Nancy Rommelmann

I Will Be on KOIN-TV Tonight, Talking about Amanda Stott-Smith

I was contacted by a producer for KOIN, who heard about my on-going work looking into Amanda's life, the circumstances leading up to her dropping her children from the Sellwood Bridge in May 2009 (lead up as in, decades), how the community responded well and badly, who wants to keep things hidden and why. This will not all be revealed, I am sure, in a two-minute clip, but Amy Frazier, the interviewer, is a super-pro and I am in her good hands. The piece will be part of the 11pm newscast tonight, January 10, KOIN-TV Portland, Channel 6.

Some of you have read the essays I posted in 2009-2011 about Amanda. Those are currently offline as the book, "To the Bridge," is written. We had interesting, sometimes heated conversations on this blog, and I invite you as always to be in contact with me.

 

Gene Weingarten, Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, and the Indefensible Ethics of Journalism

Boy, do I love the writing of Gene Weingarten, his boldness and subtlety and truth-telling, his subjects, his hyper-critical eye and his kindness, all of it works for me. A brilliant example: this December 5 piece from the Washington Post, on convicted family killer Jeffrey MacDonald, whose case every long-form journalist is well familiar with, because of the ethical snares writers Joe McGinniss and Janet Malcolm found themselves traversing, ducking, becoming impaled on, in their books respective books, Fatal Vision and The Journalist and the Murderer. The issues--of what you share with your subjects, of how you gain their trust and whether you deserve it, of how far you can and should push and who you're helping, who you're hurting--can never be empirically answered. You decide boundaries on the fly, you make the phone call that is going to make the person on the other end cry. Sometimes, they surprise you. Sometimes, they stonewall, only to come back two years last and say, "I'm ready to talk now." Tell yourself, people need to tell their stories, that this is what you're here for, that you try, on your best days, to be of service, or, in the words of a friend, "to add to the well of Truth we all drink from." Trust me, there is no time to get cocky about this, because you will certainly spend years of your life getting it quasi- or very wrong before you get it right, if you ever do. Weingarten does.

"Beside the Sea" and Amanda Stott-Smith

I have been working mostly in a vacuum for 3.5 years a book about Amanda Stott-Smith and what led her to drop her children from the Sellwood Bridge in May 23, 2009, and then last week I am asked twice by the media for an update on this work, the first time by Alison Hallett, in a piece about the new Alison Barker translation of Beside the Sea, just out from Tin House, and the second by a TV station, who will film on Friday. I admit to having trepidation about the latter, as I told Hillary Johnson at Dymaxicon, "I feel very weird being interviewed." To which she replied, "Now you know how the people you interview feel."

David Swinson, "A Detailed Man"

Dymaxicon author David Swinson gets a fantastic review of his new crime noir novel, A Detailed Man in the Press-Telegram of Long Beach. A former booker of punk bands in 1980s Los Angeles, as well as the producer of the iconic punk flick Roadside Prophets (starring X's John Doe and Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz), Swinson ditched the scene, and LA, to become a detective in Washington DC. For his third act, he's writing noir. A clip from today's review:

"And there's no reason to think that Swinson won't be as successful as a writer as he's been at everything else. While it's difficult to find a retired cop who hasn't written a book, it's rare to find one as beautifully written as 'A Detailed Man.'

"It doesn't fit cozily into any of the established subgenres of crime writing. It's not a stringing together of bawdy capers, that's for sure. It's as detailed (naturally) as police procedural novels, though without the maddening mystery. It's closer to the newish genre called Nordic crime, which has expanded beyond the geographical realms of Per Wahoo/Maj Sowell, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo and, sigh, Stieg Larsson...

"Swinson writes with the soul of a poet more than a policeman mining memories. His style is fluid and sharp, his protagonist, Detective Ezra Simeon, is, in the Nordic style, complicated, brooding and introspective."

A Detailed Man is available now on Kindle, early next year in paperback. I have a few of the latter for review copies. Let me know if you want one. And congratulations to David.

The Inextricable Marriage of Grief and Love

The first time I saw a mother learn her child had died, I was making cookies. It was in the freshman dining hall's massive kitchen, where I worked several hours a week alongside two late middle-aged ladies from Middletown, CT, all of us in pink smocks and hairnets. It was at the end of our shift, early afternoon. A man in a plaid shirt, stocky and bow-legged, walked past and toward the two ladies, who were friends and always chattering. He came in right close to them, he said something, and then hands were grabbing at air; the man's face crumpled, and there started a sound I at first took for joy; I instantly thought, a baby has been born, and then right on the heels of that: someone has died. The shorter of the two women was keening, the man, her husband, was trying to hold her up by the shoulders, and the other woman was wailing, running her hands in an outline of air around the couple's bodies. I learned later, the man in that moment told his wife, their daughter had been killed in a car accident. I return sometimes in my mind to that moment, that kitchen, a moment when the entire world changed for these parents, this mother.

I stood on the porch yesterday evening, listening  to the wind in the trees, feeling the warm air, seeing the grasshopper green of the leaves, and knew I have it very easy. My child is safe. I am allowed the luxury of listening to the the wind without also thinking, but my child is dead. Then I started to cry (again, more crying). I had just spent an hour reading Katie Granju, who blogs as Mama Pundit, and her account of losing her 18-year-old son. I am not going to attach the words "grueling" or "brutal" or "unbearable" here, because they cannot support the weight of Granju's loss, made more terrible because it was slow, with spikes of hope, and in some ways, long in coming. It will take you an hour to read the account. I suggest you start here and work forward. But if you go right to her homepage, you will also see that yesterday, Granju had a baby girl. (More crying.) 

Last week, I started to put into folders all my digital photos. Naming the folders was easy -- "Tafv Fashion" "Wedding" "SF Boys in PDX." But then I came across images that I have downloaded and kept for my own reasons, and for them I created two folders, entitled "Grief" and "Love/Beauty." There were times when I could not decide which folder an image belonged in. This made me know what everyone who has ever loved knows: you do not get one without the eventuality of the other. And there they go to the prom, Grief in her widow's weeds, Love with stars in his eyes; they will always be together.

For Henry

Understanding the Hate

As some readers here know, I have been working about a book about a murder that took place in Portland last May. I write "murder," and in the strict sense of the word, it is that. And yet, repugnant as it may sound, even the act of taking someone's life (in this case a mother taking her young son's) becomes elastic. The more you look, the more you know, the more you understand. This is not to say forgive. That concept has not entered my head, and even if it had, that's not up to me. It's not why I'm here.

The work has brought me into contact with some people who need to talk, and some people who don't. Or more precisely, do not need to talk to me, and who actively need to let me know how loathsome my presence is. I understand this. My husband understands this. As we sat at the kitchen counter last night, he said, "You can't take it personally; they have gone through this horrible thing." Yes. And I know it's not about me, Nancy me. I know it's that this horrible thing has happened, and they must try to contain it, to catch the blood before it spills any further off the table. I know, too, the bruises left by the media, the lack of dimension that comes with making the deadline; the feeling that one has been left in space to suffer, the press has moved on, and good.

When I was told, by an attorney in the case, that the family of the woman does not want me to write about this because they don't want me making money on her, the piece of sesame chicken I was lifting to my mouth remained suspended in midair for about four seconds. I had to recalibrate my mind to apply this assessment. I got there, and said, I appreciate this; I might even feel the same way, were our positions reversed. And yet I knew, if they did not, that the world is made up of bigger ideas than that. And that if I wanted to make money, I'd be writing about Paris Hilton's panties.

I was shown yesterday, in court, again, that I am hated. And I am trying to figure out to do with this.

Dear Zachary: a Letter to a Son About His Father

This documentary is brutal. The circumstances also defy all common sense, and humanity, that two judges saw fit to let this woman out on her own recognizance. What, were they impressed she was a woman doctor from their province? Shame, shame, shame. Just heartbreaking

What Are You Thinking?

Besides cooking, learning to mix a Ransom gin perfect martini, and a lot of backroom work for Ristretto - Din just now finished the built-out for the third, roasting-only location, and is firing up for the first time the new roaster as I type - I have been thinking. It's required, as I am embarking on a project that might easily slip fish-like from my grasp.

In some ways, it already has, and must. I can't know the answers to what I will write until I do the research, which means gaining access, which often means contacting people who do not want to be contacted by me.

I have a list on the left hand side of the blog, "The Last 8 Books I've Read." Those who've noticed it no doubt also noticed, I am reading about murder. This is because I am writing about murder. One story involves a triple homicide and the people affected: the murderer, his family, the victims' families, the attorney, the what happens now. The people in this story are, for reasons you will read about -- one story will appear later this year in The Oregonian, and if I can fashion it, another feature in the magazine O -- are interested in speaking with me. Their pain is such that they are willing to spread it on the table, to say to me in effect, can you help me with this? The simple act of listening to the mother of the murderer seems to offer succor.

The other story, the book, is crowded with people with different prerogatives. Some -- the attorneys, the police, the social service agencies -- stand behind various laws in order not to talk about what they know. This, despite their every hue and cry, often to my face, of trying to understand in order to prevent such horrifying acts in the future. I believe they might actually believe this, despite their actions proving otherwise.

Others within this story have a lot to hide, and thus can I understand their reluctance and even hostility. And yet I do admit to being shocked at the accusation of the other murderer's mother, that she will quash my attempts at access because she does not want me making money off her child. I was momentarily rendered silent by this accusation (as anyone who knows me knows, that's a tough trick to pull off), and then said to the attorney, while I can certainly appreciate that this was the conclusion the woman came to, we must admit the world is made of bigger ideas than that.

The title of this post, I now see, refers to my having to think quite a lot about why one writes, and about what, and for whom. What I also said to the attorney that day was, if I wanted to make money, I would be writing about Paris Hilton's panties. Instead, I push through with no guarantee of anything but that the finding is in the looking, and that positing the question, to you, is part of that.

Evening's Empire

My review of Zachary Lazar's memoir, Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder, appears in the Sunday Oregonian. It's about vice and real estate, the awakening to the rot that was the early 60s, about getting away with murder. Lazar had to have a steady hand to still what he needed to long enough to get it down on paper, to wit:

Beneath it all runs the blood that brought Lazar to his task, blood and purpose exposed as he recalls watching his mother the moment she is told her husband's body has been found:

"(S)he was sitting on the couch, bowing and rising like a marionette, or as though someone was shoving her from behind, only to yank her back upright with her blouse in his fist. When she looked at me, she screamed, her face distorted. The scream was angry, personal, insane."

Unthinkable *

I received an email this morning alerting me to the murder of Lily Burk, 17. I thought, Lily, Greg's daughter? No, no...

Yes. I am not going to detail it. I am going to say that I got in the shower and wept. I was not very close with Greg, but he was on staff at the LA Weekly, where I was writing, and we interacted. I also saw him or his wife, who I never saw not smiling, nearly every weekday morning for five years, because our daughters were schoolmates in Hollywood. Lily was two years younger than my daughter, petite, a smiler like her mother, with waist-length hair and a bouncy step.

I wrote an email this morning to a dear friend, a mutual friend of Greg's and mine, and said, it's as though we -- LA journos with kids the same age -- are part of the same fishnet, and this has come along and ripped out part of it, irrevocably. It's wrecked people's lives, and the rest of us look at what's happened in horror, but there's nothing we can do to fix it, we can only say how sorry we are and also, that Lily is remembered.

*An arrest has been made

Janet Malcolm on Journalists

The opening and close of The Journalist and the Murderer (which I realize is twenty years old, but I just read it yesterday):

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse... on reading the article or book in question, he [the subject] has to face the fact that the journalist--who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully,  remarkably attuned to his vision of things--never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own."

“What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self-absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists… human nature guarantees that willing subjects will never be in short supply. Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day when their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses—the days of the interviews—are over. And still they yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.”

To which I must say, yes; what she says is true. The only defense I can muster is also true: I nearly always walk into a story with no or very little set opinion about the subject, and so can say, when I am talking with him, interviewing him, hoping he will trust me with his story, I am in empathy with him; I am trying to see it his way, because thus far, it's the only view I am getting. I do not lie and say, to the murderer, "Oh, yes; I'd have done the same thing," but I can often in truth say, I see why you did it and why it made sense to you. It is later, I think, once you have finished the interviews, once you start to look around at the parts he has not told you, when you start to breathe life into the piece, that the betrayal, and I think that is the right word, can and often does begin.

From what I've read, when Malcolm published this (first in the New Yorker, then as a book), other journalists went ape-shit, saying they would never act in the way she claims. More honest writers, however, knew just what she meant, amongst them Susan Orlean, who "endorsed Malcolm's thesis as a necessary evil." Yes.

Honeymoon's Over

My first piece for the Oregonian's Sunday Opinion section, "Honeymoon's Over," runs today. When I referred to it last night as "Part 3" of my writings about the Stott-Smith case (part 1, here, part 2, here), my husband said, "But comparatively, light." The lead:

Among Oregon's top news stories in 2003 were those about men who'd killed with such indifference to human suffering, the physical shock of their actions threatened to blow the citizenry right off its pins.

First, there was Christian Longo, convicted of murdering his young son and daughter by tying pillowcases filled with rocks to their ankles, stuffing them into a sleeping bag and throwing them, while still alive, into an inlet on the Oregon coast; his strangled wife and toddler's bodies were found in a nearby bay. Then, there was the ongoing case against Ward Weaver, who eventually would plead guilty to the rape and murder of two adolescent girls, whose bodies, one entombed in concrete, he hid in his yard in Oregon City.

I hadn't read a thing about either of these crimes until I bought a house in Portland that same year. Where, I wondered, was I moving?