Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads Event: An Evening With Author Stephen G. Bloom: Making Sense Of The World

Sat, 04/05/2008 - 12:00pm

When: February 15, 2012 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

The theme for Ann Arbor Ypsilanti Reads 2012 is Language: How We Communicate. Award-winning journalist Stephen G. Bloom, the UM Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism, will discuss how he communicates through non-fiction writing - including his December piece "Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life" in The Atlantic which set off a firestorm of controversy placing him in the national spotlight. Bloom will also discuss the role of journalists today, touching on the future of journalism and nonfiction writing. Since 1993, Bloom has been on the faculty of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, where he is Professor and the Bessie Dutton Murray Professional Scholar. Prior to joining the Iowa faculty, Bloom was a staff writer at the Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News, Los Angeles Times, and Dallas Morning News. He was a Brazilian correspondent for the Field News Service and national news editor at the Latin America Daily Post. He is the author of "Tears of Mermaids: The Secret Story of Pearls," "The Oxford Project" with photographer Peter Feldstein, "Inside the Writer's Mind" and "Postville: A Clash of Cultures In Heartland America." His work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Wilson Quarterly, Salon, Chronicle of Higher Education, American Journalism Review, International Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Money, Journal of Health Communication, Annals of Clinical Psychiatry, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, American Editor, and National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

Transcript

• [00:00:23.46] TIM GRIMES: Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the Ann Arbor District Library. My name is Tim Grimes.
• [00:00:28.32] I'm the manager of community relations and marketing here for the library. And I thank you so much for coming out this evening. This is one of many events that we're holding here during January and February that's connected with the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads.
• [00:00:43.51] For those of you that don't know, that's been around for about 10 years. It's an initiative. We have the University involved, the libraries, in Ypsilanti, and Ann Arbor, the schools, lots of bookstores, trying to get everyone to read one book and join in discussions in January and February.
• [00:01:05.06] Every year Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads is based on a certain topic. This year's topic is Language: How We Communicate. And so tonight's event is going to be an offshoot of that. We're going to be talking about how people communicate through journalism, nonfiction writing.
• [00:01:23.11] And here with us tonight-- we're very, very pleased-- we have award-winning journalist Stephen Bloom He's the Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan, and since 1993 has been on the faculty for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, where he's professor and the Bessie Dutton Murray Professional Scholar.
• [00:01:45.47] Prior to joining the Iowa faculty, he was a staff writer at the Sacramento Bee, the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Morning News. He was Brazilian correspondent for the Field News Service and national news editor at the Latin America Daily Post.
• [00:02:02.95] He's the author of several books-- Tears of the Mermaids: The Secret Story of Pearls, The Oxford Project, Inside the Writer's Mind, and Postville: The Clash of Cultures in Heartland America. His work has appeared in many, many magazines and newspapers and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Please join me in welcoming Stephen Bloom.
• [00:02:25.43] [APPLAUSE]
• [00:02:31.82] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: Hello. Hello. Thank you all for coming out tonight. It's very nice of you.
• [00:02:38.53] So this is going to be the drill for tonight. I will do a couple of very quick readings. And then if there are questions or observations or anything you guys want to talk about, just hold that to the end. And we're going to have a spirited, free, interesting discussion, I hope.
• [00:02:56.34] So I want to talk about something that-- two words that I've really never heard put together-- "loyalty" and "journalism." I'm intrigued enough about loyalty, really, to write a book about it and what it means-- philosophically, politically, culturally, socially, economically, ethically.
• [00:03:21.14] So tonight we're going to have an informal discussion about loyalty. That is, the concept of loyalty through a journalist's own writing over the last 15 years or so. I know it's a little strange to go to a lecture on journalism by zeroing in on loyalty, but just stay with me.
• [00:03:44.74] So loyalty, I think, is alive and well in all shapes and sizes these days I'm a loyal Wolverine, Go Blue. People are very loyal to a host of very different things.
• [00:03:58.93] There are some Apple people out there, I'm sure, and there's some PC people out there. People are very loyal to-- not to both, but to one or the other. Delta versus United. Actually, I'm not loyal to any airline. How can you be today?
• [00:04:16.46] Companies today cash in on brand loyalty with-- you know about this-- loyalty cards, frequent flier bonuses, preferred customer points. It's sort of like the more you buy, the more you save. Listen to that-- the more you buy, the more you save. A strange logic, I know.
• [00:04:37.32] So there's CVS versus Walgreens. Are you a Kroger's, Whole Foods, Hilliards, Trader Joe's, Busch kind of guy or gal? Each has a loyal following, prompting someone I know to say, I wouldn't be caught dead in Kroger's.
• [00:04:57.40] Just about every national chain has customer loyalty programs-- Starbucks, J.Crew, Nordstrom, Macy's, The Gap. Pottery Barn. Well, the list goes on and on. So convincing shoppers to be loyal is part of the capitalist system of convincing consumers that economic units have actual personalities.
• [00:05:23.58] We reward you for coming back to us because we're the good guys. And you could save a ton of money by spending it on us is really what they're saying. Going deeper now and choosing Target over Sears, when does loyalty promote blind faith, a kind of fascism? It's a good topic, but it's a topic for another evening.
• [00:05:48.15] So tonight we're going to talk about, again, loyalty that one has as a journalist. In other words, to whom should journalists be loyal? Well, my answer is to the reader, of course, to the public, to your constituency. That's what I think.
• [00:06:07.70] I've always been uncomfortable about joining anything. You know, it's an old journalism rule. I'm not overly loyal to any cause. I've never worn a political button. I've never marched in anything.
• [00:06:21.33] And, remember, I'm a child of the '60s, of the Vietnam War and the Vietnam protests. But to quote a good friend of mine, Dale Maharidge, who's a writer, "The only organization I've ever joined is Costco." So this riff on loyalty is what I want to talk about tonight.
• [00:06:39.79] In all my books it comes up. This loyalty motif comes up because in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently there was a story about me, and someone in Iowa characterized me as, quote, "not having a normal loyalty. " This I found really interesting because it's really at the cutting edge of journalism.
• [00:07:04.15] So I thought I could talk about this tonight, loyalty in journalism, ending with this so-called controversial piece in the Atlantic about the Iowa caucuses. So, as I said, there's plenty of time for questions. It's a nice, small crowd. Hold 'em for the end, and we can have a nice discussion about loyal or, really, anything you guys want to talk about.
• [00:07:26.54] But before I go on and we start with this reading, I want to quote Joan Didion. And the writers out there know what I'm going to say, probably. Probably Joan Didion's most famous comment is this-- "There's one thing to remember, writers are always selling somebody out."
• [00:07:48.11] OK. So let me start with the show. And let me start with Postville. And let me set this up and read an excerpt from the book real quickly. And remember loyalty, loyalty is the key tonight. OK?
• [00:08:10.22] So this is Postville. And as many of you know, Postville is a story about a small, ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community 18 miles west of the Mississippi River in the corner of Iowa that is right next to Minnesota and Wisconsin. In the late '80s, a group of ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews started a slaughterhouse in Postville.
• [00:08:36.39] And I decided, living in Iowa City, 105 miles from Postville, that, wow, that would be a really interesting story. So I began to drive up to Postville every single weekend. And I parked myself in Postville more or less for five years.
• [00:08:57.09] Some weekends I stayed with Hasidic Jews. Other weekends I stayed with local, mostly Lutheran, farmers. This is an excerpt I want to read about loyalty. And the setup also includes just this, which I won't read, and I'll just describe it to you guys.
• [00:09:19.81] My wife, Iris, and our son, Michael, came up with me that weekend. And so they were at a bed and breakfast. And I think Michael left-- Michael's a student at the University of Michigan now. This is when he was seven years old. He left his toothbrush in the car, and so I went down from the bed and breakfast to get his toothbrush. And this is what happened.
• [00:09:47.65] "I glanced over to the alley next to Rosalyn's house and saw a doleful, stooped, solitary figure plodding by. The man looked like he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. For a second or two I didn't know what I was seeing. Hot day, a guy dressed all in black? He looked like the grim reaper. But I looked closer and saw a familiar Borsalino hat, black beard, and waistcoat.
• [00:10:15.97] 'Lazar!'
• [00:10:18.17] He barely lifted his head.
• [00:10:19.74] 'Hey, Lazar!'
• [00:10:22.36] Lazar turned my way, muttering to himself, softly but audibly so I could hear. 'Who's this goy, someone in shorts, shouting at me?'
• [00:10:33.41] 'Lazar, it's me, Shlomo, son of Jacov! Moishe's father. Remember?'
• [00:10:39.22] 'What are you doing here? What are you doing there?' Lazar shouted, pointing to Rosalyn Krambeer's bed-and-breakfast house.
• [00:10:50.15] 'I came back to talk to more people.'
• [00:10:53.49] 'Why would you want to talk to anyone else? You already talked to me.'
• [00:11:00.23] 'Because, Lazar, someone else might have something else to say.'
• [00:11:05.54] 'I doubt it. I told you all you need to know. Why waste your time?'
• [00:11:13.72] 'Lazar, I need other viewpoints.'
• [00:11:16.90] 'From the goyim?'
• [00:11:19.72] 'From people who might have a different viewpoint.'
• [00:11:22.91] 'Viewpoint? What does viewpoint mean? Viewpoint? Sounds like a goyishe word to me. I don't know about this viewpoint business. You already heard the truth. Why do you want to confuse yourself? You don't trust me, Shlomo, a fellow Jew?'
• [00:11:44.76] 'Lazar, I do my job, you do yours.'
• [00:11:48.25] 'But what is this job of yours? You start snooping around, asking everyone questions, you're liable to confuse yourself. You understand what I mean? Your job, as you call it, is plain and simple-- always to be a Jew.'
• [00:12:04.99] 'Lazar, if I need help with that, I'll come to you.'
• [00:12:08.51] 'Good. I'm glad to hear that.'
• [00:12:11.27] The comment, for a moment, silenced both of us. We reached a temporary standoff until Lazar said, 'Always remember this, Shlomo-- You are one of the Chosen People. This is a free country, and don't you ever forget it. Now, you come to shul with me. It's late. Then you come to the house for lunch.'
• [00:12:34.88] 'We can't go to shul.'
• [00:12:37.05] 'We? Who is we? Moishe? Moishe your son is here?'
• [00:12:42.34] 'Moishe came with me. So did my wife.'
• [00:12:45.11] 'The wife? The wife, she 's here this time? She finished with the law school exams?'
• [00:12:51.53] I nodded.
• [00:12:52.44] 'Excellent! Then you and Moishe come to shul now, and the wife, the wife joins us in the house in the afternoon. It's all settled.'
• [00:13:03.05] 'We can't come to the shul, Lazar. We're going to the parade downtown.'
• [00:13:08.40] 'The parade? That's more important than shul? A Jew, a Jew can't come to shul? This I cannot understand. Shul comes out ahead of a parade. Always it comes out ahead of a parade. You going to parade with the goyim, with animals, cows, with pigs? Whaddaya meshugge? You're a Jew, Shlomo. You come to shul with me.'
• [00:13:41.75] 'Can't. I promised Mikey we'd go to the parade.'
• [00:13:45.68] 'Moishe'll understand. I'll explain it to him. He should be in shul on a Saturday morning. Not at some cockamamie parade with all that chozzerai. And you too, Shlomo, son of Jacov.'
• [00:14:02.37] 'Nope,' I said, smiling . 'You're going to the shul. We're going to the parade.'"
• [00:14:10.09] Loyalty, issue of loyalty. Whose side am I on? OK. I want to move now to another bit of loyalty. And it has to do with the Oxford Project. OK.
• [00:14:31.34] So the Oxford project-- let me give you a real quick setup on the Oxford Project. A photographer lives in a tiny town about 18 miles west of Iowa City. He's lived there for 30 years. The photographer, Peter Feldstein, decided in 1984 to take photographs of every single person in this tiny town.
• [00:14:56.35] There were 776 people, and Peter was able to take pictures or photographs of 773 of those people. It was more of a conceptual-art kind of project. And he didn't ask them to wear their Sunday best. He didn't ask them to jump up and down. He just took a quick snapshot.
• [00:15:23.60] 20 years later, Peter and I started talking about his project, which was now all filed in drawers because he didn't use digital cameras. He used actual film. And we got to talking, and Peter and I decided it'd be interesting to talk to these people about their stories, who they are.
• [00:15:52.01] So these are contact sheets taken in 1984 of just ordinary people in an ordinary town in flyover country. And I got into the act by interviewing a hundred of these people. And I just want to go through a couple of these things. And remember the keynote here-- I am supposed to stay behind this. I've been warned. The key here is, remember, loyalty, loyalty, to whom am I loyal? . OK? So this is the town butcher, Darrel Lindley.
• [00:16:28.73] "I shoot 'em, bleed 'em, then skin 'em. I do hogs, cattle, goats, buffalo, and sheep. I use a .22 Magnum. After I shoot 'em, I cut their throats. Hogs, I stick 'em underneath in their brisket." I've eaten a lot of brisket. I never knew that's where brisket was, by the way.
• [00:16:46.06] "Tomorrow I'm going to do four hogs. That'll take me four hours. Hogs I get twenty-four dollars apiece. Cattle is fifty dollars plus the hide. There was a time when I'd work five or six days a week. I had customers in seven counties. I used to do five to six thousand head a year.
• [00:17:02.71] One thing I do, if there were kids around, is I cut out the eyeball. It's a little smaller than a golf ball, and I swish it around my mouth. The kids can't believe that. Then I give the eyeballs to the health teacher at the school so the kids can dissect it." Oh, I 'm not supposed to read that. I forgot.
• [00:17:22.08] OK. 20 years apiece. So this picture was taken in 1984. Next picture was taken in-- actually, in 1996. No. Excuse me. In 2006. What happens to people? And my mandate to all the people of Oxford was "Tell me your story." I started out every single interview with "Tell me your story."
• [00:17:48.00] Some people took that very literally and said, my story, my story is I'm late. I have to go to the dentist, so we'd better make this quick. Another person might have said, my story, my story is that 22 years ago my son died, and I haven't gotten over it.
• [00:18:05.90] Darrel was interesting. His whole presentation becomes interesting because visually we were struck by, of course, these two very strong images. If the images work, your eyes are going to converge on panel two, and you're going to start seeing words. If the words work, they will inform you about the images, and you go back and forth and back and forth.
• [00:18:30.93] We've had many museum exhibitions of this. And it's interesting to sort of be incognito, just to see how people look at things on a wall and how for how long they stay with each photograph and each story. It's very difficult to get people to read, particularly when they're standing up. This also is in book form and looks like this. So it's a little different.
• [00:18:54.87] Then we get Darrel to say, "We lost one of our daughters to cancer two years ago. I talk to Darnell every day, every day. She had a great sense of humor. Always did, even as a little girl. The loss of a child is about as bad as it gets. The last thing Darnell said before she died was, 'I love you, Dad.'"
• [00:19:14.59] And we go on to something else, to a larger issue of death, which is, "The invasion of Iraq was very foolish. We never should've gone there. A just war is one thing, but this war isn't just. Bush isn't honest. He's an idiot and a coward."
• [00:19:27.92] You're informed about Darrel. To me what happens-- and what's so interesting is there's 6 inches between everyone's ears, and, wow, we are totally informed of who Darrel is. Darrel isn't just a butcher. Darrel has lots of very deep, interesting, conflicting thoughts. We get out of this by Darrel saying, "I don't have a lot of disappointments. I wish I had charged people more, maybe then I'd have more money now."
• [00:19:57.95] Look at a couple more of these. This is an interesting deal. Calvin Colony used to trap mountain lions. There are mountain lions in Iowa. And in terms of storytelling, it's interesting.
• [00:20:14.29] You guys are going to be mesmerized by the lion. And there's no way you can't be mesmerized by the lion. I know that, so I want to delay any mention of the lion until the second paragraph.
• [00:20:25.50] These are verbatim quotes, by the way. I don't use a tape recorder, ever. It's all in longhand. OK. So it's interesting.
• [00:20:33.83] "I'm a plumber, but I'm also a driver for the county. I dive for drowning victims, hunting accidents, snowmobiles that go through the ice. It's black down there and you're crawling through logs. I've probably pulled out twenty bodies since 1973."
• [00:20:53.40] And then these are verbatim comments. I love the whole idea of snowmobiles that go through the ice, and it's black down there.
• [00:21:02.30] So now you know I've got to talk about the lion. And you know Calvin's gotta talk about the lion. But there's a little cheat there because I know you know that Calvin is going to talk about the lion. So we'll go to the second paragraph.
• [00:21:19.38] "I've had maybe thirteen lions over the years. You can train 'em, but you can never tame 'em." Gr Great. "You can't trust 'em around children. They're like cats around mice." I love those big paws. You just think of these paws like patting back and forth, mice or children.
• [00:21:43.49] "They'll kill a dog pretty quick. I used to feed 'em road-kill deer.
• [00:21:48.58] For the last six years I've been going to a resort in Jamaica called Hedonism. On one beach, you have to have your bottoms on. On the other beach, you can't lay out unless you're naked. You'll see people having sex if you stay around long enough. All the alcohol you want is included in the price. It's a good time. You don't have to take many clothes."
• [00:22:08.51] It's interesting to see what Calvin is covering in panel three. You know, for a guy who hangs out at a club called Hedonism, he is very modest, covering his genitals.
• [00:22:22.94] OK. So remember the issue here, loyalty. To whom do I owe loyalty? Interesting, really interesting. Girl, age four. Woman, age 26.
• [00:22:43.42] "My mom left me at a church when I was three." What she really means to say is my mom abandoned me, but she's not using the word "abandon." "Left" is strong enough. "She used to travel with the carnival, and the carnival ended up going broke in Iowa. When my mom and my stepfather had a hard day, they'd take it out on me." Wow. That's a euphemism for "abusing me." "So she left me at this church with our dog Freddy. She pinned a note to my shirt that said, 'Please take care of her. We can't any longer.'
• [00:23:25.68] Freddy ran away and I got scared." This is so moving to me because she wasn't scared when her mother left her. She's scared when Freddy leaves her. "I started crying. A couple heard me and called the police. They sent me to a foster home, which I hated. When I was four or five, I moved to Blanche's place in Oxford. My favorite movie was Annie. I watched it over and over with Blanche."
• [00:23:49.21] Well, of course her favorite movie was Annie. Little Orphan Annie. And we all know what happens to Little Orphan Annie, right? She ends up in a home with Daddy Warbucks.
• [00:23:59.88] "When I was nine, Blanche said to me, 'I really can't be your mom any longer.'" Wow. Her real biological mother abandons her. Now Blanche abandons her. "In my next family, the mother would put my hair up. But I was a tomboy and it drove them mad. I went to three or four other foster homes after that.
• [00:24:21.90] When I was thirteen, I was adopted by a very religious family." We know what's going to happen now. "They gave me my new name. They home-schooled me; they said all history comes from the Bible. They wouldn't let me cut my hair, no make-up or TV. I came home one day and they had taken away all my jeans and replaced them with skirts. They shredded by MC Hammer tapes." Well, that I agree with, actually. "They told me my marriage would be arranged. At sixteen, the county sent me to another foster home.
• [00:24:56.69] On my eighteenth birthday, my mother blew into town. She wanted us to go on The Montel Williams Show and say how she really never wanted to give me up. She asked me to move in with her in Florida and start a new life. That didn't work out, so I came back to Des Moines, where I've been for six years
• [00:25:17.55] I met a guy from Honduras and he didn't speak a lick of English. I got pregnant, then we broke up. After that, I really got into partying. I'd stay out till three or four in the morning. I liked drinking. I met another guy at a bar, and I got pregnant again. So now I live with the fathers of both my children and another guy.
• [00:25:36.69] Nothing for me has been normal, so why should now be normal?"
• [00:25:40.73] Really interesting, really fascinating story. You know, we pass people every day in the library, on the streets, on the bus. Everyone's got a story to tell.
• [00:25:52.78] This is fascinating because there's a serenity that has come over her in panel three. And the other thing is, well, it makes sense then that she meets a guy from Honduras who doesn't speak a lick of English. She's a caregiver. She wants to give care to people who are parent-less, who are without mentors.
• [00:26:20.24] This is Blanche. Remember Blanche? Blanche was the mother, was the foster mother. "I first heard about foster parenting when I was a waitress at the Red Garter."
• [00:26:30.64] I love that. It's not I just was a waitress. It's the Red Garter. It's not I was a cocktail waitress. It's not I was a waitress at a bar. It's the Red Garter. I trust the young people in the audience know what garters are? OK. I'll let you know afterwards if you don't know.
• [00:26:49.19] "I always liked babysitting, so I thought I'd give it a try. We started forty-one years ago, and we've had five hundred children live with us." What a story.
• [00:27:00.42] "I had one girl for fourteen years, and others for just a couple weeks. We used to take in newborn babies, but I quit because it was too hard to let them go. One girl I got when she was three-- her mother was running with the carnival, and she left the girl and a dog at the church steps." Well, we know who that is.
• [00:27:21.70] "A lot of them are victims of sexual abuse-- I had one was just four years old and she'd already been abused twice. The worst is when they come in with lice. I've had to shave girls' legs and armpits because no one taught them how. You turn their values around. For some it works, for others it don't."
• [00:27:38.73] The fascinating thing about this-- there's a lot of fascinating stuff, but, you know, for Blanche, Brianne was just one of 500 kids. For Brianne, Blanche was everything. What a great story. They're all great stories, though.
• [00:28:06.92] Jim Hoyt, proud member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in panel one. Standing in the exact same way. He hasn't been prompted. Look at that. Right hand over left. Listen to Jim's story.
• [00:28:25.11] "I worked for the railroad and my mother was a rural school teacher. I went from kindergarten through twelfth grade in the same building. My biggest achievement was winning the Johnson County Spelling Bee in 1939. I was in eighth grade and I still remember the word I spelled correctly-- 'archive.'" Remember that word, "archive."
• [00:28:45.51] "After basic training I was sent overseas and went through the Battle of the Bulge. I'm the last living of the first four American soldiers who liberated Buchenwald concentration camp."
• [00:28:55.99] I will tell you parenthetically that Jim had not told anyone this. He'd shared this with his sons. He shared something about this with his wife, but Jim really didn't want to talk about this. In the twilight of his life, he decided, in a sense, I suppose, he wanted to make meaning of what he had done.
• [00:29:18.98] "There were thousands of bodies piled high. I saw hearts that had been taken from live people in medical experiments. They said a wife of one of the SS officers-- they called her the Bitch of Buchenwald-- saw a tattoo she liked on the arm of a prisoner, and had the skin made into a lampshade. I saw that.
• [00:29:40.71] I received the Bronze Star, but when I got home, I didn't have a job." What's this remind you of? Returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.
• [00:29:50.85] "I worked at a bank, then for Burroughs Adding Machine, then in construction. I ended up a rural mail carrier. I have post-traumatic stress disorder. My oldest son, who was awarded the Purple Heart for service in Vietnam, suffers from the same thing. Seeing these things, it changes you.
• [00:30:11.66] I was a kid. Des Moines been the furthest I 'd ever been from home. I still have horrific dreams. Usually someone needs help and I can help them. I'm in a situation where I'm trapped and I can't get out. I go to a group therapy session every week at the VA.
• [00:30:26.72] For the fifty-year anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, they asked me to return. They would've paid for the whole works. But I said no. I don't want to bring back those memories.
• [00:30:40.58] Thinking back, I would have pushed to be a psychologist-- if for no other reason than to understand myself better." I love this. I loved his last line. In journalism we call this the "tag line" or "the caboose."
• [00:30:54.19] "I met my wife Doris at a dance in Solon back in 1948. She's the love of my life. I don't know what I'd do without her." Wow. Wow.
• [00:31:07.86] There's a couple things I want to say about this. Remember loyalty, loyalty. A couple things I want to say about this. One is I love Burroughs Adding Machine. I mean, it's so old, a company that makes adding machines. Burroughs Adding Machine.
• [00:31:22.60] And I'd like to think that the secret, the secrets that are in-- I know I'm not supposed to get away from that. The secret's in this guy's head right now. It's sealed as tightly as the letters that were sealed in the envelopes that he delivered as a rural mail carrier.
• [00:31:49.50] Go through a couple other things. Real tough bruiser, panel one. A lot can happen in 22 years. "When I was thirteen, my mom, dad and me drove to a rodeo on Highway 151. It cost me six dollars to ride, and I was hooked.
• [00:32:09.89] Hooter Brown, Joe Marvel, Marty Wood (an Indian from Utah), Money Hawkeye Henson, Red Lemmel, these guys were the guys I wanted to be when I grew up. In 1984, I was in the top ten in the United Rodeo Association in the Bareback Riding category. Jo-Jo Booth was what they called me." His name is Joe Booth.
• [00:32:31.55] "I had a horse kick me in the face. I had my front tooth knocked out. I broke my nose, busted my sternum, and had knee surgery. Once I got bucked right out of the arena.
• [00:32:41.92] You gotta have a strong right arm and a sense of balance. And you gotta want to do it. You got to be rodeo-smart, too. I seen guys spend all their money on pints of whiskey, steaks every night, craps and poker.
• [00:32:54.49] If you're worried about gettin' hurt, then you better stay home. If it was easy, then girls and young children would do it." And there's a great expression that's coming up. "It's like a chicken riding a windmill." I have no idea what that is or what that means, but it's absolutely the greatest.
• [00:33:12.30] "You just her go and hang on for dear life. I never like riding bulls. I've been run over by 'em and I've been hit by 'em. With bulls, you have less of a distance to fall, but horses, they don't come back looking for you." The wisdom of a rodeo dude.
• [00:33:30.49] "Dick Moore said it best-- Bulls are meant to be eaten, not ridden." This is great stuff. And I'm just writing it all down. I had no idea who Dick Moore is, by the way, but it adds verisimilitude. It's just wow. Dick Moore is the authority on this.
• [00:33:52.35] He ends up by saying, "I was thirty-eight, and I was tired. It go to be sorta like jump-starting a car in the morning. These days, I deliver doors and windows for a lumberyard. I'm a delivery-truck driver." So he's still riding. Woof.
• [00:34:09.44] So the photographer caught Pat Henkelman when she'd just come back from the general store. Photographer said, well, if you've got the sack-- it's called a "sack," by the way, not a "bag"-- you can still hold it. Notice Pat 22 years later. She's still wearing the same shoes. She's bent a little bit to left in panel one, and a little bit more to the left in panel three.
• [00:34:34.90] Pat was my third interview. So I did 97 after Pat, over the course of about a year and a half. It's really nice because Pat-- part of this book is that you see transgenerational similarities. And Pat's children are in the book, too. I'll introduce you to Pat's son, Steve, right now.
• [00:34:56.91] "I get up at five A.M. My son-- he works as a prison guard-- stops by for breakfast every morning. He usually wants Cream of Wheat or oatmeal. Then I say my morning prayers, take a bath, and eat breakfast. After that, I clean houses. I come home and have lunch, usually a sandwich and a cup of green tea. I watch. TV, usually CNN. Sometimes I take a nap.
• [00:35:19.57] In 1940, Harry and I were working at a bee factory in Harlan, and when I came back from lunch one day, he was filling my jars." If this isn't sexual-- I know Christian is looking at this right now. If this isn't sexual, I don't know what is. A bee factory, meaning a honey-processing plant.
• [00:35:38.11] "That night we met at the county fair and had our picture taken, and that was that." That's courtship, foreplay, engagement, marriage. "In 1985, after forty-five years of marriage, he left me for another woman."
• [00:35:52.27] AUDIENCE: Oh, my God.
• [00:35:55.41] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: That dog?
• [00:35:56.30] AUDIENCE: Yeah.
• [00:35:58.95] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: And I just think this is amazing.
• [00:36:00.86] "I didn't know who the woman was, but everyone else in town did." Less than 800 people in that town. "I would have felt better if she was young and beautiful, but she wasn't." Why would she feel better if she was young and beautiful? Wow. I'm not quite sure about that, but I think it's interesting.
• [00:36:18.56] "They used to play euchre at the Legion Hall." Euchre is a card game, as many of you know. "My faith helped me get through. I don't have malice or anger. You have to forgive. For a while I thought I hated him. But that stopped.
• [00:36:33.20] Jesus died to suffer for our sins, but you're still responsible for the sins you commit." She's talking about Harry there. I'm very interested in death, as many of you might know. And when anyone starts talking about death, I really want to find out what happens after you die.
• [00:36:54.69] And Pat seemed to have a lot of the answers. So I asked Pat, and Pat said, "I think the instant you die, you step out of your body." A beautiful image. It's like Casper, the ghost. "You have to be perfect to go to heaven-- like Mother Teresa-- but almost everyone else goes to purgatory." Interestingly, her daughter's name is Teresa.
• [00:37:17.01] And then we changed topics totally. Have this wonderful ending. "There used to be a hat store in town. I wish it still was here. I love hats." There's something deeply feminine about Pat. And really, within 300 words, we get a really strong indication of who Pat is. Loyalty.
• [00:37:39.51] We'll look at two more and then we'll go on to something else. This is interesting. It has to do with hats. We're skipping a generation here. "My father's a Christian musician. He's won two Grammy Awards.
• [00:37:58.05] When I was seven we moved to Nashville. I went to public school at first; I was the only white girl in my class. Every summer my sister and I went to Oxford to live with my grandparents. It was a Mayberry very kind of place. I used to skip on the sidewalks, singing, 'Step on a crack, break your mother's back.'
• [00:38:16.27] I had my rebellious stages. I went a little crazy. I was a party girl. But I had fun. You got to live a little. Once I got out of college, I decided what I really wanted to be was a hairdresser. I now work at one of the nicest salons in Memphis.
• [00:38:31.56] I consider myself an artist. I try to inspire others to be happy. I'm almost like a psychologist." Interesting. This goes back to who? This goes back to our Buchenwald soldier, Jim Hoyt.
• [00:38:50.58] "I love purses-- the kind that are large enough to carry a blow drier in them." Really cute. "And I also love shoes, especially high heels. If they're smokin' hot, they can make a pair of jeans into a sexy outfit."
• [00:39:02.76] And here we go, Pat. It skipped a generation. "And hats. I love hats, too. I'm happy with who I am. God knows my heart and my intentions. I'm not close to being perfect, but I'm always trying to be a better person.
• [00:39:19.11] I want to travel the world. I want to have a couple kids. I want to have a big kitchen and a big bathtub. I'm not engaged, but I'm working on somebody." It's really nice because there's a Pat Henkelman element to her.
• [00:39:35.42] I could do this for hours, because I love all these stories. And I can't go for hours. I'll just go through a couple of these, and we'll read a little bit of some excerpts. Great story.
• [00:39:46.87] "I do a lot of bow hunting. I take a shower"-- He's a hunter. "I do a lot of bow hunting. I take a shower, a bath, then I use human-scent neutralizer. I wash my clothes in stuff that makes them smell like dirt." This to me is amazing. Usually you wash your clothes to get the dirt out. He washes his clothes to put the dirt in.
• [00:40:04.69] "Then I douse myself with buck urine." So dirt wasn't enough. Then he put buck urine on himself. "I go up twenty feet in a tree. You sit there for four or five hours. Sometimes it's longer.
• [00:40:18.42] I start in the morning when it's dark. I take pop and coffee, maybe a few pieces of candy, sometimes a turkey or ham sandwich. If you gotta pee, you do it in a milk bottle." This was a response to a question that I asked.
• [00:40:30.58] He's not a young guy, and I'm thinking, man, he's drinking all this pop and coffee, he's up in a tree. So I ask him, What happens if you have to pee? And his response, of course, is you do it in a milk bottle. That's really a great image. Sorry. But it's somewhat of a great image because you're hearing the sound in a milk bottle, not in a carton.
• [00:40:56.00] And then I just love this at the end. "If it's real cold, I bring a tent. I get up early. That's when it's the best-- crappies, bluegills, walleyes, northerners. I use wax worms with red or white hooks. I know how to get me some fish." You know he knows how to get some fish.
• [00:41:16.56] OK. I will do two more and then I promise, we have to leave this. Wow. What's going on here? We will find out. "I used to working in a strip club in Phoenix called the Kitty Kat." I absoulutely love the two Ks, the Kitty Kat. It just works perfectly.
• [00:41:32.74] "I was a good pole dancer." Huh. "I was thin then, maybe between 130 and 150 pounds. If it was male, I'd find my way there. I used to do alcohol, marijuana, and speed. I was a bad girl.
• [00:41:47.39] In high school, we all drank. My parents would buy us bottles of alcohol and say, 'Have at it!' Whatever we wanted, they gave us. I had two or three boyfriends, sometimes all at the same time." I wasn't sure if she meant consecutively or all at the same time. "That's the life of buckskinner girl." OK.
• [00:42:08.34] "God grabbed me by the back of my head and gave me a sound whippin' on my noggin' and said, 'Get your act together, girl!'" Again she ends with religion. "Heaven is where the streets are paved with gold and there's no tears. It's a place of eternal happiness, no anger, no hunger. The Book says it. Once you accept Jesus in your heart, you just know."
• [00:42:31.87] And this is the last one we're going to do. This is her father. This is the guy who said drink as much as you want. "I used to be a buckskinner, shooting muzzle-loaded rifles, throwing knives and tomahawks. I was obsessed with coon hunting. It wasn't about the kill. It was about the chase." Remember that.
• [00:42:54.38] "I first heard the Lord speak to me when I was sixteen. I took four years of correspondence Bible college and from then on I've given myself to the Lord. He told me to start a gospel church and call it Anchored in Faith . In our church we have a horse tank with a heater in it to do baptisms. We've done more than a hundred."
• [00:43:12.57] Moving down, "I've seen devils, demons, and angels. I once had a demon come to my bedroom. He was tall, almost touching the ceiling, and cold-- like a cold-blooded animal. He was dark and drapey, like Darth Vader without the helmet. I rassled with him on the bed. Another time, a three-foot-tall demon came at me carrying a piece of roasted meat in one hand, and a cup of blood in the other. He told me, 'Drink the Devil's Communion and you will be well!'"
• [00:43:44.90] And I love this. "Angels are like fluorescent light. They're radiant." Just like Pat Henkelman. "You can almost see through them.
• [00:43:56.26] The year 2028 will be when Jesus returns. I may be off by a year or two, but I believe it'll be around then when the Resurrection will take place." Well, frankly, to me this is a huge prediction. You can't be off a year or two. I mean, people will just live through 2028 and be like, where is the Resurrection?
• [00:44:19.20] OK. So that's all we're going to do. And then I'll just show you some other photographs to see people and how they've changed. Here, this guy. "I've called Frank Sinatra. People think I look like him." Go figure. OK.
• [00:44:39.00] So now we are moving on. Loyalty, loyalty. So this is another book I wrote called Tears of Mermaids. Well, OK. I want to read you an excerpt from this book.
• [00:44:55.66] In many ways this is the favorite thing I've ever done. This started out many years ago when I was a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. And I had to rent a tuxedo to be an usher in a friend's wedding.
• [00:45:12.42] And while I was trying out the tuxedo in a tuxedo rental shop in downtown Dallas, the lightbulb went off-- not in the dressing room but in my brain. And I thought, who is going to be wearing the same tuxedo jacket for the next 51 weeks? Wow. Let me trace and track this same tuxedo jacket.
• [00:45:33.77] So that's what I did. And every three weeks I'd call into the tuxedo rental shop, and the manager would say, oh, model 62174 came back, and it smelled of perfume. Got to have it dry cleaned. Next time, man, that same model jacket came back and had a rip under its right arm. I don't know what happened to that.
• [00:45:57.68] The last person I talked to, the last person who rented the tuxedo I talked to, and he said, I had the greatest time in that tuxedo jacket, but you can't use my name. And I said, well, if you had such a great time, why can't I use your name? He said I went on an Alaskan cruise and it was great. I said, OK. Well, why can't I use your name? And he said, because the woman I went with was not my wife. Just like Pat Henkelman. No connection, though.
• [00:46:37.23] So that was a real crowd pleaser. I did the story for the Dallas Morning News. It was a Sunday story. You don't see these kinds of Sunday stories very much any longer. It jumped three or four or five pages. And it was a favorite of mine. It stayed with me.
• [00:46:51.16] And about 15 years later, I thought I'd really screwed up the story. I'd gone forward, from the tuxedo jacket forward, 52 weeks, another year. What I should have done was I should have gone backwards in time.
• [00:47:06.25] What I should have done was I should have gone to talk to the people who cut the fabric. I should have found the workers who picked the cotton, the factory workers who spun the cotton into rayon. I should have picked the fabric cutters. I should have picked the people who sewed the buttons on.
• [00:47:29.34] That would have been a story about global capitalism. That would've been a really fascinating story just about a global assembly line. But I can't go back and redo that story, so what I decided to do was do that kind of story with a strand of pearls, a single strand of pearls.
• [00:47:49.90] And I wanted to go from diver's hand off the coast of northern Australia, when a diver scoops up from the ocean floor an oyster containing a single pearl. And I wanted to create and link a global assembly line to the moment a woman in Geneva or Sao Paulo or Paris or Chicago fastens a clasp of pearls with that same pearl in it. And that's what I did.
• [00:48:21.88] So it took me five continents and 30,000 miles. And that what Tears of Mermaids is all about. Loyalty. Let me read you a little bit about this.
• [00:48:30.87] And the setup the setup gets you to this. This is in rural China. So I was taken on a tour-- I didn't pay for the tour-- to see freshwater pearls. Not saltwater pearls, but freshwater pearls. I'll read you a little bit about this.
• [00:48:52.17] "Follow me." No. Let me start out a little earlier. "I can see, against a backdrop of purple fog and haze, scores and scores of similar lakes cutting into the patchy Yangtze River Valley countryside. The lakes seemed to go on forever. Dotting the surface of each were thousands, tens of thousands, of green plastic pop bottles bobbing up and down. It was a bizarre sight.
• [00:49:19.92] Deep in rural China, as far as possible from anything Western, it seemed a 7UP bottling plant had unloaded millions of green liter-size bottles that magically found themselves floating on the surface of a multitude of opaque lakes. 'Follow me,' Dave Bing instructed. He took a machete from the pickup.
• [00:49:43.94] A small welcoming party awaited my arrival, and therein ensued all the requisite bowing that accompanies such occasions. As he finished with the formalities, Dave Bing asked me to choose whichever green bottle I fancied on the lake before us. I did, pointing to a bottle thirty feet from the shore which seemed off in its own world.
• [00:50:07.08] A worker promptly got into a flat-bottom wooden boat and paddled over to the bottle. 'This one?' he shouted in Chinese. 'This is the one you want?' I nodded, getting the distinct feeling that I was being set up as the rube at a magic show far away from the Midway.
• [00:50:27.15] The worker promptly pulled up a muddy, five-foot rope tethered on top by the green plastic bottle and on the bottom by a round wire basket. He cut the rope, dropped the basket onto the floor of the boat, then quickly paddled to the shore. Inside the basket were four large, hard-shelled mussels, their halves shut tight.
• [00:50:50.28] As the worker dumped out his haul, I notice how different these mussels looked from oysters. If hadn't known these gnarly-looking mollusks were mussels, I might have thought they were some kind of crustacean, maybe an exotic hard-shelled crab.
• [00:51:06.40] Bing asked me which mussel I wanted him to open, and I pointed to the second one. It looked as ugly and as unprepossessing as possible, even after Bing cleaned it off with a squirt of water from a hose. Bing wiggled the machete firmly inside the twin halves of the mussel, he lifted the machete and the attached mussel chest-high, and then with a whomp he slammed it down to the concrete, splitting it apart. The assembly around me clapped, nodded and bowed.
• [00:51:38.95] What I first saw was an excess of fleshy meat oozing out from the split shells. The insides were remarkably different from oysters. Bing quickly put down the machete, knelt down, and pried open the twin halves. He grabbed the gooey innards of the mussel.
• [00:51:58.59] Bing's blue tie kept getting in the way, swinging back and forth. And out of frustration, he finally flipped the tie over his shoulder. Within seconds, he was picking out from the mussel halves glowing, oblong things that looked like jelly beans.
• [00:52:19.09] They were pearls-- purple, pink, lilac, white, yellow. And they were shiny. I'd never before seen so many bright-colored, smooth-skinned nuggets come from anything. I couldn't count how many Bing had scooped from the mussel, but he had at least fifty. And they weren't small.
• [00:52:36.66] 'Wow,' I said. The circle of onlookers seemed pleased with my reaction. 'Wow,' they mimicked, nodding to each other, smiling widely. 'Wow, wow, wow.' They join each other in increasing volume. I guess 'wow' is one of those universal words, like 'OK,' that needs no translation."
• [00:52:55.95] OK. We just have a couple more minutes, and I want you guys to start thinking if you have any questions. So I now want to read a little bit very quickly from The Atlantic, this provocative piece that I wrote in The Atlantic about Iowa. Two of these books, two of the three, are very much about Iowa.
• [00:53:22.48] "I've lived in many places, lots of them foreign countries, but none have been more foreign to me than Iowa. They speak English in Iowa. You understand the words fine. (Broadcasters, in fact, covet the Iowa 'accent,' since it could come from anywhere, devoid of regional inflections.) But if you listen closely, though, it's a wholly different manner of speaking from what folks on either coast are accustomed to.
• [00:53:49.94] Indoor parking lots in Iowa are ramps, soda is pop, lollipops are suckers, grocery bags are sacks, weeds are volunteers, miniature golf is putt-putt, supper is never to be confused with dinner, cellars and basements are totally different places, and boys under the age of 16 are commonly referred to as 'Bud.'
• [00:54:14.98] Almost every Iowa house has a mudroom, so you don't track mud or manure into the kitchen or living room, even though the aroma of pig shit is absolutely venerated in Iowa. It's known to one and all here as 'the smell of money.'
• [00:54:32.68] Friday fish fries at the American Legion hall; grocery and clothing shopping at Wal-Mart; Christmas creches with live donkeys, sheep and a neighbor infant playing Baby Jesus; shotgun-toting hunters stalking turkeys in the fall (better not go for a walk in the countryside in October or November). Not many cars in these parts of America. They're vehicles, pronounced ve-HICK-uls-- 4x4's, pickups, snowmobiles).
• [00:55:05.66] Rural houses are modest, some might say drab. Everyone strives to be middle-class; and if you had some money, by God, you'd never want to make anyone feel bad by showing it off. If you go to Florida for a cruise, you keep it to yourself. The biggest secret often is-- if you still own farmland-- exactly how many acres. Ostentatious is driving around town in a new Ford F-150 pickup.
• [00:55:34.57] The reason everyone seems related in small-town Iowa is because, if you go back far enough, many are, either by marriage or birth. In Iowa, names like Yoder, Snitker, Schroeder, and Slabach are as common as Garcia, Lee, Romero, Johnson, and Chen are in big cities.
• [00:55:57.43] Rules particular to rural Iowa that I've learned are hard and fast, seldom broken-- backdoors are how you always go into someone's house. Bar fights might not be weekly occurrences, but neither are they infrequent activities. Collecting is big-- whether it's postcards, lamps, figurines, tractors, or engines.
• [00:56:20.44] NASCAR is a spectator sport that folks can't get enough of. Old-timers answer their phones not with 'hello,' but with last names, a throwback to party-lines. Everyone's phone number in town starts with the same three-digit prefix.
• [00:56:36.93] Hats are essential." Remember Pat Henkelman? "Men over 50 don't leave home without a penknife in their pocket. Old Spice is the aftershave of choice. Everyone knows someone who has had an unfortunate and costly accident with a deer (always fatal for the deer, sometimes for the human).
• [00:56:58.53] Farming is a dangerous occupation; if farmers don't die from a mishap (getting a hand in an auger, clearing a stuck combine), they live with missing digits or limbs. Comfort food reigns supreme. Meatloaf and pork chops are king.
• [00:57:16.31] Casseroles (canned tuna or Tatertots) and Jell-O molds (cottage cheese with canned pears or pineapple) are what to bring to wedding receptions and funerals. Everyone loves Red Waldorf cake. Deer (killed with a rifle is good, with bow-and-arrow better) and handpicked morels are delicacies families cherish."
• [00:57:41.74] OK, so we are done. A lot of problems with this story, a lot of problems that Iowans had with it. But I don't think I agree with Joan Didion. Remember what Joan Didion said? Let me read that again. I am a teacher after all.
• [00:58:03.87] AUDIENCE: "Writers are always selling someone out."
• [00:58:06.76] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: That's exactly right. What Joan Didion said was, "That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling someone out." But I don't agree with Joan Didion. Yes, I think loyalty is getting the story. But it's also educating your reader with the story.
• [00:58:28.98] It's telling the story in a fiercely competitive way. And a fiercely compelling way also, so that the story becomes essential material for that reader. In other words, it's gotta be a "Hey there, Mabel," story. This shows my age. Long time ago, we used to try to write stories called "Hey there, Mabel." And that comes from, Hey, Mabel, did you read that story?
• [00:58:55.51] Well, there are not too many people named Mabel today, so maybe it's a "Hey there, Alona" story, "Hey there, Chelsea" story, "Hey there, Britney" story. Those are the kinds of stories that I like to write. And those are the stories that I like to write for you, for my readers. I'm loyal to you guys. I'm there for the story.
• [00:59:19.73] OK. There's a very small crowd. We're done at 8:04. If there are questions, if you've got any comments, if you've got some daggers or darts you want to throw at me, that's fine. Or we can just call it a night and we can get some drinks together. Any comments, observations, anything?
• [00:59:39.42] TIM GRIMES: If you have a question, just raise your hand. I'll come around with the mike. OK, right here.
• [00:59:44.86] AUDIENCE: It seems like one of the things in your-- the actual thing was the people are unpretentious in Iowa. There were a lot of problems, but the people are unpretentious. I think the question is that you were saying in the story is are they representative of America, of greater America? And that might be the case. I think the part that the people in Iowa are upset about is the violation of the unpretentiousness. And if you could get the unpretentiousness, yet saying, OK, these people don't represent the greater America, but there's something decent about these people, too.
• [01:00:42.38] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: I think there is something very decent. I mean, if you look at the Oxford Project, a hundred profiles, I mean, I have great respect for an American hero like Jim Hoyt. Jim, I will tell you, died two weeks before the book came out. So this secret that he chose to share wasn't shared with the greater world where he could be appreciated.
• [01:01:11.85] You know, Postville, Postville was a fascinating place. I mean I mean, I love Postville. I'm a writer, and that was just a great social laboratory for me. I went up to Postville, and the way a writer insinuates him- or herself into a closed society is person by person by person.
• [01:01:34.03] And the first person I met I thought ought to be the editor of the local newspaper, The Postal Herald Leader. Her name was Sharon. I'm a journalist invading her turf. That's the least I can do.
• [01:01:45.09] And so I talked to Sharon, and Sharon said, there's no story up here. I mean, if there was a story, I would've written it. But Sharon was right in the middle of the thick of things. Sharon didn't see the story. It's pretty difficult to see that story when you're right there.
• [01:02:02.78] But Sharon said, you know what? Talk to Betty. Talked to Betty. Betty said talk to Dwight. Dwight said talk to Frank. And at the end of this there were 350 people I talked to. I have the time of my life interviewing people.
• [01:02:26.89] And in many ways I looked at Ohio as a foreign assignment. I'm a kid who grew up in New Jersey. I'm a kid who went to college in California. This was a real foreign place to me. And they speak English, an English I can understand, even though I don't refer to a "parking lot" as a "ramp."
• [01:02:47.95] So I've enjoyed this. And I've enjoyed getting to know people in a deeper, stronger, more personal, more intimate way. Other questions? Anything else you guys have on your mind?
• [01:03:03.73] TIM GRIMES: Just a second.
• [01:03:07.72] AUDIENCE: Fascinating talk and slides and book, and just fascinating. Can you tell us about your background, where you're from, where you grew up, where you went to school? And are you working on anything now? I guess I have three questions. And you mentioned writing books and articles and so forth as a freelancer and then also as a reporter. What's the differences, pros and cons, of working for someone versus working for yourself as a freelance writer? So I guess I had three questions.
• [01:03:42.01] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: OK. So the quick and down and dirty bio is I'm a really undereducated guy. I just have a bachelor's degree. I went to the University of California. I went to Berkeley.
• [01:03:52.79] Always wanted to be a writer. Maybe it's because I had never been able to balance my checkbook. I know you don't have to balance your checkbook these days, with Quicken and that kind of stuff. But I was really bad in math.
• [01:04:02.57] I always really loved listening. I'm a very shy guy. People can't figure that out about me. But when I put on this metaphoric cape, the Superman cape, I suddenly can ask intimate questions of people that I am really interested in getting the answer to. That's not a great sentence. Sorry.
• [01:04:28.47] And so I've never been decked. I ask a lot of questions. That's a tough question to ask Pat Henkelman. I asked Pat Henkelman, were you in love with your husband? And that was the answer that I got. That floored me when Pat was as frank and candid as she was.
• [01:04:46.41] So that's my background. That's that. And I've worked for a host of newspapers. I got out of the daily newspaper business because the editors were getting younger and the stories were getting shorter. And I was just going the opposite way.
• [01:05:01.73] I wanted to write longer stories. I wanted to write stories like the tuxedo rental piece. You wouldn't see that in a paper today. And I sort of was fortunate because as I got out of daily journalism and began a new career as a Professor of Journalism at the University of Iowa, it was just the beginning of the demise of American journalism.
• [01:05:24.60] Papers were starting to fold. It was 1993. I came to the University of Iowa and started teaching what I know a lot about, which is the creation of stories. I'm really weak on theory. I don't know much about the German press from 1883 to 1887. There are people who know a lot about that. I'm not the dude to ask about that. But I do know how to tell a good story.
• [01:05:52.75] So that's that. The second question is?
• [01:05:55.28] AUDIENCE: What are you working on now?
• [01:05:57.73] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: What I'm working on now is I'm working on a story about abortion. I think abortion is a very interesting topic in light of the Susan Komen escapade or debacle with Planned Parenthood. I'm also working on-- seriously beginning to think about working on a book about loyalty-- What is loyalty, the concept of loyalty?
• [01:06:24.65] I mean, there are a whole bunch of different elements to loyalty. There's Go Blue. There's I'm loyal because I believe in the IRA. There's brand loyalty of Delta versus American. And what loyalty really is and when it verges on to blind faith and fascism. So I'm really interested in that.
• [01:06:49.22] I'll tell you, I don't do much journalism today because, frankly, there's not that much of an outlet for quality journalism. I mean, there are five or six great magazines, but that's it, in America today. It's pathetic. It's sad. I'm wearing black for a reason. OK.
• [01:07:11.19] And was there a third question? That was it.
• [01:07:14.91] AUDIENCE: The difference between freelancing and working [INAUDIBLE].
• [01:07:19.55] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: Freelancing is difficult. I mean, on one hand you've got these blogs. You've got all these Atlantic.com kinds of publications. And they can run long and long and long stories.
• [01:07:34.55] The story I did for the Atlantic.com is 6,000 words. That's a very long online story. But quite honestly, the pay is terrible for these kinds of publications. I don't want to embarrass myself by telling you what the fee I got for the story was. It's impossible to make a living as a journalist today.
• [01:08:01.11] These are the dark, dreary, black days for doing freelance journalism. It's very, very difficult. And it's extremely frustrating to teach young, bright University of Michigan students who are hungry and want to be journalists, because there's not that many jobs out there. There's certainly not jobs in newspapers.
• [01:08:26.77] Anything else? Any other stuff? Yes?
• [01:08:28.86] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [01:08:29.94] TIM GRIMES: Hang on just a moment. Let me come around with the mike.
• [01:08:32.81] AUDIENCE: Have you read the satire of your Atlantic article?
• [01:08:35.53] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: I have not.
• [01:08:36.09] AUDIENCE: Oh.
• [01:08:36.67] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: And I don't want to.
• [01:08:39.80] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [01:08:41.68] AUDIENCE: Well, it's online. You can just go and see it.
• [01:08:44.01] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [01:08:46.28] TIM GRIMES: Okay. We want to make sure we got the mike. Because otherwise it's just blank tape.
• [01:08:50.86] AUDIENCE: I just read it very briefly. I read it very briefly. But it was obviously done by someone knocking your liberal bent, apparently. But it was very well written.
• [01:09:03.44] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: That's good. I'm glad it was well written. At least that's good.
• [01:09:11.24] AUDIENCE: What advice would you give a writer, a creative nonfiction writer who wants to write, not for newspapers, but would it be books? Would it be queries to those five magazines? And what are those five magazines? And how would someone get published or get noticed or get an agent? Or how would someone achieve, you know, achieve that dream?
• [01:09:34.79] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: OK. Well, those five magazines are The New York Times Magazine, the Sunday magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Harper's, perhaps. There are online sites like Salon. I used to do a lot of work for Salon, salon.com There are a couple of-- if you're interested in politics, politico.com.
• [01:10:02.35] But politico.com, the maximum length they will run is 800 words, so what can you say in 800 words? So because there are so few venues, that means there are a lot more people who are submitting material to those venues. It's extraordinarily hard to get into those venues.
• [01:10:26.23] So what's my advice? My advice is it would be to try to come up with a topical subject and put it together as a book. But I have to also tell you that the publishing world is falling apart out there. You know, advances for books are not what they used to be. And as an independent, creative nonfiction writer, you need an advance to pay your rent, to pay your health insurance, to do all of the research needed to put together the book.
• [01:11:05.55] For the Tears of Mermaids book, I didn't get a really large advance. But fortunately I was teaching at a university, and the university gave me a leave of absence. They gave me a little bit of a development money, and I could travel. I didn't travel very nicely. You know, it was not first drawer at all.
• [01:11:26.11] So it's not a pretty picture out there for a writer. I mean, writers now resort to creating blogs. And the idea is that, wow, if I can create a blog, then I can be a Citizen Kane wannabe. Then what I can do is I can go around and go to Afternoon Delight, the restaurant right across the street, and I can go to Jerusalem Kitchen, and I can get advertisements.
• [01:11:51.13] And you're really a publisher. This is nothing that really has ever interested me. I really dig writing. That's what I do. I don't want to be an ad salesperson. But it's tough out there.
• [01:12:02.79] And I guess how I want to end this, this obituary on writing-- and that's really what it is-- is it's a great time to be a politician. It's a great time because there's no one else. There no one holding their feet to the fire. CNN certainly isn't doing it.
• [01:12:22.41] The New York Times can do some of that, but The New York Times doesn't cover Ann Arbor, doesn't cover Detroit. I mean, there's one person covering the region that is surrounded by 500 miles. So there's really no watchdog out there. There's no fourth estate any longer.
• [01:12:39.32] And there are hyper local blogs that are developing. And, you know, we'll see what happens to them. We'll see if they can become financially viable.
• [01:12:52.19] Any last question?
• [01:12:53.81] TIM GRIMES: OK. Right up here. Hang on just a moment.
• [01:12:58.05] AUDIENCE: I felt guilty when I didn't know the Joan Didion quote. Could you give us a little more context on that? That's a pretty dramatic statement.
• [01:13:05.69] STEPHEN G. BLOOM: Well, Joan Didion, I'll give you a context. She has been described, or perhaps described herself, as bird-like. She wants to be a fly on the wall. I know I'm mixing metaphors here.
• [01:13:22.13] And she's always after the story. She's always looking for the story. The story is the protagonist. The story is the character. The story is why she is there. And so taking that quote, Joan Didion is loyal to herself, and I suppose in a sense to her constituency, her readers.
• [01:13:51.18] You know, I don't think that's the best way to go about journalism. I think the best way to go about journalism is to exercise sincere, complete empathy. So when I'm covering a fire-- and I've done a lot of that as a daily journalist-- my first admission in interviewing people is, I am sorry that you just lost your home. Is there anything I can do to help you?
• [01:14:18.55] And that might mean letting them use a cell phone. That might mean giving them a lift to a grocery store, because I am concerned about that. That's really what I care about most. And there's a point at which I might say, do you want to tell me your story?
• [01:14:40.24] But if you don't want to tell me your story, that's fine. You're a human being who's undergoing major trauma now. How can I help you? You know, maybe someone would say there's an ulterior motive in my doing that, but to be a good journalist you've got to be a good human being, I think. And that's what I try to do.
• [01:15:08.47] I'm trying to tell a story because I love stories and I love telling stories. I don't know what Joan Didion meant when she said that, except that writers are always selling you out because they are concerned about the story they get. They can leave you and say bye-bye. They're not going back to the charred rubble of their burned-down house.
• [01:15:32.50] I think that's callous. I think that is crude. I think that-- I think that undersells tens of thousands of journalists who really are deeply human. And they're there for a reason-- to tell stories about real people.
• [01:15:54.89] Anything else? Any other stuff for Tim's microphone? Thank you very much for showing up on this cold night, and I appreciate your sharing this with me. Thank you very much.