Tom Donaghy| The Atavist Magazine |September 2023 | 1,531 words (5 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 143, “Who Killed the Fudge King?”

The fudge sold at Copper Kettle was so creamy, so sweet, so beyond compare, that many candy shops on the Ocean City boardwalk didn’t even sell fudge, because there was no point. During summer vacations to the Jersey Shore in the 1970s, my father would take my brother and me as a treat, when we behaved. A pretty girl in a pinafore would greet us outside with a tray of free shavings. We’d load up on them until her smile strained, then proceed inside. Once we popped actual cubes of the magic stuff into our tiny mouths, we were as high as kids are allowed to be.

For decades, Copper Kettle lived in my head as a kind of childhood memory-scape: the salt air coming off the ocean, the shiny vats of molten fudge, the too much sugar all at once. Then, during the pandemic, my family decided to return to the Jersey Shore for my mother’s birthday, so everyone could gather outside. I told my brother we should make our way back to Copper Kettle, and he informed me that it had long since gone out of business. He had some more information too: about what had become of Harry Anglemyer, the man behind the fudge.

In the early 1960s, Harry had a string of Copper Kettle Fudge shops up and down the Shore. So revered were his stores that Harry was known far and wide as the Fudge King. He was even in talks to build a fudge factory—something that would’ve taken his Willy Wonka–ness to the next level—when he was savagely beaten to death on Labor Day 1964. His body was stuffed under the dashboard of his Lincoln Continental, parked at an after-hours nightclub called the Dunes. The case was never solved.

I spent the next two years sorting through a trove of whispers and accusations around the murder. At first I was just curious, but the more I learned about Harry—a figure beloved by friends and strangers alike—the more intent I was to identify his killer.

I scoured blogs, Facebook groups, newspaper archives, and thinly veiled fictional accounts of the crime. As one local put it, over the years a veritable “Jersey Shore QAnon” had blossomed around the murder, raising questions of culture, class, sexuality, and hierarches of power. I discovered a plausible myth, a trove of red herrings, and, finally, what appeared to be the truth.

Almost six decades on, I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear it. When I visited Ocean City while reporting this story, a shop owner I engaged about Harry Anglemyer lowered her voice and said, “You know he was murdered, don’t you?”

I admitted that I did.

She responded, by way of warning: “You sneeze in this town and everyone hears it.”

Harry Anglemyer, a stocky charmer out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was born in 1927. His high school summers were spent in Wildwood, New Jersey, where he apprenticed at Laura’s Fudge Shop. He was told that this was a little sissy. He didn’t care.

He left high school to join the Navy, served two years at the end of World War II, then returned to the Shore to open his own fudge shop in 1947. In those days, Ocean City seemed postcard perfect. Ten blocks at its widest, situated on a barrier island about 11 miles south of Atlantic City, it was lined with boarding houses, deep porches with rattan rockers, and striped canvas awnings that softened the summer sun. It called itself—and still does—America’s Greatest Family Resort.

The author Gay Talese, who grew up there, once described Ocean City as “founded in 1879 by Methodist ministers and other Prohibitionists who wished to establish an island of abstinence and propriety.” Prohibitionists remain. To this day, you can’t buy booze within city limits. Or have a cocktail at a restaurant. Or go to a bar, since there are none. If you want to bend an elbow, you must belong to one of the few private clubs that allow it. You can also import your own adult beverages, stopping at the Circle Liquor Store in Somers Point before entering town across the Ninth Street Bridge.

You would think that such a gauntlet might encourage at least a semblance of abstinence and propriety, but a 2017 USA Today article deemed Ocean City the drunkest city in New Jersey. It was and is a place of contradictions.

Just like Harry Anglemyer was a man of contradictions. He donated generously to civic causes and charities, including religious ones. He sat on the city’s planning board at the behest of the mayor. He joined the Masons and the chamber of commerce. He befriended prominent men and their wives, whom he squired to social functions when their husbands were busy. He hobnobbed with local luminaries, including the Kelly family of Philadelphia, who kept a summer cottage in Ocean City that Grace Kelly visited—first as a child, then as a movie star, then as a princess. Harry was so well regarded that 1,500 people showed up at the Godfrey-Smith Funeral Home in September 1964 to view his body. Businesspeople, politicians, and socialites came to pay their respects, packing the place with flowers.

Many of them also knew of Harry’s other, less civic-minded side. When he wasn’t delighting families with his fudge or charming the local elite, he liked to go out. He shut down bars. He was a fixture at Atlantic City’s racetrack, where he played the horses. He spent time at the nearby Air National Guard base. During the summer of 1964, he seemed to have acquired boyfriends from both locations.

Harry was, in fact, a little sissy.

Which everyone kind of knew. He was 37 and handsome, he’d never married, and he dressed fastidiously. He had a small dog, acquired on a trip to Fort Lauderdale—which, he confided to a friend, was perhaps “too obvious.” He once had a girlfriend who wondered why they weren’t having sex. She seems to have been the only one in the dark. Men both known and strange came and went from his large suite of breezy, ocean-view rooms above Copper Kettle, right on the boardwalk, where he lived in the summer.

Harry took no pains to hide any of this, an astonishing fact given the pre-Stonewall, postwar pinko-homo panic. In the early 1960s, and especially in small towns like Ocean City, which had a population of about 7,500 during the off-season, men were expected to find a girl and put a ring on her. Especially handsome men with killer smiles, fitted jackets, and penny loafers that shined like onyx.

But something saved Harry from too much scrutiny—for a time, anyway. He was an entrepreneur, and he elevated the boardwalk’s game. He saw the future, which might have been his shield. Other local business owners looked past his sexuality. They wanted even a little piece of his magic.

Harry placed gleaming copper kettles in the windows of his boardwalk shop, poured in liquid fudge, and positioned above them teenage boys with bronzed skin and sparkling white teeth, gripping big wooden paddles, churning and churning. Outside on the boardwalk, children panted as they watched, their faces cracked from too much sun, their bare feet sandy, their eyes wet and hungry. They wanted that fudge so bad. At night, after the last box was sold and the shop had closed, the kettles remained pin-spotted from above like Ziegfeld girls.

Money surged in like the tide. Soon Harry had shops in Atlantic City, Sea Isle City, and Stone Harbor as well. The Fudge King became one of the richest men for miles, with no qualms about flashing his wealth. He purchased a two-story colonial in the Gardens, Ocean City’s fanciest neighborhood, where he lived in the off-season, and kept two cars: the Lincoln Continental where his body would later be found, and a Chrysler Imperial purchased just months before his death.

Most spectacularly, he acquired a blinding ring: five emerald-cut diamonds, approximately eight carats total, set in a band of white gold. It was valued at about $10,000, almost $100,000 in today’s dollars. Harry wore it everywhere. Which was quite a big deal. With the exception of a few families, including the famous Kellys, whose fortune came from brickmaking, Ocean City was for the most part a resort of the working class. Its tourists and year-round residents had likely never seen such jewels except on television, worn by the likes of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Or Liberace.

Harry’s success made him an object of allure and envy, though by all accounts he shared his fortune with others. He frequently bought dinners for his staff. He gave loans to friends and told them to take their time paying him back. (After his death, his family found a drawer full of IOUs.) He even had a brand-new clothes dryer delivered to a young mother burdened by a bad marriage. She wept knowing there was at least one good man in the world.

That’s what most people said about Harry: how good he was, generous and kind, fun-loving and curious. But in the summer of 1964, they noticed something else about him. The Fudge King was uncharacteristically on edge.

Carlos Barragán| The Atavist Magazine |June 2023 | 1,370 words (7 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 140, “The Romance Scammer on My Sofa.” 

Natasha Bridges blanketed the Facebook inboxes of men she didn’t know with the simplest of greetings:

hi 
hi
hi                            

Plenty of the men never replied to Natasha, but it was striking how many did. Even more striking was how quickly some of them seemed to fall for her.

Can you love an older man?

So wrote a guy named James* after just a few hours of messaging. James said that he was 56 and rode a Harley. After sending Natasha pictures of his bike, James told her, unprompted, how he would perform oral sex on her.

Other men were starry-eyed. They told Natasha that she was gorgeous, that they liked her smile and her flirtatious way of chatting, that they couldn’t wait to meet her one day. There were also sentimental types, like Brett:

I don’t know if I’ll ever be truly happy again. I think the only dream I have is if I had a special woman with me.

You know I mentioned it a couple of days ago, but I haven’t seen you for a very long time. Would you please send me a few of your pictures? I would really like to see you.

Natasha had yet to respond to Brett’s latest lovelorn message. Her silence would have been callous if she was who she said she was. But given the truth—that Natasha Bridges didn’t exist—the real cruelty might have been replying.

The person sending messages to Brett, James, and dozens of other American men was named Richard, but he preferred to be called Biggy. He was 28 and from Nigeria. The photos he used in the Facebook account where he posed as Natasha—a 32-year-old single mother from Wisconsin, interested in economic development and cryptocurrency—were pilfered from the social media of a real woman named Jennifer. He’d used other accounts to pretend to be a gym instructor, and a lonely American soldier deployed abroad.

I knew all this because Biggy was sitting on a green sofa in my hotel room in Lagos, playing the video game Pro Evolution Soccer 17 as I read the private messages he’d sent to unsuspecting foreigners on his iPhone 6. When I asked why he was ghosting Brett, Biggy, scoring yet another goal for Australia in the Asian Cup final against Japan, shrugged. “Bro, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Being a Yahoo boy is very stressful,” he said without taking his eyes off the game. “Do you find it easy to make someone fall in love with you? The hustle is the same as real life, with just one difference: You have to pretend to be another person.”

In Nigeria, Yahoo boys are online fraudsters. Their nickname comes from the email service Yahoo, which became popular in Nigeria in the 2000s, and they are descendants of the infamous 419 scammers, who, first with letters, and later in emails, promised to help strangers get rich for a nominal advance fee. (The number is a reference to a section of the Nigerian criminal code pertaining to fraud.) Biggy is a particular kind of Yahoo boy: a romance scammer who pretends to be other people online to seduce foreigners into trusting him and giving him money.

Biggy’s game is all about intimacy. He invests time in building what seems like a real relationship with his victims. He flatters them, tells them jokes, asks intimate questions. “The most important thing about being a Yahoo boy is keeping the conversation alive,” Biggy told me. “Dating is all about patience. It takes a long time before a client starts trusting you.”

Yahoo boys, I was learning, love euphemisms.

Biggy estimated that over his ten years—and counting—as a romance scammer, he’d lined his pockets with $30,000 from people he conned. People yearning for love. People like my mother.

Hi Silvia, how are you? This is Brian. We contacted each other on Tinder, I hope you are having a wonderful day. It would be a delight for me if we can get to know more about each other, and to answer your question, I was once married, but now I am single after the divorce.

I would hope to hear from you soon

warm hugs
Brian Adkins
Carmel, NY 10512
bcmakins@aol.com 

By a lot of metrics, my mother, Silvia, is a successful woman. She opened her own dental clinic in Spain before she was 30, and over the next two decades she served some 10,000 patients. She got married and gave birth to three boys, of which I am the youngest. But her divorce from my father in 2003, when she was 44, was turbulent and costly. After the split, my brothers and I lived mostly with our mom in various rented apartments around Madrid. For a long time, her only asset was an old Citroën C1. The bulk of her income was spent on food, education, and yearly vacations with us. “Books and travel—no matter what, there’s always going to be money for that in my house,” she’d say. 

One day in December 2015, my mother’s face seemed brighter than usual. She told us at Sunday lunch that she’d met someone. They’d connected on Tinder, an app I’d encouraged her to use. The man was named Brian, and he was a handsome, divorced 52-year-old American soldier. My mother said that her feelings were real, and that Brian’s were, too.

At first my brothers and I didn’t pay any of this much attention. Jaime and Miguel were in their twenties, launching their careers. I was 19 at the time, the only one of us still living at home, but I was busy studying at university. My mother’s blossoming romance was background noise. But when she later told us that Brian was on a mission in Syria, Miguel, a pilot in the Spanish air force, scoffed. “Come on, you really believe that? It’s sketchy,” he said.

After that my mother shared updates about her new love more sparingly, and mostly with me. She showed me some of the long, passionate emails she and Brian exchanged. She’d studied English in high school but still used Google Translate to better express herself. Brian’s messages had grammatical mistakes, too—but I thought, so what?

“Sometimes I tell Brian, ‘You’re going too fast!’ ” my mother confided in me. She’d said as much in one of her messages to him:

I hope there will be many ends of the year together. I think the love of a couple is a way to go, I am sure our beginning is good and I like it. We are in different situation, my life is very comfortable, yours not, I am surrounded of friends and family, you are only with other men fed up like you. And so…and so. I understand you hang on me and in some way I appreciate it very much, but in other way it makes me feel a little bit anxious about responsibility of being what you expect of me. 

Whatever doubts she had, the joy she felt overrode them. One day she came home with two rings: one for her, and one for Brian. “He’s coming to Spain,” she said, grinning. He’d told her that he wanted to leave the military and be with her.

Now my brothers and I were officially concerned. We asked her if she’d ever had a video call with Brian; when she said no, we told her we found it shady that, apart from a few photos, she’d never even seen the guy who claimed to love her. We argued, and my mom, hurt that her sons weren’t supporting her, shut herself in her bedroom. “I’m going to talk to my boyfriend,” she said before closing the door.

In early January 2016, about five weeks after my mother first connected with Brian, Jaime sent me a message while I was studying at the library for a microeconomics exam. “Carlos, we have to do something,” he wrote. I could feel his anxiety behind the typing bubble on my phone’s screen. “This guy told mum he’s going to ship her some bars of solid gold he’d found in a terrorist stash,” Jaime continued. “It’s a scam.”

Others had been pumping out viruses for months, but Dark Avenger built his to be lethal. His first creation would be known as Eddie. When a user ran a program infected with Eddie, the virus would not start by attacking other files. It would lurk in computer memory and hand back control to the original program. However, when a user loaded another program, skulking Eddie would spring into action and infect that program. These infected programs would be Eddie’s new carriers.

Eddie also packed a payload that slowly and silently destroyed every file it touched. When the infected program was run the 16th time, the virus overwrote a random section of the disk in the computer with its calling card: “Eddie lives … somewhere in time.” After enough of these indiscriminate changes, programs on the disk stopped loading.

Destructive viruses were not new. Vienna, for example, destroyed every eighth file. But Eddie was far more malicious. Because Eddie infections took a while to produce symptoms, users spread the virus and backed up contaminated files. When users discovered that their disk had turned into digital sawdust, they also learned that their backups were badly damaged. Dark Avenger had invented what are now called “data diddling” viruses — viruses that alter data in files.

Dark Avenger was proud of his cruel creation and claimed credit in the code. First, he inserted an ironic copyright notice: “This program was written in the city of Sofia (C) 1988–89 Dark Avenger.” The “Eddie lives” string that wreaked such destruction was a tribute to his love of heavy metal music. “Eddie” refers to the skeletal mascot of the band Iron Maiden; Somewhere in Time is the name of Iron Maiden’s sixth album, in which Eddie appears on the cover as a muscular cyborg in a Blade Runner setting, next to graffiti that reads “Eddie lives.”

Nile Cappello | The Atavist Magazine | January 2023 | 1,867 words (7 minutes)

This is an excerpt from The Atavist’s issue no. 135, “Crushed.” 

Hollywood is the last place you’d expect to meet Johna Kay Ramirez. She doesn’t come across as cutthroat. Thin, with auburn hair and warm eyes, Johna is thoughtful when she speaks and quick to apologize when she goes on a tangent. She’s the kind of person who knows that “bless your heart” is often a veiled insult. Hollywood, with all its glitz, glam, and high drama, became part of Johna’s story because of her children.

Born and raised in the Great Plains, Johna met Nelson Ramirez at a department store in Enid, Oklahoma; she sold shoes, he worked in menswear. They married, and in 1991, when Nelson got a job as a tech recruiter in Texas, the Ramirezes moved to Austin. Johna did video production for a local news station, then worked for a state agency. In 1998, when the Ramirezes had their first child, a daughter they named Liana, Johna became a stay-at-home mom. A son, Jentzen, came along eight years later.

Liana caught the entertainment bug first. What started as recreational dance classes quickly evolved into a passion for the performing arts. Liana loved being under bright stage lights, and Johna was proud to watch her precocious toddler blossom into a talented young girl. Liana appeared in local dance and theater productions, and by the time she was 13, her ambitions had surpassed the scope of what Austin could offer. She dreamed of being on the Disney Channel, of making it big in Hollywood. If Selena Gomez, a half-Latina teenager from Texas just like her, could become a star, Liana was sure she could, too. She had the talent and she had Johna, her chauffeur, line-reading partner, meal deliverer, videographer, and number one fan. “I knew how much my daughter wanted this, how much it meant to her,” Johna said. “So whatever I could do, whatever skills I had, I would use them to help.”

In September 2011, Johna snapped a photo of Liana at an airport gate. Her smile is all teeth, and a black bow holds back a portion of her curly brown hair. Mother and daughter were on their way to Los Angeles for Liana’s first Hollywood audition. The role was in a production of A Snow White Christmas, a stage musical. If cast, Liana would appear with Neil Patrick Harris, then a fan favorite on TV’s How I Met Your Mother, and with Lindsay Pearce of The Glee Project.

The audition was held at the Westfield Culver City mall on a Saturday morning. Kids and their guardians hustled inside and waited near a stage situated between Macy’s and Victoria’s Secret. Liana received her audition number and practiced the dance routine she’d be performing. She breezed through the first cut and kept going. In the final round, she danced to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” At the end of the number, right as the audience began to applaud, Liana looked over at her mom, beaming.

Johna announced the good news on Facebook. “She nailed it and she got a role as a dancer,” Johna wrote. “Can you hear us screaming?” Back in Texas, the Austin American–Statesman ran a piece about Liana. “Teen heads to Hollywood to dance in her dramatic debut,” the headline read.

The Ramirezes decided that Nelson would stay in Texas, where he had recently started his own business, while Johna took Liana and five-year-old Jentzen to California for the duration of the production. They would be joined by Johna’s mother, Martha, who would help with child care and managing Liana’s obligations. Johna drove her kids and mom to Los Angeles, a more than 20-hour trip mostly through dry, flat rattlesnake country. She’d never taken a leap like this—never lived somewhere like Los Angeles, been around serious entertainment people, or parented without Nelson. Johna was leaving her comfort zone in the rearview mirror.

She was surprised by how much she liked Los Angeles. Within a few days of arriving, she and Martha had their first celebrity encounter, an exchange with Kiefer Sutherland over potatoes at a Whole Foods. The city’s traffic was a pain, but they managed to sightsee, visiting the Hard Rock Cafe and Universal Studios, where Jentzen posed with actors dressed up as Dora the Explorer and the donkey from Shrek. Liana stayed busy with the stage production, and Johna spent long hours at the theater, watching as her daughter rehearsed and had costume fittings. Liana would appear in 32 performances over two months, working straight through the holidays. 

When the show wrapped, the Ramirezes reunited in Austin. Within a year, however, they decided to resume living as a split family. The musical had led to auditions and bookings for Liana, and she needed to be closer to LA to take advantage of them. Johna relocated to California full-time with her kids and tended to their day-to-day needs, while Nelson provided financial support from afar. Liana made appearances on Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, and the prime-time network shows Criminal Minds and The Goldbergs.

As it turned out, Liana wasn’t the only family member who had star potential. With a smattering of freckles and a megawatt smile, Jentzen drew attention from casting directors, talent, and other industry insiders when Johna brought him on set with his sister. “You’ve got to put him in commercials,” stage moms told Johna, pinching Jentzen’s cheeks and ruffling his shaggy brown hair. He was in the sweet spot for child actors: old enough to memorize lines, but still young enough to be considered cute. Soon Jentzen was building out his own IMDb page, appearing in web series, short films, and the Lifetime movie Babysitter’s Black Book. 

For Johna, Jentzen’s success further validated her decision to move to Los Angeles. Every parent hopes that a child will find their thing. Other families travel to soccer tournaments, move across the country to train with gymnastics coaches, or spend thousands on STEM camps where kids learn to code and build robots. Liana and Jentzen didn’t just like acting—they were good at it. Plus, their budding careers allowed Johna to spend time with them, whether that was backstage at rehearsals, stuck in gridlock on the 101, or putting together audition tapes at home. “It wasn’t just something they did,” Johna said. “It was something we all did together.”

Without auditioning for it, Johna had been cast in a new role: “momager.” She played it well, surprising even herself with how easily she toggled between cooking meals and attending movie premieres. She learned how to advocate for her kids’ needs and when to say no on their behalf.

As Jentzen approached his teenage years, he began kicking around the idea of getting into YouTube. A child actor’s presence on social media was increasingly important to casting agents and directors. Johna, whose experience with social media was limited largely to updating her Facebook account, wasn’t convinced. “I just didn’t know what we’d post,” she said with a shrug.

Then, eight years after arriving in Hollywood, the Ramirezes saw a promising ad, known as a breakdown, on LA Casting, a website that film, TV, and online productions use to enlist talent. A breakdown typically includes a description of the project, the parts to be cast, and the pay rate, along with information about how to audition. The breakdown the Ramirezes saw was for something called the “Piper Rockeele Show,” which was planning to shoot a YouTube video on the Venice Beach boardwalk. Described as taking inspiration from the movie Grease, the shoot would involve a tween character named Chase brushing off Piper, the show’s eponymous star, to look cool in front of his friends. Chase seemed like a good fit for Jentzen; the listing offered $1,500 for eight hours of work, a very good rate.

The Ramirezes weren’t familiar with Piper Rockelle—her name was spelled wrong in the breakdown—but an internet search led to a tween girl with a YouTube channel boasting hundreds of hours of video content, including original songs, makeup tutorials, and staged pranks and challenges like “24 Hours HANDCUFFED to my ‘BOYFRIEND.’ ” Jentzen showed Johna his iPhone screen. “Mom, she’s got a lot of subscribers,” he said—more than two million.

Johna didn’t have a problem with Jentzen participating in another kid’s social media content. It was easier than striking out on his own in the wilds of YouTube. Jentzen replied to the ad and was asked to come in for an audition.

The day of the tryout, the Ramirezes had another appointment across town and were running late. Johna tracked down a number for the person, a voice coach, who’d posted the breakdown on LA Casting. According to Johna, the coach assured her there wouldn’t be a problem. “They really wanted him at the callback,” he said. “They really liked him.”

It is one of many moments that now haunt Johna. “Can you imagine if we would have missed the callback?” she said, shaking her head. “How maybe life would’ve been different?”

More than three years later, Piper Rockelle’s popularity has exploded. She has more than 25 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fan pages dedicated to her. Piper has staged live meet-and-greets and musical performances around the world, and she sells her own line of merchandise. She lives in a pink and purple house worth $2.3 million in Sherman Oaks, previously owned by the actress Bella Thorne.

But all is not well in Piper’s world. Her own momager, Tiffany Smith, is being sued by 11 former members of the Squad, the name given to the circle of child actors who appear in Piper’s videos and ostensibly are her friends. Two of the plaintiffs are cousins of Piper’s. The kids allege that, when they were in the Squad, Smith verbally, physically, and in some cases sexually abused them. They also claim that Smith knowingly produced exploitative content featuring her daughter and other minors. “Smith would often boast to Plaintiffs and others about being the ‘Madam of YouTube’ and a ‘Pimp of YouTube,’ and that she ‘makes kiddie porn,’ ” states the lawsuit, which was filed in January 2022. Smith’s boyfriend, Hunter Hill, and Piper Rockelle Inc. are also defendants in the suit. Hill, who works behind the scenes to produce Piper’s YouTube videos, is accused of conspiring with Smith to “sabotage” the plaintiffs’ careers after they left the Squad.  

Johna knows the plaintiffs and their parents personally. She doesn’t doubt their claims. However, she isn’t part of the lawsuit. For the past few years, Johna has been fighting a legal battle of her own. It began after Jentzen auditioned for Piper’s team, and it has pitted her against Smith as well as her own family. Today, according to Johna, all she wants is to have a relationship with her children again.

This story is based on interviews with Johna and Nelson Ramirez; two of the plaintiffs’ mothers, Steevy Areeco and Angela Sharbino; and the plaintiffs’ attorney, Matthew Sarelson. It draws on hundreds of pages of court documents, personal communications shared by sources, and the trove of social media content produced by Piper and the Squad. Smith and Hill did not respond to requests for comment. They have denied the allegations against them.

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As host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, Brendan O’Meara is no stranger to talking about the art and craft of storytelling. In this craft-focused excerpt, we’re digging into Episode 345, in which he interviewed Atavist editor Seyward Darby and freelance writer Sarah Souli about her work on the latest issue of The Atavist.

Writing long pieces is overwhelming, which also leads to overthinking. Where to start? Where to end? Too slow? Too fast? In media res or no?

Sarah Souli — whose recent Atavist feature, “A Matter of Honor,” saw her try and solve a triple murder of an Afghan mother and her two daughters at the Greek border — shares advice she received from her father.

“When I was in middle school and high school and studying for tests, he would always say, ‘Just do the easiest thing first,’” Souli says. “’When you read all the questions on the test, point out the ones that are the easiest and start with those because then you’ll feel a bit confident. And then you can move on to the hard ones, as opposed to doing it from page one.’”

Some writers can’t proceed until they have a lede, which can be akin to putting roadblocks at the base of your driveway. Instead, take that great scene you know is in the middle of the story and consider being more modular. Start writing there. Pause. Regroup. Even if the story is linear, the writing of it can be nonlinear. Like Souli says, it builds confidence — something most of us can attest is always in short supply.

Please enjoy this excerpt below, and listen to the full episode for more.

These interviews have been edited for clarity and concision.

What struck you about this story when it came across your desk?

Seyward Darby, Atavist editor-in-chief: We’ve read, heard, seen so many stories about migrants in the Mediterranean struggling to get to Europe and being treated really terribly at borders. What was striking about this is that it defied some of the stereotypes. It was a murder investigation: three women who struggled to make it where they wanted to make it, and then someone literally slit their throats. They were barely over the border into Europe, and they had come from Turkey; Turkey and Greece do not get along on any number of fronts. So it was a true crime story tied up with all of these international forces, which were made even more complex because Afghanistan — where these women were from — fell to the Taliban again, in 2021. Trying to solve a crime under any circumstances is going to be a challenge. But then add where it happened, who it happened to, and when it happened, and it becomes like nothing I had ever read.

When you’re receiving pitches for stories, how much legwork and pre-reporting do you like to see before you commit to pursuing it?

If I recall correctly, Sarah had a good contact at the Greek police: the woman who had spearheaded the investigation for a time. She also had grant support. The combination of who she had access to, and the resources that she had mustered, along with what we found interesting about the story itself, made sense to us. 

One thing we talked about extensively over the years, because she’s been working on this for so long, was that it was highly unlikely she was ever going to solve this triple murder. So what can the narrative be here? It wasn’t like other true crime stories in which crimes have been solved. This was something very different. And Sarah’s first-person work was one of the things that we knew was going to set this apart from the beginning.

When you’re editing a piece, any piece, what are some common potholes that you hit and you realize “we need to figure out a way to patch that up”?

Every piece has different potholes. In this case, there was any number of challenges. Sarah started reporting this in 2019, maybe even a little earlier; she started following the story soon after the women were killed in 2018. Think about all of the events that have happened in the world since then. She wanted to go to Afghanistan and couldn’t because of the pandemic. Then, the Taliban came back in power. It wasn’t as though Sarah hadn’t done her job. It wasn’t as though there was some loose end that we just hadn’t tugged. It was like, “The world is burning. How are we going to figure out how to keep telling this story?”

And in this case, Sarah did a really nice job of using first person to express frustration and anxiety about some of the obstacles she encountered along the way. Yes, part of the job as an editor is to patch holes. But I’m a big fan of saying, “Let’s acknowledge in the story that it’s a problem.” It’s more honest. Having a really polished story that conveniently ignores some of the obstacles or pitfalls that a writer dealt with? Awesome, I’m so glad it reads nice. But I don’t necessarily trust stories like that. 

Sarah, the reporting in this piece is really something.

Sarah Souli: This was one of the rare instances where the writing felt like the easiest part of the whole process. I was out of my depth at so many moments in the reporting, and really felt like I was taking on roles and responsibilities that I’d never had to before, even when doing other vaguely investigative work. 

This was deep infiltration — not just into people’s personal lives, but also following a trail that the police had covered up to a certain point, and realizing that there was a lot to explore beyond what the police had done and venturing out on my own in a lot of ways. I’m not a trained investigator or a police officer, and I often found myself in situations where I was just like, “What am I doing? I should be behind a desk.”

How did you process that and try to find some degree of comfort in it?

Journalism, especially when you take a piece of this size or reportage of this depth and breadth, is never an individual thing. It’s so much more collaborative. I would not have been able to do what I did without the support from my Afghan colleagues. This was a project that I did over three and a half years. And at various points, I worked with a couple of different people, most of whom have asked to remain anonymous, just given the nature of the reporting that we did, and the precariousness of the political situation in Afghanistan right now. But there’s no way that I could have done what I did without the people that I worked with — in particular, Khwaga Ghani, who is credited on the piece. She’s an amazing Afghan journalist from Kabul, who’s now actually studying in California. 

I couldn’t travel to Afghanistan, because it was COVID. This was March 2020; at some point, I realized that this situation is not going to get better. There’s no way I can travel. I really need to rethink how I’m going to report this from Afghanistan. Khwaga was recommended to me, by a couple of different colleagues. She traveled to Mazar-e-Sharif, which is where Fahima and her daughters are from, and we were basically on a WhatsApp video call for like 12 hours a day for 10 days. I could never have done that without her.

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There are moments when you inject yourself into the piece. One that I found particularly brave and even harrowing was when you confront Saïd with the pictures of the three slain family members — the mother and the two daughters. Where did that come from?

The confrontation with Saïd was actually the most difficult part to write. We edited it several times. It’s really hard to write action in a way that doesn’t feel cheesy. It was such an intense and cinematic moment, because at that point, I had been reporting for two years or more. I was just pissed, honestly. I had all of this information, all of these leads, and it was all pointing towards this one person. And so when I finally had a chance to meet him, I was just filled with anger.

Over the years, a lot of people — family members, close friends — were like, “You should be more scared. This is dangerous.” Again, because of the people that I worked with, I was never in situations that were extremely dangerous. One thing I realized in Turkey that really broke my heart: Even if I’m talking to someone who’s a human trafficker, or potentially a murderer, they’re much more scared of you than you are of them. 

There are a couple of layers to that. One of them is that Turkey doesn’t recognize Afghans as legal refugees. So everyone’s situation is quite precarious. And there’s just a lot of mistrust when it comes to journalists in general. So I never personally felt like I was in danger. But again, I was with [translator and reporter] Tabsheer, who’s one of the best journalists I’ve ever worked with. I felt quite safe being with him. If I was alone, as a woman, I probably wouldn’t have done that. 

And it must have been all the more uncomfortable that the piece starts with a first-person vignette of you hitting a roadblock — and then you find someone who has seen these women and could give you information. It was really effective to set the stage of being a little bit dejected, and then getting that lead, and it’s off to the races.

After I came back from Istanbul last September, I gave myself a three-week period to just sit at home in Greece and write it all out. I was like, “Okay, beginnings and ends are the hardest, so we’re just going to forget about that right now, and we’re just going to write the middle.” 

I have to give Seyward credit for that opener. Eventually, we were talking, and I was like, “I have no idea where to start this story.” She said, “Well, you should start it in the ice cream shop.” This is a murder investigation; isn’t starting in an ice cream shop too superficial? Or is the fact that I’m gonna have to talk about myself somehow disrespectful to Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana, the main characters of the story? But at some point, I understood that this was going to be what was most helpful for the piece.

How did you originally arrive at the story?

The region of Evros between Greece and Turkey has historically been a very common point of migration — actually, so much so that until 2009, there were still landmines on the border. But it’s never really gotten the same amount of press as the Mediterranean Sea, especially with what goes on in Greece on the islands and Lesbos. When I first moved to Greece in 2017, I thought it was fascinating that it was such a historically important point, but there weren’t a lot of people reporting. So I started going up there pretty regularly from Athens a few times a year reporting. 

In late October or early November 2018, I’m talking with some of my sources in villages, and they’re like, “Didn’t you hear about this murder?” There are a lot of people who die on this crossing, but they generally die either from drowning in the river or from hypothermia. Car accidents, maybe, or people who walk along the train tracks and get crushed by a train. But murder is not something that happens. It hadn’t happened in that region in, I think, about 20 years. In Greece in general, there aren’t necessarily a lot of homicides; there are an increasing amount of femicides, but it’s still a pretty small number compared to other countries. So usually every time there’s a murder, it makes the news. And this hadn’t. 

So I went to go see Pavlos Pavlidis, a forensic scientist who I’ve interviewed many times and who had done the autopsy. And he was like, “Well, we have these three women. But we don’t really know much about them, or really anything about them.” They didn’t even know where they were from — one of the big problems with dead bodies that turn up in Evros is that people don’t have their papers or any documentation, so it becomes impossible to ID them. And so I wanted to start digging into that.

For people who might not be familiar with fixers, what does the fixer do? There might be translating, obviously, but what else?

We could also spend a long time interrogating the word fixer, because within the hierarchy of journalism, they’re often the lowest paid, and don’t really get a lot of credit — especially when you’re working in countries like Turkey or Afghanistan. Of the people that I worked with, two of them are already very established journalists. I mean, you can hire and work with a fixer who helps you on the ground, someone who just does translation, but for me, I really felt like I was working with a colleague. In the case of both Tabsheer and Khwaga, I was lucky to be working with people who were really invested in the piece and the story and figuring out what happened to Fahima and her daughters — and getting some justice for them.

I was reading an essay on writing by Francine Prose in a Tin House anthology, and she writes that writers are creatures who function best when we recall the writing process and tranquility. What is the writing process like when you’re alone, by yourself in the dark? In that moment of tranquility as you’re trying to crack the code of a piece — and especially one of this nature?

Honestly, I think it’s one of severe disassociation. I was trying to recall those three weeks that I first wrote the piece, but I don’t really remember the process or the feelings that I had about it. It’s a bit difficult for me to consider myself a writer. I have friends who are what I would call “writers” in quotes — writers who write novels that you get written up in the New York Times, and craft these whole worlds and write these beautiful sentences and come up with these extravagant characters, and just have a real depth of imagination. And I’ve always felt like what I’m most interested in is really just talking to people: hearing the story and pulling the threads and putting together this puzzle. I write because that is the medium through which it’s easiest to tell these sorts of stories and because I don’t have a very nice voice for radio. I have a complicated relationship with this identity.

What has to be in place for you at your workstation, so you can grease the wheels and get some momentum going?

Really, it’s that I wake up. I’ll maybe put on pants with, like, a zipper and a button. But usually I’ll stay in pajamas or be in workout clothes, because I’ll like try and trick myself that I’m going to work out later. Because that’s good for writing. I have my glass of tap water, a huge cup of coffee, and I will just drink coffee until like noon and not eat. As I’m saying it, I’m like, “God, that’s so unhealthy.” But that’s how it goes. 

I have to start in the morning. Like, writing has to be the first thing that I start doing. I’m not one of those people who goes to the beach in the morning and swims first and then comes back and writes. No, it’s very utilitarian, very unromantic. I just get myself up, put myself on an extremely uncomfortable chair — because after all these years of working from home, I still haven’t gotten a desk chair — and just start writing. And that’s it.

At what point in the reporting process do you feel like you have enough to start writing?

I was so anxious about the writing process for this one. The reporting itself was so overwhelming, and I felt like there were so many moments where things could just go terribly wrong and the whole thing would fall out from under me. I know this is imposter syndrome, but I felt like someone at some point was going to call my bluff and be like, “You have no business doing any of this.” So I was hesitant about starting to write until I had enough of the reporting done. And at one point, it was just like, well, I mean, it’s never going to end up in a perfect conclusion. The person that I think should be on trial, or at least questioned by the police, it looks like it’s not going to be happening. So you just have to sit down and start writing. 

How did you keep everything organized and straight so when it was game time you were you were ready to hit the ground running with all the information you gathered?

I was terrified of the fact-checking process from the beginning, so I tried to be as fastidious as possible. When I wrote the piece, basically every sentence was footnoted for the fact-checking.

Does finishing a piece like this leave you more energized or drained in the end?

When I got the layout for the piece with all the illustrations, it was the first time in reporting it that I cried. To see this mother and her two girls, to see their faces in front of me — and the illustrator did such an amazing job — it was like I was looking into their eyes. I’m so happy that they’re finally getting their story told and that there is some sort of modicum of justice that comes at the end of the piece. I don’t think I’ve really processed it yet. 

Like most freelancers, I’m just constantly working, so I have a slate of assignments for the next few months. But this has made me rethink what kinds of stories I want to tell in the future and how I want to tell those stories as well. In what format? What medium? Where do I see my place? That was a very roundabout answer to a very specific question, but I think I kind of feel everything at once.

I always bring these conversations down for a landing by asking the guests for a recommendation for the listeners. What are you excited about?

I’ll give two, if that’s okay. The first is whenever I read a very intense piece, I’m like “Well, what do I do now?” Afghanistan is in extreme political and humanitarian crisis at the moment, so I got some recommendations from some Afghan friends, who told me that the best charity to donate to that’s doing good work with Afghans both in Afghanistan and Afghan refugees outside of the country is the International Rescue Committee, the IRC. So I’d like to encourage your listeners, if they feel so moved by Fahima’s story, to give a donation. 

And then the other thing, because the piece starts with an epigraph from an amazing Bulgarian author who was an inspiration for me to start visiting Evros in the first place, I would recommend Kapka Kassabova’s book Border. It’s really fantastic, and a very illuminating look into this small corner of the world.

J.B. MacKinnon | October 2022 | 10 minutes (2,749 words)

This is an excerpt from The Atavist’s issue no. 132, “True Grit.”

The wild horses all have names. Ronald, for example, and Becky and Clyde. The names sound mundane, even for horses, but each is something like a badge of honor. For years now, the people of Cedar Island, North Carolina, have named each foal born to the local herd of mustangs after the oldest living resident who hasn’t already had a horse named for them. Every island family of long standing has this connection to the herd.

Cedar Island, located in a pocket of North Carolina known as Down East, is what passes for remote in the continental United States these days. Though it’s only 40 miles as the gull flies from the Cape Hatteras area, with its tourists and mortgage brokers, its restaurants with names like Dirty Dick’s Crab House, Cedar Island remains a place with only a scattering of people and businesses, where you can’t be certain of finding a restaurant meal—not so much as a plate of hush puppies—on a Sunday evening. Upon arrival you might not notice that Cedar Island is an island at all. Crossing the soaring Monroe Gaskill Memorial Bridge, which connects it to the mainland, what you pass over is easily mistaken for another of the region’s sleepy, curlicue rivers. In fact, this is the Thorofare, a skinny saltwater channel connecting the Pamlico Sound to the north and the Core Sound to the south. The Pamlico is one of the largest embayments on the U.S. coastline, while the Core is narrow and compact. Cedar Island stands between them, and all three are hemmed in by the Outer Banks.

I’ve just written that Cedar Island separates two sounds, and on maps this is true. Reality is less decisive. Swaths of the small island are sometimes underwater, depending on wind, tide, and season—in particular, hurricane season.

The shifting, amphibious nature of Cedar Island was never more apparent than on the morning of September 6, 2019. Under the whirling violence of Hurricane Dorian, maps lost all meaning. The Pamlico and Core Sounds joined to become a single, angry body of water, shrinking Cedar Island to a fraction of its acreage. It was no longer separated from the mainland by the thin blue line of the Thorofare, but by nearly six miles of ocean.

Most of the 250 or so people living on the island were safe, their homes built on a strip of not-very-high high ground precisely to weather the wrath of hurricanes. The wild horses—49 in all—were in much deeper trouble.

There were also some cows. The cows did not have names.

There is no such thing as a truly wild cow. While Cedar Island’s cattle range more or less freely, the technical term for them is feral—they are the descendants of escapees from domestication. The island’s mustangs are feral, too, but while visitors often come to Cedar Island solely in hopes of seeing the Banker horses, as the area’s herds are known, next to no one makes a special trip to photograph the “sea cows.”

The cows are striking to look at, though. While they vary in color, many have a bleached-blonde coat, blending in with the pale sand and the glare of the sun on Cedar Island’s hammerhead northern cape, where both cattle and horses roam. Tourists are happy to see the cows, just not as happy as they are to see the horses. Here and across America, a mustang—mane flowing, hooves pounding the earth—is an embodiment of beauty and freedom. Cows are not.

For Cedar Islanders, the cows are part of what makes their home distinctive, a fond and familiar part of the community and its history. In fact, the cattle have been on the island far longer than the mustangs, who were transferred from the more famous Shackleford Banks herd three decades ago. But the relationship people on the island have with horses is different than the one they have with cows, in much the same way it is for people nearly everywhere.

“This used to be horse country,” said Priscilla Styron, who has lived on or near Cedar Island for 30 years and works at its ferry terminal. “Everybody rode, they had pony pennings, they had all kinds of stuff. Everybody was always riding horses.” As for the cows, there was a time not so long ago when an islander might round one up from the beach, take it home to graze and fatten up, then butcher it for meat.

As Hurricane Dorian approached Cedar Island, no one troubled themselves about either kind of animal. One islander, who called himself a “simple country boy” and asked not to be named, scoffed at the idea that wild creatures would brook being corralled and taken off-island to wait out the storm. Not that anyone thought that was needed, according to Styron. “They usually protect themselves. You don’t have to worry about them,” she said. “They can sense more than we can.” Cedar Island had never lost more than one or two members of its wild herds to a storm—and Down East sees more than its fair share of those.

In 2019, there were perhaps a couple dozen cattle on the island—no one knew for sure, because no one was keeping count, not even residents who were fond of their bovine neighbors. For at least some of the cows, Dorian was nothing new. Few cows in America live longer than six years; many are slaughtered much younger. A Cedar Island cow, on the other hand, stands a good chance of living into its teens, and might even see its 30th birthday. A cow that was 20 years old in 2019 would have had close encounters with at least ten hurricanes: Dennis, Floyd, Isabel, Alex, Ophelia, Arthur, Matthew, Florence, and two named Irene. The herd could look to its elders for guidance.

Biologists only recently recognized that cows have complex social behaviors, involving depths of comprehension that we might not expect of animals stereotyped as grungy, placid, and dull-witted. A feral herd, for example, will organize nurseries by dividing calves into age groups, each usually overseen by one adult cow while the rest go out to graze. For this to work, the sitters need to understand that their role is to look after calves that are not their own, even if it means settling for low-grade fodder while others enjoy greener pastures. The calves have to grasp that they are under vigilance despite their mothers being out of sight.

No one documented how the cows responded as Dorian approached, but Mónica Padilla de la Torre, an evolutionary biologist, can give us a good idea. “They usually are not afraid of storms. They like storms,” Padilla said. “They like to be cool. They like shade. They appreciate when the rain comes.”

Even before the hurricane loomed on the southern horizon, the herd likely began to move—with that usual cattle slowness, that walking-on-the-moon gait—toward shelter. In the era before hurricanes were tracked by satellites and weather radar, cows were a useful predictor that one was coming. The migration, Padilla said, would have been initiated by the herd’s leaders. Cattle violently clash to establish a pecking order, and once that’s settled a benign dictatorship ensues. Leaders are granted the best places to eat and the best shade to lie in, and they make important decisions—like when to retreat to high ground in the face of a storm.

For Cedar Island’s cattle, high ground was a berm of brush-covered dunes between beach and marshland. There the cows grazed, chewed cud, and literally ruminated, passing rough forage through a digestive organ, the rumen, that humans lack. Far from appearing panicked, the herd was probably a bucolic sight, from the Greek word boukolos, meaning “cowherd.”

A close observer, Padilla said, might have noticed subtle differences among the animals: mothers that were watchful or unworried, calves that were playful or lazy, obvious loners or pairs licking or grooming each other. Padilla once spent several months studying cow communication—I found the urge to describe this as “cow-moo-nication” surprisingly strong—by memorizing the free-ranging animals she observed via nicknames like Dark Face and Black Udder. (She didn’t realize at the time that the latter was a perfect punning reference to the classic British TV comedy Blackadder. What is it about cows and puns?) On Cedar Island, Padilla said, there wasn’t simply a herd that was facing a storm. There was a group of individuals, each with its own relationships, including what Padilla doesn’t hesitate to call friendships.

Dorian arrived in the purest darkness of the first hours of September 6. Three days prior, it had ravaged the Bahamas with 185-mile-per-hour winds, tying the all-time landfall wind-speed record for an Atlantic cyclone. Some observers suggested giving it a rating of Category 6 on the five-point scale of hurricane strength. It had weakened by the time it reached North Carolina, but it was still a hurricane. Thick clouds blacked out the moon and stars; Cedar Island’s scattered lights hardly pierced the rain. Passing just offshore on its way to making true landfall at Cape Hatteras, the hurricane lashed the Pamlico and Core Sounds into froth and spray and sent sheets of sand screaming up the dunes. The scrubby canopy under which the cows likely took shelter, already permanently bowed by landward breezes, bent and shook in the teeth of the storm. A 110-mile-per hour gust on Cedar Island was the strongest measured anywhere in the state during Dorian’s passage.

When the eerie calm of Hurricane Dorian’s eye passed over the island, dropping wind speeds to only a strong breeze, there seemed to be little more to fear. There was still the back half of the storm to come, but Cedar Island residents, both human and not, had seen worse. Even in the off season, the North Carolina shore has hurricanes on its mind. If you see footage of a beach house collapsing in pounding surf, chances are it was shot on the Outer Banks. Drive around Down East and you’ll see many houses raised onto 12-foot stilts; in some homes, you reach the first floor by elevator. Maps show that much of the Outer Banks, including most of Cedar Island and huge swaths of mainland, will be underwater with a sea-level rise of just over a foot. Residents aren’t rushing to leave, though. A hardened sense of rolling with the punches prevails.

Yet with Dorian, something unusual happened as the center of the storm moved northward. At around 5:30 a.m., Sherman Goodwin, owner of Island’s Choice, the lone general store and gas station on Cedar Island, got a call from a friend who lived near the store. A storm surge was rising in the area, the friend said. Fifteen minutes later, as Goodwin drove through the dim first light of morning, the water was deep enough to splash over the hood of his Chevy truck, which was elevated by off-road suspension and mud-terrain tires. “It came in just like a tidal wave,” Goodwin said. “It came in fast.”

By the time Sherman and Velvet, his wife—“My mother really liked that movie National Velvet,” she told me—reached their shop, they had to shelter in the building. Velvet saw a frog blow past a window in the gale. A turtle washed up to the top of the entryway stairs. “It came to within one step of getting in the store,” Sherman said, referring to the water. A photograph shows the gas pumps flooded up to the price tickers.

To understand what happened on Cedar Island that morning, imagine blowing across the surface of hot soup, how the liquid ripples and then sloshes against the far side of the bowl. Dorian did the same thing to the Pamlico Sound, but with a steady, powerful wind that lasted hours.

The hurricane pushed water toward the mainland coast, which in the words of Chris Sherwood, an oceanographer with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is “absolutely perfect” for taking in wind-driven water. The Bay, Neuse, Pamlico, and Pungo Rivers all flow into the Pamlico Sound through wide mouths that inhale water as readily as they exhale it. Much of the rest of the shoreline is an enormous sponge of marshes. What accumulated in this series of reservoirs was, in effect, a pile of water held in place by the wind.

People who know North Carolina’s sounds are aware of the tricks fierce wind can play. Coastal historian David Stick once noted that, during a hurricane, half a mile of seafloor in the lee of the Outer Banks can be left exposed as sound water is pushed westward. When that happens, a bizarre phenomenon can occur: A storm surge can come from the landward side, striking offshore islands in what’s sometimes called sound-side flooding. Scientists know it as a seiche (pronounced saysh).

When Dorian’s eye passed the Pamlico Sound, the seiche the storm had created began to collapse. Then winds from the southern half of the hurricane, which blow in the opposite direction from the storm’s leading edge, drove the water back the way it came. In a sense, the seiche was also running downhill; the ocean tide was falling in the predawn hours, while the hurricane, still pressing down on the Atlantic, forced water eastward, leaving behind a depression. These forces combined to send the seiche pouring out of the Pamlico Sound east toward the Atlantic, nine feet above the water level in the ocean.

The avalanche of seawater was truly vast, equal to about one-third of the average flow of the Amazon River, by far the highest-volume river on earth. The Amazon, however, meets the sea through a gaping river mouth. Dorian’s sound-side surge was trying to reach the open Atlantic past what amounted to a levee of Outer Banks islands with just a handful of bottleneck channels between them. At the southern end of the Pamlico Sound, there was an added obstacle: Cedar Island.

The water didn’t go around the island. It washed right over it.

The surge left nearly as quickly as it arrived, carrying on to the Outer Banks, where it hit the island of Ocracoke with a wall of water higher than anyone there had ever seen before. Once Dorian passed, floodwaters began receding. On Cedar Island they left thick, greasy muck in buildings and debris on the roads, but no serious injuries were reported. More than a third of the buildings on Ocracoke were damaged, but there were no known deaths.

The first news of losses from Cedar Island’s herds of horses and cattle came as soon as the ocean had calmed enough for islanders to go back to sea in their boats. “That’s when they saw a lot of them,” Styron said. “You know—floating.” That Cedar Islanders do not wear their hearts on their sleeves about such things is strongly conveyed by an anonymous source’s reaction when I asked how people felt about the dead animals. After an uncomfortable pause, he said, “You can pretty much guess that.” Then he added, “Mother Nature allowed them to be here, and I guess Mother Nature can also take them away.”

If anyone witnessed what transpired with Cedar Island’s feral herds, they haven’t said so publicly. Most likely, though, no one saw it, since the surge came without warning in the darkness, and the horses and cows often roamed far from people’s homes. The animals would not have been sound asleep in the predawn—feral creatures, like wild ones, are more vigilant through the night than human beings tucked tight in their homes. Still, they may have dropped their guard, sensing that they’d survived another hurricane.

Then suddenly, the sea moved onto the land. Nine feet of water covered the beaches. It drowned the marshes where the cattle fed on sea oats and seagrass, and flowed over the lower dunes. We know from Padilla’s research what the scene must have sounded like: high-pitched, staccato mooing—cows’ alarm calls—ringing out in the humid air, the bawling of calves competing with the howl of wind and surf. In waters rising at startling speed, mother cattle would have raced to find their young, as bovine friends struggled not to be separated.

Twenty-eight horses were swept away. No one knows exactly how many cows were carried off—four of them managed to remain on land, and locals would later estimate that between 15 and 20 were taken by the flood. The water likely lifted the animals off their hooves one by one, first the foals and calves, then the adults. They disappeared into the tempest.

As host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, Brendan O’Meara is no stranger to talking about the art and craft of storytelling. In this craft-focused excerpt, we’re digging into Episode 336, in which he interviewed Atavist editor Jonah Ogles and freelance writer Cassidy Randall about her work on the latest issue of The Atavist.

Cassidy Randall, a freelance writer based out of Montana, sees herself more as a writer than a reporter, or a writer first then a reporter. There isn’t any question she can report, as evidenced by her Atavist Magazine piece “Alone at the Edge of the World,” but take a look at this opening sentence — read it aloud — and you will hear a writer at work:

“In the heaving seas of the Southern Ocean, a small, red-hulled sailboat tossed and rolled, at the mercy of the tail end of a tempest.”

The alliteration is beautifully embedded in this 25-word sentence.

“I love rhythm in sentences,” Randall says. “One of the reasons I had chosen some of those longer sentences was that I wanted it to feel dreamlike, so that you have a long time to be in this moment.”

Randall’s story charts the story of Susie Goodall as she competed in the Golden Globe Race, a race to sail solo around the world. By this piece’s very nature (Randall was not in the boat with Goodall), it’s a masterclass in recreating scenes, something vital to this kind of storytelling.

“I like to spend a lot of time saying, ‘Tell me what happens. Do you remember this?’ And if there’s a detail that I want to hear about that maybe gets a little glossed over, I always make time to go back. I’m constantly writing these notes that say, ‘Go back to this one thing. What was this? Be sure to follow up on this.’ And so it’s just a series of questions.”

Randall also digs into how she deals — or doesn’t deal — with rejection, as well as myriad other struggles common to the freelance-writer experience.

Please enjoy this excerpt below, and listen to the full episode for more.

These interviews have been edited for clarity and concision.

* * *

Brendan O’Meara: If I had a harrowing boat-journey story, should I turn to you to edit it?

Jonah Ogles, Atavist articles editor: The answer is, you should turn to Cassidy to write it. Man, she nailed this story, it was so much fun to work on. She had a really good handle on her character, and clearly knew what she was doing when it comes to adventure writing. Yes, the writing is good, but I’m talking about pure narrative, the arc of the story itself — Susie Goodall’s experience. When you get something like this, you just let it do its job. You tell the story, and you get out of the way, except for the parts where you absolutely need to be there.

One of the more chilling aspects of the story is that you really feel like you’re in the boat with Susie, and you feel the power and terror of this wave. When I spoke with Cassidy, she said that in an earlier draft there’s — not a set piece, but several paragraphs explaining rogue waves, which sounds fascinating. But to your point, it might have been a little hiccup among what were already very good story blocks.

This is a story where we cut things — not because they were bad, but because Susie’s story on its own was so good. Rogue waves are a fascinating phenomenon, and especially when it comes into play in this story, because statistically speaking it shouldn’t have occurred during this race.

Cassidy had all this really fascinating stuff about rogue waves and the scientific consensus about whether they’re predictable in some way. The problem is, it happened during the storm, when Susie is out there on her own. As a reader, I’m already there. I’m invested. If you’re watching a movie, it’s like reaching the climax, and then stepping away for a second to have some narrator speak to you about the context of the scene. That’s fine, but what we want to know is, is the dude going to fire the gun or not?

The peril of nonfiction in so many ways.

I do this a lot: When I’m cutting early in a piece I’ll say, “there may be a place for this later in this particular story.” We didn’t end up reinserting it but there were other things that we did find a home for elsewhere. But in that moment, I just didn’t. And this is maybe selfish because as a reader, I just didn’t want to be away from Susie and her experience.

We often talk about how these Atavist stories are puzzle-like in nature. What were some of the challenges that were unique to this piece as you were bringing it to life?

This was less of an editing challenge than a challenge for Cassidy, although she really pulled it off: The majority of the words occur with Susie alone on a boat. It’s like that Robert Redford movie Alone, where he’s sailing alone on a boat, and there’s virtually no dialogue. That’s a difficult thing to do. How do you write thousands of miles of solo sailing, which includes periods of time in which nothing happens? How do you make readers feel close to this character when you don’t really get to see her interact with anyone else? You have to be really deep inside Susie’s head. Originally, Cassie had these snippets: Here’s 200 words about marine wildlife she saw; here’s 400 words about this piece of equipment malfunctioning. All of it has value and lets you know Susie in different ways, but as a reader it felt like getting postcards from somebody on a trip. “Having fun, had a good dinner.” It was hard to feel like you were on the boat with her. So we tried to streamline.

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Another challenge was that her family becomes very concerned for her once she goes through the storm. After something like 12,000 words next to Susie, all of a sudden we need to be away from Susie to experience what’s happening outside of her little bubble. So it was really a trial and error situation: Let’s try dropping in with her family right here, and let’s try 400 words. How does that feel? Not quite right. Let’s move it, let’s shorten it up, let’s lengthen it. And we just did that until it felt like we’d gotten it to a point where you’re never away from Susie so long that you’ve forgotten where you are in the narrative. But you’re with the family long enough that there’s some emotional resonance with them as well. You’re not just hearing what they feel; you feel it too.

You said this was one of the more fun stories that you’ve been able to work on. What makes a story fun for you as an editor?

I’m still totally an Outside magazine guy at heart. I like adventure stories and survival stories and feats of human endurance. It checked that box for me naturally. Originally, Seyward [Darby, The Atavist editor in chief] was going to run lead on this, but I’m really glad it worked out that I got to jump in.

Cassidy had strong opinions about what she wanted the piece to do, but was also very happy to collaborate and listen to differences of opinion, so it felt like we were always pushing the story forward in a good way. But part of it, too, is that Susie is just a really interesting character. She’s not only doing this interesting thing, but she has an interesting perspective on it. And maybe this is another testament to Cassidy, but it seemed like they really had a good connection, and that Cassidy had a good sense of how to convey Susie’s thoughts and experiences in the story. “Can you get us closer to this character?” was never a note I had to give during this story; we were just close to her from the beginning.

* * *

Cassidy, what are some of the inspirations that you draw from so you can synthesize pieces of this nature?

Cassidy Randall: In preparing for this piece, I actually read some sailing books. The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier about his journey in the Golden Globe. So many of the other competitors in that original Golden Globe were having a horrific time with loneliness and leaking boats and weather and dealing with a lot of mental stuff — and he was just gazing at the Aurora and watching dolphins frolic. I also read Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, which also chronicles the logs of those sailors in the original Golden Globe, and is a pretty propulsive read. If you’re a sailor, he uses a lot of sailing terminology that ocean people absolutely love. But if you’re not a sailor, it might be kind of harder to get through that.

I wish I could write fiction, honestly. I have trouble personally getting through a lot of nonfiction books, so to ask what influenced me in writing this, I would just list fiction book after fiction book. It’s like my entire upbringing of reading to figure out how to weave together several different arcs into a single … arc, for lack of a better non-repetitive word.

What novels or short stories do you return to again and again?

I’m rereading some Louise Erdrich. I just think that her books are just incredible. She came to speak in Missoula recently. I reread Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry recently. Holy moly, what a tour de force; that’s an incredible one.

Your Instagram bio just says, “writing stories on environment, adventure, and people exploring the bounds of human potential.” And I was like, “well, that about sums up her Atavist story.”

So true.

How did you arrive at it?

My family is a family of sailors. I’ve never been able to get into bluewater sailing — I love the mountains, I love skiing — but my sister is an avid sailor, my dad taught us how to sail, my uncle’s a sailor. I had a friend who was following Susie Goodall around the time the Golden Globe was coming back, and that introduced the story to me. I pitched it around; my Time editor had really wanted a story on the race, but we couldn’t fit it in. When Susie pitchpoled, I ended up reporting about that for Adventure Journal. And then I had written about Jean-Luc Van Den Heede for Men’s Journal. So I was familiar with the race. And in reporting that story on Susie, I had noticed that she never really talked to anybody. When she got back, no news outlets had anything beyond her statement, which I thought was really interesting.

I reached out to her last year, because I was thinking about writing a book on women and sailing. I had no idea that she would check this email that goes through her website, but I sent a note saying that I was really compelled by her journey, that I’d heard her talk about it on this podcast called 59 North, and that I’d love to just talk to her and see where she was in life now. We had a lot of conversations before she agreed to work on a story with me. We built up a lot of trust together, I think because she’d had some bad experiences with the way that her story was told.

As your story illustrates, Susie was dangled out in front as the lone woman in the race, and it ended up being a real study in gender and media. When you were getting that trust that you mentioned, how did you gain her confidence to be able to tell her story in a way that honored her place in the Golden Globe?

I think that’s almost something to ask Susie, but I actually did ask her that, too, towards the end. She said she liked that I didn’t have some pre-thought-out narrative in mind — that I wanted to hear everything that she had to say, essentially. Even as I was formulating some of these arcs, I would run things past her, like “Does this seem like what you were actually feeling?” So much of the story, it feels like you’re in her head, and that’s a huge responsibility. I think the fact that I was really collaborative with her even after we’d had hours upon hours of conversations, I think that that made her feel more at ease, too.

The real challenge in third-person nonfiction is to get in the head of your principal figure. As a reporter, how did you go about interviewing her so that you were getting between her ears?

I wanted to know so much about her background. I mean, we spent so much time talking about just the prep for a voyage like this before we even got into setting off. I wanted to know about her love of sailing, how the ocean had obsessed her, and maybe that helped a bit with building trust. I’ve only done one blue water crossing ever, but I could at least understand the pull of the ocean. And so I asked her a lot about that.

I always want to know how something feels in someone’s body when they’re scared or when they’re thrilled. I want to know how those emotions feel, and where people feel them. She had this beautiful way of talking about celestial navigation, where she talked about how some sailors used to be so in tune with the ocean that it would speak to them, that before compasses Vikings would mark where on the horizon the sun rose, or how Polynesians knew which direction they were going just based on swells and currents. That’s how we got into the fact that she had read all of these books, and how the books had influenced so much of why she wanted to sail solo and find this connection.

But the other thing is that I just love to let a subject go on. I don’t like to interrupt, and I often find that people will go in the best directions when they’re just allowed to talk.

Robert Caro famously wrote in the margins in his notebooks, SU SU — as in, “shut up, shut up” — anytime he was interviewing a source, be it for his Robert Moses biography any of his volumes of Lyndon Johnson. Oftentimes reporters and writers want to interject to prove how smart they are, prove how much they know. But oftentimes, the best interviewing tactic you can do is to just shut up. Silence can do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Oh my gosh, absolutely. Sometimes thoughts take a while to process, and a lot of people have never been interviewed. I mean, Susie obviously had quite a lot, but I don’t know how much people had given her space to actually speak, either, because I think a lot of things were time-sensitive. A lot of us in general aren’t used to being listened to, and by asking the next question we might cut something off that hasn’t been fully formed. You have no idea what could possibly come out when somebody fully processes a question that you’ve asked. I think that’s really fascinating.

This story is really a masterclass in recreating scenes; you weren’t in the boat with her, but it felt that way. Let’s talk about how you went about getting that degree of recreation.

I think that also comes from having enough time to speak to somebody that you can say, “walk me through what happened.” You’re not always lucky enough to be writing with or about somebody who remembers so much. And honestly, if she hadn’t written down what happened to her during the wave, she might not remember either. But she did remember so much of the actual voyage and the prep, which is incredible.

But I also think that since I’ve been in a small sailboat, I’ve experienced some things that are similar to what Susie experienced in different mediums. Like, I’ve felt my stomach drop like that before — not because I’ve been involved in an 80-foot wave, but it helps to be able to run that past somebody and say, “does this translate?”

One particularly chilling scene was when she’s in the middle of a storm, then all of a sudden it goes quiet — because a giant wave that is approaching is blocking all the sounds. How do you even begin to build a scene like that?

This is almost exactly how she described it to me in the lead-up to that moment. She remembers exactly how that felt, that moment when she thought that someone had turned the wind off — and then had this feeling of no, no, no, no. It’s like gold for writers when somebody remembers something like that. That’s like a privilege. Jim Harrison talked about how he wrote Legends of the Fall in nine days, and it was like taking dictation from the gods. If you’re a nonfiction writer, when you have a source like this, and somebody who’s willing to talk about it like that, it is like taking dictation. It’s incredible.

What do you think it is about long journeys — be it the Pacific Crest Trail or circumnavigating the globe — that draws us to them, and that we find so much meaning in?

I mean, I think that we evolved with the natural world. And we’ve been so removed from it in such a geologically short timespan that I think we mourn that in a lot of ways. That’s often what people are seeking when we head out into the woods, the ocean, the mountains: it’s where we feel more alive. When you talk to people, particularly in adventure sports, there’s this thin line between life and death, and proximity to the elements brings us so much closer. I think that’s a morbid way to put it, but it’s this idea that we’re part of something bigger — and we aren’t at the top of this bigger thing.

Well, there’s an element of our modern lifestyle that’s very sedentary. We fall into very grooves of our everyday routines, and it’s very hard to break out of that and to find comfort in discomfort. It’s at our core to be able to push our physical limits, but there’s a lot pulling at us not to do that, be it social media or television. As an outdoor person, how do you try to make a good partnership with discomfort?

I’ve made it a priority to live somewhere where I have access to less development. There’s wilderness a mile up the road, but of course, these things are disappearing very quickly, too. I think it’s a conscious thing that we have to make time to go out and be far away from cell service, which also is harder and harder to do these days. For our honeymoon — and most people would think this was horrible — my husband and I walked across the Bob Marshall, the biggest wilderness in Montana, for seven days.

That’s amazing.

We’re the only people who would honeymoon with mosquitoes and blisters. But it was so important for us to go and do that, right? We sacrificed what could have been a European vacation or something in order to just reconnect, to have that time with our thoughts. To have to just take care of yourself, I think, is such a powerful thing. But it takes intentionality for sure.

In the story you write that what often drives people to quit a race of this nature is the loneliness — it really breaks people. Being a writer is often an exercise in loneliness, also, especially if you’re a freelancer in somewhat remote locations. What’s your relationship to loneliness?

I used to say that I was a raging extrovert, but I’m now married to more of an introvert and I think he’s made me realize I have more introverted tendencies. I mean, as an extrovert, I’m not good with loneliness. And, again, I’ve done nothing like what Susie has undertaken. On the History Channel’s hit show Alone, where people are dropped in the wilderness to survive by themselves, the longest anybody has ever gone is 100 days. Susie spent 160 alone. I mean, that’s just incredible.

I think we all have different relationships to loneliness, and it’s finding that line between solitude and loneliness. For me, I know that being around people and relationships feed me so, so much that I can’t be alone for more than 24 hours. And you’re right — there are different kinds of loneliness, right? There’s this idea that it can be lonely being a freelance writer, because you feel like you’re the only one who’s getting so much rejection with all your pitches, or it seems like everybody else is making it and you’re not.

I started this podcast roughly 10 years ago, to appease a lot of the loneliness I was feeling — but also to maybe metabolize the toxic feelings of jealousy and competition I was feeling. Because it did feel, like you just said, like everybody else was just killing it. And I was writing about the Daytona 500 for Bleacher Report. I’m like, “This isn’t the longform journalism that my heroes are doing, my peers are doing.” It took doing the show to realize that maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe I need to try to celebrate other people’s work and have these kinds of nourishing conversations to realize that we’re all wrestling with these feelings. We can look beyond the veneer of social media and get to the ugliness that we’re all dealing with and be like, “Okay, I’m not really alone in this endeavor.”

My God, I wish we talked about that so much more. I always think I’m the only one who struggles with it, and I know I’m not, because my husband is also a freelance writer. It’s just this pervasive thing. Maybe there are those writers who don’t struggle with impostor syndrome or rejection, but it seems unlikely. When you’re a creative person, I think you never think that your work is good enough, or that it’s done, or that it’s worthy; we all struggle with that. But we don’t talk about it enough.

And you’re seeing on Twitter that everyone is getting these great bylines. And you’re like, “Damn, why am I struggling here? I’m spinning my tires in the mud.” But there’s also any number of writing gigs that people aren’t tweeting about that subsidize some of those more prestige pieces — and no one really talks about the writing we don’t tweet about.

Or the other income! I have a friend who is a great writer, she’s an award winner. She’s told me that she couldn’t write without the income from her Airbnb, right? Or the people who are writing for some weird company on the side to make the narrative reporting work. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they couldn’t freelance unless their partner was making good money.

I think that way all the time: “Wait a second, how have you had three stories in The Atlantic?” But there’s such a range of what a writer looks like. It could be the night janitor, whose novel he hasn’t sent out because he’s so terrified. It could be the person who’s only writing notes on the back of a napkin. It could be the full-time New York Times journalist. There’s so many different ways to be a writer. I wish that we all talked about that more, so we didn’t feel this pervasive “I haven’t made it” thing.

How have you made peace with or even embraced rejection?

Oh, God, I have not embraced rejection at all. That is so hard. Quite honestly, I’ve decided that I have to be really judicious about what stories I actually want to pitch. And I want to work on bigger projects like this Atavist story, because then you don’t have to hustle so much. And you don’t have to face so much rejection when you’re trying to get work. And in some sense for me, that’s really heartbreaking. There was a time when I used to have to write down what I had out, and when to follow up, because I had so many stories I’d pitched. I guess it’s like killing a lot of your darlings before they have the chance to be killed.

I’ve come to see rejection, or even silence, almost as a gift. Maybe this is just my own Jedi mind trick on myself, but if a piece finally is accepted, I’m like, “If it had been accepted five times ago, the pitch wouldn’t be nearly as good or fleshed out. So thanks for those four other rejections because now it’s actually stronger because of it.”

That is a far healthier mindset than the one I’ve had, I’m going to start adopting that.

Something struck me about your Atavist piece right off the bat. I’m gonna read just the first sentence here, because I think this piggybacks on a lot of things that we were talking about already. “In the heaving seas of the Southern Ocean, a small red-hauled sailboat tossed and rolled at the mercy of the tail end of a tempest.” It seems like there was a lot of attention put into the wordplay and construction of that sentence. What’s your eye for detail when you’re starting to construct sentences of that nature?

I actually try to avoid outright alliteration. I love rhythm in sentences — I actually talked a lot with Jonah about this. As I was writing it, there were a lot more long-ish sentences throughout; in the top edit, Seyward cut a few of them up and made them shorter. I think she was right, but one of the reasons I had chosen some of those longer sentences was to give the piece a dreamlike feel. That’s why that sentence starts out long, right? So that you have this long time to be in this moment.

You said in working with Jonah and Seyward that you learned a thing or two about pacing.

I told both of them that I wanted this to be a learning experience. I wanted to use this story-editing process with them to learn how to elevate my craft, and they both were very open to that. And they actually have the time to do that and are very willing to do that, which I’ve thanked both of them for. But it’s rare to find editors who have time to do that these days. So that’s a huge, amazing experience if you want to learn as a freelance writer.

I had written Susie’s journey originally, when she set off, in a series of very short vignettes. I had done that because I wanted to convey that not much really happens when you’re sailing, right? And when it does, it happens in bursts. But Jonah had this great point that you can’t really expect your readers to trust you at that point. He said that readers typically take around 750 words — not all the time, but in general — to really drop into what the writer wants them to feel and what the writer wants to tell them. So that was huge for me to understand, in terms of pacing and passage construction.

As we bring this down for a landing, I always like asking writers to offer a recommendation of sorts to the listener.

Well, since we were talking about fiction, I want to recommend to anybody who loves reading joyous writing — have you ever read any Brian Doyle?

Some of his essays.

I just actually read Martin Marten twice. The way he spends pages upon pages, creating this whole world before you even know why he’s brought you into it, and you become so close to these characters. It’s just incredible.

The other one I’d recommend: my husband and I read out loud to each other, and reading a book out loud is such a different experience. It’s so cool. We just read out loud Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All; my God, what a masterpiece.

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Cassidy Randall  |  The Atavist Magazine  |  September 2022 | 10 minutes (2,925 words)

This is an excerpt from The Atavist’s issue no. 131, “Alone at the Edge of the World.”

The Atavist Magazine, our sister site, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.

In the heaving seas of the Southern Ocean, a small, red-hulled sailboat tossed and rolled, at the mercy of the tail end of a tempest. The boat’s mast was sheared away, its yellow sails sunk deep in the sea. Amid the wreckage of the cabin, Susie Goodall sloshed through water seeping in from the deck, which had cracked when a great wave somersaulted the boat end over end. She was freezing, having been lashed by ocean, rain, and wind. Her hands were raw and bloody. Except for the boat, her companion and home for the 15,000 miles she’d sailed over the past five months, Goodall was alone.

The 29-year-old British woman had spent three years readying for this voyage. It demanded more from her than she could have imagined. She loved the planning of it, rigging her boat for a journey that might mean not stepping on land for nearly a year. But she was unprepared for the attention it drew—for the fact that everyone wanted a piece of her story.

The thing was, her story was a fantastic one. Goodall was the youngest of the 18 skippers resurrecting the Golden Globe Race, a so-called “voyage for madmen,” and the only woman. Last run 50 years prior, the race entailed sailing solo and nonstop around the world in a small boat without modern technology. The media were hungry for it, and people were drawn to Goodall in particular: Here was a blue-eyed, blond, petite woman among the romantic mariners and weathered adventurers. All of them were chasing the limits of what humans are capable of physically and mentally, but much of the coverage singled out Goodall, who wanted no part of the sensationalism. She had been a painfully shy child and was a private and introverted adult. The fervor surrounding her participation in the Golden Globe made her feel like a caricature, an unwilling icon. All she wanted was to sail, to search out the connection sailors had with the sea before satellite phones and GPS.

When the race began, she was almost able to leave the attention behind. There were quiet days gliding south in the calm Atlantic; ecstatic mornings surfing swell in the Southern Ocean; the sudden appearance of a magnificent sunset through persistent clouds. But the spotlight tailed Goodall like a subsurface current. Now, after two days of brutal storm, she knew the world was watching to see whether she would survive.

I.

In 1966, an English bookstore owner named Francis Chichester riveted the world when he set out alone in a boat to circumnavigate the globe. He wasn’t the first to do so; Canadian-American Joshua Slocum completed the first known solo circumnavigation in 1898, and the feat may have been achieved long before but gone unrecorded. Yet the 65-year-old Chichester chose a dangerous route—one that no one, according to sailing lore, had ever attempted alone: From England he would sail south in the Atlantic, along the coast of Africa to the bottom of the world. There he would pass under the Cape of Good Hope, Australia’s southern coast, and South America’s treacherous Cape Horn before sailing north across the Atlantic again. The remote lower reaches of the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic where Chichester would spend much of his voyage are known collectively as the Southern Ocean. The region is a vast field of sea unobstructed by land in any direction, with enormous waves, riotous gales, and dramatic skies. Stories abound about ships meeting their end in the Southern Ocean and heroes enduring impossible circumstances.

Chichester stopped only once on his journey, at the halfway mark in Australia, to perform major repairs to his 53-foot boat, which had been battered by three and a half months on the open sea. When he stepped ashore in England nine months after he’d left, he was greeted like a rock star. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him nearly on the spot. Meanwhile, fellow seafarers understood that, after Chichester’s feat, one great ocean challenge remained: sailing solo around the world without stopping. No one knew if a boat could stand up to 30,000 uninterrupted miles at sea, or what might happen to a human mind so long without company. Nine different men decided to find out.

They ranged from a former British submarine commander to storied French and Italian sailors to thrill seekers with little seagoing experience. GPS hadn’t been invented, satellite communications and solar panels were scarcely commonplace, and computing had yet to transform weather forecasting. So the men would sail with the accessible technology of the era: a radio, a windup chronometer, and a barometer. They would catch rain for fresh water and navigate with a sextant and the stars.

The Sunday Times decided to brand the men’s individual attempts a formal race, announcing the Golden Globe in March 1968. The event had virtually no requirements or regulations, as the competitors were already planning their voyages, each with its own launch date. But in offering a trophy for the first man to complete the challenge—to incentivize urgency—and a cash prize for the fastest time—to incentivize competition—The Times instantly created one of the greatest adventure stories in history.

Only one man finished the race. Twenty-nine-year-old Brit Robin Knox-Johnston’s heavy, 32-foot boat Suhaili had been considered a long shot. During the voyage, Suhaili’s water tanks polluted, her sails tore, and the self-steering—a primitive autopilot system consisting of a wind vane that attached to the boat’s rudder—fell apart. The radio malfunctioned two and a half months in; Knox-Johnston had no way of calling for help should trouble have arisen. He jumped overboard multiple times to perform underwater repairs, once shooting a circling shark before diving in. While rigging near impossible fixes to his equipment, he splashed battery acid in his eye and stitched his mustache to a sail while repairing it. When against all odds he reappeared in the harbor of Falmouth on April 22, 1969, after nearly a year at sea, Knox-Johnston sailed into legend.

The other eight competitors sank, abandoned the journey, or worse. Alex Carozzo bowed out in Portugal, vomiting blood from a peptic ulcer. John Ridgway surrendered to intense loneliness and a poorly constructed boat, exiting the race near Brazil. Nigel Tetley barely survived 80-foot waves in the Southern Ocean, only to have his boat sink a thousand miles from the finish. A storm destroyed Bill King’s mast, and he ended his journey in Cape Town. Favored winner Bernard Moitessier, a sea mystic who practiced yoga naked on deck, was well in the lead after passing Cape Horn. But, imagining the glare of the international spotlight that surely awaited him, he used a slingshot to hurl a message onto the deck of a passing ship, informing the world that he was abandoning the race “to save my soul,” and continuing on to the tropics.

And then there was Donald Crowhurst. He sailed slow circles around the Atlantic in his rushed build of a leaky boat, transmitting fake radio reports of progress in hopes of fooling the world into believing he was winning. His log told the story of a man slowly going insane under the pressures of deception and monstrous debt to his sponsor, until his transmissions went silent. His trimaran was later found floating on the waves, its skipper having slipped into the ocean in an apparent suicide.

It would be half a century before anyone attempted the Golden Globe again.

Susie Goodall’s father was obsessed with the sea first. Stephen Goodall learned to sail as a teenager and taught his Danish wife, Birgitte Howells, to sail too. “Sailing is one of those things where people either have a yearning to get back on the water, or they have no particular desire to,” he told me.

Susie and her older brother, Tim, began sailing and racing small boats on a lake near where they grew up outside Birmingham. In 2004, when Goodall was 15, English sailor Ellen MacArthur set out to break the record for fastest nonstop solo circumnavigation; Susie and Tim followed her journey. After that, Susie read countless books about single-handed sailing and the noble explorers, salty adventurers, and sages who entered into a relationship with the sea as if it were a living thing. Maybe one day she, too, would sail around the world.

When Susie was 17, she told her parents she wanted to attend university, and they took her to visit several campuses. One day she announced, “I’m not going to go to university. I’m going to the Isle of Wight to become a sailing instructor.” Yes, her father thought. That’s what she should be doing.

Susie got her instruction certificates and taught sailing courses. She also worked on superyachts, delivering boats to port for their wealthy owners or crewing them while the owners were on board. She loved long ocean passages and taking night watches to memorize the patterns of the stars. But the yachts were so mechanized that her work felt like operating a computer. She marveled at stories of sailors once keenly in tune with the ocean and the boats they helmed: Ancient Polynesians, for instance, found their way by swell direction and the flight patterns of certain birds. She taught her students celestial navigation, but there was always backup—a GPS or their smartphone could be turned on at any time.

Susie voyaged to Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, and the Baltic, and rose through the ranks of instructors and crew to become a skipper, the small-boat equivalent of a ship captain, in an overwhelmingly male industry. Still, she doubted her abilities. She rarely felt pressured by her crewmates to prove her worth, but that hardly mattered; with few female role models to look to, her internal critic was more than happy to pick up the slack. Susie found herself wondering: Am I smart enough or strong enough? Am I good enough to do this job?

It didn’t help when, in her early twenties, she voiced her dream of sailing around the world to her boyfriend. “Well, that’s just ridiculous,” he replied. “You can’t sail around the world by yourself.”

Susie read countless books about single-handed sailing and the noble explorers, salty adventurers, and sages who entered into a relationship with the sea as if it were a living thing.

In July 2015, Goodall, then 25, was teaching in Iceland when one of her crewmates mentioned that a rerun of the Golden Globe was in the works. When her boat came ashore, she used a computer in her tiny hotel to look up the details. And there it was: The race was set to launch in 2018, the 50th anniversary of the original voyage. Don McIntyre, a decorated Australian adventurer who’d grown up idolizing Robin Knox-Johnston, was masterminding the event. On the edge of 60, McIntyre knew that if he didn’t re-create his hero’s journey now, he never would. And if he wanted to do it, he figured a few others might, too.

Boats would be limited to the same class as the intrepid Suhaili, between 32 and 36 feet. Sailors would have to navigate with paper charts and sextant, catch rain for water, handwrite their logs, and communicate by radio. No outside assistance would be allowed: no physical contact with anyone else, no help with repairs, no supply deliveries. The specifications couldn’t have been more different than those of the only other solo, nonstop, round-the-world race on offer, the Vendée Globe. That event, which took place every four years, was high-tech, high-speed, and high-cost; the boats alone were worth $300,000 to $5 million. But the new Golden Globe seemed more about the journey than the competition. Goodall downloaded the application and sent in the $3,000 entry deposit.

Telling her parents wasn’t easy. She called her mother—her parents were by now divorced—first. Howells knew something was up just by the sound of her daughter’s breath.

“What’s the matter?” Howells asked in her light Danish accent before Goodall could speak.

“Nothing, nothing, all is good,” said Goodall.

Howells waited.

“There’s this race,” Goodall said. “Round the world. Robin Knox-Johnston has done it before. I’ve applied to join it.” She didn’t mention that the race would be nonstop, and run solo without modern technology. She hoped to drip-feed the more worrying details to her family. What Goodall didn’t know was that Howells, on her first sailing trip with Goodall’s father, had read The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. The book recounted the original Golden Globe and Crowhurst’s haunting end. Goodall’s mother knew exactly what her daughter would face. And she also knew from her own experience that the sea offered a connection to something greater and deeper, something perhaps beyond words.

“I’ve been waiting for you to do something like this,” Howells said.

In the ensuing months, Goodall didn’t tell many people that she planned to sail the Golden Globe. When it did come up, she dreaded a particular question: What made her think she was capable of sailing around the world alone? She had no response to this. It was true that the farthest she’d sailed single-handed was four miles across the Solent, a strait between the Isle of Wight and mainland Britain. Still, she knew she was a strong sailor and could cope with being alone.

In truth, that she didn’t know whether she’d make it was part of the reason she wanted to try. She wasn’t content to merely read about the size of the Southern Ocean’s waves, the ferocity of its wind. She wanted to feel those forces, face them on her own. Only then would she know what she was capable of.

Sailors would have to navigate with paper charts and sextant, catch rain for water, handwrite their logs, and communicate by radio. No outside assistance would be allowed.

Interest in the new Golden Globe came fast and heavy. Dozens of people wanted to run it. McIntyre eventually sacrificed his own entry to devote himself to overseeing such a large event and securing the necessary funding.

The first meeting of participants was held in London in December 2015. There Goodall was introduced to Barry Pickthall, a former yachting correspondent for The Times who had written dozens of books on sailing. McIntyre had enlisted Pickthall to publicize the race in hopes of gaining a major sponsor. Pickthall was a teenager when Knox-Johnston went around the world, and remembered following the voyage. Of the rerun, he said, “In the end we had 18 starters, with 18 different reasons for going, and very few had aspirations to win it. That wasn’t what they were doing it for at all. They wanted to prove something to themselves, to other people, or just do something they’d always dreamed about.”

In Goodall, Pickthall saw a golden opportunity. Indeed, Goodall remembered him telling her as much the first time they met. He said that having a woman in the race made it more glamorous and he wanted to get The Sunday Times to feature her. “We’re going to dangle you like a puppet for the media so we can attract a sponsor for the race,” Goodall recalled him saying. She was immediately put off. During my conversations with him, Pickthall disputed Goodall’s characterization of their meeting, but conceded that he knew she had media appeal. “It was the sex side of things! Pretty girl sailing around the world,” he said. “And I made the most of it.”

In A Voyage for Madmen, a book about the 1968 race, author Peter Nichols writes about the “Ulysses factor” in human mythology, “the lone hero figure in society, the rare character who by his or her exploits stimulates powerful mass excitement.” The archetype encompasses a set of characteristics—imagination, endurance, selfishness, discipline, courage, and social instability. Francis Chichester was such a figure, Nichols writes, as were many of the other original Golden Globe sailors. Goodall didn’t fit the Ulysses mold in many ways. It would be difficult to call her selfish, and although she’s an introvert, she’s socially adept, with valued connections to friends and family. But she was a woman at an unprecedented time of women’s empowerment, when the public was hungry for stories of lone heroines who’d found success in male-dominated arenas.

When Goodall told her mother about what Pickthall had said, Howells was surprised. Back in 1989, when she’d just had her daughter, Howells followed Tracy Edwards’s history-making circumnavigation during the Whitbread Round the World Race. Edwards had worked as a cook in the 1985 edition of the race, and she was treated like a servant or worse. One crew member wrote “For sale: one case of beer” on the back of her thermal underwear. After that, Edwards refinanced her house to buy a yacht she named Maiden, and she assembled an all-female crew for the 1989 Whitbread. The media skewered her. Journalist Bob Fisher called the crew a “tin full of tarts” in The Guardian. While other crews were interviewed about experience and strategy, Edwards was asked about packing waterproof mascara and how such a “gorgeous slip of a young girl” expected to raise the millions of dollars needed to participate in such an extravagant race.

Among the journalists lambasting the Maiden crew was Barry Pickthall. In his telling, it was essentially the women’s fault for the things that were written about them. “They hadn’t done very well in their preparations. We saw all sorts of catfights,” Pickthall told me. “We said, ‘How are these girls going to get round the world?’ ”
When the women came in third and then first in the first two legs of the race, Pickthall said, “We were absolutely astounded. Bob had to change his view to a ‘tin full of smart, fast tarts.’ ”

Howells saw how the media had treated Edwards, but that was nearly three decades before her own daughter planned to embark on a similar endeavor. This is a whole new century, she thought. Surely we’ve moved on.

Read the full story at The Atavist

As host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, Brendan O’Meara is no stranger to talking about the art and craft of storytelling. In this craft-focused excerpt, we’re digging into Episode 331, in which he interviews Atavist editor Jonah Ogles and writer/editor-in-chief Seyward Darby about her work on the latest issue of The Atavist.

Many of you know Seyward Darby as the editor-in-chief of The Atavist Magazine, but like many editors she’s an incredibly skilled writer and reporter. If you need proof of that, look no further than “Fault Lines,” her investigative masterpiece about Grover Cleveland Charter High School and the alleged grooming and sexual abuse that took place over decades.

In a piece this sensitive, is there latitude to be artful? Is lyricism in poor taste? Or is it something that helps the reader better sink into the piece, so that the gravity of the alleged events hits even harder? Darby elected to deploy a brilliant metaphorical lede about the 1994 Northridge earthquake — a pivotal external event that embodies the subterranean forces capable of bringing structures to the ground.

“This is not one person’s story,” Darby says. “This is a lot of people’s stories. There are all these accusations; how is it going to shake? Who is it going to shake? To me, that was so important to the story. And I wanted to make it clear from go.”

We also talk about Darby’s experience hanging the editor hat on the hook so she could sidestep her “editor brain” while reporting and writing — the other hats. The divide doesn’t have to be impermeable, but it’s easy to imagine how editor brain blocks forward progress.

“When I sit down to write, I’m immediately also editing,” she says. “I sit down and I’m like, ‘Well, this sentence I just wrote could already be better’ as opposed to ‘just get out what you need to say.’ It’s almost like my brain is in constant editing mode.”

Please enjoy this excerpt below, and listen to the full episode for more.

These interviews have been edited for clarity and concision.

Brendan O’Meara: Wouldn’t you know that the featured writer this month is none other than Seyward Darby.

Jonah Ogles, Atavist senior editor: I know, it’s a special treat for all of us.

This time around, you and Peter Rubin from Longreads helmed up the editing; what was it like having to edit Seyward, who so often does much of the editing?

I mean, she’s a tremendously talented writer. She just turned in a great draft; if I compared documents, I’m sure it would be 95% the same. There was very little actual futzing with text. And it really gave us an opportunity, I think, to just refine something that was already working. When you get a story like that, it’s sometimes even worse, because then the pressure is “Can we make this a really great story?” Writers are often the ones saying, “I can’t crack this thing,” and so we spend all of our time dragging it forward. And that wasn’t the case with this piece. It was great already. And we were just trying to make it as good as we possibly could, by the time we had to push it out the door.

I think what made it so good as well was how hard Seyward felt like she had to be on herself. If you’re a dad coaching your kid’s baseball team, and you put him at shortstop, you’re going to be like, “I gotta be twice as hard on my kid, because I don’t want anyone to think I’m playing favorites.”

Well, certainly Seyward feels a great deal of responsibility on her shoulders at all times. I know that she felt a great responsibility to these women, which any writer writing any story can relate to. But when writers are working on pieces where sources are sharing stories of trauma, they feel a great responsibility — as they should — to do right by the sources and do right by the story.

I don’t think I ever said this to Seyward, but if you have the chance to do that type of story for a publication where you inherently trust the crew — our copy editor Sean, our designer Ed, the fact-checker, Kyla, who we’ve worked with — it’s much easier to bring such a sensitive piece to people that you already work with. It’s not that you’re not getting good advice at other publications, but it might be the first time working with an editor, and there’s a lot of faith and trust you have to build on the fly. In this case, she didn’t have to, because we’re all here, we all want this story to be great. And so I hope that resulted in a process that she felt really confident in as she was working through revisions.

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What ultimately tipped the scale to making you confident in saying “this is an Atavist story”?

For me, it’s the openness of the Jane Does that we talked to. Every story has probably a limitless number of ways it could be written and edited. There are versions of this story that are a Los Angeles Times investigative piece, a multi-part series that’s that classic newspaper feature with a narrative lead, and then you just hit people with details in the complaint. And you can imagine an investigative outlet doing a story like this that has a little bit more narrative detail in it. But for me, what makes it an Atavist story is the depth of the narrative and the scenery.

In this particular story, that’s really heavy stuff. When you start off reporting a story like this, you don’t know if your sources are going to want to talk deeply about these things, or if the way they remember it will fall apart as you start fact-checking it. But as she got deeper and deeper into the story, it became clear that there were not only opportunities to add that depth of scenery and character that I think of as trademarks of an Atavist story — but that the Jane Does were really incredible sources with great memories, and a willingness to be vulnerable and open with Seyward and trust her. That’s when the needle tips into an Atavist story. This isn’t just an investigative piece, this is a piece in which we are going to get to know characters and feel deep sympathy for the experience that they went through because of the detail with which we will describe that.

A couple of months ago. Greg Donahue’s piece ended with this metaphorical scene that really encapsulated everything that had come before it, and it was a beautiful ending. Seyward’s piece has a very metaphorical lede involving the 1994 Northridge earthquake. When you’re starting to generate a piece of this nature, what is the calculus of deploying that metaphorical lede?

I wish there was an equation, right? I think it becomes apparent pretty quickly whether that sort of thing is working or not. In the case of this story, Seyward had that in the story before I even read it. I read two sentences, and my brain — knowing that this is a story about alleged sexual abuse in a public school district — goes, “Hey, this isn’t the story I expected to read.” So then it’s on the writer to basically deliver the goods.

Seyward does that partly because the writing is strong and good. Readers are more likely to trust strong, good writing, and give those writers more leeway, which may sound stupid and oversimplified, but I think it’s true. So you keep reading, and then it becomes clear how she ties it into the story, and you realize, “Oh, I see what she’s doing.” And then you’re checking your gut for “Do I feel duped? Do I feel like this was a trick? Was the writer just trying to be flashy? Or does it feel sort of, like, appropriate, and in line with, like, the subject and tone of the story?” And with this one, the first time I read it, I think the note I even made for myself in the margins was like, “Wow, if I were writing this, I would not have thought to do this in 100 drafts.” But it just worked.

“Scientists believe there was a dense thicket of invisible faults underneath Los Angeles, threatening to convulse the city.”

These stories are tough. Obviously, it’s much tougher for Seyward to work on, and no one’s comparing her and my experience to these women’s experiences. You don’t undertake a story like this so you can say you wrote a good story — you do it because you want it to have an impact. Because these cases often occur in clusters. There are probably more stories out there to tell. That’s a part of journalism that I struggle with; you do these types of stories because you want to make a difference, but in doing so you know that it means individuals will have to relive trauma and pain.

And then you’re pulling back those scars and putting your story in the hands of a stranger who becomes a little more than a stranger over time. You have to trust that they handle it responsibly. That’s got to be really, really hard.

It requires, I guess, a faith in each other. I feel it, and I’m sure Seyward feels it even more, and I know the fact-checker did and the copy editor did. I mean, we all talked about this. But I hope we did right by these women, and I hope they feel that in the story.

A lot of times writers are working with editors and maybe they feel like, “What do editors know? They’re not writers.” But often editors do some of the best goddamn feature work you’ve ever read. And Seyward, who ushers in so much great work along with you, is a great reminder that people who primarily edit are some of the best, if not underappreciated, reporters and writers that we have out there.

It’s a tough thing to do — and I say this as someone who stopped writing a long time ago, other than very short things here and there. I admire someone like Seyward who’s capable of doing both things because it’s like a different brain that you use. She would Slack me and say, like, “I can’t figure out which part of my brain I’m using. Am I using the editor part of the brain? Or am I using the writer part of the brain?” Because you just look at it a little differently.

When I was young, I thought I didn’t want to be an editor. I wanted to write. But holy cow, is it an education. Even a really good writer writes what, four big features a year? And then maybe a lot of smaller stuff? At Outside I was editing two to four features in a month. It’s just more experience dealing with problems and finding solutions, so you end up with more tools in your toolbox, where you can say, “I know what to do with this type of situation, we had to fix that a year ago.” You walk away with structure and reporting tricks and how to deal with sources, or whatever it is. I would highly encourage any young writers out there to spend a little time in the trenches as an editor if they can find that.

Seyward, what’s your sense of the story’s pace, given that it doesn’t have some of the classic narrative propulsion we see with pieces about suicide races or kayaking across the Bering Strait?

Seyward Darby, Atavist editor in chief: This is the first time I’ve written for The Atavist. I’ve always been kind of hesitant to do it. Because we only publish 12 stories a year, I want to leave those slots open for freelancers, and I’ve just never felt super comfortable with publishing my own work in the magazine. But when I started working on this story, I felt immediately very protective of it — because of the women at the heart of it, and how deeply traumatized they were, but also how brave and generous they were being with their time. And ultimately, I realized that there is a narrative here; it’s told chronologically over the course of about 25 years, and I felt confident that there would be that arc of a beginning, middle, and end. That doesn’t say that everything is resolved, but it’s not an inverted pyramid of an investigation. It’s a story that builds as it goes.

If I had published it somewhere else, I might have told it a bit differently. You know, certainly there was a version of this story that was more tightly focused on one of the cases of alleged abuse as opposed to all of them, that wasn’t quite so sweeping in its approach. Because it was in The Atavist, I definitely felt the imperative of making it as Atavist-y as possible. And I certainly looked to other Atavist stories that I’ve either had the pleasure of working on as an editor, or that I read before I came on board as an editor.

Thankfully, I had Jonah to bounce ideas off of. It’s always very weird to go from being the editor to the writer, but Jonah is such a great editor and collaborator. We also worked with Peter Rubin, who is the head of publishing at Automattic, our parent company; he oversees both The Atavist and Longreads from a strategic standpoint, and he stepped in to be the second editor. I’m nervous about the story in a couple of different ways. But I’m also really proud — not just of myself, but of The Atavist for putting out this kind of investigative work.

What makes you nervous about it?

This is a very emotionally fraught piece. As you know, any piece that deals with abuse, sexual violence, you know, naturally is, I think, in this case, I have been lucky enough to have several women — including the four Jane Does in the lawsuits that are at the heart of the story — really trust me with their time and with their stories, and with their feelings. There’s always pressure in those situations to make sure you’re doing it justice, to live up to what they are offering. I feel good about the story, but with any writer, just as you’re about to publish something, you have that moment of, “Is this good?”

I talked to dozens and dozens of people for this story and the alumni community of the school that’s at the heart of this story is quite split. I talked to people who had either heard about the accusations or were not surprised when I told them about the accusations. And then I spoke to people who are not interested. I spoke to people who asked why I was bothering to write this story at all, because the magnet program at the heart of it is such a great program, and why would I want to destroy it? I’m telling a story of alleged abuse; the intent of the story is not to destroy anything, but to expose suspected wrongdoing.

How did you go about navigating the conversations that you had with several of your sources, as they’re giving you these raw, visceral details? It can be hard to know when to ask, when to sit back, when to let silence do its thing.

I really started almost all of my interviews — and this went for the Jane Does but also for pretty much everybody else in the story as well — by saying, “Let me tell you who I am. Let me tell you why I’m interested in reporting this, and let me open myself up to questions.” I felt bad for Kyla, my fact-checker, going through my transcripts because I feel like the first quarter of my transcripts is this refrain of me doing that: saying, “What questions do you have for me? What can I answer?”

With the Jane Does, I spoke to the attorneys first, because I didn’t know who these women were, and it was the same sort of thing. Who am I? Why am I interested in this? Why do I think it’s an important story? And I think that the attorneys were then able to go to the women and say, “We have a good feeling about this person.” And then with each of the women, I offered to just start by having a conversation completely off the record, where we just get to know each other a little bit.

We talked about what work I’ve done, what my values are, and we also talked a lot about boundaries. This is before we were even formally doing an interview: Tell me if you don’t want to talk about something, tell me you don’t want to answer a question. This is not about my feelings. I explained the fact-checking process up front, tried to communicate how hard the interviews would be. I’m trying to operate as a journalist from a principle of doing no harm, particularly to vulnerable subjects. There was a lot of precursor conversation.

As far as the interviews themselves, I think the first one I did lasted about nine hours in person. It progressed from one site to another, and then ultimately, you know, we were going through old high school materials that she had kept. Another one was about five hours in person; the other one was about seven hours in person. One woman really only wanted to be on the phone, another wanted to meet in a place on a beach where she felt very comfortable, and asked if she could bring a friend.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last nine months working on this story. Obviously, there are lines that must be kept in place between journalists and sources, but not every source is created equal — and in this case, it felt like I needed to bring more of myself to the table, and also be willing to be flexible in ways that I just wouldn’t normally think about. It’s been a real-time education in terms of evaluating what I believe in as a journalist, what I value as a journalist, and what it means to tell a fair and accurate story. I’ve said this to the women, you know, I’m grateful that I, personally and professionally, like, have had that opportunity to kind of, you know, go through, I don’t know, just a very, very different type of reporting experience than I’ve ever had before.

Was there any point, especially the reporting phase, that it felt like it was going to fall apart?

Early on, I was very lucky. When I started looking into it, the plaintiffs’ attorneys were willing to share some documentation and materials that really cracked the thing open for me. And that’s not always the case. So I felt quite confident from the beginning that I was going to be able to tell a story. It was more that I wasn’t quite sure what sort of story this was going to be, because I didn’t know if any of the four women were going to talk to me. How long can the story be? How deep can the story be?

I flew out to California in February [2022] to meet with a key witness, and then also one of the Jane Does. At that point, I thought that might be the only Jane Doe who was going to talk to me. I got back to the East Coast, and one of the attorneys got in touch with me like, “Can you come back to California? Because one of the other Jane Does wants to talk to you, but would really like to do it in person.” And so I was like, “Yep, turning back around.”

And you love flying.

Oh, my God, Brendan, I hate flying. But, it was definitely the kind of reporting process where I just needed to be flexible and available. And you know, luckily at The Atavist, I could work from wherever. I got COVID right when I started writing from my poor sister-in-law, who didn’t even realize she had given it to me. So I was locked in a room, trying not to give it to my husband, attempting to put together hundreds of pages of legal documents, hundreds of hours of interviews.

So much of what The Atavist does is what we consider artful journalism — that elevated style that kind of reads like short stories, even fiction. This piece has elements of that too, but last month you were telling me about this piece and saying this one has a more service drive behind it. I’d love for you to talk a little bit about a piece that is as service-driven as this one intends to be.

It’s a great question. We have to use the word “alleged” a lot, we have to use the word “suspected” a lot, things that don’t immediately lend themselves to the most beautiful of writing but are important from an ethical and legal standpoint. So, from a structural standpoint, I tried to make sure that there would be pockets where I was able to not worry about that language quite so much. As long as I can execute the narrative and find these pockets where I could be a little more artful — where I could bring in scenes and character detail — I knew in my bones that it was a good story.

I don’t even consider myself a writer first. I consider myself more an editor-reporter than a writer. I just wanted the material that I found to speak for itself, as opposed to getting lost in my turns of phrase. Also, because so many people at the heart of the story are Jane Does, there were classic ways of developing a character that I could not use. I couldn’t talk about them physically. I couldn’t talk about their background, their ethnicity, any identifying details. So I had to find other ways to get their characters to feel specific. And to get the characters to feel like you had a sense of who they are as people.

The lede is essentially describing an earthquake that happened in 1994. It’s a very metaphorical thing to what’s happening throughout the story, but also in a geologic sense that anything below the ground can lead to something big down the road. And so you kind of get the sense that maybe something big is going to happen — maybe, maybe not.

It’s very important to say that my husband deserves some credit for this lead, because while I was working on the story, my husband also was reading a lot of Mike Davis, the great urban theorist and environmental activist. I had said to him several times that the Northridge earthquake kept coming up in my interviews, because it had a tremendous impact on the school, both physically and the way that students interacted with their space. And he said, “You should really read this chapter in Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis. It’s about the earthquake; maybe you’ll find some inspiration.” And lo and behold, he was very correct.

But this also kind of ties back into what we were talking about what makes this an Atavist story. I don’t know that every magazine would have loved this lede. I wanted to set this scene — literally, because the epicenter was just a few blocks away from the high school, but then also kind of this metaphorical landscape in which the story is framed. This is not one person’s story, this is a lot of people’s stories. And also, there are all these accusations; how is it going to shake? Who is it going to shake? To me, that was so important to the story. And I wanted to make it clear from go.

I think it’d be really illuminating for you to talk about what it was like to take your editor hat off and set that aside for a bit — to surrender to other people giving you the same sort of treatment.

I mean, I love being edited. I love being fact-checked. I love being legal-reviewed. All journalism is collaborative, but this kind of like deep reporting and more elegant writing is a collaborative project.

And I think I’ve said this before on the podcast, but I think that it makes me a better editor, ultimately, to experience all the things that a writer experiences working on an Atavist story, because it builds empathy. It also helps me think about “can we be doing things better? Can we be doing things differently? What are we not thinking about?” That’s really crucial, honestly, to the whole enterprise. The hardest thing for me on the reporting and writing front is that when I sit down to write, I’m immediately also editing. I’m like, “Well, this sentence that I just wrote could already be better” as opposed to just “get out what you need to say.” My brain is just in constant editing mode.

Yeah, it’s hard when you have such editor tendencies that you can be paralyzed by your own editor brain.

That’s the biggest struggle for me in these moments — but I just so enjoy it. I’ve been at this for five years at The Atavist, and this is the first time I’ve been on the other side of things. I’ve now received a memo from Jonah; I’ve gotten notes on my work. I don’t want to do it all the time, but there’s something to be said for really understanding every facet of what we do.

It’s like an actor going behind the camera to be a director, and becoming a little more empathetic to the experience.

If anything, I think I’m harder on myself as a reporter and writer because I have editor brain. I’ve worn a lot of hats, and in this case, I’ve got all of them on. Figuring out how to actually produce something under all that pressure I’m putting on myself is tricky. But I also felt very safe the whole time; knowing whose hands this was in, sharing a collective vision for it. And that was just such a nice experience.

What do you recommend to people out there, as we bring this down for a landing?

Longreads previously published an excerpt from Ecology of Fear, which you can read by following this link.

First of all, definitely, Mike Davis. Any Mike Davis. Ecology of Fear is fantastic. Also the Q&A in the LA Times. He’s just really a brilliant person. I’m not by any means the first person to say that.

And then my other recommendation would be this. I had the pleasure last weekend of spending time with my dear friend from college, her husband, and their 2-year-old, and: Sesame Street still slaps. Everybody needs some Sesame Street in their lives. I watched so much Sesame Street over the course of three or four days, and I just came away feeling good about things. There was a whole segment about what it means to vote and like why voting is important. I loved Sesame Street when I was a kid, I’ve always loved the Muppets, but this was my first time watching Sesame Street as an adult. It’s just so good.

Fantastic. Well, this was great to talk to you at greater length than we normally do about this incredible piece — first one for The Atavist in five years. So I’ll look forward to the next one in 2027, Seyward!

It will be no sooner!

Jana Meisenholder|  The Atavist Magazine | August 2022 | 7 minutes (2,197 words)

This is an excerpt from The Atavist’s issue no. 129, “King of the Hill.” 

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The Atavist Magazine, our sister site, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.

Before the arrival of European colonizers, the Columbia Plateau, which forms swaths of present-day Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, was home to several Native tribes, including the Nez Perce, Wenatchi, Palus, and Colville. Foreigners brought with them disease and destruction. They also brought horses. “It was probably the best gift the white man ever gave us,” the late Stampede organizer and horse trainer Eddie Timentwa told author Carol Austin, who wrote a book about the Suicide Race in 1993,

By the 1700s, horsemanship had become an integral part of Native culture. The animals assisted in transportation and territorial expansion. “Mounted war parties could strike enemies at greater distances and with greater force than ever before,” writes anthropologist Deward Walker. Horses also led to larger traditional gatherings, allowing more people from a wider geographical range to come together. During salmon-spawning season, plateau tribes would meet at the confluence of the Sanpoil and Columbia Rivers to harvest and dry the coming winter’s supply of fish. Horses served as entertainment and objects of sporting competition. Riders paraded horses adorned with tribal regalia and beaded stirrups and bridles before running perilous mountain races.

After the plateau tribes were forced onto the Colville Reservation, the tradition of horse racing continued, and people wagered on riders. Stories of these events were most often passed down through oral tradition, but in 1879, Erskine Wood, a U.S. military officer, wrote of one horse race, “It did not take long for the excitement to grow and soon the bets were showering down and the pile swelling visibly with such great rapidity that it was marvelous how account could be kept. Blankets, furs, saddles, knives, traps, tobacco, beads, whips, and a hundred other things were staked.” (Wood wrote positively of many of his encounters with Native tribes, but also participated in the violent removal of the Nez Perce from their ancestral land.)

In the 1920s, Hugh McShane, a white man married to a Colville woman, introduced a mountain race at the rodeo in Keller, Washington. The race, described by Austin as “a half mile, pell-mell down a nearly vertical, boulder-strewn chasm in the face of a mountain,” quickly became a crowd favorite. But it wouldn’t last: The construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in the 1930s flooded Keller, forcing residents to relocate. In Omak, about 60 miles northwest, Claire Pentz, a furniture salesman in charge of publicity for the town’s rodeo, heard about McShane’s event and decided to stage one of his own. Locals brainstormed what to call the starting location, a precipitous incline on the Okanogan’s southern bank. Murder Hill was floated, but organizers settled on Suicide Hill. “The suicide race draws only the most nervy riders,” The Omak Chronicle declared.

In 1942, a jockey named Bev Conners drowned in the river during the race. Since then, according to various sources, no other jockeys have died. But injuries are common, including grievous ones. Larry Peasley, who taught Andres how to ride a mechanical bull, has two adult children who were nearly killed in the race. In 2002, his daughter Naomie—one of only a few women to ever run the race—suffered a skull fracture and flatlined on the way to the hospital. Doctors were able to revive her. A few years later, Peasley’s son Tyler went somersaulting off his horse and was trampled by oncoming riders. He fractured his ribs and suffered a broken pelvis and hip.

It’s not hard to see what makes the race so dangerous. There’s the hill itself, more than 200 feet of earth pitched at a harrowing angle—according to one race organizer’s measurement, it’s steeper than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Riders charge down the slope at full gallop, reaching speeds up to 30 miles per hour by the time they hit the river. Then there’s the lack of any hard-and-fast rules about how the race should be run. Horses aren’t lined up in an orderly fashion at the starting line. What happens on Suicide Hill is a free-for-all, with mounted jockeys jostling each other, fighting for a competitive spot. The aggression only escalates during the race. Riders violently whipping other jockeys in the face with their crops, attempting to throw them off balance or slow them down, is a common tactic, and often a successful one.

The best Suicide Race jockeys are adrenaline junkies, as athletic as they are knowledgeable of the event’s 1,260-foot-long course. They’ve meticulously mapped out the quarter-mile and know what to do when: Lean back before this point, lock your knees here, sit forward just after that section, pull back the reins there. Riders have incredible core and leg strength to help them stay in the saddle, and they know how far their bodies can tilt sideways if need be, to avoid injury or inflict it on a competitor.

In 2002, the race’s all-time reigning champ, Alex Dick, passed away at the age of 83. He had 16 King of the Hill titles to his name; his obituary in a local newspaper noted that Dick, who was Native, “set a record that will probably never be broken.” So far it hasn’t been. Yet if there’s a first family of the Suicide Race today, it’s the Marchands. Three brothers—Loren, Francis, and Edward—have followed in the footsteps of their grandfather, Jim, an endurance racer who died after a horse fell on him in 1990, and an uncle, George, who holds three Suicide Race titles. Loren, now 34, has been crowned King of the Hill seven times, most recently in 2015. Francis and Edward have never won the overall title, but they’ve come close.

As the dominant force in the Suicide Race, the Marchand brothers have a wealth of tips and tricks, and they know all the best places around Omak to practice. But the race is a tradition most often shared among kin, and the Marchands are notoriously wary of letting people who aren’t blood, or at least Native, into their inner circle. They also reject weekend warriors and wannabe jockeys who are in it purely for the exhilaration. “The Marchands don’t fuck with anybody,” said Conner Picking, a Suicide Race jockey and a great-grandson of one of the founders of the Omak Stampede.

That didn’t stop Andres from trying to get their attention.

***

By the summer of 2018, Andres, now 26, had cleaned up his life and was working construction and picking up jobs as a handyman. He was also holding fast to his desire to learn from Suicide Race royalty, looking for a way in to their good graces. One day he accompanied a welder to a small ranch in Eastside owned by Preston Boyd, a Colville elder renowned for breeding and training thoroughbreds for flat-track racing. Boyd needed the men to fix his broken horse walker, a motorized machine that leads horses in a circle. While Andres worked, Boyd took a good look at him. He noticed Andres’s height—just five feet six inches. He probed the young man about his weight.

Boyd was searching for a new rider to exercise his racehorses, because his usual guys were getting too busy. Among them was his great-nephew, Francis Marchand. Francis was helping Boyd break some new horses that summer, but his schedule was increasingly packed with rodeos—a formidable horseman, Francis regularly competed in saddle bronc and bareback riding. Andres’s specs were promising for the kind of rider Boyd needed. Sure, he couldn’t gallop a horse yet, but he could learn. Boyd told Andres he might fit the bill.

Andres knew he was being given a rare opportunity—a chance to get to know Boyd and one of the Marchands, and to show that he had what it took to run the Suicide Race. But months went by and nothing happened. Boyd never followed up with Andres about exercising his horses.

Omak is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody, and sometimes Andres bumped into Francis at social gatherings. He would bring up Boyd’s suggestion that he was rider material as casually as he could, to see if Francis knew anything about his great-uncle’s plans. Andres also asked about going off the hill—what it felt like, what it took to win. Francis recognized Andres’s ambition, and in early 2019 he told him to stop dithering and get to the point: If he wanted to become a rider, he should go to Boyd and say so. “You want to do this? Look him in the eyes,” Francis said. “In any culture, you grab a guy, shake his hand, and tell him you want this.”

Andres took the advice to heart, but he didn’t want to seem desperate. He waited until he ran into Boyd at a gas station one day, then asked if he could help exercise his horses. Boyd said sure, and Andres showed up at 7:30 the next morning to start learning.

Unlike bull riding, which Andres took to easily as a boy, riding racehorses was challenging. Though short, he was stocky and muscular; working construction had made him strong, but he wasn’t nimble or quick to respond to a horse’s stride. Montana Pakootas, a seasoned jockey who helped out on the ranch, had to constantly remind Andres not to yank the reins, but to pull them gently, if he wanted to slow a horse down. “Use your wrist, not your whole arm,” Pakootas said. Otherwise, when a horse was going full speed, Andres risked throwing it off balance.

Andres’s riding improved, and by the summer of 2019 he was exercising Boyd’s newest racehorses for several hours most days of the week. Boyd expected his riders to stick to a routine, for the horses’ sake. “I take Wednesdays and Sundays off to let their muscles, if they get sore, to give them a little rest,” he said. On training days, it was Andres’s job to guide horses to a trot around a local track for a quarter of a mile, getting their blood pumping and helping them build stamina. Eventually he would get them up to a gallop. As a horse became more aerobic, Andres learned to increase its speed against its pulse, maintaining a low heart rate even while the horse worked hard over varying distances. After weeks or months of training, when a horse was comfortable running at top speed around the track in Omak, Andres took the horse to Emerald Downs, a race facility in Seattle, not to compete but to get acquainted with crowds and the whirring sound the starting gates make when they open.

Andres exercised Boyd’s horses for free, and he and Renteria, who was selling Amway products at the time, sometimes struggled to cover the bills. Andres picked up odd jobs where he could, but not anything that took away from his time with Boyd’s horses. The Suicide Race was never far from his mind. He watched videos of past races over and over, studying them. “He’d always say, ‘I hope I go down the hill one day,’ but I never thought he would actually be in it,” Renteria said. Sometimes Andres was surprised he still had a girlfriend at all. “He told me that he thought I’d break up with him since all he did was ride,” Renteria said, smiling.

One day, when Andres had been working with Montana Pakootas for a while, he decided to tell him about his ultimate goal. Pakootas, who had run many Suicide Races and was crowned King of the Hill in 2004, was hosing down a horse at the time. In response to what Andres said, he turned and sprayed him in the face. That’s how the hazing began. Another time Pakootas dumped a boot full of water on Andres’s head. “You scared of getting wet? Because that water fucking feels like it just whips you in the face,” he said, referring to the dive into the Okanogan River. Andres was humiliated, but he kept showing up, kept taking shit.

When Boyd asked him to come along to Emerald Downs for an official racing event, Andres jumped at the chance. At the Downs, Andres awoke every morning at 4:45 to feed the racehorses, then got them ready for the day’s competitions. Francis Marchand and his brother Edward were there, helping care for Boyd’s horses, and they picked up Andres’s hazing where Pakootas had left off. “Edward wasn’t easy on me, that’s for sure,” Andres said. The eldest Marchand brother, known for his success in the extreme sport of Indian relay racing, in which a rider changes his mount mid-competition, seemed to notice every mistake Andres made while warming up the horses. “It’s almost like he waited for me to fuck up,” Andres said, “just so he could go off on me and drive me away.”

Andres persevered, and over margaritas at an Applebee’s one day, he felt bold enough to say it to Edward straight—what he wanted, what he was sure he was capable of. What did he need to do to go off the hill? Edward, who had placed second overall in the 2018 Suicide Race, shook his head in response.

“You don’t have what it takes,” he said.

“What’s it take?” Andres asked.

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t got it.”

Read the full story at The Atavist.