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Episode 118—Earl Swift on Routines, Proportionality, and the Secret to Being a Fly on the Wall
131 Plays6 years ago
Earl Swift, author of Chesapeake Requiem, stopped by CNFPod HQ to talk about his reporting and writing life.
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Transcript
Introduction of Earl Swift
00:00:02
Speaker
Hey, what's going on CNF-ers? Welcome back to another show. Titting you a little later on this CNF Friday. A little later than I'd like this week's guest, Earl Swift. Author of seven books with his latest being Chesapeake Requiem. A year with the Waterman of Vanishing Tangier Island.
00:00:27
Speaker
But before
Craft of Storytelling
00:00:28
Speaker
we get to that, maybe I should let you know what it is we do here at CNF Pod HQ. This is the podcast where I speak to the best artists about the craft.
00:00:40
Speaker
of telling true stories, origins, habits, routines, key influences. So you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. Be sure to subscribe and listen to the show wherever you get your podcasts. And if you dig the show, consider sharing it across your social platform and perhaps leaving an honest review over on the Hub Apple Podcast.
00:01:07
Speaker
There's
Swift's Journalism Career
00:01:08
Speaker
nobody better in this line of work than Earl Swift. He's that rare blend of great reporter and brilliant writer. He's a great example of how great reporting is a prerequisite for the writing. His work has been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. You know, like several times. Yeah, those awards. And you get to hear him right now.
00:01:38
Speaker
At what point did you decide that you wanted to go into newspapers and maybe who were you reading at the time that kind of gave you that inspiration? I think that my initial attraction to newspaper was less based in the idea that I'd be writing every day than it was in
00:01:58
Speaker
the idea that I acquire a byline for everything I wrote or for a lot of what I wrote and I was always a kid attracted to cemeteries and to ruins and other reminders of our impermanence and that byline exerted a strong pull on me because I saw it as
00:02:25
Speaker
is announcing to future generations, hey, look, there was this guy who lived at this particular time, and here's the evidence. And it seemed to me there were very few lines of work where you could leave a mark like that right from the first day. If you're a captain of industry, you'll leave a mark, but it takes decades to become a captain of industry and to be remembered.
00:02:55
Speaker
Odd
Legacy and Bylines
00:02:56
Speaker
as it seems, journalism offered a hedge against being forgotten.
00:03:05
Speaker
Yeah, because anyone doing research on maybe something, whether it could be a research paper or their own books, and they might go into the newspaper archives and then there it is, there might be a story by Earl Swift that will feed their research. And if you've done your job the way you do, you know, you've left a little mark on history. Yeah, and I think it was probably doing papers in junior high and high school and finding stories that had been written by
00:03:34
Speaker
and newspaper folks and magazine writers in generations past that alerted me to that, to this notion that, yeah, you may be seen by few, but you're going to be seen. There will be this monument to your work and it will be the work itself with your name attached to it.
00:03:58
Speaker
That's a really great way. There is that kind of ego component that's great about having your byline and then having something that will, at least in the short term, endure for the life of that paper, maybe a week or a news cycle. And then of course, if you write something that is truly lasting, that it is something that will kind of stick with you for a while.
00:04:20
Speaker
that that's a part of the reason why I I kind of like this too because when I would read a certain byline like I knew what kind of ride I was gonna go on when I saw so-and-so's name and and part of my part of my charge was maybe a reader somewhere will read my byline and know that oh they're gonna be on for this kind of experience so that was kind of the draw for me as well yeah yeah you know I'm in most lines of work if you I mean if you weren't if you walk through a cemetery and you run across a monument to somebody and
00:04:50
Speaker
that alerts you to the idea that this person did something. But when you see a byline and a story, to have the monument and the work in the same place contained in the same item is, you know, it really kind of sets newspapering apart or journalism apart and writing apart because the same is true of fiction and, you know, book length stuff. It's, you know, the work itself is what you leave behind.
00:05:20
Speaker
not references to it. That was enormously attractive to me.
00:05:28
Speaker
Yeah, which is kind of a bummer of late that, say, the New York Times on their website took the bylines down, except for, I think, commentary. So oftentimes that byline, especially if you read a lot of the stuff over and over again, that byline is a signpost of what you're getting, and there's reputation associated with that name. So without that name, things fall flat, at least for people in the know who kind of look for those things. You bet. You bet.
00:05:55
Speaker
We all have our favorites. And as she said, you know, you have an idea of what you're going to get, at least in terms of quality, when you see a certain byline, if you're in the know. And without
Influence of Watergate
00:06:06
Speaker
that, you have to kind of stumble along and, you know, if you're truly in the know, you'll know pretty quickly in reading a story whether you can pretty much suss out its DNA, but not having that flag to, you know, that signpost to guide you is a pain.
00:06:26
Speaker
And who were some reporters, writers, as you were coming up as a journalist who kind of turned that, sometimes I like to say, turned the world from black and white into color and kind of unlocked the possibilities of what the type of work you could do was possible, if that makes any sense. Yeah, well, you know, early on, well, I was in junior high when Watergate unfolded and
00:06:52
Speaker
And so that was a strong influence like it was for anyone, I think, who entered the business in my generation. And, you know, I got into, I got my first, I was an intern in 1979. And that was my, that was my, you know, I became a copy boy at the St. Louis Democrat in 1978, and then became an intern there the following summer. So that, you know, that time pegs me.
00:07:20
Speaker
I was definitely of the Watergate generation. And for the first many years of my career, my emphasis was on news reporting and news writing. I was not a feature writer. I would like to think that, you know, I strove for some elegance within the inverted pyramid, but I was pretty much an inverted pyramid kind of guy.
00:07:49
Speaker
It wasn't until really pretty late, well, it wasn't until I arrived at the Virginian pilot in 1987 and even years into that, probably the early 90s, 93 or so, that I started seeking
00:08:14
Speaker
primary satisfaction not in breaking stories and breaking news, but in really paying attention to the stories themselves, how I told them.
Transition to Feature Writing
00:08:26
Speaker
What did or how did becoming a straight news or beat reporter, what did that do in terms of skills that allowed you to become such a great feature writer later in your career? How important was that as a foundation? Oh, it was hugely important. The great thing about news writing is that you have to learn.
00:08:51
Speaker
You learn how to write fast or you don't keep doing it. It's a pretty Darwinian process, news gathering. You're able to do it quickly or you have to find something else to do. And so there was that. There was just the
00:09:10
Speaker
Knowledge every day regardless of whether I felt like writing I was going to have to sit down at the keyboard and I was going to have to write and I was going to have to do it quickly and you know, the other great thing about about news writing is that it's It places such high value on
00:09:26
Speaker
conciseness. And you have to make every word in a new story load-bearing. Every word has to be a load-bearing component of the sentence it's in. Every sentence has to be a load-bearing component of its paragraph. And every paragraph, needless to say, has to be a load-bearing component of the whole. And so it really trains you into removing decoration from your language.
00:09:57
Speaker
Which is not to say that you can't get into atmospherics and mood and such, but it's got to be important to the story if you do go that way. And it prompts you to view writing as the left brain exercise. It largely is. This is engineering. I think a lot of people have the misperception that writing is something that requires
00:10:22
Speaker
inspiration before you sit down to do it. And it's always been my experience that the inspiration comes while you're doing it. You know, you sit down and you work and it's, you build a story, you assemble a story and along the way magic stuff can happen. Stuff that you might not be able to explain later, but your story isn't good because of that, that those little extras come along just as part of going through the process of
00:10:51
Speaker
sitting down and putting words on paper. Did you have any nerves or apprehensions as you got into being a straight news reporter, dealing with those tragedies and accidents and that nature? Or did you just kind of fold into that and take to it naturally? I took to it pretty naturally. I was a pretty aggressive news reporter.
00:11:21
Speaker
I enjoyed beating the competition, I enjoyed getting the story, and I found it very exciting. When I left St. Louis, I worked in Anchorage, Alaska for the afternoon paper, the Anchorage Times, and it
Aggressive Reporting in Alaska
00:11:42
Speaker
was the kind of operation where
00:11:44
Speaker
I'd go in and I covered crime initially and I'd go in and check the police blotter every morning at about six in the morning and by 11 o'clock or noon I'd have written five or six stories and it was the kind of environment that chews up and spits out a lot of
00:12:11
Speaker
young reporters, I think. And I just found that for whatever reason, it just excited me. It just energized me.
00:12:19
Speaker
Yeah, not similarly, but I had a very short stint as kind of a news reporter in a pretty gritty city. I actually had to quit because I was struck by anxiety and fear about dealing with the gritty underbelly of certain things. I just took to the temporal nature of feature writing that you could take your time and be slower and not have to be
00:12:50
Speaker
aggressive sort of in your you know that that constant kind of you know that hustle where you got to find the right spokes go to the fire and find the right guy try to talk to him like for some reason I just I Seized up with that. That's a skill that I wish I had but it looks it sounds like you know You kind of just you had that in you like you where did that come from?
00:13:14
Speaker
I don't know. I think I was just a competitive jerk and it lent itself well to it. And we had a tremendous newspaper work going in Anchorage at the time. The Morning Daily News had long been the smaller paper in town and by 1984 had drawn even with and was quickly passing the times in circulation. And so we had a really
00:13:42
Speaker
you know, an existential struggle at my paper to beat the Daily News whenever we could with a smaller staff, you know, a much leaner operation. And, you know, I enjoyed being part of the scrappy underdog. And my main fear was getting beaten.
00:14:09
Speaker
And that did keep me up at night sometimes, but there was no greater feeling than beating the daily news on a story. And as you were coming up as a reporter and then even later in your career, how did you or what process did you use to vet out stories that sounded like there was more to it than what was on the surface and allowed you to dive in?
00:14:35
Speaker
Well, even on covering crime, you know, you would run across those stories on occasion. It wasn't just doing the police blotter. And I remember I got a call while I was working one late morning, I think it was, from the Cook and Lint pre-trial facility, which was the jail in Anchorage, from a guy who said that he had been a professor of psychology
00:15:04
Speaker
at a couple of universities in the lower 48. And he was being unjustly held at the jail. And would I come and talk to him? And it was just such a strange call that I, you know, and I got calls from the jail all the time. But this one really stood out. I mean, he sounded like a professor,
Unique Story of Confession
00:15:23
Speaker
for one thing. His name was Ken Hunter. And so I went over to the cooking lab pretrial facility and met with him. He was a mountain of a man, really big guy. We sat in this little tiny interview room.
00:15:34
Speaker
were our knees almost touching. And he proceeded to effectively confess to a double murder, which was not what he was being held for at the jail. He was being held for a sexual abuse charge. And his contention was that the state troopers had arrested him on a sex abuse charge, a trumped up sex abuse charge in his
00:16:02
Speaker
in his thinking, so that they could investigate and put together a case for this double murder. So he kind of, he just preempted them, I guess, by telling me the whole story of this double killing that he had participated in. And, you know, I knew by the time I left the Cook-Inler pretrial facility that day that
00:16:26
Speaker
that wasn't going to be a typical 12-inch inverted pyramid story. I don't know how huge. It just seems obvious at the time is the only way to answer your question. I don't think there are any rules that guided me. It's just that there are some stories that are so clearly interesting and complicated and odd
00:16:53
Speaker
and that you're compelled to dive in. Did you have any experiences of false starts or stories that felt promising like that on the surface only to yield after X amount of reporting that it just kind of fizzled out? Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. I don't know what the attempt to success ratio would be.
00:17:18
Speaker
But certainly throughout my career, you know, I've had stories that look promising and just did not go where I expected them to. Just didn't, for whatever reason, pan out. And I'm guessing, though, that they'd be the minority. You know, you can almost always find a story, even if it's not necessarily the story you expected going into it. And I know you've had this experience, you'll leave the newsroom.
00:17:48
Speaker
following one story and you come back with something completely different and your editor almost on occasion gets upset. You know, what do you mean? You told me this story was going to be about this. But the fact is, until you've left the building, you often don't know what the story really is and editors don't often leave the building. And the good ones recognize very quickly that often what you come back with is far stronger than the story you left the building to go get.
00:18:16
Speaker
course yeah yeah just that the boots on the ground mentality is is so key to to reporting and it's kind of been in the last 10 15 years or so it feels like there's there isn't as much it's not valued as much it doesn't mean that there's just no
00:18:35
Speaker
I just feel like there's no time. It's almost got to be like you're reporting by phone more often than not. Geez, I've written so many stories that my primary mode is actually on the phone, which is not preferable. It would be nice to be, you know, huffing it and wearing the outsoles of my boots to do it, but it's kind of the nature of the biz these days. Well, the 24-hour news cycle.
00:19:01
Speaker
It makes it pretty tough to invest a print time. And the other thing is that so many outlets do not pay. They don't pay well. And you find that on the scene reporting is an unaffordable luxury, which is tragic. I'm incredibly fortunate in that I have not had that happen. I've always been able to get assignments that
00:19:30
Speaker
from outfits that are willing to make that up for an investment. And all of my books have relied heavily on immersion, which is what I really love to do. But I sympathize with writers out there who have not been so fortunate. It's a tough new world, and I don't like it much.
00:19:58
Speaker
We've already established that a great strength that you have is that competitive nature that allows you to get in there, ask the questions, not be fearful of the situation. I wonder, what do you feel like you struggle with on the other side of that coin? Well, the kind of stuff I do these days, I'm not really called upon to use
00:20:28
Speaker
my competitive nature in the way that I used to. It's not about getting the story first anymore. You know, I'm writing books now or I'm writing magazine stories that have a six-month lead time on them. And so, you know, it's just not part of the mix. But now that my competition manifests itself and you're trying to outright anybody else who might be covering the
00:20:57
Speaker
you know, the same story. And whether I succeeded that is, that's for others to say, but my goal now is just to be as comprehensive and elegant and compelling as I can be on the page. And so that anyone else
00:21:21
Speaker
reading the story who might have been interested in the same subject will walk away thinking, okay, well that's been done.
00:21:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's because Tangier, the island of Tangier has been written about a lot in the last decades and certainly recently. So I think that that probably played into a lot of your creation of your latest book because it had been covered a lot but not as deep a dive as you did. So you were able to
00:21:55
Speaker
truly sort of take the time and immerse yourself and maybe and have written like the definitive story on the island of Tangier Yeah, well, I mean per capita This little town of 460 people might have been written more about than any other community in America I mean it was just since the 1890s newspapers have been going to Tangier and writing about Writing
Writing 'Chesapeake Requiem'
00:22:20
Speaker
about its its odd ways and
00:22:24
Speaker
You know, all those stories have had a certain sameness about them. And that's a product of the methodology that the writers involved used, which is, you know, they drop into the island for a day or two or three. They talk to a few people. They keep their eyes and ears open, you know, as they walk the narrow streets and then they leave and they write the essentially the same story that the last guy to show up in the island wrote. And so it's gone for
00:22:54
Speaker
more than a century now. So it seemed to me that seeing as how Tangier was likely to be the canary in the coal mine on climate change in a town that faced the real prospect of having to be abandoned within a very few years, that the first thing I was required to do
00:23:21
Speaker
uh was to really take up residence and and to take my time and do it right and to get beneath that very surface tangier that so many others had written about and uh you know let the place soak into my porcelain and and so to get back to your last question did I have any you know any worries what what sort of thing worries me now it's okay here I had
00:23:47
Speaker
an assignment where I was given basically about a year to put together this story, a little bit more than that. My main fear was how can I use my time wisely and make the most of this year and insinuate myself into a community that was somewhat notorious for not permitting outsiders to insinuate themselves.
00:24:16
Speaker
And could I tell this story if I failed to insinuate myself? So those were the sources of my dread going into this particular assignment.
00:24:29
Speaker
Yeah, there was one moment, too, where I think Jean Crockett, she said that, you know, folks will come here and have their island experience. They'll be attracted by this idea that it's an idyllic place. And the truth is that it's not an idyllic place and they won't stay. But which is true, it is a hard knock island. But at the same time, it's
00:24:51
Speaker
They're not they weren't too receptive to outside people they'll they could shun you pretty pretty easily so that must have been an apprehension of yours too like I can be here for as long as I want but if they want to shoulder me out that's They're gonna shoulder me out. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was a very real worry and I Didn't have any any
00:25:15
Speaker
There were no test cases that had come before me, no journalists who had gone to Tangier and embedded themselves for any real length of time. I think the longest embedding that had happened before I showed up in the spring of 2016 was probably me 16 years before. The photographer Ian Martin and I from the Virginian pilot spent six weeks on and off on the island.
00:25:44
Speaker
back then. Even then, writing about what was at the time just labeled erosion that was taking the island away, you know, the whole notion of climate change had not, although it was certainly discussed by scientists, had not moved front and center in the public's mind. And so, you know, my experience back in 2000 had been that I was embraced pretty warmly
00:26:14
Speaker
by the people. But I was embraced by folks who knew that my visit was finite, that my aims were finite, that I was there to write a newspaper package, and that I wouldn't be in their hair for long. In this case, I was dealing with a different circumstance here. I was going to take up residence in town, and they were going to see me every day for months on end. And if they did chose
00:26:42
Speaker
choose to shut me out. The length of my stay wouldn't help me a bit. In fact, it might work against me. It was a bit daunting.
00:26:59
Speaker
But as it happened, I spent the first month and a half or so just kind of getting my face seen around the island and kind of underlining to folks that this wasn't going to be the typical quick hit newspaper reporters visit. This was that I was really going native to the degree that I could.
00:27:26
Speaker
And they embraced that. They were excited by that. And it worked out. How did your reporting strategy change for this project versus the one from 16 years ago? Well, 16 years ago I was there to tell a feature story. And so I had pieces that I knew that I had to get. I had elements that I
00:27:56
Speaker
I knew ahead of time I had to nail down. And of course, as I was there and got to know the place better, additional elements presented themselves that I was able to nail down. But the whole thing was on a scale that was pretty predictable from the outset. The elements were predictable from the outset.
00:28:20
Speaker
I knew that it was a town. At that time, I had been to Tancher a few times long and sufficient number of times that I had an idea of what the issues were. And so there was very little mystery about the process and what I was going to do, both reporting and writing. This time, I had really very little idea about
00:28:40
Speaker
what approach I would take except that I would, it was a let's see what happens approach really. I did not go in with this strategy beyond the notion that I could not write a book with 460 main characters that I had to choose a half dozen or so people who would carry the water for the thing and represent different pieces of the island's thinking and that it would take me some time to figure out
00:29:10
Speaker
who those half dozen people were. I knew a couple going in. They were obvious. The mayor, Ukeresk, which was clearly going to be a main character of the story. But otherwise, you know, I went in with a pretty open mind as to as to whom I'd concentrate on. And that same month and a half that I devoted to kind of showing the flag and just, you know, going to church, going to every every island social occasion.
00:29:38
Speaker
riding my bike through the streets throughout the day, going to the afternoon coffee clatch of old timers five days a week, and going out on crabbing boats, that whole process of getting islanders used to seeing me. I was using that same period of time to try to suss out, okay, who among these townsfolk should I really spend the next several months sticking close with?
00:30:06
Speaker
And as you're vetting out the people that you're looking to suss out for characters, do you have your notebook in hand or do you have that tucked away so as not to feel too intrusive at the outset? Or is that something that was your badge every time? Like, oh, here's Earl in the notebook. I carried the notebook.
00:30:32
Speaker
in plain sight wherever I went, often in a gallon-sized Ziploc because you're exposed to the elements on Tangier quite a bit. There was no question wherever I went on the island that I was there to do a job and that I would be writing down everything I heard. And at first I'm sure that discouraged people from speaking their mind and
00:30:58
Speaker
They were quieter, quieter maybe than they normally would have been. But over time, I think it worked to my favor because they never saw me without the notebook. And it just became part of who I was and what I was doing. I think all of the island understood that
00:31:15
Speaker
When I was sitting there with my pen out my notebook open, which I was whenever I wasn't actually riding my bike and even sometimes when I was riding my bike You know, I was I was gonna write down anything anybody said the process of becoming a fly on the wall Does not rely on folks forgetting that you're a reporter But if it it relies on them trusting you enough that they don't even think about it and so
00:31:44
Speaker
whether or not I had that. I mean, I think it would have been a big mistake to keep surreptitious notes, not be completely upfront about what it was that I was doing. And, you know, I've always been a big believer in Sean the Notebook. It's
00:32:01
Speaker
This isn't a line of work, I think, where you can be duplicitous or shady to any degree. You have to be absolutely upfront about what you're doing. That's a great point you're making in a sense that the way that you are able to blend in and have them
00:32:21
Speaker
Forget about you and who you were in the job that you were tasked with was to actually kind of be that Sticking out from the outset with with the notebook Instead of trying to be almost like an undercover Agent and then scribbling notes and in a bathroom stall like it was actually you were able to blend in by Not blending in at first right right and and being consistent in
00:32:49
Speaker
in my overt approach to what I was doing.
Reporting Timeline for 'Chesapeake Requiem'
00:32:57
Speaker
With such a long amount of time, what was it, about 14 months you stayed? You're pretty much a full-time resident, more or less? Full-time for the first seven months, and to a lesser degree, the second seven months. But a regular presence. After the first seven months, I dropped off to about
00:33:18
Speaker
A week a month for two or three months. And then I stepped it back up again as we got closer to the summer of 2017. And then my last reporting trip was in October. So I started in May. You know, went to the end of the year full time. Backed it off in the early winter when I actually started writing the book.
00:33:38
Speaker
and then stepped it up again as in my writing it became obvious to me what I was missing and what I really had to concentrate on. So the spring of 2017 when I was approaching my one-year anniversary and then when I passed it was really a time when I had come along in the story enough, had structured it, understood how I was going to roll it out.
00:34:01
Speaker
and now went back to do very specific reporting rather than they just open notebook, live every day as it happens and let's see what unfolds that characterize the first seven months. How did you keep your notes and your research organized as you were taking in all that information through the first several months? At first,
00:34:29
Speaker
I just organized my notebooks chronologically. I'd get back to my rented rooms each evening and dump my notebooks contents into the computer. My days had a certain predictable structure. There were things that I responded to, things that happened on the island that I'd go and basically cover. There was the every afternoon coffee clutch.
00:34:56
Speaker
what the mayor called the situation room, which usually involved six to eight old timers sitting around in the former birthing room of the shuttered health center and solving the problems of the world and complaining about wrong-headed state fisheries regulators. And I knew that I'd be getting great material from that every day.
00:35:20
Speaker
And really, the Situation Room would almost serve as a Greek chorus for the story. That became obvious pretty, pretty early on. Because those guys would always be talking about whatever happened to be going on in Tangier. They'd always have varying opinions on it. And they'd have a great way to, you know, great ways of expressing those opinions. So the, you know, I had church. I knew that whenever I was in church,
00:35:48
Speaker
there was a good chance that I get material either from the sermon or more often from the prayer requests that took place that would speak to what was going on on the island. And the churches made my life quite a bit easier because in the interest of making services available to the island's shut-ins, they record every service on CD-ROM. So after
00:36:17
Speaker
Every Sunday and every Wednesday night, I always collected the CDs of that day's service and was able to decide a great record of backup for my own notes. These church services that were incredibly important because cancer is basically a theocracy of old school Methodism and that just made life so much easier.
00:36:44
Speaker
And so you've got all your, you know, as you're getting your notes, you're typing them into the computer. At what point do you start to see the shape of the story take hold?
Braided Narrative Structure
00:36:55
Speaker
And how did you decide to settle on, you know, your three main threads and braid those together? Let me think about this. Well, you know, I guess throughout I was, you know, especially as
00:37:13
Speaker
I arrived in May, late in the summer, when I was pretty well established on the island. By that time, I was accustomed to living on the island, and the island was accustomed to having me around. I was thinking at that point, okay, how the heck am I going to tell this story? How can I
00:37:35
Speaker
How can I structure this thing? Because it was clear to me that it was not a story that would necessarily follow a straight chronology. I'm a big fan of the braided narrative because it allows you to start a story at a gallop rather than begin at the beginning, which might not be nearly so interesting. And then go back to the beginning or incorporate the beginning into your rollout of
00:38:03
Speaker
you know, of the here and now. And it also enables you to incorporate backstory or technical background that the reader needs to be equipped with to understand what's coming, but to do it in kind of a sly manner. You don't have to present the reader with a big chunk of homework up front.
00:38:29
Speaker
you can get the story started and then spoon feed the homework a little bit by little bit as you go along. But all my previous forays into braided narrative had always relied on one of those threads being a very strong chronology. You know, this happened, then this happened, then this happened, this happened, usually in the here and now. And with Tangier, I had a strong chronology in the island's history and its past. But
00:38:59
Speaker
You know, when you're there day by day, you're not guaranteed that you're going to be presented a strong chronology in the present. And so what I figured was that I would arrange the book thematically, that there would be a thread of the here and now in which I would take you through a rough chronology of life on the island while I was there. And it would include, you know,
00:39:26
Speaker
something that happened early in my stay, Henrietta Wheatley's funeral. There was a wedding that occurred early in my stay. There was the school's graduation. All of those were going to be set pieces that I could put in chronological order. And I'd be spending time on boats in various kinds of weather. I could use those as part of the chronology. But it wasn't necessarily going to be
00:39:54
Speaker
a definite point B kind of thread. There wasn't any destination necessarily as there had been in my previous attempts. And I was a bit worried about that. History was clearly a thread that would be pretty easy to write, I figured. And then the science of
00:40:17
Speaker
of what was happening to Tangier, what is happening to the place, the science of climate change, the manifestation of
00:40:26
Speaker
of rising sea levels and what they look like when you're on a marsh island that's already pretty watery to begin with. Yeah, because the sea level rise part, a lot of people just – the vision is it's attacking from the shores. Right. But what you found was not only is it coming from the shores, but it's quite literally coming up from underfoot.
00:40:51
Speaker
Right. I mean, this is, you know, when your island is 80% marsh, it lacks hard edges against which you can really measure the advance of sea level rise. You know, you've got no yardstick against which to see it. And what happens instead is that as waters rise in a marsh, the marsh drowns and it turns to open water, turns to mud flat first, then to open water. And upland,
00:41:21
Speaker
such as the skinny ribs of sandy loam on which all of Tangier's houses are built in this marsh. They're basically islands within an island. Those gradually as they get more waterlogged turn to marsh. So you've got upland turning to marsh, marsh turning to mud flat and then to open water. And that really is where you see sea level rise taking its toll on Tangier. It's just
00:41:46
Speaker
Rather than getting smaller around the edges, which it is, the most profound changes are that it's coming apart from within. It's just turning into a loose macrame of land and ever larger bodies of water. It's turning to lace almost before your eyes.
Impact of Rising Sea Levels
00:42:10
Speaker
And it's difficult to see if you're on the ground. I mean, tenures flat as a board.
00:42:16
Speaker
When you're standing on the island, you look out across the marsh and it appears a pretty unvarying lake of bronze in the winter and light green in the summer, marsh grass.
00:42:36
Speaker
and you know quite beautiful once you've calibrated your senses to it you know it moves with the wind and makes this nice rustling music and but you don't see its imperfections you don't see from that that low altitude all the all the holes in its makeup it's not until you get up in an airplane or in a helicopter you look down on it that you say holy smokes that doesn't look at all like what I thought it would you know and that
00:43:06
Speaker
that's falling, it's just dissolving. Before we were on air, you brought up a great term about, this is when you were writing a previous book, but I'd love to hear how you apply it to this one about proportionality and balancing the science of this, the history of this, but also the spine of your time on the island.
00:43:30
Speaker
So how did you measure those proportionality so the recipe of the whole book felt balanced instead of heavily weighted against versus one element being heavier than another? Right. Well, that's always the big question. Proportionality is the hardest thing to get right, I think. And it's the thing on which a book, a narrative propulsion, most heavily depends. I mean, it's, you know, you're
00:44:00
Speaker
Presenting the reader in this case with close to 120,000 words of narrative and asking him or her to make a commitment to sit down for, I mean, that's a lot of words to make your way through. It is incumbent upon you.
00:44:21
Speaker
to provide that story with the greatest amount of thrust that you possibly can. You have to maintain forward propulsion to get the reader through that story. And proportionality is where you succeed or fail. If you don't get the mix right, you'll kill your momentum. In fact, you run the danger of providing too much forward propulsion.
00:44:48
Speaker
which is, you know, you can, you can build too big a head of steam, uh, and, and race in places when really you need to be a lot calmer in the rollout. So it's, I, Brendan, I wish I could tell you that, that I, I have, uh, you know, hard and fast rules that, that I followed that, that have ensured that I get the proportionality right.
00:45:17
Speaker
But the fact is, I don't, with the braided, one of the advantages to a braided narrative is that, well, the way I do it anyway is I write in thousand word chunks basically. Most of my chapters run about five thousand words and within that chapter you're going to have five pieces and you're going to see
00:45:43
Speaker
all three braids represented in those five pieces. So you may have two of a couple and one of the other two or whatever. You're going to see them in a different mix, but all represented almost all the time. And the advantage to that is that your reader never gets a chance to get tired of what you're saying. So if you're talking about climate change,
00:46:11
Speaker
You know, a little goes a long way. A lot of readers do not want to get bogged down in the weeds of the scientific weeds. And so that approach enables you to make a point in a thousand words and get the heck out and get back to say what's going on in the situation where. And so you have an advantage in using that sort of almost mathematical structure in that
00:46:41
Speaker
You have an implicit propulsion just because you're never sticking with anything for too long. But in terms of the overall proportionality of the story, for me, I almost always have to wait until I'm finished and have a chance to walk away from it for a couple of weeks and then come back and
00:47:10
Speaker
Usually, when I can read it with cold eyes, I can usually pretty quickly say, okay, I've got too much here. I've got too little here. I've got to change this mix a bit. Also, I rely on a couple of friends who are my first readers, who are great writers themselves, and spectacular editors, which I don't think either of them would have seen themselves being.
00:47:36
Speaker
When we first became friends, they were reporters with me at the pilot. But they've just turned out to have a great gift for being able to get high above a really long story and pick out where it flags, where it has holes, where I annoy them.
Building Empathy in Storytelling
00:48:01
Speaker
And they've just been keys to
00:48:05
Speaker
to whatever success this book especially but also my last one autobiography enjoyed and with thrust so much of that comes from inherent conflict and sometimes with conflict comes unsavory or bad things that kind of have to happen to the people that you've that you've grown i used to start to like and
00:48:32
Speaker
I wonder if you had any moments for the purpose of your story and because you're a writer and a reporter and you know that you need conflict and you need strife and see these people tested in non-fiction you can't make it up. So is there a part of you almost wishes for something bad to happen so you have the necessary thrust to write a good story even if it means the people you're writing about are somehow in peril?
00:49:03
Speaker
No, I mean, well, I would not have taken on this story had there not been something bad happening right from the get go. You know, I mean, the bad thing here is that I was writing about a town or writing about people who were facing an existential crisis and, and we're very likely to lose that, that
00:49:32
Speaker
wrestling match with with mother nature that they they found themselves in and and so the way the it You know, I pretty much established what the stakes are right up front in the end in the book I tell you look this is a town that's You know that only has a few years left and the tension I hope comes somewhat unexpectedly in that it comes not from a
00:49:59
Speaker
understanding the horror of what's unfolding here, this slow motion natural disaster. But it comes instead from growing to like the people. And so you start the story understanding the horror, but not really caring about the victims. And as the book progresses, the horror gets sharper and focused, but doesn't really grow any bigger.
00:50:27
Speaker
But your stake in the victims does. And so it's almost a backwards way to unfold the narrative. But I hope it works. I think most stories get you to care about the characters.
00:50:52
Speaker
and then have drama thrust at them. This one starts off with a drama and then gets you to care about the characters.
00:51:00
Speaker
And for spending so much time with these people, and of course there's no way around them becoming essentially very friendly, what are some of the challenges that you've found throughout the course of the books you've written when you've spent so much time with key figures of writing about them in a way that's true to the story, but also a way that
00:51:24
Speaker
Doesn't you know violate the the friendship that you've you've garnered as as a member of a community of Tangier for essentially over a year Well again, you know, I'm holding that notebook wherever I am and whomever I'm speaking with and so the understanding the the implicit contract is that That notebook is why I'm there
00:51:52
Speaker
And I did become very friendly with some folks. And I have great affection for the people of Tangier. But I was there to do a job. And a job that, in the abstract, really can't hurt them. It can only do them good to get the plight that they're in in front of as many people as possible.
00:52:20
Speaker
So I never really felt a conflict with, you know, I never worried that somehow I was betraying a confidence as far as I'm concerned. No confidence was ever shared with me because I was always holding a notebook. If I was told something, then I was told it with the understanding that it was probably going to wind up in print or at least it could wind up in print. I never, I'm searching my memory for some instance where
00:52:49
Speaker
I think that most of the time, people will impress you more than disappoint you. That was my experience on Tantra. I found this a place that I really came to love.
00:53:13
Speaker
And one of the reasons this gets off the topic of your question a little bit, Brendan, but one of the reasons is that, you know, when I, it really got me thinking about the whole nature of the word home. Cause I told people that, you know, immediately while I was writing the book and immediately after I kind of left full, full time residency there, um, I told people that I considered teenager a second home and, and, but that does not really accurately capture how
00:53:41
Speaker
The place made me feel because the fact is that when I'm at home here in the Blue Ridge of Virginia and I leave the house every day, you know, I drive into a community in which I'm, I'm anonymous. Nobody has any idea who that guy in that car is. I drive to my office and, uh, you know, I'm friendly with folks at the office, of course, but between home and office, I could be anywhere and I could be anybody. Whereas when I left my place on Tangier,
00:54:10
Speaker
I was greeted by name by every single person I encountered. I was welcomed with a smile wherever I went. Every transaction was face to face. It was a completely different way of living and in many ways a far more authentic way of living. It's a place where everybody counts. There's accountability that you cannot escape.
00:54:35
Speaker
And during the length of my stay there, that included me. I counted. I was allowed to pretend that I was a team chairman for those 14 months. And my role in that community was that I was the guy writing the book. I was the guy with the notebook. So I don't think there was ever a point at which an islander
00:55:05
Speaker
said something to me and and then approached me later and said hey could you could you leave that out i don't recall that ever happening which is pretty unusual right right and especially for a community that's so tight-knit well maybe it's because they are so tight-knit and there are no secrets in that town that they didn't yeah i i think you're onto something there i think that's exactly what's what's going on yeah i mean
00:55:31
Speaker
There are no unacknowledged feuds on teach here. You know, they're all acknowledged. There are very few secrets. And when you got to the nitty gritty of the writing of the book, how are you setting up your days so you could chip into what ended up being like 120,000 words by the end? Yeah. Well, I have a daily quota. I write 1,200 words a day.
00:56:00
Speaker
I'm a creature of unvarying routine when it comes to writing. I'm lucky enough to live just a few miles from the Appalachian Trail and so I begin the day with a four and a half, five mile hike and come home, grab a shower, head to the office and I usually work from one to nine or so, one to eight thirty and
00:56:28
Speaker
assuming that is that I can produce those 1200 words if I can't that I stay later. The first couple of hours at the office was usually devoted to going through the previous days 1200 words and stuff that I thought was just
00:56:49
Speaker
pure literary genius the day before revealed itself to be far less than that when I started the day looking at it. And so I'd spend a couple hours cleaning up my mess and then dive into the work of the day. And so I'm not somebody who throws words down on the page and then figures I'll clean it up later. I try to get it as perfect as I can while I'm doing it. And so I'm not a particularly fast writer.
00:57:15
Speaker
My methodology has changed some from my days writing news, banging it out. The beauty of the inverted pyramid is it doesn't require a whole lot of strategizing. This of course did. Because I'm writing 1200 words, what that usually means is I can finish one of those little sections.
00:57:44
Speaker
within the space of a day. And so I'm finishing a chapter and starting a new one each week. And I just found that that's a nice pace to work at.
00:57:57
Speaker
When you're in the thick of it, in the middle, when, as I always like to say, when you're too far away to turn away from home and turn to go back home and too far away. For our sake. Yeah. How do you deal with that despair in the middle of the draft and still find the momentum and the sort of courage to keep getting the 1,200 words done every day? Well, it certainly does come.
00:58:27
Speaker
try to remind myself that I could be wearing a necktie and selling insurance. And that I'm the luckiest guy in the world to be able to do this for a living. And I mean, nothing untoward towards the many fine people in the insurance industry when I say that. But it's, you know,
00:58:55
Speaker
My dad, when I was growing up, was an executive first for Firestone and then for Uniroil and then ultimately for Quaker State Oil. He was completely into his work, loved work, but I never could understand how somebody could get excited about how many tires you sold or how many pallets of oil a particular vendor needed.
00:59:23
Speaker
It just seemed to me to be work that wasn't going to change the world in any respect. And here I'm lucky enough to have, and you are too, we are lucky enough to have work that has potential to change at least one life and sometimes many more than one. And it's enormously exciting. And so whenever I hit the doldrums,
00:59:52
Speaker
And it usually hits it about two thirds of the way through the writing. And when I really begin to get uncertain about the whole, the value of the story and whether it's just a loathsome piece of crap or, you know, I might be under something good. I, you know, the doubts really creep in. I just try to remind myself this is just part of that great, that great job. It's, you know, it on good days, it gives you further fuel to
01:00:23
Speaker
to make every word as good as she can make it. And is there a point where you feel most engaged and most alive in the process of either writing or the information gathering phase or the rewriting? Well, I don't know about most. No, no, I really don't. There are parts where it's easier because it's what your needs are in greater focus. And so, for instance,
01:00:53
Speaker
I finished writing the book. My deadline was last October 1st for turning in the manuscript and I was approaching that deadline mid-September or so and working on the ending and I realized that I was going to have to go back to Tangier and do some more reporting for the ending. I had the last chapter except for the very last scene.
01:01:19
Speaker
And I was able to put that get that done and turn in the manuscript and with a note that the final scene was TK and and then on October 5th of last year four days after my deadline while my editor was reading the manuscript I Went back to Tangier and reported that last scene and that last piece of reporting was some of the the most fun and
01:01:47
Speaker
because I knew exactly why I was there. I knew that this scene had a role to play in the story. And it didn't mean that my questions would be any different. It didn't mean that I had to shape it in any way.
01:02:06
Speaker
It just meant that I had to keep my eyes and ears open for what I needed to establish in that last scene. And that made it enormously easy compared to every other scene in the book. I had to be wide open and just a Hoover just sucking up every detail.
01:02:30
Speaker
In this one, I had the luxury of going after – I knew that I had to make certain points to get out of the story. That's such a great feeling when you have basically like a lighthouse in the distance where you can see where it ends and you know – Yeah.
01:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, like you report in this instance you're reporting to an end, you know where it's coming and then it's even nicer when you can be writing to that end and that way The word like the way you say like those load-bearing words They they have the substance that get you and thrust you to that final end point Yeah, and and you know really the end point didn't have to be where it wound up being in this in this particular case but
01:03:12
Speaker
The whole scene I knew served the purpose of getting us back in the story to where it began. You know, the story opens on the beach, this abandoned town at the north end of Tangier with Carol Moore, one of the main characters of the story, walking along the beach and making a terrible discovery. And the book ends on the beach in the same place with Carol Moore, you know, five years later, walking into that same stretch of sand. And so what happened within that scene,
01:03:41
Speaker
wasn't nearly as important as the atmospherics of it. You know, I was there just to, I wanted to pay particular attention to the way things looked and smelled and just put the reader on that beach with her. And then,
Quantifying Value of Communities
01:03:56
Speaker
you know, the fact that we were there and she couldn't find anything when she was beachcombing all the things that unfold in that last scene, but they were, they were just bonus.
01:04:05
Speaker
Oftentimes when I get the books from the publicist, and I usually get these sheets with talking points, and I usually ignore them, because I like to come up with my own. But there was one that really stuck out to me. And it was that Earl Swift believes that we must devise a means to quantify the intangibles that make a place special. How we choose to respond to its plight will speak to what we hold in port, and how we tackle the more complex rescues and retreats
01:04:35
Speaker
come. And that one struck out to me. I was like, I really want to ask him about that and how you were, in fact, able to quantify intangibles in this story. Well, you know, one of the, I guess, one of the central themes to this, to the whole Tangier situation is that what's happening there now is going to be coming to a neighborhood near you, like very soon. This thing's accelerating.
01:05:05
Speaker
And we have 88,000 miles of shoreline with thousands of communities in harm's way. And Tangier is just the first of an almost inconceivable number that are going to be facing destruction, erasure. And we do not have the money, the time, or the means, the technical means to save them all. So we're going to have to figure out as a country
01:05:34
Speaker
What's important to us so we can decide when we have to develop a rubric for deciding which towns, which communities we're going to save and which we're going to surrender to the sea and 10 cheer offers a great example of why that's going to be tough because here you have a town that if you look at these statistics just by the numbers. This is a place. That. It might not initially make sense to save or to try to save.
01:06:02
Speaker
It's home to 460 people, give or take. It could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, given its location, the fact that it's an island. And that not only the sea is coming up, but the land itself is sinking. It could cost hundreds of billions of dollars to save it. So when you look at the per capita expenditure necessary to rescue this little place,
01:06:26
Speaker
It seems wildly unbalanced, you know an investment that that doesn't make a lot of sense versus say a Miami or in New Orleans or in New York or in Norfolk places with a million or more people and and therefore You know in a cost per head that's more reasonable
01:06:54
Speaker
at least from an accounting standpoint. But if we use headcount as the sole criteria to decide which towns we save, we're going to lose not only Tangier, but a lot of small places that we as a country view as basically sacred ground, hallowed ground, or places that we have
01:07:21
Speaker
considered important for one reason or another over our history and so you know really we're going to have to not only decide which towns we save and which we surrender but we're going to have to decide how to decide and that's
01:07:41
Speaker
That promises to be really ugly, I think, because it does force us to come up with a way of measuring importance, measuring value in ways that we've never had to do it before. Is there a value to a Hilton Head, say, that one can separate from the size of its population?
01:08:05
Speaker
And if there is, okay, what is the nature of that value? And what kind of number should we attach to it so that when it comes to time to decide between saving Hilton Head and Montauk, New York, we can make that rational decision. And it's a job that's going to have to be undertaken by far smarter people than me. And I don't envy them.
01:08:33
Speaker
Yeah, Elizabeth Rush just wrote a great book called Rising. It's a, have you heard of it or read it? Yeah, yeah, I've not read it yet, but yeah, I have heard about it.
01:08:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great book. She's been on the show a couple times and we got to talking about that. In her book, she's talked about a lot of the successful inward retreats and where that could be happening in lots of coastal areas in the Panhandle of Florida, New Jersey, even how the rising sea levels are affecting climate change in Oregon and so forth.
01:09:13
Speaker
kind of a, you know, a broad swath of it and how it's happening just here. But then it's because we're a fairly, you know, insular country and in a ways we only think about here we see levels are rising everywhere in the world. So I mean, we don't even really give thought to all the island, island nations, the seashells and the islands of the South Pacific. It's
01:09:39
Speaker
Yeah, the Maldives are in a terrible, terrible shape. You know, Tangiers has the unenviable position of being in a part of the bay that is sinking and has been subsiding for thousands of years and will continue to subside for thousands more. It's a byproduct of the last ice age. And so if you combine that subsidence with the
01:10:08
Speaker
the level of the bays rise, you find that the lower Chesapeake has among the highest relative sea level rises on the planet. And so here you've got this little island that has no elevation to speak of, to begin with, facing this one-two punch. So it does make Tangier's situation a bit more dire than most, but you're right. I mean, this is a problem that we're all going to be feeling to one extent or another.
01:10:37
Speaker
What's in your story file these days that might yield the next book, the things that are exciting you to get back to doing the reporting in the subsequent 1,200 words a day? Well,
Shift to Magazine Writing
01:10:52
Speaker
you know, when I finished this and then finished, I took the book through three drafts.
01:11:03
Speaker
and tinkered with it beyond that, as you do. And so I finally wrapped up the last of the heavy lifting on the book early in the year. And I resolved that 2018 would be a year in which I was not writing a book, because I had not been not writing a book for 12 years or better. I've always been working on one, and I just needed a break. So I have been blissfully
01:11:33
Speaker
mindless on the subject of what my next book would be. I've been writing nothing but magazine stuff and tried my hand at some speech writing and I've just been doing shorter form stuff, but not real short form. I mean, I've written two magazine pieces and they both top eight inches or 80, I'm sorry, 8,000 words. I'm thinking like a newspaperman. But yeah, they both were 8,000 words or longer. So I mean, they're,
01:12:02
Speaker
damn near book length magazine pieces, but I've really tried to avoid devoting too much thought to pre-preparation on the next book. I have a couple of ideas. I have a very strong idea. I have actually a proposal already written, but it's going to take some reframing. I want to see if I can go for a few months more before I
01:12:32
Speaker
I dive too deep into the thinking about it. Yeah, it's probably one of those deals where you can't even help yourself. You're like, here's that thing. It's definitely a book. Here we go. Well, the beauty of a magazine story is you can actually see the end of the project. It may be as much as six months out, but you know it's there. Whereas with a book, there is just
01:13:02
Speaker
The nearest analogy I can come to the process is that writing a magazine piece is like climbing in the Alps and writing a book is like building base camps to go, you know, to summit Everest. And there is so much more time you have to devote to the base camps than there is to the actual climbing. You got to acclimatize your oxygen levels. Oh, yeah. It's all about logistics.
01:13:32
Speaker
in preparation and structure rather than just sitting down and banging out a story. Right. Oh, man. And where can people find you online, Earl? I'm on Facebook. They can find my website at earlswift.com.
01:13:50
Speaker
and they can reach me directly through the website. And they can also buy the book and other books through the website. And yeah, I mean, I've got a Twitter account that I rarely, rarely use and but it's there and I have a
01:14:08
Speaker
I'm Earl Swift one on Twitter. And I have a yeah, I mean, that's, that's pretty much it. That'll do it. Cool. Well, fantastic. Well, Earl, thank you so much for jumping on the show and elucidating us on your process around this book. And of course, where that overlaps with others. This is a lot of fun getting to talk to you at length. This is like, I've been looking forward to doing this for a while. And this is the timing worked out.
01:14:36
Speaker
I'm filled with the same dread, Brendan, that I am two-thirds of the way through the process. I have no idea whether I've made a lick of sense, but it's been a lot of fun talking with you. Yeah, for sure. I appreciate it. I wish we had two more hours. This was great. Thanks for doing this, Earl. Thank you so much for having me.
01:15:01
Speaker
Thank you for listening and thanks to Earl for the time. Wasn't that great? Load-bearing words. I love it baby. Be sure to follow me on Twitter and Instagram at cnfpod and at Brendan O'Mara and follow the Facebook page.
01:15:21
Speaker
if that's your thing. If you want a tasty bit of goodness in your email inbox once a month, I have a kicking newsletter where I send out my reading recommendations and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it. I think that's it this week. Maybe we'll do it again next week at about this time. So long and let the rock and roll take you into the weekend.