Paige Williams, deputy editor of Atlanta magazine, recently beat finalists from GQ, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker to win the 2008 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.
She did it with You Have Thousands Of Angels Around You, the inspiring story of a girl from Burundi and all the people who saved her life.
Read the story, then read our e-mail conversation.
Gangrey: Where did you get the idea for this story?
Paige Williams: In planning our first International issue (October 2007), Rebecca Burns, the editor in chief, knew she wanted a narrative in the mix. I started calling various agencies and organizations and law firms known for immigration work. A woman at one such firm told me about a refugee from Sierra Leone who had spoken to her firm recently and that his story was amazing. His lawyer was Sue Colussy, the Catholic Charities attorney. Sue and I tried for weeks to find this guy, and when I finally did find him, with the help of a private eye I know, he absolutely did not want his story told. In fact, he was terrified that we had located him. His story was stunning and he’d not told even his fiancé—he wanted to leave behind, completely, that part of his life. I truly believed I would never find a story as compelling as his, but, sadly, those stories are everywhere. Sue remembered Cynthia, phoned her, and Cynthia agreed to be interviewed.
I have to admit this is the kind of project I would have hesitated to undertake. There are so many places where it could so easily fall into the hackneyed swamp of the second-rate newspaper feature. And yet you didn't let it. How did you pull this off? I mean, how did you go about avoiding the trite and the sentimental?
I have no idea. I just wrote it. That’s not very helpful, I know. What I do know is that it felt important to section it off and keep it as linear as possible (and it’s almost too linear, if you ask me) in order to keep the story line as simple as possible, especially given the complicated nature of some of the facts. It’s actually easier to say how I reported it, which is to say obsessively. The interview transcript with Cynthia ran 43 pages. Grace: 14 pages. Reid: 11. Sue: 10. And those were just the first interviews, with just the principle characters. The timeline, which I almost always do with longer stories, ran 21 pages. I’ve been accused of over-reporting, which may be true; but I guess I’d rather over-report and feel I have as thorough an understanding of the people and situations as possible than to go thin and superficial by under-reporting.
That isn’t to say I didn’t feel emotion during all of this. A friend of mine died in a car wreck—the phone rang with news of his death one morning literally as I was writing—and, corny as it sounds, I guess the story is watered with tears for Cynthia as well as for my friend.
How much time passed between initial idea and final editing?
According to my calendar, my first meeting with Cynthia was the afternoon of June 11, 2007, meaning I had already spent time with Sue Colussy and had started the preliminary reading on Burundi and on U.S. immigration/refugees. The calendar’s following weeks show entries such as “Read, read, read,” and “Feed the timeline,” and “Pay car insurance,” and “PAY CAR INSURANCE!!” (a lot of my life gets lost to work, including one very nice ex-husband). For the first two weeks of July every day is marked CYNTHIA, so I’m sure I worked on it daily, with continual interviewing and other reporting throughout. The piece was due July 30. Because we have a small shop, I had other editing and writing duties during this time, apparently including something on pimento cheese (no idea) and an interview with Andruw Jones in the Braves dugout, the rewards of which consisted solely of getting to see his dimples up close.
There's a riveting stretch of dialogue near the beginning between Cynthia and an agent at the Detroit airport. How did you reconstruct it?
Among her Justice Department papers, just past the form titled “Record of Deportable/Inadmissable Alien,” was a three-page transcript of Cynthia’s interview with immigration officers. I’m crazy about transcripts and documents in general.
This is a fantastic detail: "Grace wore a gold locket whose contents were between her and the Lord." What did she say when you asked what was inside? Did you ever find out?
I noticed the locket – that Grace occasionally fiddled with it as she spoke – and asked her what was in there. She smiled and said, “That is between me and the Lord.” I never did find out. Her late husband’s photo? I just don’t know. And I almost prefer not to know. We as reporters sometimes think we have to know every single detail—that we’re entitled to every single detail—but sometimes you just have to let it go and work with what you’ve got. And even if you’ve got nothing, as was the case with the locket, you can at least try to use it to the story’s advantage. Not knowing the contents of Grace’s locket echoed, to me, some of the inevitable mystery and incompleteness of stories such as hers and Cynthia’s.
The first four paragraphs of Part Two -- starting with "Here is your room, here is your bathroom, here is your closet" -- were unusually effective at propelling me into the section. Was that your first idea, or did you have to try several times before arriving at that construction?
That was the first go, yeah. To me, the piece at this point needed a change in texture, a shakeup of rhythm and voice. The new pacing also seemed, to me, to mirror what Cynthia was going through at that part of her journey: a hail of information and newness coming at her fast. A breathless sort of almost-incantation felt appropriate there.
Part Three contains an extraordinary level of detail for something that happened fifteen years on another continent. How did you do it? How did you get Cynthia to open up? Who did you interview? Did you go to Burundi?
Cynthia sat through not hours of interviews but days of interviews. She got tired at times and cranky and at one point told me I asked stupid questions. It was extremely painful for her, I’m sure, to be asked not only to remember this part of her life but also to recount it to some reporter she’d just met. We did all of our interviews over the Mizells’ kitchen table and I don’t really know how the openness happened; I like to think she felt comfortable enough with me to tell me what she could. Having said that, I know she held back at times, which was understandable; she’s still reluctant to trust. Parts of her story I got from her entry essay, which she wrote for the immigration court not long after her arrival. As for Burundi, no, I didn’t go; I read as much as I could find on the region and on the war, whether in books or government reports or travel guides, etc. I’m also a huge fan of maps; I love studying them.
OK, so you finished the reporting. What next? How many drafts did you go through? What was the back-and-forth like with your editor?
I write as I report, and the reporting usually happens right up to deadline. It’s never been a one-two thing for me; these facets of the process happen simultaneously. If I’ve got a full notebook I do a note-dump while the material is fresh to me factually and emotionally. The long interviews I tape and transcribe myself; I’m always surprised to hear something that didn’t register while I was actually with the person—some detail that slithered through the cracks while I was focused elsewhere. I’m a little anal about transcription—I transcribe literally every word. I like the written record to be absolutely complete. Being able to turn on a tape recorder and hear the person speak keeps me connected to that person in a visceral, necessary way.
As for the drafts: one draft. That’s usually my goal, to get it in one take, and usually that happens because I’ve been so obsessed with the piece from conception to filing. I don’t show it as I’m working. And because I rewrite for myself and for the story, I like to think I have a fairly keen sense of when it’s working and when it’s off, in which case I fix it myself. By the time I file, I know it’s been written and rewritten to death, and I try to hand it over in as perfect a form as is possible. And clean. Always clean. If the fact-checking department can find even one error, it bums me out. Of course there’ve been times when I’ve failed miserably, embarrassingly: for instance, GQ once—rightly—cut a story of mine to haiku, and Adam Moss—rightly—killed a long piece I’d worked on for months for the Times magazine. With the Cynthia piece, we trimmed for space and tweaked here and there but it ran pretty much as written.
Could you give us a brief history of your writing career?
The Daily Mississippian (college)>Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal (intern)>The Clarion-Ledger (intern)>The Washington Post (intern)>The Charlotte Observer (staff writer)>freelancer + journalism adjunct (NYU and others)>Atlanta magazine. Newspapers were a terrific foundation for magazine work because you’ll never get better training on accuracy and ethics and accountability, which isn’t always true in magazines. The detriment: a (necessary) tendency toward the truncated and formulaic, which can be a hard habit to break. For me, magazines have been murderously difficult at times (near lethal doses of rejection, poverty, etc.), but it’s never been boring. I’ll always love newspapers and believe newspapering to be the noblest work around, but for their pace and structure magazines suit me better.
What writers have influenced you most, and why?
Writers/reporters across genres have influenced me in one way or another, from Sherwood Anderson to Michael Herr to John Hersey to Denis Johnson to Rebecca West to Ernie Pyle to the Russians to the Southerners to my storytelling aunts, uncles, and cousins in Mississippi, to David Foster Wallace to Aleksander Hemon to Orwell to Elizabeth Leland and John Vaughan of The Charlotte Observer.
How did you get to where you are as a writer? By this I don't mean position, I mean skill. What exactly did you do to build the skills you have now? What are you doing to get even better?
Read, write, and repeat. And get comfortable with pain. And with never being off duty. It’s like Ben Bradlee once said about adversity: “Put your nose down, your ass up, and push.” Sounds awful, doesn’t it? Maybe I need a vacation.
What's it like for a writer at a city magazine to win the National Magazine Award? What sorts of people have congratulated you? How does this affect your career?
Well, it’s a huge plus for Atlanta magazine. It wasn’t the first nomination in the magazine’s long history (I think Tom Junod secured that) but was for sure the first win. I hope it means we’re on the right track and shows that city and regional mags can do outstanding journalism. As for the career, who knows? Hopefully it means I’ll always get to work.
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