Crayons to Chaos

lombardi goes local, gets clips, and returns to the old obsessions

As I commence another all-nighter, and continue with my nearly-unbroken wail of "I can't write!", I wanted to mention some slightly more encouraging developments as well.

I guess I can start by just limning the week:

The same day as my last post, I got a call from a small Queens weekly, which had already expressed interest in my mold story. The editor (J  '04, by the way) wanted to know if I would cover a debate in the 26th City Council District - one that went on without the front-runner in this Democratic town, Eric Gioia. Still recovering from my cold, I trudged to Long Island City, to observe a debate between Robyn Sklar -- a typical Green, smart, well-meaning and a bit clueless - and Nancy Jackson of that chameleon Independence Party, who couldn't quire conceal her true wingnut characteristics. The resulting article, as well as the editor's analysis,  appears here - in addition to the mold story, which ran on the front page of the paper this week.

A poor thing, but mine own: I'm perhaps irrationally quite thrilled at my first clip in weeks. And now, he's already expressed a desire for the food pantry and even the Z Crew stories: so I'm real, in my own way. (It's nice to know if I'm not CJR caliber, I'm good enough for the Queens Chronicle.)

Also,  some good progress on reporting for the two magazine pieces: I went to this yesterday, and after the obligatory VIP breakfast, started stalking young men with very short hair and guarded expressions, in the hope I'd find people willing to be part of a piece we might as well title "The Things They Carry."  Surprisingly, allmost none outright refused to talk to me - too well bred, and maybe I'm about the age of their mom? And I met a few who might, I hope, be the characters I'm looking for. Meanwhile, my takeout story,  on domestic violence in immigrant communities, has turned up a bunch of great possibilities, including this. I'm not giving any more detail for fear of jinxing myself.

Meanwhile, the prep for the spring is beginning -- and it don't look any easier. And this morning, I went to the briefing session for this class, which sounds like it guarantees that no-easier bit - while it helps you develop a viable book proposal. I'm now worrying frantically over my one-paragraph email pitch, which may or may not get me into the class. (I also learned yesterday that the fall scholarship money hasn't actually been given out yet. Which doesn't mean I'm anywhere near the top of the class, but it somehow cheered me to feel like it ain't over till it's over.)

What haven't I mentioned? My RW1 story for this week. Which I should have written after my return on Monday to I.S. 126, and Betty Pansione's library space, to hang out with the kids at Ramadan.  But  instead I tried to go to a kids' Diwali celebration on Wednesday, which didn't happen, and then to sniff at these guys' mosque yesterday, the first day of Eid, which turned out to be closed. Ultimately I wandered around the hood re-remembering stuff like the ecumenically named Allah Tawwakil Grocery, which advertises both Halal Meat and Spanish Grocery, and the park where amid all the Spanish one kid calls to another. "Wait, Ishmael!" All of the above in search of the "rock 'n'roll feature" demanded by the syllabus. I wish I'd had the stamina and nerve to go for a beer with one of the GIs, and I'd have declared a topic change.

I still might. Let's see if I can't weave something out of the gentle rabbi-voice and round face of young Naur,  who responded to a generalized question about the Pakistani earthquake with "When one of us suffers, we all suffer."  (Even the corpses, pal.) And hope that this good-reporting-energy doesn't dissolve under the conviction that I can't, actually, write a word.

gateways, blood spatters and pen de mort

So I've sat here for six hours trying to write my story for the Covering Courts and Trials class, and ended up writing 3000 words that I posted first on Book of Days. Now I'll get to take a break before I shape 1000 words that sound more lke an article than a ramble.

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Q. Do you have any recollection about anything that he said?
A. Oh, yeah, he said they had been into an argument and he slapped her and she fell and hit her
head and it killed her and he didn’t mean for it to happen.
Q. Was he intoxicated?
A. He was drinking real heavily, yeah.
Q. Was he emotional?
A. Very.
Q. All right. How very is very?
A. Well, he was crying and just all to pieces.
Q. All right. How long had he been there before he told you about this incident?
A. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes, not real long.
Q. Did he say what they were arguing about?
A. He had wanted to go to a dance or something or another and was wanting to go somewhere
else. That is what they got into an argument over.
Q. What did you do when you heard Little Hube say he hit his wife and she died?
A. I freaked out and run him off.
Q. You freaked out?
A. I freaked out and ran him off.
Q. Okay. After the party did you tell anybody about this?
A. Not that night. The next day I went to Union County and tried to talk to some law people
and —
Q. Would they listen to you?
A. Went to Union County to the Sheriff’s Department. I tried to speak to the Sheriff but he was
real busy. He sent me to a deputy. The deputy told me to go upstairs to the courtroom and
talk to this guy. I can’t remember his name. I never did really get to talk to anybody.
Q. Tried to tell them?
A. Yeah.
Q. Did you talk to your mother about it?
A. A little later on there wasn’t a whole lot said about it, but she was the one that took me to the courthouse.
Q. Your mother went with you to the courthouse that day?
A. She drove me. I didn’t have a vehicle.
Q. Did you know Carolyn Muncey?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Are you aware of whether or not Little Hube had ever abused her or beat on her?
A. She was constantly with black eyes and busted mouth.

Testimony of Kathy Parker, Nashville resident, testifying to a federal district court in Tennessed on behalf of Paul House, who is on death row for Carolyn Muncey's murder.

Is  this a Supreme Court preview, or an episode of CSI?

Well, it's House v. Bell, which turns out to be both.

Not that I've ever seen that show, actually, but I thought I'd be wrestling more with precedents than with blood spatters, missing or planted evidence, semen-stained jeans, or a theory that an entire rape-murder can be committed, in a rural area without a car, inside of 50 minutes. I didn't know that Paul Gregory House, who has been on death row since 1986, has multiple sclerosis -  of the most advanced kind, which may kill him before anyone tries to strap him down for the lethal injection or gas chamber.

It's all about the DNA, of course.
It's all about the revolution in our thinking about the death penalty thanks to the careful work of attorneys, all around the country, who have re-opened investigations that were done sloppily, or ineffectively presented, the first time.

And it's all about politics. Paul Gregory House was 2/3 of the way to exoneration when 8 of 15 appeals court judges declared he was probably innocent and he deserved a new trial. But a year later, when they could have made it official, four of those 8 judges, appointed by Democrats, had been replaced  by George Bush. Their replacements said no, he still hadn't established reasonable doubt - despite DNA evidence, despite eyewitnesses, despite affidavits that shot down, or at least seriously questioned, the forensic evidence offered by the prosecution.

And it's all about the word "no."

Specifically the "no" in the following paragraph from Sandra Day O'Connor:

a petitioner must show that, in light of the new evidence, it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The focus on actual innocence means that a district court is not bound by the admissibility rules that would govern at trial, but may consider the probative force of relevant evidence that was either wrongly excluded or unavailable at trial. The district court must make a probabilistic determination about what reasonable, properly instructed jurors would do, and it is presumed that a reasonable juror would consider fairly all of the evidence presented and would conscientiously obey the trial court's instructions requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Schlup v. Delo, the 1995 Supreme Court opinion quoted above, offered both hope and frustration to defendants with newly discovered evidence, as it instructs judges to imagine themselves that Platonic "reasonable, properly instructed juror."  In its poetry, it's  also proved a Rorschach blot, taken up by  both sides. And to Judge Dan Boggs, a grizzled veteran of the Sixth Circuit, "no reasonable juror" means exactly that: not a single juror. Basically, the Sixth Circuit panel demanded that every single piece of evidence put out by the prosecution be directly refuted  before it could order a new trial.

Is this all too arcane? Should I get back to the blood?

z crew part two

While I'm up, here's that second ed story. I actually did most of the actual writing, including the mandatory pre-blog, yesterday: 12 hours in this dayum chair.

-----------

“Shut up! I’m trying to watch the movie!”

The call came from Guillermo, the curly-haired teenager closest to the TV, to the noisiest of the dozen middle-school kids next to him.

The room, like many church basements, was dark and made darker by the wood of donated furniture. On the walls, Biblical images shared space with framed posters of traditional African art. The kitchen area rattled with the sound of popcorn popping, adding to the noise made by boisterous sixth-graders. And the noise was drowning out Samuel L. Jackson.

The youth group, called The Z Crew. was watching the movie Coach, for lessons in leadership,  though the popcorn made it challenging.

Since late last year, the Z Crew has been an invisible but real force in their local school, the Albert Shanker School of the Visual and Performing Arts. Founded last year under the auspices of Father Edmund L. Brady, six members of the team succeeded, last year, in changing the way their school handles its policies on school uniforms.

This partial victory forced the students to grow and change, before they asked their school to do the same.

a uniform what?

A warmup to my second education story, which will now be an unholy marriage of reporting done in August, phone follow-ups through September, and then a PUSH that started with my visit last Friday to an actual meeting of the Z Crew  - or some facsimile thereof, since there were a lot of new members, some of whom were only 6th graders -- and ended, for now, with a quite dramatic flourish, in a quite evocative visit yesterday to I.S. 126, which I saw last when it was quite empty. Then,  I was able to sort of ambush the principal into giving me a very quick comment for the Father Brady story, butI didn't linger - no one else was there, and I was afraid the security guards would give me the heave-ho.

Today was different. Today I knew where the school was, approached it in the pouring rain with a name in mind - a counselor I wanted to see. I told the guards "I'm here to see Miss Smith," which was true (nevernomind that she didn't at that point know I existed).

"And you're from?"

"Columbia University," I said, leaving out the J-School part; they nodded and gave me a yellow visitors' sticker, and sent me upstairs. I rejoiced silently; whether I found Ms. White or not, I would keep my promise to the student I've been calling Jessie to meet her at 10:37, would walk the halls and see the kids (and see how many wore what's loosely known as a uniform there). I had already won.

And since I was feeling serene, serendipity commenced.

a filigree of stories

I'm supposed to have a draft tonight, of my second story on the Z Crew. But my brain is stuffed with too many stories competing for space - two of which are due next week, two of which need to be started next week - bouncing against one another like ping-pong balls. In short, the messy plate sliding off my brain's crowded table:

• Z Crew in Action.  Or How a Bunch of 12-Year-Olds Started a Movement. I'm going back to the same school I invaded in August, but tonight (after this spill) I need to sketch out the story as I see it. Due Saturday noon, setting me up for a Friday all-nighter at this rate.




• House v. Bell.  Since the supreme court keeps refusing to agree to hear Hamdan v . Rumsfeld, despite all the reasons it should, I've taken on a different case for my first story for the legal reporting class: House v. Bell, one of the scores of death penalty cases where DNA evidence has emerged to challenge these sentences. The story told me by House's attorney yesterday, which I'll spill a little on Sunday as I get ready to write, sounds like an episode of CSI:  spilled vials of blood, evidence disappearing and re-appearing, and fantabulous stories by the prosecution, along with a political subtext that reminds you that court-stacking is about more than Roe v. Wade. (That last point, citing House, was made elegantly in a Times editorial last year.) Due Wednesday, October 19. at 4:30 p.m.




• Astoria business story. A new power plant is going up - reportedly so  mean, clean and environmental that even NYPIRG loves it, after years of opposition. Peter Vallone, the local poo-bah, and a coalition community groups fought it until the New York Power Authority agreed to also shut down,  by 2008,  the much dirtier plant next door. I talk to Vallone Friday, and go poke around the site Monday, while trying to get 2 or 3 person-at-the-plant interviews.  Due 7 p.m. Thursday, October 20 at 7 p.m.


• Rant for "Critical Issues in Journalism." I haven't written much about this wild strange class of ours, led by Richard Wald -- wherein 235 students (combined full and part-time) listen to speakers and then engage in a sort of Oprah/Donahue open mike. I'll likely talk about it further as I'm breeding that paper, 750 words on "something we've talked about."  One of which was "Are bloggers journalists?" I'll likely talk mostly about my hero Lindsay, 18 yrs younger than I, whose lovely blog served as the base for an investigative trip to New Orleans -- and inspired her to quit her big pharm job for the freelance life. Due Friday, October 21 - and you can be sure I'll be writing it in the middle of the night, too.


• Astoria feature. This week I need also to start reporting on a long fuzzy feature, a "mood and feel" piece: I'm thinking about the food pantry I've visited; a profile of a Muslim woman I'm about to interview;  or a comparison between Fr. Brady's two parishes - the one by the housing project, which is scheduled for closure, and the one that has services in 5 languages and a more middle-class congregation. Due: full draft noon Thursday, October 27, t work on in  lab.
• Take-home. A long, more complex story, perhaps relating to the masters' project (see below).  I have to generate 3  and send them to Dale and Stacy tomorrow (when??).


• Masters' project. The first draft isn't due till January, but a proposal is due 11/18 and we need to be doing an interview a week. Next week, I'm talking to the gatekeeper at the New York Veterans Administration Centers -- my way into the returning soldiers coordinators, and the lives of those who try to help vets sort out their lives when they come home. Whose story will emerge from all that is anyone's guess.

I'm tired even writing this. Will I have the energy for the girls and boys of the Z Crew? I just wish I already had a camera-phone, for my trip to the school tomorrow.

How can I possibly juggle so many stories? How can so many characters vie for attention? How can I do justice to any of them? Is this phase of the program meant to be like stroke recovery, and have us grow new neurons?

I talked to Sree, for just a moment, yesterday. He said this is much more overload than in a real job. But is that really true? No wonder I want to write books - though I bet most who do are doing that on top of all of the above.

dancin with the z crew

And as I warned (see post below), here's your introduction to Father Brady - a loose, overgrown version that's not likely to see the light of day. Comment and guess where you think my next neighborhood story came from?
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When Schoolbooks Are Like Fires

Bree Sanders, a willowy 12-year old with waist-length dark hair and a soprano giggle, grins when she talks about the fashion show she helped direct last year at her school, the Albert Shanker School in Astoria. Her sister Jessie, shy behind an oversized pair of glasses, takes a moment to say what she likes best about school. “I know I need to study harder,”  she says softly.

The 72-year-old man beside her says quietly, patiently, “You know you can do it, right?”  Jessie nods, but the grin of certainty is gone, especially when he follows up with “Remember that seventh-grade problem we did together?”

He then explains to Bree and Jessie’s mother how Jessie, given a not-simple math problem, “went ahead and did it,” even though she had been told she was “fifth grade level” in math. He then repeats his question to Jessie: “You know that you can do it?”

Jessie stops mumbling and looks directly at the white-haired man. “Yes, Father, I do.”

In the 13 years he’s been pastor in his old neighborhood, Father Edmund L. Brady – who just retired as pastor of St. Margaret Mary Church in Astoria, Queens– has become known to parents, schools and city administrators as as someone who takes action on education issues.

Brady and his parent group don’t completely blame teachers or administrators for the problems they work on. “The system is organized against them,” says Brady,  citing the pressure of constant standardized tests, curriculum changes, and shifting classes  - the woes that cut across the educational spectrum. Often, “organizing means finding unexpected allies,” he says, sometimes at the highest levels, to support the “hard work of committed teachers who are trying to navigate the potholes.”

orange alert turns astoria blue

So after the long post below, I managed to craft something with only 3 interview points, as advertised - and even kept it closer to the assigned 700 words than I'd ever thought I could. It took me all night, of course; I filed at 4:30 a.m., went home and to sleep, woke up at 11 convinced I had screwed it up. But a morning e-mail from Dale, my instructor, calmed that core fear, while sending me into another convilsion:

Aha, another night writer. I took a break tonight and flashed in
here, this is not really an edit, but a few comments. First, KUDOS
on getting details. Nice, nice, nice. But you need to make the lead
more immediate. Again, this is insta-editing on the fly, but I think
I'd lead with that Egyptian, especially in light of London. Take us
right into a scene with that person. Also, work on getting fuller
quotes. But I like, like, like a lot of this!

Always go with your first instinct: I should know that by now. So after consultation with Stacy, I did just that, and edited the rest of it. Here it is, prior to full edits by anyone but me (and a little help from Rache, who helped pace me through the all-nighter):

 

Stacy Sullivan/Dale Maharidge
Chris Lombardi
POS: ASTORIA
20 August 2005

Orange Alert Blue for Generation Y
Chris Lombardi

"I try to avoid carrying anything," the young man says matter-of-factly. "Or at least to carry less stuff."

A common resolution for any subway commuter, especially a young  man with many places to go: but the young man, Nordin K, 27, is not just making conversation. Here in Astoria’s “Little Cairo,” where young girls ride bicycles in full headscarf and old men in white pants brood over tiny cups of Turkish coffee, he’s explaining how he avoids having his day ruined by someone else’s fear.

Beside him, his friend Garni,24, nodded. “You don’t want to appear threatening.”

For these young Egyptian immigrants, the everyday hassle of commuting is magnified by the fear that someone will decide they’re terrorists. This fear has increased in the past weeks, in the wake of the London bombings  on July 7 and 19 and the July 22 police shooting of an unarmed young Brazilian mistaken for an Al-Qaeda suspect. 

“You have to always be thinking about it,” Nordin says.  He finishes his lunch, the sounds of the café pulsing around him.

 

listening to astorias

Report back, back half an hour ago after spending six hours on the beat: I don't think I had enough follow-up questions, and made some stupid mistakes -- never got occupations and phone numbers for enough people, but in general I think I have enough for a story.

Time to decipher what I've scrawled in a now-half-filled steno pad (I thought my handwriting was improving but not yet). I walked around all day with two minicassette recorders, but they seemed an unnecessary barrier in such quick conversations. And I told you I over-report: I talked to exactly twice the minimum number of people required for this assignment, thus making the all-nighter possibility more of a reality.

Some notes to help me grasp toward a story:

Getting off the R train at Broadway, I made a beeline this time to that senior center; I really wanted to get some old people's voices (and thought, selfishly, that I might get enough interviews to come back here earlier). The guard at Bffy- Dellamonica Senior Center waved me in when I said I was with Columbia J-school: I stupidly assumed, since I had heard Astoria was "saturated" with  us, that he knew all about it.

Not so. The Center is part of Catholic Charities, and permission from on high is required. In the time it took for me to find that out, I had a nice chat with the assistant director, who is also an adjunct at La Guardia (though in the nursing program), who told me to go to a local diner for half an hour, till the director was free.

So I went off to Sanford Diner, where I made my first approach - asking a couple at the next table, "I'm a journalism student at Columbia, do you have a few minutes?" The couple, Chris and Erica, smile; Chris, an intense, balding young man with a ready smile, works in nonprofit fundraising at Columbia, and has a friend who went through J a few years back. That calmed me right down: "I'll warm up on you1"

Have their daily lives changed because of terrorism, orange alerts, searches?  Not much, they say -- they both take the subway to work every day. But "Mostly we talk about it," said Chris. "We talk a lot about what the city's doing -- what it might mean for our civil rights."

  They're moving to Boston next month; not because of terrorism (because of a job opportunity for Chris and out of a desire for a better standard of living than they feel they can afford right now), but "I'm kind of relieved...I feel like I know something will happen" eventually, he said. "When I'm down in the tunnel and hear a noise, I wonder what will happen."

On the subject of searches: they've gone round and round about them. The subject of profiling -  a constant theme - came up for the first time here: "They're not able to profile," Chris says, "which is kind of counterintuitive." They'd both heard some story on NPR that the reason for all these searches was that some Al-Qaeda communication had advised acolytes: "Stay away from stations with checkpoints."

Neither has been called out to be searched: Chris says "I think I would object. It's not voluntary! You have to use public transportation, some people have to use airplanes -- there's no choice involved. No, it's not cool, b ut it's legal" because of Patriot Act, he says. He then quoted Ben Franklin on liberty vs. safety, and said "I think we are headed to a police state."

Chris, who's Greek and grew up in the neighborhood, said the current situation had sort of radicalized him, pushing outward the liberal politics he inherited from his public-school-teacher parents: "UFT types?" I asked, and he smiled.

The next interview, after I got turned down explicitly at the senior center --  not turned down but deferred, 'Fax us something and we'll plan it" which is tantamount to not possible with this story -- couldn't have been more different.

Maria Sherbatsky is an Eastern European immigrant of about seventy, who was in the  neighborhood today for the Feast of the Transfiguration, which celebrates a subtle moment in the Gospel with a harvest celebration (a sort of Byzantine Succoth, from the looks of the photos). Her first response to the terrorism question, then was religious. "I'm a woman of prayer," she said. "I pray for the conversion of the terrorists, that they realize what they have done; I pray that the war ends."  Still, in her daily life? She breaks out into a smile. "I lived in New York, and when I come to New York. I still use trains." What about the searches? "I wish they had some sort of detector to make it go faster," said her companion, a somewhat younger woman who refused to give me a name. "People are in a hurry it's difficult."

Then it was on to the Euro Delights Cafe, to talk to a pair of twentysomethings: Jenna Soleo, of Astoria, and her friend Kim Coleman of Chicago. Roommates at SUC-Geneseo, they both  now find themselves getting married soon (not to each other). They could be any of the skinny girls in my classes at CCNY or NYU (though with the gloss of the skinny millionaires I joke chased me out of San Francisco).

"I'm living in denial," says Jenna, a doctoral student at CUNY Grad Center who says she still takes the subway, and that  "It hasnt stopped me from flying." In Italy and other countries,  she noted, cops have machine guns [referring to carabinieri, we later agreed] and that security seems even more stringent in smaller airports in the U.S. 'In Kalamazoo, I was practically strip-searched."

As for the subway searches: "I feel like they're making a good effort," she said. "If something were to happen...I don't know if it can actually be prevented."  She sighed. "I give the terrorists more credit than I used to." Then she explained why:  on 9/11 she watched the Twin Towers burn out her window and made it downtown before the trains stopped running, finding herself amid the disoriented people covered in ash.  This makes her sensitive to people in places like "Montana -- I was at  a conference there, and people all over wanted to claim 9/11 as their own. I was a little annoyed."

Civil liberties concerns? "I studied the Middle Ages," she says,  and these kinds of convulsions "always happen when there's a crisis." She also pointed out "We get searched in a lot of places -- like the public library."

Kim, a quiet blonde with a slow smile, says fear of terrorism only comes to her "in flashes," often when she's traversing Chicago's many underground spaces. "Will this happen in Chicago?"  But it was when I asked about civil liberties concerns that the conversation took a surprising turn. First, she told   of seeing a South Asian man trying to do something at his bank and being told that he'd better never travel without over three forms of I.D. , or else "you could go to jail." She was shocked, she says: 'I guess cause of Patriot Act?"

Right after 9/11, said Jenna, "one of the bodega owners around here got beat up --and he wasn't even Arab....They can say all they want that they're not profiling."

Then came the surprise, for me: Kim adds that her fiancee is from the Middle East, and they're moving to Jordan next week for his job. "My family all thinks I'm going to Baghdad," she says wryly.

two great coaches in the spirit of Naipaul

So what do I wake up to in the morning but this interview with V.S. Naipul, a writer I've admired forever (and who recently helped me perform respectably in a very compeitive game of Trivial Pursuit/Book Lover's Edition). Naipul says, again, that he's given up writing novels, that only nonfiction can evoke wholly the complex reality of our lives. Rachel Donadio, the interviewer, seems to quietly disagree on both points:

But what spares Naipaul's work from the ideology of critics who would dismiss him as anti-Muslim and admirers who would laud him for essentially the same thing is its unsentimental, often heartbreaking detail. In ''Among the Believers,'' Naipaul speaks with Mr. Jaffrey, a newspaper journalist and British-Indian-educated Shiite in Tehran who supported Khomeini as a way of bringing about the Islamic dream of a ''society of believers.'' Mr. Jaffrey ate a plate of fried eggs as he spoke. In ''Beyond Belief,'' Naipaul revisits one of the journalist's colleagues, who also relishes his lunch. Ideology is abstract; fried eggs are not. Naipaul's nonfiction has the force, the almost unbearable density of detail and the moral vision of great fiction. It comes as no surprise that Dickens and Tolstoy are his heroes. For all Naipaul's talk about the limitations of the novel, the power of his work is ultimately rooted in a novelist's preternatural attentiveness to individual human lives and triumphs, to the daily things we do that make us who we are, and are the key to our survival.

And there you have it:  what I want to achieve in the articles and booka I write, what I hope I do somewhat in my fiction - not Jehanne Darc's visions, not even her dream of France or of chevalerie, but the flour on her maman's hands, the tiny broken wooden angels when her home church is raided.

And today, the day before The First Day of the Rest of My Life, I learn that my coaches in the reporting class are on about the same thing -- and that the class itseld will be divided into "straight newspaper reporting" and "literary journalism" divisions.

I learn this because I was given my first choice of instructor in this class: Dale Maharidge, author of And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Homeland,  for which he spent yearsa in the Midwest; Denison, Iowa, ditto; and The Coming White Minority: California, Multiculturalism, and America's Future, which he wrote with -- of all people -- Theodore Sturgeon, the guy who first taught my geek-adolescent self that speculative fiction could be literary, too.

I learned also that he lives in Petrolia, in California's Humboldt County -- Alexander Cockburn country, Dan Hamburg country. In my email back to him this morning, I mentioned my gig in 1994 doing press for Hamburgs re-election campaign (he'd slid into Congress on Clinton's coattails despite being more of a Green than a Democrat even then, and slid back out in that weird 3-strikes-and-you're out year). I then told him an abbreviated version of one of my main fears:

I've been living and working with multiple sclerosis for nearly 21 years now. It hasn't stopped me yet from working a punishing schedule or getting work done at a decent level. It does affect my hands, my typing speed -- and thus I'm frankly terrified of the "drills" I hear are so core for RW1. I'n NOT asking for deadline policies to be changed, or even officially asking for more time under the ADA; I just thought it would b good for you and Stacy to know that if stuff is timed, you might have a choice between lots of typos and the work being perpetually unfinished.

The "drills" consist, as much as I've heard about them, of making a story quickly out of a mass of data -- a police report,an interview - thrown in your lap. On the writing test I took for the School in January, I skipped to the editorial (about Afghanistan!) and then ended up with only enough time to write a lead for the other. It's probably my core fear -- that my inability to write quickly (so far) will doom me in the program.

But Dale's email - in which, among other things, he stresses cooperation not competitiion among class members - has calmed me down already, while his talk of literary journalism made me giddy.

And that's not all. His co-teacher, the adjunct, is someone i never heard of before -- but she  may be my next role model.

I'd sort of been practicing my answer to the question of where I hope to go after this, and decoded to say  "I want to be Philip Gourevitch with breasts."  (Gourevitch, who is EXACTLY my age, demmit, did it all with a fiction MFA from Columbia, but i'd be happy to drag along after.) I still think I might,

But Stacy Sullivan, who reported from Bosnia for Newsweek and wrote two books as an outgrowth of her reporting from New York and Sarajevo,  including one with the intriguing title From Brooklyn to Kosovo with Love and Ak47s , would rate a pretty close second.

I also learned a lot else, that all adds up to how much work I have to do now -- including a memo on my beat by the end of this week.I'll likely be writing on Wednesday about how overwhelmed I am, and how scared. But right now I want to bask in the sense of possibility: that together, we'll make he best stories  come to iight.