Yummy

   With racial violence and controversy heavy on my mind, it was a surprisingly cheerful experience to listen to Rashod Ollison and Michelle Zenarosa, the SFJ Diversity Fellows this year. He qualifies as diverse by being gay and black. Michelle is a feminist, a new mother and GenX. 

   Since there are more women than men, you might think that would make her a majority member, right? But no, GenX is sandwiched between two bigger demographics. And she’s Filipina.

   With 15 years experience in our field, she’s been an editor at Fusion Media and New America media and worked on Maria Hinojosa’s program America By the Numbers. Today Michelle is managing editor of two publications, Everyday Feminism, a digital media site, and Woke, a digital media startup that will feature life stories from less well covered sorts of people. 

    “Social media is played out,” she said. Everybody’s mining it for stories and so everybody’s diving on top of the same pile of bodies.   
   She also uses it to find stories: She looks for cool Instagram accounts, takes tips from friends and RSVPs to everything she’s invited to, whether she attends or not, so she can see who went. Those people can become subject-expert sources. 
   She builds Twitter lists of people who have hundreds or thousands of followers, creating a database of influencers who can tell her things or share her work.

  Rashod said he finds his stories “by instinct,” because he has 20 years invested in looking for stories. He knows one when he sees it.

  Rashod is from Little Rock and might have started his career at our newspaper had we been inclined to notice him. He told me didn’t even get an interview when he was looking years ago, even though he’s friends with Shereece Kondo. 
   Too bad, he’s a hoot. Don’t feel sorry for him, he’s done awright without our help: Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Dallas Morning News ... We did review his book, Soul Serenade.

  These days he’s based in Norfolk, Va., and working as culture critic for The Virginian-Pilot. 
   Poot, I forgot to ask him where in Norfolk. We lived there when I was little.

  I love that Rashod no longer has to do weekly celebrity phoners because one day he decided, and said, “I don’t care.” 

  A cool thing he did recently was discover a soul-food-cooking grandmother who has been using YouTube as her recipe repository, because she wants her granddaughters to know their heritage. He was following her for some time before something the girls said on air alerted him that she lived near him. He went right over there and got some food, wrote her up. 

  Look her up at chris cook 4 u 2.

   

Last words

   Jim Haag told us its podunk to end a story with a quote. Why would we give up our voice to someone else?
  You know why? Because sometimes, that other person said it better than we could.

‘Research is essentially detective work’

   Candice Millard wrote The River of Doubt, a nonfiction account of how Teddy Roosevelt led companions to their deaths, was almost eaten by cannibals and wanted to kill himself in the Amazon. She also wrote Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine & the Murder of a President, about the assassination of the brilliant James Garfield and the frantic efforts to save him.
   Her most recent book is about Winston Churchill and The Boer War — Hero of the Empire.
   So I sat up straight and paid attention.
   She delivered an anecdote-illustrated listicle of advice for nonfiction writers who want to dive as deep into their subjects as she’s been able to do.
   Advice bullet points are lame, I know, but here is what I have.
   • Don’t rush into a story. Before you make a commitment, be absolutely certain it is for you. You must have massive piles of primary sources. You must be able to document what circumstances suggest happened — it’s not good enough to convince yourself. You need to be drowning in source material.
   She told us about a book she spent a year pursuing, about 15 years Benjamin Franklin lived at 36 Craven Street in London with the widow of a surgeon, and the piles of human bones found recently in the basement there. Ben wasn’t a serial killer. 
   The late doctor was an anatomist, and he worked with grave robbers. Also, there was a tunnel connecting his basement to a gallows practically in his back yard. He would barter with the condemned for the right to claim their corpses — a new suit of clothing for their hanging, for instance.
   But did Ben go down there? Surely he did, he was a scientist and insatiably curious. But she hasn’t found a primary source to put him in the basement, so she dropped the book project a year in.
 
•  Never send someone else to do your research. Not only will you be at the mercy of their work ethic or lack thereof, but you will miss the wonder of discovery. 
   In the archive that houses Garfield’s effects, including the bones of his killer (in the same drawer with bones from John Wilkes Booth) she opened an unimposing envelope and out fell hair — fine, pale hair. It was a lock clipped from the dead president’s head.

• Find the expert. For the Amazon book, she wanted to know what tribe attacked Roosevelt’s party. Other historians hadn’t found out. She found the right anthropologist, the one with a dusty map of Amazonian tribes. He was able to poke his finger on the very tribe it had to have been.
   
• Whenever possible, go to the scene of the crime. At the least it will be an adventure. 
   She took a hair-rising flight into the jungle and met the very scary tribesmen, who had every reason to want to kill outsiders because they live in a diamond-rich area and are besieged by make-a-buck thugs. The state is too far away to defend them, and so they defend themselves. With poison-tipped arrows.
   Not long after she visited, the tribe killed people. She recognized some of the dead as having helped her, but she didn’t feel all that sorry for them.
   She told Rashod Ollison (who raised his hand before I did) that her funding comes from the book publishers. She sells them the idea, not the book. They pay in three installments, one up front to allow her to travel. After publication, if it sells, there are royalties.
   How does she know when she’s got the story and it’s time to publish what she has? “I always say my only boss is fear,” she said.