YEARS AGO I WAS A REPORTER FOR A SMALL-TOWN VERMONT NEWSPAPER. I covered the municipal beat—city council, schools, police. I wrote frequently about stormwater projects. I nearly fell asleep writing these articles; reading them must have been lethal.
I remember sitting in the editorial office while Donna, our acerbic managing editor, formatted a piece I’d just filed.
“Were there actually twenty?” she asked.
“What?”
Donna—who, in addition to editing the paper, was the treasurer of the regional Little League division, where she no doubt inspired the same fear in dues-paying parents as she did in greenhorn reporters—spoke without taking her eyes from the screen where she adjusted columns and cut and pasted text.
“Your article says there were twenty people at the Development Review Board meeting. Were there?”
“I think so,” I said. I felt a trap being laid.
“Did you count them?”
I had not. Twenty was a guess, and I told her so.
She swiveled in her chair to face me. On a good day she was maybe five foot three. Brown hair, olive skin. No-nonsense fleece vest and leggings with clogs. Everything neat as a pin. Her eyes locked on mine. I’ll never forget her next words: “This is journalism. Don’t write ‘twenty’ unless you count.”
She then turned back to her screen to continue laying out the next day’s issue. When the paper came out, I paged through until I found my piece on the meeting.
There was no mention of how many people had attended.
The lesson stuck with me. If something is called journalism—or nonfiction, for that matter—it should be true. Not just kind of true, or more or less true, but as true as possible. I realize memory is faulty. I know we embellish certain episodes of our past, gloss over others, conveniently order events to fit narratives. But I believe—as cranky and old fashioned as it may be—that if you say a thing is true, it should be. Every effort should be made to be faithful to what happened.
I’m out of step with others on this, I know. Geoff Dyer, the brilliant English writer, is known to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Essayist John D’Agata—notorious for his artistic interpretation of the truth—and his fact checker, Jim Fingal, argued so vehemently about what constitutes fact that the editorial process (usually hidden behind drafts and inboxes) got published as a book called The Lifespan of a Fact When I found out the opening paragraph of Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek—where a tomcat returning from its nocturnal prowls leaves bloody paw prints on Dillard’s blankets—was not Dillard’s story at all, but an anecdote she lifted from a student (with permission), I was crushed. I love that opening paragraph. To find out it wasn’t exactly true; well, it took some of the raw joy out of it. For me.
The aforementioned folks are brilliant and I’m a huge fan of their work. Their derring-do stylistically is something I can only marvel at. My quiver contains a slightly less sexy arrow. I try to be accurate. To tell the truth. No matter how shame-inducing or cringey.
Everything in these pages happened. Various bits have been read and verified by individuals in the actual stories. Names have been changed out of respect for privacy. Any omissions, misrepresentations, or mistakes are completely my own. I really did fall into a latrine once.
No one is clamoring for another book by some white dude about the transcendence possible in nature. I mean, come on Gag me with a Nalgene. But we all have a story, and this one is mine to tell. I hope I’ve done it justice.