TRAIL diaries are a sadly under-utilized form of reportage.
The thought first occurred to me while reading an interview, in the Paris Review’s Art of Non-Fiction series, with Gay Talese. This clip elaborates on his writing process (emphasis mine):
INTERVIEWER: Do you use notebooks when you are reporting?
TALESE: I don’t use notebooks. I use shirt boards.
INTERVIEWER: You mean the cardboard from dry-cleaned shirts?
TALESE: Exactly. I cut the shirt board into four parts and I cut the corners into round edges, so that they can fit in my pocket. I also use full shirt boards when I’m writing my outlines. I’ve been doing this since the fifties.
INTERVIEWER: So all day long you’re writing your observations on shirt boards?
TALESE: Yes, and at night I type out my notes. It is a kind of journal. But not only my notes—also my observations.
INTERVIEWER: What do you mean by observations?
TALESE: I mean my personal observations, what I myself was thinking and feeling during the day when I was meeting people and seeing things and making notes on shirt boards. When I’m typing at night, on ordinary pieces of typing paper, I’m not only dealing with my daily research, but also with what I’ve seen and felt that day. What I’m doing as a researching writer is always mixed up with what I’m feeling while doing it, and I keep a record of this. I’m always part of the assignment. This will be evident to anyone who reads my typed notes.
I uncovered a good example of this recently when I was looking through some old files from the sixties. I had just gotten to the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles to begin researching my piece on Frank Sinatra. I hear a knock on the door. It’s the night chambermaid. She comes in to turn down the bed and to place a piece of chocolate on the pillow. And this chambermaid is gorgeous. She’s a strong, lean woman from Guatemala, about twenty-two years old, who speaks English with a heavy accent and wears a wonderful striped skirt. I have a conversation with her. Then I find myself writing about these women who work for the Beverly Wilshire, many of them quite beautiful, and most of them from faraway places, who each day are immersed in the luxurious and privileged lifestyles of the hotel’s guests. So here I’m supposed to be working on Frank Sinatra, but this whole drama about hotel rooms and chambermaids, that’s in there too.
“I am always part of the assignment,” Talese says. Reporters usually are, even if they don’t articulate the thought as well — there is no way you are divorced from your subject during the reporting process. But when you sit down to write, all those personal thoughts are filtered out, or at the least sanitized.
But what if these were available to the reader? What if you could read not only the narrative, but be part of the the process of reporting itself and experience the seen and the heard and observed and felt while a reporter is in-field? An example of what a Talese ‘shirt-board’ looked like, when he was reporting for his iconic profile of Frank Sinatra:
Image courtesy openculture.com
Open Culture has more on the image above. And here, a gem: the Frank Sinatra profile, annotated by Talese
See the bit where Talese sets up his second scene, using Jim Mahoney as the connecting link between the first and second scenes?
Courtesy Open Culture
Here is the clip, from the Sinatra profile:
IT WAS THE MORNING AFTER. IT was the beginning of another nervous day for Sinatra’s press agent, Jim Mahoney. Mahoney had a headache, and he was worried but not over the Sinatra-Ellison incident of the night before. At the time Mahoney had been with his wife at a table in the other room, and possibly he had not even been aware of the little drama. The whole thing had lasted only about three minutes. And three minutes after it was over, Frank Sinatra had probably forgotten about it for the rest of his life–as Ellison will probably remember it for the rest of his life: he had had, as hundreds of others before him, at an unexpected moment between darkness and dawn, a scene with Sinatra.
It was just as well that Mahoney had not been in the poolroom; he had enough on his mind today. He was worried about Sinatra’s cold and worried about the controversial CBS documentary that, despite Sinatra’s protests and withdrawal of permission, would be shown on television in less than two weeks. The newspapers this morning were full of hints that Sinatra might sue the network, and Mahoney’s phones were ringing without pause, and now he was plugged into New York talking to the Daily News‘s Kay Gardella, saying: “. . . that’s right, Kay . . . they made a gentleman’s agreement to not ask certain questions about Frank’s private life, and then Cronkite went right ahead: ‘Frank, tell me about those associations.’ Thatquestion, Kay–out! That question should never have been asked. . . .”
A writer’s notebook is a catch-all repository of sights and sounds and impressions and thoughts and notes on structure and unanswered questions and promising lines of inquiry — the engine room of the developing story.
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BEGINNING two years ago, Arati Kumar-Rao made a series of trips to Rajasthan to report on the phenomenon of how the Rajputs and the Bhils, today’s people, harnessed the wisdom of the legendary Paliwals and learnt to work with the desert rather than despite it, and how this learning had helped them farm one of the most inhospitable terrains on earth.
Multiple trips spanning over a year — an immersion needed to capture in its entirety a story that spans the seasonal cycles — resulted in this story: The Miracle of Sky River
Between 7-13 this month Arati was back in the field, in that region, to record another aspect of the desert story: a story of survival in the face of extremes of heat, of the challenges of leading a pastoral life in the midst of terrain so parched it is a struggle to find water for man and beast.
On this trip, Arati experimented with a combination of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, the ‘shirt-boards’ of today, as a scratch-pad to record what she saw and heard and observed and felt — an emotional palette that spans the spectrum from delight at learning that the desert people have over 30 words for clouds, to the sadness of seeing the shredded bodies of vultures dotting the landscape, like so much roadkill on the highway to development.
Here is her fluid field diary — an all-access pass to the narratives that will follow for Peepli:
Also Read:
The Miracle of Sky River, where the reporter uncovers the story of ancient desert wisdom that feeds thousands today
In Search of a Minstrel, where the reporter goes in search of a song, and its singer, that holds the secret of the ancients
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