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Episode 414: John Rosengren on Cuts, Note Taking, and Darkness for The Atavist
650 Plays6 months ago
John Rosengren is a journalist based out of Minnesota whose "Anatomy of a Murder" marks Issue 151 for The Atavist Magazine.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction and Content Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
A message high up in this podcast. It's that Atavistian time of the month, so lots of spoilers in this conversation. Also, there's talk of graphic sexual abuse of children in the story and a little bit of in the interview as well. So if that's triggering or there are young years around, you might want to listen to this in private or with headphones. Head to magazine.atavist.com to read the story and consider subscribing to The Atavist.
00:00:28
Speaker
This happens to me a lot that I find out so much about a subject. And I don't know, maybe you're going through this with your book, you know, you feel like you have so much space with a book, you know, and so many pages you can go, but I find out so much information. And then I can't use it all.
The Story of Larry Scully and Levi Axtell
00:00:49
Speaker
OAC and Everest is the creative non-fiction podcast, the show that I started in 2013. Wow. Where I speak primarily to writers about telling true stories. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara. Yeah. John Rosengrin is our guest today for episode 414. And he's a two-time writer for The Atavist, whose publishing credits are as long as the first day of summer. This story is bleak, man. But it's remarkably told.
00:01:19
Speaker
It's about a small town in Minnesota and a man, Larry Scully, convicted of second-degree sexual conduct and Levi Axtell, a paranoid young man who sought vigilante justice to protect his young daughter and the community.
00:01:35
Speaker
The two were on a collision course in one way or another, and this is that story. Show notes to this episode more at brendanamerra.com. Hey, where you can also sign up for my rage. You can see algorithm newsletter, short riff, four books, seven links. It literally goes up to 11. Writing prompts in there, happy hour, no spam. Can't beat it, I guess. Downgrade to free, man. It's always gonna be free.
00:02:02
Speaker
I might be upping the frequency of the newsletter as I continue my immigration from social media. If that upsets you, I'm sorry. The unsubscribe button is pretty easy to find.
00:02:15
Speaker
If you dig this pod, this show, consider sharing it or leaving a review on Apple Podcast. We love those. If you do leave a written review, I'll coach up a piece of your writing of up to 2000 words.
Editing Insights with Jonah Ogles
00:02:28
Speaker
Email the show at creative nonfiction podcast at gmail.com with a screenshot of your, of the review. Once it posts and then we'll start a dialogue.
00:02:41
Speaker
So here we go, here we go. First we're gonna hear from lead editor Jonah Ogles on this piece, about his side of the table. And it's always nice to talk to Jonah. So let's just get right into it, CNF'R's riff.
00:03:09
Speaker
It's nice. They know the process. That's probably the thing that's easiest for me at least. They know how we work. They know how fact check works. I get to do less hand holding and more just button it up a little bit faster and just kind of get into the nuts and bolts of the story. So that's nice for sure.
00:03:36
Speaker
Yeah, and John's, he's got such a varied and robust career doing features, immersive work, and this kind of reporting. So in a sense, when you get a, kind of like when, you know, Bob Colker had a story, he's just like, you know, someone's got the chops and got the skills and the experience. So when John comes back around, you're like, oh, cool, like this is, this should be fun.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's a known. There aren't there aren't as many question marks. You know, we sort of know a writer's strengths and weaknesses and can, you know, see we can kind of see ahead of time what we will where we will be most needed and where we can kind of just be like, oh, I know John is going to have this. Let's just kick it back to him and let him do it, you know.
00:04:29
Speaker
Right, yeah, and this story is, you know, it's really, it's rich and dark and there are these kind of two parallel characters that you know are essentially going to intersect at some point. So when you're setting out to edit this piece and you know that there are these convergent threads, you know, what becomes the challenge on your end to tease that out as long as possible?
00:04:56
Speaker
Yeah, I know that was a thing that it took us a while to crack on this story. Like John and I did an edit. We worked on it together and then we sent it to Sayward and her first comment was, it's just so dark early. Because we told it originally more or less chronologically. We started in a similar way, but then we backed up to like,
00:05:27
Speaker
you know, the 50s and 60s and immediately got into some pretty dark material. You know, it was just... Sayward's point was, it's just hard to read. You know, it's hard to... When you've got a 10,000-word piece or whatever it ended up being, and the first, like, 4,000 words are just the darkest stuff you can come up with.
00:05:51
Speaker
you know, it's a real shot to the psyche. So the challenge was then, okay, how do we spread that out in the story? And can we do that in such a way that each character
00:06:08
Speaker
is coming into shape like in a slow and steady and satisfying way as the reader moves through the story. It was tough to do, honestly. You know, even at the very end, once we got it into copy edit, our copy editor had some really great notes about how
00:06:30
Speaker
places in which he had felt like a character's identity had shifted in a significant way and in a way that felt like we were almost trying to trick readers, which is obviously not what you want to do. And so even right up to the end, we were finessing what information we revealed when.
00:06:53
Speaker
in order to paint both of these main characters but also kind of the characters that surround them make them nuanced and complex in the way they actually are without sort of like giving away everything right at once.
00:07:12
Speaker
with the nature of the story and the people at the center of it. It's not like they ever really come across as sympathetic or there's moments of levity in a story of this nature too. So it's always going to be kind of bleak throughout the entire
00:07:30
Speaker
So I imagine your challenge was, well, we need to at least dilute it in a sense where it's stretched out over time. But yeah, I imagine that's the challenge. You're not going to be leaving this one feeling like, I'm ready to tackle the day. Well, yeah, exactly. And I mean, it's a story in which I'm not sure there's any character who behaves well all of the time.
00:07:58
Speaker
Like almost everybody in the story is flawed or holds some view, has either done something or holds a view that's difficult to defend. So it was, yeah, it's tough. That's a tough challenge when there's not really a protagonist. There's just people behaving badly.
00:08:27
Speaker
Yeah, I don't envy the task that you and John had to do. It's a riveting story. Like, don't get me wrong. It really is. And you are wondering how these Levi and Larry come together in this story. And it even shocked me to the extent to which they intersect.
00:08:52
Speaker
And it is gripping, but not every story can lighten the mood. I see it in the totality of a year of Atavus stories. That's almost kind of a book unto itself. They can't all be sunny, but here is the darkness before the dawn.
00:09:14
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and we thankfully we do I have a like an extraordinarily light piece. Also in edits, which has been like such a breath of fresh air.
00:09:25
Speaker
And one of the things that really helped us with this story is early in the process, even when John pitched it to us, is what interested all of us a lot was the town's reaction. Because this whole story takes place in a town of, I forget how many people, it's about 1,300 people. It's a small town. Everybody knows everybody.
00:09:52
Speaker
stereotypical small-town type of feel to it.
Journalism Industry Challenges
00:09:56
Speaker
And we were all sort of fascinated by the way in which this Larry and Levi's interactions and the way they ultimately sort of come together at the end of the story. The way that that
00:10:12
Speaker
played out in the town. And I think that helped because you're right, there's no moment of levity in this piece. But I hope that by having
00:10:26
Speaker
reactions from people who live in the town and were aware of part or all of what was going on, it gives readers a chance to gain a little bit of distance from it and not feel like they're just stuck down in the darkness all the time. Really, that stuff to me is what's
00:10:47
Speaker
fascinating and still has me scratching my head is how the people in town basically choose sides when there's really no good side to be on. That helped me in the editing process because if we went too far, if there were too many words,
00:11:12
Speaker
or a lot of words devoted to a particularly dark episode in one of these guys' lives, you can then pull back and sort of get a sense of how the town was feeling about it and hopefully gain enough distance that you feel capable of continuing with the story.
00:11:34
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Were there any particular, for lack of a better term, just like hiccups along the way that you're like, ah, this is the Rubik's Cube of this piece? You've kind of alluded to it, but I wonder if there was any way, if there was like one real particular thing. Like, we need to really get out the dynamite to blow up this roadblock. I'm like, oh, OK, there's the path.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yeah, well, the, you know, some of the allegations against Larry when he was younger, I think that was played. That was the thing I struggled with most is just like, where do you introduce that? And because it happens early in his life, you know, long before.
00:12:17
Speaker
Most of the action in the story takes place. And so you, you know, so you do have some options, maybe too many options about where to drop it in and it really was just like a trial and error thing where, where I would
00:12:33
Speaker
move it. John was very gracious in letting me, I was basically like, I need to blow this up and try putting it back together like 20 different ways and see how it feels. And he very graciously let me do that and didn't balk at all because it was like I would move it to the first quarter of the story and then set it aside for a day and come back and it wouldn't feel right. And so I'd try something else and it's,
00:13:03
Speaker
It's a slow process. It just took me time until eventually I was like, okay, now I think it's working.
00:13:11
Speaker
Do you ever worry about the fragility of the writer's mind when you have to feel like you have to dismantle an entire thing and you're like, oh, shit, kind of dreading this conversation with the writer? Yes, I do. I do. And I try to have conversations early with writers about how they prefer to work, because I can
00:13:40
Speaker
I think I may have even said this to John. I can send him a memo laying out how I think it should work and why I think it'll work. Sometimes the writer and I even agree that that's the way to go and so the writer goes off and does their thing. Then they come back and maybe something came up. I almost always tell writers if they get into a restructure and it feels like they're just like,
00:14:10
Speaker
pushing against an immovable force, they should probably stop and call me and we should talk because something's wrong if it's that difficult. But that's a little bit less work for me because I get to write a memo and then it's purely conceptual and I send it off. It is nice when a writer says, look, I'm not precious about
00:14:38
Speaker
this, I just want the story to be good, take a crack at it, and then we can both read it. And that is, I think, a little more common with a writer like John who has a ton of experience, and he's been through the process. And he's probably had stories blown up against his will many times in his career. So those types of writers are a little more willing to engage with it. And younger writers, depending on
00:15:06
Speaker
the writer, I guess, but they tend to, if it's like a passion piece for them or something they've been working on, they tend to want to take the lead on that type of stuff, which is also fine. You know, it doesn't bother me too much either way, but it can be a little faster if I can just do it.
00:15:26
Speaker
Yeah, and just getting to the fact that John has a lot of experience, and what's dispiriting, I guess, about just the nature of the industry is that it used to reward people who stuck around for a long time to get institutional knowledge, to get repartorial experience, just based on doing it over and over and over again.
00:15:50
Speaker
And I just feel like these days, journalism is just running people out and burning people out to the point where there are very few people that are, let's say, late 40s into their 50s, still doing just like good, solid reporting and writing that haven't been driven out to be PR flags.
00:16:12
Speaker
Yeah, right. And we were just talking about this because the the Adivis team was all together for I think the first time ever since I've been working there. And we were talking one morning about
00:16:29
Speaker
about this very fact that the people who acquire the skill set are leaving the industry. At the same time, the publications that still exist
00:16:45
Speaker
There are fewer and fewer of them willing to sort of like coach a writer through Gaining those skills, you know, okay now you need to do this and when you talk to people remember, you know Whatever the case may be whether it's reporting whether it's writing there there is a skill set to be learned and You know, I worry about people not having that, you know, I was
00:17:13
Speaker
kind of the last generation to come up through a really rigorous research department. I spent like six months basically learning how to not make mistakes in stories like this and losing all sleep because of it, just like nightmares about missing a fact in a story. There's just less and less of that happening.
00:17:43
Speaker
Yeah, I hope, I'm glad there are places like us. I do find, I talk to other writers who find publications where they still get good experience and gain some of those skills. I hope enough of them stick around that there's sort of a new generation whenever we come out of this and people can still do really quality journalism of this nature.
00:18:10
Speaker
Yeah, and I, you know, you always kind of like knock people who get into PR, but it's like unless you have maybe a spouse with a steady job, it's like almost no one can afford to stay in the game this long. You know, eventually you have costs that just supersede your capacity to be a long-standing 30-year journalist doing features and maybe some other things, but it's like you just can't afford to stay in it that long.
00:18:40
Speaker
I was just talking with a writer on this trip I took to New York who we were both saying how lucky we each were because we don't live in big cities. We live in places where you can buy a house for $150,000 or $200,000.
00:19:00
Speaker
That's one way of doing it. You keep your costs really low and so you can afford to still work. I'm in awe of anyone living in major cities on a coast where they can, or God, even Austin and Denver and Nashville aren't any better. They're expensive. I admire the people who
00:19:25
Speaker
try to make it work, but I do feel like more and more it's one of several hustles that you're going to have to have going in order to
00:19:37
Speaker
pay the bills. I hope that changes, but I don't know if it will. I don't have the answers.
John Rosengren's Writing Journey
00:19:43
Speaker
Yeah, I know. It's crazy. But yeah, but any case, well, well, Jonah is always, it's great getting your side of the table and to talk about the piece at hand, but also some more global things in this morass we're in. So yeah, thanks for coming on. We're going to kick it over to John now. Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
00:20:12
Speaker
Alright, John Rosengren's list of journalistic clips and accolades is impressive.
00:20:20
Speaker
He's the author of the greatest summer in baseball history, how the 73 season changed us forever, Hammer and Hank, George Almighty, and the Say Hey Kid, and the novel A Clean Heart. He's written for the Atlantic, GQ, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, and the Washington Post Magazine, and the Adivus, now twice. You can read more about him and his work at johnrosongrin.net. John with an H.
00:20:48
Speaker
In this conversation, we talk about decompressing after draining interviews, note-taking versus recorders, and the carnage of editorial cuts waving at you from the floor. Again, spoilers and sensitive content, so take the proper precautions. We start by merely hearing what John likes to have in place to start his writing day.
00:21:13
Speaker
At the end, a little parting shot about an internet version of going back to the land. For now, here's John. Good idea. Well, I mean, I have my desk in an office at my house and it's where I go to write. Often I'll go for a walk with the dog in the morning beforehand and
00:21:42
Speaker
That kind of gets me thinking about what I'm going to work on for the day. And then I show up at my desk and start writing. And I try to do that in the morning because I have my best writing time or creativity during the morning. I tend to get tired by one, two in the afternoon. So I protect that time right then and then do interviews and research in the afternoon.
00:22:04
Speaker
I understand, too, you've got the Mets hat on and you've written several books, a lot of which are baseball-oriented. So what's your love affair with baseball? How would you describe that and how you got into ball and just how much you love it?
00:22:18
Speaker
I grew up in the Minneapolis suburbs. My father was a baseball fan. He'd take me to games at Metz Stadium in the 70s. And so he imbued me with his love of baseball. And it's something I've carried on since. And the Mets hat is because I wrote a book on the 1973 baseball season. And one of the storylines was that was Willie Mays last season. He'd returned to New York, played with the Mets.
00:22:45
Speaker
They ended up getting to the World Series. It was the year of It Ain't Over Till It's Over, the manager Yogi Berra's mantra, and then Doug McGraw saying, you gotta believe. And they took the A's to seven games, and it was a sort of passing of the torch of the superstars because Reggie Jackson was the MVP of the series. It was his first World Series, and he was playing for the A's.
00:23:08
Speaker
and ushered in a new era of the super stride, maintain Jackson's the prototype of the superstar. And at this point, it kind of gave us a little segue to jump off. And we talked a little bit about Steve Prefontaine and how he was the dawn of a modern athlete of some kind. And the congruencies with Reggie Jackson.
Grand Marais Story Exploration
00:23:29
Speaker
So that was pretty cool. But in any case, we're going to start talking about his out of his story and how he arrived at it in particular.
00:23:37
Speaker
Well, Grand Marais is this small little town on the north shore of Lake Superior in what's called the Arrowhead region of Minnesota, that northeastern corner. And it's about a five-hour drive from Minneapolis. And it's this place that I've known and traveled to and traveled through. It's the gateway to the Gunflint Trail, which is one of the
00:24:02
Speaker
areas where you can access the Boundary Waters canoe area. Since I was a child, I've been going through that town. I heard about this sensational murder where this young man killed a guy with the moose antler
00:24:18
Speaker
And the first reaction is like, what? And then as I dug into it and found out what happened, that the town kind of backed this guy. And not everybody in the town, but a lot of people said, yeah, he did a good thing. He's a hero. And I thought, I want to learn more about this and what's happened there.
00:24:34
Speaker
Yeah, you get the parallel tracks between Lary and Levi in the story and it's a matter of when they intersect fatally at the end, but they do kind of have some overlap throughout the narrative too. So structurally speaking, how are you thinking about the parallel tracks of the story and eventually how they do converge?
00:25:03
Speaker
Well, what you see is sort of the editor's design. I thought it would be most interesting to tell a story by
00:25:13
Speaker
With this question looming, was Larry a legitimate threat or not? Was Levi justified in his fear? And so him taking action to protect his daughter by killing Larry, was that a reasonable act? Or was he just imagining all this and not at all justified?
00:25:39
Speaker
Even if Larry was a threat, the vigilante justice is probably not justified, but he was frustrated with his attempts to go through the system and felt the system didn't back him, neither the courts nor law enforcement. I think, to his way of thinking, there was no other recourse. I thought that was an interesting way to structure the article.
00:26:01
Speaker
Jonah, my editor, thought it would be better to do this, the two parallel narratives, and eventually have them meet. And I mean, I agree, it's another way to tell a story, and I think it works quite well that way too. And what are the conversations that you're having in the dialogue going back and forth, you know, that writer-editor relationship, trying to manifest the best version of the story?
00:26:24
Speaker
Well, it's just that, like how to best get this story. And I think Jonah thought, and it's true. I mean, it's a dark story. And Jonah thought that the darkness came on too hard, too fast, because I initially led with the murder. And so we decided, you know, there was some back and forth on that, how then to structure it and go from there. And, you know,
00:26:49
Speaker
it was more you know let's get to know these characters and see if I mean if you can be sympathetic to both that's best but then you know there's their stories ultimately intersect and with some nasty consequences then you know let that unfold so but anyway so it was just you know conversations back and forth and how are we going to work this out and several revisions and finally then the fine there's a lot of fine tuning and finally here we are ready to publish
00:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, and when you go in to do the reporting on a story of this nature and you talk to people in the community, how do you just navigate that degree of reporting and trying to get people comfortable talking to you about a real sensitive issue and topic?
00:27:36
Speaker
You know, I've done a lot of this in the past. I've spoken with people whose children have killed themselves, whose husbands have killed themselves, who've gone through addiction and sexual abuse, and one woman who was shot in the head by hijackers of an airplane left for dead on that tarmac.
00:27:58
Speaker
over the years spoken and interviewed a lot of people on very sensitive issues. And I found that it's most effective to go in with a sense of humanity and to recognize that, you know, these are human beings telling me their stories and trusting me with their stories and opening up to me. And so to be able to show compassion, to be able to show
00:28:23
Speaker
do you know to pause at moments and say you know I'm just really sorry for what you've experienced and what you've gone through and as you can imagine to talk to the siblings of Larry who all seven of them have been sexually were sexually abused by Larry and I talked to six of the seven one of the seventh apparently has been
00:28:46
Speaker
I think so scarred that she's not open to speaking to people about it. But the other six told me that it was somewhat healing for them, therapeutic even, to speak about their experience because I was willing to listen in a non-judgmental way. And Patrick, who's kind of the lead for the family, and the one I first approached said, because I showed some compassion, they felt willing to talk to me. And I just hope that I've
00:29:17
Speaker
You know, I've been able to respect that and what I wrote, because it is, I mean, it's so damn sad just hearing their experiences, you know, and someone cried when they spoke to me and I teared up at times. It's just, it's sort of
00:29:33
Speaker
inevitable when you encounter this sort of suffering, and it's ongoing. I mean, they're still living it in many ways, even though it happened 50, 60 years ago. When you have conversations of that nature that are incredibly heavy, do you have a means by which you decompress from conversations of that nature, too, so you can better metabolize it and don't take it on too much yourself?
00:30:00
Speaker
Right. I try to go for a bike ride or cross country ski in the winter and kind of exercise, you know, let my body release the sadness, tension, whatever. But also, I find it really important to talk to friends and my wife about what's going on. And they've been very indulgent in listening to me, especially in the almost 12 months I've been working on this story.
00:30:25
Speaker
So, yeah, that's really important and necessary for me to so I'm not carrying that load around inside because it's I mean, it's, it's traumatic to listen to someone else's trauma. And, and yeah, especially this degree of trauma, I mean, the horrific abuse they suffered, it was just, and it was repeated. I mean, they
00:30:47
Speaker
over and over and over and over. And these are just young, vulnerable children who are experiencing this. And nobody's helping them. Their parents aren't intervening. And when confronted with what's happened, when Larry impregnates his 12-year-old sister, the parents just give him condoms and make her get an abortion. And then when Mike, the brother, he stops Larry from raping
00:31:13
Speaker
One of his sisters and he throws the naked Larry on his parents bed waking them up and says look Larry tell them what you did and they he wouldn't so that Mike did and the parents to get your line you line little son of a bitch get out of the house. I mean.
00:31:29
Speaker
And then, yeah, it's awful, awful stuff that they experienced. Some of them have found, I mean, incredibly, they're resilient, but some of them have found some real supportive spouses or other people in the community to help them heal, which is really good.
00:31:48
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And in the telling of the story and the writing of it, it just when you think that Larry, you know, that that central question of like, is he still a threat? And just when you think like, he's just an old man, he probably isn't a threat, then you kind of like drop in that family history of what he what he did, how he abused his siblings. And you're like, oh, this guy is he's not right. And the system failed to not put him away and get him adequately healed and keep him from causing the harm he did. And you're like, yeah, he's
00:32:18
Speaker
He probably will always be a threat even if he's a meager old man. Yet, au contraire, because that's the common perception of sexual offenders in general and pedophiles in particular, that they will just continue to repeat their offense over and over and over. And what the data seems to show
00:32:42
Speaker
And the research on this is that a very small percentage of those who are convicted repeat the offense. It's under 30 percent over a 15-year period based on like a meta-analysis, you know, a bunch of different studies.
00:32:59
Speaker
Now that said, the researchers themselves will agree that it's difficult to analyze this data and that not everybody, it's compromised by the fact that not everybody reports sexual abuse. And also they're starting with people who are already caught. So of course there are people who aren't going to get caught and are likely to reoffend. But I think what's important to note, and this goes back to the compassion theme, is that not
00:33:26
Speaker
The, perhaps the majority of sexual offenders do not repeat their offense once they've been caught. And so, you know, if we're looking at Larry, so I guess that idea of give them a second chance but also don't be naive like I wouldn't leave my six year old daughter alone with this guy.
Community Reactions and Moral Complexities
00:33:42
Speaker
Because of what could happen, but the idea that people maybe can change or do change and certainly another thing is with the data that the older typically male because males tend to be the vast majority of offenders.
00:34:00
Speaker
As they age, the chances of reoffending go way, way down. And so, I mean, Larry was 77. I don't think he was necessarily a threat to Levi's daughter or any other child in the community. But we don't know if at some point between the time he arrived when he was in his mid-30s to his death, he did offend others. And so it remains an open question.
00:34:29
Speaker
And certainly the talk around the town was so intense about Larry, you know, the whispers, the fears, the rumors, and then those were fueled by Patrick and his siblings, you know, spreading more information about the past conviction and their past and how he'd abuse them. And so, you know, you can see how it gets built up in the mind of a parent of a small child, young child, thinking this guy's a real danger, a real threat.
00:34:58
Speaker
Yeah, and he had his own mental health issues, too. And it just seemed like a perfect storm for this kind of vigilante justice. And some people in the community, as you found, were like, found it justified, which even when you push back, you're like, well, murder? And they're like, well, yeah, maybe like in this case, yes. Right. It was shocking to me. And I think, again, some of that comes from the fact that
00:35:26
Speaker
You know, maybe it's based on this fundamental belief that I mean in the crashes terms like Levi posted on his website, the only way to stop a pedophile is a bullet like, and that belief that they're going to keep offending until the day they die.
00:35:44
Speaker
I think Larry creeped people out and they felt uncomfortable around him. And parents especially had reason to be wary of him with his parents with young children. And so there was, I mean, everybody kind of knew where he was. It's sort of like if you're playing basketball and there's a star or you're playing hockey and there's a soccer and there's a star on the
00:36:08
Speaker
court or the ice of the field, you know where that person is at all times, you know? And I think that's kind of how they were with Larry, not that he was the star, but that presence was just sort of known and they kind of had the radar out. So people lived with that. And so to have that eliminated, like the mother who told mother, four kids who told me, well, you know, I don't believe anyone should kill anybody else like that, but
00:36:35
Speaker
can't say I'm not thankful he's gone, you know, because like that fear now has been eliminated. She's been relieved of that. And so that's part of the complexity of the story and this guy's presence in town. Yeah.
00:36:50
Speaker
And what were some, just over the course of your reporting and then as you start to synthesize the information to write about it, what were some unique challenges to you that presented themselves just for this story as every story is kind of its own beast and what was unique to this one?
00:37:10
Speaker
Well, this happens to me a lot that I find out so much about a subject. And I don't know, maybe you're going through this with your book, you know, you feel like you have so much space with a book, you know, and so many pages you can fill, but I find out so much information, and then I can't use it all.
00:37:25
Speaker
And I spoke to probably over 50 people. I had multiple conversations with several of them. I scoured court records and hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents. And then I, at one point, joining my editor, we will just
00:37:44
Speaker
think this was the second or third draft, he said, well, just add in all that stuff you want. And so this draft ballooned over 17,000 words. And then, you know, it got paired back to the published version will be below 10,000. So I had all these anecdotes that I wasn't able to include, and all this information. And I think it certainly makes the story richer to have all that stuff in there. But it also becomes more tedious to go
Interview Techniques and Challenges
00:38:10
Speaker
way through and so that's to me the big challenge is like Bob Seger says you know what to leave in and what to leave out and Joan and I disagreed on it like he digs something out I'd put it back in on the next draft he'd take it out again and sometimes some of it was able to stay in and some of it just had to you know end up on the cutting room floor but you know I think what's there is a pretty streamlined strong version of the story
00:38:37
Speaker
how do you navigate the tough conversations that you have to have? And you say you're just being compassionate and empathic, but yeah, just over the course of this where you do have to have really tough conversations with people, it's just that, what were the nature of those conversations for you and just how best do you approach them? So yeah, you're getting the information you need, but you're also not feeling wholly exploitative of people and their traumas.
00:39:02
Speaker
Yeah, well, trying to win people's trust and have a conversation with them rather than me just grilling them, asking questions, certainly saving the tougher questions for the end can make it a little easier.
00:39:18
Speaker
Rick Riley tells the story. You remember Rick Riley who used to write? Oh yeah. He tells the story with Sammy Sosa. I think it was. Sammy Sosa kept saying, I'm clean. I didn't do any performance enhancing drugs. And
00:39:33
Speaker
he said, well, why don't you just tell people that then? Why don't you go public with that? And so he said, this interview is over. So Riley writes, note, young reporters always leave the hardest questions for last. But yeah, that idea. I mean, if you have sensitive questions, I don't lead with those.
00:39:56
Speaker
Yeah, the bridge burners, they go to the end because there might be no going back to them. You always like to end those conversations, like, oh, can I circle back to this? But yeah, if you light a match at the very end and it combusts the entire relationship, you're like, oh, really? Well, at least I have 45 minutes before I incinerated the connection.
00:40:18
Speaker
Right, right. And I guess the other thing, too, is to be persistent, to keep calling and trying to get hold of people. I mean, like, you know, some people didn't return phone calls, so I would call back or I went to this one woman's place of employment up there in Grand Moran. I asked for her and she wouldn't come talk to me. So I left her a letter and she didn't respond, which is unfortunate, but it turns out it was
00:40:45
Speaker
on something that was kind of tangential to the story and wouldn't have, Jonah probably would have cut anyway. But there was another woman who she'd moved out of Grand Marais, and I couldn't find her phone number, but I found an address. So I mailed her a letter. And you know, people are not used to getting letters. And so they tend to respond, I find, to those. And she responded. There was a priest, and she was a really useful source. There was a priest, Father Seamus, he's mentioned in the courtroom transcript. And
00:41:14
Speaker
I tried to reach him several ways, and he wouldn't talk to me. But I did talk to the archdiocese about some other charges that Patrick had about it. But I think those ended up getting cut, actually. But there was a priest, too, in that Grand Maraiso had sexually molested a kid back in the 90s. And so anyway, again, people don't want to talk to me about that. But I kind of pushed and pushed and pushed and finally got the information I needed.
00:41:41
Speaker
I mean, there's even Larry's mentioned in a book. I don't know if I have it here in my, you can see this is my part of the spot. Larry file. Oh, wow. My gosh.
00:41:55
Speaker
Now, I'm not one to do video interviews because who needs that drama? But we had to use Zoom because my usual recording software was having issues, as they say. So John turned his camera around to his desk and there was a stack of documents that must have been in the neighborhood of a foot high for this story.
00:42:22
Speaker
And that's why I was like, oh, wow, because anytime you see a pile of papers that tall, you're like, oh, my God, how do you get your head around that shit? I mean, that's not all the documents about the documents of 100 pages of documents I have online, digital copies. But OK, so here's a book at this priest. It's called More Urgent Than Usual, The Final Homilies of Mark Collenhorse.
00:42:49
Speaker
he's the priest and befriended Larry and they traveled together and Larry cut his hair and carried a lock of his around his neck that he's you know a little leather pouch that he said could and he also carried a vial of priest's blood or allegedly priest's blood that he said could affect miracles and cures for people um i quoted from the book that got cut
00:43:14
Speaker
the story of this interview. It's like that got cut. That got cut. Yeah. I could write the sequel of all the cut pieces. Right. The DVD extras for this would be a legendary. Right, director. Yeah, exactly. Bonus features. Yeah. I had that on my website, you know, like blogs from articles and all this stuff that got cut.
00:43:37
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, I spoke with Tommy Tomlinson yesterday for his latest book, Dogland, and he's a sports writer and wrote a great memoir, The Elephant in the Room, also. But he was saying a lot of stuff from Dogland that was
00:43:53
Speaker
Getting cut he's just like you know it's cut from the book, but it makes for good Repurpose material for like his newsletter. I'm like those. That's a really good idea for engendering that degree of connection with your with your readers you're giving them a little bit of
00:44:09
Speaker
the what got cut, those DVD extras, those bonus things. Be like, okay, this didn't make the cut, but if you're along for the ride, let me show you some things that are pretty interesting, but just ultimately made the narrative sag. Like, may I tell one of those stories?
00:44:24
Speaker
Oh, yeah, please. So, you know, parents would tell their children, stay away from this guy. And the kids all knew who he was. And I mean, I'm sure they talked among themselves, too. But there was a group of kids who on a bitter cold December night, I mean, like below zero, Minnesota cold, right?
00:44:44
Speaker
They gathered and practiced these three songs, and this was December, but they weren't Christmas carols. They were like Negro spirituals.
00:44:55
Speaker
I don't know what those are called today or what the correct term for that is, but, you know, like hymns that the slaves would sing to empower themselves. They practiced those in a public restroom, which was like the only open public space they had, you know, they could hear them. So then they walked like a mile in this bitter cold to Mary's Larry's house in the end of town, knocked on his door. He came outside and they sang him these songs.
00:45:19
Speaker
And then he kind of stood there bemused, not quite knowing what was going on. And then they marched back to town. And it was as though they were liberating themselves or doing this exorcism of their fears so that they could purge themselves of this kind of weight that they carried and this semblance of fear that they carried.
00:45:43
Speaker
of him. I mean, it was I mean, it was this incredible anecdote that cut, but it showed to me it spoke to the weight that these kids carried and just the sort of presence that Larry had in their psyches as they were growing up.
00:46:04
Speaker
Yeah, that is a really telling anecdote that they're trying to confront the monster, if you will, as a way to at least swash their fears as best as possible, and they're like, maybe it's not as bad as our folks are telling us. Yeah, they stared down the dragon, and you saw him back into the cave.
00:46:24
Speaker
Yeah. And when you're getting back to some of the just the nature of conversations that you have in interviewing for story versus interviewing for, say, information, how do you go about preparing for interviews with sources, be it doing a lot of background or maybe just leaving yourself open to discovery?
00:46:44
Speaker
Well, I try to find out as much as I can about a person I'm going to interview and then, and maybe their connection to whoever it is, you know, like in this case, how might they know Levi? How might they know Larry?
00:46:56
Speaker
And then I write out a list of questions, you know, things I want to know, and then kind of try to figure out what order to ask them in. And then I approach them. I tend to go in with a curiosity and letting people know I want to hear what you have to say. I'm really curious.
00:47:15
Speaker
and trying to, you know, if I'm in person make eye contact and listen while I'm furiously scribbling notes, but trying to hear what they have to say and affirm that. But I think of Robert Caro and he used to write in his notes, S-U, you know, like shut up, shut up, shut up. And so I've
00:47:36
Speaker
Try to practice that and just listen and not say anything. And as you said, people tend to fill in the gaps. And often when they pause,
00:47:48
Speaker
And they're speaking, if I just wait, there's usually something else coming. And then of course, you know, that question at the end of, is there anything else you want to add or think I should know? And a lot of times that's when I get my best quotes and then asking too, who else should I talk to? That usually yields some more sources as well.
00:48:07
Speaker
But it's trying to, you know, and not trying to come in like I'm a nodal, just confirm what I know, but like I'm kind of a tabular asset, tell me everything. And then there are times when I find it helpful to tell people, often people in authority, it seems, this is what I know.
00:48:29
Speaker
And and I want to know, you know, do you think this is accurate or someone told me this? Is this accurate? Like I heard a story that Levi had been drinking in a certain bar in town before he went over to Larry's house.
00:48:40
Speaker
And someone else had told me Levi didn't in there. I asked the owner of the bar, hey, was Levi drinking there that afternoon? He said, no, no, he never came in there. And we opened at three and he went to Larry's at four or something like that. So he wouldn't have time to get drunk. Well, sure, now there's plenty of time to get drunk. But anyway, I said, well, I talked to this other bartender who used to work there. And he said he used to serve Levi at that bar.
00:49:07
Speaker
Well, you know, then so I, I thought that was important, you know, to kind of come back at this guy and try to, but ultimately I can't pin down whether Levi was there or
Interview Strategies and Credibility Assessment
00:49:18
Speaker
not. So we, we dropped it.
00:49:20
Speaker
Yeah, and when you're interviewing, are you someone who relies on a strictly note-taking or a tape recorder of some kind as well? I'm old school. I like to write out notes because I find it more efficient than having to go back and listen to tape.
00:49:38
Speaker
And I also find a lot of the transcribing services, especially the free ones, well, they're either expensive that they're good or the free ones tend to get stuff wrong a lot. But so I like to just write out stuff. And then I've gotten pretty good at my own form of shorthand. I mean, I scribble. In fact, Hector hate it because I can't read my handwritten notes.
00:49:59
Speaker
tend to be pretty good at getting stuff down. But you know, it's very difficult to multitasking because you're asking a question, you're trying to listen, you're taking notes, and you're thinking of the follow up questions. And I mean, it's just it's a lot going on. So it's very intense. Anyway, especially then if there are emotions that are going or if it's an emotionally charged conversation. Anyway,
00:50:19
Speaker
i've had editors chastise me for not recording interviews and so if there's a really sensitive interview or a big project like this i record interviews so i record almost all the interviews the only i tend not to if i feel like when i take out my
00:50:35
Speaker
recorder, which is now my telephone, or my cell phone. If that's going to make a person self conscious or not talk, then I don't use it. But no, there are a couple conversations I didn't record. And there was another one where I was talking to this guy for this article, who's in his late eighties, maybe even 90 Jerome Brand,
00:50:53
Speaker
And he was having a lot of difficulty hearing. And so I thought, I can't put this guy on speakerphone. I need to just hold the mic real close to my mouth. And so I didn't record that interview. But then I just know I have to take really good notes.
00:51:10
Speaker
Yeah, you brought up a really good point about if you're doing the old school way and scribbling like crazy, it's like you're trying to listen, synthesize what's coming in, write in such a way that you can access it later. You gotta be able to read it at some level. And then you're thinking of something else that you might wanna follow up on while you're still scribbling something from like three sentences ago to keep up. So it's just like, it is so hard to keep pace in that scenario.
00:51:38
Speaker
And on top of that is trying to filter the information like, is this guy full of shit? Is he telling me the truth or what's his bias? Why might he be skewing or she be skewing what she's saying here? And do I believe this or is this total bullshit? And this reminds me, and like with this case, Larry's friends all seem to repeat the same version of a story.
00:52:01
Speaker
Like, they'd all talk together and said, this is what we're gonna say. And there was some of that overlap, too, in the Larry siblings, as they were talking. And it's like, it was obvious to me that they, you know, they'd say certain things, and I think, oh, so and so has been talking to so and so. And I, but it's like, just a lot to be processing, you know, you're trying to pick it all in.
00:52:20
Speaker
Yeah, well, John, before Zoom just cuts us off in this way, I want you to just be mindful of your time. And also, I'd rather hit stop than have Zoom hit stop. So just amazing. This is an amazing piece. I'm so excited people are going to get to read it soon and then hear about some of the backstory on it. So just thanks for coming on the show and talking some shop. Well, you're welcome. Thanks a lot for having me. It's been fun to chat with you, and I appreciate your interest in the story.
00:52:53
Speaker
Awesome. Thanks to John and Jonah and the lovely team over at The Atavis for doing what they do, magazine.atavis.com. No kickbacks or commissions for me if you subscribe, so go do it. If anything like that changes, I will be fully transparent. I like to be transparent.
Host's Reflections on Social Media and Internet Presence
00:53:18
Speaker
If you head over to brendanamara.com, I've recently put up a new blog post about an internet version of the back to the land movement, which is to say, remember the days when you liked what someone was putting down and you bookmarked their website and you made the effort to check it. Yeah. Every day or every other day, like it was a news site. Like, Oh, is there anything new? Oh, cool. Look at that new blog post.
00:53:44
Speaker
I've been fully logged out of Instagram and threads for a full nine days now. They are the only two social media platforms I have. I technically have a Facebook account, but I only use that to find people for reporting purposes. But for all intents and purposes, I don't have that, nor am I tempted to look at it.
00:54:08
Speaker
Frankly I don't want to ever log back into Instagram or threads or anything of that nature. In fact, unless my publisher or agent threatens disownment, I don't plan on using social media for the forthcoming book promotion.
00:54:26
Speaker
In the blog post, I draw other parallels to the Back to the Land movement that you can check out on your own. It'll also be linked up in this month's newsletter. There's a tremendous amount of FOMO going on in my brain, not gonna lie, but the cost benefit analysis of the FOMO versus the jealousies or resentments I feel, as well as just being so impossibly annoyed by all the writers out there.
00:54:55
Speaker
I don't know, taking selfies and posting so much shit that is just so annoyingly myopic, flooding the infinite scroll with how great they are, and I'm just so fed up with it. It broke me. It just, it finally broke me.
00:55:14
Speaker
It doesn't jive with my brain and mental health, so why should I force myself? Because we've been hoodwinked into using these platforms. Newsflash, they're not designed for us. But then again, you knew that. But how will people find me? Well listen, it's not easy, but the answer is simple. If you totally eschew social media.
00:55:36
Speaker
You know you have your own little internet acre and you pump you that being your website some real estate you own and you publish as widely as possible and You always link people back to your website and email list. That's the math
00:55:54
Speaker
soon through building a permission asset over years. I mean, this podcast is 11 years old. Let that sink in. People will soon seek you out. And you just keep delivering value over and over again. And people will, you'll earn trust.
00:56:12
Speaker
I craved the internet of 2007, you know, before I had heard of Twitter and when people hadn't been totally locked into Facebook and the like, you know, when you found the writer,
00:56:28
Speaker
that you admired and you find out that they had a website and you poked around you're like oh they got a blog too that's cool you know that's my dream dammit that's back to the land internet style baby so stay wild and if you can do interview see ya
00:57:05
Speaker
you