Posts by Peggy
Overheard in the Wolfe House #240
Sam (in the laundry room): I smell electricity.
Peggy: What?
Link-and-Twist: ethical reporting on health impacts and breast cancer
Mark had this rule we lived by, and we did our best to pass on to the kids. If something makes you mad, don’t do anything about it for at least 24 hours. Oh, The Places You’ll Go! when you don’t go to your angry place. Usually, we found that we woke up the next day and couldn’t remember why we were bothered. Or, if something was still wrong, we could think it through and get it fixed.
Editors have a rule that, when someone asks to reprint a story, they have to print the whole thing. That’s smart. It keeps people from misappropriating your work, recasting it in a shape that fits them, or just flat-out stealing it.
For a while now, when it comes to my long-ago story on local breast cancer rates, I think I’ve been applying too much of Mark’s rule, and not nearly enough of the editors rule. Here’s the rub: if a blog post is misappropriating a story, a link to the whole doesn’t fix that. In the case of the breast cancer story, there are too many of these supposed “stories-behind-the-story” and “stories-around-the-story” that link-and-twist.
Bud Kennedy of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram passed on a tweet by George P. Bush today that shows a certain level of determination by a handful in Wild West Cyber Space to keep twisting that story.
So, I will do my duty and offer my annual defense (here is last year’s) of what was a damn good story in summer 2011.
I think it started when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made a short reference to it in an essay on Huffington Post that summer. He didn’t boil it down quite right. It grated on me, but his heart seemed to be in the right place and I thought, who am I to call up Mr. Kennedy and say, “Dude, linking is not enough, that summary wasn’t right, fix it.” After Josh Fox referenced the story in 2012 in “The Sky is Pink,” an Associated Press reporter in Pennsylvania got a Texas-sized hitch in his git-along over it.
How huge? I endured a week of emails as this reporter tried, but couldn’t (or wouldn’t), find the original report with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the concern over breast cancer rates in North Texas and flat-out ignored the report on the uptick in breast cancers in Flower Mound. Then, he tried to cook up numbers of his own through the Texas Cancer Registry and fell flat.
That clunky AP story should not derail this important conversation about breast cancer and the North Texas environment, because it offers no numbers, just odd quotes of alternate experts a full year after the original story ran.
Meanwhile, Florence Williams masterful book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, has stepped in to keep the conversation going in the right direction. Or so I hope. She reminds us that as little as 10 percent of breast cancers are straight-up inherited. Most are triggered by something in the environment, either lifestyle, surroundings or both. If you haven’t read her book, shut up about what you think about breast cancer in the environment because, to those of us who have read the book, you will just sound like an idiot until you do.
In other words, for a breast book, it’s seminal. (You’re welcome, Ms. Williams.)
The good people of the Barnett Shale know what those breast cancer numbers meant in the original story — a friend, a neighbor, a colleague, a loved one who is suffering. One fellow in Double Oak so took to heart that spun-up criticism by the AP that he devoted a chapter in his book about it. Tom Hayden is a retired math professor, not an epidemiologist, but, Hey Martha! (that’s a dog-whistle to you budding epidemiologists out there) if he didn’t find something interesting: He compared breast cancer rates for two Texas cities about the same size, Fort Worth (shale) and Austin (no shale), and did the math. He appears to have found statistically significant differences in the rates, especially when examined by race.
I want to share one last thought for the really smart readers out there, and for those journalists who remember graduate school lessons about things like hegemony and logical fallacies.
Ask yourself this when you are reading a news story about the health impacts of the shale boom: does the underlying theme in this story assume that not just higher cancer rates, but statistically significant higher cancer rates, are necessary in order to change the course of this policy or practice?
There are scores of other health impacts, too, and they can be costly. To bring such a level of skepticism about health impacts and cancer risks to writing a story? I won’t do it. That’s just messed up.
Moreover, good journalists are not stenographers. We aren’t supposed to sit down and re-write the executive summary proffered by the bureaucrat and call it a day. We’re supposed to be in the community, listening, watching. We’re supposed work hard to be the light on the dark corner, the first draft of history, the dot-connector, the bellwether.
That’s what I did with the breast cancer story. All kinds of people read the news to understand what’s happening in their community and to better inform their work, and that includes scientists. The really smart ones are looking for clues to the next paradigm shift.
So, after the original story ran in 2011, maybe that’s why UT-Southwestern called me and asked for reprints of it. They told me they wanted copies for their team.
Doesn’t sound at all to me like my sources thought I got the story wrong.
There is a still a lot of work to be done in Texas. Tens of thousands of wells have been dug and those of us who drive the back roads and talk to people and know the patterns of history have got a pretty good idea what’s coming next.
The rest of this breast cancer conversation has to be taken up by you smart and discerning readers out there. You need to keep it going in the right direction.
I just got back from The Mayborn Nonfiction Conference and I need to get back to work. But if I have to, I’ll be back next summer for my annual defense of the breast cancer story.
As told to the Mayborn Nonfiction Conference
I went. I heard. I tweeted what resonated most with me.
- We’re in it – Skip Hollandsworth, all about “Bernie”
- This is a story you don’t get in the way of – Skip Hollandsworth
- Only when readers feel will they begin to think it through – Jeff Guinn
- Unconventional warfare is a cancer we pour in and once we do that, it’s hard to control – Tony Schwalm, The Guerrilla Factory
- There are no shortcuts in the process of owning your material – Jim Hornfischer
- OH at #Mayborn: “Because the person who comes back is not the person who left” – what migration/immigration and military memoir share
- Truth and courage – Alfredo Corchado, Reyna Grande
- I look for the voice, the voice that will carry it – agent Bonnie Nadell, on book proposals
- In democracy no decision is more profound than war and peace – Rick Atkinson
- In good narrative history, there is no foreseeable future – Rick Atkinson
- Public figures deserve their complexity – Kevin Merida
- I was always trying to write about this cosmic wrong – Donna Britt
- I said everything except this is a story about the healing power of love – Kelly Benham
- Storytelling can be a healing process, a wounding process – Tom Huang
- I probably should’ve run – Hugh Aynesworth, JFK eyewitness
- JFK 50 years later. Here’s a story from a Dallas reporter who was there http://t.co/05iCF8ynwy
- Love favors the prepared heart. – John Valliant
- I spent a year writing a pitch letter. Front-loading works well – John Valliant
- In memoir writing, there are ways to take a powerful memory and nail down the corners – Amanda Bennett
- It was, in the end, a love story – Amanda Bennett
- A photo can be simultaneously clear in its storytelling ability and confusing – Paul Hendrickson
- Westword’s Alan Prendergast tells the #Mayborn tribe that the original new journalists used archival research more than they let on.
- In those silences that follow your questions, you must use your imagination as well as your research to understand – Helen Benedict
- Editors see the holes in the logic that you can’t – Susan Orlean
- It’s just not the #Mayborn until Bill Marvel asks a question
- Archives have the good stuff; and can be more intimate than the interview – Susan Orlean
- There is a radiant quality to a story that has that longer timeline – Susan Orlean
- @LowellMBrown Yes. Chickens are very popular in the twitterverse
- To start on twitter, tweet about your chickens – Susan Orlean
You can follow me at @phwolfeDRC. Or find more searching #Mayborn. Or read Michael Merschel’s story (paywall) which underscores that, if you went, you could not continue to think that journalists are “heartless, self-centered or careless.” We showed, amply, that we have heart.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #239
Peggy: So was Dave laughing when he told you what was rattling in the trunk?
Sam (as a smile creeps across his face): A little.
The sibling experience
I didn’t tackle the sibling experience in my book about the first few years of Sam’s life. I didn’t feel it was my story to tell.
Many siblings of people with autism are starting to tell their stories. Paige and, especially, Michael enjoyed one book I picked up for them several years ago, The Ride Together. Paige wrote an essay for her nonfiction class at the University of Iowa that she will workshop at the Mayborn conference.
This young man shared his heartwarming story on YouTube.
Paige’s favorite lines:
“They thought he reached his fullest potential. He proved them wrong.”
“I play the big brother in the way I look out for him, but I still look up to him.”
Overheard in the Wolfe House #238
Sam (slapping the wall in the other room): Goodbye, mosquito!
Try the front row
The kids and I sat behind a family with three wiggly boys at Mass this morning. It didn’t take long for Michael, now a coach at Easter Seals, to notice that the youngest one was likely on the spectrum. I noticed, too, and remembered when my children could be that wiggly.
I thought for a moment about tapping the mom on the shoulder and offering her a tip, but then I remembered how I felt about advice from well-meaning strangers and kept my thoughts to myself.
Our church has Mass in the round. The altar is in the center of the room. It provides a good view for everyone, if you’re a grown-up. If you sit in the back, whether at St. Philip’s or at a church with a traditional layout, your kids seen only all the big people around you. But if you sit in the first row — and you have about six chances with a church in the round — all of the proceedings unfold right in front of you.
Mark had a bold idea when our church, St. Philip the Apostle in Lewisville, opened its new worship space in 1997. We wouldn’t sit in the back. We would sit right up front. If the kids wiggled, they would wiggle right onto the floor. And, they could see.
The first couple of times were a little scary. But it worked. The kids actually wiggled less because they could see what was going on. And, when they came back from children’s liturgy, they didn’t have to work too hard to remember where Mark and I were sitting because they only needed to scan the front rows.
I can’t remember when we realized the kids were calm enough that we could sit in other spots. But I do remember we started picking spots that would let Sam avoid the incense during the Gospel reading. He would slip out into the narthex and then slip back in at the end of the Homily, when it was done smoking so much. Eventually, we found a spot where the smell wasn’t as strong and we sat there so he could stay all the way through the service.
On the way home, as we shared our observations of the new Family Wiggly, I asked the kids if they could remember sitting in the front row and whether they liked it better. Could they see better? Did they know we did it so they wouldn’t wiggle so much? None of them could remember a bit of it.
Sam did remind us however, that while it may have been years since we’ve sat in a front row, we did for Mark’s funeral Mass.
Amen to that, Sam. Amen.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #237
Peggy (to grandparents via Skype): Do you want to see Paige’s birthday cake?
Sam (noting the pile of buttercream and strawberries): It’s not much of a cake.
Words My Dog Knows
I have a Blue Lacy dog named Gus:
He will be 12 years old this year. Over the years, he has learned many words and phrases. He understands basic commands such as come, sit, stay, and down, of course. But let’s explore some of the more interesting words Gus knows.
Uh-oh. Gus knows when this is uttered in the kitchen to come a-running because something delicious just fell on the floor. Say it in another room and he ignores you.
Time for toothbrush. He follows you to the pantry for those chews that ostensibly clean his teeth.
Squirrel. Nothing more needs to be said.
Crow. Like squirrel, little more needs to be said, but he looks up in the sky.
Time for work. He barks at you until get your boots on. Same goes for, let’s get the paper, or walk, or outside, or take the trash up.
Tractor. Sam never says a word, but Gus knows when he puts in the ear protectors, it’s time to bark because the 2N is heading out into the orchard.
Get ’em up. This was very useful when we had more livestock here, for example, when Michael’s cashmere goats would get out of their pen or the chickens needed to be hustled back in the coop. In 2005, I thought about dispatching him to the Texas Legislature when they made one of many messes they’ve made with school financing at the same time they declared his breed the official state dog.
Given what’s going on in Austin this week, I may yet send him down there.
Get ’em up, Gus.
Venison steaks
Another favorite venison recipe, as promised, from Chili, two ways.
The first thing Mark often cooked after a successful hunting trip was the venison backstrap, or tenderloin. I know some people soak the meat in buttermilk or wine to smooth out any gaminess that might be in the meat, but Mark rarely did that.
Instead, he would cut the meat on the diagonal into small medallions and dredge them in flour that was seasoned with salt and pepper, fry it in a bit of cooking oil and then serve it up with mustard. Pretty delicious, just like that.
Sometime ago, I stumbled across a recipe that took advantage of the little bits left behind in the fry pan that made a nice sauce, and that’s the way we’ve served it since.
If you want to make the sauce, choose a cast-iron pan and olive oil for frying the venison — a scant tablespoon per pound of meat. After removing the meat from the fry pan (keep it warm on a platter nearby), pour about a 1/2 cup of stock into the pan to pull up all the bits. With the heat on very low (so you don’t curdle the sauce), add a teaspoon each of dijon mustard and horseradish, and 2 tablespoons of Greek-style yogurt. When it’s hot, plate the steaks and pour the sauce over.