Editor’s Corner
January 9, 2009
Just a day’s drive from the U.S. Capitol
By
Constance Hale
Many competing interests surface when Digest editors discuss submissions. One lurking tension is between a tendency to feature stories published in major metropolitan dailies and a desire to highlight pieces published in smaller newspapers. How can we showcase work from all kinds of publications, and from all regions of the country? Another tension involves resources: Can we compare stories from, say, The Washington Post Magazine, with those from, say, C-VILLE Weekly? Is it fair to hold stories written for less money, and often edited and published as a labor of love in the alternative press, to the same standard as pieces in major national magazines?
Other tensions are more literary: between fact-based, deeply-reported stories and experimental, idiosyncratic pieces. How can we compare pieces that aim primarily to inform with those that aim primarily to evoke—and maybe even provoke? What if one story appeals to the head, another to the heart?
These were some of the questions we asked ourselves this month when confronted with two compelling narratives focusing on rarely seen worlds in central and Western Virginia. On the one hand, “Hidden Hurt” dives straight into big issues—health care, workplace safety, poverty, the aching history of coal mining. The writer, Mary Otto, chooses a narrative stance at once authoritative and invisible. Characters are succinctly but richly drawn, and paragraphs laden with statistics are quickly counterbalanced by poignant description. In the end, the facts drive the story, not the narrator.
On the other hand, “The Blunt Truth” gives us a stirring story told in an intriguing, agile, innovative voice. The writer, J. Tobias Beard, doesn’t avoid big issues—in this case, the underground world of drugs and the complicated web of relationships with dealers—but he paints on a particular kind of canvas, with expressionistic brushstrokes rather than photo-realist detail. And it isn’t only the voice that gives this piece style; the narrative begins in the present, flashes back, winds artfully through 10 years of drug dealing, and then returns to the quotidian. And yet we aren’t always sure whether the narrator is observing a particular event or describing a typical scene. We question whether the writer depended too heavily on a single source and find that the line between the subject, a drug dealer, and the narrator often blurred.
In the end, at least for us at the Digest, the journalism wins out. The power of facts, reporting, and information, graced by the welcome eloquent sentence, leads us to select “Hidden Hurt” as our Notable Narrative. But “The Blunt Truth” lingers in our minds.
Which would you pick? Please let us know by sending us an email. Within the next few months we will be making this site more interactive, and we hope to start publishing more of your comments.