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Q:
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How do you usually find your subjects? How much time do you spend reporting and writing each column?
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A:
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It’s this weird calculus. I’m looking to satisfy my own curiosity and to move around the country. And I try to change the tone of the columns so they’re not always about death or loss. I’ll read government reports. I’ll look at the name of a town I’ve never heard of, and I’ll see what’s happening there.
Usually it’s two to three days of reporting, on occasion longer. The decision in 2009 was to slow down, but when I had a weekly deadline before, it did help me focus. Otherwise I become enamored of a phrase and spend three hours trying to shoehorn the phrase into the story. That’s not very conducive to good writing.
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Q:
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How did you find Ines De Costa, or Vovó, the cook you profile in the column about Fall River?
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A:
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I worked for several years with the Providence Journal. I went to Fall River and ate some of Vovó’s food back then. Fast forward to the present—I wanted to write about Fall River. I was driving around the place thinking of writing a column about how there’s yet another attempt to revive the city. I called a friend who was from there—he suggested I go to the Athletic Club. I had forgotten about Vovó. I didn’t even know about her connection to Emeril Lagasse.
There was a man eating lunch with his very elderly mother. I’m sitting having my soup, and this older woman comes out. She’s bent over, and she’s maybe five feet tall. She comes over and begins talking to them. It’s clear that the woman who is sitting down has had a lot of health problems and isn’t grasping everything. Vovó asks the son, “Would Mama like some soup to take home?” and he turns and says, “Ma, do you want some soup?” She nods her head.
So Vovó goes back to the kitchen and gets soup to give to her for free. I went out to the parking lot and called my editor. I said, “What if we do something about a woman offering soup to a city?”
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Q:
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The making of the soup seems to provide the spine of this column—could you tell me a little about how you decided to structure the piece?
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As columns go, this was easy. I knew roughly how I would begin it, with this woman making her soup. Once you have that concept as an introductory image, then you can go back and forth.
You have a notebook full of details, and you wind up using maybe 10% of what’s in your notebook. All sorts of things happened that morning. Her nephew comes in with the shellfish, and I know how much they paid. And some guy comes in with produce, and I got his name. That kind of reporting gives you a sense of ownership of the moment. You insinuate yourself—while you’re there you might as well milk it for all it’s worth. It gives me a faux sense of authority, perhaps, but I want to know as much as I possibly can about this moment.
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Q:
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Do you have your own recipe for a good “This Land” column—not a template, but a series of things you want to happen each time?
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I just want a good story. And a good story has to have some kind of conflict. And I like when it’s unexpected in the sense when another reporter might look at it and say, “That’s too mundane to be newsworthy.” I like to have some kind of a surprise at the ending, but I can’t always do that. You can’t concoct it.
I love secrets, and the idea of the past meeting the present. Or maybe there’s an event that takes place, and you can frame it in a way that it’s almost like a short story. You haven’t taken liberty with the facts. It’s in the words you use and the way that it happens.
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Q:
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Do you worry about crossing the line from emotion into sentimentality?
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A:
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All the time. All the time. I worry most about sentimentality—and humor that doesn’t work. I may be guilty of it sometimes. But I’m aware of it. What I’ll do is read my stories aloud to my wife on the phone. Also, in my conversations with copy editors, after we go through the story, I almost always ask, “Is there anything in there that makes you cringe? You gotta tell me.” I’m begging them to save me from embarrassment. But we’re also trying to produce something good for the paper.
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