A tornado tragedy

NOTES ON A PULITZER

What struck me most about Julia Keller’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning series on a tornado that ripped up Utica, Illinois, was not her meticulous reconstruction of events, or her attention to detail, or her metaphors and similes. All are laudable, aspects of an incredible story told incredibly well, but what struck me most was her folksy tone.

I once read a Nicholas Lemann essay where he said good magazine writing almost always consists of creative inspirations within an established theme. The parts are almost always identical: anecdotal lede, biographic information, use of scenes, etc. Newspaper writing, I feel, is not particularly different. Keller’s inspiration was her tone.

“Maybe, just maybe”, “slapping down all his chips”, “with an affection that ran deep and true”, “she knew everybody right back”, and “people who must've wondered what on earth had gotten into sweet little Gloria Maltas” are a few of the examples that popped out at me. Taken out of context, they seem less striking. But their effect, on both tone and pace—all lengthen and extend—were profound in my reading of the article.

However, they leave me curious. Their placement is irregular and mixed with elegant metaphors and similes that refer to orchestra conductors and finicky artists. So do both high-culture references and conversational, almost down-home come naturally for her, or were the expressions adapted from the interviews she did. Undoubtedly their use is a conscious choice, to reflect the personalities who people her story, but I wonder if the expressions flowed naturally from her pen, or it was done—entirely successfully, in my reading—to insert the feelings of a culture she is not fully a part of.

(Just found her biography on Pulitzer.org. As she was born and raised in West Virginia, college'd there and later in Ohio, and only then located in Chicago, I guess she was bred on that style. But given she carries a doctorate in English—her thesis looked at literary biography—and was a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 1998, it seems she’s got an ear tuned to each pitch.)

Early on in the story, when she is reconstructing Shelba Bimm and Lisle Elsbury’s thoughts, she falls into the same expressions. A similar question arises: did she turn direct quotes into thoughts, or did she insert their own expressions into recollections of thoughts?