Trymaine Lee on His Approach to Storytelling

Your Fellowship project is a book about the true costs of gun violence in the United States. What inspired the project, and what impact do you hope it will have?

It’s cliché to say that I didn’t choose the book but the book chose me, but it’s true. What began as an exploration into the many ways in which gun violence costs society in terms of dollars and the more intangible costs, really became an exploration into the ways in which violence has affected me. The seeds for the book were planted many years ago when I was a local newspaper reporter in Philadelphia and grew as I moved from city to city covering the heartbreaking results of gun violence. But it more recently became clear that there was no way for me to cover the topic with any depth or nuance if I didn’t engage with how my family has been touched by it time and again. And how two decades of reporting on violence and trauma reshaped me in profound ways. I hope it reveals something fundamental about life, death and a specific kind of American experience.

You’ve spent much of your career chronicling the role of race, violence, law enforcement, and politics in the lives of everyday Americans. Since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and this summer’s demonstrations, many more writers and reporters are writing about protests and racial equity. What advice do you have for someone writing about these issues for potentially the first time?

The key to understanding this moment in the context of the movement for Black lives and writing about it with any heft, let alone authenticity, is to really educate yourself on the true history that led us to this moment. There are many really smart, really educated journalists and writers who don’t fully grasp how complicit the U.S. government, and white Americans more generally, have been in maintaining America’s racial caste system. Start with that basic premise. There is a caste system that is reinforced by our systems, structures and institutions. And that the threads of anti-Black racism (America’s preferred and perfected form of racism) are central to America being America. It’s not the whole of us, but it’s been a guiding principle. I think that’s an important jumping off point in order to digest and understand this moment chunk by chunk. Read, listen and synthesize with that filter.

Along with hosting the podcast Into America you write op-eds and articles, like your piece about the wealth gap for The 1619 Project. What makes a story catch your eye? Do you take a different approach to storytelling based on the topic?

I think about stories as puzzle pieces. I’m drawn to the kinds of stories that help us see ourselves more clearly. I look for stories that help fill a gap in our understanding of who we are, where we’ve been or where we might be headed. Sometimes it’s just a sliver of the big picture. But it’s a puzzle piece, nonetheless. I’m drawn to people and places that carry scars, the kind that welt. I love survivors. And defiant ones. I find myself gravitating to stories that live somewhere between life and death, hope and hopelessness. I think that’s where the humanity lives. I tend to have a narrative impulse regardless of the topic. I never met a narrative lede that I didn’t love. Give me all of the honey and vinegar and roughhewn edges that bristle beneath fingertips. But sometimes you have to just cut to the bone gristle. You have to know when to play it straight.

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