Courtney Shea takes a look into the industry of Christmas movies by interviewing a master of the genre. A light, but oh-so-seasonal, Q&A.
Falling for Christmas was the most-watched movie on Netflix for more than a week after it came out. Are you a guy who pays close attention to the ratings?
Every morning I would come onto set of the project I was working on and ask, “Does anyone here have the number one Netflix movie in the world? Anyone? Raise your hand? Oh, that’s right—I do.” I did that for nine days straight and drove everyone crazy, but it really is absurd.
“What happens when the child of a slave writes over text that has been digitally archived?” In this powerful essay that’s part of Scalawag‘s grief & other loves series, Victoria Newton Ford reflects on and pushes back against the media record that continues to dehumanize her mother, Tamara Mitchell-Ford, years after her death.
I’d believed for years the presence haunting our lives was a specter dwelling in the yard. But this isn’t a ghost story. The abjection my mother endured was organized and funded by the city—from the police officers, to the judges, to the reporters who circled our house, hungry to add to their narratives. Tamara’s humiliation and punishment were profitable and entertaining. It was made possible by structures and a paradigm of surveillance fortified by antiblackness, which claimed her life—as an ex-wife, an addict, a prisoner, a main character, my mother. None of these were even stable identities for her to claim.
A gentle love note to Texas, Elizabeth Bruenig’s essay takes time to reflect on her family leaving the state, after more than 200 years of history. A thoughtful look at heritage, community, and belonging.
I wanted to call and tell them to turn around and go back, but it wouldn’t have been any use. They wanted to be closer to me and my children on the East Coast. People can be heliotropic, their faces turning toward the future the way flowers lean to the sun. They were always going to follow their grandchildren, and I was the one who’d spirited them north in the first place. I had been the one to end our family’s history in Texas; they had only been late to accept it.
This is a beautiful, lyrical essay about coming to terms with death. An enthralling read, from beginning to end, it is a reminder of the joy and pain of a life lived on the edge.
When the rescue helicopter lands, I rush to embrace Jean-François and kiss his cold face, until the emergency team forces me to let go. It’s the second time I’m kissing my dead partner. Eight years earlier, I had insisted that I should be taken, by ambulance, from my hospital bed to the cemetery to attend Erhard’s funeral.
Susana Ferreira reports on a digital nomad village that promised integration with the locals. Instead, she finds a somewhat awkward community with little meaningful interaction with the local Madeirans. Can such villages ever really work?
Established digital nomad hot spots, like Chiang Mai, Thailand, or Canggu, Bali, tend to be bubbles where wealthy and overwhelmingly white foreigners cluster at coffee shops, coworking spaces, and other businesses that cater to their wants and comforts in English. If he built a destination for digital nomads in small-town Madeira, Hall thought, things would be different. Itinerant remote workers could live just like locals, alongside locals: They could reside in the same neighborhoods, eat at the same restaurants, and mingle at gatherings coordinated by a “community manager.”
A great profile accomplishes the nearly impossible by making you feel like you truly know someone you’ve never met. It’s a feat of empathy and insight, the kind of alchemy that turns reporting into rapport. The five examples here span all manner of tone and subject, from victims of gun violence to digital charlatans, but they share one very important trait: They lodged in our editors’ minds long after the reading was done.
John Woodrow Cox | The Washington Post | October 24, 2022 | 8,582 words
“It had been 100 days since Caitlyne hid in a classroom, listening to a stranger slaughter 19 fourth-graders and two teachers across the hallway at Robb Elementary,” writes John Woodrow Cox. “Caitlyne knew them all.” I revisited Cox’s profile of 10-year-old Caitlyne Gonzales, one of the survivors of the school shooting in Uvalde, on a week when I was touring public elementary schools, since my 4-year-old will be entering kindergarten next fall. As I visited classrooms, I pictured my daughter sitting on a rug, listening to the teacher reading a book; I imagined her coloring at her desk. My eyes well up as I read details about Caitlyne and her classmates’ lives: the things they like, the things they do. Watching TikToks, doing cartwheels. The things that 10-year-olds are supposed to do. Cox does what he does best: He immerses us in Caitlyne’s day-to-day life and, with care and respect, tells an incredibly moving, human story of loss and resilience. So much of this story hurts to read, particularly lines that reveal the impossible reality and trauma our children face in a country that values guns over their lives. Caitlyne shouldn’t have to wear a lanyard with the photos of her dead friends. She shouldn’t know more about ballistic windows and bulletproof backpacks before knowing how to ride a bike without training wheels. She shouldn’t have to travel to the nation’s capital to beg this country’s leadership to do something to make our schools safer. (“I’m gonna go meet Joe Byron,” she says at one point, which is at first funny, but also deeply disturbing.) Caitlyne should be playing, learning — not fighting for action and accountability. It has now been 212 days since the Robb Elementary School shooting. This is just a reminder so we don’t forget. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
“The Remarkable Brain of a Carpet Cleaner Who Speaks 24 Languages” by Jessica Contrera for The Washington Post: My colleague Jessica Contrera’s story on a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages was such a delight. Many reporters would’ve seen it as an 800-word feature, but Jess went so much deeper, revealing the complex person behind the extraordinary talent. It never feels saccharine or belonging in the genre of manufactured, feel-good stories that make us cringe. The profile was often painful and poignant — moments made the joyous ones feel earned.
Christian Wallace | Texas Monthly | May 11, 2022 | 6,127 words
I am fascinated by vital elders. I want to be a vital elder. So when I see fascinating profiles of “old” folks kicking proverbial butt, I am there for it. Boots O’Neal was 89 at the time Christian Wallace wrote this fun, deeply reported profile of a cowboy who just loves to go to work every day, decades after many would have hung up their spurs to sit on the porch full-time and tell tall tales. Boots has a roundup of stories, that’s for sure. But by getting up before first light, riding a horse, and moving ornery bulls for a living at the end of his ninth decade, he is also the story. Wallace does a masterful job, not just in painting a portrait of Boots’ working life, but into capturing precisely what drives Boots to do the job he’s loved for the past seven decades: “’There’s not very many people in the world who love their job,’ Boots and Nelda’s daughter, Lauri Colbert, told me later. ‘I mean, people might like their job, they might tolerate it, but he loves it. When they give him the weekend off, he’s kind of mad about it.’” This devotion to his craft, coupled with the deep knowledge of ranching he’s accumulated over a stunningly long career — possibly longer than any cowpuncher alive — has propelled Boots to a level of fame practically unheard of for a working cowboy. —Krista Stevens
“‘She Made Us Happy’: The All-Star Dreams of Uvalde’s Biggest José Altuve Fan” by Roberto José Andrade Franco for ESPN: It’s been difficult to even read stories about Uvalde, so I can’t imagine how painful this piece was to write. Roberto’s profile of 10-year-old Tess Mata is an incredible tribute to a young life taken too soon. It’s also more than that. By exploring historical events that shaped this part of South Texas and the American West, Roberto helps us — not make sense — but contextualize the racism and violence that continue to shape and shatter our lives.
Kerry Howley | New York Magazine | May 9, 2022 | 7,800 words
I knew as soon as I read this piece in May that I would pick it for Longreads’ Best of 2022. Not because the subject, Marjorie Dannenfelser, is from my hometown, went to the same university I did, and got married in the Catholic church attached to my middle school. All that made me feel eerily close to the piece, sure, but what makes Kerry Howley’s work worthy of inclusion here is that she uses a magazine profile as a vehicle for challenging the tropes and omissions, the lies and distortions of America’s anti-abortion movement. “If we are by now accustomed to discussing ulterior motives and the well-documented history of legislators using abortion rhetoric to consolidate the right,” Howley notes, “we speak less of how the rhetoric works: by triggering in its subjects a stomach-churning horror.” And: “Almost all social movements work to erase context contrary to the cause. In this case, the context is a woman.” Howley shows how Dannenfelser, a powerful, single-minded activist, orchestrated a generation’s worth of horror and erasure, leading directly to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. —Seyward Darby
Sean Williams | Outside | September 20, 2022 | 6,616 words
There is something primal about skipping stones. See some rocks near a body of water and I’ll bet you chuck one across it, as millions have done before you, all the way back to competitions in Ancient Greece. The subject of this profile, Kurt Steiner, has tapped into this deeply embedded part of our psyche. Stone skipping, he says, has an “undeveloped natural purity, a refuge against the consumerist, plutocratic, kleptocratic, f*cking destroy-and-build-up-everything mentality.” In this beautiful piece, Sean Williams attempts to find out more about Steiner and this ancient sport. It was not an easy quest: Kurt lives in a cabin with no central heating or shower, craps in a bucket, and goes weeks without cell or internet coverage. It took Williams a year to reach Steiner via email, two years to set a time to meet him, and an intense few minutes to persuade U.S. border guards he was entering the country to interview a stone skipper. It was worth it. Williams immerses himself in Steiner’s world, spending days with him, skipping stones until his elbow throbs, talking for 12 hours at a time. He discovers a fascinating character for whom stone skipping is a respite from mental illnesses, love, and loss. The time invested in getting to know Steiner is apparent in every word. A respectful, thoughtful look at someone who has found a way to step out of society as we know it — and produced some record-breaking throws to boot. —Carolyn Wells
This was going to be a story about trekking in the western reaches of Guyana, about beautiful waterfalls and indigenous people living in an area where the border with Venezuela is a mushy and unimportant thing. Then I found myself travelling with a pair of influencers, so instead it was going to be about what it’s like to witness, up close, the rise of their industry and the death of mine. It was going to be about content and clicks and why any of that matters in a place with no electricity, let alone WiFi.
But then something weird happened, and we all almost died together, so now it’s really a story about that.
Madeleine Aggeler | GQ | May 5, 2022 | 3,054 words
What was the year of the scammer? Was it 2016, when a scammer became president of the United States? 2018, when the Anna Delvey saga became known? 2019, when twin documentaries about the Fyre Fest fiasco landed on competing streaming platforms? Or has it truly been 2022, when a man named Brian Johnson amassed a following of millions on TikTok and Instagram by selling supplements and espousing an “ancestral lifestyle” that includes eating a pound of raw beef liver a day — only to be brought low in December after his staggering (and obvious) steroid habit was revealed? It’s a trick question: Thanks to the attention economy, every year is the year of the scammer! But at least 2022 brought us Madeleine Aggeler’s treat of a profile of Johnson, a man who hasn’t seen a shirt or a parenting manual in years. (I’m not saying that boxing lessons in the living room is bad parenting; I’m saying that calling them “Savage Liver Boys” and filming them eating organ meats is maybe worth a think.) Be clear: This is not a history-bending profile. It is, however, a wildly entertaining one. And more importantly, it’s a valuable reminder that social media isn’t a dumpster fire just because Elon Musk bought Twitter; it’s a dumpster fire because the only thing it rewards is extremity. We’ll see if that’s changed by the end of 2023, the year of the scammer. —Peter Rubin
Moriah Wilson was a champion in gravel bike racing. Her shocking murder left the community devasted. Rowan Moore Gerety takes a look back at her impressive life, before its untimely end.
Back in Mo’s childhood room, beyond the door with the macaroni nameplate, Karen picks out cherished flannel shirts to give to Moriah’s cousins, bike outfits and cute jeans with holes in them for Cash. Karen and Moriah wore the same size, and Moriah’s scent is threaded through Karen’s dresser drawers now too. Each day, she chooses something to pick up and breathe in. “Sometimes it makes me cry, and sometimes it makes me smile,” she said, seeming, as we spoke on the phone in October, to do a bit of both. “I do wonder,” she said, “what’s it gonna be like when the scent is gone?”
Eighty years ago, Walter Springs, a 24-year-old Black man from Colorado, died on a barroom floor in a small Texas town in the segregated South, shot by a military police officer named Martin Walker. Springs had been a star boxer and popular student at Regis College (now University), but left Denver in 1941 to join the Army. He never made it to battle.
For decades, his family was in the dark about his death. “What the Springs family wanted, more than anything, was to know why? Why did Walter Springs die the way he did that day in 1942?” 5280 journalist Robert Sanchez digs into what happened that night; his investigation eventually leads him to answers in court-martial transcripts in a folder tucked away in a military archive.
It was vindicating to know her family’s stories had been correct. Their assumptions about the night in Texas, Walter’s father’s intuition, were right all along.
There was a fragility here, too, Springs-Levert thought. What if she didn’t have the family album with her uncle’s photographs and papers? What if Campbell hadn’t been asked to research Springs’ life in 2020? What if the fire at the National Personnel Records Center had destroyed the transcripts of Martin Walker’s court-martial proceedings?
At Oxford American, David Ramsey writes a braided ode to the forever unknowable Hank Williams, a country music legend and violent drunk, who died of alcoholism in 1953, before he turned 30 years old.
But he did not live. And so he is ageless, of another time. Hank with his guitar in black-and-white photos. He was signed up to be a movie star by MGM but he no-showed and was canned. He remains pure, for the purists. He remains unknowable. Storytellers and historians hunt through old articles and radio promotional materials. They double check state records and rifle through legal proceedings and re-read the transcripts of interviews from decades past with anyone who might have crossed his path. They gather the whisper of facts and conjectures from the archives. But this was before we knew everything about everyone. This was before we’d figured out how to preserve and catalog every bit of data about every little thing. A legend forms when much is lost.
I am not here to knock down any statues, just here to tell you the truth, as best as I can make it out from an imperfect record: When the man who sang these songs lived, and started drinking to cool whatever deep harm was within him, he could be a monster.
As part of Best of Longreads, our annual labor of love, we pored over all the stories we’ve picked in 2022 to create these year-end lists. The following features all embody the strong voice and excellent writing that made us fall in love with narrative journalism. Sweeping, hard-hitting, and emotional, each immerses us in a time and a place, introducing us to a fascinating set of characters that make for unforgettable stories.
Similar to last year, we asked our featured authors to share their favorite stories across categories. You’ll see their recommendations alongside ours in this list and others to come this month. Enjoy!
Annie Hylton | The Walrus | February 28, 2022 | 8,160 words
Ayoob Mohammed, an Uyghur man, left his family in Xinjiang to find a better life. While waiting for a U.S. visa in Pakistan in September 2001, he traveled into Afghanistan — and found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sold to the U.S. for bounty as an alleged terrorist, he was held in Guantánamo Bay for four years, and then exonerated. He and a few other Uyghur detainees resettled in Albania, the only country that offered to take them. But 16 years later, he is still trying to prove he’s innocent, and is unable to reunite with his wife and children in Montreal as Canada continues to reject his application for permanent residency. Annie Hylton weaves an intimate story detailing Mohammed’s journey into a larger piece about the complex global politics among nations and the “invisible forces” that move people like pawns. For most of us, family separation and love across borders are abstract ideas, but Hylton’s narrative of one man’s life, told with precision and empathy, makes for an emotional and devastating read. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Jeff Weiss | Los Angeles Magazine | Jan 13, 2022 | 6,842 words
Categorizing a piece like this can feel like an impossible compromise. Jeff Weiss’ gut punch of a story about the killing of Los Angeles rapper Drakeo spills across nearly every journalistic genre imaginable. It’s deeply reported and essayistic, a nearly inescapable combination when the reporter in question is also an eyewitness. It’s a dispassionate profile written from within the clinch of a genuine years-long friendship. But ultimately, only the word “feature” can accommodate the many ways it plumbs facts and grief with equal acuity. When Drakeo rose to prominence in the city that put gangsta rap on the map, it was because he was the herald of something unapologetically new. But when 113 people ambushed him backstage at an outdoor music festival last December, it was because of something much, much larger. “To begin to understand why it happened,” Weiss writes, “is to grapple with the most corrosive aspects of humanity: the need for revenge and hatred of the other; our capacity for rage, ego, and jealousy. It is the boomerang of racism, police corruption, and the worship of violence. Yet it is also a condition of the spiritual and material poverty that infects most aspects of modern American life. Only here, under a deranged spell of nihilism, greed, and lust for fame, can all the codes and compasses that once governed us become meaningless.” This story won’t make you feel good. It certainly won’t restore your faith in human nature. It might, though, help you understand why an artist like Drakeo moved the way he did. Why he refused to stop fighting, even while marked for death by both the state and the street. Why he stepped out of the car that cold December night, knowing what awaited him — if not immediately, then still far too soon. —Peter Rubin
Mitch Moxley | Esquire | June 2, 2022 | 5,756 words
Humboldt is a farm town of about 5,900 in central Saskatchewan, Canada. In Humboldt, hockey is a religion. In Humboldt, everyone is proud of The Broncos, the junior hockey team. It was on April 6, 2018, that a lorry crashed into the Broncos’ team bus, killing 14, and leaving the close-knit town devasted. In this essay, Mitch Moxley, while still telling the story of the day of the crash, focuses on what happened in the years afterward: A community left in shock, families grieving, and a high-profile court case where the driver of the lorry, Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, is charged with 29 counts of dangerous driving. It’s a heartwrenching read, but Moxley is careful and compassionate in his portrayal of the different paths grief can take you down. One father who lost a son advocates for Sidhu to be deported to his home country of India after his prison sentence. Another father forgives him, writing letters to support his stay in Canada. Moxley’s description of Sidhu meeting the man who forgave him — down on one knee, sobbing — will make your emotions somersault. There is no clear right or wrong here, whether to forgive or not. Grief has no clear answers. A powerful essay that looks beneath the surface of a tragedy, examining the complicated tangle of issues beneath: forgiveness, family, community, immigration, unfair work practices, and tremendous loss. —Carolyn Wells
Paul Fischer | Hidden Compass | January 11, 2022 | 4,985 words
It’s the rich, cinematic detail in Paul Fischer’s “Gazawood Dreams” that draws you in and holds you captivated. It’s the story of two Palestinian brothers who, despite ongoing violence around their home in the Gaza Strip, just want to make films. Fischer introduces us to Tarzan and Arab within the ruins of Gaza City’s al-Nasr movie theatre, the site where the brothers’ cinematic dreams were born. It’s been shut down since 1987. “They called their studio Gazawood. Its walls plastered in collages of images, Gazawood was like a psychological and emotional bunker, sheltering them from the fighter jets roaring overhead, the whipcrack of rockets firing in the distance, the sectarian arguments in the febrile streets.” Fischer paints more than just a portrait of two brothers trying to make films in a war zone, taking us from hardship to hope and from Gaza to Cannes as Tarzan and Arab persevere, despite violence and overwhelming government oppression. —Krista Stevens
Paul Fischer recommends three pieces that moved him in 2022:
Jonathan Tjarks was dying when he wrote this. We were more or less the same age. He had a young child, I have a young child. I loved reading him, and I loved listening to him — on podcasts and elsewhere. This is a final story about the author’s own death, his fatherhood, his faith.
Peanuts is foundational to me and many, many other. This excavates and illuminates the strip’s depth and beauty, in such an intelligent, insightful, precise way.
Rachel Aviv | The New Yorker | March 28, 2022 | 10,600 words
When I think about what connects Rachel Aviv’s diverse body of writing, one word comes to mind: complexity. She isn’t afraid of it. She confronts the knotty, the nuanced, and the murky through reporting and language. To my mind, this is what it means to do a story justice. Aviv was true to form with this feature about a teenager who escapes an abusive parent, gets a full ride to an Ivy League school, and eventually wins a Rhodes Scholarship — only to have her success and resilience challenged by the very entities that had celebrated her. The story shines a glaring light on the ways that powerful institutions define, use, and abuse individual suffering. Calling it thought-provoking is putting it too mildly: This story is infuriating. —Seyward Darby
Rachel Aviv recommends a piece that made her think:
“How To Recover from a Happy Childhood” by Rivka Galchen for The New Yorker is an extraordinary essay about childhood, grief, nostalgia, and replicating the ways of our parents. In a mysterious and delicate way, the essay made me feel (without making any claims to be providing advice) that I had a better grasp on what it means to be a good parent.”
In the fall of 2020, Helen Naslund was sentenced to 18 years in prison for killing her abusive husband Miles on their Alberta farm. The sentence angered people across Canada, and is a clear example of how an outdated justice system views women and treats domestic violence cases. Through interviews and letters from prison, Naslund opened up to journalist Jana G. Pruden about the decades of abuse she endured, the day of Miles’ death and the cover-up that followed, and her fight for freedom. Pruden’s portrait of Naslund is tragic but ultimately hopeful, and shines a harsh light on how we fail to protect, and even punish, victims of domestic abuse and violence.
From then on, Helen understood without question that if she left Miles, many people would die. She would die, the kids would die, and others – police or neighbours or whoever else Miles could take down – would die, too. Of that, she had absolutely no doubt.
Helen’s case was tough. She’d been charged with first-degree murder, and if a jury could be convinced the shooting was planned – even if that meant getting the gun and loading it moments before – she’d spend 25 years in prison before she could even apply for parole. Her conduct after the shooting, in disposing of Miles’s body and reporting him missing, wasn’t particularly sympathetic. And despite being a victim of severe physical and mental abuse for nearly 30 years, a psychologist who assessed Helen didn’t diagnose her as having battered woman syndrome. Her memory could be poor, and it was difficult – even impossible – for her to open up about the things she and her sons had endured.
As host ofThe 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 intoEpisode 345, in which he interviewed Atavist editor Seyward Darby and freelance writer Sarah Souli about her work on the latest issue of The Atavist.
Writing long pieces is overwhelming, which also leads to overthinking. Where to start? Where to end? Too slow? Too fast? In media res or no?
Sarah Souli — whose recent Atavist feature, “A Matter of Honor,” saw her try and solve a triple murder of an Afghan mother and her two daughters at the Greek border — shares advice she received from her father.
“When I was in middle school and high school and studying for tests, he would always say, ‘Just do the easiest thing first,’” Souli says. “’When you read all the questions on the test, point out the ones that are the easiest and start with those because then you’ll feel a bit confident. And then you can move on to the hard ones, as opposed to doing it from page one.’”
Some writers can’t proceed until they have a lede, which can be akin to putting roadblocks at the base of your driveway. Instead, take that great scene you know is in the middle of the story and consider being more modular. Start writing there. Pause. Regroup. Even if the story is linear, the writing of it can be nonlinear. Like Souli says, it builds confidence — something most of us can attest is always in short supply.
Please enjoy this excerpt below, and listen to the full episode for more.
These interviews have been edited for clarity and concision.
What struck you about this story when it came across your desk?
Seyward Darby, Atavist editor-in-chief: We’ve read, heard, seen so many stories about migrants in the Mediterranean struggling to get to Europe and being treated really terribly at borders. What was striking about this is that it defied some of the stereotypes. It was a murder investigation: three women who struggled to make it where they wanted to make it, and then someone literally slit their throats. They were barely over the border into Europe, and they had come from Turkey; Turkey and Greece do not get along on any number of fronts. So it was a true crime story tied up with all of these international forces, which were made even more complex because Afghanistan — where these women were from — fell to the Taliban again, in 2021. Trying to solve a crime under any circumstances is going to be a challenge. But then add where it happened, who it happened to, and when it happened, and it becomes like nothing I had ever read.
When you’re receiving pitches for stories, how much legwork and pre-reporting do you like to see before you commit to pursuing it?
If I recall correctly, Sarah had a good contact at the Greek police: the woman who had spearheaded the investigation for a time. She also had grant support. The combination of who she had access to, and the resources that she had mustered, along with what we found interesting about the story itself, made sense to us.
One thing we talked about extensively over the years, because she’s been working on this for so long, was that it was highly unlikely she was ever going to solve this triple murder. So what can the narrative be here? It wasn’t like other true crime stories in which crimes have been solved. This was something very different. And Sarah’s first-person work was one of the things that we knew was going to set this apart from the beginning.
When you’re editing a piece, any piece, what are some common potholes that you hit and you realize “we need to figure out a way to patch that up”?
Every piece has different potholes. In this case, there was any number of challenges. Sarah started reporting this in 2019, maybe even a little earlier; she started following the story soon after the women were killed in 2018. Think about all of the events that have happened in the world since then. She wanted to go to Afghanistan and couldn’t because of the pandemic. Then, the Taliban came back in power. It wasn’t as though Sarah hadn’t done her job. It wasn’t as though there was some loose end that we just hadn’t tugged. It was like, “The world is burning. How are we going to figure out how to keep telling this story?”
And in this case, Sarah did a really nice job of using first person to express frustration and anxiety about some of the obstacles she encountered along the way. Yes, part of the job as an editor is to patch holes. But I’m a big fan of saying, “Let’s acknowledge in the story that it’s a problem.” It’s more honest. Having a really polished story that conveniently ignores some of the obstacles or pitfalls that a writer dealt with? Awesome, I’m so glad it reads nice. But I don’t necessarily trust stories like that.
Sarah, the reporting in this piece is really something.
Sarah Souli: This was one of the rare instances where the writing felt like the easiest part of the whole process. I was out of my depth at so many moments in the reporting, and really felt like I was taking on roles and responsibilities that I’d never had to before, even when doing other vaguely investigative work.
This was deep infiltration — not just into people’s personal lives, but also following a trail that the police had covered up to a certain point, and realizing that there was a lot to explore beyond what the police had done and venturing out on my own in a lot of ways. I’m not a trained investigator or a police officer, and I often found myself in situations where I was just like, “What am I doing? I should be behind a desk.”
How did you process that and try to find some degree of comfort in it?
Journalism, especially when you take a piece of this size or reportage of this depth and breadth, is never an individual thing. It’s so much more collaborative. I would not have been able to do what I did without the support from my Afghan colleagues. This was a project that I did over three and a half years. And at various points, I worked with a couple of different people, most of whom have asked to remain anonymous, just given the nature of the reporting that we did, and the precariousness of the political situation in Afghanistan right now. But there’s no way that I could have done what I did without the people that I worked with — in particular, Khwaga Ghani, who is credited on the piece. She’s an amazing Afghan journalist from Kabul, who’s now actually studying in California.
I couldn’t travel to Afghanistan, because it was COVID. This was March 2020; at some point, I realized that this situation is not going to get better. There’s no way I can travel. I really need to rethink how I’m going to report this from Afghanistan. Khwaga was recommended to me, by a couple of different colleagues. She traveled to Mazar-e-Sharif, which is where Fahima and her daughters are from, and we were basically on a WhatsApp video call for like 12 hours a day for 10 days. I could never have done that without her.
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There are moments when you inject yourself into the piece. One that I found particularly brave and even harrowing was when you confront Saïd with the pictures of the three slain family members — the mother and the two daughters. Where did that come from?
The confrontation with Saïd was actually the most difficult part to write. We edited it several times. It’s really hard to write action in a way that doesn’t feel cheesy. It was such an intense and cinematic moment, because at that point, I had been reporting for two years or more. I was just pissed, honestly. I had all of this information, all of these leads, and it was all pointing towards this one person. And so when I finally had a chance to meet him, I was just filled with anger.
Over the years, a lot of people — family members, close friends — were like, “You should be more scared. This is dangerous.” Again, because of the people that I worked with, I was never in situations that were extremely dangerous. One thing I realized in Turkey that really broke my heart: Even if I’m talking to someone who’s a human trafficker, or potentially a murderer, they’re much more scared of you than you are of them.
There are a couple of layers to that. One of them is that Turkey doesn’t recognize Afghans as legal refugees. So everyone’s situation is quite precarious. And there’s just a lot of mistrust when it comes to journalists in general. So I never personally felt like I was in danger. But again, I was with [translator and reporter] Tabsheer, who’s one of the best journalists I’ve ever worked with. I felt quite safe being with him. If I was alone, as a woman, I probably wouldn’t have done that.
And it must have been all the more uncomfortable that the piece starts with a first-person vignette of you hitting a roadblock — and then you find someone whohasseen these women and could give you information. It was really effective to set the stage of being a little bit dejected, and then getting that lead, and it’s off to the races.
After I came back from Istanbul last September, I gave myself a three-week period to just sit at home in Greece and write it all out. I was like, “Okay, beginnings and ends are the hardest, so we’re just going to forget about that right now, and we’re just going to write the middle.”
I have to give Seyward credit for that opener. Eventually, we were talking, and I was like, “I have no idea where to start this story.” She said, “Well, you should start it in the ice cream shop.” This is a murder investigation; isn’t starting in an ice cream shop too superficial? Or is the fact that I’m gonna have to talk about myself somehow disrespectful to Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana, the main characters of the story? But at some point, I understood that this was going to be what was most helpful for the piece.
How did you originally arrive at the story?
The region of Evros between Greece and Turkey has historically been a very common point of migration — actually, so much so that until 2009, there were still landmines on the border. But it’s never really gotten the same amount of press as the Mediterranean Sea, especially with what goes on in Greece on the islands and Lesbos. When I first moved to Greece in 2017, I thought it was fascinating that it was such a historically important point, but there weren’t a lot of people reporting. So I started going up there pretty regularly from Athens a few times a year reporting.
In late October or early November 2018, I’m talking with some of my sources in villages, and they’re like, “Didn’t you hear about this murder?” There are a lot of people who die on this crossing, but they generally die either from drowning in the river or from hypothermia. Car accidents, maybe, or people who walk along the train tracks and get crushed by a train. But murder is not something that happens. It hadn’t happened in that region in, I think, about 20 years. In Greece in general, there aren’t necessarily a lot of homicides; there are an increasing amount of femicides, but it’s still a pretty small number compared to other countries. So usually every time there’s a murder, it makes the news. And this hadn’t.
So I went to go see Pavlos Pavlidis, a forensic scientist who I’ve interviewed many times and who had done the autopsy. And he was like, “Well, we have these three women. But we don’t really know much about them, or really anything about them.” They didn’t even know where they were from — one of the big problems with dead bodies that turn up in Evros is that people don’t have their papers or any documentation, so it becomes impossible to ID them. And so I wanted to start digging into that.
For people who might not be familiar with fixers, what does the fixer do? There might be translating, obviously, but what else?
We could also spend a long time interrogating the word fixer, because within the hierarchy of journalism, they’re often the lowest paid, and don’t really get a lot of credit — especially when you’re working in countries like Turkey or Afghanistan. Of the people that I worked with, two of them are already very established journalists. I mean, you can hire and work with a fixer who helps you on the ground, someone who just does translation, but for me, I really felt like I was working with a colleague. In the case of both Tabsheer and Khwaga, I was lucky to be working with people who were really invested in the piece and the story and figuring out what happened to Fahima and her daughters — and getting some justice for them.
I was reading an essay on writing by Francine Prose in a Tin House anthology, and she writes that writers are creatures who function best when we recall the writing process and tranquility. What is the writing process like when you’re alone, by yourself in the dark? In that moment of tranquility as you’re trying to crack the code of a piece — and especially one of this nature?
Honestly, I think it’s one of severe disassociation. I was trying to recall those three weeks that I first wrote the piece, but I don’t really remember the process or the feelings that I had about it. It’s a bit difficult for me to consider myself a writer. I have friends who are what I would call “writers” in quotes — writers who write novels that you get written up in the New York Times, and craft these whole worlds and write these beautiful sentences and come up with these extravagant characters, and just have a real depth of imagination. And I’ve always felt like what I’m most interested in is really just talking to people: hearing the story and pulling the threads and putting together this puzzle. I write because that is the medium through which it’s easiest to tell these sorts of stories and because I don’t have a very nice voice for radio. I have a complicated relationship with this identity.
What has to be in place for you at your workstation, so you can grease the wheels and get some momentum going?
Really, it’s that I wake up. I’ll maybe put on pants with, like, a zipper and a button. But usually I’ll stay in pajamas or be in workout clothes, because I’ll like try and trick myself that I’m going to work out later. Because that’s good for writing. I have my glass of tap water, a huge cup of coffee, and I will just drink coffee until like noon and not eat. As I’m saying it, I’m like, “God, that’s so unhealthy.” But that’s how it goes.
I have to start in the morning. Like, writing has to be the first thing that I start doing. I’m not one of those people who goes to the beach in the morning and swims first and then comes back and writes. No, it’s very utilitarian, very unromantic. I just get myself up, put myself on an extremely uncomfortable chair — because after all these years of working from home, I still haven’t gotten a desk chair — and just start writing. And that’s it.
At what point in the reporting process do you feel like you have enough to start writing?
I was so anxious about the writing process for this one. The reporting itself was so overwhelming, and I felt like there were so many moments where things could just go terribly wrong and the whole thing would fall out from under me. I know this is imposter syndrome, but I felt like someone at some point was going to call my bluff and be like, “You have no business doing any of this.” So I was hesitant about starting to write until I had enough of the reporting done. And at one point, it was just like, well, I mean, it’s never going to end up in a perfect conclusion. The person that I think should be on trial, or at least questioned by the police, it looks like it’s not going to be happening. So you just have to sit down and start writing.
How did you keep everything organized and straight so when it was game time you were you were ready to hit the ground running with all the information you gathered?
I was terrified of the fact-checking process from the beginning, so I tried to be as fastidious as possible. When I wrote the piece, basically every sentence was footnoted for the fact-checking.
Does finishing a piece like this leave you more energized or drained in the end?
When I got the layout for the piece with all the illustrations, it was the first time in reporting it that I cried. To see this mother and her two girls, to see their faces in front of me — and the illustrator did such an amazing job — it was like I was looking into their eyes. I’m so happy that they’re finally getting their story told and that there is some sort of modicum of justice that comes at the end of the piece. I don’t think I’ve really processed it yet.
Like most freelancers, I’m just constantly working, so I have a slate of assignments for the next few months. But this has made me rethink what kinds of stories I want to tell in the future and how I want to tell those stories as well. In what format? What medium? Where do I see my place? That was a very roundabout answer to a very specific question, but I think I kind of feel everything at once.
I always bring these conversations down for a landing by asking the guests for a recommendation for the listeners. What are you excited about?
I’ll give two, if that’s okay. The first is whenever I read a very intense piece, I’m like “Well, what do I do now?” Afghanistan is in extreme political and humanitarian crisis at the moment, so I got some recommendations from some Afghan friends, who told me that the best charity to donate to that’s doing good work with Afghans both in Afghanistan and Afghan refugees outside of the country is the International Rescue Committee, the IRC. So I’d like to encourage your listeners, if they feel so moved by Fahima’s story, to give a donation.
And then the other thing, because the piece starts with an epigraph from an amazing Bulgarian author who was an inspiration for me to start visiting Evros in the first place, I would recommend Kapka Kassabova’s book Border. It’s really fantastic, and a very illuminating look into this small corner of the world.
