#149 - Writing that puts the reader in the story

“The best way to tell the story is to really try to give the reader a sense that they know the person they’re reading about.â€

 

Steve Friess, a freelance journalist and former staff writer for Politico and Knight Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan, found himself on the receiving end of the story opportunity of a lifetime in the form of a cardboard box filled with hundreds of letters.

 

Capt. David Wilsey served as an anesthesiologist during World War II and wrote letters to his wife, Emily, back at home. The letters were discovered by Friess’ friend, the doctor’s son, in 2009 after both David and Emily Wilsey had died.

 

Friess’ friend and his two sisters knew their father as a hard, unrelenting, sometimes unyielding man who withheld affection and seemed distant toward his wife and children. But the letters revealed a man who wrote beautiful, passionate, literate letters filled with details of the war he’d never discussed with his family.

 

Thanks to his friendship with Wilsey’s son, Terry, and discussions with his sisters, Clarice and Sharon, Friess was able to make copies of several dozen of the letters, which he’s used as the foundation of a 5,000-word article recently published by The New Republic in a gripping article, “A Liberator, But Never Freeâ€.

 

Wilsey was among the soldiers who arrived at the Dachau concentration camp in May 1945 during the camp’s liberation, and in several letters, he stressed the importance of the public learning the truth about what was going on in Hitler’s Germany and captured territories. Other than those letters, he never discussed what he’d witnessed with his family.

 

Friess said the task of selecting which letters to read, which to copy, which to pull from and use as source material for his piece, was staggering.

 

“You can dip in and out of these letters,†he says. “You can read one of them as a historical document. You can go directly to May 8, 1945 and read his account of going into Dachau, and they’re really interesting as historical documents," Friess said. "But if you read dozens of these letters in chronology over the course of several months or years, that’s how you really get to know him and that’s how you’re able to detect a shift in the way he is. You see it very clearly the minute he starts writing from Dachau, he’s just 10 times angrier, as you might expect.â€

 

It’s also worth noting that Wilsey’s three children do not “have a united front†in what to do with letters: each has responded differently to the discovery of their father’s letters. Terry has no interest in them; Clarice, in whose home the letters are currently kept, is “incredibly immersed†in the stories, while Sharon, the youngest, seems removed from the entire situation. There is one common sentiment, however. “They are not interested in their father being painted as a monster,†Friess says. “There’s no doubt he was a hero. The things he did, the honors he received, the people he saved, absolutely. This is a harrowing period in our history and performed brilliantly. But it cost him and his family a lot.â€

 

This isn’t Friess’ first go-round with multifaceted and complex narrative. Previously, he spent several years researching the overlapping or fully disconnected network of registration requirements for sexual offenders, resulting in a piece published by TakePart.com earlier this year. His journey there began when a victim of sexual assault suggested Friess examine boxer Mike Tyson’s registration on the sex offender list in Nevada.

 

“In 2009, Mike Tyson was considered to be noncompliant by the state of Nevada’s registry, but the city of Henderson has one too and he was perfectly properly registered there,†Friess said. “He also was nowhere to be found in the registry of Indiana where he was convicted; he was in the registry in Florida where he had lived but that registration said he lived in Arizona. Arizona had no reference for him at all, and so on. It was this big mess. This was one example of somebody who you and I could find out where he was tomorrow just by looking him up on Twitter,†whereas other victims might not be able to get any kind of information on their attacker."