Chapter 69: Why We Must Tell Stories Now

Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.

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I struggle to read the news. It comes at me in torrents and feels overwhelming, depressing, maddening, terrifying. I turn to sports. I turn to the food section, anything to escape the relentless grimness of the day’s dispatches. I gather I am not alone.

I say this as someone who has spent over 45 years in the news business. That is not a good turn of events. If I am turning away from the news, if I am feeling I just cannot bear to read another story about democracy in peril, Ukraine bombed, fascism’s rise, rights denied, hunger rising, housing evaporating, teenagers massacring with assault weapons, and just this week tarmacs in Britain melting in temperatures so high they boogle the mind, I can only imagine what the experience must be like for those who have not spent decades chasing stories. 

And yet, quitting on the news feels like the worst possible option. It opens the door to too many perils, beginning with ignorance and quickly leading to manipulation and deceit.

A month from now a new crop of journalism students will arrive at my school and I hope they come with a sense of mission: that seldom has there been a time when the work of journalists is more essential, even as it’s ever more under threat – by those in power doing all they can to silence journalists, as well as from the feeling that the news somehow makes life that much more difficult to bear.

I suspect my students, perhaps more anxious about succeeding at learning their craft than about the fate of the world, may not necessarily be inclined to rush to the journalistic barricades. And if recent history is any guide, not all will want to cover the news, at least every day. It is their right, their lives. And yet, I feel it is my job to make them want to do just that.

But how?

How can they capture and convey the transformative events that are tearing the country, and the world, apart? 

How can they make people aware of what readers, viewers, and listeners are sure they don’t want to hear about anymore? 

They can learn to do this indirectly but perhaps even more effectively. 

They can learn to tell stories.

Storytelling is a term so overused that it has lost much of its meaning. Everyone talks about storytelling but not everyone, I believe, truly understands what it means, and how it can be deployed as a tool for disseminating vital information. Just because an article begins with an anecdote and includes a scene and a character or two does not make it a story. 

Stories – in fiction and nonfiction – are launched with a question and propelled by the simple imperative of leaving readers asking: what happened next? Stories have conflict. Stories reveal things about the characters who populate them. Stories can miraculously transport us to places and lives we may have never wanted to visit or know but which we cannot turn from. Stories do not have to make us happy to succeed. 

Finally, stories are animated by a palpable sense of urgency – the sense of a writer needing to tell you what she or he has learned. 

Ask yourself: do you want to read about climate change? Do you want to read about fires consuming vast tracts of the world? Do you want to read about lives and homes lost? 

I suspect that while you may think you should, that while you may glance at a headline just to make sure you’re not left completely unaware, you will likely decline. Seen it. Read it. Heard it. Know it.

Consider this news, as reported in Goldrushcam.com for June 20, 2022: Almost 3.1 million acres have burned in 86 large fires and complexes across the country. Five new large fires were reported, two in Oklahoma, and one in Idaho, Montana and Texas. Extreme fire behavior was reported on large fires in Idaho and Texas. The Alaska Multi-Agency Coordinating Group downgraded the geographic area to preparedness level 3 yesterday due to continued moderation of fire weather and demobilization of resources including crews and aircraft. So far in 2022, 37,395 wildfires have burned 5,499,140 acres in the United States.

Every fact in that dispatch is terrifying and important to know. And yet, whatever impact it has on me, a reader, will quickly dissipate because I will, inevitably, turn elsewhere, or away. I should feel guilty but I am well past guilt.

Yet, part of my job as a publisher is to make you want to stick around for a story on that very topic. So I look for writers with stories they are bursting to tell. I look for people like Lindsey J. Smith.

Several years ago, Lindsey came to us with a story about fire. It came to us over the transom, which is always a tough sell – editors are like Chicago politicians: We don’t want nobody nobody sent. But it took no time at all to sense that there was a story here – not an article, a story – and that, yes, it did speak to the issue of climate change but was something much more.

It began: To grow up in the wild American West is to live under different gods. Leave behind the urban sprawl and palm trees of Los Angeles, the candy-colored Victorians and precipitous hills of San Francisco and drive north. Just a few hours will be enough to find the buildings replaced by towering redwoods, Douglas firs, sugar pines and oaks. Here, people find north by looking for where the moss is thickest on tree bark. They harvest wild huckleberries, pick pea-sized strawberries and eat thistle hearts. They get their water from cold springs and flowing creeks and can identify poison oak even when it is leafless in winter. Their children learn to ride a tricycle or roller skate indoors, because the dirt roads are too rough for little wheels. Neighbors are the distant buzz of a chainsaw, deep in the forest. The land smells like fresh-baked bread in the summer, and blooms with a musty spice after the first fall rains. Fog rolls off the ocean, over the coastal ridges, sucked inland by heat, and the fading sun paints it rosy. Innumerable stars, hard and bright, throw their blanket over the land at night.

When stories open with a sense of wonder, it is often the case that something is going to go wrong. And that is just what happens.

Lindsey had grown up in Northern California and had come to New York University for graduate school in journalism. She was living in Brooklyn, which I can tell you as a proud son of that borough, is as far from her childhood home as can be imagined.

But Lindsey needed to write about home. Or rather, one aspect of home that felt particularly resonant – and if you will newsworthy: how fire comes and destroys everything. Its headline: The Burning Season. 

She continued: A wildfire, like any fire, needs only three things to exist: fuel, heat and oxygen. Eliminate any one element and the fire dies, but provide them in ample supply and it can send 160-foot flames to the tops of trees. Wilderness is the best fuel, with no concrete or metal to get in the way, no sidewalks and pavement and bricks. Just dead grass, shrubs, sapling trees, moss like a candle’s wick, a tinderbox of withered foliage. With these raw materials, a fire can get creative.

What unfolds is not a story, strictly speaking, on climate change – even though the subject feels ever present. Instead Lindsey tells a story about life in a place defined by two natural forces that inspire awe, wonder, fear, and at certain moments, helplessness: beauty and fire. It is told, as the best stories are, through the experiences of people for whom home can be so precarious. As she herself came of age knowing all too well. 

I reached out to Lindsey recently, to catch up but mostly to talk about the story about her home that she brought to us.

She replied: It took me a long time to see that where and how I’d grown up was worth writing about. It finally clicked in the fall of 2015 when I was living in New York City and the Valley Fire in Lake County was making national news. I was in graduate school for journalism at the time, and one of my classmates said, “I just don’t understand why anyone lives in a place that’s that dangerous.” I realized that not only was there an opportunity to help answer that question but that doing so was vitally important. If people who have never lived in America’s wild places didn’t understand why families like mine do, then those places — which are increasingly bearing the brunt of climate change — would only become marginalized, othered, and isolated. I was delighted after it was published to hear from people all over the world who weren’t from rural areas but connected with the piece or were and saw themselves reflected in it.

I wondered whether the reporting and the telling gave her the chance to make sense of, and perhaps confront the fear, which is beyond existential in the case of Northern California. 

She wrote: Growing up, I didn’t really fear a fire. Obviously, I didn’t want our house to burn down, but the risk of it felt more just like a fact of life, like I describe in the piece. Also, it’s worth mentioning that the risk was lower — in my childhood, only one fire got close enough to make us consider evacuating; in the last five or so years, several have. I think what the reporting and writing helped me confront was grief for the way climate change is distorting a place I love. 

She continued: And yet, one anxious August after another, we stay. We stay for the frog song choruses, shimmering stars and the summer nights when the earth smells like fresh bread. My parents still live deep in Northern California’s forests. They have been there going on thirty-seven years, and have watched the redwoods, Douglas firs, madrones and oaks that cover our property grow taller, fill spaces in the canopy and creep into the meadows. The land has changed slowly but is as beautiful as ever, and my dad, not the first person to see it this way, calls it G.O.D. — Great Out of Doors.

Lindsey left Brooklyn. She is back in California. Fittingly she named her website Narrative.land and describes it as “Writing fueled by curiosity about our relationship to the places we love.” 

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In that same spirit of publishing stories that speak to the urgency of the moment, we wanted to share with you Zenique Gardner-Perry’s “When Momma’s Prayers Weren’t Enough,” which appears this week on The Delacorte Review. Zenique, the recipient of one of our Diversity Grants, tells a powerful and haunting story of a family in the aftermath of an arrest. If you are as moved by the story as we are, we ask you to share it. 

Many thanks.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.