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Episode 294: 'We Wish to be Able to Sing', Mike Damiano Talks About His Atavist Story
194 Plays3 years ago
Mike Damiano stops by to close out 2021 to talk about his Atavist story "We Wish to be Able to Sing."
Social Media: @CNFPod
Show notes and newsletter: brendanomeara.com
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Sponsor love: West Virg. Wesleyan College's MFA in Creative Writing
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Transcript
Dedication and Patreon Shout-out
00:00:01
Speaker
This episode of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast is dedicated to Melissa Robinson. She's a tier three Patreon member. Yes. That tier gets you like transcripts and coaching and other great things. And I just want to give a shout out to Melissa.
Audio Magazine Submissions Deadline
00:00:23
Speaker
Oh, and by the way, today, the day this publishes, is December 31st. Oh my goodness. That means that it is the deadline for the audio magazine titled, or themed, Heroes. Email any submissions you might have, it's gotta be done by today, by 11.59 p.m.
00:00:48
Speaker
PST Email to creative nonfiction podcast at gmail.com with heroes in the subject line. It's a written thing I judge them based on writing and then we work on the audio later So if that tickles your fancy as the last thing you do in 2021 Well, I hope you'll submit. All right, dig
Introduction to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:01:10
Speaker
it
00:01:10
Speaker
It's never comfortable prying and doing what is really an indecent thing, which is walking into someone's home, walking into a stranger's home who's just invited you in and saying, nice to meet you. I'd like you to tell me about some of the most painful memories in your life, and I'm going to record it.
00:01:34
Speaker
Well, is it just me or is it the three beers I've had? I don't know. This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. Do I have a drinking problem? I don't think so. I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going? Mike Domiano. My goodness.
Mike Domiano on Alfonso Rapu's Revolution
00:01:51
Speaker
He's bringing 2021 to a close with his peace for the Atavists about an unlikely revolutionary who helped the people of Easter Island earn rights they deserve from an oppressive Chilean naval regime. It's the story of Alfonso Rapu, a school teacher turned revolutionary via nonviolence, an unlikely hero, and as it were, somewhat of an anti-hero. You gotta love those shades of gray, man.
The Atavist's Role in Storytelling
00:02:20
Speaker
Mike is a staff writer for Boston Magazine, and like many people writing stories for the Atavists, he'd been working on this Easter Island story for years. Atavists becomes like this benevolent foster home for stories that are too long for traditional magazines and too short to be books. And say where Darby and Jonah Ogles say, come here little story, we're gonna make you a star. And damn it, they do it. You know this.
00:02:51
Speaker
Go to magazine.adivis.com and consider getting a subscription for yourself or a friend.
00:03:00
Speaker
It's some of the best money you'll spend. It really is. The work that they do to package these stories is next level. It's wonderful stuff. You're not going to have ads bombarding you as you're reading these stories. You truly get to immerse yourself in the stories. And no, I don't get kickbacks for subscriptions. So how dare you? How dare you, Donna?
00:03:22
Speaker
Before we get to Mike, we're going to hear from Jonah Ogles, the lead editor of this piece. So why don't we do that CNFers? Okay, let's do that.
Balancing Talent and Hard Work in Writing
00:03:42
Speaker
Nice. Before we talk to him, I came across this interview with Dave Remnick and Paul Thomas Anderson. And there's something that Remnick said in asking him that I kind of disagree with about this notion of genius and talent. And I wanted to get your impression of working with people that are really high performers in this line of work.
00:04:06
Speaker
And he had said, in asking Paul Thomas Anderson about writing, he's like, you have the self to do it. And nothing else is required other than, well, genius or talent. And he goes on, and I was just like, well, to be a genius is obviously very limiting.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, I guess there has to be some sort of a kernel of talent, but I feel like that's really setting the bar almost too high and almost squashing a lot of people would be like, oh, I don't feel that talented. I'm certainly not a genius. I think it discounts the work that sometimes, you know, if you just have enough rigor, you can get really damn good at this line of work. So I wonder, like, maybe what your impressions are of that.
00:04:44
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think talent is really helpful. I often told young aspiring writers or staffers when I was at outside that they either needed to have
00:05:00
Speaker
so much talent that they could coast on that or they had to be willing to work harder than anybody. Because as an editor, I'm willing to put up with missed deadlines and cranky writers if the writing is really good. So the talent can get you a long ways. But I think you're right, you've got to
00:05:22
Speaker
you've got to be willing to work for it. And George Saunders and his last book was like an instructional book about becoming a fiction writer. And he said that the writers that he has taught who have gone on to have the most publishing success have not been the ones who are most talented. They're the ones who are most willing to revise and revise and revise. And I think that is
00:05:52
Speaker
is the greatest indicator of success in writing in general. If you're willing to show up and put in the work and not succumb to the thoughts of, hey, maybe I'm not talented enough for this, or hey, I don't really want to work on this right now. If you can push through that, I think you can actually, that's what it takes to be successful, is just
00:06:15
Speaker
doing it over and over and over again and sort of showing up every day. Well, to that point too, and to piggyback kind of on a sport metaphor, like there are innumerable, there is a graveyard of talented athletes who were the fastest and the most gifted, but they weren't very good.
00:06:39
Speaker
even though they had some of these intangible things that are objectively high talent, but you see so many players who didn't have the greatest 40-yard dash time, but they're some of the greatest wide receivers of all time. So it's this thing where, yeah, you do need some talent, but really hard work really does trump talent because we can rattle off any number of very talented people who didn't amount to much.
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. You know, I think you could look at like, um, and I don't know if this is going in the podcast or not. I may be hanging my neck out here, but you know, you look at somebody like John Krakauer and granted like Krakauer, I actually do think has talent, but that, that dude works so hard. You know, he is relentless in his reporting and he does not stop and he keeps writing. And you know, you look at the career he's had,
00:07:37
Speaker
And I think you attribute that to hard work. Certainly talent is going to help as it'll help anybody, but I also think talent can be sort of cultivated, you know, if you're willing to look at a sentence and try to make it better and better. I do think that long-term your sentences are going to get better.
00:08:03
Speaker
A year or two ago, I read the journal that John Steinbeck kept while he was writing East of Eden. That book was more or less published the way he wrote it. There wasn't really a revision process. Part of that may have been the state of publishing in that day and the stature that he had at the time that book was published.
00:08:30
Speaker
Certainly. Well, I suspect that his sentences when he wrote East of Eden were better than the first sentences he put down when he wrote some earlier book. I think the harder you work, the
00:08:49
Speaker
better you will get it, whatever it is. It can be anything, it could be cooking, it could be parenting, it could be talking to your spouse. If you work at these things, it gets easier over time to get things to go the way you want them to go.
00:09:10
Speaker
And bringing up Saunders in revision, and this is just coincidence, I was just cleaning out some email and I came across, I subscribed to James Clear's newsletter, which is kind of cool, his 321 newsletter, and he went in his headline and had something to do with the difference between good and great, and he wrote, the difference between good and great is often an extra round of revision. The person who looks things over a second time, or in my case, like third, fourth, fifth, sixth, tenth time,
00:09:40
Speaker
will appear smarter or more talented, but actually is just polishing things a bit more. Take the time to get it right, revise it one extra time. And that's exactly what you're talking about with Saunders and Krakauer and everyone else who is really good at this, is that extra bit of rigor. Yeah, I remember when I was starting to edit features, you know, and I was just, I felt buried in deadlines and I was sort of trying to move as quickly as I could. One of the editors at Outside,
00:10:10
Speaker
who I'd sent a story to them for top edit, and they just brought it back to me, printed out, and they said, just read it one more time. Not today, but just let it sit here on your desk, and tomorrow read it one more time, and then send it back to me. Because that extra effort is always worth it. It always is.
00:10:33
Speaker
Nice. And speaking of, you know, a great effort and a great story, you know, Mike Damiano, you know, wrote a great story about the Alfonso Rapu, this charismatic school teacher who essentially, you know, leads a nonviolent revolution on Easter Island and, you know, changes the course of their history in the late, mid to late 20th century. So, yeah, maybe you can just
Pitching the Easter Island Story
00:10:57
Speaker
talk a little bit about this piece and, you know, what lit you up about it.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, well, so Mike sent us this pitch in May 2019. And he'd been reporting it years and years before that. So he really done the work on the front end. And this was one of those stories that it showed up in our inboxes and, you know, say word and said to me,
00:11:26
Speaker
I think this is good. And I'd said, yep, me too. And, you know, the pitch was so clear already in the story that Mike wanted to tell. And, you know, I think it wasn't just, I mean, we're attracted to good writing and writers who have a really clear sense of the story they want to tell.
00:11:46
Speaker
But in this particular case, it's also this really interesting piece of history that has essentially been overlooked at least in the US. Maybe that's not the case in Chile, I don't know, but it's really fascinating to hear this very self-contained story about
00:12:14
Speaker
nonviolence and about, you know, the struggle for equal rights. And it sort of spoke to, you know, in 2019, as we got this pitch, was obviously a year of, you know, some upheaval. And, you know, so it felt like a story that, you know, had resonated a little bit with modern current events as well.
00:12:41
Speaker
Yeah, and it's a wonderful story, and when I was talking to Mike about it, the idea of it had started more or less like really a big sweeping book project, and then he was able to really distill this story to a sliver of what he knows about it, but it is still animated by such great action and personality. So what was the challenge on your end to really
00:13:10
Speaker
drive that story home to structure this thing in such a way where we're driven by the charismatic people at the center of it, but also it's imbued with a great amount of history that goes back centuries.
Editing Challenges with Jonah Ogles
00:13:26
Speaker
Yeah. In editing this, I really felt like I was editing a book because I wasn't doing a ton of line editing because I didn't need to, Mike's just that good of writer. And we didn't have a ton of conversations about structural changes or anything like that. Mostly what I was doing, we were talking about
00:13:55
Speaker
just the larger shape of it, bringing Alfonso more to the forefront in certain places, you know, identifying spots where I thought maybe we were, we drifted a little bit from that main arc and the tension that it contained. So it really, I think the first memo I sent him was, was probably very short and was basically amounted to me saying,
00:14:24
Speaker
more Alfonso here, a little bit less of this here. How does that sound to you, Mike? I think we had one conversation after that memo, and then he knows the story so deeply that that conversation was all it really took. After that, the story was more or less in the shape that it's in now. We did some trimming and tightening the way we always do with stories, but
00:14:54
Speaker
Really, the story was there, and we just helped cut away some of those extraneous bits that kept us away from that momentum you described.
00:15:05
Speaker
And I really like how the piece comes to its coda at the end, where Mike is, you know, he's in the story at the very end, where there's some very complicated, you know, feelings and allegations against Alfonso, too, that are very unsettling to the characters at the heart of it, and certainly to Mike, too, and we kind of spoke about that as well.
00:15:34
Speaker
It was a great, I think, a great strategy of him to come in at the end as kind of an epilogue to the story with him there. But it also, it brought in a complicated layer of nuance to the story of the hero at the center of it isn't quite as noble as we had hoped. Yeah.
00:15:59
Speaker
stories of this length allow us to do, I feel like. If this were a 3,000-word piece in a traditional print magazine, I don't know how you'd be able, well, I don't know how you'd be able to tell it in 3,000 words, honestly, but maybe I've just been spoiled by being at the activist this long. But that sort of nuance can
00:16:25
Speaker
end up on the cutting room floor when you're really trying to get it down to just the bare minimum. I don't like what happened to Alfonso or those around him as the years went on, but I like that Mike both had the perseverance to pursue that and keep reporting the story.
00:16:52
Speaker
and that we have the space to allow him to talk about how it made him feel, how Alfonso responded, how those around him thought of him after the allegations came out or after Mike discovered them.
00:17:12
Speaker
So it's a good way to end the story solely in terms of the way it sort of complicates the picture because that's true of anything. Stories are always complicated and that's why I love reading books and working at this length because we can get into that.
00:17:36
Speaker
Nice. Well, Jonah, always a pleasure to get your insights on what it's like to edit pieces of this nature. And it was kind of cool to dig into some of the other things that are sort of tangentially related to the work at hand and the work that we do at large. So it's always good to have these conversations. And so thanks for the time. And we're going to kick it over to Mike now. It's my pleasure. Thanks so much.
00:18:08
Speaker
Alright, as we tee up Mike Damiano from the blue tees, I want to remind you to keep the conversation going at Twitter at cnfpod or at Creative Nonfiction Podcast on Instagram.
Supporting the Podcast and Subscriptions
00:18:22
Speaker
You can support the show by becoming a paid member at patreon.com slash cnfpod. I know. I know you only have a few discretionary dollars to throw at various subscriptions, whether it be literary magazines or
00:18:34
Speaker
The great or atavist the you know, there's just so many things where it's like you want to support It's like I want to do it. I want to support that but it's just I only have so many dollars I only have maybe a couple hundred dollars a year if that to ferry towards these subscriptions and I understand I Understand it's hard. But if you if you can I
00:18:58
Speaker
It's something I deeply appreciate. As I say from time to time, the show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. Members get transcripts, chances to ask questions of future guests, of which I give credit to you for that. I'm working on special exclusive podcasts and such for those Patreon members in that community. So think about it.
00:19:25
Speaker
Listen, no hard feelings if you don't want to, I understand. But consider, free ways to support the show. Hey, you can leave a kind review or rating. Written reviews are the best. And for our little podcast that could, we've got a hell of a lot of written reviews for how relatively small the audience is, it's amazing.
00:19:49
Speaker
but can always use more, always use more. So go to Apple Podcasts or even give it a rating on Spotify. Link up to the show on social media channels and tag the show and then I'll be sure to give you digital fist bumps and retweets and maybe even a shout out at the top of the show. Why not? We're all in this fucking shit hole together, am I right? Show notes in my up to 11 monthly newsletter can be found at brendanomero.com. Hey, once a month, no spam.
00:20:19
Speaker
As far as I can tell, you can't beat it. It's kind of like the Atavist, am I right? Alright, one other little thing. Support for the Creative Nonfiction Podcast is also brought to you by West Virginia Wesleyan Colleges.
West Virginia Wesleyan's MFA Program
00:20:32
Speaker
I can never say Wesleyan. It always just, it never flows out of my mouth, you know what I'm saying? West Virginia Wesleyan Colleges, low residency MFA in creative writing.
00:20:44
Speaker
Now, in its 10th year, this affordable program boasts a low student-to-faculty ratio and a strong sense of community. We dig that, man. Recent CNF faculty include Randy Millings-Noble, Jeremy Jones, and CNF pot alum Sarah Einstein. There are also fiction and poetry tracks with recent faculty including Ashley Bryant-Phillips and Jacinta Townsend, as well as Diane Gilliam and Savannah Sipple. No matter your discipline, man,
00:21:09
Speaker
If you're looking to up your craft or maybe even learn a new one, consider West Virginia Wesleyan right in the heart of Appalachia. Visit MFA.wvwc.edu for more information and dates of enrollment.
00:21:24
Speaker
So, we had just spoken with Jonah, of course. Always great to speak with Jonah about the peace at hand. Also nice to dig into that quote from David Remnick, he of, editor of The New Yorker, this place that I would just die to have something in. Well, you're either a genius or you're super talented, and if you're not either, you're kind of fucked.
00:21:50
Speaker
Maybe that was an unfair reading of it, but I hate when people attribute genius or supreme talent as to why a piece of art is electric. I think it discounts the work, undercuts the work, and also makes the late bloomers among us, the less quote-unquote gifted among us, feel pretty lousy.
00:22:12
Speaker
You know, if I ever have Remnick on the show, which it's always been a goal of mine, I would want to, and I hope I have the spine to unpack that a little more. It really boils my potato. Anywho, this is about Mike Damiato, isn't it?
Origins of the Easter Island Story
00:22:29
Speaker
So in this part of the show, we get into the origins of how Mike arrived at this story. But partway through, I cut in as an aside because we pivot to update some information on his main character, Alfonso Rapu. Then we go back to the original through line of the conversation. I cut in one more time to add another piece to the conversation. So it's a bit more fractured than you're used to, but I think it's a good ride if you ask me.
00:22:57
Speaker
for you reporter types out there some great stuff about having to ask probing awkward even bridge burning questions of your key figures so I feel I've wasted your time enough already so why don't we just get into the real meat of this conversation
00:23:18
Speaker
Here's my conversation with the one and the only, the final episode of 2021, the final interview with Mike Damiano.
00:23:43
Speaker
This project, I guess maybe like a lot of activist stories, has been a while in the making. I think it's been, I think I started working on it more than a decade ago.
00:23:53
Speaker
definitely more than a decade ago. It started of all places while I was studying abroad in Baparaiso, Chile. And I had a history professor then who was just frustrated that the kind of the colonial history of Easter Island under Chile just hadn't been integrated fully into kind of public school curriculum, public school history curriculum in the country.
00:24:16
Speaker
And she just thought it deserved more attention. And that got me just researching the island, went to the island and talked to some people. And basically, the story of Easter Island is that in the late 19th century, the Chilean government annexed the island, had this whole fantasy that they were going to turn it into.
00:24:38
Speaker
this paradise in the Pacific, this paradise fantasy colony in the Pacific. And it just didn't come to pass. They didn't understand the challenges of surviving on the island. And the first settler families there fled or died. And they got buyer's remorse, and they pawned off the whole island to a for-profit entity that came to be known as the Easter Island Exploitation Company. That was the official name.
00:25:07
Speaker
And they walled the Rapa Nui people, the native people of the island, into one square mile, not one square mile, one corner of the island. And then the Rapa Nui people were stuck there for 70 years until this story begins, or until this story ends, really. By the time that the protagonist of my story is a teenager,
00:25:32
Speaker
The company is gone and the Navy has replaced it as the authority on the island. So the people have gone from living essentially as serfs in this kind of feudal regime to now just living under authoritarian naval regime.
00:25:51
Speaker
where this naval governor sent from Chile ruled unaccountably and visited various horrors and atrocities on the Rapa Nui people. Our protagonist, Afonso Rapu, was able to put an end to that regime.
00:26:07
Speaker
This project started actually as a book as a more sprawling book project where I was planning on telling various stories.
Alfonso Rapu's 1964 Revolution
00:26:16
Speaker
You know, in the piece, I refer to these these three movements or moments or episodes of resistance against foreign authority, foreign rule. And in this book project, I had planned to tell each of those stories and also kind of integrate those with or tell them in
00:26:34
Speaker
in concert with the ancient history. It was kind of a sprawling book that probably didn't hold together as a single war, conceptually. And it just didn't come to fruition for those reasons. But there's always this story of Alfonso Rapu's revolution in 1964 that just felt like it needed to be told, especially that felt like I had something
00:26:56
Speaker
really new and different in just in my reporting to say about it. So I'd been looking for years for a place for this story to land and the activist is just really obviously the right place for it.
00:27:10
Speaker
Now with the telling of the story and the fact that it kind of was the sprawling book project, would you say that the great lesson maybe you learned just in terms of research, reporting, and writing is that maybe sometimes the best way to approach a story of this nature is to maybe see if it can stand alone as a longer magazine piece than if it merits that, like that's kind of like the audition for it to see if there's more, see if there's a book in it.
Magazine Stories as Book Auditions
00:27:39
Speaker
I think that's a good idea. Certainly that's the more natural progression of stories, right? I think that there's sometimes, I mean, I think a lot of, not a lot, it sometimes occurs that a great magazine story winds up, you know, getting sold as a book and is less good as a book just because it can't really sustain that length.
00:28:00
Speaker
Yeah, this one was different because it was really, you know, I didn't, I didn't condense the entire book project into, you know, 20,000 words here or whatever it is. I really extracted basically a chapter from that book project, you know, told it at the length that I think made sense for that one story, and then just, you know, brought in enough of the other chapters, what would have been the other chapters to give the reader the background information they need.
00:28:31
Speaker
Now, what would you say separates an Alfonso Rapu from a lot of other revolutionaries that we might have read about in the 20th century? Yeah. I mean, great question because to me, you know, Alfonso Rapu and his followers are, you know, the protagonists of a great civil rights movement of the 20th century, which has gone relatively unnoticed.
00:28:57
Speaker
Surprising, it's a small number of people on a small island lost in the Pacific. But it is one of them, in my view, it is a great civil rights movement. He had similar goals to the goals of other civil rights leaders. He was demanding full civil rights, full citizenship, the same protections by the state that were afforded to
00:29:25
Speaker
Chileans on the mainland and that were denied to the Rapa Nui people who were living under this special and brutal regime. I don't really want to make certain comparisons, but he definitely viewed himself in a context of being one leader in the world who was demanding rights for his people.
00:29:50
Speaker
Now what kind of makes him unique as well is that he went to, he became educated in Chile. Well he went to, you know, university there and became, and studied to be a teacher and he could have maybe stayed there or gone to the United States or any, but he chose to come back to Easter Island and try to help the people there. So maybe you can just talk a little bit about him as a,
00:30:18
Speaker
you know, as the school teacher who, you know, said about this revolution of sorts.
00:30:25
Speaker
Yeah, there were definitely easier lives available to him, more comfortable lives, less dangerous lives available to him. And I think a couple of things were going on. I mean, he was thinking of his family. While he was in Chile for about a decade studying in the Chilean school system, he visited twice. And the first time he saw with fresh eyes
00:30:50
Speaker
the state that his people were living in, the state that he had been living in. And the second time he saw that his brother had been brutalized by the Navy regime and he was haunted. I don't think that the ostensibly more comfortable life available to him elsewhere would have actually been more comfortable for him in the state that he was in, the state of anxiety and worry that he was in.
00:31:16
Speaker
So he did what he felt he had to do. The interesting thing is that, like so many people who find themselves at the center of momentous events, he didn't mean to. I mean, he did find himself in those circumstances. When he returned to Easter Island, he didn't have a plan. He didn't have a roadmap for how he was going to overthrow a naval regime who would have been absurd to think that he could even do that. He just went back to help. He knew what the problems were, but he didn't know
00:31:46
Speaker
what the plan was, you didn't have a plan. And that only took shape and frankly was improvised by him and his allies over the year that he was there leading to the revolution. Yeah, he was going to use education as the main weapon to make sure that everyone was literate in Spanish so they didn't, so nothing nefarious was going on too. Like that was going to be the major weapon of this.
Alfonso Rapu's Nonviolent Strategy
00:32:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's true. He used what he had at his disposal. He was not a military man. He was a teacher. That gave him the ability to educate and to organize and to draw the community in around him in a way that gave him influence to petition for change, to demand changes on the island.
00:32:33
Speaker
feature, important feature for Alfonso was his commitment to nonviolence. He never, he always, you know, this ties into how he viewed himself in the context of civil rights movements. He viewed nonviolence as
00:32:51
Speaker
essential to the cause and to his own mission, which not everyone agreed with. I mean, his people had been brutalized. Violence had been committed against them. It wasn't just immoral. It wasn't just out of the sense of morality. He pragmatically believed that nonviolence was the answer and was the path forward.
00:33:16
Speaker
Now, how did you come to know and meet Alfonso?
Meeting Alfonso Rapu
00:33:19
Speaker
So I was on the island in 2012, beginning research for the book project. And I was researching a number of episodes, including the current or 21st century.
00:33:33
Speaker
struggles, conflicts between the Rapa Nui people and the Chilean state. So, you know, Alfonso's story was one of the stories, one of the most important stories I was researching. I guess I don't remember exactly who made the connection, but, you know, in Hungaroa, in the village on Easter Island, it's really a matter of showing up at people's houses, you know,
00:33:56
Speaker
knowing someone who knows someone. So we met in his living room and started having these very long conversations about his life, about the movement of 1964. And eventually he got tired of the recorded interviews. So he had me out to his pineapple farm. He's a pineapple farmer now. We worked. We worked and we talked. And that's how he told me the story.
00:34:21
Speaker
I love how the piece essentially ends with that little anecdote you just shared. That's when you come into the story at the very end where you kind of, well, this is kind of how we went about having these conversations. You know, what was the structural choice for you to kind of end the piece or start to bring the airliner down with that scene?
00:34:43
Speaker
So I think the only reason, well, there may be two reasons. I think the main narrative of the piece ending as it does in 1965 kind of begs the question of, well, what happened to these people, especially Alfonso? So I guess a natural way to answer that question is just to come see for yourself, right? Come show people with first-person narrative in that way. But the other reason is because of the absolutely gutting
00:35:12
Speaker
revelation, discovery, that Alfonso is a complicated and deeply flawed man who became
00:35:25
Speaker
at least in part, so much of what he loathed and became a violent man who visited, who hid his wife. And I didn't learn that until my last trip to the island in 2020. And that, to me, that was a reality, a complicating
00:35:43
Speaker
complicating reality that had to be divulged and engaged with. And it just seemed that the most straightforward way to present it was just to, no mediation of third-person narration, just go straight to the source.
00:36:04
Speaker
We're going to break away from the main spine of the conversation for just a moment because there was late breaking news, so to speak, regarding Alfonso and Carmen, his wife, in the story. A day after Mike and I had spoken on the Mikes for this podcast, he finally was able to reach Alfonso for comment about the allegations that he physically abused Carmen. So here's the latest from Mike.
00:36:29
Speaker
I finally got in touch with Alfonso, which just took a little bit of effort, and I had to bring this to him, give him the opportunity to respond to the allegation that he had abused.
00:36:47
Speaker
his wife Carmen, that he had hid his wife Carmen over the course of their marriage. And he denied it outright, which I don't know if I should have been surprised or not. But he said, no, that is not true. We had one big argument once. And he said, people say things about me. People once accused me of being a communist because they opposed me politically. Apparently, they're now saying this about me.
00:37:13
Speaker
as well. So that's his response. And well, three siblings of... My sourcing on this was that three siblings of Carmen's independently told me that Alfonso had abused Carmen over a period of decades and that that was the cause of their separation, which occurred about a decade ago. And of course, as I write in the story, I brought this to Carmen directly and
00:37:42
Speaker
It was an awkward, difficult conversation. She clearly did not want to talk about it. I mean, this was not an allegation that she was looking to level. But when I confronted her with it in really straightforward language, she just demured. It's important to acknowledge that she did not say, yes, he did this to me. She demured and said there's some things that
00:38:11
Speaker
that are mine that I'm not going to talk about. And so she declined to deny it. I took that as confirmation, but one does not have to interpret it the same way I did. So that's what we're left with, the three siblings affirmatively leveling this accusation, Carmen not knocking it down, and also denying it outright.
00:38:35
Speaker
Yeah, early in the piece, when you're talking about his family and everything, and his father would be Alfonso's mother, and it was something that was very scary for all the children, especially him. And then he had that revelation at the end that he can't outrun that part of his history.
00:38:57
Speaker
All this despite the fact that he was so committed to nonviolence that he still couldn't outrun the violence that is essentially baked into the DNA sometimes. It used to be a philosophical question about individual responsibility or kind of the consequences of systemic oppression and the trauma that results.
00:39:22
Speaker
you know, a piece of journalism can't really settle that philosophical question about what to make of it. But I think about it. And, you know, we know that domestic violence was endemic in Hongaroa, in the colonial and naval era. And we know that domestic violence has
00:39:44
Speaker
become endemic in many colonized communities. It seems to be one of the consequences, one of the symptoms of colonialism for reasons that are beyond my ability to explain.
Colonialism and Endemic Violence
00:39:59
Speaker
So I do think of it in that context. This was a trauma in a context that he couldn't escape despite, as you say,
00:40:11
Speaker
the non-violent inclinations and kind of the temperamental gentleness that he also does have. Now, with respect to how a journalist might approach something of this nature or a historian, have you toggled the difference between those two given some of your background as a journalist and someone who studied history?
Journalism vs. History
00:40:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think that maybe it's a cop out, but I get to just say, this is a work of journalism, not a work of history. It's not a cop out, it's just reality. These are different disciplines that bring different things to a reader and to the public. They all seek out and impart different kinds of knowledge.
00:40:58
Speaker
For example, a work of history would have to deal more fully with the broader political context of what was going on at this time. I spend very little time in the piece dealing with the
00:41:13
Speaker
you know the both domestic and international pressure that the uh... administration president fray was under that made him and his administration more inclined to give off on so what he wanted you know that my piece does not attempt to make an assessment or an argument about you know the relative important relative importance of the you know factors on the island which is up on those movement and to the
00:41:39
Speaker
broader political context. This work of journalism takes place at a more human level. This is what these people did and lived. So I think that's kind of the difference. And I think a work of journalism like this that relies on a lot of firsthand accounts can provide a lot of the grist for future historical work.
00:42:03
Speaker
When it came to the writing of the piece, what did you identify as maybe a fundamental challenge of finding the right structure for it?
Narrative Style Choices
00:42:11
Speaker
One thing I wondered about and just had to make a decision about was, do you tell this as kind of an authoritative, almost omniscient, third-person narrator voice, or do you
00:42:25
Speaker
you know, do it in a more traditional, more traditional, more conventional journalistic mode of quoting, you know, quoting people, you know, all phones over calls today, stuff like that. It really came down to what I was able to say.
00:42:42
Speaker
And I chose the former method, right? It's just a narrative. There's no quoting in Alfonso telling me something in 2012 about something that happened in 1964. It's all extensively footnoted and fact-checking from these interviews, but I chose to just write it as a narrative.
00:43:00
Speaker
And what that means is that I excluded some things that just couldn't be absolutely nailed down. Whereas if I had been using the more conventional mode of presenting people's differing views of what occurred, well, then I could just do that. To the extent that some matter of fact was disputed, I could just give two people's views and move on. Because of choosing to write it in the mode that I did,
00:43:27
Speaker
stuff that was more disputed just got left out. But I had enough that was concrete enough that I could write the narrative I did in the mode I did and I just kind of the almost novelistic third person narrative voice. And one thing that enabled me to do that was
00:43:47
Speaker
coming upon this massive trove of contemporaneous documents in early 2020 that corroborated and expanded on a lot of the material I had and continued to get in interviews. I like that there's always so much under the hood of a piece of this nature. It's kind of like, I think John McPhee talks about this, or people who revere McPhee, myself included, who love to talk about structure, where he might have said, or someone might have said,
00:44:17
Speaker
that it's on us as the writers. We have all the scaffolding there and that helps us build the structure, but in the end, we got to pull all that stuff down so someone can enjoy the structure or the building without having known all the grit that went into the formulation of the structure itself.
00:44:39
Speaker
Yeah, and in terms of structure, the structure is a little bit funny in this piece because there's so much history to tell, right? I mean, we tell the colonial history, the post-Chile history or the post-Chile annexation history from 1888.
00:44:57
Speaker
And then we also tell a summary of the island's ancient history going back a thousand years. And so structurally, that was a little funny to figure out how to work that in. Hopefully it worked. I mean, I think one thing I'm happy is that we didn't
00:45:16
Speaker
we didn't try to do it chronologically. We didn't put it all in one place. It kind of peppered in where it seems relevant to the main narrative. So we wind up kind of going back in time three or four times during the piece. Yeah, I really like that where you put in sort of the ancient history and the population of the island from the Polynesians who found the island Tahitians or wherever the main
00:45:46
Speaker
pioneers of the island were and then how all the the clans and tribes had different portions of the island then of course it kind of devolves into a lot of feuds that were likely about their resources and everything and I really really love that that section where you also talk about the the famous statues so it gave the story to me like an extra level of elevation like where you choose to do which is pretty much right in the middle
00:46:11
Speaker
Yeah, thanks. So there were two things driving that. One was you just can't ask somebody to read 15,000 or 20,000 words about Easter Island and not tell them about the statues and not tell them about the ancient history. That's just one matter. The second convenient thing from a storytelling perspective is that part of Alfonso's strategy was
00:46:40
Speaker
to bring that history, bring that proud heritage to the fore in 1964 while he's organizing as a reference point for the community to say, we are the inheritors of this society and we're still here and this is still our island, inculcating a sense of identity and pride in his followers before they did this difficult thing. So that became a very natural place to then tell what that story actually was.
00:47:10
Speaker
Now for you, where is the
Growth in Writing and Reporting
00:47:13
Speaker
juice? Would you say it's in the reporting or the writing of a piece? Yeah, I don't know which one. I think definitely earlier in my career, I would definitely have said the reporting and researching. I think because it took me longer to figure out how to write in a way that felt somewhat competent.
00:47:37
Speaker
And now I feel like I have a little bit better handle on writing. I mean, not really trying to overstate anything there.
00:47:45
Speaker
maybe it feels a little more balanced to me. Certainly, you know, a decade ago when I was research, when I was first researching the story, the reporting and the research was the juice. And I really felt like I was, you know, making progress, you know, getting somewhere. And then the writing felt pretty difficult.
00:48:09
Speaker
and like a chore. So I think that's shifted just as I've written a lot more for a while to now where the writing itself feels better than it used to.
00:48:20
Speaker
Now, how have you gotten comfortable over the years having to have those uncomfortable conversations?
Asking Painful Questions
00:48:28
Speaker
And specifically what really triggers this for me is when you have to, towards the end of the piece when you're talking to Carmen about Rapu hitting her. And she, that's a really tense, hard conversation to have, especially as an outsider. So I wonder how you've danced with that.
00:48:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's awful. I mean, you just have to go straight at it. I mean, it's never comfortable, at least not for me. It's never comfortable. I mean, it's just never comfortable prying and doing what is really an indecent thing, which is walking into someone's home, walking into a stranger's home who's just invited you in and saying, nice to meet you. I'd like you to tell me about
00:49:16
Speaker
some of the most painful memories in your life and I'm going to record it. That's just an outrageous thing to do and I kind of never forget that or that never ceases to
00:49:29
Speaker
be a pretty salient part of the experience for me. But I don't know, it's the job. And weirdly, people are pretty gracious about it. Carmen was quite gracious about it. And we'll go with you, usually. She didn't kick me out of the house.
00:49:49
Speaker
Yeah, and amazingly, she goes on to explain to you this story. She's like, there's a sad story of water and survival here. And she goes on, maybe you can expand on what she told you, which is just so heavy with wisdom and the fact that she told to explain it to you in such a way, in that particular way, I just found incredibly moving.
00:50:16
Speaker
Yeah, I kind of deliberately just kind of put that there and didn't try to say much about it or explain it. And I don't think I have any special authority to explain what she meant any more than a reader does. But for me, it makes me think about the stakes of what happened there and the starkness of the change.
00:50:46
Speaker
What she's saying is that this was really about survival on a really deep level. It was about biological survival and it was about kind of existential survival and that the people wouldn't have survived in either sense without escaping from the regime they were living under and the conditions they were living in. I think another part of it is just that she knows, I think she intuits that
00:51:17
Speaker
you know, someone like me coming to this story, you know, almost any reader coming to the story just truly cannot grapple with what the life was like that she and Alfonso and another Rapa Nui people were living in the 40s, 50s and 60s before the movement. I mean,
00:51:39
Speaker
When in your life have you ever not had access to water or had to walk four miles to get it? I just have no reference for that. And I think she knows that, and I think she wants to impress that on me. And that's why she says, people always come and ask about the political history and the political events or the socio-political events, because maybe that's what we're prone to do in our context.
00:52:09
Speaker
And she's like, remember, we didn't even have water. That's the level that our struggle was at.
00:52:20
Speaker
Oh yeah, and then throw on top of that that in order for survival you make certain concessions maybe ethically or morally for yourself to survive and that might be hitching your caboose to, I don't know, people who might be abusive to reach a different level, a different plane of survival just to stay alive. That's what all rolled into that, at least for me when I was reading it.
00:52:46
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's another legitimate reading. And also that makes me think about the men of the old guard or the families of the old guard. It's not just the political leaders of the old guards, the families that follow them. They hitched themselves to the Navy. It was the way they knew to get ahead. And they came to believe that
00:53:13
Speaker
supporting the Navy, a lie in themselves with the Navy was not only useful, but right, as people tend to do. They tend to convince themselves that what they need to do is also the right thing to do. And that's why Alfonso forgave those men and those families. He was sympathetic to the situation they were in and the limited options they had available to them.
00:53:40
Speaker
Now, earlier when I stepped in for an aside to let Mike expand on Alfonso's situation, we kept talking for a few more minutes about how complicated it can be to have this question, what we call the bridge burning question, in your back pocket.
00:53:59
Speaker
when dealing with the principal figure of your story. As the image says, and you ask the question, you may never get to go to that well ever again.
00:54:12
Speaker
And that gets to a point we were talking about earlier where I asked you about how challenging it is to even ask Carmen about it. And then in here you have to, you know, just responsibly doing your reporting and diligence going to Alfonso for response. And here is someone who has done great things and is
00:54:37
Speaker
by most accounts an incredibly admirable person and granted these are allegations but it's still something that you know you have to like awkwardly bring to him and it's uncomfortable and I imagine this was probably one of the more uncomfortable phone calls you had to make over the course of the reporting for this piece. Yeah that's true and the reason I did it late is because I didn't want to do it. I tried to do this in person when I was on the island in 2020 just before the pandemic began and
00:55:07
Speaker
Alfonso was just very unavailable. It was bad luck. Alfonso was just very unavailable during the two weeks I was there. We had one very long interview, but then I was not able to have follow-up interviews with him during that reporting trip. Frankly, that may be part of the reason that I discovered this. There was a lot of time that I had been planning on spending with Alfonso that I wound up spending going around the village talking to whoever I could. And one of those people was Carmen's brother, who was the first person who told me about this.
00:55:35
Speaker
In any case, I had wanted to do this in person. It was not possible, because I just was never able to get FaceTime with him again. And then I just, yes, from a not professional standpoint, from a personal standpoint, just really didn't want to have this call. I am way too close to this subject. This is a person who I met when I was very young, not very young, but I just, you know, in my
00:55:56
Speaker
mid 20s. And I just have, you know, before I learned this, I had a very uncomplicated respect and admiration for Alfonso. And that's, and, frankly, discovering, discovering this this allegation against him, which I believed and continue to believe, was personally devastating. And I have very complicated feelings about him at this point.
00:56:25
Speaker
It was a strange call when I talked to him about this. I mean, I brought the allegation to him. He denied it. And then we were on the phone for 45 more minutes talking about the island and politics and the pandemic in a way that was very reminiscent of the long conversations we used to have on the island on his farm. So yeah, that's the kind of collision of personal feelings and professional obligations.
00:56:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's got to be tricky to like here's probably something that you've, you know, wanted to maybe talk to him or bring up earlier, but it's like if it's a kind of a bridge burning question in a lot of ways or could be the fact that you just said that you were able to speak for 45 minutes afterwards means like
00:57:10
Speaker
All right, there's a relationship there that's not easily fractured. But that said, it's like, here's this thing that's in the back of your pocket that you really have to ask about. But if you ask it too early in your reporting, you might totally lose him as a source for the story that you wanted to tell.
00:57:28
Speaker
So that is absolutely, I spoke to the personal reasons that I delayed this conversation, but what you just said was absolutely a practical calculation that was made because I had the expectation
00:57:44
Speaker
that you were just alluding to, that this would be a completely bridge-burning conversation. When I brought this up, that would be the end of my relationship with Afonso and of his participation in the story. Obviously, his participation story was quite important.
00:58:05
Speaker
So yes, there were practical considerations also that led me to do this late. And yeah, I did not predict how this conversation would go in any way correctly. I somehow imagined some kind of more introspective conversation with him about this. That was not a reasonable expectation. He just denied it. And I expected it to be a relationship and conversation ender. And that was not the case either. He denied it.
00:58:37
Speaker
moved on. So yes, that's how it shook out. Very nice. Well, Mike, it was a wonderful piece. And I really have to just commend you on a job well done about how you're able to sustain the story and the tension and the narrative drive behind it. So it's just a wonderful piece to read. So thank you so much for the work.
00:59:05
Speaker
Oh, thanks a lot, Brendan, for your interest and for the conversation. And where can people find you online and get more familiar with your work if they're not familiar with it already?
Mike's Work at Boston Magazine
00:59:15
Speaker
Most of my clips are at bostonmagazine.com, where I've been writing features for the past six years. Very nice. Excellent. And any social media to speak of?
00:59:26
Speaker
Oh, I have a very inactive Twitter account where I retweet links to some of my stories. It's at MJ Damiano. Fantastic. Well, thank you for the conversation as well, Mike. And like I said, amazing piece. Oh, thanks a lot.
00:59:51
Speaker
Well, that was great. Bit of a challenge, if I'm being honest, to stitch all of that together in the end. But we're professionals here at CNF Pod HQ. Well, thanks to Jonah, Sayward, Mike Damiano, and West Virginia Wesleyan's MFA in Creative Writing for the time and the support this year.
01:00:14
Speaker
I can't believe this is the final podcast of 2021. It's bonkers. I'm not going to do a year in review. Year in review. Year in review. But we had a nice year. Starting with episode 235 with Mason Gravelie. Gravelie. Jesus. What the?
01:00:35
Speaker
Way to end the year, BO. Way to end on a high note. We finished the year with a wonderful partnership with The Addivist. Made some extra pods. I think it was about 60 interviews this year, including the audio magazine. Well, it does not include the audio magazine. The audio magazine was something else. Anyway, listen.
01:00:56
Speaker
I don't have much to say other than thank you. Thank you for being along for this CNFing ride, through the good and the bad, my meanderings, my missteps, my incessant complaining, and bitching, my stumbles, my stammering. But before I get too emotional, I'll say this. Happy New Year, CNFers. And if you can't do, interview. See you next year.