“That’s it!” I hollered from my study. “I’m pulling the piece. I’m pulling it!” My wife, who’s used to my writing-related tantrums, appeared in the doorway bobbing our latest offspring in her arms. “Yeah, you’re really going to pull the piece,” Wendy said, affecting an expression of amused disbelief.
But I meant it this time. Or at least I thought I meant it, gritting my teeth over the latest e-mail from my fact checker. She had been assigned to me by the magazine that had months earlier accepted my essay about oak trees. She had seemed like such a nice young woman when she introduced herself in an e-mail. But then the bombardment ensued. She wanted me to mail her all of my source material. She wanted the contact information for every person to whom I attributed quotations. (Yes, she would call each one.) She wanted photographs to verify pretty much every verifiable visual element of the piece: road signs and dedication plaques I had described, the steel cables and rivets that I claimed supported the limbs of a grand old tree. She even wanted a photograph of a photograph that I had mentioned.
This wasn’t a hard-hitting news story. It was just my attempt at a poetic little meditation on oak trees. Was all this fact checking truly necessary?
“It’s like she thinks I’m lying,” I had initially complained to my wife. “She’s insulting my integrity.”
“Your integrity?” Wendy had asked, sniffing out my malodorous sanctimony. “Come on.”
What particularly irked me, and what triggered my final rant, was when the fact checker forwarded an article to me on the Jena Six controversy in Louisiana, hoping that I would read the piece and reconsider a few lines I had written about the event. These were unremarkable lines, I had thought, which pretty much hewed to the conventional narrative of the racial episode that had been conveyed by the popular media. It seemed to me that she had overstepped her bounds here. Who did she think she was, sending additional reading material my way, urging me to reconsider the substance of my work? My next thought I convey now with shame: She was just a fact checker.
In the end, I swallowed my writerly pride, cooperated with the diligent fact checker the best I could—yes, I offered a more nuanced account of the Jena Six controversy—and got on with my life. As far as I was concerned, I had suffered through a protracted series of pesky inquiries that in the end didn’t really alter the essential spirit of my essay. Weeks passed. The new semester began. Our baby graduated to solid food, which was nice but demanded more planning and preparation. I was pretty busy.
Then a colleague placed a recently published piece of creative nonfiction in the cubby outside my office. She had scrawled a provocatively terse note at the top: “Seen this?” The piece would make me reconsider all this fact-checking business. It was written by a well-regarded practitioner of creative nonfiction, who had recently served a five-day stint in our M.F.A. program as a writer-in-residence. The piece appeared to be a meditation on the lost art of walking, inspired at least partly by Thoreau’s essay “Walking.” He had sprinkled resonant passages from that classic artfully about in italics. So far, so good. It was a piece I could probably get behind. I love a good walk. I love Thoreau. I hate cars and traffic and avoid them whenever possible.
But hold on. It appeared that Thoreau wasn’t the only scaffolding holding up the prose. Our former writer-in-residence had used my fair city and university as a convenient framing device. Boca Raton, Fla., and Florida Atlantic University were positioned in the narrative as negative models, clownish manifestations of our antiwalking, car-crazy, materialistic, philistine culture. “And as for paradise,” he wrote, “I hope never to return.” In short, we were part of the problem. Which was fine, I suppose, setting aside the arguably poor taste of pillorying a town and university that had recently entrusted its students to you, and had paid you quite handsomely for your services.
What wasn’t so jake with me, however, were the factual inaccuracies littering the essay. I’m talking some real doozies—flat-out untruths that never would have escaped a competent fact checker. For example: “Boca is just a resort town for the wealthy and retired.” It would be churlish, and far too easy, to deploy evidence to refute that absurd claim, or to catalog the essay’s additional false or misleading statements. But suddenly a collection of mangled facts—which probably seemed like small potatoes to our well-regarded writer, picayune details in an essay that was about so much more—mattered deeply to me. This wasn’t Jena, La., after all. This was my town, and my university of 15 years, that a fellow writer was summarily, sloppily dissing.
My dander up over another writer playing fast and loose with the facts, I subjected to fresh scrutiny my own recent experiences with matters true and false. I reread those numerous and lengthy e-mails I had exchanged with my fact checker months ago. What stood out now wasn’t her brazenness, or her overblown diligence, but how much I had actually gotten wrong, things I had written off at the time as trivial, but which wouldn’t have seemed so insignificant to certain parties had my essay gone to press without the necessary revisions. A source I had quoted, worried over his job, had requested a minor excision; I had assumed that certain trees had existed in certain places, which may or may not have been accurate; I had even misquoted an inscription on a tree’s dedication plaque.
And then there was Jena. That town, like Boca Raton, was a real place to the people who lived there—much more than just a symbol of racism. It surely mattered to residents of Jena when writers casually alluded to it as such, parroting the popular media. The truth was far more complicated.
This was the real offense of the piece written about my city by our former writer-in-residence: He had only regurgitated, and thereby reinforced, what most outsiders already probably thought of Boca Raton, thanks to the sound-bite attention it has received in the popular media. “People are going to read this,” one of my colleagues lamented after I passed the essay along to him. “And they’re going to believe that it’s the truth.”
I look back at the episode with my fact checker with some embarrassment. Even though I tried to mask my irritation, I’m pretty sure that she intuited my growing frustration and general thin-skinnedness. “I promise I’ll stop showing up in your inbox very, very soon,” the subject heading of one of her later e-mails read. Good, I thought at the time. It hadn’t occurred to me to be grateful for her hard work, even some weeks later, when the managing editor of the magazine mentioned to me how many late nights she had worked as the production deadline for my piece loomed. I know I’ll try to be more careful in the future, with or without the benefit of a fact checker watching my back.
So consider this an apology, Anna, for my formerly stingy feelings toward you and your profession. But more, thank you for saving me from myself.
A talented, trained fleet of fact checkers has probably never been more crucial to our writing and reading culture than it is now, in our post-James Frey, Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Margaret B. Jones era, in our Internet age so drenched with specious information that it sometimes pollutes even our best intentions. So here’s to all of you fact checkers out there, who put up with jerks like me and clean up our messes. You remind those of us who relish dwelling in ambiguity that the truth matters, too. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
