Editor’s Corner
September 11, 2009
Working Story
By
Andrea Pitzer
Narrative often finds its magic in the mundane, the down-and-dirty details that make a story feel real. So perhaps it is not strange that narrative journalism frequently takes on one of the most everyday activities—work—and renders it extraordinary.
Our current Notable Narrative, “The End of Mystery,” from Esquire, recounts the story of crash investigators trying to make sense of a helicopter accident that killed 17 people. Reporter Chris Jones follows his subjects as they start with possibilities as vast as the ocean floor and narrow the potential causes down to one.
Earlier this year, the Columbus Dispatch put together an ambitious multimedia project titled “Death Perceptions” that delved into occupations that (like the crash investigators’) often deal with the end of life. The most powerful moments come from short videos that reveal the hidden intimacies of each job. A pediatric hospice nurse talks about watching parents learn to give their terminally ill children permission to let go. A paramedic describes a tradition of making the new guy buy ice cream for everyone after his first night run, first fatality, and first multiple-death accident—and he tells how he had to pay out on all three counts after his very first shift.
A recent Associated Press story looked at how a North Carolina town transforms itself into an imaginary country to help train U.S. Special Forces in the most mundane aspects of their jobs. Paying with foreign currency and staging raids, trainees learn to interact with locals—in one case, with terrible consequences.
But in addition to pulling back the curtain on unusual occupations, sometimes narratives relate the risks of work. From Lewis Hine’s century-old photographs of child laborers to a project from the Chicago Tribune that reported the exploitation of young Nepalese men in Iraq, narrative journalism has long publicized the dangerous jobs inherited by the neediest among us.
Studs Terkel, the lion of labor narratives, died last October. In his book Working, which later became a Broadway play and a graphic novel, Terkel captured the wonder and the misery of jobs. He summed up his fascination with unseen workers in a 2002 interview (see part 3) by quoting Bertold Brecht: “When the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch?” Those masons, Terkel claimed, were the people whose stories he wanted to find and hear—the people whose work goes unnoticed, the people who make the world.
From Terkel’s Lovin’ Al the parking attendant to the Nepalese workers who never came home, work narratives introduce us to the mysteries of what people will take on in order to follow a dream, to pay for a new TV, or simply to survive.