Perhaps I’ll take a break.

From writing about Melville.

To share a few more tulips.

Last night, after I wrote about a passage in Clark Lee’s “They Call it Pacific” that described what a bombing raid on Corregidor sounded like, I spent some time exploring the Web for a little bit more about Lee’s book (Once again, the book includes the account of Melville and Annalee Jacoby’s escape from the Philippines alongside fellow reporter Lee). Along the way, I found something I hadn’t yet stumbled across in my research. In July, 1943, NBC aired a 30-minute adaptation of Lee’s book on its “Words at War” broadcast. According to Dee of “The Digital Deli Too,” the “Words at War” series aired during World War II and featured dramatizations of then-current literature about the conflict. Its third episode featured Lee’s book.

As it turns out, the dramatization revolves heavily around portions of Lee’s book involving Mel and Annalee. Though it still focus on those first uncertain months after Pearl Harbor, it draws on the three journalist as central characters, with a narrative arc that makes Mel’s death the story’s tragic denouement.

It turns out the episode — along with other “Words at War” episodes — has been shared on the Internet Archive. I’ll share it here, as well. It’s a fascinating listen, not just because of how the dramatization brings Mel’s story to life, but also because of the chance to listen to seventy-year-old radio storytelling. Why not take a listen yourselves:

[WARNING: As is the case of much media from this period, there are ethnic terms used repeatedly in this broadcast that many - myself included - would find offensive today. Proceed with caution.]

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

The file comes from the Internet Archive, where you can also stream or download other episodes of Words at War and other materials, not to mention many other audio programs, films, images, text and even old websites.

“…Then would come the noise of the bombs falling. The bombs didn’t screech or whistle or whine. They sounded like a pile of planks being whirled around in the air by a terrific wind and driven straight down to the ground. The bombs took thirty years to hit. While they were falling they changed the dimensions of the world. The noise stripped the eagles from the colonel’s shoulders and left him a little boy, naked and afraid. It drove all the intelligence from the nurse’s eyes and left them vacant and staring. It wrapped a steel tourniquet of fear around your head, until your skull felt like bursting. It made you realize why man found he needed a God.”

This is what war sounded like. This is what war sounds like.

Journalism doesn’t have all the answers, and we shouldn’t expect it to. We shouldn’t expect our stories to solve things for us.

Journalists’ primary role is not to answer the challenges that face our society: it’s to bring light to those challenges, so that those with the proper tools to solve a given problem will know that the challenge exists. In a sense, we’re brokers, we’re middle-men, we’re matchmakers between problems and solutions. But those problems and solutions still have to get to know one another, find the right match. We can’t consummate their relationships, we can just help them find one another.

A couple weeks ago, I pitched a story idea to a magazine whose content I admire. From my perspective, the idea was right up this prospective client’s alley. It fit their unique geographic focus and addressed a new angle to a controversy that’s beginning to show up in more and more states. In the interest of still pitching this story elsewhere, I’m not going to get into much detail about it.

I’m writing because the outlet’s rejection of my pitch centered on the editor’s position that there were too many unknowns in the subject I wanted to discuss. I tried to stress that that’s the noteworthy aspect of the story: this is an unknown situation. It also happens to be one that involves multiple state governments and economies sailing into uncharted waters. They’re trying to develop a strategy for approaching the subject at hand (hint, it involves regulation of an increasingly popular energy resource extraction technique), but don’t seem to be able to because they don’t yet know how much this issue will impact them.

My potential editor didn’t want the story because there are so many questions. Isn’t that the point of journalism? Isn’t part of our responsibility as journalists shining the light on inadequacies in official government? Are we only supposed to do so when we have tidy answers to present? Am I asking too many questions?

If there was another issue at play – the outlet doesn’t like my approach, they don’t trust my ability to complete the assignment, they can’t afford to pay me, or anything else – they didn’t let me know that was the case (and thus, lacking such knowledge or the ability to read minds, I’ll go with what they said to me directly, rather than worry what they *might* be thinking, something I spend too much time doing all across my life).

Perhaps I suck as a journalist. It’s quite possible, and that might be one reason I’m focusing more on my book than on reporting. Actually, this wasn’t my first pitch rejected because there were too many uncertainties. Maybe that says something about my reporting. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough for a story. Maybe I’m giving up too soon before I find an answer. Maybe I don’t belong. It’s tough not to think such things when these sort of situations repeat themselves.

But I also can’t help thinking that one responsibility of journalism is to help identify the “unknown unknowns.” Is it also our responsibility to then make those unknowns known? If it were, I’d suspect we’d get paid a lot more than we are (or I’d hope we are).

It’s such a grind to pitch and hustle. Have I really been spending so many years doing all this work, racking my brains for all these answers, only to possibly have a magazine maybe think about publishing something of mine for a few hundred dollars? Is this really any way to survive?

The ground beneath my feet is so incredibly unstable.

Fifteen thousand dollars is a lot of money to raise in a couple months. Twenty-five thousand in one month raises eyebrows even higher. Yet these were the targets I set for fundraising as I work to tell Melville Jacoby‘s story. First, I gave myself a month to raise $25,000 in what turned out to be an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign. Now I’m looking to raise three-fifths of that amount in more than twice as much time.

So far, I’ve raised nearly $2,300 through WePay, plus another thousand or so in checks mailed directly to me. That’s encouraging, but it means I’m on pace to raise $8,700 by June 16, and that’s only if I consider those checks in the calculation.

But why do I need so much more money than that?

What do I need to pay for? After my Kickstarter campaign wrapped up I went to my networks and asked for advice about possible next steps. Someone asked “Why don’t you just start writing?”

I’d love to. I really would. Nothing would make me more content than to just pour all of my energy into researching and writing Mel’s story and producing the multimedia elements I hope to include alongside it. Unfortunately, doing a project like this, and doing it professionally, in a way that’s worthy of the story that there is to tell, requires an investment of time and of resources.

As this book takes greater precedence in my life — as well it should — I’m learning ever more about how much will be involved in its preparations. I’m posting this while on the MAX, and therefore don’t have my breakdown of precise costs in front of me. Nonetheless, here’s what I’m going to have to pay for:

• Printing and distributing the book.
• Converting and distributing the multimedia version.
• Hiring a designer and editor.
• Acquiring the rights to photos of Mel by people like Carl Mydans, as well as any other copyrighted material.
• Traveling to or otherwise accessing archives with relevant material and paying duplication and other fees at these places. Already I’ve identified collections at Harvard and Stanford that are directly relevant and I know there will be others.
• Paying for conversion and preservation of fragile materials already in my family’s possession that I’ll need to consult regularly and want to avoid damaging.
• Marketing and legal costs.
• And a host of other expenditures.

Ultimately, I expect it’s going to cost me more than $15,000 (Hence my Kickstarter ask), but during this phase I’m also pursuing grants and pitching literary agents. And I’ll pursue every avenue until this story is told.

There are two options for me here: write this story in the nooks and crannies of my life during the seconds that i can scrounge up as I work for a living, or make this project my living, make it an endeavor whose nooks and crannies everything else must negotiate.

My guess is if I hope to “just write,” I need to make the latter a reality.

That’s why.

Today, I took some video and audio equipment along for the ride so I can show you a sliver of what it’s like to commute by transit across the mighty Columbia River. Enjoy.

There’s something about this machine that changes my writing, that makes it into something else. There’s something about the way this machine and my fingers interact, about the immediacy and the physicality of words landing on the page that isn’t replicated on a computer screen. It doesn’t quite make sense to me that different tools can produce different types of writing — it’s all still made up of words, after all — but, nevertheless, they do seem to do so.

By the way, this machine wouldn’t be in the condition it is had I not bought myself a birthday gift last year of a tune-up from Portland’s Ace Typewriter & Equipment Company, an anachronism in a town full of anachronisms. A while back, my friend Christina spent a day shadowing the father and son team as part of her research into a bigger project about second hand society (By the way, she wrote a great piece for the New Yorker about Portland’s last book scout). I got to read a version of that piece and know that Ace isn’t intentionally anachronistic the way so many throwback enterprises in Portland can be; instead, the father and son team running the store are just plugging away at their business as they have for decades.

The strong impressions Mel made weren’t limited to personal relations, though. After Mel died in 1942, Stanford University‘s journalism department produced a beautiful pamphlet memorializing his life. The booklet led off with reflections on Mel and the impact his reporting had in those early days of World War II. They came from two of the most prominent U.S. military officials of the time, General Douglas MacArthur and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. See what they had to say after the jump.

General MacArthur:

Secretary Stimson

These two represent a tiny sampling of the many individuals whose lives Mel touched. Some were even higher profile than Stimson and MacArthur. Many were far lesser-known. I’ve mentioned a few previously, and look forward to learning about more.

Do you think contemporary generals, cabinet officials or other government officials  would ever hold, let alone express, similar opinions about any 25-year-old reporters today? Let me know in the comments.