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Episode 313: Katia Savchuk
310 Plays3 years ago
Katia Savchuk (@katiasav) is a freelancer journalist and wrote an incredible piece for The Atavist Magazine. We talk to her as well as editor-in-chief Seyward Darby.
Social: @CNFPod
Support: patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Finding Accountability in Fitness
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It would shake and see in efforts if you're looking to get into shape like I am, always. Ugh. Or someone to hold you accountable. Yeah, you're a personal trainer, am I right? Like, okay. If you're writing me the spotter, consider letting me help you out.
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If you're working on a book, an essay, a query, oh my god, a book proposal, geez, and you're ready to level up, consider dropping me a line, Brendan at BrendanOmero.com, and we'll start a dialogue. I'd be honored to help you get where you want to go.
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Speaker
And that hot call for submissions is that I already got one. It's crazy, world record, world record, world record guy. Codes, codes to live by, mantras, personal beliefs, rules, oppressive or liberating, who knows.
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Speaker
I love people who are so principled they live by a code. Captain Fantastic or even The Mandalorian. This is the way. Give me your best 2000 words or fewer essays about codes.
Creative Nonfiction Podcast Introduction
00:00:59
Speaker
Email Creative Nonfiction podcast at gmail.com with code in the subject line.
00:01:05
Speaker
simultaneous submissions are fine, but if you have your piece accepted by another publication or you're holding out for a more, quote, prestigious publication, let me know ASAP so I don't read and edit your piece because I even give notes to rejected essays. What a guy. For it to be, you know, if it's going to be taken elsewhere, it'll save me some time and a headache or two or three. I've been getting a lot of headaches lately, right? The brainstem, right? The form and magnum.
00:01:36
Speaker
Where are my biologists? You know where that is. Deadlines October 31st. This is the way. And we see the cabin and we see all these bizarre things in the cabin that are just like, you know, hair dye and stun gun and bunch of gloves and electronics. And it's just, I mean, super cluttered like a hoarder's home. Spray paint, you know, crime scene tape.
00:02:03
Speaker
a penis pump. I mean, there's all these things that you're like, what happened here?
00:02:13
Speaker
Oh, and this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the non-award nominated podcast where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going? It's that Atavistian time of the month. Oh my goodness. And how thankful am I that they're dropping their April story on a Friday
00:02:34
Speaker
Makes my life easier. It does. Oh man. And do we have a doozy? We have Katya Satchok.
Katya Satchok's Story Introduction
00:02:42
Speaker
She is here. Her piece is part thriller, part true crime, psychological thriller. What's real? What isn't?
00:02:50
Speaker
It's called a crime beyond belief. A Harvard trained lawyer staged bizarre home invasions, psychosomes, may have compelled him to do it, but in a case that became a public sensation, he wasn't the only one who lost touch with reality. Try not reading that.
00:03:09
Speaker
Got it? Spoilers ahead. We do talk about all the gritty details. So by all means, read this piece and then come in, sit around the table, pull up a, what do I have here? NOMO Non-Alcoholic Hazy IPA from Crux Fermentation Project at a Bend, Oregon. It's all right. It's an okay one. Athletic to me still makes the best. Athletic Brewing.
00:03:34
Speaker
free wave hazy IPA Yeah, okay, but they were not talking about. Oh God to use peace wild stuff. All right, this thing is like 20,000 words long long form more like short book form. Oh it's
00:03:54
Speaker
the kind of story that reads half that length. It's kind of like these intros. They're usually like four to six minutes, but they feel like eight to 12, am I right? I want to remind you to keep the conversation going on Elon Musk's Twitter at cnfpod or Zuck's Instagram at Creative Nonfiction Podcast. You can also support the podcast by becoming a paid member at patreon.com slash cnfpod. As I say, the show is free, but as sure as hell ain't cheap.
00:04:22
Speaker
members get transcripts, chances to ask questions to future guests, special pods. I also give away cool stuff. If my book proposal perchance lands a deal, yep, you guessed it, I'll be sharing my proposal so you can see what a winning proposal looks like. If it doesn't sell, pie to the face. Free ways to support the show, you can always leave a review or rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Spotify does ratings, they don't do written things, whatever.
00:04:49
Speaker
Best way to do it Apple podcast written reviews for a little podcast that could go a long way Towards validating it for the way we're seeing effort No, no reviews to to uh to to read But if you do publish one and I see it and I always check every morning always checking I'll be sure to read it right here man right in this spot
00:05:14
Speaker
Be sure to head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly, up to 11, Rage Against the Algorithm, CNF and monthly newsletter. Say that. Three times fast, first of the month, no spam, as far as I can tell. You can't beat it. Before we get to Katya, we're going to pull up a chair and talk to lead editor, editor in chief, Sayward Darby.
00:05:38
Speaker
So it's just a really complicated twisty piece. And definitely one where structure was not a given from go.
00:05:47
Speaker
We riff on their incredible representation there being out of us during the awards season. Okay, National Magazine Award. There's another piece from Annalise Jolly and Zahara Gomez. That's up for a James Beard Award. Lots of stuff. Madison Kroll, who had the Invisible Kid story. These are interviews you can hear in the CNF pod feed. In any case, nominated for big awards.
The Nature of Awards in Journalism
00:06:15
Speaker
Awesome stuff.
00:06:16
Speaker
But I think we can all agree that once you reach a certain point in your life, you realize awards are largely bullshit. But to even be on the playing field with the finalists, with the heavy hitters, is pretty much a win unto itself. There's so much subjectivity involved that if you get to the shortlist IMO, you've already won. Sure, it feels nice to win things. But for instance, I won a gift card a few months ago to Prince Puckler's. It's an ice cream shop.
00:06:46
Speaker
Yeah, I know. It was a raffle. It's not like I won it or earned it. It was totally random, but I still won, damn it. And since I'm vegan, I had to give the card away, but I still won, damn it. No one can take that away from me. So National Magazine Awards, same thing. Don't bother hitting the skip button, I swear, because right now we're getting into it. We'll say we're Darby, okay? Okay?
00:07:22
Speaker
Well, I think a fun place to for us to start this this round might be to maybe just Get a sense of what the award season has been like for you and Adam is nominated for Several, you know finalists are shortlisted for several. It's got to be pretty exciting for you
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah, we've had a really good year on the awards front. Let's see. Two stories in particular have just been gangbusters for us. And one of them is A Feast for Lost Souls, the author and videographer of which you interviewed, Annelise Jelly and Zahara Gomez-Luchini.
00:08:00
Speaker
And there are pieces about women who cook for the disappeared in Mexico. They search for their bodies, but they also cook meals for them to honor them. And let's see, it was a finalist for a national magazine award. It won an overseas press club prize. It's a finalist for a dart award for the coverage of trauma. And it's also a finalist for a James Beard award in food writing, which is really cool.
00:08:26
Speaker
And then the other piece is Invisible Kid by Maddie Kroll. And I can't remember. Did you interview Maddie? Had we started doing this by then? OK, cool. Yeah. So right, right. I remember now when we started. So Maddie's piece, and you interviewed Maddie, is about a young man named Adolfo Davis who was sentenced to life without parole at the age of 16 and was supposed to kind of be this test case to, not test case, but
00:08:55
Speaker
Anyway, he was supposed to get out of prison earlier because of legal reforms than he actually ultimately did. And the day he got out was the day that we went into COVID lockdown, like as a nation. And so it's this really gorgeous profile of somebody who's really had to come up against some impossible circumstances.
00:09:15
Speaker
And that was also a finalist for a National Magazine Award and is now a finalist for a Livingston Award. And this is actually Maddie's, I believe, second year in a row being nominated for a Livingston. Last year it was for a piece in Virginia Quarterly Review. So yeah, we're super excited about how this has all been going. And those two stories are just so deserving of all the attention they've been getting.
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah, I'll never forget in Maddie's piece how when she when she described Adolpho getting out of prison and he was at a gas station a convenience store and he was just like blown away by you know just like the candy bars and like he just like loaded up on Gatorade and stuff like that.
00:09:58
Speaker
The most simple things but you just got a sense of like Here he is with his newfound freedom And he just like it was just such a touching Scene of like loading up on this junk food that he just missed for however many years I mean it's like 15 plus years or something
00:10:15
Speaker
Right. Yeah, totally. I'm such a big fan of profiles of people who don't usually get profile treatment, if that makes sense. I feel like profiles are often people who are high profile or have some
00:10:33
Speaker
crazy research or I don't know, he's just a really good example of someone who if you spend time to really get to know him and his story, all these incredibly human and relatable moments pop out. And I think that Maddie just did a lovely job of doing that and really took the time to find those details.
00:10:54
Speaker
And it's a great narrative. There is a lot of – there's a propulsive quality to it trying to figure out what's going to happen to this guy as he's fighting against this, in my opinion, incredibly unjust tradition in the United States of putting juveniles away.
00:11:12
Speaker
for life without possibility of parole. But he
Profiles of Trauma and Hope
00:11:18
Speaker
just really, I don't want to say pops, but he really just shines as a character, I think. And yeah, Maddie just did such a tremendous job.
00:11:26
Speaker
Well, the piece had such a ring of this American life thing, which is very much not a billionaire, not of these charismatic, you know, type A, super successful, visible people. It was very grounded in an American life, which it had that ring to it, too.
00:11:49
Speaker
I think that's a really, really spot on comparison. He very much has. In a lot of ways, we think of what does it mean to have an American life? And for a lot of people, it can mean a lot of trauma and violence and injustice because of the way our systems are structured. But there was also a lot of beauty in his story of the people who supported him and gave him chances and loved him.
00:12:19
Speaker
I don't know, just a really special story and I'm really glad we were able to tell it. I see. And with Katya's piece this month, you know, this one's a, let's see, a month ago we had one that was around 8,000 words. It was shorter for an Advent story. Now this one was coming in at like 20K roughly. And so we're talking like a big jump in word count, which means really a big jump in what it means to
00:12:43
Speaker
tease out the tension and keep people reading for that long because you're going to sit with it for a while. In terms of this story, what really struck you about it when it came across your desk and then we can start unpacking how you keep people reading for something that is a very meaty story?
00:13:02
Speaker
Totally. Yeah, this story is several years in the making. I think Katya told me she looked it up today and we first started corresponding about it almost exactly four years ago, which is crazy. But this story about this
00:13:18
Speaker
kidnapping that police in Vallejo, California initially said was a hoax. You know, it was definitely the kind of thing that was sensational at the time. It was, you know, in the national news, the story wound up on things like Dateline and Nancy Grace and all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, we're not the first to tell the story, but what Katya has done here is just gone so deep
00:13:43
Speaker
into what happened, who was involved, and how so many things went wrong, but then ultimately were also made right. And I mean, just so much time and effort. I mean, she talked to everybody she could think to talk to. She read so many documents. Our fact checker said that she kind of feels like Katya's immune to error because she was such a perfectionist.
00:14:06
Speaker
And so, you know, there was a version of this story, I think, that kind of took the more sensational pieces of it and really front loaded that stuff. But we kind of wanted to take the readers on a revelatory journey
00:14:21
Speaker
if that makes sense, where we were going along with some of the characters in the piece as they encountered information and had to process it and decide what was true, what wasn't. And so there's a little bit of like puzzle piecing that the piece itself shows happening. And so the reader is like partaking in that.
00:14:41
Speaker
And I think even if this is a case you've heard of, if you, I don't know, read about it in People or caught the victims of the kidnapping, it was a home invasion and kidnapping on The View or something like that, there's just so much here because it's not just about the one crime, it's about at least one other
Media Coverage of Crime Stories
00:15:01
Speaker
crime, potentially a series of crimes. And it's also just about the ways in which a range of people over several years
00:15:10
Speaker
didn't really have a great grasp on reality in one way or another. They kind of believed what they wanted to believe or looked past things. Or in the case of the perpetrator of the home invasion who Katya was able to talk to at length. He's behind bars, but was able to talk to him at length. He was someone who is someone who struggles with really intense mental illness.
00:15:35
Speaker
You know she talked to him about what what that meant and for him what it means to lose a grasp on reality to regain it to lose it again. So just a really complicated twisty piece and definitely one where structure was not a given from go.
00:15:53
Speaker
When Katya, who's just a great writer, that was never a question. When she turned in the first draft, I spent a lot of time kind of staring at it and writing notes on Post-its and trying to think about how can we make this because we knew it was going to be long. There was basically no question that it was going to be quite long.
00:16:12
Speaker
And so how can we place things, organize them, order them in the story such that the reader never feels like, okay, I kind of feel like I have everything I came for. Why are there still 10,000 words left? And so figuring out that structure where things didn't really feel front loaded,
00:16:33
Speaker
you know, was was I think maybe the most important decision we had to make. And it was I mean, honestly, I'm just I'm just a nerd about this stuff. But like, I think that stuff is really fun trying to figure out, you know, how to not just organize things, but pace things. And I think pace was just really, really crucial here.
00:16:51
Speaker
And speaking of not knowing reality and believing things, taking things at face value, there's the element of the cops reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle and the relationship that is teased out with law enforcement, how sometimes you just take what they say at face value.
00:17:14
Speaker
And sometimes you got to do that to just still maintain the relationship with the police department if you're covering them so frequently that oftentimes that they are the mouthpiece and you can't really, I don't know, challenge that very much. So anytime that a reporter is brought into a story as a character, I always love reading that dynamic and how a reporter is writing about a reporter in a story like this.
00:17:37
Speaker
Yeah, and Henry Lee, and he's such an interesting subject, and he also talked to Katya Link and had some, I think, smart things to say about the ways in which, I would never say that he was taken by the police. I think it was more, and I think he makes the point, the events in the story for the most part went down in 2015, and he says, we were kind of just at the beginning of a reckoning about law enforcement, well,
00:18:05
Speaker
Some people were just at the beginning of a reckoning about law enforcement in the country and how to approach them as reporters. And I think the other thing that's really important to remember here is that how often do you hear
00:18:22
Speaker
cops publicly say something like, we think this kidnapping was a hoax. And Lee points out, he's like, that's just an insane thing to claim and have it not be true. And so that's definitely like a tension in the piece of like, once you know everything, you're like, how could they ever say that it was a hoax? But if you're on the receiving end of that information and you hear
00:18:45
Speaker
the police calling something a hoax and you're like, I've never heard the police say anything remotely like this about a case like this. There is, I don't know if we would call it a biased assumption or a human assumption or something where you think, well, that has to be true, right? Why else would they claim something so outlandish?
00:19:07
Speaker
And that's obviously, you know, a flaw, but it's an interesting one because I do think that there are moments in the story where, you know, as journalists, certainly, you know, you can take a step back and say, OK, well, yeah, I guess I get why that might happen. And especially when you're a beat reporter and sorry, my dog just started. No, Maggie, that's not the time for a squeaky toy. Not the time.
00:19:31
Speaker
She just really wants to be on the podcast. I love it when dogs hop on the pod. It happens every now and again. It's always welcome. She just sometimes, when I'm talking like this, she'll just go for her squeaky toys. And she's like, I'm here. Don't forget me. Anyway.
00:19:46
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, I think Lee is like a very interesting and I think I should also say this like he's a lens to into the way media covered this story more broadly because the media just as like an institution was also really important. It wasn't just him. It wasn't just the San Francisco Chronicle. You know, it was again like the date lines and Nancy Grace's and other, you know,
00:20:08
Speaker
organs of journalism, I guess we could call Nancy Grace journalism, we could maybe put that aside. But media wise, you know, seeing someone who, you know, does seem like a very, like, well intentioned, you know, thoughtful guy, you know, as the lens into some media coverage that was not so thoughtful about it. And it's always nice, too, to have, you know, a journalist kind of speak
00:20:37
Speaker
frankly, about, you know, errors made or, you know, bad assumptions followed, you know, not that not that he as far as I know, not that he ever, you know, like maligned or demeaned the subjects or the victims of the home invasion, but, you know, certainly took a credulous approach to to what the police were saying.
00:20:57
Speaker
Now, several years ago at this point, probably it was 20, probably 2016-ish, I remember I had pitched this story to you for Atavist about this old cartoonist who subsequently is coming up close to 100 years old, he's still alive. His equine cartoon is in his son, Remy, and how he's just had an extraordinary life, like lived through the Nazi occupation in France and everything. And I remember you and Jonah were
00:21:27
Speaker
a little bit interested but it was I remember you coming at me like there this feels like there should be a big fish element to it and you like brought that movie sensibility to it which I thought was really intriguing and I bring that up only to say that in this piece there was the gone girl element that was dropped into this piece and it made me think like oh I wonder if say we're brought the gone girl element
00:21:49
Speaker
to at least get that on Katya's radar because there is that cinematic thing and just a tie-in to that to that movie in that book. So I was wondering maybe you could speak to that and how sometimes you use those movies as a way to crack the code of a piece that's coming across your desk.
00:22:05
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I mean, that's a great question. In this case, no, absolutely not. I didn't have to bring up Gone Girl because the police were the ones who brought up Gone Girl. They were the ones who were telling this woman's family before she had been returned by the kidnapper, you know, we think this is being faked. You should go read or watch Gone Girl, which had just come out a couple of months prior, the David Fincher adaptation of the Flynn book.
00:22:30
Speaker
They were like, you know, you can go understand what your daughter, sister, whatever like might be doing in this case by reading this fiction. And then Nancy Grace called her like the real life gone girl or something along those lines. You know, in that case, the story kind of like the cinematic story was
00:22:47
Speaker
almost part of the problem was part of the problem, right? Because people had in their heads this wildly popular story, you know, that's a very, you know, I mean, it's novelistic and cinematic for a reason, right? Because it does seem pretty far-fetched, extreme, whatever. But people looked at the situation and for whatever reason decided, okay, we actually think the thing that's happening in real life sounds a whole lot like this thing in a book, in a movie. And so we're gonna start calling it that.
00:23:15
Speaker
And that obviously did a tremendous disservice to the couple at the heart of this entire story. And so it's funny because you're absolutely right. Oftentimes when I'm thinking through
00:23:29
Speaker
uh, stories and thinking, you know, okay, how could we kind of, you know, make this more cinematic? And sometimes thinking of a comparison, um, can be really helpful. Um, just, you know, okay, well, what makes that cinematic, that version of cinematic storytelling work? Um, you know, in the case of Big Fish, obviously this relationship between
00:23:46
Speaker
the father and the son. It's so funny. I actually don't even like big fish very much, but it is a nice, very colorful depiction of a father-son relationship. But yeah, no, this case was totally different. The gone girl element was already there and was highly problematic. And so I've been trying to think what
00:24:10
Speaker
as you were asking the question, I was like, okay, if not, obviously not Gone Girl, but you know, what movie would I kind of compare the story as Katya?
00:24:20
Speaker
put it together like how would I I don't know like what movie does it make me think of this kind of like unraveling of an insane criminal situation I'm gonna have to think about that for a second maybe by the end of us talking I'll have a good comparison yeah I know it doesn't run backwards but in a sense because it's a slow exposure like a Polaroid coming into focus it kind of makes me think of memento but
00:24:43
Speaker
in a sense like that as things are starting to things that are the reality is questioned and of course things are starting to come into focus things are blurring it has that element though not running chronologically backwards or anti chronologically
00:24:57
Speaker
Yeah, no, but I think describing it as like a Polaroid coming into focus is absolutely right. That's definitely the vibe we were going for in working on the story from a structural standpoint and kind of building tension and whatnot and doing some jump cuts and everything along those lines. We definitely wanted it to feel like the reader would start to see things clearly at the same time some of the subjects in the story are starting to see things.
00:25:25
Speaker
clearly. And then some of them never, I mean, like the main, you know, the guy who, Matthew Muller, who, you know, is now convicted of this crime, you know, he doesn't necessarily see it yet. Maybe he never will because of, you know, the mental illness that he's afflicted with. But then there are some other really interesting questions that she gets into at the end about how there are other people in, affected by the events of what happened in 2015, who still have questions about what did or didn't happen.
00:25:54
Speaker
And this kind of question of trying to grasp reality and how, you know, even when things might seem settled to some parties involved in a situation, to others reality can still feel somewhat out of reach. And so the Polaroid, I don't know, it's not quite in focus for everyone involved.
00:26:15
Speaker
And something I've noticed over the course of several Atavist stories, and this goes back to even the very first time we collaborated with Scott Eden's piece, even with Bill Donahue, certainly
Reporters in the Narrative
00:26:29
Speaker
Katia's, and several others. Oftentimes, through the first two thirds, maybe the first three quarters, is often pretty third person, if not exclusively. And then usually in that final chapter or the final quarter, or even maybe just a little epilogue,
00:26:45
Speaker
We often see the reporter come in. This happened with Mike Damiano, too. What is it about that particular structuring of, now we're going to introduce, the reporter's going to kind of come into the story at this point. What is it about that that appeals to you?
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. I'd never thought of it so much as a pattern. But I guess, yeah, it is to a certain extent, and on maybe a certain type of story. But I feel like, especially when you're talking about the types of stories we do that introduce a lot of these gigantic questions, right? And when you get to the end of something like that, and there's a bit of a, what does it all mean?
00:27:27
Speaker
And I think sometimes the reporter can be such a helpful prism for starting to tie some of those things together. And I'd like to think by the time you do get to the last
00:27:42
Speaker
passage of a piece, our writers have really earned the trust of readers so that when they do become the prism for kind of thinking about the story and its totality, that the reader almost feels like, oh, good. OK, now they're here. No, they're talking to me. And it definitely doesn't work in every story. And I wouldn't ever want to put it in every story. But I do feel like there are, I don't know,
00:28:09
Speaker
a not insignificant number of our stories where I kind of want to know what the reporter thinks, or I kind of want to see the reporter vis-a-vis some of these people. I mean, in this case, Kati had talked to Matthew Muller over the course of four years, and I do kind of want to see her
00:28:25
Speaker
talking with him at that point. So I definitely don't think it's a conscious decision where we sit down and say, is this the kind of piece? We're at the end. We're going to go somewhat into first person. And certainly there are stories where there's some first person throughout, and there are other stories where some first person comes in much earlier in a piece or something like that. But yeah, some of these kind of
00:28:48
Speaker
pieces that feel like they have some lingering threads, some loose ends, sometimes having the writer more just frontally there to navigate that, I feel like can be a good way to wrap things up.
00:29:06
Speaker
Yeah, I what I kind of like in it too is in a kind of like in a in a whodunit or anything and at the very end it's like Hercule Puro is gonna come in he's gonna kind of sum everything up he's gonna answer some questions and it's just like kind of swooping in and it's like okay it's relieving some of the pressure it's it's bringing some new light it almost it grounds it in a way that I I feel like I'm like
00:29:32
Speaker
I feel like that's the best way I can put it. I feel like my feet are back on the ground when the reporter comes in to kind of show the work and show some interaction and raise some questions that sometimes we don't even know the answers to, if that makes any sense. Yeah, no, it absolutely does.
00:29:49
Speaker
Obviously there's still some people who say, you know, don't bring yourself as a journalist into, you know, magazine reporting, you know, unless it's like a first-person story of some kind. And I don't know, like I just, I feel like when you're talking about these really kind of rangy pieces, you know, you're right. There's like a feeling of like, I want it to, I want it to feel grounded in the end. And the reality of life is that there's not always this like decisive conclusion.
00:30:17
Speaker
you know, like there are always going to be some things, especially when you're trying to tackle every element of something. There are going to be some pieces that feel a little loose or feel, you know, a little up in the air. And I do think that like having the writer be the thing that helps like anchor, at least, you know, asking those questions, acknowledging those questions, whatever it may be, can be, I mean, I like it as a reader.
00:30:38
Speaker
And I also think, I will say, I think it's something that you do get more of in podcasting because obviously in podcasting, you're hearing the writer, there's just writer. I mean, yes, I guess writer, but host. You much more feel like you are in some kind of like relationship with them.
00:30:56
Speaker
you know, because you're just kind of like letting them into your head. And, you know, Serial obviously did this, where, you know, the reporter themselves becomes like a way for listeners to, you know, have access to certain questions or certain issues or whatever it may be. And like, as far as I'm concerned, it, you know, it can work in writing as well. It doesn't just have to be, you know, audio driven.
00:31:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's... I hate the first person stuff where it'll start off like, you know, Matthew McConaughey was eating steak tartare and I walked up to him like, shook his hand and like, oh, you had an embrace and I'm like, oh, this is gross. I hate that stuff so, so much. Me too.
00:31:44
Speaker
But we don't have to worry about that with the Adamus stuff because you guys handle that so well Although now I feel like I'm just gonna like at some point do that just to make you angry I'm gonna like put it in a draft and say word. What is this?
00:32:03
Speaker
Very nice. Well Sayward, always a pleasure. This was great. And yeah, this piece is a very, it's intense. So I'm excited for people to get to dig into it. And of course, unpack it here with us and also with Katya, who's coming up shortly. Awesome. Thank you so much.
00:32:35
Speaker
Now Batting, Batting Batting, Katya, such a joke. Here's a little more about Katya. She's a freelance magazine writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, a proud generalist. She's often drawn to stories about inequality, psychology, wrongdoing, and mysteries of all kinds.
00:32:55
Speaker
recently she had a talk of the town piece in the new yorker called the vlog of war about Volodymyr Zolkin a freelance videographer who broadcasts on a youtube channel about information about the war in ukraine katya was born in ukraine and sent out uh recently a well not really like beginning uh beginning of the
00:33:19
Speaker
So several weeks ago at this point, a tweet that went viral that helped get her 94-year-old grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, and her father, Katya's father, out of Kiev and out of Ukraine. I'll link up to the story. It is bonkers.
00:33:38
Speaker
It gives you some hope that social media has some validating value. It's wild, wild stuff. So we talk a little bit about that. We also talk about tape recorders and structure and organization and dance and top chef and empathy. She earned a master's at the Columbia School of Journalism and earned a BA from Harvard. We have a term for people like that where I grew up on the south coast of Massachusetts, wickets not.
Katya Satchok's Background and Work
00:34:04
Speaker
So grab some Dunkin, throw your litter out the window, add some unsuspecting Rube on the side of the pike and have a listen to Katya.
00:34:19
Speaker
I'm forgetting to hit record. Have you ever had that happen? Like when you're out reporting using a recorder or something, you're like, oh, yeah, we've been talking for like five minutes. I forgot about this. Definitely. I always I try to just have my iPhone as a backup now.
00:34:35
Speaker
Just in case because it's happened too many times. And also on the phone, I use like this Olympus in ear recorder, and you have to make sure to plug it into the right jack on the recorder. And if you put it into the ear jack instead of the mic jack, then all you have is like a great recording of you typing. And like the faintest murmur of something else that you like try to hear but you can't so yeah, don't recommend that.
00:35:02
Speaker
Yeah. I've, I've heard of this Olympus thing. I described this a little more. Yeah. Are we getting to the recommendation early? Is that where you're going to recommend? No, but it's a, it's a good recommendation. A friend reported recommended it to me. It's, I don't know, you know, the model or anything, but it's just a little earbud, you know, like from headphones, but it's just one and you plug it in, you put it into your ear, then you put over ear headphones on over that.
00:35:28
Speaker
You plug the little earbud into a recorder and you press, um, you just press record. And I don't really understand how the technology works, but somehow it, you know, records what you hear on the phone. And I've just heard my, you know, a lot of horror stories about table call and stuff like that. So it's never failed me.
00:35:49
Speaker
Oh, that's cool. That's good to know. Yeah. Speaking of, you know, voice recorders and using those like I'm actually working on an essay about like the pros and cons of voice recorders and tape recorders and everything because there's the there's a lot of old school reporters like only real old school like with my hero of mine John McPhee who
00:36:08
Speaker
never uses them at all. He thinks even though they capture everything, they're not selective. So they're getting everything. And he trusts that when he's taking notes, he's getting the best stuff. And of course, it's just what you're capturing. But at the same time, I argue sometimes that your penmanship can fail you.
00:36:33
Speaker
And by not capturing everything, you're not getting the exact thing down 100%. It's such a conundrum, because I'm very romantically tied to the idea of just pencil and notebook. But at the same time, the recorder, it does afford you the luxury of being able to, OK, I know this thing is going to capture everything. But then there's a technology thing. The batteries could die. The thing could just break. So I don't know. I don't know. How do you feel about it?
00:37:00
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think I could operate like that because I'd be too focused on, you know, what am I missing? Get that down. Remember that, you know, I'd like to know that there's a machine going in the background. You know, sometimes you don't know what's going to be important until later. Also, I feel like you interview other people, you learn other things and you kind of connect dots that you wouldn't have otherwise.
00:37:19
Speaker
So I feel I always record and take notes, you know, I'm taking notes on usually, you know, the ambient details, you know, what someone's expression looks like, what's on the wall.
00:37:31
Speaker
those kinds of things. And so, and I trust the, you know, the machine to be getting down the exact quotes. I feel like if I were just trying to get down with someone was saying, then I wouldn't be able to also, you know, I'm sort of looking at them and nodding, but I'm also taking note of, you know, I don't know the little knickknacks they have around the house or just telling details like that at the same time.
00:37:51
Speaker
Oh, for sure. I'll never forget a long, long time ago when I was using a recorder and just talking to a horse trainer. And just in the background, it was like you could hear Blue Jays chirping and calling. And that ended up just being a little detail that I was able to kind of fold in to that particular chapter I was writing.
00:38:14
Speaker
And it just added that extra layer of flavor that I wouldn't have been able to get if I was just scribbling like crazy, trying to keep up with what Nick was saying and them worrying about that. But that recording, I didn't know there was a Blue Jay there, but you heard it in the background. They're like, oh, that's cool. There's another detail. This thing was kind of like just a trolling net. It was getting everything for me so I could focus a little more on the conversation at hand. I think recorders helped me listen more. I know some people check out, but they actually helped me listen more.
00:38:43
Speaker
I agree. And I mean, there's obviously so much to be said for interviewing in person and just, you know, the trust that's built, the things you notice. But I also
00:38:55
Speaker
There is something I enjoy about doing interviews over the phone because I usually try to type in real time. So, you know, and first of all, that kind of saves you time. I also, I use something called pair note. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but it's a pretty cool tool that basically I do, you know, the recording that I mentioned where I have an earbud or an in-ear Olympus earbud recorder recording onto a tape recorder. Then I'm also typing at the same time in this tool called pair note.
00:39:25
Speaker
Then once I'm done recording, I can import the audio and I link them. So then you can press play in pair note and you hear that part of the tape. So that really helped with fact checking this story. It's, you know, similar to like Otter or Temi, but with those you usually input, my understanding is you input the recording
Tools and Techniques in Journalism
00:39:45
Speaker
And then it kind of does the auto transcription for you, but you know, it still leaves a lot to be desired. I think to get to the, you know, what you would do if you were typing yourself, but with pair note, you're transcribing, you upload the audio, you click in the text and you hear that tape. So I love that tool.
00:40:02
Speaker
You know, another thing too I thought would be kind of fun to ask you about is, so recently, I know Top Shelf has been on for like 18, 19 seasons, but my wife and I just discovered it on Peacock. And we live in Oregon, so the latest season that's on there is Portland, so it's been kind of cool just to see Oregon represented.
00:40:23
Speaker
And two of the judges at one point, one of them said, you know, your plate has to have like authorship. And another one's like, you have to like edit your plate. And I was just like, oh, this is cool. Like how cooking and writing are kind of coming together here and how you have to have that voice and authorship and how you have to think about what to leave in and what to leave out. And so I always look to cooks as a really inspiring way to improve my writing.
00:40:50
Speaker
So maybe for you, maybe it's not cooking, but are there any other artistic media that really help you become a better writer? I listened to your recent interview, I think, with another activist author who was talking about rock climbing, I think. And that would be Niall Capello of episode 275 fame. Okay, back to Katya.
00:41:14
Speaker
I honestly, I haven't thought about it too much. I mean, I do love dancing, you know, very much as a hobby and not in any way professionally, but it's something I've been doing for a long time just, just for fun. And I do think
00:41:31
Speaker
You know, there are lots of elements here, especially people who take it really seriously. It's, you know, it's practicing, it's just getting better over time and trusting that, you know, kind of like the Ira Glass quote, like, you know, you won't, you know, if you have good taste, you won't be, you know, meeting your own standards early on. And it's, you really just have to plow through that and get to the point where you, you know, get a little bit closer and a little bit closer. But what I've been thinking about lately is actually
00:41:59
Speaker
the sense of play that I get from dancing. Like I approach it from just a total place of this is just for fun, you know, just to unwind. And I don't have anything wrapped up in it around, you know, I want to be the best. I want to like, you know, I want this dance to be perfect. There's nothing like that. So I've been trying to, I mean, I've been getting better about it, but I've been trying to see like, what are ways that I can bring some more of that sense of play
00:42:25
Speaker
into work that you definitely start out with and have as a student, but sometimes can get lost along the way. Because a lot of the work is really serious and important. And depending on the story, people's lives, you're writing about real people.
00:42:42
Speaker
And a lot of the stories I've tended to do have been on pretty serious topics. But just that sense of play, whether it's, you know, at the sentence level or free writing or just playing, you know, feeling a sense of play when you're coming up with ideas, that's something I'm working on. I'm working on playing.
00:43:02
Speaker
Oh, for sure. That is such an important point to underscore. I'm so glad you brought that up. When your kids are even in middle school, maybe even in high school, too, when you were told to write a story, and if you kind of gravitated towards that element of class, you just wanted to have fun with it and write the thing, and you didn't care if it stuck or won an award or all these things that we attach our prestige and status to. And you just did it because it was a fun, creative outlet.
00:43:31
Speaker
And I think it's so great to hear you say that because we often times get so earnest with our writing, with our work that it's great to remember that this is something we get to do. And yeah, there are certain subject matters where you have to kind of put the play hat aside because it is serious.
00:43:52
Speaker
at the same time there are ways where you can be like okay this is an art we can be unbridled and maybe just try to have some fun with it because uh we often we just attach like too much doom and gloom to it you know the tortured writer so it's great to hear you talk about play i love that
00:44:09
Speaker
And I was one of those people who, you know, started in middle school on the middle school newspaper, you know, paw prints and all through high school. So definitely sort of just, you know, try to tap in as much as I can to that spirit.
00:44:26
Speaker
Yeah, and lately, you know, of course, Leon Musk is in the news with everything in the Twitter acquisition. A lot of people have strong opinions on it one way or the other, whether it's deleting Twitter altogether or just like putting themselves in some sort of a social media holding pattern.
Impact of Social Media on Journalism
00:44:45
Speaker
So what do you make of it right now?
00:44:49
Speaker
I don't think I'm the most person to talk about that right now. I've been so deep in the story. We just closed it yesterday that I've been reading about it, but I'm not like a big Twitter person anyway. I'm on Twitter and I feel like it's a place where journalists hang out. So I like going there and seeing what people I admire are thinking, what opportunities there are. Obviously, sometimes from a news perspective, it's a great spot.
00:45:17
Speaker
I haven't been, I don't think I have an opinion because I've just been so deep in this story.
00:45:24
Speaker
Oh yeah, well that makes sense, and we'll certainly get to that in just a moment, but the Musk thing was a bit of a segue for me because, you know, you say we're cheering this with me, it's like you put out a tweet on Twitter that got your father and your grandmother out of Ukraine. It made me think of how toxic Twitter is and how it
00:45:47
Speaker
It sucks, but if you weren't on there and you were able to put out this call, that got your grandmother and father out of Central Ukraine. I don't know. There's the utility right there in its value.
00:46:01
Speaker
Yeah, that was definitely something I did not expect to happen, that, you know, soon after the war in Ukraine started, and I was born in Kiev, and I immigrated as a refugee, technically, when I was four. I, you know, just sort of fell into doomscrolling for a while and was in touch with my dad
00:46:23
Speaker
who lives in Kiev with my grandmother who's 94 and a Holocaust survivor. And it seemed like they weren't even interested in leaving just because it was completely not feasible. You know, she couldn't wait. She couldn't travel on a train for like 12 hours. She couldn't stay in traffic for days as people were doing. She was not very mobile. So they just were stuck and there were airstrikes going on and it was just
00:46:50
Speaker
very scary, and I asked my dad, what can I do to help? Is there anything I can do? And he said, no, there's nothing you can do. But I just decided to at least tweet. I know I have a pretty good network out there, and maybe somebody just has some resources. So I put this tweet out and said, my grandma and dad are trapped. They can't get out. My dad also has a disability, so he can't drive. That's another thing. And it just really went viral, which
00:47:18
Speaker
actually restored my faith in humanity a little bit during that time. And I got so many tips and so many offers of support. And I just spent a few days fielding those. And one of them was a German journalist in Kiev.
00:47:33
Speaker
And he happened to know the Klitschko brothers, who are famous boxers. One of them is the mayor of Kiev. And they decided to step in and kind of escort them essentially to Hungary and then to Germany. And sort of friends of theirs, a local rabbi, a local businessman, have kind of been helping them from there. And they are
00:47:56
Speaker
safe now and you know pretty still obviously devastated just to be displaced at that age it's really hard to see what's happening and for me it's been really hard to see all the people left behind because this is you know just to watch the suffering unfold while feeling relieved just for their situation but
00:48:16
Speaker
It was kind of a one-off solution. So they got lucky, but it was definitely social media working for good in this case.
00:48:28
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'm very happy that your family was able to get out. But yeah, I can sense, and you've talked about the mixed feelings of it, given that you were able to get them out, but so many people are still behind in suffering and dying. It's just deeply tragic. Yeah, and it's been hard to not... No, I did write a few stories.
00:48:56
Speaker
sort of in between working on on the side of his piece, but it has been hard at least so far not to just be able to run immediately and cover things, you know, partly with having a one year old at home.
00:49:14
Speaker
You know, I don't know that I ever would have gone necessarily to the front line. You know, I'm not a conflict reporter, but maybe certainly to the border. And I do I do still hope to work on all longer stories about Ukraine, too. But I did manage to do at least some just from from here in the early days. Yeah. Well, there's the the vlog of war talk of the town piece that you had recently in The New Yorker, too. So how did you arrive at that?
00:49:40
Speaker
Yeah, that was, as I mentioned, I was just kind of doom scrolling early on and kind of refreshing the news. And I do speak fluent Russian, so I was able to go on, you know, some of the telegram channels. And one of them was the Ukraine, one of the Ukrainian ministries started this telegram channel that was
00:50:01
Speaker
just basically a running feed of what they said were prisoners of war, just from the front line. So they were, you know, they sort of framed it as, you know, we're, look, we're treating prisoners of war well, you know, send this message back to, you know, your families in Ukraine to other, you know, soldiers in Ukraine to really tell them the reality of what's going on and that, you know, we're not going to welcome you with open arms here, like you'll be captured if not killed.
00:50:31
Speaker
So, you know, it was kind of a goodwill gesture, kind of obviously a propaganda tool as well. So I thought that that was very interesting. I had certainly never seen any kind of livestream POWs, you know, in a conflict. And I kind of wanted to write about that. And then somebody wrote something very similar, actually, for The New Yorker, just about sort of the livestreaming, the war in general, including POWs.
00:51:00
Speaker
in that feed, they had linked to a YouTube channel that this blogger Vladimir Zulkin had. And he was just kind of a videographer who had like a political blog as a hobby before the war. And once it started, he got a list of names and numbers of families who had been writing into this Telegram channel because the government also created this automated form that families could write in and basically started cold calling people in Russia.
00:51:29
Speaker
And I just thought it was a very interesting intersection of just human to human conversation. And he started just five days after the war began. And he was basically trying to get through the misinformation. And he was broadcasting these things live on YouTube to tell families, this is what's happening. Are you going to do anything about it?
00:51:51
Speaker
you know, try to sort of get through the wall of misinformation. So, yeah. And people obviously reacted in different ways in the conversations. Now, on your website, you write that you're a proud generalist, often drawn to stories about inequality, psychology, wrongdoing, and mysteries of all kinds. So, how did you arrive at that taste for your writing in your journalism? I added that line not too long ago, actually.
00:52:21
Speaker
I, you hear so much about people saying that, you know, you need a niche and I think it certainly, it certainly can be helpful, but it's just something that I can't, um, that just doesn't work for me. You know, I.
00:52:36
Speaker
One thing I love about being a journalist and especially a freelancer is just getting to follow your curiosity and learn about so many different things. And, um, you know, I used to work at Forbes magazine and certainly I, you know, I worked for the wealth team and there's a lot that falls under that. It's kind of probably the broadest team, but as you move up, it tends to get more and more specialized. Um, and that's just, that, that wasn't what I wanted to do. Um, but I did.
00:53:03
Speaker
sort of try to think about, okay, what are the themes in my work? What am I generally drawn to? And that's kind of the best, the best I could do in, in coming up with it. I mean, definitely there's, I love investigative stories and sort of have a background in investigation and investigative reporting and always drawn to that and public interest issues.
Katya's Investigative Interests
00:53:23
Speaker
But I do also just have this love of, you know, mystery and kind of, I don't know, ever since reading Harriet the Spy or something.
00:53:32
Speaker
just, you know, often drawn to stories that have that element too. Yeah, you also write that you worked as a private investigator too. In what way has that really helped you as a reporter?
00:53:49
Speaker
That is, yeah, it was probably a lot less exciting than it sounds, you know, in that I was not tailing people on the street necessarily, you know, looking for, you know, cheating husbands or anything. It was a firm called the James Mintz Group, which is, you know, it was in a private investigative firm and a lot of what they did was
00:54:10
Speaker
background checks and investigations that are part of lawsuits. And they did do exciting work. A lot of it had to do with just this wealth of databases and kind of knowing how to use those to find information. But I loved working there. It was some of the smartest people I've ever worked with. I loved doing investigative work. It was just that the end product would be this memo that would go to you.
00:54:37
Speaker
the, you know, whoever commissioned at the law firm or the partners at some hedge fund or something, and then be like this great story in this memo, you know, and you write it up kind of like a story, very much like a story, and then nobody would really see it. So I just really wanted someone, you know, to read it and kind of that writing creative aspect was, was equally important to me. But in terms of the investigative tools that I learned and investigate a way of thinking, that's
00:55:06
Speaker
definitely applicable. I just I do wish I still had all those databases. But you they're expensive and you know, you have to be licensed but
00:55:16
Speaker
And based on your description of the things that you're into as a reporter, a lot of those kind of, in the Venn diagram of all those things that you're interested in, this out of his piece kind of encapsulates a whole lot of those themes, you know, wrongdoing, psychology, inequality, I mean, I'm history, it's right there.
00:55:42
Speaker
how did you arrive at this story, which was something that was pretty mainstream at the time, but then you glommed onto it and stuck with it and told something that is wholly and uniquely you.
00:55:56
Speaker
Yes, I certainly have been with the story for a while. I was trying to figure out when it started before we started recording this, and I realized I sent my first outreach message four years ago. So it's really been something I've been working on for a while, on and off, certainly. But I found out about it just in the news, you know, like everybody else. It was in the news in 2015, obviously, because
00:56:23
Speaker
the police initially called, you know, the main crime I write about a hoax. So it made headlines, you know, everybody, the word that everybody uses is bizarre, which it certainly was. So it caught my eye, but I was working at Forbes at the time, and it wasn't something that, you know, would fall into their coverage area. But not too long after I went freelance, which was in 2017, there was
00:56:51
Speaker
the victims in this case sued the city of Vallejo, California, and they ended up winning a settlement, and so it kind of was back in the headlines. It might have been 2018, or 2018, actually.
00:57:02
Speaker
And so then I was like, Oh, yeah, that story is just fascinating. Like somebody must have already written the magazine version of it. And I looked and they hadn't. And then I thought somebody must be currently writing magazine version of it. But why don't I, you know, why don't I just give it a shot. So I, I reached out to kind of a lot of the people involved and I went from there.
00:57:25
Speaker
It's funny hearing you say that because sometimes I come up with ideas myself. I'm like, oh, this is a great idea. I'm like, but, oh, man. But if I came up with it, someone else must have by now is not even worth pursuing. I know. I mean, with so much of the time, it turns out to be true. Like, I feel like so many times you think of an idea and somebody public then someone publishes it like, you know, the next week because
00:57:51
Speaker
there are things that are in the zeitgeist and there are things that people who are magazine writers, you know, they all kind of see the elements. But, you know, at the same time, there's so many stories out there. And sometimes it's the ones that are in plain sight that for whatever reason, you know, maybe I'm sure a lot of people did reach out to them, but they probably couldn't get access right away. You know, nobody wanted to talk in the early days. And sometimes I guess that so happened that a few years after
00:58:17
Speaker
main events. I mean, things continued to unfold as I was reporting and new trial started, but a few years had passed since the initial media circus, you know, so they were maybe a little bit more receptive.
00:58:32
Speaker
Yeah, access is such a tricky thing, of course, to tell these kind of stories and getting that kind of trust and sometimes just getting that first one, that first cold email, that first cold call to land, because then that's the one that can start the momentum. So for you, what becomes the challenge of getting access and maybe especially that first lead domino as you're trying to build sources for a story of this ambitious?
00:58:59
Speaker
as I mentioned, started four years ago, and over that time, a lot of the times it sort of stopped was because access was really on and off. So the first thing I did was to reach out to the victims in the main case that I'm writing about, Denise Huskins and Erin Quinn. I try, if I can, to find some connection, someone who knows someone. I mean, this story is in the Bay Area, which is where I live.
00:59:26
Speaker
figured out that a friend of mine who is a criminal defense attorney, I thought maybe she has come across their criminal defense attorney. And we can talk about why they had one, which is obviously because they weren't initially believed. So I wrote to her and she was willing to pass on
00:59:46
Speaker
my email to their attorney who was willing to pass on my email to them. So we ended up corresponding a little bit and then meeting in person just to kind of feel each other out. And I like to say, sometimes, you know, we let's meet with no commitments, you know, so they don't feel like they're signing on to anything. But this was obviously a very traumatic and personal story for them. And a lot of people had reached out to them. So they wanted to see, you know, do they feel comfortable and trust me. And so I drove
01:00:15
Speaker
to where they live. And I think we had a great conversation. But then the next day they said, actually, we're signing a book deal with an NBA, so we won't be talking to you. The book ended up coming out, which wasn't a sense, like an extended interview. It was really their story and their voice. And then later I ended up
01:00:37
Speaker
interviewing them as well, you know, once the book had come out. They also gave, you know, extended testimony in court about what happened to them. But from, in terms of the, I guess, the man who was convicted of the crime, I reached out first. There was one family friend who was quoted in all the news stories, and I found him
01:01:00
Speaker
on Facebook, I think, and I reached out to him because he was kind of acting as a spokesperson for the family. And I just said, you know, I usually have, say something along the lines of, you know, a lot of people are probably reaching out to you or I sort of give my impression of what the coverage has been so far. And in this case, it really did seem pretty one dimensional in terms of the man involved who, you know, is a basically ex-Marine Harvard trained lawyer who did pro bono work for most of his life and then ended up
01:01:30
Speaker
being convicted of these pretty bizarre crimes. And so, you know, some of the news articles had mentioned, almost in passing, like, oh, he has bipolar disorder or he struggles with mental illness, but it was just kind of a throwaway thing. And it didn't really come up in his court case either, in his federal court case. And I just thought, you know, I mean, there's not to excuse, you know, anything that he did, but, you know, everyone
01:01:56
Speaker
is three dimensional and kind of how does somebody go sort of from A to B, what happened? What role did mental illness play? What was that like also for his family to watch and be part of?
01:02:11
Speaker
So I reached out to them and told them that, you know, my intention was really to go deeper than any of the headlines had done and not to do anything sensational, but really try to understand his life as a whole and just write a more nuanced, thorough piece and that I was willing to put in the time to do it and find a publication that would edit it, you know, with that perspective as well.
Empathy in Storytelling
01:02:38
Speaker
How did you develop that degree of empathy to bring that to your reporting so you can get to that nuance and beyond the headlines? Well, I don't, I mean, I don't know if you develop empathy. I mean, I think to be a
01:02:57
Speaker
magazine writer, you have to have empathy, I think, because you're spending so much time. I mean, I guess you could just write gotcha kinds of stories. But, you know, you, you spend a lot of time trying to get inside a person's mind in a way. And, I mean, in order to, to even want to spend that time, it's, you know, it's either you have empathy for, you know, if it's a case of wrongdoing, then you have empathy for the people that are
01:03:27
Speaker
the victims of whatever it is. But usually there are just no like, you know, 100% clear victims and villains. I mean, often villains, you know, in this case, again, not to excuse what he did. And his name is Matthew Muller himself said, you know, if I'm dangerous, I should be behind bars. I mean, he has he has said that.
01:03:46
Speaker
But in some ways, in many ways, he was also a victim of psychosis, that he just wasn't able to get a hold of, wasn't willing to get a hold of. And certain systems that told him that it wasn't okay to reveal that, like the military, like the legal profession, at least decades, I mean, I think it's maybe gotten a little bit better, but, or kind of a father who was kind of a,
01:04:17
Speaker
coach type tough guy figure who sort of had a tough it out mentality. You know, for all reasons that you didn't want to speak out, you know, when he started running into troubles with with delusion. So I that's why I love magazine writing, because it lets you tell the you know, give all the all the context and the nuance that really is is there, I think when you go looking for it whenever whenever humans are involved.
01:04:48
Speaker
Do you find a way to integrate some sort of a pressure valve into your reporting, given how deep you can go with people talking about sometimes very disturbing things, traumatic things, so that way you don't take on too much of what you're reporting on? Is that something you integrate into your life or have coping mechanisms?
01:05:14
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think, I think there's so many other people out there probably, you know, doing work that I, I feel is so much more traumatic. You know, the people on the front line in Ukraine right now, um, certainly, I mean, I think in, in this particular case, it was a lot of the interviews were pretty spread out. I mean, some of the interviews I did were pretty intensive, like five hours long at one time, but they were spread out over time and with.
01:05:40
Speaker
with Matt Muller, we did a lot of our interviews over video conference in the jail, which is the they don't allow in person visitors in the jail, even for family, which is kind of crazy that I think and he made that somebody wouldn't see another living person. But they were limited to half an hour at a time in those in those interviews. So it was it was pretty broken up. But yeah, I mean,
01:06:06
Speaker
I don't think I have any revolutionary coping mechanisms, but, you know, dance helps taking a walk. I have kind of a call it an accountability buddy, but it's, you know, another freelancer here in the Bay Area. Jaya Lee is her name, who is an amazing reporter and writer, and we check in weekly. And we've done that pretty much for the last four years, I think. I think that really helps. You know, it's like kind of having a colleague
01:06:35
Speaker
that's a sort of home base that you can run things by, you know, wins, challenges, and kind of, you know, just bounce anything off of. Yeah.
01:06:49
Speaker
Given how big the story is, it's practically 20,000 words, it's a lot to get your, as a writer, it's a lot to get your head around. So for you when you were doing all your reporting, how did you go about organizing your material so you had access to the things that you wanted to draw from?
01:07:12
Speaker
I'm a fandom Scrivener, so I definitely don't think I could write a long piece without Scrivener at this point. So what I usually do is I try and I did in this case is just try to put everything in there. So I
01:07:26
Speaker
I have tried to map it out, uh, you know, here with the sections are going to be, and I created a folder there for each section. Uh, and I tried to put everything in that folder that I had, you know, photos, interview transcripts, court records. Uh, and then, you know, in Scrivener, you can do a split screen. So I would then have that folder open and whatever document I was looking at in the bottom. And I would have the.
01:07:52
Speaker
window that I was typing in at the top. So that's usually how I organize things.
01:07:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's helpful too. I'm naturally a disorganized person, and I'd like to think I'm not alone in that. So I'm always curious how people, even if you're like newspapers.com, you're getting all these PDFs of stuff, and it's just like, okay, how do you organize all this stuff? And I've got things for a big project, so I've got it by year at folders.
01:08:24
Speaker
So at least it's organized like that. But I'm sure within that year, it's going to have to be further subdivided. So I'm always curious how people do that, because it can get unwieldy and out of hand. And then you have this Gmail account or this Google account has some things saved here. But then this one over here has got some other things. It's like, oh my god, you've got to wrangle it in somehow. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's still a perennial challenge, because we went through fact checking.
01:08:53
Speaker
I think, to an extent, I was organized, but at the same time, when it comes to like, I'm always like, I'm going to write down the page number as I'm writing, you know, which page of which court record I got this fax so that when faxing comes along, I, you know, I just know exactly where it is. But I just have still never managed to do that, you know, because when you're writing, you don't want to note down the exact page number only.
01:09:16
Speaker
Oh, for sure. And you're like, I'll remember to do it back then. Like, oh, yeah. I'll make a little note. I'll put a pin in that. And then you never do. It's like, ah, shit. Yeah.
01:09:25
Speaker
But I will say another thing that was really helpful, especially in this story, was having a timeline.
Structuring Complex Stories
01:09:32
Speaker
So just kind of a timeline that is in a spreadsheet format. So where you have the years and the months. And then I had different columns for the different characters or the different sort of threads that I was following. So there's one for
01:09:52
Speaker
Matt's world, Matt Muller's world, the world of Denise and Erin, or the world of the crime and the investigation. And kind of just putting the key events there really helps because sometimes you draw connections that way of like, oh, this was actually just happened the same month as this happened. So it helps with transitions, with structuring things, and just seeing the patterns that might not be apparent without that.
01:10:22
Speaker
And speaking of structure, given how big the piece is, it's always a challenge to have the requisite tension to keep people, quote unquote, turning the page, even though scrolling the page here. So for you, what was the challenge in getting your head around the structure and making sure that requisite tension and pacing was there and satisfying?
01:10:46
Speaker
I give a lot of credit to Sayward for that and working on the structure with me. I think initially it seemed like the structure I started with was going to work. It seemed to make sense to start with the main crime in question, which is basically this
01:11:05
Speaker
bizarre kidnapping that happened on on Mare Island in Vallejo in 2015 with, you know, there were wetsuits, lasers, pre-recorded messages, night quill, blood pressure cups. I mean, there's a lot of bizarre details, which you could read about in the story, but it just seemed to make sense there because it's so to start there because it's so gripping. It's kind of what the story is about, you know, in
01:11:32
Speaker
you know, at its core in a way. But starting there ended up when you once you looked at the story as a whole, it ended up, you know, as they would point it out, taking out some of the air out of it, you know, because you kind of you don't then build to that crime, you kind of know in advance what's going to happen, you know, that Matt's responsible. And this was never going to be a whodunit, right, in terms of we just have no idea who's who's responsible for this crime. And we found out at the end,
01:12:02
Speaker
because a lot of the story is also about Matt and really the mystery there being how did he go from this sort of model citizen, for lack of a better word, to this convicted criminal and why did he do what he did specifically, which was again quite bizarre. So what we ended up doing was starting with
01:12:32
Speaker
this raid on a cabin in South Lake Tahoe where he's arrested. And we describe a crime there, but it's actually not that crime. It's a different crime. And we see the cabin and we see all these bizarre things in the cabin that are just like
01:12:47
Speaker
you know, hair dye and stun gun and a bunch of gloves and electronics. And it's just, I mean, super cluttered, like a hoarder's home, spray paint, you know, crime scene tape, a penis pump. I mean, there's all these things that you're like, what happened here? And so that kind of drives the mystery a little bit. And then we learn about
01:13:13
Speaker
you know, we kind of go to the beginning of Matt's life. We learn that he's arrested and then we're like, well, who is this guy and how did he get there? But there's also at the end of the first section, near the end of the first section, this detective discovers this long blonde hair and none of the victims in the crime that we just learned about was blonde and the suspect isn't blonde. So then we hope, you know, part of what drives a good portion of the story is whose hair is that?
01:13:44
Speaker
Um, and then the tension that drives another good portion of the story is was or was not, you know, was this crime a hoax or not? You know, I kind of tried to write the beginning, the description of the crime in the beginning to where you wouldn't know, you know, because there were all these strange details. Um, and the police, you know, the police ended up thinking that they staged it and, or first they thought that this guy killed his girlfriend. Then when she showed up, they started calling her the real life gone girl.
01:14:11
Speaker
and claiming that they made it up. So the way I tried to write it at first was that the reader wouldn't be sure if they did make it up or not. Obviously we learned that they didn't. But then what I hope keeps you reading till the end is, you know, I do find out things that have never been reported before about, you know, why he says he did what he did. So kind of the,
01:14:41
Speaker
you know, why did he do what he did is sort of another question that we don't really answer until the end.
01:14:50
Speaker
And given the scope of the piece, too, and there are going to be any number of hiccups that a writer comes across, whether that's just self-doubt or maybe there's just a bit of information you just feel like you can't get your head around or you can't find, but you can't just shoehorn anything you want into a particular section.
Ethical Challenges in Reporting
01:15:10
Speaker
So for you, what were some challenges that you experienced as you were synthesizing this piece?
01:15:17
Speaker
There were, yeah, there were quite a few challenges along the way. I mean, one of them was Matt's mental state. You know, as I mentioned, Delusion played a big part in his life and in what ended up happening. And he, you know, in the course of interviewing him, which, you know, we start, we first got in touch in 2018. He was in a federal prison and then he got moved to a jail here in Solano County.
01:15:46
Speaker
And his mental health kind of fluctuated during that period. So trying to figure out when is it, is he or is he not kind of in a state of mind where, can I trust what he's saying? Does he trust me? And he kept pulling out because paranoia got the better of him. And he told me just last month, which I didn't know before, that he thought I was a CIA agent.
01:16:16
Speaker
So at one point in our interviews, he said, you know, I just need to ask you a bunch of questions to know if you are who you say you are. And he started kind of grilling me. And he sounded really lucid a lot of the time about the past, but then, you know, starting to sound maybe a little bit paranoid about the present. And it's something he says at the end of the story where it's not like a black and white thing, like it's not like you are
01:16:39
Speaker
always completely lucid and completely not. So I think in the story, I tried to be pretty transparent about, you know, when his memory was patchy. I tried to corroborate things with letters that he wrote to other people at the, you know, at the time, things that were documented in other sources, like police reports, or trying to talk to his colleagues and stuff like that. That was challenging. And then at one point, he ended up being deemed incompetent to stand trial.
01:17:08
Speaker
And it wasn't clear when the judge ordered that he should get antipsychotic medication against his will, but he was in a psychiatric hospital and it wasn't clear when or if he would be restored. So he did end up being restored just a couple of months ago, but in between, I just really wasn't sure, like how are we gonna fact check with him?
01:17:37
Speaker
You know, because if he's deemed incompetent to stand trial, it really doesn't feel ethical to reach out to him because he might say something that isn't, I mean, is incriminating for one thing that he doesn't, that he wouldn't say if he was, you know, mentally stable. Um, so if the, if he's not legally competent, it doesn't feel like he would be competent to, you know, participate in an interview. Um,
01:18:01
Speaker
But so, you know, he did end up being restored to legal competency and we did fact check with him. But that was, you know, a situation I had never encountered before.
01:18:15
Speaker
And structurally, as well, it isn't until the final chapter or so where you're really in the piece, speaking with Matthew. So from a storytelling standpoint, what did that accomplish for you to come into the story there at the end? It's really only a couple of lines, I think, that I am there, which was basically just saying that
01:18:41
Speaker
I talked to him and he thought I was a CIA agent. I thought I did talk with Sayward about whether or not I would appear in the story more because he wrote me some letters early on. And again, I told you he started doubting me.
01:18:57
Speaker
and grilling me and asking me questions. And, you know, I just thought, you know, I spent, I interviewed him many, many times. I mean, I haven't counted, but maybe 10 times or more. And so I thought, you know, would the reader want to know what my impressions are of him? But in the end, there was just nothing really that would have come out of that that didn't already come out in another way, you know, through his interview with
01:19:24
Speaker
Henry Lee, where I could sort of describe how he was.
01:19:37
Speaker
And yeah, so the only, the value I think of adding that at the end is just, I mean, maybe again, to be transparent, to show maybe his state of mind during parts of these interviews, to show, I guess, the extent of his struggles with mental health. And then also, I mean, I think to give a little bit of a timestamp, like this is kind of, it's just happened a month
01:20:00
Speaker
a month before the story is published and right after he was sentenced, all his cases are closed. And he's kind of a moment where he's giving me a lot of, not all the answers, but a lot of answers to things a lot of people have been wondering. So kind of puts that, but he's still in the psychiatric hospital. So it kind of puts all that in context just to have me appear briefly. Yeah. Well, the piece is like, it's intense. Like this thing's intense.
01:20:29
Speaker
Yeah, like it reads that way and I imagine just coming across the materials like holy shit like this is intense.
The Writing Process and Inspirations
01:20:37
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I keep wondering like it's like 19,000 words is that like a third of a book or something? Did you make it all the way through?
01:20:47
Speaker
Oh yeah, beginning to end. Yeah, I started it yesterday morning. I did it in 10-page chunks so I could kind of pace myself and be able to digest what I'm reading and not just try to hammer through. But yeah, I saw that. I was like, okay, this is how I'm going to break it up. And yeah, that's how I went about it.
01:21:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, there are a lot of twists there. So you know, it's one of those like truth is stranger than fiction things where kind of if you were writing it as a novel, you'd be like, Oh, well, that's a, that's a coincidence. You know, that's a little bit too convenient or odd, just the connections between, you know, for example, the lead investigator having had a relationship
01:21:30
Speaker
with the intended target of the kidnapping, who is also the ex-fiancee of the victim. I mean, it's very odd. If you're writing a novel, you'd be like, this is lazy. Yeah. So there's just a lot of things that feel
01:21:51
Speaker
like a movie, which is just this theme that kept coming up over and over and over in the story about people thinking that life is like the movies and then realizing that it's not. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. What a trip it was. Well, Katya, as I like to do at the end of these conversations, typically, is ask the guest for a recommendation of some kind. And that can be anything from something professional to a brand of coffee or a pair of socks you're really excited about.
01:22:19
Speaker
fanny packs, who knows? So I'd extend that to you. What would you recommend for the listeners out there? Okay, I would recommend a practice that I started doing this year, that I always meant to do but never did before, which is to copy the work of your, you know, your idols. You know, it's something like you always hear about like John Didion did that, you know,
01:22:45
Speaker
artists sort of go to the, you know, artists and trading go to the museum and copy the works of the great. So it's something that I always thought was intriguing, but I actually tried it this year. And I started with David Gran's work, who's one of my one of my heroes. And, you know, did from episode 99 fame. Yes, I have listened for sure. But he also, you know, has written a lot of things that sort of are in the
01:23:14
Speaker
true crime genre, so I thought it was a good one. But I ended up copying his stories, just retyping them kind of for 10 minutes before I started writing for the day. And I just, I found it to be an amazing practice. I mean, first of all, it like gets your hands just flowing, like the words flowing, instead of just sitting down with your own text, like a blank page. It's almost like, you know, running a few laps.
01:23:41
Speaker
to give your fingers something to do. But also it just I feel like you pick up things that you just don't from reading alone, you know, just the sort of decisions on a sentence level that a writer makes. I found it to be really inspiring and educational and also kind of fun. So I highly recommend that.
01:24:02
Speaker
awesome that's cool yeah i think hunter thompson copied the great gatsby down so it was uh yeah i think it's an incredible exercise how many people how many musicians are out there probably very very good ones who will get you a guitar tabular turf or whatever band they really like and they'll play that stuff like note for note and
01:24:22
Speaker
It's getting into their brain and their musculature, and then if they go off and write their own music, they're not plagiarizing, but they are informed by everything that they just rehearsed with their favorite and esteemed artist. So I think that's a really wonderful tip for people.
Practical Discoveries and Reflections
01:24:39
Speaker
If I had a number two, one of those, um, I also recently got one of those like cushions. That's kind of like the top of a chair. You know what I mean? It's like you, it's something you'd buy for your college dorm room that kind of cushions your back in your arms. If you're sitting on a couch or in a bed and I did not have one of these in college, but I feel like I should, I wish I got one earlier.
01:25:04
Speaker
Nice. What are those, what are those called? I've heard them called husbands. Are they husbands? No. Wow. I've never heard that's evocative. No, I've never heard of that. I don't have a good word for it. Okay. Yeah. So being the intrepid reporter that I am, I did a internet search and yes, those pillows are actually called husband pillows. It's weird. I mean, okay. Okay.
01:25:35
Speaker
All right, but I think everyone can picture it. I know exactly what you're talking about, too. Yeah. Nice. Very nice. Well, Katya, this was awesome to get to talk to you. That piece you wrote for the Adivus is incredible, and it's a lot of fun to read, and I know people are going to love digging into it and hearing you talk all about it. So thanks so much for the time coming on the show. This was a trip, and I appreciate the time. Thanks so much, Brendan. I'm a fan of the show.
01:26:07
Speaker
Did you catch that? Did you hear this? She's a fan of the show. No take backs partner. Did we do it? I think it happened again. We made it to the end. Thanks to Sayward and Katya for putting up with me. It is a lot to put up with. Subscribe to the show so you don't even have to think about it. CNFers, we're everywhere.
01:26:30
Speaker
And if you have a moment, leave a kind review on Apple podcast or a rating on Spotify. They go a long, long way. I have no name recognition. You know this. So if there are a lot of reviews and, and there are some CNF and writers out there doing their memoir of journalism or doc film, and they want to get some inspiration from what we're doing here, seeing all those reviews and ratings and be like, whoa, I don't know who that guy is, but that, that show must be good.
01:26:59
Speaker
Okay, my book proposal, round two, V2, is back out with the agent. I think I stuck the landing, or at least I landed and then maybe tripped a little bit, but I think it's okay. Decent sample chapter, well, extra sample chapter, one that is a little more intimate. I did some internet sleuthing and found my main guy's classmates from back in the day, and I've dug up some stuff I've never heard or read about. Like, yeah, that's the juice.
01:27:26
Speaker
That's what it's going to take, finding these cats out there. And the thing is, it just takes one. I landed that first one out of the blue and she's a lynchpin. She didn't balk at my request. She heard me out. She was like, and then she was like, how did you find my email? And I'm like, well, it was on your high school reunion website page. And that's the thing with people of a certain age. They're not very privy to internet security, so you can find some stuff.
01:27:55
Speaker
but she spoke to me and gave me other names and they spoke to me and they've given me other names and suddenly you're not some weirdo you're the guy who has some capital and some trust with these people who've known each other grow up to each other so they're like oh you spoke to so-and-so okay let me see if I can help you
01:28:16
Speaker
But without so-and-so, you're pretty fucked. So give it up to the so-and-sos you find that make your work possible. And stay wild, CNFers. And remember, if you can't do, interview. See ya.
01:29:12
Speaker
you