Q+A: Writer Sam Adler-Bell

Adler-Bell's writing is a reminder that although the world is increasingly serious, we don’t always have to be.

Interview by Ella Fassler

When I first met Sam Adler-Bell, I was one of the two hundred or so people facing seven felony charges stemming from the January 20 Trump inauguration protests in Washington, D.C. I was involved with the protestors’ defense committee in New York City, and a few sympathetic writers had reached out to me about covering the story. Adler-Bell ended up attending one of our meetings, not as a reporter but as an observer who wanted to gain insight into our priorities as defendants. We did not, for example, want the media to demonize any of our co-defendants as “bad” protesters, a sentiment that was made clear throughout the meeting.

Adler-Bell eventually covered the case for The Intercept and I was a source for his story. The corporate media apparatus has a knack of turning someone else’s story into one that aligns with the status quo or generates the most revenue; his thoughtfulness, in contrast, meant a lot. Adler-Bell also doesn’t take himself too seriously, as exemplified in his recent piece in The Outline titled “Unpopular opinion: Sharing your unpopular opinion sucks ass.” For those of us on the left, frequent visitors to the pits of despair, he reminds us that although the world is increasingly serious, we don’t always have to be.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Study Hall: How did you break into the world of lefty reporting?

Sam Adler-Bell: After college in Providence, I did communications work for a left-wing civil liberties group called Demand Progress and worked for a hotel workers’ union. I was involved in local electoral organizing and union solidarity boycotts. But I always wrote too and wanted to try to do more of that, so I applied to the internship at The Nation; I had known a few people to have done that and liked it. After I got the internship, I moved from Providence to New York in 2014.

That internship was basically a full-time fact checking job. There wasn’t built-in time in the internship for writing, although I did ultimately write a couple pieces for the website while I was there. It’s a really good internship. At the time we were paid $9/hour, I think, which was the minimum wage. The previous group of interns had to agitate to get it to that. It was a stipend before, which is pretty wild. I had to work another job while at that internship.

SH: Was your first published piece in The Nation? Or did you write before that?

SAB: I wrote for a weekly college paper that got distributed around the city. I also edited the nonfiction section of a literary journal that doesn’t exist anymore called Wags Review, and I wrote a piece or two for them that were more like personal essays and criticism.

It was confusing to me — and still is — when I tried to talk to people about breaking in. You need clips in order to be taken seriously and you need to be taken seriously in order to get clips, so it’s a metaphysical conundrum. Escaping that metaphysical conundrum is subject to so much luck and chance and privilege.

You don’t want to write for free, but you don’t want to write for too cheap because you might not be able to afford to. But also, you may not want to [write for cheap] as a political matter since it contributes to bringing down rates for other professional writers. Of course, if you ask people without those principles what to do, they will say write for free. It really is tough, especially if you are trying to break into the industry and don’t have the economic privilege or didn’t go to the “right” school, or don’t fit in with the predominantly white lefty media scene. I don’t begrudge people doing what they have to do to get clips.

SH: How do you find stories or think of ideas? Do you have a way of keeping track of them?

SAB: When I did my J20 reporting — which is when we first met — I was researching surveillance and policing for a think tank. I didn’t have to make my living solely from freelance writing and podcasting until this year. Since then, I have been much more diligent about keeping lists of ideas and writing things down as soon as they occur to me. Often those things come up in conversations with people. I’ve sat down at my computer to find something to write about, but then you just end up reading other people’s reporting and you can’t easily find original ideas. I find I end up listening differently when people describe what they do or what their work is like. There are these little interesting stray things that people say that make you wonder if there is something more to it.

I have all these lists that are not particularly well-organized. A small fraction of things that go on the list end up becoming pieces.

SH: Where do you keep the list?

SAB: On the notes application in my phone which syncs with my computer.

SH: I really enjoyed your story, “Appalachia and the Carceral State,” about a small group’s successful fight against the construction of a new prison in Whitesburg, Kentucky. How did you come across the story?

SAB: I sort of knew Tom [Sexton], a main character of the story, from listening to his podcasts, Trillbilly Workers Party. It’s a really great left-wing podcast with an Appalachian perspective on politics. I had written about a Green New Deal “just transition” [the process of moving away from fossil fuels without destroying the communities that rely on them] for this other magazine called The New Internationalist, and that story touched on Appalachia because it had been the testing grounds for different kinds of just transition.

I talked to Tom for that story and he mentioned that some of the money put into abandoned mine funds — a fund coal companies paid into as a form of reparations, supposedly for initiatives like public parks — was being used to prepare for the construction of a prison. He talked about how he had done some organizing around it. Then I pitched a story on their organizing, but really more broadly about the phenomenon of the Appalachian prison boom, to The New Republic.

SH: That’s been talked about in Study Hall threads too — that we can ask sources for new story ideas.

SAB: I should have said that! Occasionally now an editor of mine will say we are doing an issue on X and ask if I want to send them some pitches to participate. I will often go to sources who have knowledge about X and ask them what they would like to see covered.

SH: Did you pitch the TNR story to any other publications first?

SAB: I had told a friend of mine that I would be freelancing for the year and she had very, very kindly and generously recommended me to some editors that she knew, including this one at TNR. And that person had asked me if I wanted to send some pitches for features. This was one of the few I sent. This was 100% a situation where a more talented and a more accomplished journalist — who happens to be my friend — put me in touch with this person and vouched for me. That’s how I was given the opportunity to even try to write something like this.

SH: How much writing did you complete before you visited Kentucky?

SAB: Almost none. I ended up using one paragraph that was in the pitch. Otherwise I didn’t do any writing before I went.

SH: How did you prepare for the trip to Whitesburg? Did you prepare questions, for example?

SAB: I’ve done reporting on the ground in places other than where I live, but this was the first piece where a magazine was paying my expenses to travel somewhere to report on something. I was learning this on the fly, for sure. I don’t think I had any questions.

I knew the themes I wanted to get at. I knew the information I wanted. And I set up a lot of meetings, or at least said, “I’m going to be in town, can I come see you when I am there?” and laid the groundwork. Then when I was there, I recorded a ton of audio and just tried to get people talking. I wrote a lot of observations in my phone when I was actually reporting.

It was a great place to report. Frankly, people in the northeast — and this is a kind of cliché thing to say — have really lost the art of conversation and people in eastern Kentucky have not. I got so much amazing material just by talking to people. You know when you’re recording and you think, “Holy shit, this is all gold,” and you keep looking to make sure your recorder is on? I had that experience a bunch of times in the course of seven days.

SH: How did you find your sources?

SAB: The people I knew there already, like Tom, were really helpful in connecting me with other people. A lot of people knew each other from organizing so I would be vouched for by someone that I talked to who would tell someone else I was okay to talk to.

I was aware of the carpetbagging aspect of the project: I was very much a person from New York parachuting in to eastern Kentucky to write about this story, which was their story. There’s a really deep, complicated history of journalists using Appalachia as a theater for making arguments diagnosing America’s essential problems. The war on poverty, to a significant degree, was inspired by these images of poor white people in Appalachia, and journalists played an important role in producing those images. One of the effects is that Appalachia exists in the American imagination more as an idea than an actual place.

Before I travelled there, I read a bunch of books. That’s usually something I do. The problem of Appalachia and Appalachians being used as characters in political arguments taking place elsewhere is such a common theme throughout American history, so there are a lot of useful books about that phenomena and how to resist it. I had these meta concerns in my mind when I was reporting, none of which had any big impact on how I behaved or, probably, how people felt about me. It doesn’t really help the conversation to be like, “Oh look, I’ve read the books about these issues!” But at least it’s a good idea to have these things in your mind anywhere you go, to be sensitive to who is telling the story so you’re not using people.

There is necessarily always an aspect of that in reported writing, though. You think, “I really want someone to say this,” and there is a way you can begin to instrumentalize people when you are having conversations with them for the purposes of the piece. They stop being human and start being the pretty words that you want them to say. You risk ventriloquizing people, which is exactly what you are trying to avoid.

It boils down to, “Do my sources reading this story feel good about it?” [I mean] the heroes. If the villains feel bad about it, that’s fine.

SH: Do you generally make an outline of the first draft?

SAB: I don’t make outlines. Maybe I should, but I don’t.

That first draft of that TNR piece in particular was an absolute disaster. My editor sent me one of those horrifying emails that was like, “This was a great start….” There’s a Twitter thread somewhere with all of the worst sentences you’ve seen in an email from editors. It’s a knife to the heart and I got a bad version of that. I basically had written all these little vignettes that didn’t amount to an article that could be printed in a magazine. My editor told me that, and she was right. I probably would have benefited from having an outline.

SH: Do you conduct research before the first draft, or do you research as you go along?

SAB: If it’s a long feature or reported piece, I will do a lot of research first. If I am going to be calling academics, I don’t need to know the things I want to know from them. But I want to show that I put in some work and am serious about the topic so I can decently converse with them.

When it comes to quicker reported pieces, I just start calling people. Trying to figure out the piece before I talk to people is stressful and doesn’t help. I often procrastinate by reading a bunch of things that may or may not be helpful, but what I really need to do it just pick up the phone and call.

SH: As practitioners of what some might call “critical journalism,” do you think we should lean toward making independent media stronger, or should we interject our ideas into corporate media to reach a potentially wider readership?

SAB: I probably fall toward the entryism strategy of sneaking our subversive ideas into the corporate media stream as much as possible. I love independent media and would despair if there were no places to read stuff that doesn’t have a profit motive at its core, but I do think part of the left project is contesting the meaning of big ideas like “America” and “work,” which means we need to engage in the places where regular people — not just left-wingers — are reading and can participate.

Media is a sinking ship and we are rearranging the proverbial deck chairs on the Titanic. I don’t see a solution to the problem that doesn’t involve public funding. Most places in the world that continue to have robust public spheres are places that publicly fund more journalism and media and art. This is the type of socialism I imagine.

SH: My coworking space is closing so we have to wrap up! What’s your new podcast? And where can Study Hall readers find it and you?

SAB: The podcast is called Know Your Enemy, and it’s about American conservative ideas, history, and politics. It’s hosted by myself and my friend Matthew Sitman. Both of us are socialists, but Matt grew up in a conservative fundamentalist Christian household and was himself right-wing until his mid-twenties, so his perspective as a convert is particularly useful. Also we have a Patreon. Shocker.

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