Remarkable pieces of writing on tragedy - by Carr, Junod & Teague

There were three pieces of recent first-person writing on the subject of death that really struck a cord with me, two from Esquire and one from Glamour.

The Glamour piece was the fairy short essay "My Dad, My Mentor: How Do You Say Goodbye to Your Father?" by filmmaker Erin Carr about her father, David Carr, who died in February. It was a really nice remembrance on the writer who I a few times posted on writing by and about.

The first of two Esquire pieces to note here was by Tom Junod with "The Death of Patient Zero," a followup story to his 2013 "Patient Zero" on Stephanie Lee. I wrote about the original feature in this blog post and as sad as it was to read of Lee's passing, it was almost heartening to read of the friendship that Junod and Esquire Mark Warren formed with Lee and devotion they showed to her. Also, even with the awfulness of Lee dying of cancer so young is the hopeful idea that the efforts to save her put forth by Eric Schadt and his team could continue to move forward and help save others.

The last piece to mention also centered around someone dying of cancer with Matthew Teague writing "The Friend" on his wife Nicole Teague, her diagnosis with terminal cancer, and his best friend Dane Faucheux moving in with them and staying past her death. The essay from Teague is quite possibly the most personal and open account I've ever seen someone write and Faucheux someone that comes across as an absolutely remarkable person.

Writers on writing & pieces about New York Times writer David Carr

There's been a number of great things I've seen recently on writers and writing, with a majority of them related to New York Times writer David Carr who died on Feb 12th.

Three really profound remembrances were "David Carr, friend of journalism" by Erik Wemple for the Washington Post, "King David" by Ta-Nehisi Coates for the Atlantic, and (with this last one the shortest) "David Carr was one of my dearest friends" by Andrew Rossi for CNN. Related to Rossi, he directed the movie Page One: Inside the New York Times, an awesome film for anyone interested in writing.

Written in the New York Times as a final "Media Equation" column of Carr's (the byline was "with David Carr") was "David Carr's Last Word on Journalism, Aimed at Students," a piece that included the link to Carr's syllabus to his Boston University Journalism class, a pretty fascinating document about writing that Carr posted to Medium. The last thing to note about Carr in this post was something published by Longform with "David Carr, 1956-2015" containing five pieces by Carr and one interview done of him.

Two other pieces about writing were compelling works starting off with "I never intended to write a Starbucks story" posted to Nieman Storyboard and on an interview with New York Times writer Jodi Kantor done by Lisa Pollack. It's interesting content from Kantor about writing a story that's incredibly fascinating to me in that it appears to have quickly brought about a large change for the better from Starbucks in how they schedule employees' work shifts.

The final piece to mention here was a sort of oldie, but goodie with "Stephen King's Top 20 Rules for Writers" taken from his brilliant book On Writing, originally published in 2000.

The Night of the Gun by David Carr

The Night of the Gun by David Carr in 2008 was a remarkable memoir of addiction, single parenting and a career in journalism from the New York Times writer who died recently at the age of 58. The book is a sort of going back in time for Carr, with him researching and conducting interviews about his past and he writes of how our memories can selective, and not actual representations of what occurred. Carr provides an incredibly honest account of his life, with details about the depths of his addiction to crack cocaine, horrendous parenting decisions prior to rehab, and events after his successful six-month stint in drug rehab, including the difficulties that can come with a blended family and then Carr's trouble with alcohol years after kicking drugs.

At the beginning of the book, Carr wrote of how he grew up in a Minneapolis suburb and while in high school drank, smoked pot every day along with doing other drugs, and then did cocaine for the first time on his 21st birthday. He went to drug treatment for the first time in 1984 and was a successful journalist by the mid-1980s, then freebased cocaine for the first time in early 1986 at 29 years old and after that started smoking crack cocaine. Crack took things to a whole new level, both in how great the experience was and in its negative ramifications. In terms of the dangerous situations that alcohol and drugs got him into, it's amazing that he made it through and a dominant thing that comes out about the wild times is how the life really was exciting, until it wasn't anymore.

In April 1988, Carr became a father when fellow junkie Anna gave birth two months prematurely to twin girls, Erin and Meagan, and Carr on November 18th of that year gave them to his parents to watch (after he left the girls in a cold car to go and get high) and a week later entered Eden House, a state of Minnesota-funded six month treatment program. During a fair amount of this time the twins were with excellent temporary foster care and Carr's parents would bring them by Eden House every weekend to visit. When Carr got out, he lived in a house for recovering addicts and the girls were living with Anna at the time after she did a rehab stint. However, while Carr was able to throw his energies into rebuilding his journalism career, Anna fell back into the drug dealing life and Carr in May 1990 successfully filed for full custody. At that point, so many people, especially family, helped Carr raise the girls with he as a single parent and increasingly more successful journalist. Related to his career, Carr at one point in the book notes how his goal was to have enough juice that he would not get pushed around by lesser men or women who were his superiors.

In December 1991, Carr got cancer, a disease that at the time resulted in the removal of his spleen and difficult rounds of chemotherapy. This is the disease that eventually killed him some 23 years later and it's sad reading what Carr in his book wrote about how cancer becomes a part of you that keeps it's own schedule, with your body as the host. In 1993, Carr met Jill, who would become his second wife when the twins were six years old and the family moved to Washington D.C. in 1995 when Carr got the job as editor of the Washington City Paper. Their daughter Madeline was born in December 1996 and in 2000 Carr moved to New York to write for Inside.com. The site ran out of money after a year and he did contract writing for New York Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly and then got a call from the New York Times about working there and became a staff writer.

Carr had a drink again in November 2002, later realizing that he had stopped thinking of himself as an alcoholic and figured drinking not a big deal, and in 2005 he could have killed his daughters while driving drunk and then was arrested for a DWI while driving solo to college night at the twins' high school. He then went to detox for a few days, came out and went back to regular meetings and there's no mention in the book of drinking again. It was a great book from Carr and sad that cancer took him when it did, regardless of how lucky he may have been to have made it past his drug and alcohol abuse unscathed.

Business of writing - on Omidyar, Greenwald & new media

There were some fascinating pieces in the past few weeks covering the business of writing, in particular stories on a forthcoming startup news site backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar (who I posted about back in 2009) and with noted investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald as a key principal.

The first piece that stood out to me as interesting on the venture was for the New York Times by David Carr. "An Interview With Pierre Omidyar" notes how Omidyar looking at an investment in the $250M range and in his now hometown created Honolulu Civil Beat, a site Carr described as doing "public affairs reporting with an eye toward giving citizens a look into the affairs of government."

Also about the new site was for Nieman Journalism Lab with Adrienne LaFrance writing "What does Pierre Omidyar see in journalism?" It was tremendously interesting stuff from someone who worked at Honolulu Civil Beat alongside Omidyar and whose description of that still ongoing site fairly closely matches that from Carr, with LaFrance saying "Omidyar’s goal for us was simple and neutral: Ask tough questions on behalf of the public to make this community a better place."

In terms of Greenwald as a lead investigative journalist for the new venture, he's known for receiving and reporting on NSA surveillance documents from Edward Snowden and just today, Greenwald did the interesting essay "On Leaving the Guardian" in which he wrote about journalism, it's role and importance.

Only in part about the site backed by Omidyar was an interesting short piece by Hamish McKenzie and Sarah Lacy to the website PandoDaily. "Vox’s new mega-round puts a bow on content’s 'holy shit' moment" covered the abundance of new media sites in recent years and high valuations on many of them. It was fascinating stuff and brought to mind Lacy's 2008 book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good (which I reviewed in the first few months of my writing this blog). On this same theme of hot new media companies, I was reminded of the service that to me helps make it possible for them to thrive, Twitter. The best writing I recall on the company and the power of it's links (literally) was by Clay Travis with "2011 belonged to Twitter, so does the future of sports media" for his college football focused sports website Outkick the Coverage.