Articles

On Sept. 1, 2015 Nondoc.com was launched by my former college editor Tres Savage and former state senator Andrew Rice. I was in on opening day covering a goods and services giveaway event at the state fairgrounds held by a group called LoveOKC. From talking to various people there I began a year of community reporting — AP style, mostly reporting-based work, but with room to branch out on sourcing and try different ideas.

Post Ferguson, Missouri I was interested in what was happening in our country as evidenced by racially-charged incidents. One day a story hit all of the national news feeds where young fraternity members at my alma mater were caught on video using a racist chant on the bus ride to an event. For days I was disturbed and got on Facebook to see who I could interview about it. This was the only story I've ever reported on for a year — starting on Facebook, then moving to phone and e-mail, then to me walking the campus.

The result is probably my proudest work of reporting. On Twitter the African American Studies scholar Michael Eric Dyson of Georgetown sent me a DM with compliments and a follow-up question on the story. That was pretty big for me.

In my mid to late 20s I got into a routine of covering the deadCENTER film festival in the summers, thanks to Colin Newman's multi-contributor blog OKC.NET and the PR man for the festival Rob Crissinger. I developed a good rapport with Crissinger and he would send me stories; from the Three 6 Mafia to the veteran war reporter, I didn't know who I would get to meet next.

I post this partly because I was surprised at how much I got out of talking to Mike Boettcher, who for ABC covered wars in the Middle East and elsewhere for over 33 years, stretching back to the conflict in El Salvador. What struck me about his documentary 'The Hornet's Nest' was the therapy function behind it — combat veterans watched, and sometimes said the names of their comrades out loud. Boettcher told me the soldier tends to isolate when he returns home, and as a war reporter he did the same thing.

The more we forget about what actually happens at war the more we risk rushing into unnecessary armed conflict — a risk to our democracy overall.

In September of 2015 I did a story for Nondoc about a women's wrestling match. The orchestrator of the whole thing was a local musician and artist that we all knew, Balthazar Henley. The event itself was a success — a lot of swagger, mock nastiness, and Camp.

This story came back for the poet at the Scissortail festival who promoted it, Gary Worth Moody — a real Santa Fe resident as well as a falconer, cowboy and co-winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award in poetry. His comments are indicative of exactly what I was trying to do with my reporting.

In 2012–2015 I had the privilege to watch a ton of movies and then write about them as they happened. My writings at this time were more influenced by Richard Brody's aspirational work on The New Yorker blog. Film opening up my writing is something that couldn't have happened without the obscure, passionate, and erudite young people who hovered around OKC.NET during those years.

I'm including Harmony Korine and PT Anderson here for the collision of interests that their work represents — the impulse toward social comment, and the drive toward pure art. The films break narrative in an attempt at arresting artistic sensations. PTA unknowingly giving me a movie I could try to decode played the final part in sharpening my essay writing from a clunkiness.

Somewhere in my true magical wilderness of youth at the MI Dollar Movies 5 I saw Sarah Polley in the film 'Go.' I would never have guessed the hip actress in that movie would be the directorial author of two films I did deep dives on in 2012 — 'Take this Waltz' and 'Away from Her'.

I found the fluid way the movie swept through different older people's memories and emotions to be a kind of miracle. It was a powerful movie to watch. The sensitivity and delicacy of 'Away from Her' inspired me — its almost angelic vision toward people with frailties. After experiencing it I was more open to using a restrained but still noticeable lyricism in writing about movies, and being open to more expansive thoughts like love and memory in the way they bind a film to its characters.