When I went to the Arctic to write a book about Iñupiaq whalers, my invitation had to go to a vote of the captains of the several dozen crews in Utqiagvik who hunted from skin umiaq boats. If I lost the vote, they would shun me and tell me nothing. If I won, I would be invited into the camps on the sea ice to be part of the tradition and write my book—for which I already had a publishing contract.
This was spring 2002. I had no day job and four kids at home. This was my chance to be a real author.
And I wouldn’t be allowed to attend the meeting where they voted.
I never thought the process was unfair. Permission is part of the process. News reporters don’t need permission, but for a non-fiction author trying to recreate a world in a book, permission is a moral requirement.
The Iñupiat’s considerations were practical. Their ancient whale hunt—although sustainable and highly regulated—was under attack from animal-loving environmentalists, who wanted pictures of blood. The community also lived atop a huge oil field and had complex feelings about climate change, which was my book’s theme.
But I thought I could write honestly and respectfully at the same time. Since beginning at a small town weekly, the Homer News, that’s been my ideal: truth for the reader, but also to leave the subject feeling faithfully portrayed—or, at least, fairly portrayed. In Homer, that was simply survival. The town was so small you generally met the subject the next day at the post office.
To prove my intentions to the whalers, I got an assignment from an alternative weekly in Anchorage, which came with a plane ticket north and the support of a brilliant editor, Robert Meyerowitz, but not much money. I hoped my piece would become my calling card.
Reporting the article, I didn’t get far into the whaling community, but I met enough people and heard enough interesting new ideas to write something I found really exciting. And the whaling captains liked it.
That and some careful networking won the vote and the support of the late, great Oliver Leavitt. I spent the spring with his crew and with Savik Crew, led by the extraordinary Richard Glenn. They liked the book, The Whale and the Supercomputer, and so did reviewers and prize juries. It is still in print.
I left some things out of the book. No one asked me to, but sometimes withholding information is the better path to truth, because a fact’s meaning in the original context would change in the context of a distant reader.
As a young writer, I remember the urge to take and write, with the feeling that everything coming in through my senses belonged to me. Some writers betray their most intimate confidences for a good story.
I’ve come to see that as pure arrogance. A non-fiction writer is a partner with his or her subjects. Truth and honesty are not always synonymous.
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