{"id":56,"date":"2019-09-03T19:28:40","date_gmt":"2019-09-03T19:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chipbrown.com\/?page_id=56"},"modified":"2019-09-04T00:03:26","modified_gmt":"2019-09-04T00:03:26","slug":"interview","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-themeisle-blocks-advanced-columns has-1-columns has-desktop-equal-layout has-tablet-equal-layout has-mobile-equal-layout has-default-gap has-vertical-unset\" id=\"wp-block-themeisle-blocks-advanced-columns-ea1b85bd\" style=\"border-width:0px;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-radius:0px;justify-content:unset\"><div class=\"wp-themeisle-block-overlay\" style=\"opacity:0.5;mix-blend-mode:normal\"><\/div><div class=\"innerblocks-wrap\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-themeisle-blocks-advanced-column\" id=\"wp-block-themeisle-blocks-advanced-column-8b938a0b\" style=\"border-width:0px;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-radius:0px\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-wordpress wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-the-stacks-reader\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"LHUInfSHxz\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestacksreader.com\/the-stacks-chat-chip-brown\/\">The Stacks Chat: Chip Brown<\/a><\/blockquote><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"&#8220;The Stacks Chat: Chip Brown&#8221; &#8212; The Stacks Reader\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thestacksreader.com\/the-stacks-chat-chip-brown\/embed\/#?secret=LHUInfSHxz\" data-secret=\"LHUInfSHxz\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br> By Alex Belth Esquire Classic 2016 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\"><em>Chip Brown has long been one of the finest magazine writers we have. An exacting\nreporter and a deft stylist, Brown began under the tutelage of David Maraniss and\nBob Woodward at <\/em>The Washington Post <em>and flourished as feature writer for glossy\nmagazines, too many to mention here. He\u2019s a longtime contributor to <\/em>The New York\nTimes Magazine<em>\u2014for an example of his best work there, check out this 2013\n<\/em><em>piece on the North Dakota oil boom\u2014and more recently, <\/em>National Geographic<em>. We\ncaught up with Brown recently to discuss a fascinating career that has taken him\naround the world, and specifically, the terrific work he did for <\/em>Esquire<em>.\u2014A.B.\n<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Esquire Classic: Your dad was a writer so I presume you grew up in a house\nwith books.\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chip Brown: <\/strong>With books, and with judicious editorial judgment. My Dad was a very\nfine writer and editor \u2014 he once pointed out a passage in the manuscript of my\nsecond book <em>Good Morning Midnight <\/em>that he thought was \u201csonorous twaddle\u201d and\nshould be struck. I didn\u2019t have to think twice about cutting it out. Growing up \u2014 I am\nthe eldest of five kids \u2014 our family game was <em>Scrabble<\/em>. My parents would not hold\nback \u2014 they would gloat when they crushed us at the <em>Scrabble <\/em>board. I remember\nonce using a word that my mother didn\u2019t know. I still remember the word\u2014saltatory.\nIt means \u201cof, or related to leaping.\u201d I said, \u201cYou don\u2019t know what that means, do\nyou?\u201d And she said, \u201cArgh, I don\u2019t!\u201d Well she didn\u2019t actually say \u201cargh\u201d but something\nalong those lines. I was probably 12 or so. In my family, if you wanted to have\npower, if you wanted to be heard, you had to develop a vocabulary. If you didn\u2019t\nhave a vocabulary you didn\u2019t really exist. You didn\u2019t have to have a visual feeling for\ndesign or color; it was all auditory. Everybody was playing musical instruments;\neverybody had to be able to articulate their thoughts and opinions if you wanted to\nget anywhere. I always want to write because it was another way of exercising word\npower.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Were you drawn to writing fiction?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>Yes at first but I discovered I needed the skeleton of actual events to support my voice. If a fiction writer puts a character in a red sweater there\u2019d better be a reason; randomness is death in fiction. A non-fiction writer can fall back on \u201cthe sweater is red because that\u2019s what color it is.\u201d I like non-fiction because it is delimited, you don\u2019t have to play God or pretend to know everything. In fact it\u2019s about getting to the point where you feel you know a little something, even if only a very little bit, about an infinitely vast and mysterious world. It\u2019s about unpacking what already exists, finding the deeper connections in material you didn\u2019t have to create from scratch. You don\u2019t have the responsibility for the patterns and relationships of the given world; you only have to find the meaning inherent in what exists, if there is any. I suppose it\u2019s like working inside the strictures of a poetic form like a sonnet. I often feel like I\u2019m a slave to real events, which is why I probably became a journalist. Though I\u2019m trying to break out of exactly these constraints at my now advanced age. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Were you aware of Esquire growing up?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>I remember coming into New York on the train from Connecticut when I was in college and reading the Dubious Achievement Awards issue for 1975 \u2014 January 1976 issue. I had written a paper on New Journalism in college and Esquire was one of the main venues of that movement to throw off the hidebound conventions of the trade. I was one of the editors of our college paper at Hampshire College, which was a brand new college started by Smith, Amherst, Holyoke and the University of Massachusetts. I was in the school\u2019s second class. The paper \u2014 <em>Climax<\/em>, it was called\u2014 was organized and run by students. One of my first <em>Climax <\/em>stories was a very, very long and painfully sophomoric imitation of an <em>Esquire <\/em>piece in which I plumbed the Dante-esque nightmare of a mixer at Smith College where yellow school busses were disgorging locust-like hordes of drunken meatheads from Dartmouth. The horror! It was called \u201cThe Human Cannery.\u201d I don\u2019t dare re-read it for fear of being too mortified ever to write again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Did your parents read to you as a kid?<br><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>I don\u2019t remember them doing that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p> <strong>EC: Did you get books for your birthday and holidays? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>Oh yes. I remember my Dad bringing home John McPhee\u2019s famous Bill Bradley\nprofile in <em>The New Yorker <\/em>and saying, \u201cYou might be interested in this.\u201d And he\nhanded me a hard-cover copy of Exley\u2019s <em>A Fan\u2019s Notes <\/em>and said \u2014 almost shyly for\nfear it might come across as sententious \u2014 \u201cThis has the ring of truth.\u201d One\nChristmas I got a dictionary from my mother. Her inscription was: \u201cWords Fail\u201d which\nI thought was about the wittiest thing anyone could inscribe in a dictionary.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Did you want to write about nature?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>I was drawn to wilderness and wild places at college because Hampshire had\nan incredible outdoors program. Mountaineering, wilderness exploration, rock-\nclimbing were all just beginning to become popular. The Outdoors Program was run\nby one of my professors, David Roberts, who is sometimes called the dean of\noutdoor writers. His most famous Hampshire student was Jon Krakauer. In my junior\nyear some friends and I organized a 36-day expedition to the Arrigetch Mountains in\nthe Brooks Range in Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle. We airdropped food and\nclimbing equipment and, insanely, three-pound quality-paperback editions of\n<em>Gravity\u2019s Rainbow <\/em>which we were then obliged to carry out. We landed on a lake in\na floatplane and then hiked into the range, which is now one of the most spectacular\nparts of the enormous Gates of the Arctic National Park. When we camped under\nthe Arrigetch Peaks they had only been seen by a handful parties in history. Robert\nMarshall visited in 1931, there were a few parties in sixties. It was an epic trip and\nthe account I wrote of it became part of my senior thesis, and the first thing I ever\npublished that someone thought was worth paying for \u2014 $175 for 20,000 words\nfrom a magazine called <em>Mountain Gazette<\/em>.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: And then you started your career in Alaska at <\/strong><strong><em>The Homer News<\/em><\/strong><strong>.\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>I worked part time as the layout editor, and tried to write short stories on my\ndays off. I lived alone in a cabin on a hill called Diamond Ridge with a 300-mile view\nof five volcanoes, part of the Pacific Rim of Fire. I eventually became the managing\neditor, with a staff of 4 that I was nominally in charge of. It was a lot of work and a\ntotal lark at the same time. There were 2,500 people in Homer and we had a\ncirculation of 2,500. People would line up on Wednesday afternoon for the paper\nbecause there were so few diversions. No radio. No TV. No media, just the weekly\npaper. In a small town your job is just to establish for the record what everybody\nprobably knows already via the rumor mill. You\u2019re not the impresario of the news the\nway you are in a big daily. Homer was a lot like that TV show <em>Northern Exposure <\/em>\u2014\nwhich was also created by a Hampshire student. A lot of Hampshire students went\nup there after graduating. It seemed close to, but not completely of, the grown-up\nworld. At least to the influx of 20-somethings from the lower 48.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: What made you want to leave?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>A lot of my friends cleared out during my first winter. Living alone during the winter I found myself starting to find excuses to go into town. My first September there it rained for 37 days in a row, and September only has 30 days. Then came the snow, and the darkness \u2014 the sun rising around 9 a.m. and gone by 3:30 p.m. The male\/female ratio was 3 to 1 men to women. I tried to fortify myself by reading Rilke\u2019s letters. Rilke advised that young writers should \u201chew to what is difficult\u201d but I don\u2019t think even Rilke would have lasted very long alone in Homer during the winter. I remember one frigid night my neighbor massacred all of his chickens with a lead pipe because he realized it cost more to feed them than he made selling eggs. I was taking a lot of hot baths because I was always cold \u2014 I had a wood stove but my cabin was drafty. I\u2019d set up all these traps to catch the voles that were trying to get inside because they were cold too. I would draw a hot bath and lie in it until I felt warm. It was so quiet I could hear the blood pulsing in my ears and moose crunching willow browse 100 yards away. And then suddenly BAM, BAM, like gunshots, the vole traps would go off, and there would be a desperate skittering sound. One night six traps went off like a Gatling gun and I had six poor dead voles to dispose of. I felt bad. It was a hard country for everyone in the winter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My father offered to fly me home for Christmas. I swallowed my pride and went.\nWhen I went back as the managing editor with a full time job and vole-free garret,\nT<em>he Homer News <\/em>had a new owner \u2014 Howard Simons, the managing editor of <em>The\nWashington Post<\/em>. Howard was the editor who gave Deep Throat his name. He had\nbought the Homer paper for $65,000 when he stopped over in Alaska on a flight to\nJapan. I took over as the managing editor under his tenure, and after a year, he\ninvited me to come to Washington to interview for a job at the <em>Post<\/em>. I started on the\nMetro staff in September 1979.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: What was that transition like?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>Okay for the very first story \u2014 the desk editor seemed pleased to find the words elegiacal and detritus in my maiden story about trees that had been toppled during a hurricane. Though he did change detritus to debris. But then it was awful. I tightened up. I was overwhelmed. I forgot how to write. I went from a town with 2,500 people where I was just confirming what everybody already knew, to a newsroom of 500 reporters pickling in Ben Bradlee\u2019s \u201ccreative tension\u201d and where, as my friend Blaine Harden liked to say, some of them wore trench coats with slits in the back for their dorsal fins. I was assigned to cover the cops and schools in Montgomery County north of Washington in Maryland. I didn\u2019t know anybody. I was commuting to the bureau in Rockville Maryland in a Fiat with disc brakes that kept locking up, which seemed to be the automotive equivalent of my mental state too. You can\u2019t write unless you feel you are free to say anything in any voice. I couldn\u2019t seem to master the compulsories of a <em>Post<\/em> story in a key of my own. Like many new hires I was on probation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: How did you snap out of it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><br> CB: <\/strong>As things turned out, it was a dog who saved my career. Montgomery is one of the richest counties in the country, and I was assigned to write a story about a new phenomenon called Neighborhood Watch patrols. I went out on a patrol one night with a guy from Potomac, Maryland, one of the poshest places in Montgomery. The neighborhood watcher was patrolling with his standard poodle whose name was Bentley. It seems so obvious now that I can\u2019t imagine why it was such a revelation at the time, but when I was back in the office writing the story \u2014 on a manual typewriter on paper called six-ply because there were literally six copies being made of each keystroke \u2014 I had the wild career-saving thought that I ought to include Bentley\u2019s name. Not only did Bentley\u2019s name capture Potomac\u2019s atmosphere of privilege and paranoia but it leavened the piece with something comic, and something comic in the piece unleashed me, or rather my voice. Over the next four or five months I stopped trying to write like what I thought a Washington Post reporter should sound like and just tried to bark like myself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: You said David Maraniss was your first editor. What was it like working for\nhim?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>I learned an awful lot from David. I can still hear him say something that, again,\nseems absurdly basic now but at the time was a revelation: Every paragraph must\nadvance the story. Among many fine editors I\u2019ve had, I rank him as one of the best.\nAnother would be Will Blythe, who was the literary editor of <em>Esquire <\/em>when I was\nworking for the magazine and encouraged me not to be afraid to throw in an\noccasional quote from E.M. Cioran, the great Romanian philosopher, whose\nwonderful screwball provocations include lines like \u201cOne always perishes by the self\none assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.\u201d And there is\nalso Julie Grau who now has her own book imprint Spiegel &amp; Grau. I remember\nMaraniss once said even if you are writing about someone who is corrupt, rotten to\nthe core, you can\u2019t take away their humanity. You have to kind of cradle them when\nyou write about them. It doesn\u2019t mean you pull a punch, but you can\u2019t be self-\nrighteous or snide or judgmental. That just makes you look worse.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: You want to let them hang themselves.\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>If it\u2019s a capital offense, maybe that\u2019s right. But in a way there\u2019s editorializing in\nthat too \u2014 in letting the reader make the righteous judgment \u2014 only it doesn\u2019t seem\nas objectionable. And it\u2019s truer to life, not to say more decent, to make room in what\nyou write for the frailties of your own character, or to allude to the degree that all of\nus are imperfect.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Did Maraniss encourage you to work on having a strong point of view or\nmoral position?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>Not in the sense of consciously taking up issues with a moral agenda, but yes,\nin the sense of having a moral sensibility. He told me to work on my coldness. He\nwould say, \u201cDon\u2019t be uncharitable.\u201d Actually that might have been advice for\nmanaging a bollixed love life, not journalism. But it carried over.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: I wondered about that in your Esquire profile of Deepak Chopra? Was it\ndifficult to be charitable to him? I didn\u2019t think you were that harsh at all.\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>Well, I didn\u2019t really struggle because I liked Deepak \u2014 he is very charming, and\nhis ideas at the time, recycled and updated as they were from the ancient wisdom\nknown as the perennial philosophy, seemed sort of fresh. He had credentials a lot of\nNew Age exponents didn\u2019t have, like an M.D., and he\u2019s a magnificent silver-throated\nspeaker. You know your being lulled by what seems, and may well be, nonsense,\nbut it\u2019s hypnotizing all the same. And an ayurvedic massage with sesame oil dripped\non your third eye \u2014 which was part of his spiritual spa program \u2014 is an authentic\ntrip to the moon. Long after the story came out, at one of the early Consciousness\nConferences put on by the University of Arizona, I was talking to a neuroscientist\nfrom India who described Deepak as \u201cthe used car salesman of the perennial\nphilosophy.\u201d But I wanted to give him a forum for his ideas, far fetched as they may\nhave been. All progress in science depends on outlandish ideas that challenge\nconventional wisdom, and it\u2019s never a good idea to prematurely say what\u2019s wheat\nand what\u2019s chaff.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There were other writers \u2014 I\u2019m thinking of a hapless hitman from <em>The Weekly\nStandard \u2014 <\/em>who were all too happy to go snide on Deepak. (That agenda-driven\nwriter had to retract and apologize for parts of his story.) And David Hirshey at\n<em>Esquire <\/em>got in a jab with the headline he wrote for my piece: \u201cDeepak Chopra (Sniff!)\nHas a Cold\u201d, which essentially was tut-tutting the author of <em>Perfect Health <\/em>for not\nbeing in perfect health himself. For my part I thought the best way to challenge\nDeepak\u2019s extreme Vedic idealism which posited that consciousness precedes the\nmaterial world and reality is essentially made in the mind was simply to wonder if he\nwould champion his views on the train tracks outside the conference hall. All during\nhis lectures, I kept hearing the whistles of passing freight trains, brute symbols of\nthe material world, blasting out a kind of contrapuntal refutation of what Chopra was\nadvocating.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Okay, let\u2019s backtrack to your start at Esky because you won a national\nmagazine award for feature writing for your first story for the magazine\u2014\u201cThe\nTransformation of Johnny Spain\u201d in 1988. How did that story come about?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>Johnny Spain was an assignment from Adam Moss. He gave me a pile of\ndocuments and a letter and said, \u201cI\u2019ve got this big case, I don\u2019t really know what it is\nbut see what you can make of it.\u201d I remember Lee Eisenberg telling me I didn\u2019t need\nto explain the Sixties or the significance of Johnny Spain\u2019s bi-racial history. In other\nwords, I didn\u2019t need to write what at the Post was called the \u201cso what\u201d paragraph. I\ncould just let the narrative run, relieved of the awkward obligation of having to step\nout of the story and tell the reader why the story was important or worth reading. AP\nstories start with everything you need to know in the first sentence. <em>The Washington\nPost <\/em>style was two paragraphs of atmosphere and then the \u201cso what.\u201d When I\nswitched to magazines the \u201cso what\u201d wasn\u2019t a sentence or a paragraph, it was often\na section that presented a thesis, an argument, or an idea that would be played out\nand dissected in the course of the story. It was a higher order of thinking \u2014 and\nharder to pull off for being that.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: What effect did the National Magazine award have on your career?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>The best thing was that I didn\u2019t have to pitch stories. For 30 years people asked\nme to write. I could propose things and sometimes I have, but mostly I got to\nentertain assignments, and do things I never would have dreamed of doing myself\nin subjects such as ballet, Egypt, indigenous cultures. I got to indulge my curiosity\n\u2014 the greatest gift for any nonfiction writer, apart from money.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: You profiled three authors for Esquire\u2014August Wilson, John Edgar\nWideman, and Ken Kesey. They are all compelling, all for very different\nreasons. The lede to the Kesey profile is pitch-perfect. How did the idea of the\nartist as magician\u2014who is always vulnerable to losing that magic\u2014come\nabout?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>Kesey himself suggested writers were magicians with signature tricks, and\nduring the time we spent together, he was always showing me magic tricks. He\nthought of his art as a magic trick, the writer shows the reader an empty palm and\nthen presto, by sleight of hand produces a dove. What made all this poignant was\nnot just that Kesey couldn\u2019t pull off his signature trick with the finesse he once had\nbut that as E.M. Cioran once said, magic is the lowest of all the arts, and to frame\nliterature as magic made it seem like trickery not genuine transformation. When I\nwas traveling with him, Kesey who had written a new novel that was not up to the\ncaliber of his first two runaway successes, was reduced to reading a children\u2019s story\nto an audience of adults at Claremont College. It\u2019s a great story, for sure\u2014<em>Little\nTricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear<\/em>\u2014but it was poignant to see him\nhoping his grown-up audience would revert to five-year-olds to judge the literary\nmerits of his work.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: August Wilson was on our minds recently what with <\/strong><strong><em>Fences <\/em><\/strong><strong>being up for\nsome big awards. What do you recall about Wilson?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>What I remember of August, who was maybe the most self-effacing and modest\ngreat playwright in American history, (or so he seemed in 1989) was the long rainy\nnight I spent with him and three of his oldest friends driving around their old\nPittsburgh haunts, listening to them tell finely-honed stories and josh and razz each\nother. I would say the texture and depth of their friendship was unlike anything I had\nknown in my own life, and I realized those deep bonds were how all of them had\nsurvived what at times were very difficult racial injustices.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Your first three stories for Esquire all featured black protagonists \u2014\nJohnny Spain, John Edgar Wideman and August Wilson. But these were all\nassigned to you so that was just by chance, right?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>Yes it was. Though once editors think you can write about a particular subject\nthey look for things in that vein. One of the editors told me they got a letters from\nreaders assuming I was African American. But I don\u2019t think I was asked to write\nabout John Edgar Wideman because he was black but because he was a central\nfigure in a family tragedy \u2014 his younger son Jake stabbed a boy Eric Kane to death\non a summer camp trip in Arizona.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: And you didn\u2019t talk to him for the story, correct?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>I tried to but neither he nor his wife would consent to being interviewed. I can\u2019t say I would have done otherwise myself if I were in their position. I wrote that story before I had kids and there are a few things I would tone down if I wrote it today. A few words here and there perhaps. It was a terrible tragedy for everyone involved. When I was researching and reporting it, I found what seemed to me an irresistible metaphor, which was the figure of a circle \u2014 the headline in fact became \u201cBlood Circle.\u201d The circle surfaced in the circularity of the fates, in the way that Wideman\u2019s son was obsessed with spinning wheels, in way the family moved to Laramie Wyoming where they could circle their wagons against the dangers that had beset them in Pittsburgh. Again and again circles kept coming up. I was so enamored of the figure as way to structure the story I probably beat it into the ground. Craftsmanship is marred if the craftsman is too pleased with his work. That\u2019s something you learn later in life, I think. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: What did John Edgar Wideman say about your piece?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>I didn\u2019t hear from him, and didn\u2019t expect to. I did unexpectedly hear from his\nwife who left a message on my answering machine. All it said was: \u201cChip Brown,\nthis is Judy Wideman. I have never worn mascara in my life.\u201d Click. I have no\nreason to disbelieve her. That detail was in the piece because it had been told to me\nby someone who had seen her at the courthouse when her son was being\nsentenced to prison and told me Judy was crying so much mascara was running\ndown her face. I couldn\u2019t verify it but I believed it. The woman who told me seemed\nvery conscientious and sympathized with Judy\u2019s suffering. She was not being catty\nor cruel. Maybe she saw somebody else or maybe she saw some eye shadow, I\ndon\u2019t know what it was, who knows? But the description incensed Judy Wideman\nand of all the things she might have said, she said no more than that. Not long\nafterwards, they jointly wrote a letter to Esquire saying what a gross invasion of their\nprivacy the magazine had perpetrated.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Wideman did continue contributing to the magazine though.\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>Yes. I don\u2019t think he hated the magazine, just the story. Actually I don\u2019t know if\nthe story even mattered to him. He had much more anguishing things on his mind. I\nknow his agent Andrew Wiley was contemptuous of the very idea that someone\nwould write a magazine piece about the case. I can still hear him brushing off my\ninterview request saying something like \u201cJohn Wideman isn\u2019t interested in being\nquoted in glossy magazines\u201d like there was something loathsome about the caliber\nof the paper that corresponded to the moral sliminess of the reporters making the\ninvasive interview requests. There was a story about the same tragedy in <em>Vanity\nFair <\/em>which seemed much more judgmental to me.\nI actually felt uneasy about not protecting Eric Kane\u2019s mother from her own ferocity.\nThere was one line where Eric\u2019s mother said to me, \u201cWe could have John Edgar\nWideman killed but we chose to work within the system.\u201d And then she reached for\na plate she had set out for our visit, which was laden with large ripe strawberries.\nShe took one and sank her teeth into it. I was mesmerized by the primal quality of\nthe act. I included that scene with the strawberry as a little grace note which, of\ncourse added \u2014 perhaps unfairly, but literally \u2014 some teeth to what she had said.\nTeeth. A visual note of rapacity. It made her seem to be a lioness who would rip the\njugular out and devour the father of the boy who killed her boy. I can understand her\nfeelings. And the fact is she said what she said, she ate the strawberry as\ndescribed, it all happened, it was not invented, it was true. But was it fair? Was the\neffect fair? Was the impression it left of sublimated carnivorous fury fair? I don\u2019t\nknow. The effect was something the writer staged with her help, and probably,\ncertainly, not something she herself intended to convey. It\u2019s possible I am\noverthinking this&#8230;.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Do you often look back on stories and find things that you would do\ndifferently?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>There are almost always sentences I would rewrite. Adjectives I would cut out.\nVerbs I would improve so they were more expressive and could carry the weight I\nhad been trying to support with adjectives, which is what verbs can do. Line for line\nyou can always find a way to say more with less. But the larger flaws \u2014 the failure\nto mine more deeply as Melville once said, the inability to refrain from the impulse to\nmoralize, the failure to understand something with both exactitude and compassion\n\u2014 those are the more painful flaws I wish I could correct but obviously can\u2019t. I fear in\n\u201cThe Accidental Martyr,\u201d the Esquire story about the gay American sailor Alan\nSchindler who was murdered by a shipmate in Japan, that I might have editorialized\ntoo much about the culpability of the Navy. But that\u2019s me talking as a 63 year old\nabout a story I wrote when I was 39.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: I understand what you\u2019re saying but you could argue that not having a\npoint of view in \u201cThe Accidental Martyr\u201d would have been a mistake. There\nwas a crusading nature in doing that story at all, exposing the hypocrisy of\nthe Navy\u2019s official stance on gay bashing.\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>I\u2019m not saying forgo a point of view, but think harder about passing judgment.\nSelf-righteousness is a ruinous and diabolical temptation now blighting us all on the\nInternet.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: How long did you report that piece?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>I went to Japan for three weeks. I\u2019m a cheap traveler \u2014 extravagance offends\nmy sense of Yankee thrift \u2014 so I think it wasn\u2019t hideously expensive. As I remember\nI took at least two trips to San Francisco, some to San Diego, one to an\nimpoverished suburb outside St. Louis. I was critical of the Navy in the story\nbecause they released all these documents and were trying suddenly to be open\nabout the incident because \u2014 or so it seemed to me \u2014 being open about the details\nwas a way of absolving the Navy command of any responsibility.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Do you recall being happy with the story?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><br> CB: <\/strong>I was very excited by the structure of the story, which I found thanks to something Iris Murdoch once said. She said you can tell a reader what\u2019s going to happen over and over again without destroying the suspense because what the reader cares about is the how it happened. So I can tell you that Alan Schindler is going to die, he\u2019s going to be beaten to death by one of his shipmates because he was gay; you know what\u2019s going to happen but there is still suspense because the tension comes from <em>how <\/em>the crime unfolds. A lot of putting the story together is just intuitive carpentry. A well made piece is satisfying like a well-made chair. But the only thing that makes me truly happy is if the last line lifts the whole thing off the ground. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was very happy with the last line I found for \u201cThe Accidental Martyr.\u201d It came after\nthe description of the horrific beating and took you right back to the opening, but\nalso into the future in which the poor dead sailor would be resurrected as the martyr\nof a cause. As I remember it went: \u201cAnd Seaman Allen R. Schindler lies alone on\nthat dire floor, unconscious and near death. He knows nothing of the new life to\ncome.\u201d I\u2019m never really happy unless the last line of anything I write lifts the piece\ninto the air. There always ought to be a feeling of being elevated, even exalted, by\nthe last line. And yet of course paradoxically it has to close the shop too \u2014 it has to\npull down the steel shutter with an emphatic sense of finality that nothing more need\nbe said. If that paradoxical thing happens, it\u2019s possible the story is great. If it doesn\u2019t\nhappen, you probably wish you hadn\u2019t bothered to read all the way to the earth-\nbound end.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Are you always conscious of doing that?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>Oh for sure. I often know what the last scene will be but not the exact way the\nwhole thing will finally be buttoned up. One of the great pleasures of writing is\ndiscovering the right rhythm of the right last words. If I can\u2019t find them I often want to\ngouge out my eyes.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Can you boil that down to paragraphs?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>Sure. There should be a sense of closure at the close of every paragraph too\u2014 every paragraph of some length. A paragraph is not an arbitrary break in the text; it\u2019s a unit of thought. If it seems arbitrary, there is something flaccid about the movement of the piece, like a festering stretch of slack water in a dammed river. I like things to have shape and a current. Profluence, John Gardner called it. A good section in a magazine piece should be a little story unto itself, with a clearly demarcated opening and closing. It should have a bite or a lift or a rush or a button at the end of it. I also sometimes think of stories in terms of music. The lede section is like the overture to a Broadway show\u2014you can hear samples of all the themes that will be elaborated on later. The music analogy also allows for variations in scale. Some pieces are like chamber music, and some are large and complex, scored for the whole orchestra. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>EC: Is the last line even more important than the lede?\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CB: <\/strong>The lede is the next important thing. But at the risk of belaboring this point,\nnothing is more important than the final line because it\u2019s how you let the reader go.\nMy main goal as a nonfiction writer is to invoke a sense of poetry, to smuggle poetry\ninto prose, which goes back to my original drunken love of words for the sheer\nsound of them, notes of music signifying nothing. Because my instincts are\npoetically based, not moral, I am hoping always to leave the reader resonating with\nsomething transcendent and beautiful, even ineffable, because in the end, when you\nget down to it, my mother was right: words fail.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":70,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-56","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}