Genius at Work
But journalism is both. Good reporters are dogged and curious, and because stories don’t fall in their laps they’re expected to be ingenious too. The best go beyond ingenuity. Judy Havemann is a Post editor I’ve known for years, and when I asked her to comment on Boo she E-mailed me this:
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Havemann was describing two Boo stories that had popped into her mind as she wrote me. The protagonist of the second, written in 1997, was a 34-year-old woman who’d finally and proudly achieved “what the federal government would consider a social policy triumph”–she’d made it off welfare. But her 15-year-old daughter, already the mother of a sickly infant, was pregnant again, and the mother didn’t know what to do. She could arrange for day care–and wipe out her income. Or she could tell her daughter, who was in ninth grade, to stay home and be a mother. But the girl wasn’t mature enough to be a mother, and if she dropped out of school she’d be throwing her life away. There was also a bright younger daughter to consider, as full of promise as her big sister’s life was full of woe.
“When we think of creativity we talk a lot about the writing,” Boo tells me. “Is it creative writing? I think, for me, the people whose work I admire most, the creativity is in the front end of it–it’s in the choosing. The first person I think of is not a journalist. Frederick Wiseman did this film called Belfast, Maine, and it’s basically montages of scenes from a fishing village with a tourist industry, and the climax is an English teacher talking about Moby Dick–how Melville wrote an epic story about kings, only they were workers. It’s a subtle, beautiful film about the loss of a way of life and a class in America. The genius was that he saw ahead of time that he could do something about this. We think so much in journalism about getting the right phrase. For me the hardest thing is always to figure out what the story is–is the story worth doing? Why Belfast, Maine? Why that?
“I took a leave in part to separate myself from the newsroom culture and conventions,” she says. “I like newspapers, but I don’t always like the newspaper culture. There’s something about the competitive nature of newsroom culture that made me happy to be outside it. But that’s not a categorical criticism of newspapers as much as a reflection of my own wussy temperament.”
She’s also working on another New Yorker piece on marriage as an antipoverty measure–a popular idea in the Bush administration. “It is the quickest way to raise people’s incomes with minimal government investment,” she explains. Oklahoma, she says, is a state whose divorce rate trails only Nevada’s and also a laboratory of new ideas to encourage marriage. In July she attended a “marriage prep class” at Oklahoma City’s Holy Temple Baptist Church. “Only three women came, but after class I went home with the women, and I’ve been following them ever since.”
He’d heard I was unloading every stock I owned and looking for something solid–one possibility was a gold-plated investment opportunity E-mailed my way from new friends in Nigeria.
