Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 477: David Howard and the Search for Stories He Believes In
749 Plays18 days ago
"It's honestly one of the biggest gambles I've taken in my career," says David Howard, the journalist behind "Conversations with a Hit Man," this for the Atavist Magazine.
David is a journalist and author, and in this conversation we talk about:
- Nonverbal stuff, so the importance of doing this stuff in person
- The grand puzzle of a piece
- Looking for stories to believe in
- Keeping his mind as clear as possible when he starts to write
- Taking gambles
- Learning from losses
- And what the tape recorder frees him up for
We also hear from lead editor Jonah Ogles about his side of the table. If you want to learn more about David, visit davidhowardauthor.com and follow him on Instagram @davehoward99.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Recommended
Transcript
Pitch Club and Upcoming Events
00:00:01
Speaker
Whoa. Hey, issue two of Pitch Club just dropped July 1st. This with Runnin' a Tor. Head to welcome to pitchclub.substack.com to read her pitch and listen to her audio annotate various sections of that pitch and subscribe to it.
00:00:19
Speaker
Oh, hey, CNFers. The front runner knows out. I think you know that. And I think it's gaining a bit more traction out there. Got some events here on Thursday, July 17th. I will be at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Washington in conversation with author Maggie Mertens at 7.30 p.m. And on July 27th, there will be yeah the third live taping of the podcast featuring ya boy, B.O.
00:00:50
Speaker
CNF Pod's reigns are getting handed over to Daniel Littlewood. 1 p.m. at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene. Go on and get yourself a front runner.
Audiobook Excerpt from Mariner Books
00:01:03
Speaker
And last week for a double feature Friday, I dropped in a longish excerpt that my gracious publisher Mariner Books shared with me from the audio book. It was episodes 475 and 76. I'm going to just drop in a shorter version of that excerpt right here. I'll share them a few more times.
00:01:24
Speaker
If you already heard the excerpt, by all means, skip ahead about five minutes, but we're going to hear a little bit more from one of my favorite set pieces of the book.
Steve and Waddle's Race Experience
00:01:33
Speaker
race went off, and just like Steve told Waddle, he paced him through three-quarters of a mile in 2.56, Steve hugging the inside lane, and Waddle coasting to the outside of Steve's right shoulder.
00:01:45
Speaker
Waddle had never gone faster than 3.01 for three-quarters. Steve's legs felt heavy, and at this point, he wanted to explode. He had run four three-mile races in 13.20 or below in ten days.
00:01:59
Speaker
The acceleration wasn't there. He had no snap. Waddle was told by his bowling green coach that his best races would come off a fast pace, and right there before him on a platter was about as fast as he'd ever experienced.
00:02:13
Speaker
Steve put the world record in Waddle's sights. All Waddle had to do was take it. Steve rushed by the east stands with 220 yards to go. Fans knew the book on Waddle, and right on cue, Waddle surged 10 yards clear of Steve.
00:02:29
Speaker
There would be no catching Waddle. But Steve chased after him not only to keep up with the clock, but to give his people in the rickety west stands reason to cheer. Maybe the roar would push Waddle past the point of reason, past Ryan.
00:02:43
Speaker
By the time Waddle struck the tape, the time was 3.53.3, the third fastest mile ever. Waddle winced at the finish. Steve finished a few yards behind Waddle and gave his people all that remained, what would be his career best mile, 3.54.6.
00:03:03
Speaker
A little girl screamed, That's okay, Pri. Don't worry about it. Years later, Waddle looked back at this race with a rare pang of regret. So much of his mindset was geared toward winning the race, not the clock.
00:03:18
Speaker
Time was secondary. He never wanted to sell out too soon. Instead of going for it and laying it all out on the track and say, hey, you know, if I can run a 55-second last lap, I can get a world record, I was holding back because I was afraid of tightening up down the homestretch.
00:03:36
Speaker
Steve, being the strong runner he was, I thought he could beat me. I regret that, truthfully. I regret that he brought me through such a great race and a great time, and I didn't lay it all out there on the track.
Lessons in Sportsmanship and Support
00:03:49
Speaker
That's a weakness I had. Waddle also didn't want to like who he was running against. The better to flog them. He wanted to run angry. And after the race, with the fans still clapping and cheering, Waddle began his victory lap.
00:04:06
Speaker
Steve jogged up beside Waddle and grabbed his arm and raised them together above their heads. Waddle thought, what are you doing running with me? This is my victory lap. How stingy, Waddle remembered.
00:04:18
Speaker
How stingy of me. Steve was endorsing me to the fans at Hayward Field. He was also saying, you did that because of me. And he was absolutely right.
00:04:30
Speaker
Ernie Cunliffe, who was the coach for the Air Force working with Waddle, found Steve and told him, it was a best of life for seven other guys in the race and you made it possible.
00:04:42
Speaker
You set it up for them. Steve often made it possible for others to level up. His gift to them. The few who beat him also ran out of their shoes.
00:04:54
Speaker
Waddle bettered his best time by nearly four full seconds to win this night, the fastest mile ever run at Hayward Field, this in the Temple of Milers. Waddle recalled, If he had not brought me through in 256, there's no way I could have run that fast.
00:05:12
Speaker
It was a valuable lesson for me to learn back then. I did reflect on it afterwards, thinking, no one's on an island. You have a family, you have coaches, you have teammates, you have competitors.
00:05:24
Speaker
All that together is what makes runners achieve their goals. Steve helped me learn that lesson. I was always grateful for that. The restoration meet was a beautiful illustration of Steve's evolution as a person.
00:05:38
Speaker
He started to see his rivals as peers, even if it meant falling on a sword to lift others up. all to give back to his community. These people. Those stands.
00:05:51
Speaker
After the race, Steve was swarmed by children seeking autographs. He signed them attentively. One of Steve's older fans brandished a bottle of champagne in a paper bag.
00:06:02
Speaker
The fan offered Steve the bag, and Steve, appreciatively, took a swig.
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:06:15
Speaker
All right, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, and I've had enough. And frankly, I'm sick of it. ah The show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell, the art and craft of telling.
00:06:29
Speaker
True Stories, I'm Brendan O'Meara. The guy you invited to the party because word got out that everyone else was invited except me, it's that Atavistian time of the month. So there are some spoilers in this conversation, and boy...
00:06:41
Speaker
Do we have a shiner for you? The name of the piece is Conversations with the Hitman. I should just stop right there because ah ah you're you you already hooked. You're hooked.
00:06:52
Speaker
It's written by David Howard and edited by Jonah Ogles. A former FBI agent traveled to Louisiana to ask a hired killer about a murder that haunted him. Then they start talking about a different case altogether.
00:07:07
Speaker
Magazine.atavist.com. Go check it out. Go subscribe. but I don't get any kickbacks. You know my met recommendation is true. I don't do affiliate links.
00:07:20
Speaker
I don't do links. The hell. Come on. You're better than that, B.O. I don't do affiliate links. So you know that everything I recommend is not to get a commission.
00:07:33
Speaker
Is that stupid? Maybe. The story is wild and has a lot in common with the movie The Usual Suspects in terms of its structure. You'll hear me say that with Jonah and Dave. it
00:07:47
Speaker
David, as they say. In this world, David Howard is a journalist and author of nonfiction books and magazine stories, but he'll get a more fleshed out story. intro when it's his time to take the stage show notes of this episode and more at brendanomero.com hey hey there you can find links to hot blogs tasteful nudes and forms to sign up for the flagship rage against the algorithm newsletter the hottest thing since seltzer water is pitch club where have it uh where i have a journalist audio annotated pitch that earned publication the first two with atavis writers but the next two will not be atavis writers
00:08:23
Speaker
Well, one
Pitch Club Format and Support
00:08:24
Speaker
has written for the Atavis, but it won't be her Atavis. Actually, hold on. Yeah, it'll it will be her Atavis pitch, but Kim's is not an Atavis pitch. And so I'm looking to mix it up a little bit. Don't want to just lean on Atavis as much as I love them.
00:08:38
Speaker
Want to one when distribute, want to diversify ah these pitches and get a sense of what other publications are doing. I'm rambling.
00:08:49
Speaker
This isn't part of the script. I went off script. And when I go off script, as I am right now, things get a little loopy. Things get a little weird. So in any case, Pitch Club, a journalist, audio annotates a pitch that earned publication.
00:09:04
Speaker
If you're a working journalist, you'll want to subscribe. If you're journalism teacher, you'll want your students subscribing. Forever free. Welcome to pitchclub.substack.com. Issue two, we've run in a tour.
00:09:15
Speaker
As I said at the top of the show, just went up. Awesome stuff. And if you want to support the show and its infrastructure and my ego with a few dollars and cents, you can go to patreon.com slash cnfpod.
00:09:30
Speaker
Get some FaceTime with me to talk some things out depending on
Personal Reflections on Turning 45
00:09:34
Speaker
your tier. It's not very organized, but it's something. And most people on the Patreon page, they just like to contribute a few bucks into the kitty just to help with the show.
00:09:44
Speaker
Just like a tip jar. up to you whether you want to take me up on the perk. I don't have much by way of perks. But it's a good perk. I've been told it's a nice perk.
00:09:57
Speaker
All right, so David's story is pretty astounding, and we're going to dig into it first with the lead editor, Jonah Ogles. There are some high-level nuggets here. It's not just about the story.
00:10:08
Speaker
It's kind of cool. So stay tuned and stay with it. Parting shot on having just turned...
Patience in Storytelling with Jonah Ogles
00:10:18
Speaker
45 years of age on July 1st, the usual birthday reflections, what I consider my New Year's Day. So let's cue up the montage and hear from lead editor, Mr. Jonah Ogles Ruth.
00:10:37
Speaker
Tell it to me like you're watching a movie. One tiny lowercase lol will fucking sail me through. Editing is about helping the writer think. is This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, what kind of blew your hair back about this story? Because this this one's a wild one. You know, and that was obvious in the pitch. You know, and any time you have you know, we get a lot of cold case pitches, you know, a lot of them.
00:11:15
Speaker
And, and usually what, what people are saying in those pitches is ah you know, I've got this cold case, um, or maybe it was tried in the past and the wrong person was convicted, but you know, there's this evidence that maybe somebody else did it, or we, you know, there's a new, ah new lead of some sort and they,
00:11:42
Speaker
you know, they want to tell that story, but, ah but a new lead is, is, is not much to go on, you know, especially if a story has been covered pretty widely as you know, the, the case in this story has a book written about it, a couple of books written about it. So,
00:12:01
Speaker
you know when it When it comes in, I'm i'm always a little skeptical of those types of pitches. But in this case, Dave had the goods. If nothing else, it says a lot about chasing a story even when you don't have an assignment.
00:12:17
Speaker
because Dave had reported this entire thing before he even pitched it to us, you know which I understand, like, that's a, that's a difficult thing for writers to do. um but Dave smelled a good story. We briefly allude to this in the piece, but, you know, he'd established a relationship with this FBI agent from the reporting in a book, you know, where he interviewed this guy and they had built a rapport and they stayed in touch.
00:12:43
Speaker
And, you know, so like there's, There's a lesson in that to like be be good to sources, recognize when a source is a good one, and and keep keep fostering that relationship. Because the the source, Myron Fuller, the retired FBI agent, is the one who came to Dave and said, hey, I'm going to go talk to this you know convicted to this criminal in prison who's admitted to being a hitman and, and the FBI agent and the hitman had overlapped in Shreveport, Louisiana. and so Dave follows along, the writer follows him along and, and starts chasing his story that he didn't even know what it was going to be before he pitched it, but it turned out to be, you know, they basically crack a a notorious cold case, um, or may have cracked it. And,
00:13:32
Speaker
You know, that's all because Dave followed a hunch basically. Yeah. And when you refer to the goods that Dave brought to this story, then maybe other cold case pitches don't, they come across your guests. What was the nature of those goods?
00:13:49
Speaker
Yeah, well, he had ah a resolution. You know, it wasn't it wasn't just a bit of evidence like, hey, you know, I've been digging through and I think maybe the police overlooked somebody.
00:14:01
Speaker
It was, hey, I've I've talked to a guy. He's confessed to things. and And and not just that, I mean, just, you know, if there was a if all that had happened was a confession, we may have still assigned it.
00:14:16
Speaker
But there was in this case, there was there were multiple twists along the way. You know, he does. They don't just sit down with him and he the the hitman spills all the goods. There's like a cat and mouse a little bit conversational cat and mouse where here's a little a hint that maybe something else is going on and and Dave and the FBI agent do some digging and then come to a realization or a hunch on their own that the the hitman you know either kind of confirms or kind of pushes back on. So it's there's a really interesting like give and take in that relationship.
00:15:00
Speaker
Because, on it you know, honestly, without that, you know, so much of this story takes place with three people at a table just talking to each other. Right. And that can be pretty boring it from a from a storytelling standpoint.
00:15:14
Speaker
You know, you can only describe like the flickering lights in a room so many times to add a little dramatic tension. before readers are kind of like, okay, nothing's happening here. but But in this case, every conversation pushes the narrative forward and and sort of like propels readers and and Dave as the writer into this new realm of the case.
00:15:42
Speaker
So there there was this like natural propulsion, even to the pitch, that that was really, really intriguing when when we read it. Yeah, the even hearing you talk about it in in when I was reading the piece, too, it it had the feel of the usual suspects where you know you had the detective and Kevin Spacey's character. They would be in that office talking about it, and that each of those conversations advanced things a little farther. Then it went back into the narrative of the movie, and this this had that feel to it.
00:16:15
Speaker
Yeah, and absolutely. I mean, it's, it's really, i was telling Dave as we worked on it, like this is the kind of story editors dream about and writers, writers too, you know, but like from, from an editor standpoint, you know, we're always, we're always looking for ways to sort of maximize the, the tension in the story and,
00:16:40
Speaker
you're confined by the facts. So there's only so much you can do with that. In this case, the the story just had all of that naturally, you know, so all we really had to do was sort of work work on how we still worked on maximizing that. And it's and it was basically, you know, when when do we present certain revelations and what contextual information Should we have before that in order to like make readers feel like they know where they are and be able to follow that? Like this is a twist um without giving too much away. So there there was sort of some structural tweaking along the way, but it really had most of what you want baked in just twists, you know, some really amazing twists.
00:17:33
Speaker
Yeah. And a moment ago, you brought up something that I think is really astute about doing this kind of work and being in this kind of work where you have to be sometimes like just really patient as ah as a writer, sometimes to cultivate those sources and the relationships. So they will ah well we'll bloom and blossom perennially or, you know, every X amount of years, whatever. You can really nurture that stuff.
00:17:59
Speaker
But also the kind of the the guts to kind of stick with a story, even when it wasn't a sign, because you just know on a hunch that there's something good there. I don't know. Maybe there's something there, a thread you can pull on to about the patience needed to be in this kind of work when sometimes we want things to happen really fast.
00:18:17
Speaker
Well, yeah, and I mean, that is an issue in the industry now because so, so much of journalism is now, you know, quick reaction, quick analysis, you know, that's because that's an easy it's a really easy way for publications to produce stories that sell ads.
00:18:38
Speaker
You know, you have smart people. The Atlantic like does a great job at this. You know, you have smart people who who just react very quickly. And so much of journalism is is geared toward that now. and And there aren't a ton of places anymore that, well, if you're a writer and you're trying to make money, that's what editors are going to want from you. You know, okay can you give us this quick thing? this The news cycle is now. we got to publish this now.
00:19:08
Speaker
But to do these types of stories, you have to follow them. You know you have you have to just like be patient. You have to spend time doing it. So many times I'm getting pitches from writers where I i end up saying to them, you've found a good topic, yes.
Long-Term Story Projects
00:19:25
Speaker
like Your instincts are right.
00:19:27
Speaker
but you're going to have to follow this more. you know You need to talk to these people, you need to build relationships and and then come back to us with a better sense of what will actually be there when you sit down to write the story because you know because you need you need that. you need you You might call a source and they might tell you to shut up you know and hang hang up on you and and it's over or the archives that you hope are there.
00:19:55
Speaker
are not actually there. and In this case, Dave was able to to follow follow keep collecting string over the course of years before he actually had a story to tell.
00:20:07
Speaker
and it it pays off you know as ah as a writer do being patient. finding a way to sort of like keep yourself paid, you know pay the bills as you're moving along, but have this other thing on the side that you're just slowly working towards.
00:20:25
Speaker
I think that's how you have to do it now. Yeah, that's a really really good point to bring up. It's almost like you got to treat it like um yeah like a ah side hustle short story project or book project that that is always thrumming in the background of your of your RAM ah while you're doing other things that might subsidize ah these kind of projects. And not that these are, yeah these can't eventually pay, but if you break it down hourly and over the course of years, it it doesn't pay the bills, but it is very fulfilling if you can stick with it and stay with it. But that's what these stories require is a lot of time and a lot of patience. So you do need to find something
00:21:06
Speaker
else that is more bite-sized and then yeah you come back to this on the weekends and I find that to be the case with a lot of out of his writers that they have these things cooking on just on a low simmer on the back burner for a while and then you know when they can finally really pursue it like maybe in that final part of the reporting and the writing the yeah they put all their time and resources into something like this Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, it is pretty common for atavist writers to to have spent a long time chasing a story and waiting until they feel like they have enough to finally pitch it.
00:21:43
Speaker
And that we love that, you know, that leads to it's much easier to to fashion an 8000 or 10,000 word piece when you have many years of material to work with.
00:21:56
Speaker
And if you're trying to do this quickly, it can be a struggle. That shows in the in the revision process that you just you don't always have what you need. and And then you end up kind of slowly trying to backfill if if you can, but you don't always have that luxury once you're actually in The revision process. you Yeah.
00:22:18
Speaker
Yeah. To use a cooking metaphor, like out of his stories and certainly ah book work, like they just need to be in the crock pot and like slow cook for a while. And those flavors really need time to develop. It's just there's no way to.
00:22:33
Speaker
put like a good stew in a pressure cooker and feel like you got something that was worth the weight at the end. Like these, and but it's so hard to cultivate that just that the patients to, to do that, but it is so necessary for like the best stories that, that you publish and the best books that are out there. Like they just, they need time.
00:22:53
Speaker
But unfortunately we just feel like sometimes we, we just want things to happen so quickly. Well, yeah. And, and also like, I'm sure sometimes writers are following these stories and they fall apart.
00:23:05
Speaker
You know, you, you might have spent a year or two on something and it just doesn't work out. And like, that's tough, you know, like I, I'm not, I'm not a writer probably because I couldn't deal with that kind of disappointment, but like,
00:23:21
Speaker
you've you've got to You've got to be able to ride that out if you wanted if you want to eventually publish this type of work. You've got to be willing to like take some losses when as you're chasing a story over a long period of time and maybe one doesn't pan out or maybe three don't pan out, but then one does.
00:23:41
Speaker
But it's a real testament to like persevering through all of that. Yeah, there I remember in my horse racing reporting days and this one trainer, Nick Zito, who had a propensity for upsetting some of the bigger horses, big favorites, when he had no business being in certain races.
00:24:01
Speaker
And I remember him telling me, he's like, well, Brendan, the only way to guarantee a loss is by not running the race. And I took a lot away from that and just in terms of life wisdom. And I think that's very true with pursuing very long narrative stories that might not pan out.
00:24:18
Speaker
Like the way to make sure that it's not going to pan out is by not diving in with all the research and all the reporting you can do. If you don't do that, everything is going to feel thin and you definitely have a harder time selling the thing.
Learning from Failures in Storytelling
00:24:31
Speaker
And sure, you might hold back some of your like you don't want to pursue so much because you feel like, well, if it's wasted time, then I don't want to have to waste it all that time and money. But.
00:24:42
Speaker
to piggyback on what Nick said is like, well, you know, you're almost ensuring a loss if you kind of, you really do have to go all the way in because that, that is what gives you the best chance at publication and the best chance at winning, whatever that is.
00:24:56
Speaker
And it's also, you know, you learn from that, the stories that don't work out, you learn from it And, and I, I don't think this is an industry where like, you know,
00:25:09
Speaker
um if you're going to be dissuaded by failure, you're going to wash out pretty quick. you know so If you want to tell these types of stories,
00:25:20
Speaker
you you treat those those losses, to keep going with this metaphor, you treat those is a learning experience. you know and and you You see what went right, you see what didn't. you You're also honing your own instincts. you know My guess is that when they do fall apart you're able to kind of look back and and find moments where there was a voice in your head or something in your gut saying this isn't going right and and maybe maybe you you know you ignore that so i think sometimes you have to ignore that type of thing and keep going but eventually you're going to hone your instincts you're going to hone your your reporting how you report how you talk to sources and eventually it'll
00:26:08
Speaker
it'll pay off as you do it more and more often. Yeah. that That's really true that the having that or cultivating that experience. Yeah. Your instincts do get better and be like, okay, this is actually in my spidey sense is saying like, we, we can probably go in this direction and have a better shot at it panning out.
00:26:27
Speaker
ah But the only way to do that is athletes talk about this all the time. You can always learn more from a loss than from a win. So it's if you can kind of do the Jedi mind trick on your brain that no matter what, you're going to come away with a good experience, win or lose.
00:26:40
Speaker
It probably sets you up for the next five for 10 years if you can think of a loss as a way to ensure future wins. Yeah, exactly. Because newton um very few writers come into this and just immediately land big, deep cinematic narrative and then just keep going.
00:27:03
Speaker
You know, they just they crack the code and they and they just continue maybe like Patrick Radden Keefe or something. You know, he's he see he might be like the one. But. But otherwise, like, you know, you just keep doing it and it and it's OK that like it doesn't work out when you're 22 or 25. Maybe it's not going to work out until you're 35 or 40. But if that's what you want to do, you know, and there's this is where kind of like the the passion or the sense of calling comes in.
00:27:35
Speaker
This is the thing you want to do You just got to keep going. And, you know, we could go back to like Nick Davidson a few months ago. You know, like Nick's been trucking away in journalism for a long time. and And in recent years has gotten a lot of longer stories published, a lot of features.
00:27:53
Speaker
And like that's that's because he didn't give up. He kept working on it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's really ah yeah really astute and awesome stuff. And, yeah, I love how we and we got into some ah some like deeper topics that went beyond ah Dave's amazing story here and ah so to some of the core fundamentals to kind of do this kind of work. So this was just, um as always, Jonah, amazing stuff. And now we're going to kick it over to Dave and talk about this ah this rollicking story yeah down in the bayou.
00:28:23
Speaker
All right. thank Thanks for having me, Brendan. Always a pleasure.
00:28:35
Speaker
Yes. Pretty great, right? Pretty great. That whole taking some losses thing really resonated with me. and i think we but We really need need more losses. We need more failures.
00:28:50
Speaker
Only we're often unwilling to do it because they take time, they take money, and your ego takes a beating. That's a parting shot to stew on for another time. i won't keep going down that rabbit hole, but that's a really rich topic.
00:29:06
Speaker
Alright, so we have David Howard approaching the batter's box. He's the author of Chasing Phil, The Adventures of Two Undercover Agents with the World's Most Charming Con Man, and Lost Rites, The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic.
David Howard's Journey into Journalism
00:29:24
Speaker
His work has appeared in The Atavist, Duh, Popular Mechanics and Bicycling, among other places. In this conversation, in this section, we talk about some of the nonverbal stuff you get from interviewing people. So the importance of doing stuff or this stuff in person, the grand puzzle of the piece, looking for stories to believe in, keeping his mind as clear as possible when he starts to write, how this was one of the biggest gambles in his career, and what the tape recorder frees him up for.
00:29:56
Speaker
You may learn more about David at davidhowardauthor.com and you can follow him on Instagram at davehoward99.
00:30:10
Speaker
So why wait? Here's David Howard.
00:30:26
Speaker
I mean, I studied those guys in college, like Gay Talese and all those guys, and I was completely riveted, you know. was like, oh my God, this is exactly what I want to do. Yeah. Well, that's a wonderful jumping off point ah where I love sometimes getting a sense of how we come to this kind of work. You know, reading McPhee and Talese and Tracy Kidder.
00:30:44
Speaker
um But yes, reading those kind of writers that lit me up in a way. I'm like, oh wow, this is amazing stuff. So yeah, you brought up Talese, but ah how did you lock into wanting to do this kind of journalism?
00:30:55
Speaker
I um went to college thinking that, you know, I was going to be a ah newspaper reporter. um I really wanted to be a sports writer when I was a young kid and went and I spent the beginning of my college career, or my freshman year, you know, kind kind of like following the football team around writing stories. And then my My journalism professor, my advisor pulled me aside. He's like, all right, listen, and it's time to get out of the sandbox here.
00:31:24
Speaker
you know, if you really want to make something like a fun career happen, you got to like start thinking about real stories and, um, the world and and looking at big stuff. And he was the first person to really like inspire me, um, to pursue really ambitious, uh, kinds of stories, things that I I started reading a lot more of at that point um on his recommendation, you know, started reading stuff like Harper's and the New Yorker. I became a huge fan of outside magazine nineties during the glory days with, you know, crack hour and, and all those guys. And um i would just read those stories and feel like almost just so like energized, like I wanted to you know run out and like,
00:32:12
Speaker
Just start, you know, go up to the top of the nearest mountain and start talking to people, you know, about, uh, I spent some time in the outdoor, you know, adventure space and, um, did some work as a magazine editor and a writer and, um, gradually just found my way to, you know, these, these kinds of stories that I had read and admired so much.
00:32:32
Speaker
What, uh, what did be being an editor, ah due to your writing and they have vice versa? Like, how did they inform each other? Yeah, being an editor, i was a magazine editor for about 13 years and it was the best thing I could have done for my writing. Um, it made me pull back and, you know, think about ah story right from the first time you utter a sentence, like we're going to write a story about X and, um, how does that come together? how does that take shape?
00:33:03
Speaker
really being able to work collaboratively collaboratively with writers who um a lot of them, I was fortunate to work with people who you know were smarter at this sort of thing than I was. And so I learned from them and kind of like figured out some ways over time to you know like try to make things a little bit better. um I think that it really made me see like and think about and be able to articulate the sort of like architecture of a story and all the components that need to go into something that, you know, makes it successful, especially in narrative nonfiction, when you're talking about character development and scene and, you know, plot. and And it's really like, you can begin to analyze some specific components of stories that really help bring them to life.
00:33:57
Speaker
Yeah, scene, plot, and character are, by and large, they're, you because you can't imagine it, it can be a challenge to find those details. So how do you interview for those details and report for scene and plot and character?
00:34:14
Speaker
Being a newspaper reporter early in my life was ah a huge help because you you spend a lot of time you know i outside your office talking to people in person For me, one you know critical component over the years has just been get in front of people, get away from the phone during COVID, you know stuck on Zoom a little bit more than I would have liked.
Importance of In-Person Interviews
00:34:36
Speaker
But I mean i think like sitting across from someone, being able to look in their eyes, try to understand what they're they're made of and um see all the nonverbal stuff happening that tells you so much about you know what someone may actually really be saying beyond
00:34:52
Speaker
what they're telling you with their words. um I mean, this story and the out of this was just like ah almost a masterclass in that because we got so much from being in the same room with Larry Thompson, all the things he said with his face, the ways he wouldn't answer something.
00:35:15
Speaker
Sometimes it was like a shrug, like I genuinely don't know. And sometimes it was like, I'm just going to sit back and kind of have like a smirk on my face and like, make it clear that I'm just not going to tell you that for whatever reason. And then it would kind of become this interesting game of why don't you want to tell us that? And, you know, like how else can we, and can we get at that? So i really, i think that the in-person thing, and especially in terms of developing character for me, it's just been an important like career long lesson.
00:35:49
Speaker
Well, yeah. and Nowadays, because we're so digitally interfaced through social media or Zoom, I mean, even that feels a bit more personal than a lot of other things. ah and Nothing beats the handshake in being in person. And it goes a long way towards you know building trust. And by building trust, that's where you can really start to flesh out these real life characters.
00:36:12
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. i mean, in this particular story, we spent and between 35 and 40 hours with him in person in this room in the prison. And um we got quantum, you know, light years ahead of where we would have gotten with him if we were just trying to interact by email and and phone.
00:36:31
Speaker
It was talking about understanding, you know, what he cared about as a person, you know, just trying to move away from at times just talking about specific cases or things that he did and just try to understand, you know, what, what were the things that motivated him? What were the things that he, he he cared about? Who were the people he cared about?
00:36:56
Speaker
know, with someone who has confessed to multiple murders, that's, those are some pretty interesting questions. You know, where does he draw the line with a lot of these things you really do have without that intimacy,
00:37:09
Speaker
without that immediacy of connection, without that ability to, you know, sort of like, look into someone's eyes and have them feel how much you're interested, how much you're of your attention you're giving to them. i think it's really hard to get very deep with people, especially people like him who have a lot to la hide.
00:37:30
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and speaking with Jonah earlier, he said that when you brought this story to him, you guys, because you brought, a you basically wrote it on spec, reported it on spec is my understanding. And,
00:37:45
Speaker
it allowed you guys to really kind of lock in and work on this at a really high level. So what was just the, the experience of working with him, having brought it to him almost fully formed and we can unpack that a little more, but just, the just that relationship with that you and Jonah had from the get go, what was that like?
00:38:04
Speaker
I had brought it to him. i kind of tried to, I tried to summarize, you know, the idea and i don't know, a few paragraphs and, you know, it's, it's a fairly sprawling ah story. So i think immediately he was just like, you know, if you have more, go ahead and send it to me. And I warned him. I was like, I don't have la more, but it's a lot more. so you're going to have to wade through.
00:38:29
Speaker
i think it was like 16,000 words or something. That version was essentially built out as a book proposal. It became clear we were going to sort of like distill this into a magazine narrative that some things were going to have to fall out, you know, be, be, uh, be cut away and other things that were going to have to just be restructured and moved around. And, um, that was where, I mean, ah ah collaboration with a great editor is truly like such a gift for, you know, when, when you've been thinking about something
00:39:05
Speaker
for so long as I have for three and a half years and you you'd start to develop, I don't wanna say it calcifies in your mind, but you might start to harden your perspective about how the story is gonna be told. And um he came back after I had ah sent a draft. i I did modify the original thing he saw into ah a draft that was, again, still quite a bit too long.
00:39:32
Speaker
And then he came back with just some really great ideas about how to streamline the story and move some things around to kind of maximize the but tension in the story and the drama. And, you know, our whole idea was, you know, we have a couple pretty nice plot twists at the end and yeah make sure we really accentuate those in a fun way.
00:39:58
Speaker
i mean, it was it was such a sort of like empowering and exciting experience to work with him. Yeah, and from what I understand as well is that you came to the story and the FBI agent ah at at the heart of it because you had worked with him before. He was a source for something else you had worked on, I believe, in one of your books.
00:40:20
Speaker
And it's ah so it it goes to show of just playing the long game in this kind of journalism can can really help. And the fact that you had a good relationship with a source allowed this story to open up. So I was hoping maybe you could ah you could speak to that in the kind of the long game of doing this kind of story, this kind of storytelling.
00:40:43
Speaker
Yeah, this is a classic example of that. I think I first got to know Myron Fuller. Uh, something like 12 years ago, had gotten really interested in abs cam this, you know, um, ah FBI investigation, undercover investigation that involved the arrest of seven members of Congress.
00:41:06
Speaker
Myron was um' like the lead agent and that, so i was able to make contact. Um, we sat down in New York, uh, one time and So it turned out the bad news was that American hustle was about to come out. So someone else had beat me to it and I, was and he had actually been involved in the movie.
00:41:26
Speaker
was one of the producers or advisors or all of the above. Um, but the good news was that in the, while talking to him, he said, you know, this whole thing started because, uh, there was this case where two young agents spent a year undercover traveling around the world with a con man.
00:41:45
Speaker
And nobody in the FBI had done that before. And I was instantly like, hold on a second. Wait a minute. like Tell me about that story. And, uh, That turned into my next book, which was called Chasing Phil.
00:41:59
Speaker
But as you said, there's a long game to all this. He and established a really good rapport. um We enjoyed talking with each other. had no idea, you know, where else it was going to go with him. we We just had, would have these long conversations about all kinds of stuff he did while he was in the Bureau.
00:42:17
Speaker
it was hard for me to see anything like sort of concrete in it, in terms of you know, stories, things that I could pull out and serve as a, you know, as, as a single narrative, but because we had spent so much time talking because we had gotten to know each other. And I had written this you know a book that he was, he did have an actual part in chasing Phil.
00:42:42
Speaker
um He had a role um when, when he, it came time for him to, to you know, decide to go down to, Shreveport to this prison, i was the person he called, you know, and, and he was like, there was this guy when I was in Shreveport, you know, he was a hitman, we tried all these different, you know, 55 different ways to catch this we can never do it, it still bothers me.
00:43:08
Speaker
And um'm I'm going to go talk to him. And i have no idea what's going to come of it. But if you want to come along, you know, you're welcome to. And I was, it took me about half a second to say yes, you know, ah zooming out from that. It's just this idea that anybody that I spend a substantial amount of time talking to, um, I just try to keep the conversation open and, you know, just like, even if there's no specific end game or, you know, thing that I have in mind, just kind of like,
00:43:41
Speaker
Hey, you know, if you ever want to talk again, or you ever have hear us something interesting, keep, keep me in mind, you know, hit me up. And, um, I'm always just interested in what people are doing, like curious about what's going on. Um, you know, so, so like keep my number handy. And, um, this was an instance where that really paid off.
00:44:02
Speaker
Yeah. And Jonah told me, too, that this was a story that you were reporting and researching and writing without assignment. It was just your your instincts were telling you there was something here.
00:44:15
Speaker
And a lot of people might be gun shy to go all in. I mean, sure you had other things going on, but to go all in when you didn't necessarily have like a magazine contract or a book contract in place to, to do that. So it's a lot of investment on your part, time, money.
00:44:31
Speaker
What was it that your instincts were telling you that, that you needed to keep pursuing this? Honestly, it was one of the biggest gambles I've, I've taken in my career. Um, I've rolled the dice but a bunch of times on um stories and, but never quite to this degree um in terms of my investment of time. And, you know, obviously like you got to fly back and forth to Louisiana six times. It's, it's going to add up.
00:45:00
Speaker
My instinct was that we had something really, really unique and really extraordinary. And whenever I, would tell someone about it, you know, they, I always just got the same reaction. Like that's what you're in prison talking to like a convicted hit man. And, you know, it would just be this kind of really enthusiastic response. And i think for me, when, you know, but first time I went down and we didn't really necessarily know what we were getting at, it was like, wow, that was, you know, that was really interesting. And, um, I'm not exactly sure.
00:45:40
Speaker
what's gonna come of this, and and maybe that's it. But over the next couple of months, Myron and I kept talking about this, you know, the way that that he framed this Jim Leslie murder, and we started to just, the more we talked about it, the more we thought, you know what, we gotta just go back one more time and and try to explore this a little bit more.
Persistence and Challenges in Storytelling
00:46:05
Speaker
After two visits, I was totally hooked. At that point, I you know it was like, this is going to be a lot of time and a lot of expense. But I mean, I'm convinced that there's something really great here. And I've got to like see this through.
00:46:21
Speaker
Fortunately, I was in a situation where you know ah had enough other work to prop myself up while I was doing it Myron's retired and had the means to travel back and forth. So it just unfolded. We just kept going. Every time we went, we would get ah dance, the ball down the field enough that we'd be really excited to to go back again. So it just became the self-perpetuating situation that we arrived. We couldn't get off until we got to the end. Mm-hmm.
00:46:52
Speaker
It strikes me, just in hearing you talk about it and the way the piece is structured, that a lot of, or some of the action, or a lot of the metabolism was happening off the page, so that every time you went back for these visits, you were advancing the discussion and advancing the conversation, as a result, of advancing the narrative of this piece.
00:47:12
Speaker
So what was the the life off the page, away from the story that helped yeah they move move things forward when you did get face to face with Larry again?
00:47:25
Speaker
You know, when we first went, as I meant i think I said, ah we didn't really even know. We thought the sort of the goal was going to be for Myron to find out why he was so unable to make any you know headway when he was in Shreveport for four years Uh, the Jim Leslie thing, the we ended up focusing on in the story ended up just being kind of a pinpoint, uh, during that visit, just enough for us to say, you know, that's interesting.
00:47:58
Speaker
And so we started trying to reach people in Shreveport. What, you know, read stuff online, that had been written, who was talking about it and know who Who knew, who who was around, who remembered it? this was you know At the time, this was 47 years, 45 years in the past.
00:48:18
Speaker
We latched on to a couple of interesting characters. um People started telling us things, and we would would sort of learn enough to feel like, all right, now if we can go back to the prison, run some of these things by Larry, maybe we can learn something more from him that'll you know, take this little nugget of something we found and and kind of like keep expanding it, you know, out into something bigger.
00:48:49
Speaker
It became this really fascinating example of how a story can kind of fuel itself by, you know, we would try to time it, we'd go down.
00:49:01
Speaker
There was a really great archive ah LSU Shreveport, local history archive that had a ton of information about this case and the corrupt former police commissioner who has long been associated with it.
00:49:15
Speaker
And we would just sort of harvest all these interesting, you know, bits, you know, facts and go in and ask, we'd have all this stuff to ask him about when we got to the prison. It became this situation where we could use some of that to sort leverage him a little bit to get him. Well, but you know, we read this, is this true? we you know, we heard somebody told us this,
00:49:39
Speaker
Like, tell us about that, you know, and um especially when it was something that contradicted ah something that he knew he would, you know, we would get it, we could get our eyes out of him and get him, get him going.
00:49:53
Speaker
He really took pride in or takes pride and being kind of this guide, you know, to the underworld and that part of the country and have this, you know, vast criminal career.
00:50:07
Speaker
And it was quite, was quite proud of it. So we over time realized we could kind of use that to our advantage and in these conversations.
00:50:18
Speaker
Yeah. And ah very few of us will, unless you're in, you know, cop covering cops, kind of writing a lot of crime that we'll find ourselves sitting across from ah killer.
00:50:30
Speaker
You know, what was that like sitting at the same table of someone convicted a yeah convicted hitman? It's an experience unlike any other, I imagine. It really is. i think that, um,
00:50:44
Speaker
You know, it's funny, it actually, it was, and it wasn't, I had, I wrote on the story that I had these visions the first time we went of kind of, you know, these like dark, loud hallways where people are, so you know, like just like yelling stuff and dim lighting and, you know, these kind of like grim scenes. And we, uh, we got there, we we sort of went through this extensive security protocol and, uh, got, you know, brought through a couple of really like heavy.
00:51:13
Speaker
you know, metal doors, steel doors, and um it it kind of all fit the picture in my mind. And then we walked into this room that was kind of looked like a, like sort of a little bit like a hospital cafeteria with a little Christmas tree. It was December, you know, a bunch of vending machines. And I was like, oh, this is, this is a,
00:51:34
Speaker
Not quite, you know, as menacing as I had imagined. And then Larry himself was, um he seemed quite, quite charmed that we had, you know, taken the effort to come all the way that we had. And um he seemed pleased to have some company. And there were some, you know, some exchanges between the two of them um that were,
00:51:55
Speaker
a bit loaded, i would say. there was There was some of the old tension that came out, but ah for the most part, it was I would say that it felt less so sort of fraught than the way that some prison interviews might be portrayed on you know in movies or on TV where they're you know talking through you know so a piece of glass or somebody shackled, you know,
00:52:24
Speaker
or or something like that. it was, he had um taken great pains during his years there to be be a model inmate.
00:52:37
Speaker
He told us that he knew he was going to be in prison for a long time and that there were two ways to do things. He could go the easy way or the hard way. And he said, you know, especially at his age, it was an easy choice. He was, you know, going to be a a good inmate and had a good relationship with the warden. And um so fortunately, i think for our purposes, because of that, when we sat down with him, he was given privileges that um probably some people wouldn't have been if they were more of a security concern or a problem you know a problematic presence.
00:53:16
Speaker
Yeah. What becomes the challenge for you, having spent so much time with him, of of humanizing him, given his track record? Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting. We would have these pretty intense conversations about, you know, his kids, you know, his family.
00:53:38
Speaker
He would talk about how, you know, his sister didn't even know that much about how much trouble he'd gotten into and, um, you know, how his current wife, he felt very protective of You could tell that there was like some humanity in there. There was, you know, he would talk about how much he protected and helped his friends when he actually decided to let people into his life.
00:54:02
Speaker
And then there would be other times where you would, ah you could almost be kind of lulled into this sense of like god he really doesn't seem like such a bad guy and then and then he would just say something where it would just be really and would it would really rattle me completely out of my sense of that sort of like thinking like you know larry doesn't seem that bad after all he there were these moments that would really really jostle you in it and um and you could see that
00:54:36
Speaker
No, there was something in him that, I mean, it's somebody who chooses to like murder, you know, multiple people and, um, commit like so many other crimes. It's obviously there's something going on there that, um, makes them a little bit different from people like us. So.
00:54:55
Speaker
So there would be really distinct moments when those things would suddenly just, you know, like appear right before us. Be like, okay, right. Yeah, that's who this guy is.
00:55:06
Speaker
Yeah, and there's there's doing investigative work as a reporter, and and I imagine doing investigative work as an FBI agent, right? and There might be some bleed, but there's probably a lot different too. And given your close relationship with, uh, with Myron Fuller for the purposes of this story, yeah and what did you learn about what constitutes an FBI investigation and how, maybe, maybe what helped you as a reporter as a result?
00:55:32
Speaker
Uh, yeah, I think that, uh, Myron, you know, what you learn, um, from a guy like that as he's doing this is it's a, it's a very collaborative,
00:55:45
Speaker
approach heat. It's just us going in there, you know, talking to Thompson. But outside of that, when it you know came time to try to figure out in a broader way what actually happened Is he, what he telling us, does it pass the sniff test, the smell test, you know, what else do we know about people who were accused of, who, you know, purportedly were involved in the crime in 19, when the murder happened in 1976.
00:56:15
Speaker
There's all this kind of, you know reaching out through networks, trying to not only find leads, but explore the veracity of some of what had been said, bounce bounce things off people. um We developed a really good connection with a couple of local law enforcement guys.
00:56:36
Speaker
um There was this chief detective named Robbo Davidson. It was a real character. He had actually written a book himself about, not about Thompson, but about ah number of the cases that he'd encountered over the years in Northern Louisiana and, um, Davidson had spent a lot of time and talking to Larry Thompson in prison and was a great sounding board for us.
00:57:00
Speaker
We would come out and say, you know, these are some of the things he told us. How's that sound to you? um, being able to tap into the vast institutional knowledge of someone like him who's, you know, goes back like 40 years, you know, as a, as a cop, you can't, you can't find that anywhere else.
00:57:23
Speaker
So, um, I think, you know, that was Myron's first instinct with a lot of stuff. Once we got outside, he was talking to other agents he'd known agents. He actually worked with when he was in Shreveport, he would find people and say, you know, you would text me and say, uh, Hey, today we're going to talk to Mike Barnett. He's the,
00:57:44
Speaker
you know, state police crime task force down in Baton Rouge or, you know, whatever the, whatever the person, whoever they were, you know, really good at kind of like expanding out the circle ah knowledge. She's understanding how much these guys lean on each other.
00:58:01
Speaker
Yeah. the the In a lot of ways, that sounds like reporting. That sounds like journalism too, where you're like, you build out that circle. You're like, Oh, who else can I reach out to? Who's got some expertise here who can lead us in the right direction?
00:58:14
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. There, there was a lot of overlap. I would say that, um, I think once it comes to the point of, you know, moving towards some kind of end we diverge, I'm starting to um write a story now and he's going to go talk to the, you know, us attorney.
00:58:31
Speaker
Um, and figure out like, you know, start having meetings about how do we write up, uh, you know, an affidavit, you know, affidavits or indictments or whatever it is. But, but ah I think that that first, you know, two thirds of what, uh, three quarters of what we're doing, and was, there's an enormous amount of overlap. Mm.
00:58:51
Speaker
And ah as you're thinking about how you want to structure the writing of the piece, um you know what are how how are you thinking about the structure? And were there any ah models, be it movies or other stories, that struck you as like, oh, that's something I might be able to kind of mimic with but ah overlay my own research on it?
00:59:14
Speaker
It was a really interesting story to figure out how to structure it because, you know, sort of have a couple different timelines. You know, here we are, contemporary times we're visiting ah Thompson in prison. We're in Shreveport interviewing people.
00:59:31
Speaker
ah second timeline is Myron's time in Shreveport as an agent in the 80s. And a third one is the you know, in the 70s, Jim Leslie's murdered and all this ah stuff is happening around that.
00:59:45
Speaker
you know, it became this kind of grand puzzle to figure out how to assemble these pieces. And I think one of the biggest things that I wrestled with was sort of how to, how to get into the Leslie murder and investigation without telegraphing too soon, what, what was going to happen and where that was going to go. And one of the things that Jonah really helped with was the idea of moving Leslie back in the story.
01:00:18
Speaker
ah it had had that, you know, the murder scene was pretty close to the top in my first draft, just sort of thinking about how to draw people in, you know, and, um you know, give them something like sort of shocking and some action to wrap their heads around.
01:00:40
Speaker
Jonah made the case that, you know, the prison visits and so forth were, interesting enough to keep people around long enough to, uh, a little bit later in the story, get into the details of how, you know, what happened to Jim Leslie, who he was and how he was murdered. And, uh, I think that worked out really well. And, um, I did ah read some things i was trying I think I read the devil in the white city again, as i was like trying to you know, grapple, grapple with different timelines and different things happening. And,
01:01:15
Speaker
and parallel ways that comes to mind. uh, yeah, for some reason I got, I got pretty far along with the looming tower as well, because I was, even though it's nine 11 and everything like that, it was sort of like some of the investigative stuff and, uh, you know, the FBI role in that really interested me. So, ah but I mean, i I think overall, you know, the structure of the story took, took some time to, to, uh,
01:01:47
Speaker
reveal itself. And, um, think that was partly because I spent so much time working on the story before i even knew what was actually, you know, what it, what it was going to say. It took a couple of years even get to, you know, the, to reach the conclusions we, we reached. And, uh, there was a certain amount of, you know, driving blind up, up till that point.
01:02:11
Speaker
It's like, I think this is the story, you know, but like once, once you actually know it's, that It makes a lot easier. Oh, for sure. Yeah, what struck me, ah there was a usual suspects element to it also because you kind of have that interrogation area, and and that's always a little short, but that advances the pieces a bit more as the story goes on. There's more of a reveal with each subsequent one.
01:02:38
Speaker
And ah it connects to the previous timelines and everything. So, yeah it just, it had that nice build to it in a way where everything, every piece had its, it was doing good work.
01:02:50
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, we, uh, those couple of moments where we had, came to those epiphanies and in prison were, i think, moments that as a reporter, you know, you're just kind of like, uh,
01:03:07
Speaker
even in the moment you're kind of like, i' I don't think I'm ever going to forget this, you know, even as it's happening and, uh, just realizing the gravity of it as it's, you know, as it's, as the words are coming out and it's, um, I mean, it's really, really ah special experience and, and something that was particularly gratifying in this case, because I felt like we really worked for it.
01:03:30
Speaker
We put the time and did the research and, um, you know, spend time talking through these different theories. And, um, when we went in there to talk to him about the stuff, we really had a plan and, um, felt like that what we were onto and what he ultimately confirmed made a lot more sense to us and seemed a lot more plausible than the official version of what happened that had been
01:04:05
Speaker
you know, the subject of a, a trial and a bunch of a couple of different indictments that we felt were problematic for various reasons. And, um, it was really energizing and exciting to, you know, like, what if this happened? What if it went this way and then go in and, and just have him and his own, you know, sort of indirect way confirm confirm things. So super fun experience. Yeah.
01:04:37
Speaker
Well, the thing is too, like it does wrap up in a very satisfying way and you invested so much time in it. And i mean, it could, you could have spent two years on this and then it just didn't tie up in a neat little bow. Like it could have been, you know, just to use the win loss terms, it could have been all this time for a loss and you would have invested all that, you know, the, the cost of having done it.
01:05:02
Speaker
you know And so in in this instance, it it pays off. But have you um had an experience where you pursued something pretty far and it just it didn't happen? And were there any lessons from that that you've taken away in your career?
01:05:16
Speaker
ah Yes, I pursued in multiple ways, actually, a story about um this situation in the state of Arkansas, where I believe it was 2017,
01:05:31
Speaker
or 2018, um, the state had this lethal drug to, um, administer to members of death row when it came time to execute people and, ah came to the attention of officials there that this drug was on the verge of expiring.
01:05:46
Speaker
So they decided to, uh, execute. Um, I'm trying to remember now eight executions in 10 days, you know, really crazy idea.
01:05:58
Speaker
Uh, I, and i happen to know ah guy who's a capital defense attorney, uh, who got involved in that. Um, his, uh, his public defense, uh, organization represented four of the eight, uh, or no, I'm sorry, two of the eight guys, four of them ended up being executed and four were received stays of some, you know, for one reason or another. um but, uh, we ended up.
01:06:29
Speaker
and ended up focusing really extensively on one guy that this contact of mine represented. He ended up being executed, but he was a classic example of someone who had done some really horrible things, had had a horrible upbringing, you know, had committed a couple of really awful crimes, um, but had completely changed their life, his life in prison and had completely become a different person. And, uh,
01:06:59
Speaker
ah to the point where, you know, he was helping other inmates avoid problems in prison and he would become a pastor. Um, and so, you know, my, um, defense friend basically said, you know, it was so clear there was no point in executing this guy. he was, he was, even the guards were, to you know, lobbying the prison not to execute him.
01:07:23
Speaker
And, um, They, he, his firm was able to share some really interesting things about this guy in his life. And, um, I thought it made a really powerful story, especially up against the larger context of Arkansas's decision to execute all these people all at once, which literally was unprecedented.
01:07:44
Speaker
What I discovered was that it's really hard to sell a story where the main character is killed in the end, you know, where the whole thing you're going to spend. I know, whatever it is, 15 or 20 minutes or half an hour or 45 minutes reading the story and then kind of like be kicked in the stomach when you finish.
01:08:03
Speaker
And that I repeatedly ran into that ah response, that kind of resistance. And I tried to write about it. i also joined up with some audio people and we tried to pitch a podcast about it.
01:08:18
Speaker
In both instances came up against the same objections to the story. yeah, I don't, I'm not sure what the lesson is there other than, you know, like stories that end really badly are probably going to be hard to sell, you know, but, uh, but I, I still feel like that would have been my argument was, you know, this is sort of like a powerful lesson for the country to absorb about the cost of the death penalty and, you know, what, there's a lot of people who probably haven't thought about the human toll of what's going on and,
01:08:52
Speaker
why that might need to be revisited. But I'm sitting here telling you about it and it's that's never been told otherwise. so Yeah, well, I think it's good to hear just from the wrote the reporter point of view that it's okay and actually kind of frequent to pursue a story and do a lot of research, do a lot of reporting, even do a lot of writing.
01:09:15
Speaker
And it might just not publish. It might not happen for one reason or another. And that's it just allows you to build some experience that you can parlay into another project that you can hopefully get off the ground.
01:09:28
Speaker
And over the course of that, like your instincts get a bit better and you're like, okay, maybe this one, this one feels a bit more complete and you can be like, I know now that I can maybe dive in a bit more whole hog on this project, having that backlog of, oh, this one, I couldn't stick the landing on this one for one reason or another, but I know more now to then stick the landing on the subsequent ones.
01:09:52
Speaker
Absolutely. There's so much to learn from going through it, figuring out how to read court documents, how to find them, how to talk to people um in a place about, you know, what happened in prison, dealing with the prison itself, trying to get access. I don't regret anything that I did for that, even though I spent, you know, a substantial amount of time on it and nothing came
Gambling on Stories and Reporting Techniques
01:10:15
Speaker
of it. But um I feel like I still believe in In that story, and I think that's what it comes down to is I'm just looking for stories I can believe in because and overwhelmingly over time, ah stories that I've had strong instincts about have translated into things that other people have enjoyed reading or hearing about. and um, I think it's important to, you know, really follow your gut in that way and, um, see how far you can take something.
01:10:48
Speaker
And you have to know your limits. You have to know where the cutoff is. If you, you know, are gonna go bankrupt doing it, you know, it's probably something you need to think about, but if there's a way to to dig in and you feel strongly about it, i mean, I, I still, after that Arkansas experience and and this, um, which I think again was the biggest gamble I've taken in my life in terms of pursuing a story.
01:11:12
Speaker
i still feel as strongly as ever that next time around I'll, I'll go after it. And ah some matters of tactical and practical stuff. um I always love getting a sense of and the the tools that you have at your disposal and your tool belt when you're out, let's say, reporting. And a know in this adivist story, you know you say you were allowed you know basically pen, paper, and a small digital recorder.
01:11:34
Speaker
But what what are the things you typically love to have on hand when you're doing a reporting? And yeah what kind of notebook? I kind of have like right here with your classic spiral one that's kind of narrow.
01:11:45
Speaker
tucks into your back pocket. I have a shit ton of those from an old job. So I burn through these quite frequently. But you know what do you like to use when you're reporting? I have to say, i you know I grew up as a newspaper reporter or carrying around those paths, and I still do.
01:12:00
Speaker
But I think that the advent of these digital transcription services are really, have been a powerful thing for me, partly because i transcribing was always really painful you know and and time consuming.
01:12:14
Speaker
But more than that, um now I just use the notebook to jot down little things i need to remember. Yeah. Nonverbal things, what somebody looks like, what the scene looks like.
01:12:28
Speaker
And then I sort of like put it down, i have my phone out recording and and I'm, I feel so much freer to observe the person, look into their eyes, have, you know, really deep conversation. Whereas before, you know, it's hard not to have your head down and be like scribbling, you know, and,
01:12:49
Speaker
when you're relying on that purely for note taking purposes. So these services are are pretty, are really ah quite a game changer for me. and um one funny thing about this situation was, you know, I did rely on this little digital recorder, which I then fed into the ah you know, transcription service. And um it was amusing to see how much the AI butchered Larry's Southern accent. Yeah.
01:13:20
Speaker
He's got this incredibly rich, you know, sort of like um old school Southern, you know, deep accent. And I had to pretty much, I mean, it was almost like having to transcribe that myself from scratch it because So much of it was made no sense after it it got fed through that system. But um but otherwise, I do i do love these things and they save me a lot of time. And the fact that you can both read the words and listen to the audio again is really and pretty incredible tool.
01:13:51
Speaker
Yeah, as ah because there is, ah use Otter. ah and Yes. And that's what you use, yeah. And it's, there is an element of, you get the benefit of re-listening to it again. And there, the transcribing is like, he's kind of cleaning up certain things. So you do get to hear it again in a way, but you're not such a a slave to the keyboard and you're not getting having to go back and forth back and forth and taking the three hours to to transcribe every hour ah that it takes it's um yeah i find that to be extremely helpful for sure and it's unshackling you know with the i i know there's
01:14:32
Speaker
a lot of value in, you know, having the notebook and I always still want to have it with me, yeah you know, but, uh, just being able to limit it to a little details, things on the walls or, you know, like what kind of like, what does their kitchen look like? You know, what do they have on their shelves? Yeah.
01:14:49
Speaker
As, as a, and you can completely rely on the notebook for that. That's all that's going in there. Anything that's actually said, is going to be captured already. it's like really, really.
01:15:02
Speaker
I think it's an incredible tool because again, being able to watch someone look in their eyes and see all the nonverbal stuff happening is it powerful because fewer If you were just trying to catch up scribbling, you wouldn't see all that. Yeah.
01:15:17
Speaker
Well, it's a perfect distillation of what it does. You get those atmospheric details, maybe the way their glasses like will slide down their nose, like every um push them back. Little, little details like that. You might catch a bird in the background. Or or to your point, and you said just a moment ago of just – use the notebook to put a pin in something. Oh, they said something good. I don't want to interrupt them now. going to just, they said something here. I'm going to try to circle back to that. And that's like that endless scroll of a conversation. they It's so meandering.
01:15:46
Speaker
You're like, okay, like, oh let's well, I'll pull them back to that in a moment, but i don't want to stifle their momentum at the moment. And then you'll come back to that stuff. And if I, if I don't scribble down those things to put a pin in, I'll forget it because there's so many things are coming at you.
01:16:00
Speaker
It's so true. I had this character in my first book who was a historian and DC and he was a very, he was an older gentleman, but he was very ah passionate and energetic about what we were talking about. And um he would sort of jump, me like sort of slam his hands on his desk and jump up and go, I got to show you this. And I noticed, you know, behind his desk where his chair hit the wall that there were these broken, you know, broken drywall where his chair was like colliding with the wall when he jumped up. And it was just like,
01:16:30
Speaker
is like the perfect distillation of Ken Boling's personality right there. and And as you're ah starting to transition from the primary reporting and research mode and you're like, all right, now it's time to write, might be a deadline, be either self-imposed or publication imposed.
01:16:47
Speaker
ah What are the yeah rituals or routines that you have in place, a practice in place? So you're getting that work done. Well, I start working, i start writing really early in the morning. um i start writing at about 5.30 or 6 in the morning. um i try to keep my mind as clean as possible. i feel like it's it's hard enough to write as it is, you know, without getting pinged by, yeah you know, texts and emails. And I keep all that stuff closed.
01:17:17
Speaker
I sit down, I try to give myself at least a couple of hours to just put myself into... whatever the scene, the moment that I'm writing about, or be able to think really clearly about how I want something to, you know, come together. just find, I mean, to me, those early mornings are the times when I've, you know, figured out stories, what a story was about or how I was going to structure it. I think I used to, it's funny to think back to when I was young and my my first job, I actually was a newspaper reporter in this like cramped little newsroom with people,
01:17:53
Speaker
talking on the phone, you know, three feet away from me and, um and somehow it worked for me then, but now I'm more and more wanting to barricade myself away and have seclusion, you know, quiet.
01:18:09
Speaker
um Again, the early, the more, the early part of the day is so key for me in that way. um I think that, ah yeah, it's really just kind of,
01:18:21
Speaker
finding my way into, you know, scenes and moments in these stories before the clutter yeah of the day starts, almost kind of start forgetting things or my one of my attention's not as sharp, you know, like it's almost like things don't come together quite the same.
01:18:40
Speaker
So I think that's the biggest, the biggest thing for me. It's just blocking every barring or barricading myself in. Yeah. Yeah. it's So you you got to like be really sacred about that and protective and wall that that special time off. Because we all have a time ah window of time where our battery is best and our attention is sharpest.
01:19:04
Speaker
And it's like when when you can, lot of trial and error, you can when you figure out that time, I'm similar to you. It's early morning. Like ah as soon as like nine and 10 o'clock hit, like I'm already starting to lose it with a lot of day left to go. I'm already kind of yeah and starting to lose it.
01:19:20
Speaker
Yeah. hundred percent. I'm there with you. Everything everything starts crowding in around you. It's like you lose your little bubble or everything's just pressing in, trying to trying to pop it and get it you know get in there.
01:19:31
Speaker
yeah So um it's really, I've gotten very greedy about that time and very, you know, everybody around me pretty much knows that to bother me right then you know so It's such a good thing. I try to be nice about it, you know? Oh, yeah. Sometimes you got to be a dick about it, though. You're like, yeah, like, no, no. Yeah, exactly. Oh, awesome. well Well, Dave, this was so cool to get to talk to you Your story is amazing. And it's just a really, really great read.
01:20:03
Speaker
and um And as I bring these conversations down for a landing, I love ah asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind. It's just like anything you're finding cool and fun ah that you want to share with the listeners. So I would just extend that to you.
Inspiration from Great Narratives
01:20:16
Speaker
I'm going to mention a writer, uh, that I had a good fortune to work with a couple of times when I was an editor, um, author named Hampton sides. oh anton Yeah. He was just on the podcast.
01:20:27
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, wow. That's great. Yeah. He writes these incredible historical narratives, as you know, that accomplish all the stuff I'm trying to pull off and long form work, you know, um, all within the boundaries of nonfiction. And, um,
01:20:42
Speaker
I'm working on something right now that brought to mind his book, um, hell hound on his trail. yeah It's a book about, um, the manhunt for James Earl Ray, the, you know, the, the assassin Martin Luther King Jr. Um, so I'm revisiting revisiting that book right now and just really loving the way he brings that the 1960s to life and the urgency of that. And, uh, you know, sort of like tick tock blow by blow, like,
01:21:11
Speaker
you know, you're just like pulled from one thing to the next, like, you know, how are they going to, how are they going to pull this off? And just the level of like carefully chosen detail and, um and scene and stuff is, it's always really inspiring for me to read stuff like that. So I feel like,
01:21:29
Speaker
if I'm lucky, you know, something will rub off and come out in my own writing a little bit, you know? Yeah. yeah I love hearing you say that. And what, yeah what I love talking about too on the show is what I call kind of going to the game tape.
01:21:43
Speaker
You know, you find, you find a book like that and you're like, oh this is good. And you like, you read something, you're Oh, how can I do that? Or you might rewind and they're like, reread things and be like, oh, what what's going on here? And you try to get into the the bones of it. And that's really yeah energizing and fun. And you're like, okay, how can I how can i do this? well That's what he's doing here. Okay. like Yeah.
01:22:04
Speaker
Yeah. It's like deconstructing it in a way that you don't do if you're just, you know, if you're sitting on the beach, like reading something, you know, and enjoying it and just letting the day pass. That's just great. I love doing that too. But it is really is kind of like trying to pull back the curtain a little bit, as you said, and study the wires a little bit and figure out, okay, how did he, how did he build the scene? How did he propel the story in this way? Um, it's, it's like, um, to learn from people who are masters at it is, is a, is a really a fun thing. And as you said, energizing, you feel like,
01:22:39
Speaker
you know, close the book. You just want to sit down and like, all right, I'm going to go back and change, like revise this draft or you know, come up with something even more exciting. Yeah. Oh, amazing, man. Well, this is, this is great to get the chat about, uh, you know, how you go about this work and your awesome piece for the ad of us. So Dave, just thanks for carving out time talk shop. This was great.
01:23:01
Speaker
Thanks so much for having me. i really enjoyed it.
01:23:08
Speaker
I mean, I mean.
01:23:13
Speaker
Sweet. Awesome. Yes. Thanks to Jonah and David. And for you, kind listener, for making it this far, there's there's a woman, a listener named Linda, and she often chimes in in the comments on Spotify.
01:23:26
Speaker
So if you listen to Spotify, you can leave comments. It's very rare. Very few people do. And I jump in and... Togge offered me some good advice about my tendocinovitus with my stupid brittle wrists.
01:23:39
Speaker
Pretty cool stuff. It's nice. It's nice to have that dialogue. Visit magazine.atavist.com to read David's story and consider subscribing to their ad-free, blockbuster, national magazine award-winning journalism.
Subscribing to Atavist for Quality Journalism
01:23:55
Speaker
No, I don't get commissions or kickbacks.
01:23:57
Speaker
What a guy.
01:24:00
Speaker
So July 1st, Canada Day, was my 45th birthday. i yeah got my first ever full body massage from Maple at Aveda, a B-certified company.
01:24:13
Speaker
And it was potentially life-changing. I don't know how these massage therapists do it. It is some of the most physically taxing work imaginable. and they have their hands all over strangers' bodies, and some have hair and feet. I mean, amazing. It was kind of mind-blowing.
01:24:33
Speaker
Birthdays are always a good time for a personal reflection. Gratitude for having made it another trip around the sun. This is my New Year's Day. yeah My big goal is to can you continue to shrink my footprint, to consume less and less.
01:24:50
Speaker
yeah By and large, I'm pretty good at that. you know My wife and I are pretty good at that. If we didn't have three dogs, it would be exceptionally so. can always improve. I always feel better pushing against our culture's desire to make us feel less than, and the only way to fill that gaping hole is with stuff, ah junk food, booze, stuff on stuff on stuff.
01:25:13
Speaker
So when I see material excess in action, I feel all the more grounded in the pursuit of less and the pursuit of intentionality. Yeah, physically, I'd like to grease my joints so I'm not gonna end up hunched over in the next few decades.
01:25:31
Speaker
I want to be less brittle in places that put me on the shelf, like little things, like my wrists. My primary form of activity is weight training, and if my wrists are fucked up, it's very hard ah to deadlift. I certainly can't press.
01:25:49
Speaker
Can't do much by way of anything. Even squatting, barbell squatting, yeah it kind of puts pressure on the on the wrists too. And yeah, it's no bueno.
01:26:03
Speaker
Puts me on
Goals for Physical Health and Podcast Growth
01:26:04
Speaker
the shelf. And when you go on the shelf, think bad things happen. I'd like to get back to a 405 deadlift that I did a few years ago. you know If I train smart, the cascading effect of that strength goal will help me achieve some other things like a better body composition to partially appease my crippling body dysmorphia, but also my blood pressure, which appears to be trending down to a normalized range. yeah My doctor is all the all too eager to be like, hey, we can just give you a little pill and take it down a notch.
01:26:33
Speaker
I'm like, yeah, let me handle this. I don't want to be on any pharmaceuticals if I can help Now, cresting into full-on middle age means it's harder just to not fall apart.
01:26:46
Speaker
There's wear and tear on the on the body, especially since I've been an athlete most of my life. There's natural wear and tear. And it'll easily lay you up. And a slowing metabolism means the longer you're laid up, the more apt you are to lose fitness. And the cycle continues until you're bent over and hobbling.
01:27:07
Speaker
i'd love to see the podcast grow ah I'd love to see the podcast grow to 10,000 downloads a month. and Not to make money, not for status, but platform is currency.
01:27:19
Speaker
And it means I'm more attractive to publishers. And that's how I like to see myself getting paid. and also gives me the capacity to keep platforming writers. you know I want Pitch Club to get up into the thousands of subscribers. It'll always be free.
01:27:35
Speaker
All of my offerings are free. I don't begrudge writers for trying to make a buck. But it's my feeling there deeper-pocketed institutions where you can siphon money from so you don't gatekeep emerging voices or aspiring writers who might not have ah deep pockets. I think we're even we're seeing that with athletics.
01:27:54
Speaker
the The most well-heeled, privileged people can afford to travel, can afford to go on better teams. And as a result, those people get more access to better coaching, ah more playing time.
01:28:11
Speaker
And we're going to see, if we yeah are not aren't already seeing it, that rosters are going to be populated with people who are of ah higher caste.
01:28:22
Speaker
And that's not cool. So I never want to see that with writing either. Because how many people have been priced out of it for one one way or another? There's probably a rich parting shot baked into that concept, but I'll put a pin in it for now.
01:28:36
Speaker
I want my next book deal in place before the end of 2025. Some of that's in my control. Some of it isn't. But if we're in and around the end of 2025, beginning and there's something in place... and there's something in place I'll be pretty damn happy.
01:28:50
Speaker
And that'll buy me more time down the road. Hopefully get some some money from a publisher. And hopefully if it if it's equal or even a little more than the Prefontaine book advance, we're going to be all right.
Book Promotion and Reflection on Joy
01:29:02
Speaker
We're going to be okay. I want to keep celebrating the front runner through the holiday season. Keep that pot of water boiling on a low simmer.
01:29:14
Speaker
yeah And then put it to rest for a bit. Then ramp it up again for a paperback release probably over the summer. But like anything, if you don't write this shit down, it'll fade and get crushed by the glut of life's many, many crushing defeats.
01:29:29
Speaker
We have a government that has wrought so much damage and causes so much pain. And it's only been six months. Joy is a form of resistance. I'm not someone prone to joy.
01:29:40
Speaker
i don't even, i like today I have it on my to-do list. Google how to have fun.
01:29:46
Speaker
Yeah, I have to Google how to have fun. So joy is a form of resistance. Doing our work is a form of resistance. Caring for each other is a form of resistance. So keep doing your work. It matters.
01:30:00
Speaker
I know saying this shit, shit of this nature is a little off-brand, a little out of tune, coming out of my face.
01:30:11
Speaker
But it feels true to me right now, to this moment. too So stay wild, C&Fers. And if you can't do interviews, see ya.