Issue 10 — A Belated "Ask Me Anything"

A couple of months ago, I asked my very few Instagram followers for questions about reporting and writing. While writing about “craft” makes me a little nervous as my approach is just one of many, I hate gatekeeping and sometimes feel as though investigative or longform journalism was founded on just that. Case in point: my alma mater holds a yearly invitation-only investigative conference because apparently, an already opaque industry can only benefit from being more exclusive. Although I don’t have a lot of investigative advice to include in this newsletter — I hope to have more later this year as I tackle a slightly intimidating, complicated project — I can talk a bit about my recent experience with the hope it might be helpful.

I’ll mostly be referencing my recent story, Bitter Fruit, which you can read here or buy a print copy from The Baffler. But the spark notes: it is a longform story about the impact of the palm oil industry in Guatemala and the indigenous peoples fighting back.

How did your story (Bitter Fruit) change from when you first pitched it?

From the story’s inception to the published version, pretty much everything changed. At the start of 2019, I pitched a related but different story as part of my application to UC Berkeley’s Food and Farming Fellowship. A side note: for freelancers, most ambitious, longform, international reporting is only possible with the support of grants and fellowships and that’s what made this project even possible for me. As I planned my reporting trip and continued pre-reporting in the U.S., I realized that the story that needed to be told was quite different to the one I was planning to report. While the original idea still had merit, I knew that I had to write about palm oil.

When I was in Guatemala, things changed again. Within a week of landing, the eastern portion of the country where I was headed, entered a state of siege as police and military flooded indigenous towns in the name of “national security.” Many of the activists I was hoping to speak with were confined to their homes in fear they would be targeted, and rightly so — Guatemala has an incredibly high rate of attacks against land defenders. Unable to report from that region, I broadened my focus from so-called sustainable palm oil — at the time, most of these plantations were in the east — to plantations in the northwest that were on the precipice of becoming certified.

Shortly after I returned to the U.S., our lives were upended by the pandemic. Few editors were interested in non-Covid stories which, if I’m being honest, sucked, but it also bought me a bit of time — and a lot of panic — to think about what the ideal piece would look like. What was published in The Baffler is pretty much that.

How did you get people to speak with you so candidly?

This is a funny question because I consider myself quite a poor interviewer and it’s something I’d like to work on. I do, however, get to choose the stories I report on so what I lack in skill, I perhaps make up for in deep interest and enthusiasm. As more of an introvert and a generally quiet person, I am always nervous when I do interviews irrespective of whether I’m speaking with a politician or a farmworker. In Guatemala, that anxiety was heightened as I was reporting in Spanish and alongside a Q'eqchi translator. So, unfortunately, I have no interview secrets. But here are a couple of things I find can help put others (and yourself) at ease:

• Prepare a lot beforehand, especially if the interview is in another language. I even go so far as to write follow-up questions based on potential answers. This is mostly a security blanket as people will often surprise you with their answers, but it helps for me to have it there.

• Share something about yourself. If I’m interviewing someone who isn’t in a position of power, for lack of a better phrase, then I am pretty open about who I am and what I’m about. I feel like we ask so much of the people we’re interviewing that it can help to share something about your own life. As an Australian in the U.S., my accent comes up a lot so it’s sort of a natural conversation. I’m sure there are journalists and editors who would disagree with me on this but it also segues nicely into my next point…

• Meet people where they are. I will always ask to go to someone’s home, drive around the community with them, play with their kids, share a meal with them, whatever it takes to be where they are most comfortable. When I was in journalism school, professors loved to say that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and in a lot of circumstances, that’s very true. But I think for the kind of stories I write and the people I report on, sharing a meal or hanging out at someone’s home is a way of creating the kind of intimacy you need to trust one another and for the interviewee, to feel comfortable enough to be candid with you.

• Listen to people. Many of the people I spoke with expressed frustration that even though they were constantly speaking out, and even receiving death threats because of it, no one was really listening. Unfortunately, my story will have little impact on their day-to-day lives, let alone change policy, but I can be the person that heard what they had to say.

What was the biggest challenge of reporting abroad?

The extra pressure on you to make it happen even when your best-laid plans fall apart. Probably one of the most stressful moments in Guatemala, where I thought I would come back with very little reporting, was when a driver I hired didn’t show up. I didn’t use a fixer, basically, someone who you pay to help execute the reporting, but I did have to get to a part of the country not well-serviced by buses. When my hired driver didn’t show up at 5 am while I waited in torrential rain, I took a very stressful moment to regroup. Given the interviews I had planned, I decided to hire a car, best described as a monster truck, and drive myself around for the rest of my reporting — an experience in and of itself.

As a caveat, these things can and do happen while you’re reporting in whatever town, city, or country you live in. I once drove to Texas with grand plans that I'd return with all my reporting and only on the last day did I do an interview that led to the rest of the story. In that case, I was able to fly back two months later and do the rest of my reporting. You can read that older story here.

What’s your favorite part of reporting a story?

Despite the anxiety and butterflies, I love reporting in the field. Bouncing around in cars with people I just met, being invited into their homes, learning about who they are and how they experience the world is a huge privilege and even if I’m nervous, I never take those invitations for granted.

I also love the satisfaction and honestly, the joy I have when I finish a draft. Before I get edits back, even before I have the chance to mull over everything that is wrong with it, there’s a sort of sense of accomplishment that something you have poured so much into will soon exist in the world — for better or worse. That moment is fleeting. But it is always perfect.

Do you listen to music while you write?

I mostly listen to a carefully curated classical music playlist, aptly called Dope Classical. Some favorites include Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, and Florence Beatrice Price whose symphonies I highly recommend. Ideally, I listen to music via speakers rather than headphones because anything so close to my brain feels distracting. I write to classical music because of the lack of lyrics but also because I equate it with a decade of ballet lessons — my first great love. If you have ever danced, then you know ballet involves a lot of practice, repetition, and discipline — qualities that also bode well for writing but which I do not necessarily possess!

If there is a song that reminds me of reporting in Guatemala it is “El Instinto” by the Argentinian band Silvestre y La Naranja. One night while I was working in my apartment in Flores, I saw the film clip (below) on MTV Latin America and was obsessed.

What font do you use?

I only write in serif fonts and I am very weird about it! I love Garamond but will use Georgia or Times New Roman if I’m in a pinch. I cannot and will not write in a san-serif font. This and the beauty of the — em dash — are hills I am willing to die on.

Do you have any weird writing habits?

Besides my penchant for specific fonts and music, I constantly mumble to myself at a low but very audible volume. In fact, I am doing it as I write this! Needless to say, I don’t often work in cafes.

Thank you for reading Defender. As a Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Transatlantic Media Fellow I’ll be reporting from Italy this August and September. (Se parli italiano, per favore, mandami una e-mail e possiamo essere amici di penna!). Follow me on Instagram or Twitter for updates as I allegedly post more frequently on those platforms.

Usually, I link to my Ko-Fi page where you can support my newsletter but this time I’d like to instead highlight a GoFundMe for the families of British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous rights defender Bruno Pereira. Phillips and Pereira were reporting in the Amazon’s Javari Valley when they were brutally murdered, their bodies found after ten days of searching. Their deaths, which have weighed heavy on my mind, are a reminder of just how perilous environmental reporting and environmental activism can be, especially when paired with powerful, extractive industries bolstered by repressive governments. You can read more about Phillips and Pereira here, here, and here.

Rage On. ❤️‍🔥