Today in History - May 14 https://t.co/VaH8AVVpK5 On May 14, 1607, English settlers arriving under the authority of the Virginia Company of London chartered by King James I established the first permanent British settlement in North America at a place they named Jamestown, V…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 14, 2022
This colorful map of Japan was published in 1855, just two years after American Navy Commodore Matthew Perry visited the nation for the first time. Check it out: https://t.co/iX8sIj3G0B https://t.co/gARI2NmvRq This colorful map of Japan was published in 1855, just two years a…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 13, 2022
Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.
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Kerry Howley | New York Magazine | May 9th, 2022 | 7,800 words
When I was 13, sex education was part of religion class — this is what happens when you attend a Catholic middle school. We were given a lot of atrocious advice, such as, if you have gay feelings, you should talk to your priest about it. When we learned about abortion, a guest speaker — a classmate’s mom who worked at a “crisis pregnancy center” — told us the procedure was a sin and passed out silver pins supposedly the size and shape of a fetus’s feet at some number of weeks of gestation. I believe we were encouraged to wear them on the lapels of our uniforms. This experience has been top of mind since I read Kerry Howley’s chilling profile of Marjorie Dannenfelser, the most powerful anti-abortion activist in America. Dannenfelser is from my hometown, she went to the same university I did, and she was married in the Catholic church attached to my middle school. Reading Howley’s piece was like going through the looking glass. Dannenfelser is a terrifying, single-minded, vengeful extremist whose (anti-)life’s work relies on images of “murdered” embryos and fetuses, stripped of the physical bodies, the well-being, and the humanity of the people who carry them. Howley’s piece made me cry. It made me rage. I’ll never be able to shake it. —SD
Suzanne Cope | Aeon | May 10th, 2022 | 2,790 words
The Black Panther Party’s social and public health work across the U.S. after its founding in 1966 and into the early ’70s was far-reaching, even pioneering. I’d no idea that the Panthers paved the way for lead paint legislation and sickle cell anemia research, among other issues, so I appreciate Suzanne Cope’s glimpse into their community work. With as many as 45 local chapters, the Panthers developed safe housing and addiction treatment programs, door-to-door healthcare, and food justice initiatives like the Free Breakfast for Children Program which, at one point, fed more kids across the country each day than the state of California did. I also didn’t know that the majority of the party’s members by the end of the ’60s were women, and that they held many of its leadership roles. To this day, the more common image of a Black Panther is not of an activist mother but instead one that’s masculine and militant, complete with beret and gun — an “inaccurate and enduring perception” of the Panthers due to biased reporting, misinformation from the FBI, and “an all-out war” waged against them by J. Edgar Hoover. Thanks to Cope for this piece that acknowledges the Panthers’ community activism, which has always been “under-recognized” and “uncelebrated.” As she writes, “Imagine what they could have accomplished if their efforts were supported and not destroyed.” —CLR
Micheli Oliver | The Alpinist | May 5th 2022 | 3,955 words
I am not a climber. The mere thought of precariously hanging from a rock face by my fingertips makes me feel faintly nauseous. I am, however, fascinated by people who choose to scale mountains, and I loved the climbing descriptions in Micheli Oliver’s essay for The Alpinist: “A glorious act of raising my bones up, of holding my own body, of celebrating my humanness in a dance of strength and breath.” Oliver, a person of Piikani Blackfeet heritage, muses not just on climbing but what it means to her as a Native adventurer. Indigenous people often do not have access to such activities, leaving adventure narratives to be dominated by tales of conquering the landscape and elements. Indigenous stories tend to depict “harmonious interactions with the land.” Reverence certainly fills Oliver’s words: “Snow shimmered gold across a blue, green and black sea of spruces, firs and pines. To my conscious mind, this was an unfamiliar vista, and yet my bones seemed to know the landscape intimately.” But there is also a darker story she wants to tell. Oliver climbs despite a fear of the outside world instilled in her by her parents, who taught her that “there are those who don’t see me as the human I am but as an object, exoticized for my looks.” When white people disappear in the mountains, news articles “proliferate across national media … When Native people vanish, however, their fates have frequently generated little response…” This is an adventure story that makes you think. —CW
Jeff Mao | GQ | May 12th, 2022 | 2,598 words
Pharrell Williams may be the household-name half of legendary production duo The Neptunes, but the upbeat sound that defined commercial hip-hop for more than a decade wouldn’t have existed without his Skateboard P’s partner, Chad Hugo. When Williams transitioned into a solo career, Hugo receded quite willingly into a relative obscurity of his own making. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t still live and breathe music, however, as Jeff Mao found while spending time with him in his native Virginia Beach. This isn’t a profile built on emotional reckonings or outlandish sound bites; it’s a quiet portrait of a quiet man who seems profoundly satisfied with what he’s accomplished, and freed from the expectation of what comes next. Mao’s byline doesn’t pop up too much in magazines these days — the ego trip cofounder and rap-mag stalwart has been doing more work on the exhibit-curation and liner-note side of things — and when it does, it’s worth your time. Especially this time. —PR
Rob Brunner | Washingtonian | May 3rd, 2022 | 2,022 words
Did you know that the White House has an official record collection? Can you imagine Ronald and Nancy Reagan doing the Electric Slide on music night? (Apparently that never happened as the records were put in storage not long after Reagan took office. Sorry for creating that image / nightmare in your mind.) Although the collection includes everything from Perry Como to the Clash, the vast majority of the albums have never been played and the last time it was expanded was in 1981. If you had the chance to update the collection with records from the previous 40 years, what would you choose? What would you want to put into the ears of the sitting president, their administration, and all the administrations to come? John Chuldenko, President Jimmy Carter’s grandson, once shot footage for a documentary about the White House’s record collection and is keen to add to it. “…it would be a blast to bring the collection into the 21st century. The White House record library ‘is a treasure, and people need to know about it,’ Chuldenko says. ‘We need to update this. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.’” “And there, finally, was the collection: record-filled boxes stacked up in front of the movie screen. The LPs had been kept in their original sleeves, which were inserted into color-coded binders (light blue for pop, yellow for classical, etc.). Each was adorned with the presidential seal and a foil stamp that read WHITE HOUSE RECORD LIBRARY. The whole thing reeked of gravitas and respectability—except that inside a binder, rather than some speech delivered by FDR in the ’40s, you might find a mint-condition copy of Macho Man by the Village People.” —KS
Hubble Captures Giant Elliptical in the Head of the Serpent via NASA https://t.co/XxxVNzZ8ZZ https://t.co/L0mXfotgn8
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 13, 2022
Correction: we should have said "dedicated this month 100 years ago"! The Memorial was dedicated on May 30, 1922 Correction: we should have said "dedicated this month 100 years ago"! The Memorial was dedicated on May 30, 1922 — LOCMaps (@LOCMaps) May 13, 2022
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 13, 2022
Catholic University's Margot Hall, once located on Bunker Hill Road NE near what is now the Brookland Metro Station, was built by Antoinette Margot as her home in 1889. She called it "Theodoron," meaning God’s Gift. The house is long gone. https://t.co/G1isdPxAx0 Catholic Univ…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 13, 2022
Today in History - May 13 https://t.co/JVkUoVUedz On May 13, 1864, a Confederate prisoner of war was buried on the grounds of Arlington House, now Arlington National Cemetery. He was the first soldier buried there. Continue reading. On May 13, 1908, President Theodore Roo…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 13, 2022
Earth from Orbit: NOAA Debuts First Imagery from GOES-18 via NASA https://t.co/ltDS9ZNZWL https://t.co/OlkvAHlM3k
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 12, 2022
Today in History - May 12 https://t.co/4g82p3gTqT On May 12, 1850, Republican statesman and noted historian Henry Cabot Lodge was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Continue reading. On Tuesday, May 12, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt paid an official visit to San Francisco.…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 12, 2022
There is plenty of lush greenery and intricate details depicted in this 1879 map of York, Pennsylvania. Get a closer look here: https://t.co/TaD6ezLDw7 https://t.co/hCHBzC4qHE There is plenty of lush greenery and intricate details depicted in this 1879 map of York, Pennsylvan…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 12, 2022
Earth from Orbit: NOAA Debuts First Imagery from GOES-18 via NASA https://t.co/ltDS9ZNZWL https://t.co/KJrMgtaiPP
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 12, 2022
Vintage 1898 streetcar on a 1960 fan trip in front of the East Capitol Street Car Barn at 14th and East Capitol Streets NE. The car barn was designed by Waddy B. Wood and built in 1896. Streetcar no. 303 is now on permanent display at the Smithsonian's American History Museum. …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 12, 2022
By A. H. Reaume
My first subscription to Bitch Magazine was a gift. I was in my second year of university and couldn’t afford to subscribe. So, when my sister asked what I wanted for my birthday, the answer was easy.
I’d attended Catholic schools my whole life. By the time I was 19, I wanted nothing to do with the church because of its stance on abortion and queer rights.
But I wasn’t exactly sure what my politics were.
I was definitely a feminist — that much I knew. I was interested in social justice, but I didn’t really know what was possible to believe politically. Growing up, all I had been exposed to were conservative and right-leaning liberal views. But I knew I wanted more. More rights for women, more rights for LGTBQIA+ folks, more rights for disabled people, more rights for racialized people, and more economic equality.
Enter Bitch.
I’d heard about the magazine on feminist blogs like Feministing and Pandagon, both of which I read avidly, trying to map and shape my own politics. I searched for Bitch on the magazine racks of every bookstore I visited, and I couldn’t believe it when I finally saw a physical copy of the magazine, on a shelf in a women’s bookstore in Vancouver, British Columbia.
My breath caught.
I remember approaching it with reverence, and being absorbed in its pages before buying it along with two back issues. There was something seductive about holding these magazines, written for feminists, in my hands.
At home, I consumed them, front to back, in one sitting. Everything the magazine represented went against what I’d learned growing up.
I felt exhilarated.
I was already on a feminist journey when I encountered Bitch, but the magazine sparked new thoughts. It deepened my analysis. For a women’s studies class in my third year, I did a creative project, inspired by an article in Bitch, that examined the ways my Catholic school education had harmed me. The publication introduced me to books and musicians that have since shaped me. But, perhaps more importantly, it showed me the power of media.
“What if we started a magazine?” I asked my friend Kristen three years after becoming a Bitch subscriber.
We had been talking about a female politician who’d recently been called a bimbo in the media because she had long blonde hair. It felt to us like women couldn’t win when it came to power — and we were discussing how angry that made us and how we both felt powerless to change it.
“Oh, I like that idea,” Kristen responded. “A magazine to talk about feminism and the challenges women face in relation to power.”
That was how Antigone Magazine was born.
We recruited a number of other feminists we knew and together we named the publication Antigone, inspired by the Greek figure’s courage and determination to do what she thought was right. Through the magazine, we wanted to help young women express and do what they thought was right — even in the face of opposition or punishment, simply because they were women.
We wanted to embody that kind of defiance. Like Bitch, we wanted to reclaim the identity of the troublemaker.
We published Antigone Magazine on our campus and periodically on other campuses. It had an international subscription base. We even started an art project called Dreams for Women, curating and posting collaged postcards from around the world with people’s secret hopes for women on them. The project was featured in the International Museum of Women.
The group of women that became involved with Antigone over the years organized women’s forums and a national conference on childcare and post-secondary education. In 2008, I was invited by the Governor General of Canada to speak about women and politics in Ottawa and in 2009 was also part of a Canadian delegation to a United Nations meeting on the status of women. The magazine was even mentioned in a textbook on women’s history.
We’re no longer publishing Antigone — but it’s still making an impact. A few years ago, one of our subscribers ran for office and told me Antigone inspired her. Recently, one of our writers published a book about foreign policy. Another person is the managing editor of a national news agency. Some of us became teachers. Others academics. Still more activists. We haven’t stopped demanding more for women.
Bitch will soon join Antigone in the graveyard of feminist publications. Started in 1996 by Andi Zeisler, Benjamin Shaykin, and Lisa Jervis, Bitch Media announced on April 12, 2022, that it would cease operations in June. The announcement hit many of its loyal readers hard.
My own feminist journey, along with the those of the phenomenal women who collaborated with me on Antigone, are the types of stories you hear when people talk about Bitch. The publication sparked awakenings. Activism. Community. Change. It was loved for its resolutely queer perspectives, its intersectional coverage, its engagement with disability justice, and its integration of economic justice. The magazine talked about things no other outlets were talking about — and pushed the conversation forward. Many even credit Bitch with making space for other popular feminist media like Jezebel and Teen Vogue.
But as people appraise the media organization’s legacy, it is not without criticism — including the contention that, for all their coverage of labor rights, the magazine worked its editors and writers to exhaustion.
What those criticisms show is that even as the magazine is shuttering, the people who made Bitch great are still leading important conversations that will help make culture, work, and feminist media better.
Despite its organizational challenges, Bitch gave voice to so many amazing writers — it’s their work I want to celebrate. In this reading list, I’ve compiled 10 recommended longreads that represent (some of) the best of Bitch Magazine over the years. And since the organization’s archives will remain online for the foreseeable future, you can dig into and (re)discover your own favorites from the publication, too.
In light of the recent leak of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft opinion that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has voted internally to overturn Roe v. Wade, one thing that I keep returning to is how much feminist labor went into trying to ensure this day never came. Much of that labor was covered or inspired by Bitch. So while SCOTUS could still choose to let Roe v. Wade stand, there is something deeply tragic about the shutdown of Bitch in a time when we urgently need feminist media. I want to recognize the work the magazine has done in the past on reproductive justice, including looking at how abortion rights were co-opted by white feminists, and the assault on the reproductive rights of refugees and immigrants. This particular piece rounds up great coverage on the arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson from when the case went before the courts in December 2021 — and what action you can take.
If you’re someone who cares about protecting the right to bodily autonomy in general and abortion access in particular, you’re already aware that this morning’s oral arguments to the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson are the culmination of a decades-long conservative strategy to overturn 1973’s historic Roe v. Wade decision. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t profoundly unsettling to watch the nation’s most powerful legal body debate questions that should be easy to answer: Does the U.S. government have the right to force a person to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term? Even if that pregnancy poses a serious health risk? Even if the pregnancy isn’t viable? Even if the pregnancy itself is the result of a crime? Even if the outcome is guaranteed to be bad for the humans involved?
Dr. Chandra Prescod-Weinstein’s 2021 book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, took the world by storm. In it, Prescod-Weinstein explores the physics of melanin in skin and gives an overview of the racism and misogyny of the scientific community. She first wrote about the topic in Bitch Magazine. This piece shows how the publication offered many writers their first chance to explore topics that would later create significant impact.
Hundreds of years after the advent of chattel slavery, it’s easy to see why race is defined by skin color. Skin color offers a highly visible cue that makes sorting easy—at least until rape proliferates. The variation in human skin tones is due to a pigment called melanin, which comes from the Greek word melas, “black, dark.” Melanin is found in most living creatures, and when it is studied scientifically, researchers usually use the ink of Sepia officinalis, the common cuttlefish. Our social sorting by skin color can be put in more technical terms as a question of how much melanin our bodies produce and maintain as part of our epidermic structure.
As a disabled person who spent the first four years of their recovery from a debilitating injury single and who has many beloved single disabled friends, I am obsessed with articles that explore care work outside romantic relationships. I’ve read Caleb Luna’s iconic essay Romantic Love is Killing Us: Who Takes Care of Us When We’re Single? more times than I can count and about 10 books on the future of care. In 2021, Oliver Haug added to the conversation in this critical essay that explores this important issue in light of the pandemic.
After a year that’s laid painfully bare inequities and oppressions that have always been there, the systemic change that’s at the core of rewriting love still feels far out of reach. … The way out offered by Luna and Kim, as well as many others working in this field, is a deeper understanding of the necessity of interdependence in relationships beyond our romantic ones: “With a restructuring of romantic love as comparable to community/platonic/self-love, we begin to prioritize the care and livelihood of entire larger groups of people as equally important as our romantic partner/s,” writes Luna.
There are few outlets that cover fatphobia as well as Bitch Magazine did. But then, a feminist magazine that purports to engage in cultural criticism that didn’t respond to fatphobia wouldn’t be doing its job well. Claudia Cortese’s essay tackles the widespread effort by public health officials to restrict or prohibit fat or disabled people from accessing the limited supply of ventilators during COVID-19 waves. The piece does the important work of exploring the deadly impact of fatphobia.
Some doctors not only have an aversion to patients of size, but they assume a fat body is inherently a sick body; this mode of thinking encourages health professionals to overlook symptoms of disease, not offer treatment, and focus solely on ridding the body of fat. For example, a 2015 study of medical students found they were nearly four times more likely to prescribe medication to thin patients than to fat patients, though both groups had the same symptoms. The supposed relationship between fatness and health concerns likely exists due to widespread weight bias.
While it seems that more people know about prison abolitionism these days, in 2015, that wasn’t the case. This article by Walidah Imarisha, one of the co-editors of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, explores Octavia Butler’s legacy and the ability of radical science fiction to create change. Imarisha gives an overview of the power of science fiction while weaving in the visionary words of Ursula K. Le Guin, Arundhati Roy, Audre Lorde, and others. It is an inspiring essay that makes you rethink both what social justice organizing and speculative fiction are and do.
We started the anthology with the belief that all organizing is science fiction. When we talk about a world without prisons; a world without police violence; a world where everyone has food, clothing, shelter, quality education; a world free of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexism; we are talking about a world that doesn’t currently exist. But collectively dreaming up one that does means we can begin building it into existence.
These days, everything’s coming up labor rights. Part of what’s fueling the renewed move toward unionism is social media. Sophie Hayssen explores the ways Instagram accounts are functioning like second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups by talking about things many people don’t feel comfortable broaching to coworkers — unfair hiring, unsafe work conditions, and overwork. Bitch Magazine’s coverage of labor helped tell the stories of people struggling for justice in industries as diverse as the film industry, the service sector, nonprofits, and politics.
But these accounts aren’t going anywhere, says Lingel. According to Gallup, labor unions’ popularity has increased seven points since 2017. In October 2021, Time reported that the COVID pandemic has highlighted the stark contrast between soaring corporate profits and stagnant low wages and galvanized workers to organize. In these new labor movements, technology is at the forefront: As tech writer Nicolás Rivero, explained in a December 2020 Quartz article, everything from encrypted apps to shareable Google sheets to digital petitions “[help] people to find far-flung peers, share grievances, and coordinate action.”
Anna Hamilton’s piece is a studied exploration of the successes and gaps of the American Disabilities Act (ADA) on the occasion of its 30th anniversary. She explores what it has done and what it could not do — and how the world should orient itself toward accessibility in the future. It’s a great essay that adds helpful context to the issue to better understand the current state of disability justice.
s.e. smith echoes McGee’s concerns: “There’s a real failure to understand that while disability is a shared lived experience, other aspects of life can interact with it profoundly. The gunshot survivor in the Bronx fighting with Medicaid for a replacement wheelchair is not experiencing disability like the wealthy celebrity with multiple sclerosis. It’s not all ‘one of our people!’ when that experiential gap is so wide.” smith points out that the disability justice movement—started by a group of queer disabled people and disabled people of color including Patty Berne, the late Stacey Park Milbern, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Mia Mingus, Eli Clare, Leroy Moore, and Sebastian Margaret— offers a more intersectional approach.
I grew up watching Sailor Moon. I loved that she was awkward like me, and that she presented a very different example of a girl than what I was used to seeing in cartoons. I also loved that she wanted to “right wrongs” and understood her desire to make the world a better place. I really love this piece by Soleil Ho, who writes about her own ambivalent feelings about girlhood and Girl Power, and her turn to Sailor Moon for a glimpse into a beautifully imperfect heroine.
I realize now that being a girl (or identifying as one) is one of the hardest roles to inhabit in this world. A girl is supposed to be so many things — attractive, graceful, polite, quiet, valuable, valueless — but none of those traits guarantee that she’ll be taken seriously as a thinking and feeling human being. On the other hand, the absence of those traits can often invite violence or, at the very least, judgment.
When we say that all girls are powerful, we often refrain from explaining just what kind of power we’re talking about. The power that I want girls to have certainly includes the power to govern their own bodies, but also something else entirely.
Sailor Moon isn’t just fighting aliens, but a world of adults who want to destroy everything beautiful in girls. In order to save the people she loves, she fights and gets hurt and breaks down and even completely fails at times. And when she can manage it, she tries to save the monsters, too.
In this powerful exploration of trans women’s writing, Katherine Cross discusses how work emerging at the time the piece was written was full of “joy, love, laughter, sex, and deep wells of human flourishing amid the gloom.” It highlights writers like Casey Plett, Sybil Lamb, and Olympia Perez, and talks about writing that paints a picture of the everyday experiences of trans women that isn’t “inspiration porn” or a “feel-good story of triumph over lone bigots.” Just read the piece. Then read the works it cites.
This is trans women’s moment in modern literature, and amid the many currents of transgender existence today, it is singular. So much discourse around trans women’s existence has been spun by everyone but us: cisgender male psychologists, cis feminist academics, trans men and queer cis people. All have had their say about our lives and what they supposedly signify to them: protean radicalism, a crypto-conservative conspiracy, a tangle of pathology. But it is very rare that trans women themselves are heard when we speak about who we are and what we mean.
What emerges from all of these works is a clear picture of trans women as human beings, thinkers, and artists, with mastery and control over the kinds of stories they wish to tell. Neither genderfucking superheroines nor the nightmare of queer radicalism, we are, at last, human.
At a time when trans-exclusionary radical feminists are resurging, I wanted to return to this article by Tina Vasquez, which talks about the history of trans exclusion in feminist movements and calls on cisgender feminists to take more responsibility for fighting transphobia. That’s the thing about Bitch: It wasn’t just a magazine that asked us to think only of our own liberation — it asked its readers to think about how we could fight for each other’s freedom. The magazine made all its readers better feminists by teaching us how to be better allies to each other.
Trans women have been saddled with the responsibility of taking on trans-exclusionary feminists for far too long—but it’s not their issue to deal with alone. Cisgender feminists, such as myself, have to make it clear that our feminism loves and supports trans women and that we will fight against transphobia. As Williams said, it’s time to expose trans-exclusionary feminists for who they really are.
***
A. H. Reaume is a disabled writer whose work has appeared in the anthology Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From the Twenty-First Century. Reaume is a guest columnist at Open Book and is currently working on a memoir and a novel. She can be found on Twitter at @a_h_reaume.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy Editor: Krista Stevens
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The routes of Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, two Englishmen who circumnavigated the globe in the 16th century, are shown on this world map, which also features illustrations of Drake's voyage. Zoom in here: https://t.co/nGrRdu3iuf https://t.co/DEPNHdROqC The routes of…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 11, 2022
Washington wasn't quite ready for Bob Marley yet when he played at the U.S. Naval Academy's Halsey Field House in 1973... the crowd of midshipmen seemed to have no interest in reggae. #DCHistory #MDHistory https://t.co/HfCbupjuNQ Washington wasn't quite ready for Bob Marley …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 11, 2022
This map from the tail end of the 19th century depicts American territorial holdings as of 1898. Alaska and Hawaii would remain as territories for another 60 years before being granted statehood. Explore the map here: https://t.co/HlX1pQciox https://t.co/hCkFStWaje This map f…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 11, 2022
May News from the Library of Congress https://t.co/6l66Z3zpGn News from the Library of Congress Live! at the Library, May Heritage Months, New Concerts from the Library of Congress and More “Live! at the Library” Welcomes Evening Visitors, Special Guests Each Thursday Nigh…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 11, 2022
The Green Line Metro faced 20 years of disputes and problems before trains finally started running in 1991. #DCHistory #MDHistory https://t.co/xS9IQGjXBl The Green Line Metro faced 20 years of disputes and problems before trains finally started running in 1991. #DCHistory #M…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 11, 2022
Today in History - May 11 https://t.co/sBWLfjbPCd On May 11, 1858, Minnesota became the 32nd state admitted into the Union. Continue reading. Click here to search Today in History for other historic moments.
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 11, 2022
Nina Wang: Bringing Accountability Into Focus via NASA https://t.co/N4WCwFeh0n https://t.co/jtF6nOLJso
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 10, 2022
The Second World War abounds with stories of heroism. February 3 marks the commemoration of little-known event: the sinking of the U.S. Army transport ship Dorchester and the brave sacrifices made by four chaplains. #DCHistory https://t.co/4EHPdbf49I The Second World War abo…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 10, 2022
More on the history of the Agriculture buildings on the Mall is at: https://t.co/Ymq6fg1BLe More on the history of the Agriculture buildings on the Mall is at: https://t.co/Ymq6fg1BLe — Streets of Washington (@StreetsOfDC) May 10, 2022
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 10, 2022
Circa 1910 lantern slide of the National Mall. The old 1868 Agriculture Department building still stands on the lower right, in front of a formal garden. The new 1908 Agriculture HQ is partially built (just the wings) on the far right. https://t.co/MdKAgcWOYS Circa 1910 lanter…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 10, 2022
Today in History - May 10 https://t.co/EWo0PIenNb Officials and workers of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railways held a ceremony on Promontory Summit, in Utah Territory, to drive in the Golden Spike on May 10, 1869. Continue reading. On May 10, 1865, Union troo…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 10, 2022
As host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, Brendan O’Meara is no stranger to talking about the art and craft of storytelling. In this craft-focused excerpt, we’re digging into Episode 313, in which he interviewed Atavist editor-in-chief Seyward Darby and writer Katia Savchuk about their work on the latest issue of The Atavist.
Why don’t we copy the work of writers we admire more? Don’t plagiarize (duh), but when it comes to practicing our scales, why aren’t we retyping more work of the masters? After all, the masters did this. Hunter S. Thompson famously typed up the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Joan Didion did the same. Now, add to that list Katia Savchuk, the freelance journalist who wrote The Atavist’s latest feature, “A Crime Beyond Belief.”
Katia, who’s based in the Bay Area, routinely copies the work of the New Yorker writer David Grann, someone she greatly admires. “I found it to be an amazing practice,” she says. “First of all, it gets your hands flowing, the words flowing, instead of just sitting down with your own text, a blank page. It’s almost like running a few laps to give your fingers something to do.”
Before my conversation with Katia, Atavist editor-in-chief Seyward Darby speaks of wrangling in Katia’s piece, a 19,000-word story that demanded a tricky structure. The key wasn’t merely organization, but pace: “trying to think about how we can order … the story such that the reader never feels like, ‘I have everything I came for — why are there still 10,000 words left?’ Figuring out that structure where things didn’t really feel front-loaded was maybe the most important decision we had to make.”
And later, Katia digs into how she kept it all straight — the transcripts, the photos, her notes, everything — to tackle this ambitious, riveting account of a series of bizarre home invasions, and the Harvard-trained lawyer convicted of committing them.
“A Crime Beyond Belief” was more than four years in the making, so please enjoy this excerpt from Episode 313 of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
These interviews have been edited for clarity and concision.
Brendan O’Meara: What really struck you about Katia’s story when it came across your desk?
Seyward Darby: The story’s about a kidnapping that police in Vallejo, California, initially said was a hoax. It was sensational at the time: It was in the national news, wound up on Dateline and Nancy Grace, all that kind of stuff. And so we’re not the first to tell the story.
But what Katia has done here is gone deep into what happened, who was involved, and how so many things went wrong — but then, ultimately, were also made right. We wanted to take the readers on a revelatory journey, to go along with some of the characters as they encountered information and had to decide what was true and what wasn’t. So there’s a little bit of puzzle-piecing that the piece itself shows happening.
It’s a really complicated, twisty piece, and definitely one where structure was not a given. When she turned in the first draft, I spent a lot of time kind of staring at it and writing notes on Post-its and trying to think about how we can order them in the story such that the reader never feels like, “I have everything I came for — why are there still 10,000 words left?” Figuring out that structure where things didn’t really feel front-loaded was maybe the most important decision we had to make. Trying to figure out, you know, how to not just organize things, but pace things. Pace was just really, really crucial here.
Anytime that a reporter is brought into a story as a character, I always love reading that dynamic, and how a reporter is writing about a reporter in a story like this.
Henry Lee, the San Francisco Chronicle reporter, is such an interesting subject. A lot of the events in the story, for the most part, went down in 2015. And he says, you know, we were kind of just at the beginning of a reckoning about law enforcement, and how to approach them as reporters. The other thing that’s really important to remember here is: How often do you hear cops publicly say something like “we think this kidnapping was a hoax”? Lee points out that that’s just an insane thing to claim and have it not be true.
That’s definitely a tension in the piece — once you know everything, you’re like how could they ever say that it was a hoax? But if you’re on the receiving end of that information? I don’t know if we would call it a biased assumption or a human assumption, but you think, well, that has to be true. Like, why else would they claim something so outlandish? That’s obviously a flaw, but it’s an interesting one, because I do think that there are moments in the story where you know, as journalists, you can take a step back and say, Well, yeah, I guess I get why that might happen.
Several years ago, I pitched a story to you for The Atavist, and I remember you coming at me like, “this feels like there should be a Big Fish element to it.” You brought that movie sensibility to it, which I thought was really intriguing. I bring that up only to say that in this piece, there was this Gone Girl element that was dropped into this piece — and it made me wonder if you’d put that on Katia’s radar. Maybe you could speak to how sometimes you use those movies as a way to crack the code of a piece that’s coming across your desk.
That’s a great question. In this case, I didn’t have to bring up Gone Girl because the police were the ones who brought up Gone Girl. They were the ones who were telling this woman’s family, before she had been returned by the kidnapper, “we think this is being faked. You should go watch Gone Girl” — which had just come out a couple of months prior, the David Fincher adaptation of the Gillian Flynn book. Nancy Grace called her the real-life Gone Girl or something along those lines. In that case, the cinematic story was almost part of the problem, right? People looked at the situation and for whatever reason, decided, “okay, we actually think the thing that’s happening in real life sounds a whole lot like this thing in a book. And so we’re gonna start calling it that.” And that obviously did a tremendous disservice to the couple at the heart of this entire story.
But you’re absolutely right: Oftentimes I’m thinking through stories and thinking, “how can we make this more cinematic?” As you were asking the question, I was like, “What movie would I compare the story to as Katia put it together?” I’m gonna have to think about that for a second. Maybe by the end of us talking, I’ll have a good comparison.
I know it doesn’t run backwards, but in a sense, because it’s a slow exposure, like a Polaroid coming into focus, it kind of makes me think of Memento.
I think describing it as like a Polaroid coming into focus is absolutely right. That’s definitely the vibe we were going for in working on the story from a structural standpoint: building tension, doing some jump cuts. We wanted it to feel like the reader would start to see things clearly at the same time some of the subjects in the story are starting to see things clearly. And then some of them never did — Matthew Muller, who is now convicted of this crime, doesn’t necessarily see it yet. Maybe he never will, because of the mental illness that he’s afflicted with. But then there are some other really interesting questions that she gets into at the end about how there are other people affected by the events who still have questions about what did or didn’t happen. Even when things might seem settled to some parties involved in a situation, to others reality can still feel somewhat out of reach. I don’t know if the Polaroid is quite in focus for everyone involved.
Something I’ve noticed over the course of several Atavist stories is that the first two-thirds or three-quarters is often, if not exclusively, third-person — and then in that final chapter or the final quarter or maybe even just an epilogue, we see the reporter come in. What is it about that particular structuring that appeals to you?
I’d never thought of it as a pattern, but I guess it is to a certain extent, and on maybe a certain type of story. When you’re talking about the types of stories we do that introduce a lot of these gigantic questions, and when you get to the end there’s a bit of a what does it all mean? — and I think sometimes the reporter can be a helpful prism for starting to tie some of those things together. I’d like to think that by the time you get to the last passage of a piece, our writers have really earned the trust of readers. So when they do become the prism for thinking about the story in its totality, the reader almost feels like, “Oh, good, okay, now they’re here.”
It definitely doesn’t work in every story. And I wouldn’t ever want to put it in every story. But I do feel like there are stories where I want to know what the reporter thinks. I want to see the reporter, in this case, talk to Mathew Muller over the course of four years. I don’t think it’s a conscious decision where we sit down and say, “Is this the kind of piece where at the end we’re gonna go in the first person?” And certainly there are stories where there’s some first person throughout and there are other stories where some first person comes in, you know, much earlier. But some of these pieces that feel like they have lingering loose threads, sometimes having the writer there to navigate that can be a good way to wrap things up.
I liken it to a whodunit: And at the very end, Hercule Poirot is going to come in, he’s going to sum everything up, he’s going to answer some questions. It’s relieving some of the pressure, it’s bringing some new light, it almost grounds it. Like, I feel like my feet are back on the ground when the reporter comes in to show the work and show some interaction and raise some questions that sometimes we don’t even know the answers to.
Obviously, there are still people who say don’t bring yourself as a journalist into magazine reporting unless it’s a first-person story of some kind. I just feel like when you’re talking about these really rangy pieces, you want it to feel grounded in the end.
It’s something that you get more of in podcasting, because obviously you’re hearing the host, you much more feel like you’re in some kind of relationship. You’re letting them into your head, and the reporter becomes a way for listeners to have access to certain questions, or certain issues or whatever it may be. And as far as I’m concerned, it can work in writing as well — at least it doesn’t just have to be audio-driven.
I hate the first-person stuff where it’ll start off like, “Matthew McConaughey was eating steak tartare, and I walked up to him.” But we don’t have to worry about that with the Atavist stuff because you guys handle it so well.
Although now I feel like I’m just gonna do that at some point just to make you angry.
So I’m working on an essay about the pros and cons of voice recorders and tape recorders. John McPhee never uses them at all; he thinks that even though they capture everything, they’re not selective. And he trusts that when he’s taking notes, he’s getting the best stuff. But at the same time, sometimes your penmanship can fail you. And by not capturing everything, you’re not getting the exact thing down. It’s a conundrum. But I’m very romantically tied to the idea of like, just pencil and notebook. How do you feel about it?
Katia Savchuk: Yeah, I don’t think I could operate like that because I’d be too focused on, “what am I missing? Get that down. Remember that!” I’d like to know that there’s a machine going in the background. Sometimes you don’t know what’s going to be important until later. Also, when you interview other people, you learn other things and you connect dots that you wouldn’t have otherwise. So I always record and take notes. I’m taking notes on the ambient details: what someone’s expression looks like, what’s on the wall, those kinds of things. I trust the machine to be getting down the exact quotes.
A long time ago, I was using a recorder and talking to a horse trainer. In the background, you could hear blue jays chirping — and that ended up being a little detail I was able to fold in to the particular chapter I was writing. It just added that extra layer of flavor that I wouldn’t have been able to get if I was just scribbling like crazy trying to keep up with what he was saying.
I mean, there’s obviously so much to be said for interviewing in person. The trust that’s built, the things you notice. But there’s also something I enjoy about doing interviews over the phone, because I usually try to type in real time. First of all, it kind of saves you time. I have an in-ear Olympus ear bud recorder, and I’m also typing at the same time in this tool called Pair Note. Then once I’m done recording, I can import the audio, and I link them. So then you can press play in Pair Note and you hear that part of the tape. So that really helped with fact-checking the story.
I know Top Chef has been on for like 19 seasons, but my wife and I just discovered it. On the latest episode, one of the judges said, “your plate has to have like authorship” — and another said, “you have to edit your plate.” And I was like, oh, cooking and writing are coming together: You have to have that voice, and how you have to think about what to leave in and what to leave out. Maybe it’s not cooking, but are there any other artistic media that really help you become a better writer?
I do love dancing — as a hobby, and not in any way professionally. But it’s something I’ve been doing for a long time, just for fun. And there are lots of elements, especially for people who take it seriously; it’s practicing, it’s getting better over time. Like the Ira Glass quote: If you have good taste, you won’t be meeting your own standards early on. You really just have to plow through that and get a little bit closer and a little bit closer.
But what I’ve been thinking about lately is the sense of play that I get from dancing. Like, I approach it from a total place of this is just for fun, to unwind. I don’t have anything wrapped up in it around “I want to be the best, I want this dance to be perfect.” There’s nothing like that. So I’ve been trying to see ways that I can bring some more of that sense of play into work. A lot of the work is really serious and important, and depending on the story, you’re writing about real people and their lives. But whether it’s at the sentence level, or free writing, or feeling a sense of play when you’re coming up with ideas, that’s something I’m working on.
When we were kids, even in middle or high school, when you were told to write a story you just wanted to have fun with it and write the thing, and you didn’t care if it sucked or won an award, or all these things that we attach our prestige and status to, and you just did it because it was a fun creative outlet. We often get so earnest with our writing and our work. We just attach too much doom and gloom to it — you know, the tortured writer — so it’s great to hear you talk about play. I love that.
And I was one of those people who started on the middle school newspaper and all through high school. So I definitely try to tap in as much as I can to that spirit.
On your website, you write that you’re a “proud generalist,” “often drawn to stories about inequality, psychology, wrongdoing, and mysteries of all kinds.” How did you arrive at that in your journalism?
I added that line not too long ago, actually. I hear so much about “you need a niche.” And it certainly can be helpful, but it’s just something that doesn’t work for me. One thing I love about being a journalist, and especially a freelancer, is getting to follow your curiosity and learn about so many different things. I used to work at Forbes magazine, for the wealth team. There’s a lot that falls under that, as it’s probably the broadest team, but as you move up, it tends to get more and more specialized, and that just wasn’t what I wanted to do. But I did sort of try to think about, what are the themes in my work? What am I generally drawn to? I love investigative stories and have a bit of background in investigative reporting, and always drawn to public interest issues. But I also have this love of mystery.
You worked as a private investigator too. In what way has that helped you as a reporter?
It was probably a lot less exciting than it sounds. I wasn’t tailing people on the street, looking for cheating husbands or anything. It was a private investigative firm, and a lot of what they did was background checks and investigations that are part of lawsuits. They did do exciting work, but a lot of it had to do with databases and knowing how to use those to find information.
I loved working there. It was some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with, and I loved doing investigative work. It was just that the end product would be this memo that would go to whoever commissioned it at the law firm, or the partners at some hedge fund or something, and then it’d be like this great story [that] nobody would really see. So I just really wanted someone to read it, and that creative aspect was equally important to me. I do wish I still had all those databases, but they’re expensive. And you know, you have to be licensed.
In the Venn diagram of all those things that you’re interested in, this Atavist piece kind of encapsulates a whole lot: wrongdoing, psychology, inequality, mystery, it’s right there. How did you arrive at this story? It was pretty mainstream at the time, but then stuck with it and told something that is wholly and uniquely you.
I found out about it in the news, like everybody else. It was in the news in 2015, obviously, because the police initially called the main crime I write about a hoax. The word that everybody uses is “bizarre,” which it certainly was, so it caught my eye, but I was working at Forbes at the time, and it wasn’t something that would fall into their coverage area. Not too long after I went freelance in 2017, the victims sued the city of Vallejo, California, and ended up winning a settlement, and so it was back in the headlines. I was like, “oh, yeah, that story is just fascinating — somebody must have already written the magazine version of it.” And I looked, and they hadn’t. I thought somebody must be currently writing a magazine version of it, but why don’t I just give it a shot? So I reached out to a lot of the people involved, and then went from there.
It’s funny hearing you say that because sometimes I come up with ideas and think, “This is great — but if I came up with it, someone else must have by now and it’s not even worth pursuing.”
And so much of the time, it turns out to be true. There are things that are in the zeitgeist, and people who are magazine writers see all the elements. But sometimes it’s the ones that are in plain sight [that work out]. I’m sure a lot of people did reach out to them, but they probably couldn’t get access right away. Nobody wanted to talk in the early days. A few years after the main events, since the initial media circus, they were maybe a little bit more receptive.
Access is such a tricky thing, of course, to tell these kinds of stories, and in getting that kind of trust. And sometimes just getting that first cold email, the first cold call, to land — because that’s the one that can start the momentum. What becomes that first lead domino, as you’re trying to build sources for a story this ambitious?
The first thing I did was to reach out to the victims in the main case that I’m writing about, Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn. This story is in the Bay Area, which is where I live, so I figured out that a friend of mine who is a criminal defense attorney has come across their criminal defense attorney, so maybe we can talk about why they had one — which is obviously because they weren’t initially believed.
So I wrote to her and she was willing to pass on my email to their attorney, who was willing to pass on my email to them. So we ended up corresponding a little bit and then meeting in person just to kind of feel each other out. Sometimes I like to say, “let’s meet with no commitments,” so they don’t feel like they’re signing on to anything. But this was obviously a very dramatic and personal story for them. And a lot of people had reached out to them. So they wanted to see, you know, do they feel comfortable and trust me, and so I drove to where they live. And we had a great conversation. But then the next day, they said, actually, we’re signing a book deal with an NDA, so we won’t be talking to you. The book ended up coming out, which was essentially an extended interview, it was really their story in their voice. And then later, I ended up interviewing them as well. They also gave extended testimony in court about what happened to them.
In terms of the man who was convicted of the crime, there was one family friend who was quoted in all the news stories, and I found him on Facebook, I think, and I reached out to him because he was kind of acting as a spokesperson for the family. I just said something along the lines of, “a lot of people are probably reaching out to you,” and I gave my impression of what the coverage had been so far. And in this case, it really did seem one-dimensional in terms of the man involved, who is the ex-Marine, Harvard-trained lawyer who did pro bono work for most of his life, and then ended up being convicted of these pretty bizarre crimes. Some of the news articles had mentioned almost in passing that he has bipolar disorder, he struggles with mental illness, but it was just kind of a throwaway thing, and it didn’t really come up in his court case, either. And it’s a federal court case. That’s not to excuse anything that he did, but everyone is three-dimensional; how does somebody go from A to B? What role did mental illness play? How was that for his family to watch and be part of? So I reached out to them and told them that my intention was really to go deeper than any of the headlines had done — not to do anything sensational, but really try to understand his life as a whole, and write a more nuanced, thorough piece, and that I was willing to put in the time to do it and find a publication that would edit it with that perspective as well.
How did you develop that degree of empathy to bring that to your reporting, so you can get to that nuance and beyond the headlines?
I don’t know if you develop empathy. I mean, I think to be a magazine writer, you have to have empathy. You spend a lot of time trying to get inside a person’s mind in a way. If it’s a case of wrongdoing, then you have empathy for the people that are the victims of whatever it is. But usually, there’s no 100% clear victims and villains. In this case — and again, not to excuse what he did — but Mathew Muller himself said, “if I’m dangerous, I should be behind bars.” But in many ways, he was also a victim of psychosis, and certain systems that told him that it wasn’t okay to reveal that. Like the military, like the legal profession, or a father who was kind of a coach-type figure with a tough-it-out mentality. These were all reasons he didn’t want to speak out when he started running into troubles with delusion.
That’s why I love magazine writing: It lets you give all the context, and the nuance that really is there, whenever humans are involved.
Do you find a way to integrate some sort of a pressure valve into your reporting, given how deep you can go with people talking about sometimes very disturbing, dramatic things? So you don’t take on too much of what you’re reporting on?
I think there are so many other people out there doing work that is so much more dramatic; the people on the frontline in Ukraine right now, certainly. In this particular case, a lot of the interviews were pretty spread out. Some of the interviews were pretty intensive, like five hours long at a time, but they were spread out over time. And with Matt Muller, we did a lot of our interviews over video conference in the jail; they don’t allow in-person visitors in the jail even for family, which is kind of crazy that somebody wouldn’t see another living person. But they were limited to half an hour at a time in those in those interviews. So it was pretty broken up.
I don’t think I have any revolutionary coping mechanisms. Dance helps, taking a walk. I have an accountability buddy, Bailey, another freelancer here in the Bay Area who is an amazing reporter and writer, and we check in weekly, and we’ve done that pretty much for the last four years. I think that really helps; it’s like having a colleague, a sort of home base that you can run things by — wins, challenges, just bounce anything off of.
The story is practically 20,000 words. As a writer, it’s a lot to get your head around. How did you go about organizing your reporting material so that you had access to the things that you wanted to draw from?
I definitely don’t think I could write a long piece without Scrivener at this point. What I usually do, and did in this case, is just tried to put everything in there. I tried to map out what the sections were going to be, and I created a folder there for each section, and tried to put everything I had in that folder: photos, interview transcripts, court records. In Scrivener, you can do a split screen. So I would then have that folder open and whatever document I was looking at, in the bottom, and I would have the writing window at the top. That’s usually how I organize things.
I’m naturally a disorganized person. And I like to think I’m not alone in that. I’ve got things for a big project, and I’ve got it by year in folders. So at least it’s organized like that. But I’m sure that within that year, it’s going to have to be further subdivided. So I’m always curious how people do that, because it can get unwieldy and out of hand — and then, like, this Google Drive has some things saved here, but then this one over here has some other things.
I mean, it’s still a perennial challenge. I think to an extent I was organized, but at the same time, I always think that I’m gonna write down, as I’m writing, which page of which court record I got this fact — so that when fact-checking comes along I just know exactly where it is. But I just have still never managed to do that, you know, because when you’re writing, you don’t want to note down the exact page number always.
“Oh, I’ll remember to do it. I’ll make a little note.” And then you never do.
Yeah. But I will say another thing that was really helpful, especially in this story, was having a timeline in a spreadsheet format. You have the years and the months, and then I had different columns for the different characters or threads that I was following. So there’s one for Matt Muller’s world, the world of Denise and Aaron, or the world of the crime and the investigation, and putting the key events there really helps. Sometimes you draw connections that way — “oh, this actually just happened the same month as this happened” — so it helps with structuring things and seeing the patterns that might not be apparent.
Speaking of structure, given how big the piece is, it’s always a challenge to have the requisite tension to keep people reading. What was the challenge in getting your head around the structure and making sure that requisite tension and pacing was there and satisfying?
I give a lot of credit to Seyward for that and working on the structure with me. Initially, it seemed like the structure I started with was going to work: It seemed to make sense to start with the main crime, which is this bizarre kidnapping that happened on Mare Island in Vallejo in 2015. There were wetsuits, lasers, pre-recorded messages, NyQuil, blood pressure clubs — I mean, there’s a lot of bizarre details, which you could read about in the story, but it just seemed to make sense to start there, because it’s so gripping. But once you looked at the story as a whole, starting there ended up taking some of the air out of it. If you build to that crime, you know in advance what’s going to happen, you know that Matt’s responsible, and this was never going to be a whodunit. A lot of the story is also about Matt: How did he go from this sort of model citizen, for lack of a better word, to this convicted criminal, and why did he do what he did?
So what we ended up doing was starting with this raid on a cabin in South Lake Tahoe, where he’s arrested. And we describe a crime there — but it’s actually not that crime. It’s a different crime. We see the cabin and we see all these bizarre things in the cabin. It’s super-cluttered like a hoarder’s home: hair dye, and stun gun, and a bunch of gloves and electronics, spray paints, youcrime scene tape, a penis pump. You’re like, what happened here? And that drives the mystery a little bit.
We learn that he’s arrested. And then we’re like, Well, who is this guy? And how did he get there? But also near the end of the first section, a detective discovers this long, blonde hair. And none of the victims in the crime that we just learned about was blonde, and the suspect isn’t blonde. So then, we hope that what drives a good portion of this story is: Whose hair is that? And then the tension that drives another good portion of the story is: Was this crime a hoax or not?
What were some challenges that you experienced as you were synthesizing the piece?
There were quite a few challenges along the way. One of them was Matt’s mental state. As I mentioned, delusion played a big part in his life, and in the course of interviewing him — when we first got in touch in 2018, he was in a federal prison, and then he got moved to a jail here in Solano County — his mental health kind of fluctuated. So trying to figure out, is he or is he not in a state of mind where I can trust what he’s saying? Does he trust me? He kept pulling out because paranoia got the better of him. He told me just last month, which I didn’t know before, that he thought I was a CIA agent.
Then at one point, he ended up being deemed incompetent to stand trial, and the judge ordered that he should get anti-psychotic medication against his will. But he was in a psychiatric hospital, and it wasn’t clear when or if he would be restored to legal competency, and I really wasn’t sure how we were going to fact-check with him. If he’s deemed incompetent to stand trial, it really doesn’t feel ethical to reach out to him, because he might say something that he wouldn’t say if he was mentally stable, and it might be incriminating. So if he’s not legally competent, it doesn’t feel like he would be competent to you know participate in an interview. He did end up being restored to legal competency, and we did fact-check with him. But that was a situation I had never encountered before.
The piece is intense.
Yeah. There are a lot of twists there. If you were writing it as a novel, you’d be like, “well, that’s a that’s a little bit too convenient.” For example, the lead investigator having had a relationship with the intended target of the kidnapping, who is also the ex-fiancée of the victim. I mean, it’s very odd.
If you were writing a novel, you’d be like, “this is lazy.”
There’s just a lot of things that feel like a movie, which is the theme that kept coming up over and over and over in the story: people thinking that life is like the movies, and then realizing that it’s not.
At the end of these conversations I typically like to ask guests for a recommendation of some kind — that can be anything from something professional to a comfy pair of socks you’re really excited about. Fanny packs. Who knows? So what would you recommend for the listeners out there?
I would recommend a practice that I started doing this year that I always meant to do, but never did before, which is to copy the work of your idols. It’s something you always hear about, like Joan Didion did that, artists in training go to the museum and copy the works of the greats. So it’s something that I always thought was intriguing. But I actually tried it this year. And I started with David Grann’s work, who is one of my heroes.
He has written a lot of things in the true crime genre, so I thought it was a good one. I ended up copying his stories, just retyping them for 10 minutes before I started writing for the day. And I found it to be an amazing practice. I mean, first of all, it like gets your hands just flowing, like the words flowing, instead of just sitting down with your own text, like a blank page. It’s almost like running a few laps to give your fingers something to do. Also, I feel like you pick up things that you don’t from reading alone — the sort of decisions on a sentence level that a writer makes. I found it to be really inspiring and educational, and also kind of fun.
Read “The Caregivers” at The Atavist now
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