![]() It can be a way of helping the reader not get confused, so I think timelines are very helpful. I think it can be really helpful to keep a timeline like that, and then when you’re constructing your narrative, obviously chronology is one of the most useful organizing principles, particularly with a complex story. You find connections that way, things that you wouldn’t realize maybe if you had just done different interviews and you weren’t looking for those connections. So, if I interviewed somebody and I learned that he went to medical school in 1974, and this and that, I’d just find that spot in my document in 1974. If you’re intending to tell a narrative story, that can be very, very helpful.īasically, when I did an interview, I would go back and kind of plug the relevant pieces into my running timeline, which was just a Word document. GUTKIND: Are there two different ways you piece a story together? Do you piece together the basic information of the story while at the same time you have a narrative that you’re trying to piece together? How does that work, and how do you keep them separate and together, and how do you do that kind of research simultaneously?įINK: I think one of the most helpful things is to keep a timeline. But I was certainly doing other things along the way. Over time, sometimes someone who’s not willing or able to talk at first will be able to later, and, of course, through the incredible amount of litigation in this particular case, certain documents became available in the court record that were very helpful at reconstructing what happened-at giving facts and data and test results and whatnot, which was all very helpful in piecing things together. Particularly if you’re an independent journalist or a freelancer, it may be typical that you’re going to be working on kind of juggling different things, and I think that can be an advantage. There are stories that I follow-even now there are a couple of things I’ve been following for well over a year it’s not like I stop everything else. Or were you just kind of committed?įINK: No, I was writing about a lot of different things in the interim I wasn’t just doing that story. GUTKIND: Surely there were times when you decided you would just walk away and find something else to write about. In a phone conversation with CNF earlier this year, Fink talked about how her medical training informs her work as a reporter, the importance of “vacuuming up” information, and the six years of work she put into researching the events of five days. The result of six years of reporting was a book, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, which not only reconstructs the events at the hospital during those critical five days after the storm struck, but also explores vital questions of policy, not to mention truth and justice: Who bears responsibility in disasters? And how can we prepare for calamity?įive Days at Memorial has been justly acclaimed, winning numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Some writers might have moved on, but Fink stuck with the story, interviewing everyone she could-hospital staff, patients and their family members, relief workers, and others. Eventually, her efforts led to a story, co-published by ProPublica and the New York Times, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Working as a freelance journalist, she headed to New Orleans to try to conduct an interview with the doctor under indictment. She had previously written a book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival, about a group of young doctors trapped in Bosnia and the professional and ethical dilemmas they faced there. ![]() in neuroscience as well as experience delivering aid in combat zones, recognized the significance of the story. In June of the next year, a doctor and two nurses from the hospital faced criminal allegations of having hastened the deaths of several elderly and critically ill patients with injections of sedatives.įink, a trained doctor who also has a Ph.D. The staff at the underprepared hospital, where the generators failed after two days, worked around the clock, struggling amidst chaos and confusion to keep patients fed and hydrated until they could be evacuated. Journalist Sheri Fink talks about deep reporting, building timelines, and whether there’s a difference between “scientific truth” and “narrative truth”Īs Sheri Fink recalls it, she heard about the events at Memorial Hospital the way most of us probably did, among the news stories coming out of New Orleans after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Knowing that Truth is Complicated: An interview with Sheri Fink Tell Me a Story: Is This a Golden Age of Live Storytelling?. ![]()
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