Julia Flynn Siler

Photo by Nubar Alexanian

As a reporter, I often find that the most important conversations with sources came when I snap close my reporter’s notebook and started heading to the door. That’s what I discovered yesterday.
The second day of the Nieman conference was packed with smart, funny and inspiring speakers. Ann Hull and Dana Priest kicked the morning off by explaining how they reported their Washington Post series on the harrowing conditions at Walter Reed hospital.
One funny moment was their description of their “show-down” interview with the army brass was the image they painted of Ann in a down jacket, with its feathers sticking out, and a long row of colonels, all sitting behind them, a placement that Dana said, to much guffawing in the audience, “was all about messing with your head.”
Josh Benton, a Dallas Morning News columnist on leave from the paper for a year as a Nieman fellow at Harvard, gave a brilliant talk on blogging – ranging from the British poet/journalist James Fenton, who wrote “All the Wrong Places,” as an example of a collection of “reporting in its natural state,” to an exploration of the poet William Blake’s comment about establishment painter Joshua Reynolds, that “this man was born to depress art.”
Perhaps most moving and convincing of Josh’s point about the power of raw reporting was the teletype messages of John F. Kennedy’s assassination sent by a local wire reporter, and now displayed at the Sixth Floor museum in Dallas. I’m heading to that city this spring and plan to take a look at those dispatches.
As fascinating as those talks were, the most interesting conversation of the day occurred around a dinner table with that night with a far-flung group of journalists and authors who gathered to talk about the subject of history and journalism.
Sandy Tolan, who has recently joined the Annenberg School at USC, talked a bit about how he wrote The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, which was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist for nonfiction. In 1998, he was searching for a story to mark the 50th anniversary of the Israel’s declaration of independence, an event that Palestinians refer to as “the catastrophe.”
Sandy said he felt like a “casting agent” as he searched for the right people to tell the story. He found them in a Jewish family and a Palestinian family who had occupied the same house, weaving together their two stories into overlapping tragedies. With the goal of relating the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in human terms, he faced the challenge of how to stitch together these family stories against an enormously complex conflict, a process he described as being “like making a quilt.”
Sandy’s agent, David Black, warned him his book couldn’t just be a glorified transcript of his 43-minute radio documentary that aired in 1998 on NPR’s Fresh Air. That same year, Sandy attended the Nieman conference, where he came to the conclusion that he should aim to write a “history book in disguise” – and that the emotional heart of his story was the journey and intersection of these two families.
For the factual backdrop to these families’ circumstances, Sandy’s friend, the poet Erica Funkhouser, suggested he imagine putting the factual material into his book with great restraint and care, like drops out of an eye-dropper. Sandy asked for help, sending all or parts of his book to 43 readers.
Perhaps the best advice he got was from a top editor at Bloomsbury. He’d already asked for two extensions and was determined not to ask for another. So he mailed off the manuscript. Not long after, he got a call from the editor, who started off the conversation saying she knew he’d be upset with what she had to say and to sit down.
Your book isn’t ready, she told him his book, and Bloomsbury needed to extend his deadline again. “She saved me from myself,” Sandy said. He used the extra months to read a few extra books, lace in details, re-read all the chapters, and work on his source notes. The result was a history in disguise that the Washington Post called “an extraordinary book.”