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08/11/2003

Narrative Nonfiction — An introduction to literary journalism, and must-reads of narrative nonfiction. And some thoughts about immersion journalism and reporting on L.A., too.

Reporting L.A.
Some reflections from the panel discussion at the April 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Festival

Reporting LA for me boils down to a pretty simple idea: I try to find landscapes and subcultures and separate worlds within our vast, has-it-all metropolis that others aren’t paying much attention to, that have nothing to do with the utterances of celebrities or big show trials or political horse races, and that shatter rather than embrace the conventional wisdom defining the California dream.

A reviewer of one of my Los Angeles-based books — it was No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court — once wrote I did this by practicing something called “immersion journalism.” I had never heard that term before, and so I didn’t know that was what I was doing, but I really liked the way it sounded. Immersion journalism: I liked the image it conveys, of diving into deep waters, surrounded, buoyed, engulfed — and also risking getting in over your head, drowning if you aren’t careful. And it does describe what I try to do: immerse myself in a place, in characters, in a story — getting inside, beneath the surface of things, exploring a world that many think is familiar, though they hardly know it at all. L.A. is full of places just waiting for that sort of treatment. So now I say, why yes, I am a practitioner of immersion journalism.

Of course, it’s just a fancy way of saying that I find a place that will let me in the door, and then I don’t go away — for a very long time. Like when I showed up at Whitney High School in Cerritos, California — and yes, that is a part of L.A. — and I didn’t leave for a year, which is how I wrote School of Dreams. My theory is if you stay long enough, you eventually become part of the scenery and people forget how odd it is that you’re there all the time, poking around. This is true even if you’re a forty-something sitting in the middle of a classroom of teenagers, scribbling notes and asking overly personal questions, and the understandably suspicious kids all call you the book guy. Sooner or later they stop asking when you’re going to leave, they get to know you, and see you’re serious about trying to understanding their world. And they start talking to you about their lives, about how their school really works, about their hopes and fears and experiences.

My time at Whitney was one of the most amazing years of my professional life (definitely not to be confused with my first trip through high school). In an era in which the national discussion about public schools focuses almost entirely on failure, I found that Los Angeles is home to one of the most successful public schools in America. Whitney routinely outshines top public schools like Groton and Andover and any $20 thousand dollar a year private school you can find in L.A., and every other wealthy, state-of-the art suburban public school you can think of as well. It has topped the state’s annual testing every year since the latest brand of multiple choice exams started six years ago, and it has done all this with no money, no rich kids, a campus you could only call modest (but only if you’re in a generous mood), no special laws, charters or privatization plans or any of the other flavor-of-the-month fixes for public education. Instead, it created a culture deliberately different from most other high schools, uncommon yet commonsense, where academics come first, expectations are high, parents are highly involved. It starts with grade seven and puts 12 year olds on a collision course with the notion that school should be challenging and that what happens in the classroom should not be considered the boring moments in between the activities kids really care about. Of course, because this school , though in LA, does not reside the west side, Malibu or Beverly Hills, no one’s heard of it — at least here on the home front. Tom Brock, the principal, jokes that people line up for his autograph in Seoul and China, but no one knows who he is at the local supermarket. People move from all over the world to get their kids into this American public school. And I had this place, journalistically speaking, all to myself for a school year. That’s the kind of Reporting L.A. I live for.

…So that’s what I’ve done since I left daily journalism 15 years ago. Worlds I’ve immersed myself in have included the neonatal unit of a leading local hospital, Long Beach Memorial, an unexpectedly human and humane part of the medical world, a place that works the way we wish the rest of medicine would, but rarely does. I’ve inhabited the secretive world of our juvenile courts in Los Angeles, the largest such place in the world, where deciding the fate of young lives is considered scut work, the least prestigious assignment a judge or lawyer can get, far less desirous than litigating whiplash claims or contract disputes. And, yes, I went back to high school, where I took physics and civics (but no calculus, thank God) with kids who seemed to have lives more stressful and overscheduled than most corporate CEOs. We have leaders in Washington, the state capitols, in think tanks, devising policies and making decisions about our schools and our kids, and most of them haven’t set foot in a real public school classroom in twenty, thirty years. Most of them have never visited a juvenile court and seen the reality of their policies in practice. Most parents, for that matter, have no idea what life is really like for kids and teachers in a modern public high school. So I get to do it for them. Which is why I have the best job on the planet…

… There’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve discovered in researching my books. Except for politicians and celebrities, many of whom see themselves as endlessly fascinating, most people don’t imagine that their words or deeds or worlds could be interesting enough for a book or an article, and convincing them is sometimes a challenge. This is an experience I’ve had time and again: people I’m spending a great deal of time with, sooner or later, will ask: What book could you possibly write about us? We are so boring, we do the same things every day.

They can’t see who could possibly be interested in their private moments. This, from a doctor who brings life to a baby no bigger than a soup can, as you or I would change a Band Aid, in a place where surgery is performed under a microscope and nurses do CPR with two fingers on chests as fragile as a humming bird’s. They don’t even see it anymore. They can’t. This same perception from a prosecutor who, day in and day out, decides the fates of families and children, who determines if a child is in danger or is dangerous, and who makes these decisions forty times a day, one year out of law school. “Boring,” he says to me. “Bureaucracy. Paperwork.” Or this from a young high school student whose parents were so adamantly opposed to her pursuing art as a major in college that they hurled her portfolio — and entire years’ worth of work, evidence of an amazing talent — into the street to be run over by traffic. They forbade her to pick it up for hours. Who would want to read about my stupid life? she asked me.

One sixteen year old boy I met years ago, who’d been in the care of the juvenile courts since he was five and was utterly destroyed in the process, talked to me at length during a writing class I taught at Juvenile Hall. He told me how over the years he had forgotten the faces of his mother and his sister and brother who he had not seen since he was small. He was sixteen at the time and he could no longer tell if his few remembrances of his childhood were really happy memories or things he had just daydreamed.

It’s like everything was just swallowed up, like I had no childhood, he told me. It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard, but this boy, George, looked at me and said, Of course, no one wants to hear about that. He couldn’t grasp why I would put such a thing in a book. That’s my vision of Reporting L.A., of reporting in general. Because as big a canvas as L.A. is to report and write about, the stories are even bigger.