INTERVIEW: “THE LATEST IN BLOOD AND GUTS”

Story: “The latest in blood and guts” (<-Click there to read the story!)
Genre: Short Fiction (based on real-life events)
Keywords: Broadcast News in Florida in the 1970s; Puppets; Nominees for the Bradenton District Office’s Forestry and Conservation Award; the Dateless Wonder Club; Unsolicited Chocolate Cakes
Trivia: This story is an imagined filling-in of details about the life of broadcast journalist Christine Chubbuck, who shot herself in the head on camera in 1974. The story’s title is a phrase she used in that last-ever live report. 
Soundtrack: "You Appearing" by M83

Where did the idea for this story come from? 
My friend Nick posted a link on Facebook to an article, or a Wikipedia page or something, about Christine Chubbuck, whom I’d never heard of. Thanks to his post, I started reading a little bit of her life story, and I immediately wanted to write about her. Or rather – it seemed as if I immediately started writing about her. It was never a question of “Will I write about this?”, weighing the pros and cons – it just sort of happened, right away. Sometimes a subject just grabs you. 

I brought this story to the short-fiction workshop I used to attend here in DC, and we read it as a group (in that particular writing group, someone other than the writer always reads the story aloud, so the writer can see if other people stumble over the words or whatever). I didn’t tell them beforehand that it was based on the life of a real person, with details taken from news clips. I think they all thought it was somehow about me – my real name is similar to “Christine,” I’m a former journalist, I have dark hair, I’m not the most socially suave human being in the world. I think they were worried about me, like it was some kind of not-that-thinly-veiled cry for help.

There was this awkward moment of silence after we read it, and then I told them it was based on a real person who killed herself that way. Everyone kind of went, “Ohhh…”, and something clicked, and then they got it. I think then they could see it as more of an objective story instead of a fictionalized journal entry or something. I viewed that reaction as indicative of a failing on my part as a writer. I intentionally didn’t tell them at first that it was fictionalized non-fiction, hoping the story would stand on its own as a good story.  

But instead everyone kept asking about the real-life chick, and one guy even spun around in his chair – that writing group meets in the computer lab of a prep school – and Googled her right then and there. It was so weird to have her gloomy mug peering out at us during the story discussion. But you know, I think she would have liked that. And I like to think she would have liked my story.  

Why do you think she would have liked your story? 
Because I tried to hold that sensationalized idea of “the latest in blood and guts” up to the light and ridicule it, or expose it for being a hypocritical or at least cynical impulse to have, as a media organization and as a culture. I tried to do that by contrasting this real woman's sadness as well as these fairly noble little endeavors of hers – the little community-news bits, the puppets for the children at the hospital – that aren’t so newsworthy with the stuff that, sadly, is newsworthy. 

And it is unfortunate what's newsworthy and what isn't. I mean, I don’t know about her because she volunteered to cheer up sick kids with puppets; I know about her because she blew her brains out on TV.  

The news stories I found online quoted people saying she had a dark sense of humor. That’s part of what leads me to think she wouldn’t go, “Oh, heavens to Betsy!” at my writing a warts-and-all story about her. Also, I get the sense that she badly wanted to be loved, or at least understood. I think she would have liked to know that – 30 years after her death – here was this little group of amateur writers looking at her picture and talking about her in an after-hours prep school in Washington, DC. More than immortality, it's a kind of love, keeping a person's memory alive.   

You’ve mentioned that you looked at old news articles when working on this story. Tell us about that process – how did you choose what nuggets of information to use, and how did you go about making some things up?
It started out as just my being fascinated with her, and curious, and sort of post-mortem Google-stalking her. It was the quotes from people who knew her, along with these random and sometimes oddball factoids I kept coming across, that made me feel that I had to put it all together in a story. 

It was terribly unscientific – or organic, if I want to put a marketing spin on it. I was pretty sloppy about it – sometimes I used word-for-word quotations from actual people that I’d seen in actual news articles, but my story doesn't have any footnotes or anything. Maybe that would have to change if this ever appeared in a printed book or publication. That would kind of suck, because it’s been a while and I forget where I got everything from. It was all just sort of “out there in the Internet ether.” When you work in obscurity, assuming you'll never be famous and can therefore fly under the radar, sometimes you cut a lot more corners.   

I used to be a journalist, so I like to think I have a decent sense of when it’s OK to simply say “A news article said…” versus when you’re basically stealing another reporter’s work line-by-line and being a jerk. Sometimes it’s OK to borrow facts (to me this includes quotes from sources you’d never be able to track down now), but you never steal another writer’s language – the way they wrote something up. Geez, why would you even want to? Writing stuff up is the fun part.  

What are some things you made up?
Very little factually. There are clearly some scenes – any in which Christine is alone, for example, such as the one in which she’s alone in her house, the part about the creaks in the stairs; apparently she really did have a pink room like a little girl's room, though – that neither I nor any reporter could have known about. And whenever I speculate about what she might have been thinking or feeling, well, that’s speculation; I didn’t do anything like read a journal of hers. 

For those scenes and details, I pretty much just tried to do what I always do when I write a story: make the characters as believable as possible; make them say and do things that are authentic-seeming, that seem like things they would say or do. With the caveat that people are sometimes unpredictable, of course – but even their unpredictable actions (say, blowing your brains out on TV) should make some kind of sense when you look at the whole story. In this story, I tried to use the melancholy mood as a kind of foreshadowing.  

Although there didn’t need to be any foreshadowing, because I started with the scene in which she blows her brains out. I'm sorry if that sounds like a disrespectful or indelicate way to put it – but for some reason I feel as if she would have appreciated that kind of blunt honesty.   

Why did you begin the story with that scene?
In a practical sense, I wanted the reader to clearly know why they were reading this story. It’s sort of like a teaser on TV. Otherwise you might just think you’re reading about this unhappy TV-news chick in the 1970s, like a really bleak and gender-reversed version of "Anchorman," and you might not care. If you know that’s going to happen – you might care to read about what drove her to do that. I just now realized that this style is in line with journalistic-writing standards: you put the lead (some people spell it "lede") at the top; you don't "bury the lead."

What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from this story?
I feel compelled to say something pat and cliché here, such as: “Heed this cautionary tale and reach out to anyone you think might be depressed.” But that doesn’t feel quite right; it feels like a Public Service Announcement. There’s a place for PSAs, but I’m not sure their place is in art. That sort of thing seems to make art kind of… corny. 

I think the message of this story might be about something more along the lines of what Christine was so karmically frustrated about – the public appetite for “blood and guts,” and (some of) the media’s eagerness to feed it. Her story is totally a blood-and-guts one, but I tried to get behind that a little bit and look at some of the humanity and nuance behind one person’s act of violent self-destruction.  

Maybe what I want you to take away is: This was a person, with hopes and dreams and flaws and frustrations. Behind every gory news story and statistic you see are people like that.