Connecting with Source(s)
A few days back I returned from a two-week working vacation. I visited friends and family in Illinois and stayed for a few days in Chicago, followed by almost a week in Carbondale, before I made my way to the small town of Greenville to stay another week at my sister’s place.
It was a working vacation of sorts, as suggested, which is one reason I haven’t published a newsletter piece in a while. But with this installment, Waywards is back. You’re welcome.
My Illinois trip, the people I connected or reconnected with while back in the Midwest and the work I did during my approximately two-week stay prompted deeper reflection on human relations and on our ways of relating to what we intuit or comprehend as soulful and meaningful.
While in Chicago, I visited Back of the Yards Coffee on the South Side. After flying into O’Hare airport late on a Friday and then checking into a hotel in Rosemont, accessible via the Blue Line and booked somewhat last minute via Hotwire, I took the train to the Back of the Yards neighborhood the next day. I had hoped to get there in time to interview a barista who’d agreed to talk to me for an article I was commissioned to write about the place for Go Fund Bean’s Calibration Notes publication. No dice. It took almost 90 minutes to walk about a mile from the hotel in Rosemont to the L, then to take the train to the closest stop to the coffee shop, and then to walk another mile to get to my destination. No matter.
I took in the vibe and spoke off the record to the Back of the Yards Coffee barista who was working that day. She served me some of their medium-dark 47th Street Blend featuring hints of dark chocolate and roasted nuts, and she hooked me up with a vegan horchata on the house, which was delicious but a bit too sweet for my blood.
I also spent a few hours finishing up a forthcoming story about the effects of sickle disease on female fertility for Giddy, an outlet I write for regularly.
Preparatory work for that piece and for another story I worked on while I was away from Riverside reminded me that sources sometimes expect writers to let them review drafts including quotes from the interviews they did prior to submission. The request is completely within the realm of what’s reasonable, at least from a source’s perspective. It appears less so when a freelancer juggles multiple assignments for various outlets and only finishes a story shortly before deadline, allowing precious little time for reading and approval by those who made it possible.
Acknowledging the pretentiousness in what I’m about to write, I’ll add that in addition to some outlets discouraging the practice of sharing story drafts with anyone but editorial prior to publication, I also feel conflicted about letting someone else shape my work and over-determine the craft. Sources are in a not-insignificant sense collaborators, true, but they aren’t ipso facto collaborators in the writing process per se, nor are they responsible for furnishing the entire package, which often contains quotes and material obtained from other sources. If ever I misquote someone or make an error in attribution or the like, I would of course contact an editor ASAP about correcting the published article. Pre-approval before submission is and, well, might result in another story, however.
Since I didn’t get the interview in Back of the Yards I needed, I returned the next day and got the chance to sit down with one of their workers to discuss the local community and how the coffee house contributes to it, among other topics interested readers might need to check out my Calibration Notes piece, once it’s live, to learn more about.
Upon leaving Back of the Yards, I took the bus a few blocks and then walked a few more to get to the Truth Italian restaurant in another nearby neighborhood on the South Side. “The Pride of Bronzeville,” as the place is known, is a family-owned enterprise. I heard about it because a former student and men’s basketball standout I met when lecturing at the University of California, Riverside, is part of the family that owns it. George, a native South Sider and probably the only other person from Illinois I got to know at UCR, graduated not long ago, hung up his D1-worn sneakers and now works full-time at the restaurant which, as the Truth Italian about page states, features daily specials “designed for the wine lover, the sports enthusiast, the social butterfly, and the person who is looking for a quiet intimate dinner with that special someone.”
George was so busy working the day I planned to stop by, we didn’t really communicate beforehand. I figured I’d take a chance and at least see what the place had to offer, whether he was going to be there or not. As luck would have it, he and his mother were both holding it down at the family business on 56 E. Pershing Street, not far from the White Sox stadium.
I tried the wholesome and wholly plant-based pancakes Truth Italian had on offer. They’re on the menu thanks to George’s mother, a long-time vegetarian.
George, his mother and I all posed for a picture outside the establishment before I headed to a Green Line stop to get back to Rosemont.
After a vegan sandwich lunch with one friend and an evening sipping scotch and real talk about life, women, politics and work-related ambitions with another friend from way back, I proceeded down to Carbondale, Illinois, via the Amtrak. While on the train I got a story about an incarcerated artist and organizer commissioned by CH-VOID, an outlet focused on art, sex, love, play and healing. The piece is contingent upon correspondence with the source on the inside, who’s suffered serious repression and has recently struggled with health problems as so many do in facilities known for causing protracted suffering among the people encaged and for producing premature death.
Around the same time I had several back and forth e-messages with potential sources for a story I’m working on for another publication about high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and its effects on cognitive function.
Interestingly, some researchers who run labs prefer reporters not to contact other researchers in the labs they oversee independently without coordinating first. That’s reasonable, although having some familiarity and experience with academia – getting a doctoral degree and living the #AdjunctLife cobbling together classes at multiple campuses on short-term contracts – it still seems to me like often unnecessary micro-management in certain cases; however, scientists might justify the arrangements and strictures for efficacy and safety reasons, I suspect.
Working on the same article, I similarly had back and forth emails with a source who ended up not being available to talk before my deadline. That’s totally understandable, albeit frustrating. The frustration stems from the inherent difficulty of arranging interviews with time-strapped researchers. Nobody, of course, is obligated to fit a pro bono interview into their schedule, even if the broader public would benefit from their research being relayed in accessible fashion by way of interesting articles for popular consumption. But the inherent challenges of contacting and coordinating with sources to secure interviews, obtain clarifications and gather information can be a source of frequent frustration when it comes to working on stories.
When I got to Carbondale, I stayed at a friend’s house for a few days. He spent some time looking into prospects for additional summer income and working on preparing material for the community college courses he teaches, while I did freelance work. The latter entailed wrapping up a piece about the effects of anabolic steroids on a man’s body, which Giddy has already published.
During my stay in Carbondale, I diligently followed up with sources I hoped to speak with for an article I was working on for The Monitor about union organizing at Starbucks stores in the US and Canada. Finding sources for that story proved surprisingly difficult early on. Some of the high-profile organizers I reached out to never replied. That makes sense to me and I ought to take no offense. Folks involved in the Starbucks Workers Organizing (SBWU) campaign that’s swept the country are, as one might guess, rather preoccupied at the moment fending off company union-busting efforts. Many have their hands full trying to stave off all of the anti-union sentiment and amped up opposition to unionization and unionized stores whole-heartedly endorsed by Howard Schultz, corporate CEO and (ironically) author of “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul” – all of which reveals the mega-chain’s duplicitous public relations messaging that conceals how “partners” (employees, in pseudo-progressive parlance) are treated by painting the coffee giant as a compassionate community
I ended up speaking with some of the inspiring baristas involved in SBWU organizing. These workers were based in Chicago, Seattle and Southern California; I also connected with a staff person with the United Steelworkers, the union that helped organize several Starbucks stores in Canada, and a USW-affiliated barista at the drive-thru store in Victoria, British Columbia.
In contrast and unexpectedly, I got the Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore (circa 1990) treatment, when a would-be source I reached out to after I received a press release in my inbox with the person’s contact information located at the bottom ghosted me after we spoke – and after I took the time to type up and email questions prior to an interview we discussed briefly but that never happened.
It happens. Life happens.
Sources have lives. When you want to talk to sources immersed in the worlds of workspace or community organizing and concerted collective action, it behooves you to take into account the undue stress, vulnerability and precarious circumstances those sources face daily and endure. Admittedly, the lives of said sources could involve speaking with media workers, especially when a source puts out a press release ostensibly for that purpose, but unforeseen issues can always arise and preclude follow-through. Writers have to work through short circuits with anticipated sources as they appear. Freelancers often do so while struggling with some or all of the aforementioned challenges shared with sources and (to varying degrees) with swaths of working and poor people rendered super-exploitable and disposable in an economy predicated upon production of profit for a select few, constant accumulation of capital and concentrated ownership and control over the labor others do as well as, increasingly, over the communities wherein most people reside.
Once a friend from Bond County picked me up and drove us two hours north of Carbondale on Interstate 127 to the town I grew up in, Greenville, Illinois, I stayed at my sister’s house for another week. My sister, Katy, keeps her new place cold as an ice box, and she has a three-year-old who does three-year-old things, so the conditions weren’t always conducive to getting work done. I managed to do some interviews and to do a modest amount of writing secluded in the guest room, but I also visited the local coffee shops a few times so I could focus.
While I was in Greenville, Katy got a copy in the mail of the latest issue of The New Territory magazine featuring the feature piece she and I co-authored, which told her story in relation to a broader story about addiction, recovery and pitfalls of criminalization affecting our hometown. Katy and I posed for pictures in front of the old house we grew up in on Harris Avenue – the house pictured on the first page of our article in the magazine, which we held up for the photo.
At some point during my stay I received news that an investigative project I’d been working on – a fledgling exposé-in-the-making, maybe, for which I’ve somewhat painstakingly corresponded with well over a dozen incarcerated sources – is not going to receive the ample monetary support from an organization I pitched because of its penchants for properly funding investigative journalism.
Too few journalists covering the criminal legal system prioritize imprisoned sources, in my view. There’s a peculiar and demonstrably flawed presupposition popular among arguably too many writers, editors and higher-ups running media outlets based on the notion that official sources in the context of the criminal punishment system (e.g. spokespersons or figureheads in departments of corrections, wardens, correctional officers, county sheriffs, police commanders) are more apt to tell the truth and disclose worthwhile information than are those locked up under their authority. The assumption strikes me as particularly odd when a story involves investigation into the institutions those official sources are tasked with maintaining and presenting as palpable to the public, but I digress.
In a similar vein, if I may, I’d suggest there are too few persons among those who engaged in theory and practice to abolish the prison-industrial complex (PIC) who prioritize prisoner solidarity and mutual aid with persons on the inside. If pressed, I’d include myself in both of those camps and point to our shared abdication of responsibilities in resistance. I don’t see how prison abolition can occur, or how serious gains can be made in the process of abolition, without foregrounding the participation, collective agency and direction of those directly subject to the dehumanizing conditions of confinement and control forming the bedrock of a system of retributive justice and incarceration in the US. Again, I digress, though I do so in hopes we can figure out how to better address the above.
The investigative story I mentioned that’s in the works did not receive funding, but I did have a few exchanges with the editorial decision makers who opted not to remunerate me. Despite responding to questions they asked to clarify an already detailed pitch, I was informed the piece wasn’t a good “fit” for them. Now, could any of my additional clarification have made a difference in their determination as to whether or not what I pitched was an appropriate fit? I seriously doubt it. The added details did not change the fundamentals of the investigation or suggest a marked difference in framing from the original pitch.
So why waste my time and labor with a request for more preliminary reporting and explanation that was not going to make much of a difference in their final decision? It’s a rhetorical question. It’s also one I don’t know the answer to. The good intentions of editors notwithstanding, I chalk what transpired up to the dearth of concern among full-time editorial staff for the wherewithal and well-being of contract-based contributors at best, and to the institutionalized disposability of freelance labor at worst. Under-acknowledged or neglected by media workers in relatively comfortable professional-managerial positions, fellow freelancers are well aware of those endemic problems. My involvement with the IWW Freelance Journalists Union and the remarkable work of FJU members to address those issues attests to that, even as many of us form outstanding relationships with untold numbers of editors doing yeoman’s work, often under unenviable financial, resource and time constraints.
Whether I craft an effective pitch for a story worth funding or not, insidious if also inadvertent working relations as well as labor conditions still remain obstacles to the flourishing of freelance writers. What’s arguably more significant, is they remain impediments to doing justice to sources who assume real personal risks in hopes of affecting even minor social change. We need to break down barriers to helping those sources succeed in their endeavors to supply a modicum of experiential knowledge to the larger cultural terrain and better assist them in their commitments to contribute, even in imperceptibly small ways, to movements trying to displace practices at odds with richer notions of communally-realized human freedom.
Before leaving Greenville I wrapped up a skeleton for the HIIT-based story and submitted the draft of my Starbucks organizing article. I did this partly to the tune, quite literally, of the evangelical preaching and analysis my sister likes to listen to on speaker plugged into her smartphone while cooking, doing housework and tending to her toddler. My sister, Katy, finds solace in the devout Christian dogma. I appreciate spirituality and in some ways almost revere certain time-tested religious practices undertaken with others, but the proselytizing wears on me and doesn’t typically speak to what I value most or consider divinely sacred, for lack of better descriptors. I tried but did not do an excellent job conveying this to my sibling in the nuanced and fruitful conversations we had during my visit.
It occurred to me while writing and doing the mental planning for this Waywards piece that reconnecting in person with friends and family back in Illinois made work more enjoyable at times, though also harder than usual and likely unsustainable long-term without adjustments, given distractions encountered and my own stubborn routines and preferences.
Augmenting eros, bolstering affiliations with other human beings, and nurturing mutually affording social relations that enable persons involved to embody better versions of themselves and to actualize what’s meaningful without coercion – and minus the alienation I argue too many dominant institutions in society engender – all allows for a feeling partially akin, mayhap, to the sense others have of connecting with “source,” generally referring to the expansive or ultimate force(s) in the universe animating “spirit,” as many might have it.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Regardless, recuperating under-realized or repressed modes of interrelating also, for me, make it easier to anticipate and grasp in an incomplete, yet sensuous and participatory manner the possibilities for proliferation of social relations replete with collectively-fostered individuality, free from soul-crushing bureaucratic management and absent unjustifiable forms of agency-averse authoritarian control.
Even a temporary taste of enhanced interpersonal connection – marred as it might be by petty disputes, by elements of possessivity coming at other people’s expense and/or by trivial annoyances attributable to entrenched habits in conflict with the people’s various predilections – might inform how someone chooses to interact with and appreciate sources, how a freelancer relates to differently positioned media workers and more.
That’s not to equate those meaningful, psychically enriching connections with a magic elixir capable of curing all that ails us. What is more, I won’t go so far as to suggest that affiliative fellow-feeling with humans and non-human facets of the natural world is tantamount to “connecting with source,” as plenty of individuals desperately desire to do. But relational depth, sincerity and trust reinforced by intentional fortification of liberating communities can, perchance, facilitate the real or really perceived sensation of source connection for those who seek it.