blog

4/20 Revisited

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:36:40 +0100

Considering all of the marijuana news on this site, you might think you have a pretty good idea what I was up to on April 20. But you’d probably be wrong.

Many more details will be forthcoming in an article I’m writing, but the basics are that I spent the entire day with 23 other journalists from around the globe learning life-saving combat medicine skills at a training seminar put on by Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC). Held at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York, it was the capstone of a three-day crash course in how to open an airway, seal a sucking chest wound, stop (or at least slow) profuse bleeding, bandage wounds, perform CPR and identify a whole range of medical emergencies that reporters and photographers are likely to encounter when working in hostile areas.

That the graduation was held on 4/20 was no mistake. That’s the day, a year earlier, that Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington were killed by mortar fire in Misurata, Libya. Author Sebastian Junger, who founded RISC, believes that Tim’s wound to the femoral artery high on his leg, while very serious, needn’t have been fatal. If any of the other correspondents or rebels soldiers present had known basic life-saving skills, they might have been able to slow the bleeding enough for him to make it to the hospital.

Sebastian wanted to mark the anniversary of our friends’ deaths with something positive and significant, by teaching the first of what will hopefully be many waves of freelance journalists the skills that could save lives in the future. The course was taught by a highly skilled group of professionals from Maine-based Wilderness Medical Associates that included a former Army medic, a tropical medicine specialist and wilderness survival experts. We spent our days covered in fake blood, packing gauze into chicken carcasses, running through mock drills and rescuing training dummies wounded in action.

To say that it was an honor to have been involved is an understatement. Though there was little that could have been done for Chris on that day in Misurata—the head wound he suffered was simply too severe—it was an empowering way to spend the anniversary of his death and honor his and Tim’s memories. Everyone at RISC, WMA and the Bronx Documentary Center has my deep thanks, as do the initial sponsors of the event (which include Getty Images and the Chris Hondros Fund) for recognizing the importance of this training and making it possible to offer it for free.

Full details for those interested in taking the course (with upcoming events in London and Beirut) can be found at the RISC website. I’ll be sure to post a link to the article when it runs.

Photo by Ricky Flores

This never gets old

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:24:16 +0100

Remember that time I blogged about how, if you wanted to write for a “living,” that you’d have to come to terms with an especially depressing vision, that of yourself hunched over old dishes in the sink watching the dawn while drinking whiskey from a coffee cup, wearing a smelly bathrobe that you couldn’t remember putting on —Two days ago? Five?—and privately wondering how much insurance money you could get if you lit a fire in the garage?

Well, there is a bright side to that hard-knocks advice and it comes to your doorstep in the persona of the UPS man. Your books have arrived—real books, with their fresh stiff bindings just begging to be broken by someone curled up for a night of reading—and everything you’ve gone through up to that point has suddenly been worth it

My typically joyous reaction was a bit delayed this time around. Normally I would rip open the door and tear into the box before even signing the receipt. But since my current book is a chronicle of my clandestine adventures growing pot (in this very house), it’s still my habit to treat any ring of the doorbell in the same manner as Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs—as if it were a screeching alarm telling me the cops had arrived and it was time to barricade the fortress.

But it was no decoy designed to lure me outside where it would be easier for the DEA to throw a net on me. Officially, Pot Inc. will be on sale next Tuesday, April 3. But unofficially, there will be a limited number of advanced copies on sale for those lucky enough to live in the Denver area a few days before then. I’ll be one of three authors speaking on a panel at Lighthouse Writers Workshop this Saturday, March 31 at 7 p.m. We’ll be discussing how our books went through the process from the first hare-brained idea to the finished product. There will be wine and refreshments and Lighthouse’s famous convivial atmosphere. The event is open to the public and I hope to see many of you there.

A few days after Pot Inc. arrived, I got another surprise. When the doorbell rang again, I thought for sure that this was it. In typical DEA style, they’d botched the first raid and followed the wrong UPS truck, I thought. Peeking through the curtains, I saw another box on the doorstep and I approached it as if I were expecting something from Ted Kaczynski. It was nothing sinister … on the contrary, it was a double-dose of publishing’s true reward: a box filled with new editions of Blood Diamonds, which is on sale as a 10^th anniversary edition with new material from my trip to Sierra Leone last year.

You can find both of these titles at your favorite local or online retailer; meanwhile, I’m off to shop for a new bookshelf.

All the news that's fit to blog

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:51:22 +0100

Greetings from the world’s worst self-promoter!

You know, one of the first things you’re supposed to learn as a freelancer is how to bring attention to yourself and your work. Big surprise, that’s always been the most difficult part of this job for me. It’s those little things, like tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, et cetera.

So because I’m long overdue on this front, I hope you won’t mind an entire post dedicated to the Things I Should Have Been Telling You About All Along, But Haven’t Been. To wit:

Workshops:

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be continuing to teach a series of nonfiction workshops at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, an insanely cool salon/refuge/conclave of local writers, both professional and beginner, in Denver. On Monday, I’ll wrap up my first eight-week offerings and I’ve had the time of my life. Not only is the setting in a beautifully restored turn-of-the-century mansion superb, but so too is the level of fun and camaraderie among those in my workshops.

It works like this: I facilitate the discussion of various nonfiction forms, styles and techniques with a group of 10 writers, each of whom are working on their own projects. We read my chosen examples of narrative nonfiction illustrating certain aspects of the discussion, talk about them and then we critique one another’s works, with an eye toward providing feedback, support and suggestions for making them stronger. This is done in a real spirit of fun and cooperation, usually (OK, always) over a glass of wine and some h’orderves.

The critiques are the best part of it and I invariably learn as much from the feedback as I hope to teach. I’m thrilled to have been asked to continue with it.

So, I will be teaching the following beginning on March 19:

• Intermediate/Advanced Narrative Nonfiction on Mondays from 4-6 p.m.:

A workshop for people interested in taking their research-based narrative or literary journalism to the next level. This workshop will focus on such topics as the art of interviewing, using journalistic techniques to add detail and nuance, scene construction, arc development, pacing, the appropriate use of first person, and writing with authority. Through class discussion, exercises, and critiques, the class will help you continue to develop the narrative aspects of nonfiction and to turn otherwise dry reporting into well-paced page-turners. Because each class is tailored toward the needs of the group, actual assignments and topics will vary.

Prior to taking this class, student must take: Intro to Narrative Nonfiction, Intro to Writing Memoir or Personal Essay or have permission from the instructor.

• Introduction to Narrative Nonfiction on Mondays from 6:30-8:30 p.m.

An introductory workshop for people interested in crafting personal or research-based narrative, literary journalism, or memoir. This workshop will help you understand how to turn personal experiences or nonfiction reporting into riveting stories with universal themes. Through class discussion, exercises, and critiques, the class will help you continue to develop the narrative aspects of nonfiction. We’ll cover such concepts as writing dynamic scenes, recounting dialogue, building tension, developing “characters,” and how to mine your experience for deeper meaning. Because each class is tailored toward the needs of the group, actual assignments and topics will vary.

• Introduction to Narrative Nonfiction, online class:

Same description as above, but this takes place online! Meaning you can attend from anywhere on the globe.

And I know this will sound like a self-promotion marketing gimmick (the kind I’m terrible at), but these classes DO fill up quickly and there are only 10 slots available in each. Please don’t put it off if this is something you’re interested in because not only will you miss out on a lot of fun for the next eight weeks, but you won’t be able to take another until August, when the workshops resume.

Go here to learn more and enroll.

Jerseys on sale:

As part of our continuing effort to raise money for the completion of our film “Recovering,” Michael de Yoanna, the director, has scored a really cool coupe: Primal Wear, one of our sponsors, has designed and is selling the film’s official biking jersey. Wearing this on your next ride will show your support both for the film as well as for the soldiers to whom it is dedicated. Visit our website to order yours, as well as advance copies of the film on DVD (in full HD or Blu-ray.)

(And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, click here to learn all about the film and to watch the trailer.)

Books:

Last but not least, there’s a slew of book news:

• As previously announced, Road to Kosovo is finally available for e-readers. It’s available for Nook, Kindle, iPad (through the iBookstore app) and any other e-reader you might have.

• Blood Diamonds is ready to hit the shelves in its new and improved version. This 10^th anniversary edition includes an additional 15,000 word coda based upon my visit to Sierra Leone last summer.

• Flawless is available in paperback.

• And last but not least, Pot Inc., my personal adventure into the world of medical marijuana, will be on sale on April 3, but is available for pre-order now through Barnes & Noble.

What else? Surely I’m missing something, but for the moment, I think this will suffice. Thanks for letting me do some house cleaning to bring you up to speed. Expect these info-items more frequently in the coming days … April and May are bound to be filled with appearances, readings and other events around the release of Pot Inc. I’ll keep you updated as the schedule starts to fill up.

Mahalo.

Official "Recovering" trailer released

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:57:02 +0100

Official trailer for Recovering, the documentary film from Become Films on Vimeo.

Ah, how well I remember the day when Michael deYoanna and I were shopping at the Fort Carson Post Exchange trying to decide if we needed to buy just one 1-terabyte hard drive to store the footage for our then-untitled documentary about injured veterans or if we should pony up and buy two just to be safe. Filming hadn’t started yet and, since neither of us had ever made a documentary, we had no idea how much storage we would need.

Nine months later, we’ve filled five terabytes with material, stored in a teetering stack of external hard drives on Michael’s desk. I think we estimated that the footage equals about 500 hours. I am responsible for most of it, having filmed veterans on multi-day long-distance bike rides from Arlington, Va., to Virginia Beach over six days in June; all around Normandy, France for more than a week in July; and from Richmond, Va., to the Pentagon via New York City and Shanksville, Pa. during ten days around the anniversary of 9/11. After each day’s ride, Michael and I conducted in-depth on-camera interviews in our hotel rooms and traveled to vets’ homes to see their lives when they’re not on a bike.

Michael and I are hard on our equipment. During the course of filming, we destroyed a DSLR, a Rode microphone, a GoPro camera and a nice Canon lens. We lost a handful of speed plates, boom poles and too many other filmmaking gimcracks to count. And with each leg of filming, our volume of gear grew and grew … we went from lugging a few heavy bags to lugging a dozen heavy bags as we added studio lighting, walkie talkies, more and more hard drives, and extra tripods to our list of essentials. By the end of it all, we needed to rent a van just to get the gear from place to place.

But it was worth every effort.

The emotional and impactful story at the heart of our film, “Recovering,” is that of men and women who were badly injured since the beginning of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, both mentally and physically, taking their recovery into their own hands (and feet) from the saddles of bicycles. Even if they have no hands or feet.

Each of their stories are different—one cyclist was initially injured as a first responder at the Pentagon on 9/11, another was run over by a Humvee while rescuing a comrade, another lost his legs in an IED explosion—but the common thread is the inspiration they found with one another while riding. Out there on the road, surrounded by the only people in the world who can truly understand what they had gone through, and are still going through, they found a new sense of duty and purpose. As they would in Iraq or Afghanistan, they formed small squads and units on their bikes and tackled each day’s challenges with the same discipline and camaraderie as they would any other mission. No one was left behind. Everyone was pushed to give their all. Friendships and bonds were formed.

That’s as true with us as it was with them. Michael, the film’s director, and I, the director of photography, approached this project as we would any other journalism assignment, but we emerged with friendships that will last well beyond the completion of this project. It wasn’t always easy—many vets tend to be wary of the media. But we’re pretty wary of the media ourselves, frankly, and took pains to distance ourselves from many others in our profession. For example, there was the TV reporter in Arlington who, with no introduction or preamble, approached one of the paralyzed riders, clipped a microphone on him, turned on his camera and said tactlessly, “Tell me how you lost your legs.” No wonder it took awhile to earn their trust.

But I’m glad we did. I came out of this experience a better person, with a much better understanding of war and the toll it extracts from those who fight them. I also came away with a sublime appreciation for the healing power of the human spirit. That, in the end, is what we hope others take from the film as well. We called it “Recovering,” because it is a long and ongoing process.

And so too is finishing the film. Today, we’re proud to release the first trailer, both to give a sneak peak into what the film is about, as well as to help generate financing in order to complete it. We have many months ahead of editing, entering competitions and finding a distributor, which is where the real work lies. Much of that is in Michael's hands, and those of our friend Andrew Pogany, the film's military consultant who has been making connections in many areas to move the film forward.

But there's a role you can play as well. This project began with the help of strangers, through a Kickstarter campaign that financed the first bit of filming. Now we’re asking for a bit more help—please go to our production company’s website and promote the trailer on Twitter and Facebook. If you or someone you know is a bike rider, consider buying an official “Recovering” jersey made especially Primal Wear in Colorado to promote the film and give thanks to the troops for their service.

Breaking on through

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:33:22 +0100

It’s been some time since I really listened to rock-n-roll. I’m not talking about turning up the radio when “Baba O’Reilly” comes on in the car. I’m talking about clearing all the inhabitants out of the house and cranking up the stereo—the old beast I bought off a former boss that’s one of the last of its kind, rigged with outlets for ten speakers of any wattage I can afford—and letting “L.A. Woman” shake pictures off the wall at about 200 decibels.

Have you done that lately? The bass on that song can pop a valve in your heart if you’re not careful, and I’m not. I sit six inches from the speakers and let the vibration of “city at night, woo!” blow through my bones from the floorboards. I turn it up so loud that it’s impossible to hear myself screaming along.

It’s been a long time since I felt I could do this. Music is a minefield in a time of grief, as anyone who’s lost a loved one knows. Hondros was a classical music junkie, but what many forget is that the roots of his musical tutelage came mojo risin right out of the classic rock standards. We drove big fast American muscle cars in high school—mine was a Chevy Impala; Chris had a Nova—and there was no Mahler or Mozart involved. Def Leopard, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Journey, U2, Foreigner, and AC/DC composed our soundtrack. We once drove 400 miles between Jackson, Miss. and Dallas—in a 1975 Malibu station wagon—listening to nothing but Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” over and over so that we could decipher the lyrics and to keep our minds off the real fear that a badly leaking head gasket would leave us stranded somewhere in East Texas. For Chris, classical music came later and took over the playlist. I never budged.

So it’s been hard in these long months to brave the radio dials. There are weird days when his spirit seems to have hijacked the airways and no matter what button I punch there’s a song that takes me back to a specific time and place on the timeline of our lives. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” reminds me of spring break in Myrtle Beach; “Start Me Up” takes me back to the fake ID fiasco in Ft. Lauderdale; “Smells Like Teen Spirit” puts me back in my old VW bus during the time I managed to drunkenly park it, after much back and forth, so that the open sliding bay door was less than an inch from his Raleigh apartment’s back door, ensuring that anyone making a break from one of his legendary parties would sprawl headlong into a musty-smelling Grateful Dead daydream and be trapped. Taking a trip along the FM dial’s classic rock stations, in other words, runs the risk of sobbing behind the wheel on the highway. I’ve been keeping to talk radio since April.

But that’s no way to live, and Chris would agree. So on Monday, I paired the iPod to this dinosaur of a stereo that I’m convinced can break windows if I push it far enough (I’m really not kidding about this—I finally sold the three-foot high Sony paneled speakers it came with because I couldn’t get the volume beyond quarter power without toppling vases and showering fine powder from the rafters), dialed in “L.A. Woman” and let her ride. This is a safe enough song, because I remember it as one we sang at the top of our lungs while rock climbing in Joshua Tree. Chris belted out Morrison’s “I gotta woooo!, yeah!!” a cappella when he nailed a hard move on a hard climb during a high-desert sunset back in the summer of 1990 and the memory always makes me smile.

Don’t get me wrong; there are still songs that are totally off limits (I might never be able to listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony again, the only classical piece I’ve ever truly loved because Chris once talked me through its majesty note for note, and which could always be counted on to bring me to tears without the added freight of grief; or The Doors’ “The End,” which was something of an anthem we shared in high school because we knew that real heartbreak was required to truly understand it, which neither of us had yet experienced), but this was a start. A start at what, I’m not really sure. I just know that music was a critical component of Chris’s life, one of those things that simply couldn’t be done without, like oxygen and literature. It’s the same with me, and I know that he would frown on me listening to some jazz channel on Pandora because it has no connection to anything important.

So I brought down the house Monday. I blew that motherfucker out—“L.A. Woman,” then “Moonlight Drive,” “Backdoor Man” and “Break on Through.” I went through the opus, even risking Zeppelin’s “That’s the Way” and “Going to California.” By the time “Kashmir” came on—which, by the way, is a truly transcendental experience when total aural input solders off all other senses—I was on another planet. I was crying, of course, because these songs couldn’t (and would never) be severed from my memories of him, but it was finally OK. In my mind, we were in the car again, cruising across East Texas toward the horizon, happy enough that the oil pressure was holding and we could make it another hundred miles, at least, before we’d have to start worrying again. That was all the foresight we needed, and we took it one song at a time.

Even if we had to play that one song over and over again.

Road to Kosovo—Now available for e-readers

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:44:03 +0100

Hey, kid: did Santa get you a Kindle or a Nook or an iPad for Christmas? Because I’ve got just the thing to load it with: the newly released digital version of The Road to Kosovo, A Balkan Diary, my first book published in 1999, now newly edited and expanded exclusively for digital publication.

Throughout the years, I’ve heard from many people who either didn’t know this book existed or couldn’t get their hands on a copy. Since it was, for the most part, out of print, Westview Press recently reverted the book’s copyright to me so I could make it available online. So rather than spending the past few weeks shopping and getting in the Christmas spirit, I’ve been slaving at the keyboard becoming far more of an expert at Microsoft Word than I’d ever planned. Formatting for e-readers is a science (and a frustrating one at that), but for a first effort, I think I pulled it off with fewer glitches than one might expect. Knock on wood.

What’s that? Santa didn’t get you a Kindle? Never fear, because The Road to Kosovo can be read on practically any digital device from iPhone to laptop, using the free Kindle app for your device. Download the book in 10 different formats here on Smashwords, or have it beamed directly to your Kindle from its Amazon page. The book is also being processed by Barnes & Noble, iBookstore and others and will be available directly through those retailers soon. Once all the sites have it ready to go, I’ll post direct links on my Books page.

Read the author’s note that accompanies the new version, and to find a coupon at the end you can redeem at Smashwords to get it for half price from now until the end of the year …

A note from the author

The Road to Kosovo; A Balkan Diary was originally released in the spring of 1999, three weeks after NATO forces began what was to be a 78-day bombing campaign in Yugoslavia to end ethnic cleansing by Serb forces in Kosovo. The timing was fortuitous for a first-time author, and the book was quickly reprinted in paperback in 2000 with an additional chapter based on my return to Kosovo shortly after the offensive ended. For a brief period of time—the prototypical fifteen minutes of fame—The Road to Kosovo was the most contemporary in-depth source for commentators and pundits looking for an explanation for how we got to where we were. Despite the atrocities of Bosnia that ended just a few years before and the months of violent buildup in Serbia’s southern province, our involvement in the conflict in Kosovo took many people in the United States by surprise. We’re having a war where, exactly? And why?

It was a bit of lucky instinct on my part that The Road to Kosovo came out when it did to help people begin to answer those questions. When I conducted my reporting in the summer of 1998, it was not at all certain that the regional conflict would mushroom into an all-out war involving NATO, one that threatened our international relations with key countries like Russia and China, which were still establishing their footing in a post Cold War world. Or that it would result in one of the greatest population displacements since World War II. It certainly had the potential to get out of hand, which of course is why I was there in the first place. Two years earlier, as the war in Bosnia was ending, simmering tension in Kosovo was considered by many of the correspondents and diplomats gathered at the low tables in the lobby of the Sarajevo Holiday Inn as the most likely source of renewed violence in the Balkans. Serbian aggression in Kosovo, it was predicted, would lead to wider calamity and a return to the sort of butchery and violence that was just being put to rest in Bosnia. When that violence began to manifest in the spring of 1998, I returned to see how accurate the predictions would be.

The Road to Kosovo did its duty to the time in which it was published, offering a snapshot of a confusing conflict rooted in centuries of unrest. So why is it being rereleased now?

As proud as I am with my first book, I’ve long wished that I could tinker with it just a bit more. There were things that, as I matured as a writer, I felt needed a bit of tweaking—after all, I wrote it when I was 25. Like muscles, writing skills develop over time and there are passages in the original printing that, to me at least, show a still-developing writer at work. For example, my younger self had a fascination with stupendously long sentences infested with colons, semicolons, ellipses, and clauses offset with long dashes. The rhythm and timing of certain sections was abrupt and jolting. Passages whiplashed between somber and funny with less aplomb than I would employ today. Throughout the years, I would thumb through The Road to Kosovo and wish I had the chance to take an editor’s pen to the manuscript.

Now, with the emergence of digital publishing, I’ve had the chance to do just that. Over the course of a few weeks in late 2011, I polished and buffed the entire manuscript. This is no major rewrite, but a more of a fine-tuning. I lobbed out some small sections that did nothing to add to the story and introduced some new material that did. Sentences were rearranged to improve the flow and I rediscovered the utility of the common period, of which there was an apparent global shortage when I wrote the book in the first place. Those who were mentally running out of breath trying to find the end of endless sentences will be relieved.

Consider this, then, to be the director’s cut, complete with a new cover featuring a photo of Kosovar refugees taken by my best friend, the late Chris Hondros. With physical copies out of print, it’s a great satisfaction to have improved this work as it joins my other books on the digital bookshelf. Thanks for adding it to your library.

Readers of this blog can get RTK half off from now until the end of the year by entering this code at checkout through the Smashwords site: JZ26N.

Give a gift to the world: Donate to the Chris Hondros Fund

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:26:51 +0100

Fire-breathers and flame-dancers aren’t typical holiday party entertainment, but ChrisHondrosmas was not your typical holiday party. One of the artists let a flaming mace-like thing get away from him, but it hit the concrete floor harmlessly and the guy barely missed a beat scooping it up and recovering his performance. My friend Todd Heisler, the Pulitzer-winning New York Times photographer, tilted his head and whispered, “If that thing hits the sofa, it’s all over.”

We raised our eyebrows at each other in a mixture of apprehension and anticipation. Deep down, we sort of wanted to see it happen—with some of the world’s best photographers in the room, the photos would be awesome, and since the building was brick and concrete, there would be little damage—but once the flames started twirling, many guests silently eyeballed the dimensions of the one door we’d have to escape through to calculate how many of the partygoers could fit through it at once.

The subversive thrill provided by the pyrotechnics was definitely appropriate, however, to the often-mischievous spirit of the person being honored that night. Held as a fundraiser and silent auction to benefit the Chris Hondros Fund, the party was one Hondros would have appreciated. His only regret would have been that he hadn’t come up with the idea of fire-dancers first. Were he still with us, there’s no question that every one of his already legendary parties from then on would have featured tattooed and dreadlocked women lighting their inner thighs on fire.

The event was held in Pittsburgh and put on by photographer Jeff Swensen and the crew at his Barking Dog Studio. I’ve known Jeff and Todd and many more of Chris’s friends for years, but only truly met them after he was killed in Libya in April. As much as the party was for the sake of raising money to help future generations of photojournalists follow in Chris’s footsteps, it was also a reunion of his close friends who span a variety of generations, career paths, time zones, and nationalities. As Jeff said, Chris was the Johnny Appleseed of friendship, leaving behind strong and vibrant relationships wherever he went. It was bittersweet (to say the least) to have been there with so many wonderful people without the person who brought us all together. But as Todd said, we’re family now. And I for one could not be more pleased with or proud of my new brothers and sisters.

In the end, ChrisHondrosmas raised $4,000 for the fund, but fundraising doesn’t end just because the party is over. Charitable donations are among the most meaningful gifts that can be given for the holidays because they have an impact far beyond a single recipient. In the case of the Chris Hondros Fund (of which I’m an associate director), donations will be used for grants and fellowships for young photojournalists who not only have outstanding potential, but who also embody Chris’s spirit of humanity and compassion, in both their work and in their lives. Of course, there can never be another Chris Hondros, but there are people out there in his mold who are awaiting the opportunity to be discovered. The fund was set up to allow Chris’s legacy of producing meaningful and heartfelt work in some of the darkest corners of the world to continue in the hands of other photographers. Donations are tax deductible.

For more information, please see the Chris Hondros Fund website, and donate through the link provided. Thank you and happy holidays!

Closing Chapters

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 01:15:36 +0100

One of the many jobs writers have is identifying timelines, looking for openings and closings, beginnings and ends. Whether it’s with sentences, paragraphs, chapters, or the stories themselves, there are places for you to dive in and others where you must fade out. Any story is just an encapsulation of a period of time and no matter how much you’re enjoying it (or not, in some cases), there must be a time to put it to rest. Ending a chapter—both in life and in the craft of writing—can be easy or hard but it must be done because both stories and experiences are finite. They can weave themselves into the fabric of your life, but even the threads in fabric have a beginning and an end.

I puzzled for a few days over this blog post because I wanted to explain why I haven’t written much lately. For most of this past year, I’ve been busy closing chapters, both literally and figuratively. It’s been a long period of tying up loose ends and I’d been fighting contradictory battles while doing so. On one hand, I wanted to be done with it all, to have already moved on, to skip ahead to newer horizons and more interesting things. But on the other, I wanted to hold on to what was tangible and comfortable as long as possible, to have “something to do” so that I could avoid the inevitable—starting those new chapters.

The past few months have been unusually hectic. I’ve been wrapping up three book projects at once, finalizing chapters in Pot Inc. which is finally ready for the printer and its spring release, adding a 15,000-word epitaph to Blood Diamonds for its 10^th anniversary edition, and giving The Road to Kosovo a chapter-by-chapter facelift in preparation for its digital release sometime in the next few weeks.

It’s a case of happy symbiosis that all of these titles will be freshly released at roughly the same time (as will Flawless, which is coming out in paperback early next year), and it made sense to spend the time needed to fine-tune them all. I looked at it as a matter of housekeeping, one of those natural moments of closure that us writers are always looking for, a chance to wrap up 15 years of work all at once to make room on the shelf (literally) for whatever is going to come next.

But in the meantime, I’ve been dealing with another sort of chapter ending that I haven’t been so eager to see completed. It’s been seven months since Chris’s death in Libya and my reaction has been to run as hard as I could and as far as possible from whatever I’m supposed to be doing to deal with it. I spent nearly four of those seven months traveling—to France, to Africa, to ten different states—just to keep my mind occupied.

As I should have known, that tactic isn’t sustainable. As each of these publishing projects comes to their natural end, the need to deal with this larger thing looms that much closer. It’s led to procrastination, inertia, and a million different reasons to postpone getting started on something new, even writing blog posts. It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out why. Chris has a direct tie to each of the things I’ve worked on these past years and months; he was involved in each of the books I’ve been working on. Finishing their chapters feels like I’m finishing a chapter of my life with him. Moving forward means leaving him behind, fixed in memory.

Knowing that there’s no other choice hasn’t made it any easier. I’m afraid of forgetting. But I’m also afraid of coming to a standstill. The trick is to find a balance between the two, another skill I’ve been trying to relate to writing. I’m always balancing something—hard info with personal narrative, humor with gravity, illustrative scenes with macroscopic overviews. And that, actually, is the point of having chapters, to organize information and experiences. What’s easy to forget is that ending one chapter and beginning a new one doesn’t erase what’s happened before. Themes carry forward and the past is part of the larger work, working in concert with the whole and serving to enrich it. It will always be there to revisit.

Still … I’m the sort of writer who likes to linger and tinker over things perhaps a bit too obsessively, never entirely content to close any chapter completely. Have I done my best? Have I paid proper respects to my material? Am I saying the right thing? Is it really time to type the final period and start fresh on a new page?

How will I ever know?

From the archives: An open letter to our school superintendent

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 15:54:25 +0100

We got ten inches of snow last night, with more falling from the sky every hour. It's the heavy, icy kind that snaps trees like pretzel sticks. The roads are a slick nightmare, and the best bet on a day like today is to hunker down indoors to drink coffee and watch soap operas. But true to form, our school district did not call off school today. Apparently, the superintendent has a congenital dislike of snow days, which reminded me of a column I wrote in 2007 in which I addressed him directly after he allowed classes to be held in the face of a king-hell blizzard. Since the same guy is in charge, I thought it fitting to dig it out of the archives and repost it, for old time's sake.

Dear PSD Superintendent Gerald Wilson:

I didn’t get the news that you’d cancelled school last Thursday until my boy was already gone for more than an hour … we sent him packing shortly before sun-up, because he had a long journey ahead of him. We live on the far south end of town, but he goes to school near Old Town and the wife and I knew that if he were to arrive punctually for classes, he’d need a good four-hour head start. As you may know, it snowed a bit the day before and for some damned reason neither the Ford Explorer nor the Toyota 4Runner managed to ram through the three-foot wall of frozen snow at the foot of the driveway, even after getting a nice tire-smoking head start from within the garage. I’m taking both of those cheap vehicles to have their four-wheel-drive inspected, as soon as the front yard melts enough for their wheels to touch the ground again.

Anyway, we figured that since you weren’t intimidated by the weather on Wednesday, Thursday would surely be no different. After all, it was supposed to stop snowing on Thursday and who ever heard of a school cancellation when the weather was forecast to improve?

Oh sure, the kid whined a bit about wanting a “snow day” like every other student in Colorado, whether they were in preschool or college. But I reminded him that not every other kid attends school in the Poudre School District.

“Mr. Wilson didn’t cancel school because he knows how to build character, son. He’s from Oregon,” I told him. “Do you think the pioneers who founded Fort Collins had ‘snow days?’”

So we stuffed his backpack with his homework, some emergency flares, plenty of water, a flashlight, some waterproof matches and a .22 rifle in case he had to hunker down and shoot himself a few squirrels. I could tell he was proud to be taking on this challenge you’d presented him with, even through the tears, which were sort of frozen to his face. Since he’s only in the fourth grade, my Yukon snowshoes were a bit big on him … he managed about four or five steps before taking a headfirst digger. Boy that snow was deep! We let him flail around on his own until he managed to teeter to his feet again. How else was he going to learn? We figured you’d approve.

Imagine my disappointment to learn much later that you’d canceled school! At first I thought it was a joke, and then I feared that you’d suffered a coup at the hands of some spineless weakling who didn’t like the thought of digging his car out of a five-foot snow drift, even if it was for the purpose of educating our children. But then I read the online version of the Coloradoan (even THEY were apparently too cowed to get out there and deliver the paper, them and my postman … what’s this city coming to?) and found out that it was true, that you’d caved in to a cabal of whiny parents who were miffed at YOU because THEY couldn’t navigate their cars through snow. OK, so it was falling at an inch a minute and propelled by 35 mile per hour winds, but still. Give me a break.

The point is, I’m disappointed that you didn’t stick to your guns … maybe if there’d been more superintendents like you in PSD’s past, I would have gotten my newspaper and my mail last week, “snow days” be damned. Nothing like a little adversity to shore up one’s mettle. I’m sure my son will agree, once he returns home.

Warm regards,

Greg Campbell

On snow, and loss

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:57:06 +0100

It began snowing about an hour ago, the first big one of the year, and within minutes, I was thinking about my dead friend.

It’s somewhat baffling, because there is no connection whatsoever between the death of Chris Hondros, who was killed by mortar fire in the warm and pleasant spring of Libya, and snowfall. In fact, I have very few memories of Chris in the snow, and standing on my back porch watching it fall—clad in fleece pajamas with a glass of wine in my hand, my back to the scene in our living room of a hearthful of burning logs and The Shining on TV as a precursor to Halloween—I had to really try to remember when we were last together in a snowstorm. I had to reach back about three years for a memory, but it was a good one.

Sometime just before Christmas in 2008, I made one of my semiannual pilgrimages to New York City to, as Chris always said, “pay homage” to the publishing capital of the world. This was when Chris still lived in his loft on Tillary Street in Brooklyn, and because of the drafty floor-to-ceiling windows that insulated the apartment about as well as our wishful thinking, it was freezing cold. We sat around his apartment in sweaters and overcoats, shivering and trying to pretend the temperature wasn’t subarctic despite having the heater pegged on its highest setting. Chris tried everything he could to warm the place, including leaving all of his burners on the gas stove at a low flame and constantly keeping a kettle of boiling water steaming into the room in an effort to raise the humidity.

Finally, it became too cold to bear and Chris announced that he had a solution—we were heading to Home Depot to buy a new rug. The apartment’s problem, he decided, was its concrete floors that were as cold as ice. “A nice rug,” he said, “will do the trick.”

The trouble was that the main area in the loft was about 800 square feet of open space, variously covered in sundry rugs that were doing no good at all to trap heat. Chris was convinced that a bare spot right in the middle was the culprit and he was determined to cover it for good and finally solve his home heating problem.

Home Depot in Manhattan had a surprisingly vast selection of rugs, but none were bigger than ten square feet. Convinced we were wasting time and money, I suggested the cheapest rug in stock, about $50, but Chris didn’t like the pattern. In the end, he went with a $100-or-so selection in a beige and pale green paisley design that I hated. We were like bickering spouses, arguing over cost and patterns in the middle of Home Depot, but in the end, it was his apartment. Back home, the rug did nothing to stave off the cold but I refilled the kettle and said nothing.

It was a bitterly cold week in New York, rugs or not. I remember it being a penultimate example of any visit with Hondros, but spiced with a holiday flavor. During any of my trips east, Chris put together an agenda, which inevitably included several parties in which he would arrange for the orbits of his influential media friends to intersect with my far limited one. We crashed many that week, including (by accident) a same-sex civil union reception at which we knew no one but where we ended up staying for over an hour even after we realized we were at the wrong apartment.

At one point in the night, it started to snow—heavy wet rainy snow that’s not like what I’m used to in Colorado. I remember stumbling after Chris to his car and remarking that he wore a scarf in all four seasons, but never a hat when he needed one. Too drunk to attend the last soirée of the evening, I lazed in the passenger seat of the double-parked car while Chris made an appearance inside, watching the snow build on the windshield and listening to the same hush that heavy snowfall always produces, no matter where you are. That’s a scene that could create anxiety in any other circumstance—illegally parked on some dark street in the meat district, not even knowing what building my friend is in—but I wasn’t worried about anything. I never was when I was with Chris.

That hush and solitude and the unique peace of a heavy snowfall continued a bit later, after we’d gotten home to Tillary Street and retreated to his rooftop deck for a nightcap and to watch the snow come down all around us. We smoked cigars and drank brandy and cognac and just enjoyed the cold, quiet experience.

Tonight, I enjoyed the cold, quiet experience with my dog lying at my feet and some animal, a fox or raccoon, rustling through the bushes just beyond the light from the porch, seeking shelter. I expected only to come outside to gauge the intensity of the storm, but wound up in a reverie I hadn’t expected, feeling a new edge on the crater of my loss that seems to know no depth. I think more than anything, I was amazed that snow could fall without him being here to see it, or being somewhere where I could email him and tell him about it.

In my mind, he’s still out there in that warm and pleasant Libyan springtime where everything stopped forever, and where it could never possibly snow.

About the photo: Taken by our close friend Jeff Swensen.