Parachute journalism and rural America’s revenge

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Below is an essay I first published for The Ochberg Society, a now-defunct grassroots group of journalists who cover trauma, upon the publication of FACTORY MAN in 2014. I’ve been thinking a lot about the people featured in my essay and in that book recently. Last week on Election Day, I traveled back to Bassett, Va., to talk about my just-out book, TRUEVINE, a nonfiction narrative about race, exploitation and greed.

In the front row sat a 63-year-old white man, a trucking company owner named Jerry Hatchett, decked out in “Make America Great Again” regalia — red Trump hat that matched his red suspenders. To his left sat a septuagenarian former sharecropper and furniture factory worker named Janet Johnson, who is featured in TRUEVINE. Janet is black, and the title of one of my chapters,  “White Peoples Is Hateful,” was a direct quote from my  interviews with her. After my talk, which centered largely on racism and its tentacles, the two had a pleasant exchange.

Hatchett, who still lives on the dairy farm where he grew up in rural Sontag (just three miles down the road from the rural crossroads of Truevine, Va.), bought five copies of “TRUEVINE” at the event. When I called him up later to ask what he thought of the election results he told me, “I run a small business” with 20 employees. “The regulations passed in D.C. are killing small businesses,” he said, citing studies that truck-related deaths have decreased greatly in the past 50 years, and yet the regulations keep tightening.

Hatchett assured me he was not racist, and I believe him. “I’ve got a lot of black friends, and I’d rather have them in my house than about three-quarters of the white people I know.” But he’s concerned about soaring health insurance premiums, which he blames on Obamacare. He’s concerned about the growing number of people in his region, black and white, who can’t pass a drug test. “People out here are hurting, and nobody in Washington has done anything about it.”

Time will tell whether president-elect Trump, who has a long history of outsourcing his own products, will actually do anything about joblessness, soaring disability rates and food insecurity in places where “the China shock” has decimated the livelihoods of so many. In places like Bassett and Truevine, where factories once hummed, I believe people want their dignity back, not painkillers. They want jobs.

More than anything, I believe Donald Trump won the election, despite just about every pollster prediction to the contrary, because Democrats and journalists failed to grasp and report on the aftermath of globalization in small towns across America. I fielded a number of reporter phone calls during the campaigns, asking for my “Factory Man” sources and their phone numbers and wanting to pick my brain, from The Wall Street Journal to The Guardian. I helped the reporters, based in Washington and New York, because that’s what members of the journalism tribe do for one another.

But what I really wanted to say to them was this: Why are you just now getting around to writing this story? NAFTA was signed in 1994; China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Across America, dying factory towns held unemployment-rate records for more than a decade. What took you so long? And why were so many of my regional-media colleagues also unable to illuminate that story? (I describe more fully the impact of dwindling journalistic resources on smaller, regional media here.)

Democrats and most of the mainstream media ignored what was happening in rural America until the morning after the election. And they ignored it at their own peril.

The former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey once told an interviewer: “Some bones broken will forever be weak. They will ache and cause pain. The best we can hope for is acknowledgment. What drives me crazy is when people don’t want to acknowledge!”

She was talking about racist events of the past, but the same idea could be applied today to the pain inflicted by globalization, when 5 million American factory workers lost their livelihood through no fault of their own. And the only government program designed to ease them into new work was an outdated Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) run by people who looked down their noses at the displaced. (My personal favorite exchange, from a TAA training session I attended: “We’re not gonna pay for you to be in school and find out you’re in Myrtle Beach,” a presenter said, stressing strict school attendance. “Who here has money for a vacation?” said the laid-off worker sitting next to me. “I’m worried about losing my house.”)

It’s wrong to name-call all Trump voters as “deplorables.” It’s wrong to discount all rural voters for “clinging to their religion and guns.” As George Packer opined recently in a New Yorker story on the psychology of the Trump voter: “If the Democrats were no longer on their side — if government programs kept failing to improve their lives — why not vote for the party that at least took them seriously?”

Further, as the lives of rural Americans grew smaller, whiter, and less hope-filled, identity issues surrounding race became harder to unpack and more fraught to discuss, giving “Trump the aura of being a truth teller,” according to Packer. “The ‘authenticity’ that his followers so admire is factually wrong and morally repulsive. But when people of good will are afraid to air legitimate arguments [and discuss sensitive issues such as sentencing reform and urban crime], the illegitimate kind gains power.”

I hope the first step in bridging the divide is the airing of such arguments. The acknowledgment of one another’s pain. 

As I write in FACTORY MAN: “The people [in trade-decimated communities] wanted their stories told. … Their world was not flat, and they wanted a witness to it. Someone to describe the creeping small-town carnage created by acronyms like NAFTA and WTO and an impotent TAA, all of it forged by faraway people who had never bothered to see the full result of what globalization had wrought.” 

Perhaps those faraway people are beginning now to see the picture. It’s not a very lovely one. At Henry County’s Community Storehouse, where a converted textile-plant conveyor belt has found new life as a food-distribution device, people still arrive two hours before the doors open, some of them leaning on canes and walkers — for a box of old food.

But I take solace in the words of the poet-singer Leonard Cohen, who died last week and whose work elevated humanity’s brokenness: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” 

I don’t presume to have all the answers for these complicated times, but I hope my essay, below, sheds a little more light on how the national media selectively ignored a wide swath of its citizenry.

And to all those daring to parachute in again, I say: Come on back. And stick around a while when you do.

At the Community Storehouse in Ridgeway, volunteers can divine what people used to do by their ailments: Women who'd been bent over sewing machines all day making sweatshirts had humps on their backs. The men who culled lumber were missing fingers. Photo by Jared Soares

At the Community Storehouse in Ridgeway, volunteers can divine what people used to do by their ailments: Women who’d been bent over sewing machines all day making sweatshirts had humps on their backs. The men who culled lumber were missing fingers. | Photo by Jared Soares

When I first met Wanda Perdue in the spring of 2012, she was studying at a community college tutoring center in rural Virginia. She had missed the technology boom entirely. When everyone else was learning about Word and Excel, Wanda was tacking trim pieces onto dining room tables and gluing molding onto dresser drawers. When Stanley Furniture laid her off in 2010 along with 530 of her coworkers — moving most of its production offshore to China, Vietnam and Indonesia — Wanda barely knew how to turn on a computer.

Wanda Perdue | Photo by Kyle Green

Wanda Perdue | Photo by Kyle Green

When I met her, she was finishing an associate’s degree in office administration. She’d struggled mightily in the beginning, especially with college math, but soon she would be graduating with a 3.3 grade-point average. Wanda was a young 58 then — trim with pretty copper hair, Southern manners and a work ethic honed by decades of standing through sweltering, eight-hour shifts, just as her parents before her had done at a competing furniture-maker in nearby Bassett, Va.

“What I want [a prospective employer] to know is, if you need a job done, she’s going to find a way to do it come hell or high water,” said Kay Pagans, one of Wanda’s professors.

And yet, over the next two years, every time I phoned Wanda for an update on her job search, the story was the same: The only work she could find was part-time, without benefits, at Walmart, where she ran the cash register and stocked shelves in the health and beauty aisle. On the phone in August, Wanda sounded more desperate than ever. Walmart had recently announced they were cutting her hours in anticipation of Obamacare, part of its new labor-savings strategy. The world had gotten flat, as columnist Thomas Friedman likes to say. But Wanda’s side of the story rarely got reported: the 5 million factory workers who’d lost their jobs to offshoring had been utterly flattened, too.

According to the prevailing media narrative, the recession ended in 2009, and manufacturing has been slowly bouncing back. Only it hasn’t really. The official unemployment rate may have declined, but the full employment picture was not quite the smiley face that economists and business reporters were leading everyone to believe. The number of people toiling at temp work and part-time jobs, and those who have simply stopped looking for work — the so-called U6 rate — is almost double the official rate.

As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson conceded not long after Wanda lost her full-time job, the unemployment stories were waning because the political will to fix the labor market had faded. “It’s hard to blame the media too much for resisting to write feverishly about nonexistent efforts to fix a static unemployment problem,” he wrote.

I’m not so sure. Even when the media was still reporting full steam on unemployment, a 2009 Pew Center survey showed the recession was largely being covered from the top down, told primarily through big business with stories datelined in Washington and New York. As if that’s where all the unemployed people live. The ratio of stories featuring ordinary people and displaced workers? Just 2 percent.

Thompson may blame the problem on the lack of political will, but I have another theory to add to the mix. With a few exceptions, the national media tends to cover the people it already knows, most of them found in the same ZIP codes and Facebook/Twitter realms where they live and work. National reporters rarely venture anywhere near the hollowed-out little towns where people suffering the after effects of globalization would practically grab a visiting journalist by the collar, ready for a witness to the carnage. Reporters out of Washington and New York rarely turn up in quirky Appalachian towns like Galax, Va., where all but one furniture factory has closed, or in the once-prosperous city of Martinsville, Va., which lost almost half its workforce to the offshoring of textile and furniture jobs.

I haven’t seen any of the major news outlets reporting from tiny Fieldale, where another former Stanley worker approached me last summer and spilled his story before I could ask a single question. Now 59, Samuel Watkins’ employment benefits had run out eight months earlier, and he’d plundered his 401K. He’d cobbled together work mowing lawns and weeding gardens for $8.50 an hour. He had no health insurance and had recently maxed out his credit card to have an infected tooth pulled. He hauled his tools and lawnmower gas around in the back of a dented 1999 Ford Explorer.

Samuel Watkins | 2013 Photo by Beth Macy

Samuel Watkins | 2013 Photo by Beth Macy

Samuel had no idea I was a journalist writing a book about the aftermath of globalization when we bumped into each other in July 2013, the same week that Hope Yen of the Associated Press wrote up new data showing that four in five American adults will face poverty during their lifetimes. It was one of the first national stories I’d read that directly connected poverty to the increasingly globalized economy and the decimation of factory jobs.

When Samuel struggled to explain to his Virginia Employment Commission caseworker how demoralized he felt asking the government for help, she told him, “Get a grip. You’re not going to be making $13.90 again.” Unfortunately, she was right.

In small towns like Samuel’s, the local press does what it can, covering job fairs and the opening of temp agencies, dollar stores and call centers. The opening of Martinsville’s call center StarTek, for instance, was touted as the savior of the dying town — only to close up operations seven years later and join the cheap-labor waltz to the Philippines. For one former StarTek worker I met, it was her sixth layoff in 18 years.

But that long view rarely gets explored in depth by small newspapers, where publishers and business leaders also tend to be entwined “like roots around a pipe,” as one civic leader told me. One analysis piece I wrote about Martinsville resulted in a worker I’d interviewed being forbidden from speaking to me again — or even responding to an e-mail or private Facebook message — for my book.

The slow burn of a globalizing economy, recession or not, is hard for most reporters to get their heads around. “No one’s really covered the day in and day out of the effects of free trade on the American public,” said Richard McCormack, the founding publisher of Manufacturing & Technology News and the editor of “ReMaking America,” a book published recently by the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “So much of the media is sponsored basically by advertising — Walmart and Macy’s, and if you’re the Wall Street Journal, it’s J.P. Morgan or Chase.”

Secondly, McCormack pointed out, sorting through the thousand-plus documents produced by a single U.S. International Trade Commission case is “really hard for journalists to put their arms around. It’s not cut and dry, it’s not black and white. And the importers and foreign producers have spent millions on lobbyists, lawyers and P.R. people until domestic manufacturers get completely overwhelmed. It’s a goddamn David and Goliath,” he said.

Since newsroom beats by tradition are organized geographically as well as by theme, it doesn’t often happen that a local reporter will follow the closing of a local factory to its replacement location in, say, Indonesia. While small media outlets and regional papers like the one I write for cover every factory closing and every new unemployment stat, we rarely claim the authority, the scope or the resources to pay attention to what’s happening at the World Trade Organization or the Department of Commerce.

That’s left to journalists at bigger news outlets, but these are reporters who usually haven’t bothered traversing the dying factory towns. From where they sit, the trend is barely perceptible.

The full picture of globalization, then, rarely makes its way into the news. No one is minding the back room of this new global store.

In fact, it took a freelance photographer, Jared Soares, driving to Martinsville three times a week for more than a year before I finally grasped the big picture myself, through his images: a textile plant conveyor belt converted for use in a food bank; a disabled minister named Leonard, biding time in his kitchen in the middle of the afternoon; a Trade Adjustment Assistance training session, where the PowerPoint resembled a seventh-grade filmstrip from 1973, and laid-off workers were scolded not to blow all their unemployment benefits at Myrtle Beach. (“The beach?” one woman muttered. “I’m about to lose my house.”)

If the laid-off factory workers wanted their stories told, Jared and I were going to have to help. His project, culminating in a forthcoming photography book, is the result, along with my book, “Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local — and Helped Save an American Town,” which will be published by Little, Brown and Company next June.

With any luck at all, Wanda will land a full-time job before she hits retirement age. She called in August to tell me she was about to have her first interview in many months, as a data entry operator for a local company. Wanda had her interviewing outfit all picked out, she enthused. She was nervous because three people were going to be interviewing her at once. “But I can handle it,” she added.

Turns out the business is just five minutes up a hill from her house, as the crow flies. “If it comes a real deep snow and I had to get there, I could walk,” she said.

A few weeks later, she called back. She thought the interview had gone well, but she did not get the job. “They said they’d keep my resume on file,” she added.

When I caught up with Samuel recently, his luck had improved. He’d been hired as a full-time temp worker for one of the last furniture-related companies in the region, a kitchen cabinet supplier, making $11 an hour. He has health insurance again, and is working hard to catch up on his electric bill, now three months in arrears.

His wife, a 61-year-old former furniture worker, is in the process of applying for federal disability benefits — another rarely reported but escalating trend in towns hit hard by globalization.

Even the economists and some Washington journalists are beginning to notice what Samuel Watkins could have told them four years ago. “If my company stays in business, there’s a chance I can become an actual employee,” Samuel said, hopefully. “Honey, it’s like everything else. There’s nothing promised to you any more. All you do is work till they say it’s no more.”

RIP Harvey Wilbourne (1920-2015), war hero and extraordinary ordinary man

An obituary in Sunday’s Roanoke Times caught my eye, and before I knew it the tears were puddling on my toast. I’ve profiled scores of amazing people in my  career, but Harvey’s story was among my favorites. I loved his unflinching honesty. I really loved how fiercely he loved his wife.

A World War Two hero and fighter pilot, he had found himself, then in his late-80s, dreaming about the Japanese airmen he’d shot down. I remember him saying, “I can still see their faces. … They had families too.”

harveyTo which his wife, Nell, would then counter, comfortingly, “It was kill or be killed.”

Theirs was an ordinary story — a love story — I chronicled with photographer Sam Dean in 2007. They were doing what thousands in the Greatest Generation are doing or have done: moving into a better-than-average retirement community. And Nell was not thrilled in the least. She called her new much-smaller digs at Brandon Oaks “B.O.” for short.

She complained about having to give up her favorite knitting chair, which was ratty-looking and worn.

Harvey had to say goodbye to the duct-taped contraption he’d built to affix the telephone next to his recliner. They had to winnow down their massive collection of clocks. Every one of those clocks had a story, and I listened to them all.

When the movers arrived, the couple bickered gently with their grown daughter about what to keep and what to throw away.

But they were lucky people, and they knew it. When Nell couldn’t sleep the first night in their new abode, Harvey held her hand in bed till she drifted off with the aid of two Tylenol PM. They woke up the next morning to the chiming of the first clock they’d ever bought together in 1960, from a long-gone downtown department store.harvey and nell

Nell died in 2012, the not-quite-last chapter in their epic, 68-year romance. From his Air Force base at the start of the war, he had mailed her an engagement ring with a note that said, “Darling, now you know I am coming back to you.” He wired money home weekly so his mother could buy Nell an orchid to wear to church on Sunday. He named the single-seat P-51 Mustang he piloted Sulkin’ Susie in honor of Nell, whose middle name was Susan.

My newspaper columnist pal Regina Brett used to encourage me to write more stories like this — about ordinary people whose lives illuminate a cultural moment in time. The best ones are transition stories, in which people actively spar with the universal crap life throws their way, from aging parents to difficult children to the pain of losing your dream home. We should not be writing  for the politicians and officials, Regina said, but “for the waitress at Denny’s who’s been standing on her feet all day,”  and wants only to see a sliver of something hopeful, something real.

Harvey and Nell are together now, I’m sure of it, holding hands again and delighting in the holy hullabaloo of all those chiming clocks.

CARE FOR AGES

Roanoke Times, The (VA) – July 15, 2007

Harvey Wilbourne knows he’s a lucky man: Not every couple in their mid-80s get to move from their dream home into a comfortable — some would say posh — retirement community with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

This is what it looks like to be a privileged member of the Greatest Generation during a time when the average 65-year-old can expect to live another 19 years.

If you work hard and save carefully, if you win the lottery on matters of health and family, then it’s possible — though far from guaranteed — that you spend your twilight years perched in the catbird seat.

“They’ve had a great life with no regrets,” said their oldest daughter, Susan Gardiner, on the day of her parents’ June 25 move from their home in the Hidden Valley community to Brandon Oaks, a retirement center in Southwest Roanoke.

Harvey and his wife, Nell, have paid handsomely for a big apartment in a brand-new building, with one daily meal provided and the reassurance of nearby nursing care across the street.

Should they spill their coffee on the new white carpet, someone from the cleaning staff will arrive to shampoo the stain.

But Nell Wilbourne doesn’t feel so lucky. To her, the white walls and white carpeting imply a lack of personality. For months, she has struggled with the decision to move into a place she refers to — only half-jokingly — by its initials.

“I call it B.O.,” she said in March, shortly after they agreed to pay a $400,000-plus entrance fee. “When we built this house, I thought we would die here.

“But I guess going to B.O. is better than going straight to Evergreen” — the cemetery where many of her friends are buried.

‘We’ll keep each other’

The night before their June 25 move, Nell couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even turn over in bed. With her whole body throbbing, she thought she was having a heart attack. It was hours before she calmed down and got a grip on the real culprit: stress.

Harvey, on the other hand, had already sunk into a deep slumber, comforted by the sound of a much-needed rain. Mother Nature was finally taking care of his prized geraniums, something he hadn’t been able to do since the arthritis seized hold of his back.

They had held on to the old house for as long as they could, hiring a housekeeper and someone to mow the lawn.

But last September, doctors found a blockage in Harvey’s heart and rushed him into open-heart surgery.

Nell slept in his hospital room for two nights in a row. She had just given up driving, at the age of 86, and she was afraid to stay home alone at night.

Harvey viewed the surgery as a harbinger of things to come.

“If I had a stroke, she’d have a hard time getting back and forth to see me,” he said.

Their youngest daughter, Martha Cummings, invited them to move in with her family in Virginia Beach, but the Wilbournes couldn’t imagine reversing roles. As Nell put it: “We don’t want people to keep us. We’ll keep each other.”

They put their names on a waiting list for Westminster Canterbury, not far from Martha’s home. Westminster is a “continuum of care retirement community” — CCRCs, as they’re known — not unlike Brandon Oaks and The Glebe in Botetourt County. A burgeoning part of the elder-care industry, CCRCs offer full-service, till-death-do-you-part care that features independent apartment living, assisted living and nursing home facilities all on one campus.

Last fall, when one of their grandchildren moved to Roanoke, the Wilbournes reconsidered staying in Roanoke. It comforted them, too, that many of their former classmates from Jefferson High School were already at Brandon Oaks, where the three-story Dogwood Apartments, part of a major expansion, would open in May.

With entrance fees ranging from $94,100 to $430,000 — not including monthly fees from $1,673 to $4,363 — such options are beyond the financial scope of the average Roanoke-area retiree.

But Harvey Wilbourne had worked hard and saved even harder, retiring from Norfolk & Western Railway in 1980 when it was still Roanoke’s Big Daddy.

Although they splurged on golf, the Wilbournes lived simply. The ranch house they’d built 35 years before had its share of homemade contraptions, including a wall-mount phone that Harvey duct-taped to an end table beside his favorite chair.

And Harvey hadn’t just enjoyed the horticultural challenge of over-wintering his 75 geraniums in the crawl space underneath the house. It saved money, too, because he didn’t have to replace them every year.

With a railroad pension and a home that had more than quadrupled in value, the Wilbournes were able to pick from the priciest housing options, with the provision that their daughters would inherit 90 percent of the entrance fee upon their deaths. (In general, the less expensive the entrance fee, the smaller the refund.)

The deal was clinched when Brandon Oaks called to say an apartment was available on the northeast side with a balcony — perfect light for the begonias Harvey was planning to move with him.

But Nell was the hard sell of the two. “Look at the porch we have now,” she said in March, pointing to Sugarloaf Mountain in the distance. “Look at that view.”

A mile away, from the Brandon Oaks apartment balcony, she could make out the mountains if she squinted.

More prominent was the building that loomed from the other side of Brandon Avenue, that other portent of things to come: the Brandon Oaks nursing center.

And what would happen to all of their antique clocks? The couple had collected 55 in all, some dating to the early 1900s, including a favorite from an old train station in Ivor.

Their apartment at B.O. has room for a few, she said. “Maybe six if we’re lucky.”

Thinking of Nell

During their first two decades of marriage, the couple moved eight times for the railroad, where Harvey had worked his way up to department head.

When N&W moved him back to Roanoke in 1969, the longtime golfers joined Hidden Valley Country Club so Harvey could knock a few balls around during lunch. Every day, Nell made him a tuna-salad sandwich to eat at his desk so he wouldn’t waste his lunch hour eating.

It was during lunch one day when Harvey spotted the lot for sale. He nabbed it — for $6,000 — before the week was out. They paid $50,000 to have the house built.

It was a three-bedroom ranch designed to spotlight its location: The back yard spilled onto the No. 7 hole at Hidden Valley Country Club.

“7th Heaven,” said the homemade sign next to their Keagy Road mailbox, and to the Wilbournes it wasn’t just a pun.

Nearly every day for more than 30 years, the Wilbournes golfed from their back yard. On Saturdays, they hit 36 holes.

When they weren’t playing golf, they were watching it from their glassed-in sun porch. “Made with double-glass Thermapane windows,” he recalled.

A 14-year-old duffer once made the mistake of using a three-wood on the hole behind their house, sailing the ball smack into the glass. “It didn’t break, but he should’ve used a soft pitching wedge,” Harvey said.

The couple were adamant about golf and even more adamant about golf-course navigation: Carts were for sissies. Even in their early 80s, the Wilbournes walked the course — and usually together.

“We’re a duo,” Nell likes to say, their bond forged even before they married in 1944. As a World War II fighter pilot, Harvey flew a single-seat P-51 Mustang named Sulkin’ Susie in honor of Nell, whose middle name is Susan. He wired his mother money to buy Nell an orchid to wear to church every Sunday.

There was less than a 50 percent chance he would come back from the war, and in Harvey’s squadron the numbers were even more grim: Eight pilots from his original group of 32 survived.

“I’m coming back for you,” he wrote, before flying his plane overseas.

Harvey flew 83 combat missions over India, Burma and the Chinese border, shooting down four Japanese planes. Lately, he finds himself cogitating on those days.

“I guess it’s natural at my age,” he said. “I think about those pilots I shot down. They had families, too, I know.”

“Yes, but it was kill or be killed,” Nell interjected. “You know that.”

Between his clock-winding every Wednesday and Saturday, between his meal routines (a turkey-bacon biscuit every morning), between wishing he felt good enough to get back on the golf course — this is what Harvey does more than anything else: worry about Nell.

They’ve been married 63 years.

“We’re still so in love,” he said recently. “I know that sounds so corny, but it’s the truth.”

Moving day

It took six strapping young men from Virginia Varsity Transfer four hours to move just about all the couple’s belongings. The Wilbournes’ daughters came from their homes in Arlington and Virginia Beach to help direct traffic and to wrap pendulums from fragile clocks — and to persuade their parents to winnow down their stuff.

There was the rickety plant stand that had held so many geraniums: “Let Mom pick out a new one of those for your new balcony,” Martha said to her father. “Of all the things you have, it’s really one of the least attractive.”

Harvey relented, finally, but only because the stand held bricks to keep it stabilized, and he didn’t want the movers to have to haul bricks.

There were the chairs Harvey had nabbed years ago when the railroad decommissioned the Powhatan Arrow, its luxury passenger train: “Are you sure you want to take those old railroad chairs?” Susan asked.

The upholstery was ratty and dated, and most of their space at Brandon Oaks was spoken for already with other, better-looking things. (Susan and her husband are buying 7th Heaven to renovate and rent out and, in a few years, they’ll retire and move into it themselves.)

The train chairs remained behind, destined for Harvey-doesn’t-know-where.

There was the holey recliner next to the duct-taped phone: “That’s my knitting chair, and we’re not taking it?” Nell huffed, when Susan told the movers to leave it behind. “It’s my favorite chair.”

“But you’ve got no place to put it, Mom,” Susan reminded her.

Nell waved her arms, another battle lost.

“We’re not going to be very comfortable at B.O. without our old stuff,” she said. “I may have to come back here and spend the night.”

That afternoon, Harvey and Nell sat in the den of their new Dogwood apartment. The furniture looked crowded in the space — a fact duly noted by Nell — and when she reclined in her leather chair, as she is wont to do, it hit the wall.

She didn’t say it, but Harvey knew what she was thinking: The knitting chair would’ve fit better.

Sleepless again

That first night at Brandon Oaks, Nell couldn’t sleep. Which meant that Harvey couldn’t sleep. “I tried to see that she was settled in before I dropped off,” he explained the next day.

As they lay together in the dark, Nell whispered to him: “When are we going to go home?”

“We are home,” he said.

He patted her on the back, squeezed her hand.

The next day, the daughters returned to hang clocks and pictures, and then old friends — some from their Jefferson High School days — started knocking on their door.

The begonias were placed in the northeast sun, and the leather recliner, although it had never been her favorite, was pulled out an inch from the wall.

The second night, Nell took a Tylenol P.M. and slept seven hours in a row. She woke up to the chiming of a mantel clock — the first one they ever bought, circa-1960, from a long-gone department store.

Harvey had moved it himself the day before, still wound and running. Nine of the 55 clocks made the move.

 

 

 

 

 

Naked Baseball Players — and Four Other Things I Gleaned from Michael Lewis

lewisThe moment Michael Lewis first spotted the Oakland A’s naked, the germ of the megahit “Moneyball” began forming in his brain. What he saw was this: Fat rolls abounded on more players than not. There was a pitcher with two club feet. Not only was the locker room not a pretty picture of buff athleticism and six-pack abs, it was — most importantly — the counter-intuitive thing.

The fat rolls and dimpled cheeks presented Lewis with a niggling image he couldn’t shake, one that would lead to pure storytelling gold:

How the hell had the A’s cobbled together a winning team out of this holy mess?

For “Moneyball,” that was Lewis’s aha image — the lucky inspired moment that changed everything that came after it.

I had my own hair-on-the-back-of-my-neck book moment the first time I heard that John Bassett III had his factory workers deconstruct a made-in-Dalian dresser to prove that the Chinese were illegally selling furniture at less than the cost of materials. Furthermore, the gritty Galax furniture maker had surreptitiously traveled to the hollows of northern China, with a Taiwanese translator-turned-spy in tow — to find out from whence factory the cheap dresser came. That’s when it hit me: This was a much bigger story than a newspaper article, with tentacles stretching from the hollows of Virginia to the halls of Washington and, finally, to Asia and back.

Or, as my agent put it when he read my first proposal, “Holy shit, Macy! You’ve stumbled on ‘Moneyball’ — with furniture.”

On the eve of the release of his new book, the instant bestseller “Flash Boys,” Michael Lewis spoke Friday to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. I was in Phoenix at the same conference to talk about how one goes about turning an article into a book — from my own new fat rolls (gardnered via 420 pages worth of sitting down, to write “Factory Man”) to dealing with difficult story subjects.

Here are some takeaways from Lewis’s freewheeling talk, delivered breathlessly and cheerfully before he was ushered out of the conference hall for his next media event. (He wasn’t allowed to talk specifically about “Flash Boys” because “60 Minutes” had a story running Sunday and had embargoed the material. But since “Moneyball” had been my guidebook for “Factory Man,” which publishes July 15 by Little, Brown and Company, I really didn’t care. . . .)

 

  1. GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR “BEAT”: The best stories come about when the subjects have no idea they’re doing anything special at all. In the Oakland A’s Billy Beane’s case, they were using data to make business decisions. . . about baseball. “A lot of business is boring,” Lewis said. “The people in it don’t even know how to explain it. People in sports don’t say, ‘Wow, this is just like making plastic.’ ” People who aren’t daily business writers, then, tend to see things beat reporters overlook. (He encouraged editors to turn reporters loose when they have a real passion for an off-kilter nugget stumbled upon on their beat. Even a boring subject can come alive if it’s told through an appealing character.)

 

  1. ALWAYS LOOK FOR THE COUNTERINTUITIVE — the person or event that stretches the bounds of what’s normal in your subject arena: When Lewis first spotted the A’s naked, “I said to the front office, ‘They don’t look like professional athletes. And the second in command goes, ‘That’s exactly the point. We’re in the market for people who don’t look like baseball players. If they’re handsome, they’re overvalued. We’re looking for defective human beings who happen to play baseball.’ ”

 

  1. HOW TO SLOW-COURT A BOOK SUBJECT: “Don’t ask to sleep with them on the first date. Don’t even kiss them.” He interviewed Billy Beane every day, for hours a day, for a year. (Beane didn’t realize he was the main subject until the book came out. His main objection to the book, though, had nothing to do with being misled: It was that his mother would object to his constant use of the word “fuck.”) Leave little crumbs of unanswered questions for later interviews. “You never want your subject to think, ‘How am I going to get rid of this guy? You train them to want to say, ‘He leaves before we’re done!’ ” The goal is to make you and your notebook invisible.
  1. STORY STRUCTURE AND NOT NOT SCREWING AROUND: Lewis lays all his notes out — in paper form, not digital — on the floor. “It’s like a river full of rocks. I have to cross the river by jumping rock to rock to get to the other side. How do I get there?” The reporting never stops. He starts writing when he feels he has the first 30-40 pages formed in his head. He gives his publisher mini deadlines “and I hold to ‘em by the hour,” sending 60- to 70-page chunks at the end of every month. “And I gun for that deadline. I screw around without a deadline.”
  1. DON’T BRAG ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW; BURY YOUR BABIES INSTEAD. A book isn’t an excuse for you to tell readers how much you’ve learned about the stock market or baseball or football recruiting. A book is ONLY a story. “When I’m done, I’ve hidden how much I know. You want your book to create the illusion that it took you two weeks to write it. You have to have a willingness to ruthlessly get rid of stuff.” Never say, “I interviewed 200 people,” pulling back the curtain on your reporting/writing process. “Don’t flip on the fluorescent lights over a candlelit dinner,” Lewis said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saying goodbye to my 2013 story beacons: RIP Mary Thomas, Eddie Wall and Charlie Pullen

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She sewed at Bassett-Walker Knitting mill. She cleaned in the Bassett Furniture corporate offices. She took care of middle managers’ kids and cleaned people’s homes and, judging from her recent funeral, Mary Thomas took care of the rest of the factory town of Bassett, Va., too.

We should all be blessed to experience the kind of  jam-packed sendoff that Mary Thomas had on November 24, where funeral attendants wearing white nursing uniforms handed out cardboard fans, and the choir blew the rafters off. Friends spoke hilariously about Mary’s “Let’s Make a Deal” purses (“She had whatever you needed in that thing”) and her home remedies — including her secret cure for taking the sting out of a burn. She could do it in person and over the telephone. “You could just feel the fire comin’ outta you,” one speaker recalled.

Mary Thomas, 81, and her husband, Junior (aka, Joon), are two characters in my forthcoming book, “Factory Man,” which recounts the rise and fall of factory work in a small Southern town. They were some of my favorite story beacons — connectors who helped me understand the place I was trying to describe, beginning with the curvy, snake-filled holler where Mary and Junior were born and where they lived the entirety of their lives (previously named Snot Holler, Carver Lane and Chigger Ridge). They also went out of their way to introduce me to other people I needed to talk to and know.

They were astute interpreters who didn’t shy away from controversy or raw truths about race, class and sex. They understood the gray nuances of life in a company town. After everything that had happened to Bassett, and to their friends and families, they wanted the story, finally, to be told.

And they were kind, never once letting me leave their home without handing over an icy bottle of water and a pack of Nabs for the road, thinking my hour-long ride home to Roanoke from Bassett was fraught with danger at every turn. Junior insisted on driving my Subaru down his winding driveway, both of them admonishing me to “be careful” and “have a blessed day!” as I drove away.

They helped me research family stories, volunteered for fact-finding errands to save me the drive, and once, during a visit with our mutual friend Naomi Hodge-Muse, they literally had me in tears and collapsed on the floor. The stories featured William “Porkchop” Estes — a neighbor who was Naomi’s stepfather and Ruby Bassett’s longtime driver — and another relative of Naomi’s who once blew out his television set with a shotgun after watching a wrestler take a slam in the privates. (“Just because he didn’t like what he saw on TV!”)

The stories had nothing to do with furniture-making or the global economy. But listening to them made for the single-most entertaining afternoon of reporting my book.

I think of the Thomases every time I look in the obituaries and learn that another member of the Greatest Furniture-Making Generation has passed. These were men and women who helped construct a rich industry (as well as a rich family dynasty) while making a modest but upwardly mobile life of their own.

Eddie Wall, a Bassett native and longtime factory manager, died in August at 73. Like his grandfather and his father before him, Eddie worked for Bassett Furniture for more than three decades and was happy to describe the cutthroat and pain- and prank-filled world of American furniture-making in its heyday.

eddie wallHe gave me names and phone numbers of other people to call, and described what it was like to watch a worker die right in front of him one day at the J.D. Bassett plant. A saw had worked itself loose from a machine and flew into the main artery near the man’s groin. “You could follow the trail of blood where he was trying to get to the nurse’s office,” Eddie recalled. “I’ve often wondered if I’d thought to grab a rag and put my knee on there and hold it, maybe he could’ve made it.”

Early in my research, Eddie schooled me in both furniture lingo and southside Virginia accents. Back when I couldn’t tell whether my interviewees were calling the area where the dried lumber enters a plant the “rough end” or the “rough in,” Eddie set me straight on the rough-and-tumble rough end.

Finally, my heart goes out to 97-year-old Mabel Pullen, who lost her husband, Charles, earlier this week — at the age of 95. Their stories aren’t included in “Factory Man,” because I only met them recently while reporting another story related to food insecurity, prompted by cuts to the federal food stamp program.

But we spoke about what it was like to be born into a sharecropping family in the Jim Crow South, and they reinforced many of the stories I’d heard from others. About not learning to read because you were too busy working the fields when the tobacco came in and couldn’t go to school. About the pros of factory work (buying property, a family first) and the cons (discrimination and tough working conditions).

It was a privilege to meet Charlie Pullen, though he was no longer lucid enough to talk. Still trim at 95, he displayed a hearty appetite as his daughter, Janet Johnson, whipped up four eggs and a skillet full of gravy on a late-October morning, and he lapped up every bite.

The couple would have qualified for food stamps but they were too proud to apply, Janet explained. One reader was so moved by the newspaper story that he sent me a very generous check for them. So back to Truevine I drove  the week before Thanksgiving to deliver the gift. When Janet saw it, she showed me the Thanksgiving dinner wish list she’d just jotted down. She said she’d had no idea how she was going to buy the food.

“God bless you a double potion,” she said, hugging me and saying she’d put the donor’s name on her church prayer list.

I often tell people that working as a reporter is like getting paid to get a graduate degree in whatever you’re interested in.

But the even bigger gift is getting to know people like Charlie Pullen, Mary Thomas and Eddie Wall.

May their souls rest in peace, and may my words do them the justice they deserve.

Janet Johnson, 70, feeds her parents breakfast most mornings at their Franklin County home in Truevine. Roanoke Times photo by Stephanie Klein-Davis

Janet Johnson, 70, feeds her parents breakfast most mornings at their Franklin County home in Truevine. Charlie Pullen (right) passed away earlier this week at the age of 95. Roanoke Times photo by Stephanie Klein-Davis

Advice From Some Journalism Supernovas: Robert Caro, Anne Hull and NYT Managing Editor Dean Baquet

I’ve just spent a week feasting on a serious journalism smorgasbord, beginning with the 75th reunion of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Among my favorite parts was Jane Mayer’s I.F. Stone award acceptance speech. She reminded all the journalists in the room that our sole loyalty should be to our readers, not our sources — advice I personally can’t hear enough in this era of government obfuscation and what I call the P.R.-ification of everydamnthing, from schools to cops to the local chamber of commerce. (Even in Roanoke, you have a better chance of getting a doctor on the telephone these days than an official source who will actually come right out and tell you what’s going on.)

Publishing stories the federal government does not want out in the public realm can be quite scary, the New Yorker writer conceded.

But, quoting Lord Northcliffe, Mayer said: “The news is something someone wants to suppress. All the rest is advertising.”

Mayer talked about what it was like working under the clamped-down authority of the Obama administration. LBJ biographer Robert Caro took the audience back to an earlier media landscape that was different but no less clamped down. It was a thrill watching Caro being interviewed on stage by another of my reporting superheroes, Washington Post reporter Anne Hull.

With her hands perched together in a cool triangle, Hull asked Caro how he uses email, knowing the answer before she asked it and letting the pause linger for effect.

Robert Caro, one of the greatest reporters living, doesn’t use e-mail at all.

Instead, at his Columbus Circle office, to which he wears a coat and tie every day, he picks up the telephone. Better yet, he returns to his subjects — in person — again and again. He’s turned just about every page of some four stories’ worth of documents in the LBJ presidential library. To understand Johnson’s Texas Hill country, Caro literally dug his hands into the shallow rocky dirt because it represents the very fiber of the 36th president’s being: In politics as in farming, you’re dead if you make a mistake.

When Hull asked about his belief that “truth equals time,” Caro spoke of the luxury he has in getting to know his sources deeply over the course of writing his four-going-on-five LBJ biographies. His editor doesn’t give him a deadline, he said — to an audible gasp in the hall — and each book typically takes seven to eight years.

Which is why he wears a suit and takes the phone off the hook when he writes — to remind himself that this is serious, important work.

“You just keep going back to people,” he told Hull. “The luxury of time is, you can become friendly.”

And, if dinner and wine are involved, maybe even a bit sneaky — as long as the truth is your aim.

Caro confided that when he was trying to get one LBJ colleague to open up, Caro and his wife, Ina, took the interviewee out to dinner with the man’s wife. Ina would distract the wife so she wouldn’t hear her husband spilling the beans to Caro and remind him that some things might be better left unsaid.

For a recap of other speakers at the Harvard event, some of the videos are posted here. For narrative junkies, here’s an awesome list of 75 tips culled from Nieman Storyboard, along with a trove of Nieman “moments” posted here, including my own.

Then Came Smorgasbord: Part II. . . .

After spending a weekend with some of journalism’s heaviest hitters, I spent three days getting to know the profession’s burgeoning stars. A speaker at the Foster-Foreman Conference at Penn State University, I read from my forthcoming “Factory Man” and talked about the importance of getting on the ground with every subject you can find — in the Caro mold.

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I love how the AWSM (young women sportswriters) wanted to know about the perils of trying to balance home, kids, marriage and journalism. Tough questions!

Here’s the news coverage of my talk, along with an honest-to-goodness handwritten thank-you note that arrived in today’s actual mail. (Megan K. Flood, your mama raised you right!)

Several other students e-mailed follow-up questions, and one asked if he could get his picture taken with me after reading my entire blog, though he scolded me for being a social media slacker: “Ma’am, you haven’t tweeted since Sept. 23!”

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“What’s up with the dearth of tweeting, ma’am?”

I also brought back some inspiration from Pulitzer-winner Dean Baquet, the managing editor of The New York Times and the keynote speaker of the conference. Baquet, 57, began by cautioning reporters not to take the cliché way out, as he had done once early in a career.

He called out his own coverage of a rape trial in New Orleans, a story in which he’d described one of the witnesses as a “two-bit actor.” It was a biased story that made even the prosecutor in the case embarrassed for him — and one that still makes him cringe.

Now, Baquet spends his days going head-to-head with CIA and NSA officials, navigating some of the most ethically fraught situations in journalism today: Edward Snowden, Wikileaks, Chinese officials’ blocking of The Times’ website in China.

A self-described workaholic, Baquet spent a lot of time checking his phone last Monday evening — his i-Phone happy newsroom makes fun of him for his old-school Blackberry addiction, he said — to see if the government was still shut down. Alas, it was.

Baquet was refreshingly humble about mistakes he’d made and how far he’d climbed to achieve the pinnacle editing position he holds now. His mother had a third-grade education, and the first time Baquet flew on an airplane was for his interview at Columbia University, where he majored in English.

He encouraged students to read, read, read, especially books about history and politics — from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, to the intricacies of how bills turn into laws, to why relations between India and Pakistan are forever strained.

To fully grasp the war in Afghanistan a few years ago, he recalled e-mailing one of his correspondents to ask what he should be reading in order to better understand — and edit — the stories his reporters were filing from the field. The answer surprised him: Tolstoy’s “Hadji Murat,” a novel about betrayal and revenge.

Baquet, whose wife is a fiction writer, said novels are his favorite after-hours reading, though he regularly takes dozens of news stories home with him to review.

“Don’t get so caught up in ambitions and aspirations that you miss the process of becoming a journalist,” Baquet told the students. “And always take the job that will teach you something you don’t know.”

The Grey Lady may still be copy-heavy, but Baquet seemed to hold the greatest optimism for the future of multimedia narrative journalism, citing the Times’ recent projects, including “Snow Fall” and “The Jockey.”

“I think the best journalism is actually being produced right now,” he said. “You’re coming into a great profession that deserves to survive and thrive, and you’re gonna have an absolute blast.”

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It was pretty cool sharing a billing — as well as a poster — with Dean Baquet.

There Are No Great Stories in the Newsroom (or on Twitter)

jmu cover1HARRISONBURG, Va. — They had just returned from mostly unpaid internships, two or three months of working for free. The managing editor told me she posted to her student newspaper’s website between assignments at the entertainment weekly where she worked. A diner in town had closed, a James Madison University institution, and she’d read about it on Twitter, then posted a brief story to the site.

My talk was supposed to be a back-to-school pep talk for the editors and page designers at the student newspaper, The Breeze, to remind them why journalism matters. I was about to turn in the revisions on my 110,000-word book, “Factory Man,” and I was incredibly tired of sitting at my computer for 12 hours at a stretch. When it came time to prepare my PowerPoint for the talk, it hit me that I could avoid technology (sort of, if you count scissors, tape and a phlegmy sounding scanner on its last leg) and get my main point across at the same time.

I love technology and use it all the time. Especially Command-F on my Mac desktop when sifting through my 530-page manuscript for some hard-to-find detail.

But my main message to the neophytes is that you can’t truly provide the  civic connective tissue that your readership deserves if you only talk/Facebook/tweet with the same people you already know. Too many reporters, young and old, rely on technology as a crutch.glue

Technology bridges geography and time zones, but it is no substitute for wandering around a community you don’t already know. Talking to a grieving mother about her son, who overdosed on heroin, then talking to the mom whose son is about to go to prison for selling him the drugs.

“You have to be there,” says the master, Gay Talese. “You have to see the people. Even if you don’t think you’re getting that much. … One of the problems of journalism today is how we are narrowing our focus and becoming indoors in terms of internalizing our reporting. The detail is what I think we’re missing.”harry

I’d all but finished my book reporting on the hollowed-out factory community of Martinsville and Henry County when a friendly source took me on one final tour. I’d already written about the demolished factories, but it wasn’t until I actually saw Harry Ferguson on his backhoe, burying the last literal chunks of the last factory in Bassett, that I understood it viscerally: “If you’d told people in Bassett 10 years ago that I’d be up here today burying this factory, they’d have said you were a complete fool,” he said.

So I attended my own makeshift factory funerals. I journeyed by kayak down the Smith River, the reason the factories were built where they were. I trounced through an overgrown, chigger-filled cemetery searching out the overturned graves of slaves-turned-sharecroppers-turned-furniture factory finishers. I talked to dozens of the 20,000 people who’d lost their jobs to globalization and offshoring over the past 15 years, and still had a palpable, almost desperate desire to tell me what it was like trying to live on $8.50-an-hour part-time jobs with no benefits, and the indignities suffered in line at the VEC.

Get away from your damn Smartphones and computers, I told the budding journalists — some of whom were live-Tweeting my talk! — and go back to the basics: paper, scissors, real people. Be the glue, as the great reporter Mary Bishop once taught me, connecting stranger to stranger, if only for an instant.mentors

Find mentors at every stage in your career. Feed the friendly photog, who is your extra set of eyes and the best on-the-scene collaborator you’ll ever have. (My book would not exist without the keen eye of freelance photographer Jared Soares.) Seek out the kind of tough editing we all require and deserve and that secretly drives us crazy; that red pen-wielding hardass who sends you back to your subjects again and again — until, finally, you understand what it is you’re trying to say.

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When a student wanted to know how to show diversity among the largely white, upper-middle class population at JMU, I told her about my first tough editor, Wendy Zomparelli (we called her editing sessions Zomp Stomps), who used to send my features back to me if they didn’t accurately reflect the diversity of our city’s population, down to one-quarter of  our sources being African-American to reflect Roanoke’s 25 percent black population. Every single time. It was the greatest training a young reporter could have.

Stories are everywhere around you, and things aren’t as simple — or as lily white — as they look on the surface, I reminded her. What about the men and women serving your lunch in the gourmet cafeteria? What about the student down the hall whose parents are renting out their newly spare room to pay for your $20,000 state tuition and room and board? What about the uptick in college drinking, opiate abuse in the suburbs, campus rape? Subjects that are all grist for digging beyond the obvious, life-is-good Twitter/Facebook feeds. Ask around. Be genuinely curious. Be friendly. Be skeptical. Above all, keep digging.the book process1

It’s the trust-building and context-layering that require the most attention, I added, showing them the holy mess that turned into my 28-chapter book  — complete with a brick from the demolished Bassett furniture factory that Harry Ferguson handed to me. Between all those arrows and statistics; between the numbers,  timelines and literally hundreds of interview notes — that’s where the magic lies.

Focus on the people, especially those whose voices aren’t typically heard.

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What Would Robert Caro Do? (I finally got to ask.)

From the back cover of a reporter's notebook, where I tape reminders on story structure, Caro-style digging and other inspirations.

From the back cover of a reporter’s notebook, where I tape reminders on story structure, Caro-style digging and other inspirations.

Twenty-six people were featured in the iconic Air Force One photo of Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in as President of the United States. Standing next to him was Jacqueline Kennedy, just 43 minutes after her husband was pronounced dead.

The prize-winning journalist Robert Caro, who’s spent four decades chronicling the 36th president in a series of acclaimed biographies, had examined the records and talked to most all of the 26 people on board the plane that day, many of them multiple times. Then it hit him: After thousands of interviews about Lyndon Johnson, after decades of archives-combing, he’d never thought to interview the photographer who’d taken the picture.

So Caro found himself calling the Florida home of 89-year-old retired White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, praying he wasn’t actually calling Stoughton’s widow.

“My name is Robert Caro, and I’m writing books on Lyndon Johnson,” he told Stoughton’s wife, nearly 50 years after the photograph was made.

“Oh, Mr. Caro, Cecil has been waiting for your call.”LBJ photo

Caro, the two-time Pulitzer winner, brought down the house with that bit of meta-journalism during a recent panel on book-writing organized by the Lukas Prize Project, a joint project of the Columbia School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. I was in the catbird’s seat, sitting on the dais between Caro, who’d just won the Mark Lynton History prize for “The Passage of Power,” the fourth of his five planned LBJ books; and Andrew Solomon, who’d won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for “Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.” Still a month from turning in my own work of narrative nonfiction, I was there for “Factory Man,” which had won the J. Anthony Lukas Book-in-Progress Award.

What would Robert Caro do? I had asked myself that question numerous times during the writing of my book about globalization and a struggling Virginia furniture-maker named John Bassett III, who’d taken on China and a tidal wave of corporate greed to save hundreds of jobs.

Now I had a chance to ask Caro that in person. The question had already sent me on a quest to interview an 86-year-old ambulance driver about an EMT call he’d made 30 years before. (Caro’s editor, who was seated in the audience, told me she roared at hearing that story.) It had sent me kayaking — white-water rafting, actually — down Virginia’s Smith River, which is 42 degrees year-round if you want to know. (Oh, I know that intimately, after plunging in head over tree branch.) It had sent me back to some of the same subjects over and over again, resulting in new material every time and my own new insights on prompting memories and, maybe more importantly, a subject’s genuine trust.

At the start of my project, I had taped a quote from Caro on the outside of my notebook: “There is no one truth, but there are an awful lot of objective facts, and the more facts you manage to obtain, the closer you will come to whatever truth there is,” he told a Time magazine interviewer last year.

I had 11 months to complete my manuscript, not a decade, which is what it took Caro to turn in his fourth, 700-page installment. His pace is so methodical and slow, The New York Times’ Charles McGrath has pointed out, that it’s taken Caro longer to write about LBJ’s years in power than LBJ spent actually living them. Among the things I learned during the hourlong panel:

Caro makes detailed outlines, which he types on an old Smith Corona Electra 210 then pins to the walls of his Columbus Circle office, near New York’s Upper West Side. The very first thing he does is write a two-sentence to two-paragraph summary of each book — all the better to authoritatively digress from your theme if you know intimately what your theme is.

He does better when he has a last line in mind, something he can aim toward. The moment Caro heard the subject of his first biography, Robert Moses, tell an audience that people weren’t sufficiently grateful for his work, it occurred to Caro exactly how he would end his seven years of research into the life of the urban planner who built and bulldozed much of New York — with the line: “Why weren’t they grateful?”

Similar to Caro’s tracking down the 27th set of eyes aboard Air Force One, Andrew Solomon spoke about the process of trying to court the parents of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold for his book about children who are markedly different from their parents, including kids who are cognitively, physically and psychologically impaired. Solomon’s book is full of bitter truths and surprises but always from the perspective of a journalist who is proud to bear witness to the “shimmering humanity” of parenting.

Respectfully but persistently, Solomon kept asking for interviews, even when the original response had been no. He corresponded with Sue Klebold for two years before she agreed to meet him for coffee — only to cancel at the last minute, saying she and her husband had changed their minds.  Solomon told her he’d already purchased the nonrefundable ticket from New York to Colorado for their meeting — whether that was true or not, he didn’t say (I got the sense it wasn’t). But the Klebolds finally relented out of guilt, and ended up talking to him for seven hours during their first meeting alone.

They were thrilled that, finally, someone was more interested in understanding them — including the things they loved about their son — rather than judging them.

Solomon allowed himself to be moved, letting the emotions of his characters drive the theme of his book and the contextual reporting, not the other way around. His structure developed around the idea of what it’s like to parent profoundly different children, but he let his characters shape the final form as he winnowed 25 potential stories/interviewees down to ten over the course of 11 years.

“I tried to be awake to the possibility that the stories I was hearing were going to maybe change from what I thought I was writing,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to find the stick figures to back up points I’d already thought up. But I hoped that by talking to large numbers of people and [using] a more inductive process, I could get to the point of having my idea take shape around the people.”

In fact, he didn’t fully delve into the intellectual armature of the book until he was five years into story gathering mode. “I always thought if you ended up writing the book your proposed, it probably wasn’t worth investigating,” he said.

Friends asked me later what it was like meeting Caro, one of my heroes. He’s friendly and at the same time distant, putting his hand on your arm when he talks to you but volunteering — in a way that beats you to the punch — that, alas no, he does not blurb other writers’ books. (Fair enough, I thought, given that he’s in his late 70s and still has that fifth LBJ book to write.)

From left: Moderator Nicholas Lemann, Robert Caro, Beth Macy and Andrew Solomon

From left: Moderator Nicholas Lemann, Robert Caro, Beth Macy and Andrew Solomon

When I had a minute alone with him at the end of the evening, I asked how he might handle a sticky ethical issue I’ve been wrestling with for several months. “I don’t know, but I sure am looking forward to seeing what you do with that!” he said, beaming his bright-white smile and shaking my hand one final time.

Then he was off to hail a taxi with his faithful research assistant and wife, Ina. He had made a point to share the glory, asking her to stand up as he accepted his award, noting that she did not complain when they had to sell their house to help finance an earlier book. Throughout his  career, Ina Caro was the only one he trusted enough to help him with research.

My friends and I headed to a bar while they waited for their cab. And I thought of another bit of advice I’d taped to my notebook at the start of the project, sent by my storytelling mentor Mary Bishop, in the form of a poem by David Whyte. While it’s good to take inspiration from the masters, the real magic happens when you find your own way into a project and develop your own Caro-like work ethic, starting with the genuine sound of your own voice and “the ground you know, the pale ground beneath your feet.”

The last stanza of David Whyte's "Start Close In"

The last stanza of David Whyte’s “Start Close In”

The Book Slog Blues (Part II)

Furniture departments were segregated in Southern factories until the 1970s. This is Stanley Furniture's rub room in the late '20s or early '30s. Photo courtesy of Coy Young.

Furniture departments were segregated in Southern factories until the 1970s. This is Stanley Furniture’s rub room in the late ’20s or early ’30s. Photo courtesy of Coy Young.

The more I learn for my book-in-progress, the more I am humbled by how stupid I was when I wrote my proposal for “Factory Man.” I actually told my editor at Little, Brown & Company that I was halfway through my reporting, when in fact that figure was probably closer to 5 percent.

I wasn’t lying when I said it. I had just forgotten the central tenet of good writing: It’s all about great reporting. The more you learn, the more you realize you didn’t know anything before.

What do I wish I’d known before I started writing my book five months ago, after 20-some years of pining to land a book contract?

The connection-making mind needs frequent breaks. It needs mid-afternoon walks up Mill Mountain and breaks to make chili verde, and it craves any help and inspiration it can unearth along the way.

So I tape things to my computer, and atop the notebooks I carry with me on interviews. I write down nice things my book writer pals say to me, such as these aptly incongruent affirmations from Roland Lazenby: “You’re fucking fearless” and “Don’t be scared.”

I read and reread things like this partial paragraph from a profile of hip-hop pioneer Ahmir Khalib (Questlove) Thompson, written by New Yorker writer Burkhard Bilger:

 . . . He had an unending appetite for pop culture, a prodigious memory for dates, and a compulsion for cross-referencing them. He can tell you, for instance, that Philadelphia police bombed the MOVE headquarters on May 13, 1985; that Tony Orlando guest-starred on “Cosby” that month, and that “Soul Train” was a rerun that week.

Stand back and look at the contextual heavy-lifting accomplished in just two sentences. Marvel at the astonished, easy tone. Count the status-defining details — where the subject lived, what he watched, who he listened to and what it meant to live inside his brain in the spring of 1985.

John Updike once said we like characters like Becky Sharp and Mr. Quilp because “what we like is life — and if the character is alive, we don’t apply any other criteria.” That’s another inspiration I’ve clipped, with thanks to Martin Amis, who recalled it in an interview with Vanity Fair writer John Heilpern.

The deeper you dig into a subject’s history, the tougher the material-culling will be. I’ve never spent this much reporting time focusing on one industry through one person and, the truth is, we might both be suffering from interview fatigue.

In a one- or two-shot interview, you save the tough questions for the end. But what do you do when the interviews are spread over more than a year? You spread the tough stuff out and hope for the best.

I’m not writing a hagiography, I remind my main character. I’m not writing a biography. So let’s put an end to the embedding jokes about Paula Broadwell and General Petraeus right now!

I’m writing a book about globalization in which he is a heroic main subject but he’s not a saint because, let’s face it, he’s colorful, he’s clever, and he seems to genuinely care about the plight of his factory workers. But he ain’t a saint.

When I worry that maybe I’m stirring up stuff that should remain hidden in history’s dusty archives, I turn to the new U.S. poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey, who said this in a recent interview:

It is better if we grapple with [history]. Openly and honestly. And include parts that are difficult. … When the Birmingham church bombing convictions came down, people on the radio were saying, why open old wounds? The problem with that thinking is assuming those wounds had healed. Some bones broken will forever be weak. They will ache and cause pain. The best we can hope for is acknowledgment. What drives me crazy is when people don’t want to acknowledge!

I try to keep central in my mind: I may be writing about wealthy CEOs, but I’m also writing about their impact on tens of thousands of displaced factory workers whose stories are too rarely told.

“Factory Man” contains both history and current events, encompassing a decade of double-digit unemployment in Martinsville, Va., the recent sweatshop fires in Bangladesh and Pakistan, and what life was like for a bunch of hardscrabble sawmillers in 1902. The subject is as deep as it is wide and meandering, and that’s what keeps me awake so many nights because I know that finding exactly the right narrative, and the right tone to tell it in, are crucial.

So I write and, like the old sawmillers-turned-furniture men, I try to cull the good wood from the bad. I talk to people on the phone and I visit people, and then I talk to them again on the phone. I’ve driven from nursing homes to trailers to communities so exclusive that they purposely don’t show up on GPS.

I read through court transcripts, annual reports and simplistic old newspaper clippings.

I love, love, love the librarians and the curators, especially Pat Ross at the Bassett Historical Center, and Bill Bishop, the genius at the International Trade Commission who returns my late-night emails — by 6:45 a.m. And people like Bassett barber Coy Young, who just happened to have a stack of archival photos from Stanley Furniture during the Depression.

I really love, love, love my across-the-street neighbors Scott and Jean, who just yesterday brought me a mixed CD and homemade chicken soup to cure my strep.

My husband, Tom, is so patient with all my non-cooking and non-hygiene, he’s the real saint of my book. My son Will comes into my office at the end of his school day and still, at age 14, beams, “Hey mom, how was your day?”

Same as it ever was. I practice Ass In Chair and, for several hours a day, I try as I type to weave story from facts. I rarely take showers or leave the house, except to walk the dog up the mountain. I haven’t seen my hairdresser in six months and it shows.

I worry because I know what Robert Caro says is true:

There is no one truth, but there are an awful lot of objective facts, and the more facts you manage to obtain, the closer you will come to whatever truth there is.

 I was lucky to stumble into coffee not long ago with Internet journalism guru Clay Shirky, whose parents live in Roanoke and who very kindly offered to read my draft and give feedback. Just as I’m lucky to call on writers like Roland, Annie Jacobsen, Bret Witter and Andrea Pitzer, who advised me to “start recruiting readers now!” — among many other useful things.

Such has been the ongoing lesson I’ve learned from this project, this career, this life: The more exceptional the individual, the more generous they tend to be in sharing what they know.

It had been awhile since Shirky’s heralded book, “Here Comes Everybody,” was published by Penguin, and initially Clay said he had no advice to offer. Then he remembered a tip, a nuts-and-bolts editing suggestion that is applicable to both writing and life.

When the publisher’s copy editor sends his or her edits, simply click “ACCEPT ALL.” It saves time in the long run, and if you stumble on a change you don’t like as you’re reading, you still have time to make that sentence sing.

I’m not sure my ego will let me ACCEPT ALL blindly without previewing the changes first, but if it gets my butt out of this chair a moment sooner, it could be just the thing.

What do Elvis, Louis Philippe dressers and Dalian, China have in common? They're all featured in this maze of scribbles that is my whiteboard outline for chapter 17.

What do Elvis, Louis Philippe dressers and Dalian, China have in common? They’re all featured in this maze of scribbles that is my whiteboard outline for chapter 17.

A** in Chair, Audra and Advice from the Other Side of Publication (Part I of II)

ImageMy friend Audra Ang came to visit recently. She’s a former Beijing correspondent for the Associated Press, and a fellow Nieman who is as committed to eating good food as she is to getting the story exactly right. We were happy those two things converged when she came here to read from her brand-new book, “To the People, Food Is Heaven: Stories of Food and Life in a Changing China” (Lyons Press, 2012).

In the spring of 2010, I witnessed the moment when the idea for the book first floated from her mouth, at a brainstorming session that was part of a book publishing conference organized by our narrative writing teacher, Connie Hale, at Harvard’s Lippman House. (Connie wrote a wonderful post about her own book tour trials here.) So it was fitting that Tom and I hosted Audra’s first reading, a gathering that probed everything from the wonders of hotpot to the paranoia of reporting in a society where the press isn’t exactly free.

The audience was rapt, especially when she read about covering the earthquake.

The audience was rapt, especially when she read about covering the earthquake.

A Western-educated Singaporean of Chinese descent, Audra is someone who makes everything look easy, from her “dude”-peppered speech to her Michelle Obama arms. It’s also one of the wonders of reading her book, which flows seamlessly from scenes of her walking over earthquake rubble in Sichuan, knowing that dead bodies lie beneath her, to choking up as she shares a meal with earthquake survivors. For people who don’t know much about the world’s most populous nation and its next superpower, her book is a fantastic introduction to all things Chinese.

Now halfway through my own book project, I had hoped to suction some lessons from my Nieman pal since she’s a year ahead of me in the process. What did she wish she had known in the beginning that she only came to learn through 12 tactile months of Ass in Chair days that usually began when she awoke at 2 in the afternoon and went to sleep at 8 the next morning, with food and yoga/kickboxing breaks in between?

“Dude, writing a book aged me,” she said. Hauling around seven years of notebooks on multiple trips between the Bay Area and Singapore didn’t help her back, either.

Then came the worst news of all from the Other Side of Publication. Audra suggested I back up my material up on multiple spare hard drives as well as in the cloud. (Yep.) Keep copious track of my copious notes. (Yep, I was doing that already, too.) And find early readers who are brutally honest about what works and what doesn’t. (I’m  jealous that she had Ted Anthony, AP’s feature writing guru, to call on for help — though I’m grateful that journalist-writer friends including Clay Shirky, Andrea Pitzer and Leigh Anne Kelley have already volunteered their red pens.)

It was my worst fear realized. There are really no real magic bullets beyond sitting my ass in my chair, followed by more Ass In Chair, interlaced with copious amounts of hand-wringing and back spasms. And remember the way the old-fashioned typewriter used to sound when you dinged the carriage that final time on an article? (For you young folks, you know, like the secretary babes do on Mad Men?)

Duuuude, it’ll be a year before you even get to imagine hearing that sound. (I’m not sure what Audra did for her sore back, but I recommend those peel-off icy/hot pack stickers and, if you have one, a nightly hot tub accompanied by a book that has nothing to do with what you’re writing about so you won’t find yourself dreaming about, in my case, legal transcripts from the International Trade Commission.)

I read on a hand-me-down Nook my aunt gave me, which is backlit — great for night-tubbing — and mostly impervious to steam, as long as you hold it an inch or so above your head. Sadly, this does not take the place of a daily shower. There was a week not long ago when I wore the same sweaty yoga pants for four days.

Writing her book on the heels of a rigorous six-year reporting stint in China wiped Audra out so much that she’s happily taking a break from journalism, working as a senior development writer at Duke University — and still eating unseemly amounts of food in a single setting, though the potstickers and pork belly have given way to buttermilk biscuits and Cajun-infused deep-fried turkeys.

She's not joking when she says she eats unseemly portions in a single sitting. Where does it go?

She’s not joking when she says she eats unseemly portions in a single sitting. Where does it go?

We had the privilege of introducing our foodie pal to our favorite restaurant in the world, a hillbilly-Asian place that is a tiny speck of funk in the rolling hills of Tazewell County. Cuz’s Uptown BBQ co-owner Yvonne Thompson took us on a serious food bender that included Rappahannock oysters, crab cakes with chili hollandiase, Thai seafood curry, plate-sized prime rib and coconut crème brulee — and that’s literally only about half of what we ate. When we left our Cuz cabin the next morning, we carried baggies of leftover country ham.

Dude, welcome to the South!

Audra claims she’s stuck a fork in her storytelling career. This, from a reporter who once offered to cut off her arm in exchange for a tour of an illegal noodle-making operation. But that’s her story right now, and she’s sticking to it.

(I’ll post Part II of my Advice from the Other Side of Publication — featuring more advice I’ve been collecting from  writers — in a few days. Meantime, if you have your own book-writing tips to share, please chime in.)

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  • Tom Hanks on “Factory Man”:

    Factory Man is “Great summer reading. I give it 42 stars. No, I give it 142 stars. Yeah, it’s THAT good.”
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    This is Ms. Macy’s first book, but it’s in a class with other runaway debuts like Laura Hillenbrand’s “Seabiscuit” and Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers”: These nonfiction narratives are more stirring and dramatic than most novels. And Ms. Macy writes so vigorously that she hooks you instantly. You won’t be putting this book down. — Janet Maslin
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