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Dear Storyboard community:
Journalist Stephen Rodrick is a proud generalist: He has written about everyone and everything from a scandal-plagued CEO to the Hollywood actor publicly feuding with his daughter, and personal topics including the toxic disaster in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, and his Navy pilot father Peter, who died in a plane crash when Stephen was 13, in his own memoir “The Magical Stranger.”
For his latest story, Rodrick, a senior writer for Rolling Stone for the past eight years, traveled to the town of Shakopee, Minn. (population: 47,158), to cover ICE's continued occupation inside the state. Rodrick said he was laid out with the flu for much of January, so he was arriving in Minnesota “late.” “A lot of really talented people had already written about it,” he told me in an email interview. But whereas normally Rodrick says each new story means “starting at zero” with his sourcing, “for only the third or fourth time in my career, I already had sources in Minnesota from stories I'd done on Tim Walz and Melissa Hortman, the murdered House speaker.”
I made some calls and spoke to activists and leaders I'd met along the way. One of them was Brad Tabke, the state rep from Shakopee, who I had met on the Hortman story. At that point, I had no idea that ICE was hitting so hard in the second ring of Minneapolis suburbs where suburbs bleed into farmland. He told me some stories about what he was seeing on the ground and I decided to fly out two days later. From there, it was the proverbial peeling of the onion, he gave me five people to talk to and then they gave me five more people. I'd earned his trust writing about his friend Melissa, so he felt confident putting me in touch with victims of ICE raids and stops and that I'd handle their stories with dignity and restraint.
In many ways, all journalists are generalists, even when they have a beat. Our job is to be curious "normies,” (in the words of Drew Harwell). And sometimes I wonder if "starting at zero” on a story gives journalists a level of humility that requires them to be even more careful in how they report and write. As Rodrick says, “like the reader, you're entering a new world.”
I asked Rodrick about how he prepared for a reporting trip as intense as this one, and how he managed his time when he arrived in town:
I was in Shakopee for 15 days, which gave me time to fall into the rhythm, if you want to call it that, of the terror people were feeling on a day-to-day basis. It also gave me time to not have to pack too many interviews into individual days. I say this with the full understanding that my trauma was 0.00001 [percent] of what the people of Shakopee experienced, but I want to be a good listener. Talking to two or three people, back-to-back, who had guns pointed at them Ieft me pretty shattered and I felt fortunate that I could catch my breath in the evening and regroup for the next day.
I'm not a guy who prides himself on not getting emotionally involved in his stories, and I wept many times in those two weeks, a combination of reacting to the stories I was hearing, but also a clench-your-fists fury that this was being projected as “going after the worst of the worst,” but in reality ICE was stopping high school kids and house cleaning grandmothers. Marvin Gaye's line, “Makes me wanna holler, throw up both my hands” ran through my head repeatedly.
I felt guilty leaving after two weeks, there were more people I could have talked to, more things I could have witnessed firsthand, but I missed my kid and my wife. Sadly, I have the feeling what happened in Shakopee will happen again. So it goes.
Read more from Rodrick in the Rolling Stone archives.
Links of note
- Audio Flux, the short-form audio storytelling site and podcast co-founded by Julie Shapiro and John DeLore, is accepting submissions for its seventh "circuit" (or season), with the theme “Trash or Treasure,” focusing on stories about climate change. The deadline for submissions is April 6, with more details and submission guidelines here.
- “How being isolated is bad for my writing.” Writer Christine Hyung-Oak Lee attended the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference after a long break and reflects on the importance of community when it comes to craft. “Once upon a time, one of my mentors told me, ‘The worst enemy of writing is your friends.’ She was not a particularly social person, even though she was and is well-liked. And she was spectacularly regarded as a writer. So who was I to tell her she was wrong? But through the years, I have come to realize that art is a process. And that process is directly correlated to each individual. So some of us do need community, even if others find it disruptive.”
- You're never too old, and it's never too late: At Oldster Magazine, Tom Junod reflects on publishing his first book at age 67, “In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man,” a memoir about his father. “When I was a young writer, Frank McCourt published his memoir, ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ to great acclaim at the age of 68. I was happy for him. But I couldn’t help but wonder: ‘Why in the world did he wait until he was 68? I’ll never do that.’ Well, I’m publishing my first book a month short of my 68th birthday. I guess I have the answer to my question.”
Keep sharing your stories, at every age,
Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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