and Mailer write about themselves through their subject, and Alexievich writes about the Soviet Union.

This can then lead into a discussion about the popularity of author-centered journalism and how it has led to some spectacular journalistic disasters in which authors have been accused of advancing their own perceptions over facts or, worse, becoming fiction writers. Grantland writer Caleb Hannan allowed his own transphobia to shift the focus of his feature away from his subject’s business dealings and toward his subject’s gender identity, leading to the subject’s suicide. Stephen Glass’ fabulist escapades at the New Republic are the stuff of legend, and even Esquire’s well-respected Tom Junod was rightfully called out for his fictional lead in a Michael Stipe profile. Still, U.S. editors like Grantland’s Bill Simmons and Esquire’s David Granger, heavily influenced by the New Journalism, often seemed to operate under the incorrect assumption that if the author’s point of view is not the center of the story, then the story is not literary. Alexievich, on the other hand, speaks of her ability to listen to her sources and articulate their point of view as a core element of her work.

These lessons have proved invaluable and should be a part of literary journalism pedagogy even if producing large scale works using Alexievich’s translation technique is beyond most students’ capabilities. Teaching them to value more than one voice, teaching them to privilege the source’s voice over their own, and, above all, teaching them to listen, will only make all their writing stronger.

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published in the December 2020 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

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Find the books mentioned in this story on The Postscript’s Bookshop page.

Meet: About the Author

Melissa Nurczynski teaches in the Professional Writing Department at Kutztown University, specializing in narrative nonfiction, magazine writing, and literary journalism. She has also worked as a journalist and travel writer for publications that include Atlas Obscura, Newsweek, the Houston Chronicle, and Budget Travel.

Read: Footnotes

Classes and programs on literary journalism studies are emerging and thriving around the world, each with its local take or global perspective. As scholars try and test different methods and formats, experiment with new pedagogical tools and techniques, think of expanding the canons, and promote inclusive approaches, I was curious to see how those who pioneered a still-to-this-day unique, full undergraduate program in literary journalism in the United States could enlighten us about the promises and possibilities of such educational ventures.1 Hence, this conversation with Barry Siegel and Amy Wilentz, from the University of California–Irvine.

Important to note is the program in literary journalism at UC–Irvine is housed within the English department, a home base that bears relation to the specific attention attached to language. Besides its distinguishing badge of excellence in narrative writing, the program reflects the hybridity of literary journalism itself, with an equally solid offering of workshops and classes in reporting. Many institutions now provide courses in literary journalism, but rarely as a comprehensive program. For instance, the extension of the University of California–Los Angeles features an online introductory course in literary journalism, while other institutions offer courses at the master’s, not undergraduate, level.2 By way of illustration, the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University offers a master’s literary reportage program.3

My immense gratitude goes to Barry Siegel, director of and a professor in the program, and to Amy Wilentz, a distinguished professor on their faculty. They both generously shared some of their precious time to provide insight into their experience and expertise, now that the program has been running successfully for more than 15 years. UC–Irvine started its three-year comprehensive course in literary journalism in 2003, with Siegel at the helm. Since then, a few professors have joined in, students have responded, and bright days lie ahead, with a growing demand for storytelling skills across disciplines. Adaptability is the order of the day, with students’ needs receiving special attention, and professors standing by their standards of quality and high principles.

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Siegel is an acclaimed writer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, and longtime contributor to the Los Angeles Times. He teaches reporting, non-fiction narrative, and the history and theory of literary journalism. His latest book, Dreamers and Schemers, published in 2019, details and chronicles how the 1932 Olympic Games changed Los Angeles and triggered the city’s stunning expansion.4 Wilentz, a former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, is an award-winning author who writes on Haiti, contributes to The Nation, and teaches personal essay writing, climate literature, and nature writing.5 Other instructors are Carol M. Burke, Miles Corwin, Amy DePaul, Christopher Goffard, Erika Hayasaki, Patricia Pierson, and Hector Tobar, all teaching a variety of theoretical and practical skills.

Shortly before California was forced into lockdown to contain the coronavirus, we sat for lunch in Los Angeles, blissfully unaware this would be one of our last authorized social gatherings for a while. Their enthusiasm for the program is both palpable and inspirational. No need to ask them whether literary journalism qualifies as a discipline, or that sort of captious question. The gist of the program lies in the making of their craft — reporting and writing — that is, the essence of good literary journalism. Most striking in the conversation is the resourcefulness and commitment of this small-sized staff, and their unwavering devotion and attention to students and to the UC–Irvine community at large.

Our conversation took place on March 9th, 2020, at a restaurant in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles. It was recorded, transcribed, and edited for clarity where necessary. I stayed true to the most agreeable meandering of the conversation into a variety of subjects, and later introduced and complemented it with notes from previous research and information collected from the program website at UC–Irvine.6

Isabelle Meuret: How did you come up with a program in literary journalism at UC–Irvine?

Barry Siegel: My only exposure to university is that I had taught one semester at the University of Southern California as a journalist in residence from the LA Times. That was a journalism school. When I was approached by UC–Irvine, back in 2003, the idea that was being promoted and created by the English department, and was going to be housed there, was that all non-fiction narrative was worthy of being regarded as literature. It was a body of literature worth a degree program inside the English department. This spoke to what our interests were.

Meuret: More and more creative and non-fiction writing classes are created around the world. Why do you hold on to “literary journalism” rather than teach “longform writing” or “storytelling”?

Amy Wilentz: Barry always says about our workshops that we have all these different names for them but, really, they are all about narrative, storytelling.

Siegel: The power of storytelling.

Wilentz: So why do we hold on to literary? Because we don’t want to be swept into a dustbin of facts, solely, so that you’re just forgotten in history, and you don’t mean anything, and your work doesn’t have any standing in the way literature ostensibly has in the long run.

Siegel: Enduring — it’s news that stays news.

Meuret: Is it also linked to the origins, the fact that it was published in literary magazines?

Wilentz: That’s what I taught at Columbia [University], where I was an adjunct professor. I taught their magazine journalism class. It was kind of half professional, and half literary journalism. So, we put together a new magazine. The kids had the idea for the magazine, and we put it all together. And then they wrote it and designed it. It was every aspect of magazine. But of course, Columbia had the money.

Meuret: Robert Boynton is leading a literary reportage program at NYU. But you pioneered the literary journalism program at UC–Irvine, right?

Siegel: We were first — the literary reportage at NYU is a graduate program. Ours is an undergraduate program, but NYU is probably the closest approximation to what we are doing. It came after ours.

Wilentz: Iowa also has a program in creative non-fiction.7

Meuret: Yes, but you are the only ones to hold on to “literary journalism.” Is it your signature?

Siegel: We are the only undergrad degree program in any kind of journalism program in the UC system, and the only undergraduate literary journalism program in the country. What was happening is that the school of humanities back then invited all the departments to come up with proposals for new majors and new programs, and part of that was to attract new students into the humanities. And our English department, which is well-known for critical theory…

Wilentz: Yes, even Derrida, unbelievably…

Siegel: Here is how this happened: The person they put in charge of the committee to try and come up with proposals for new programs is a professor in the department of English, Linda Georgianna, who herself was a medievalist. She was casting about her ideas and it so happened, coincidentally, that her college roommate (when she went to college) was Madeleine Blais, who now teaches at the University of Massachusetts. She is a well-known literary journalist. It’s just her happening to tell her proposal, and it was the beginning.

Meuret: Interesting to see how things come together. Are your students joining the program because they are disappointed with “legacy” or “traditional” journalism?

Wilentz: I don’t think they think like that. I have a fairly clear view of who our students are. A lot of our students are sons and daughters of immigrants, so they don’t think about “legacy” journalism.

Siegel: They are first-generation college students.

Wilentz: Yes, and they are the first persons in the family who speak English fluently. They may not have read a lot of English. They are not a class of first-generation students who are big readers, or who have read all the old English classics, and who “love” literary journalism. They are not like that. They are coming to this sort of “weird,” almost “ancient” study to them, but they know it also has excitement. And they get very excited about the reporting, except that it’s hard, because they are also well brought up by immigrant parents who don’t want them to get into trouble. So, they would not dare to ask an important person, “How much money do you actually make?”

Siegel: Or, “How old are you?” I cannot get my students to get ages into their stories because they are too shy or polite to ask. Amy is absolutely right. But let me add that UC–Irvine’s body of students is strongly children of immigrants — about 60 percent — but that’s not everybody. Often students are there because they want to do journalism and that’s the only place to do it.

Meuret: It is a first entry point to journalism?

Wilentz: Yes, and they do go on. Those students will go on and some actually do journalism.

Siegel: Yes, they catch it. Besides my workshop, I teach a core course in the evolution of the field, the evolving ethics of the field, so I sit there with maybe 50, 60 students, and I’m trying to define literary journalism and — you know, the subjective prism of the writer — and there’s a certain segment of that class that is more conventional mainstream than we are — you know, “objectivity” is the god and “biases,” the devil — so, these are people whom we introduce to the possibilities of literary journalism.

Wilentz: Sometimes I ask my students: Did you enjoy the class? And they say, “Yeah. It was really interesting, but it was more like an English class because we read books. I thought we read only articles.” They read non-fiction books.

Meuret: You manage to make them read?

Wilentz: I wouldn’t go that far. Some of them read, but usually it’s the readers who read.

Siegel: As I tell my students, I don’t know how you can be a writer without being a reader, and so yes, we are dealing with a generation that is not a reading generation in the way we were, but the foundation of our workshops is reading exemplary models, then peer review. We peer review each other, so there’s that kind of reading, but we also X-ray exemplary models of literary journalism.

Wilentz: Also, you respond. I arrived there some 13 years ago. When I first got there, I tried to sort of teach like a Harvard [University] professor, because that’s how I had learned. I dictated to them, I told them what to read, I expected them to do the assignments. That didn’t work. So now I have conversations with them, even in my lecture classes, and although I will assign whole books, I also now assign two, three chapters, conclusions, and they can digest that.

Siegel: That’s a compromise. You cannot get any of that close reading if you assign eight books, or whole sections. And I want the close reading.

Meuret: Increasingly we talk about the “demise” or “failure” of journalism. I suppose it is connected to the current climate and politics. Still, do you see even more enthusiasm on the part of students because we are in an age of activism? Are students keen on advocacy journalism?

Siegel: When we first started, the projections were way off. We thought we could gather just a few majors, and we were inundated from the start. Inundated. Where we slowed down was with the great recession, and the concurrent implosion in the field, in the profession. And now we are dramatically seeing increases again.

Wilentz: It’s the [President Donald] Trump bump. All the name-calling of journalism has caused young people to look at journalism and say, it matters.

Siegel: I was provided with numbers with the latest applications for UC–Irvine — I don’t know how that will reflect, but there is a dimension of that that has to do with what is going on.

Meuret: The zeitgeist.

Wilentz: Yeah, the zeitgeist. It’s all the digital stuff, social media, that is affecting journalism.8

Siegel: We have a lot of majors who are interested in journalism as a tool for social change and social justice, but we also have the artists, the poets who are just drawn to it, or to literature, as writers.

Wilentz: That’s exciting. Sometimes it’s older students who are getting to this program, who are much more interested.

Meuret: In one of your course descriptions, for the personal essay, you advise that the workshop is not “a psychological group session.”

Siegel: We are against navel gazing. But most of it is under the supervision of Amy. It’s pretty regulated.

Wilentz: And also “don’t whine.” It’s not what we are here for.

Meuret: You currently have a minor and major component, and you are planning to create an MA degree. What would be the added value, compared to the undergraduate program?

Siegel: The main thing is the fact that the students in the undergrad program combine a series of three advanced workshops. In each one they write some kind of a narrative. Each one of those workshops is 10 weeks long: Fix on a subject, gain some access for the reporting, climb into the reporting, come back out and start your draft. The greater advantage of a master’s program is that you can work on a major project, perhaps even a book, over the course of an entire year.

Meuret: You have a rich program. Students have electives — nature writing, true crime, digital and cultural narratives, travel literary journalism, race writing, and immigrant narratives — to name just a few. Do you also include other formats, like radio, or film?

Wilentz: We are small and underfunded.

Siegel: We are small. I also would love to have a workshop in photojournalism. Really, it’s a matter of limited faculty, so we can only offer X, Y, Z, and we can do A, B, C. But that said, we have offered radio storytelling workshops. It all depends on who is around, who is available to teach. We’ve done a radio storytelling workshop that would be sort of a model for This American Life during class. As for film, there is a film and media studies department.

Wilentz: Often our students are double majors.

Meuret: Podcast?

Siegel: We do. What we do with all of these things, we incorporate them into the courses. If you go into the LJ 100 advanced reporting class, you’ll see that one of the components is podcast, for instance, or even video, or documentary. We will also have master classes throughout the year in which we bring somebody in to run a one-day or a two-hour workshop. We brought a photojournalist from the LA Times, for instance.

Wilentz: And there is also Erika Hayasaki’s digital conference every year or other year.

Siegel: The way we resolve the small-sized faculty and still commit to a whole class is, we try to enrich the curriculum with master classes or components inside the program.

Wilentz: Clearly, we haven’t got anything like USC has. USC has broadcast, media, newsroom. To me, there is a lot of showmanship. There is a lot of reliance on hardware. They have great people there, of course. But our program is much more content-based.

Siegel: Ours is much more specialized. It’s great to have those resources. What really attracts students to literary journalism is the fact that we are smaller and specialized in what we do.

Meuret: Focused on the craft of writing.

Siegel: As much as we require that foundation of reporting, that’s only half of it. We are equally focused on the writing.

Wilentz: And they’re both hard to get the students to do.

Meuret: You seem to be close to the law school. You also have contacts with the history department. Now, to teach immersion, essential in literary journalism, do you work with sociologists or anthropologists? Are you trying to reach out to other departments?

Siegel: We should say that interdisciplinarity has been the priority of the entire university. There is a lot of encouragement to do that, and, for instance, the Center for Storytelling that we’ve been proposing, that’s exactly what it’s for, it’s to transcend the boundaries of our own programs or our own schools even; in fact, transcend the campus and into the community.

Meuret: Something more organic?

Wilentz: More general than what is expected of journalism.

Siegel: Yes, the idea is that people have stories to tell, but they don’t know how to tell them. We talk of sociologists, but also of scientists, doctors. This is exactly what we are trying to do.

Wilentz: And criminology.

Siegel: Yeah, criminology. I did an experiment in my workshop. A student who was not even a major or in the school of humanities wanted to enroll in our workshop. But this was a student who was a major in criminology, a bright and accomplished student. I rolled the dice. She brought an original, different perspective but also had instinctive storytelling talent, because she is a reader. And she has now added literary journalism as a minor. We work closely with the academy and the public. We feel a great affinity with, certainly, historians. Some of our workshops are not only based on reporting. I teach a workshop that is mainly archival research, rather than reporting out on the streets.

Wilentz: Next year, maybe, I’ll teach the lyric essay, because all the time when they are reporting a story or when they are doing their personal essays or memoirs, I’m trying to get them interested in intellectual aspects of what they are reporting. So, if they are reporting a story about a dad, who is an alcoholic, and the grandfather was too, I tell them, what if you can take a breather and do some research online, and in the medical school, about addiction and alcoholism, and add that to deepen the story. If I teach the lyric essay, then I could combine the personal, the research, and the reporting. I mean, we always try to get them to do a certain in-depth research on their reporting stories.

Siegel: What we are often trying to do is to propose that they think of their stories on at least two levels, as having a foreground and background, a narrative track that is running through a world, and we want them to use that narrative track as a window onto that world. So, you need to research not only your foreground, narrative track, but the world that it opens up onto. The best of them get that. The writing part of it has to do with the weave. If you sat in the first week you would never think that anybody would be able to tell a story. The two words I hear are “stressed” and “overwhelmed.” But writing is rewriting, and, at the end of the day, it’s amazing to see how many of them pull it together.

Meuret: The problem with training is that it is about tools and techniques, yet there’s much more to it than that. How do you deal with ideas?

Wilentz: Barry says writing is rewriting, rewriting. I tell them writing is thinking. You have to think. And you hate it. You don’t want to have to think: What is my story about?

Siegel: I try to get them to keep their hands off the writing and think it through. I usually tell them the two biggest reasons for having a problem writing the story are: there is a problem with the reporting, or I haven’t figured out what my story is about, or both. So we try to force them to go there and try hard.

Meuret: You cover almost every topic or area of interest. What about gender?

Wilentz: We should do that, because really, practically, every class I teach is about gender. A lot of my students are interested in this. One of the things about gender is that you may teach it or not teach it, per se, yet your students bring it to the table, to the reporting.

Meuret: You cover race, immigrant narratives, as well as nature and travel writing.

Siegel: Hector Tobar, who has joined our program part-time, is also in Chicano, Latino studies. He’s added a whole other dimension to our program in the last couple of years.

Wilentz: We try to stay current, and we try to give our students the opportunity to write about the issues that they care about, but we are still trying to be classic, also.

Siegel: We have no apologies about that. The storytelling, what you are focusing on, the elements of narrative, are the main elements. Certainly, they propose what they will write about. Our job, in terms of what we are evaluating, has to do with the stuff they need to be able to write. In my workshops, students peer review each other’s story proposals. In the winter, I teach the larger classes, and I have all the majors in front of me, and I’ve done it for years, so you certainly can see the evolution of the students. I do hear gender every now and then and, in general, identity.

Wilentz: And I’ve had to change all book lists for classes, because the classics are often, you know, just barely postcolonial British men. I have eliminated so many of them, even Bruce Chatwin, who’s a good gender-fluid person. And so, I’ve had … it’s hard for me because a lot of the younger people’s writing … OK, you’re really interesting, but do I really love your writing? Is the writing good enough? But I feel it is so important for my students to see that their view is represented, their kind of person is represented. That is more important for them in their growth as journalists, to see and read, than me to represent my own perfect grammatical…

Siegel: That’s why we have a wide range of classes. I teach history, the evolution of the field’s history, and I say at the start of the class, “OK, there’s going to be a lot of dead old white men in here, because that’s how it started. So, we are going to start with Jack London, Stephen Crane, George Orwell.” That’s right in the first week. That’s the canon, but then it’s an ethics class, and so they jump in, they denounce it. And more and more, in recent years, you see them willing to do it.

Wilentz: Actually, that’s really fun to have the canon, because then they get angry. It’s a rather conservative group of kids, traditional and family based. I taught a class on the literature of journalism, so journalists writing about being a journalist, fiction, and non-fiction. I was surprised to see how many of them would start with the n-word that we are not allowed to say in America. And I would just start to eliminate canonical works because they were just too unacceptable.

Meuret: Are you including “new new journalists” like William Langewiesche or Susan Orlean?

Siegel: Oh yeah. We had Susan Orlean come to campus. We’ve had Ted Conover too.

Meuret: So, you are expanding the canon. Do you teach any foreign writers?

Siegel: We can do more of that.

Wilentz: I wanted to teach Kapuściński, but then he made too much stuff up. I am teaching an African writer [Helon Habila] in my climate literature class, this coming term. He’s Nigerian. I’m excited about that. I feel there are certainly way too many English ones.

Siegel: [Svetlana] Alexievich, a literary journalist winning a Nobel Prize. We could do more.

Wilentz: In America, you don’t have to have foreign writers. I teach a lot of Asian-American writers.

Siegel: We cross lists, but we don’t have to go abroad…

Wilentz: …to get all these different points of view.

Siegel: Send us a reading list, please!

Meuret: Are you teaching an L.A. canon? You both write on Los Angeles.

Wilentz: A great book is Writing Los Angeles by David L. Ulin. It’s a collection of excellent writing.

Siegel: He’s great. In fact, he taught a course for us called “Writing L.A.” There’s a canon of historians who have written about L.A., but then you also have Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler … fiction writers.

Meuret: Rebecca Solnit?

Wilentz: Solnit is more Northern California. She is so exceptional. She is a big theoretical influence.

Siegel: Solnit is absolutely incredible, the way she weaves together different dimensions.

Meuret: She has great ideas: A Field Guide to Getting Lost — we no longer ever get lost. Or Wanderlust: A History of Walking.

Wilentz: I like the idea of sending students out to the world.

Siegel: The fundamental thing that they experience in our program is that they are pushed beyond their known world, asked to make sense of that foreign world, and come back with a coherent compelling story about it. That makes it unique.

Wilentz: A lot of them live in some island communities of their own groups. Some feel so tied to their world here.

Siegel: Now to just add a wrinkle to what I just said, increasingly what we are seeing, and that comes across in our conversations with students, particularly in the ethics class, is, “Are we allowed to write about the Other?” We are going to address that next.

Meuret: I experience the same problem when I’m teaching African-American literary journalism. Students increasingly question our legitimacy.

Siegel: This is the white privilege going into this. We teach Joseph Mitchell and one of his pieces, “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” a classic. Students challenge his legitimacy as a white man going into a Black community.

Wilentz: And then inventing it!

Siegel: The other one that comes up, and that we are also teaching, is the famous Gay Talese profile of the boxer Floyd Patterson, “The Loser.”

Wilentz: You have to read William Styron on Nat Turner; it’s all about legitimacy. Could he write it in the first person? Styron wrote about Black men because he was friends with James Baldwin.

Siegel: These are legitimate questions, but then my question back is, if we can’t push beyond our own world, how can we do what we do?

Richard Keeble’s recent exhortation to not only ditch our obsession with evaluating literary journalism as a genre or discipline, but to implement radical responses to democratize it, and help it thrive, has certainly hit home. Being part of this conversation, it is obvious to me that Siegel and his team at UC–Irvine have nailed it. Because they understand that the “imaginative impulse lies behind the journalistic bug,” and work hand in hand with both scholars and practitioners, and, most importantly, cater to a diverse audience in a collaborative manner, their program is a most welcoming venue to learn and be critical of literary journalism. Surely there is always room for expansion, as diversity also means joining a global conversation, with its own exciting encounters, challenges, and promises.

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A version of this story was first published in the December 2020 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

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Meet: About the Author

Isabelle Meuret is an associate professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium, where she teaches English in the media, the cultures of the Anglophone world, and narrative journalism. Her research fields are comparative literature and literary journalism, and she was a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society in 2019–20.

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