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Episode 270: How did Daniel Kolitz Pull Off His Atavist Story?
177 Plays3 years ago
Daniel Kolitz is a freelance writer whose latest piece for The Atavist Magazine is about Enthusiastic Sobriety and its founder Bob Meehan.
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Transcript
Introduction to Daniel Cowlets
00:00:06
Speaker
Hey, we're getting right into it this week with Olympic speed. Today's guest for episode 270 of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast is the journalist Daniel Cowlets. Now on its ninth year, this is the show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories
Exploring Enthusiastic Sobriety's Impact
00:00:26
Speaker
his piece on enthusiastic sobriety or es about bob mehan and the wreckage his program and cult caused is a sprawling and ambitious piece and makes you go how the eff did daniel pull this off
00:00:45
Speaker
So consider subscribing to The Atavist, because that's where you're going to find this piece. And support the blockbuster storytelling, say where Darby and company are up to over there. Incredible writing, beautiful design.
00:01:01
Speaker
It's the way long-form journalism is meant to be.
Insights from Editor Jonah Ogles
00:01:05
Speaker
So we talk about Daniel's piece, but first I speak with lead editor of the piece, Jonah Ogles. That's what we're gonna do. So I told you we would be getting right into it, so let's do this.
00:01:28
Speaker
well yeah i mean we first of all i did not expect um such depth of reporting even in the even in the pitch from such a young writer you know it's it's a sort of ambitious piece of like plenty of people pitch but even really seasoned hands
00:01:51
Speaker
you know may not have done quite so much work on the front end so it was clear from the get-go that Daniel
00:01:59
Speaker
already had the sources lined up. He already had really good connections. He was tapped into the network that he would need to be able to pull a story like this off. And he just hasn't stopped delivering on the reporting front from the get-go. It's pretty common for any writer to say, well, I need to go back and ask a couple questions about that. But I would guess that's happened
00:02:28
Speaker
only a handful of times in the two years that I've been talking to Daniel about this story. He generally just knows the stuff so well that he can answer basically off the top of his head. It's really, really impressive.
00:02:45
Speaker
Oh, you said two years. So this has been a piece two years in the making. Yeah, more than
Investigative Reporting: Crafting the Story
00:02:50
Speaker
two years. I got the first draft of this story on March 16th, 2020, which I'm just realizing is like also basically the start of the pandemic.
00:03:04
Speaker
And he and I, before he even sent me the draft, we were going back and forth on the outline and sort of like a character list. So yeah, this is almost two and a half years. I think it was January.
00:03:17
Speaker
2019 that he pitched it if I remember right jeez that that is that's incredible the just the But I believe it too because this is such a it's like we were saying saying a very ambitious piece with a ton of reporting and You know, what was it about this that you think lent itself to take it this long to you know to to form to forge it and and and shape it and
00:03:45
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, part of it is the subject itself has a long history. Our stories are often looking at something that might have taken place over on the outside end, like the course of a decade. And this is a story with literally a 50-year history. And so there was a lot of stuff to get into. I mean, part of it is that
00:04:10
Speaker
Daniel had to cover the 50 year history of enthusiastic sobriety, which is self, you know, would be quite the undertaking, but also he just had a ton of sources to speak with. And this was one of those stories that the more he pulled on the string, the more came out, you know, he, so he would talk to one person and they would send him to two or three other people. And so it just really, he needed a lot of time.
00:04:41
Speaker
in order to talk to everybody that he needed to and, you know, get the story right. I mean, it's a huge undertaking. The way that Mian operated is so complex, you know, and it changed so many times. And, you know, a lot of that, I think, you know, some people would make the argument that a lot of that was intentional on his part.
00:05:09
Speaker
in order to keep it from looking like he had as much control as he had. Just to unravel that would have taken a long time, let alone build out the personal stories that
00:05:27
Speaker
Daniel brought to life and that's one of the things that so impresses me about this story and about Daniel's work on it is that yes it is a big investigation and you know the finding just like the hard boiled down facts of that investigation are impressive.
00:05:46
Speaker
and would be enough, you know, I think to just really blow people's minds when they read it. But he also has these deeply personal and intense stories and characters that make you feel the piece and feel the human impact of it in a way that not a ton of investigative pieces do.
00:06:10
Speaker
And on your end, something I always love to get your insights and say word as well is, you know, what was it like for you to edit and help shape this piece, to make it, you know, what we, what we have come to know and as that out of a story of that, that very narrative driven, cinematically driven story.
00:06:29
Speaker
Yeah, this piece in particular, I felt a great responsibility and sort of a great privilege, if that makes sense, to be involved in it. I think Daniel was going to tell a great story regardless of
00:06:50
Speaker
of where it appeared. I'm glad he found an outlet where he could write at the length that he did because I think the story benefits from it. But he, first of all, Daniel just turned in like incredibly clean copy. So I had the great advantage of not really having to deal with things on that front. All that Daniel and I talked about really was just like storytelling. You know, how do we structure this in such a way
00:07:16
Speaker
that were giving readers the hard facts that they need while also getting this human toll across and making sure that readers feel that in a really acute way. For me, it was one of those stories that
00:07:36
Speaker
Anytime I got a new revision or a new section from him, I was trying to clear the plate so that I could just focus on this because I knew we just always had the sense that it was a really important thing to do well and do the right way.
00:07:56
Speaker
And as we kind of wrap up our little chat here, what are some things that really excite you about this piece that you're jacked up about when this goes live and readers get to experience this firsthand?
00:08:13
Speaker
I'm really excited for Daniel. I hope it gets a lot of readers. I hope it gets a lot of attention because I think he deserves it. I think he's told a really remarkable story.
00:08:30
Speaker
There are a couple of moments in the story where former members or staffers of enthusiastic sobriety, the outposts, talk about the moments, other times when media outlets have talked about what was going on in enthusiastic sobriety and what Bob Meehan was up to. And they talk about the feeling
00:08:56
Speaker
of relief, I guess, that they felt that someone was saying, hey, look, this is going on and people are being hurt by it. And for those people who were hurt and managed to get out this feeling of, okay, I'm seeing someone is telling my story, people are listening and actually care about it. And I really hope that the people who
00:09:23
Speaker
who gave Daniel their time and their stories feel like they were treated with care and that, you know, readers are going to respond to it and feel sympathy for what it is they've gone through because they really trusted Daniel a lot and they trusted us. And I really just hope we got it right.
00:09:45
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Jonah, as always, great pleasure to tease out the month's piece with you, and so we're going to hand the baton over to Daniel next. So thanks so much for the time, Jonah, and we'll do it again soon. Sounds good.
Daniel's Writing Journey
00:10:11
Speaker
So what got you into the freelance feature writing morass? I think at the time, it would have been the mid-2010s. The extent of my written output, I was a kind of satirical internet collagist, had a kind of come to plug. And, you know, I wanted to get into writing. It seemed like nonfiction writing, A, paid, unlike most other farmers are writing, and then B,
00:10:36
Speaker
You know, there are plenty of examples of kind of long-form literary non-fiction writers that I love. And so I would have been... How did I get started there? Yeah, actually, so I've done these kind of stupid internet collages for my editor and now friend Marina for a website called Animal New York that is now dead. And when I... So what is... Define that for me. What is an internet collage? So I would basically... I can't believe I'm going into this here, but I would basically...
00:11:07
Speaker
print out existing websites, cut them up, collage them superimposed, new, ostensibly funny text on top of them, scan them back and it was unbelievably labor intensive for no real gain. And I did that for some time.
00:11:27
Speaker
Not a huge amount, maybe like one or two. It was like the first thing I kind of did out of college, but I figured that that was not a sustainable career path. I wanted to branch into more legitimate kinds of writing. So yeah, out of the marina, I kind of expressed this to her and I started going on these little reporting jobs. I think I profiled New York City's only pro-smoking advocate.
00:11:53
Speaker
for a now defunct website called Hopes and Spears. I went to some kind of taxi driving school, cab school in Jackson Heights. I went to the last remaining Tunnel of Love. And these are all pretty short pieces. And yeah, I just kind of went from there. You know, I've been pursuing other kinds of writing all throughout. I've never been like a full-time freelance journalist or anything.
00:12:21
Speaker
But that, that is probably the origin right there. Nice. So are you a full-length full full heads, a full-time freelancer now, or do you have other things that are kind of on the side that kind of subsidize it in being a full-time freelance writer? It seems like it would be very difficult that I'm here to talk about. It took about two years. So I can't really rely on that as a source of income, but I mean, I guess some people can.
00:12:48
Speaker
But no, I mean, I got all kinds of, you know, random gigs helping Russian people finesse their internal business correspondence, doing various things for the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, whole, whole Florida, weird stuff.
00:13:01
Speaker
Yeah, I love hearing that, because I think a lot of people who get into this, who really want to do freelance journalism and long-form features, they're like, how the hell do you even make it happen? And the fact is, so many other people we look at and be like, that is an objectively successful, prominent freelance journalist. And they're like, yeah, I'm doing this other thing on the side too, because I need something steady that's going to get me some health insurance.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I was listening to the novelist Joshua Cohen on the Art Struggle podcast. And he is like probably one of the most prominent and lauded novelists of his or our generation. And yeah, even he said he doesn't make a living from his book. And I mean, I guess that's maybe specific to fiction writing. But yeah, no, there's not a lot of money in the game, or maybe there isn't, I just don't know where to find it. Yeah.
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't found it either, man, so. Yeah, absolutely. So when I was talking to Jonah earlier, and you alluded to it as well, that this piece that you've done for the Adivus, I mean, you've been reporting this for more than two years. So just take us to the process of how you discovered or rediscovered this story and how you put your own repartorial spin on it. Sure. So it was actually, it's been two years since I started doing it with Jonah. The full process,
00:14:21
Speaker
It's four years. About four years ago, this was right around the time when I decided that I wanted to get into long form feature writing. I started a multi Reddit, which is like where you can compile a bunch of, you know, different subreddits into one feed and scroll through it. And I would just brute force through that 100 or so feed, like every day, and it yielded basically nothing. And I did that for months. Then one day I came across a post from a woman who said that she
00:14:49
Speaker
had lost track of her child or her connection with the child was in the severest. She'd been trying to get in touch with them and she was asking for help. And I reached out to her. Her name was Christine. It turned out that her daughter was in one of these enthusiastic sobriety programs. At the time, in the very beginning, the initial conception, having learned, and should I explain what those programs are or is that, did Jonah take care of that?
00:15:12
Speaker
I think it would be good if you explained it to just bring people up to speed about kind of the crux of what the story centers on. Sure. So about 50 years ago, a charismatic conman drug addict named Bob Meehan moved to Houston, started a kind of youth group, an anti-drug youth group that was founded with this anti-drug
00:15:41
Speaker
philosophy called enthusiastic sobriety, which is a lot like AA, but many of the central tenets have been replaced. Most notably, he added this rule that you should only stick with winners, which in practice means basically cutting off anyone who is not in the group, including your own parents, if they're not on board with the program. It was controversial from the very start. There was a pre-damning 60 minutes piece in 1980.
00:16:08
Speaker
various other controversies flared up over the course of the years. There was another one in 2005, but seemingly the program is unkillable. It is now run by Bob Meehan's son-in-law, Quinn Stonebreaker.
Unpacking the Sobriety Program's Complexities
00:16:20
Speaker
Yeah, these programs kind of cause a lot of damage. They don't really equip kids with any kinds of skills to combat drug use once they're not in the program. They end up staying in the program for years and years, and then those that are elevated to be counselors
00:16:36
Speaker
uh, end up in what is effectively a cult where their lives and all their decisions are controlled by the higher ups. A lot of the staff make like, you know, I think one of the persons, one of the people we talked to at the end of the article makes, I think it was like $200 a week for 80 hours of work or something like that, something crazy. So anyway, yeah, sorry. That's a pretty scattered explanation of what all of this is.
00:17:03
Speaker
But yeah, to get back to this initially, uh, at the time when I found this, uh, it was like early 2017, I was 26, which is at the very upper end of, uh, the age limit for this program. So my first impulse was to join it and to kind of go undercover and be in the program for a while. I was quickly just be used to that idea. But, um, you know, I was reporting it on and off mostly off for a while.
00:17:31
Speaker
I distinctly remember a conversation in the cafe with a friend of mine where I was like, I don't, I don't think I can even do this. It would just take so, so, so, so much time to do. Right. But then on a whim about two years after someone across this idea, I came across some kind of call for pictures from the activist where they said they were looking for these long intensive narrative stories and they,
00:17:57
Speaker
thought maybe I would pitch to them and I did and then I started writing it for them. How did you start getting your head around the size of this story, the size and scope of it? Because it is such an ambitious piece of the history of the enthusiastic sobriety and just telling the story of the people involved and the people whose lives were effectively ruined by it.
00:18:25
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, it took a long, long time to really understand what was going on here. When I first started reporting it, I was mostly talking to teens who were in the program or rather who had left the program pretty recently. So I was only getting an idea of kind of how things were now. I don't think I totally realized that it had this long history. I certainly didn't realize some of the crazier stuff about his past. It wasn't until I started writing just for the activist about two years in that I was put in touch with
00:18:55
Speaker
a former ES higher up named Dave Cherry, or actually someone drew my attention to this blog called How I Was Spiritually Raped and Left to Die, which is this blog spot. It's like 20,000 words or something longer, 40,000 words. And it is the first person account of a defector from enthusiastic sobriety.
00:19:22
Speaker
And it's a really powerful story. I mean, Dave Cherry, who is the author of it, is an amazing writer. And that was the first indication I had of the real scope of enthusiastic sobriety, how long it had been going on, how destructive it was, all of that. So I got in touch with Dave. I had actually tried contacting him a few years earlier, not having realized he'd written this thing. He hadn't responded to me. But as it happened in this
00:19:46
Speaker
moment, he said that he was ready to start talking about it again. So he was really essential in helping me to understand the kind of mechanics of this program, because he had a pretty privileged vantage point. But from him, I started talking to colleagues of his. From that period, I started talking to people that were in the original variant of the program, which was called the Palmer Drug Abuse Program, or PADAP,
00:20:12
Speaker
And they just kept snowballing. Still don't really feel like I fully got my head around it because you have all of these different programs and branches in all these different parts of the country. They all subscribe to the same sobriety philosophy, but they each have a different cast of characters. It wasn't until maybe two years into doing this that I even really nailed down the names of the different branches and what was connected to what. It took quite a long time, a lot of chart making, so many, many notes.
00:20:42
Speaker
Wow, that's incredible. I'm picturing the classic sort of tracking down the serial killer type thing on the big cork board with yarn going every which direction. I don't know if I didn't have the cork board, but I looked like that person in the sense that I looked completely insane throughout much of this process, including right now. But yeah, definitely.
00:21:04
Speaker
You know, the great New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright talks about in any long story, be it a book or magazine story, that you have to have a mule to really carry the narrative. And it looks like Dave Cherry was your mule for this piece. So what made him such a great central figure for you? Well, Cherry was useful because his tenure spanned a few different
00:21:28
Speaker
So he came in in the 1980s, the early 1980s, and he was there at a kind of an inflection point in Bob Meehan's career, Bob Meehan being the kind of cult guru who ran all of this. He was also central to the 2005 campaign to take the program down. And so there's a kind of arc to his time there in the program spanning from 1982 to 2004.
00:21:56
Speaker
But then there are still, I think, 26 years left unaccounted for that David Cherry was not a part of. But he was someone who more than many of the people I talked to, I mean, everyone was deeply affected by their time there. Many were seriously traumatized. But his memory of what had happened and the marks that had left on him made him a really useful, compelling subject.
00:22:22
Speaker
And given that you've got him and then, as Jonah was saying, it was like the more people you were speaking with, the more people they told you to speak to and so forth. And that's like the great, as you were talking about earlier, how it snowballs and you start getting more and more information. So for you, what was, you know, how did
Organizing and Concluding the Investigation
00:22:42
Speaker
you...
00:22:42
Speaker
keep your mind around all of that sort of repartorial glut and organize it in such a way that you're able to synthesize it and write such a compelling yarn. Thank you for calling it compelling. In the most roundabout, idiotic ways possible. I mean, I've never done anything like this before, and I've learned quite a bit. I would not do it in the same way again, and I guess that is the benefit of doing something like this, but I just have
00:23:11
Speaker
hundreds of Gmail drafts, Google Docs, different timelines, just this whole mess of material. And then I was constantly trying to synthesize and, you know, merge people's accounts. And it was very hard to keep a handle on exactly what happened. I did find it. I mean, I think fundamentally, and this is probably obvious, the most useful thing to have is just the chronology. And actually, I don't know if you want to mention this to you, but I think it became very clear.
00:23:41
Speaker
in the process of reporting this that there was so, so much material is going to be hard to find a kind of through line. And so I think that yeah, I assembled a 10,000 word chronology before even writing a word of the piece itself, which I then sent to Jonah. And he did an incredible job sort of identifying
00:24:02
Speaker
stepping stones through the piece from that chronology. And then from there, I kind of found the material to enrich these, those different points.
00:24:14
Speaker
What's what's what's always struck me about speaking with anyone involved in an activist story, whether it be the editors or the writer themselves, is that it's it's really a very collaborative experience. Unbelievably so. Yes. I mean, I have worked so closely with Jonas Brothers. He's such an amazing editor. It's gone through so many iterations. He has put up with so much for me in terms of my various kind of anxieties about it and confusions and also just in competencies. I mean, again,
00:24:44
Speaker
I've never done an investigative piece before of any kind, let alone one that is 20,000 words, but no for the last, you know, two years, two and a half years. We have been working together very closely and he has been there to basically talk out any issues and has, you know, and then say word too. I mean, she came in later in the process, but she, she was tremendously helpful as well.
00:25:08
Speaker
Yeah, and what about the process in working with Jonah and Sayward through this? Where were you maybe, let's say at the beginning, and where are you now in terms of just your confidence in being able to pull off something of this nature?
00:25:26
Speaker
I am more or less confident I could do it again. I don't know if I would want to, not because, you know, I mean, I'm very happy with how this turned out and very grateful for the work that they were enjoying. I just, I don't think I could have ever imagined how time could be something like this was and how labor intensive, but it feels good. I mean, it's, you know, I feel productive doing it, transcribing an interview, condensing it, doing all the kind of peripheral work that's involved with investigative journalism.
00:25:55
Speaker
But it's a really interesting kind of writing because, you know, I'm used to a kind of writing where you write something and then it's published. I mean, I'd be that sort of jokey pieces or opinion pieces or much less intensive sort of first person goes somewhere and write about it pieces. And when you're doing a piece like this, you know, every word is does not just have to be grounded in something someone said, but then it has to be, you know, fact checked and put through legal. And, you know, that's all
00:26:24
Speaker
good, obviously, but it takes a lot out of you. But no, I mean, at the same time, you know, I didn't go to journalism school or anything. And I, I feel like this is a real education, which I'm very grateful for. And I suspect I probably will do something like this again at some point.
00:26:40
Speaker
With as much reporting and interviewing that goes into something as ambitious a piece as this is, it sometimes can be hard to get off the research or the reporter flywheel. You just want to keep going and going and going. Yeah, no, absolutely.
00:27:00
Speaker
Yeah. So in that sense, sometimes people just say, what, what made you stop? And he's like, Oh, the deadline. So maybe it's as simple as that, but maybe you can say like, or illuminate, you know, how you knew you were, you were done with, with this. You know, I might have to go with the deadline too. Although that was extended quite a few times. I'm trying to think how the process played out. I mean, that has been kind of the problem, even in fact, checking in these final rounds is that oftentimes, you know, I'm trying to,
00:27:31
Speaker
remember things that I reported in 2017 or 2019 because this process has gone on for so long. But how did it end? There was a point a couple of years into this where I would talk to someone and I could almost predict what they would say next. And yet I still went on conducting interviews because even though I would almost invariably know the broad outlines and what they were going to say, there might be kind of one useful detail in an hour's conversation that I could then insert into the story.
00:27:58
Speaker
At a certain point, yes, you do have to kind of, you know, decide it's time to wrap things up. And in the process of synthesizing this piece and composing it and rewriting and so forth, what part of this process, whether it be the reporting or the writing or the rewriting, did you feel most sort of alive and engaged with it? That's a good question. You know, I think it was
00:28:23
Speaker
the reporting and I think it was kind of assembling the material and watching it all come together and shaping you know this more or less coherent narrative out of what was really just kind of a blizzard of facts and anecdotes and hearsay obviously hearsay that it's been verified because you know the writing is very interesting in a piece like this it is like almost like so much of an investigative piece like this I've learned is like getting the facts in order right it really was
00:28:52
Speaker
kind of deeply satisfying to start connecting, you know, for instance, in 2005, there was this big expose on ABC 15, the regional network in Arizona. And you can see in that video, the investigative crew comes to the office to kind of co-front Bob Meehan, this cult leader. And a woman comes to the door and says, you know, no comment, no comment, leave us alone.
00:29:20
Speaker
But then actually finding the person that said, no comment, no comment, leave us alone, who has since left the cult and is describing the scene inside of the center at that time, you know, being able to merge all these different accounts of the same situation, things that were happening in different states. It was very satisfying and very, I don't know, to take all this gas material and make a narrative out of it was definitely thrilling.
00:29:45
Speaker
When I ask that question of people, that tends to be their reply because the discovery of the reporting and the interviewing and tracking down sources and trying to find that kernel from some hard to track down person that is just going to put the spin
Final Reflections and Gratitude
00:30:03
Speaker
on it. And that can be finding a real life person or it could be someone doing historical narrative nonfiction where it's just like you track down this one random newspaper column that
00:30:13
Speaker
Yeah, just say the car sped away, but it was a Cadillac that sped away and you're like Oh, I got like I got like this really cool detail that really elevates it and brings it to life Yes, and that's what you're looking for is like, you know, you're reading, you know newspaper article after newspaper I mean, you know newspapers calm by the way is a national treasure for anyone who's doing something like this. I don't know
00:30:34
Speaker
I really should apologize to them here because for some reason they are accidentally giving it to me for free and charging a dead credit card. I got to go back on there and give them some money. But they have everything. And I would go through every reference to Bob Meehan and every local newspaper in every small Texas town from 1970 to 1980. And it would basically be the same article over and over and over again. But then right, you would find
00:31:04
Speaker
Just this one detail, this kernel of something that would send you in another direction or would really enhance the story. And that was very satisfying. Fantastic. Well, Daniel, I want to be mindful of your time. And I hope this is maybe the first of several conversations we might have over the years as more of your work comes out. So thanks so much for everything you did with this Atavus piece, which is just a compelling, ambitious yarn. And yeah, just best of luck going forward, man. It was great talking to you. Yeah, thank you so much. This has been great.
00:31:39
Speaker
It really is kinda unreal that Daniel has never done anything like this before. I salute you. And as we go to Atavus magazine to check that out, consider subscribing to Atavus so you can support that incredible journalism.
00:31:57
Speaker
that they are up to. It not only reads well, but also it just looks beautiful. And like I said in the intro, it's the way long-form journalism is meant to be. They do it right. They do it well. So in any case, thanks to Daniel and the Atavus magazine.
00:32:15
Speaker
and to Jonah Ogles for coming back on to tease it out so in any case we're gonna get on out of here yeah we're leaning mean for this extra out of his themed episode so stay wild seeing efforts and if you can do interview see ya