Vann R. Newkirk II on natural disasters, podcasting, and reporting on trauma

You wrote recently in the Atlantic about the unique threat COVID-19 poses to the South. Are there lessons to be learned from your reporting about previous catastrophes that can be applied now? Any lessons learned for resilient communities?

One I would like to stress now that we’ve learned from previous disasters is that disasters have timelines that stretch way before and after the actual catastrophic event. I’m proud of my reporting on the South, but at base it’s a rather elementary extrapolation of things we already know—the “novel” coronavirus is basically exacerbating an existing public health disaster in somewhat predictable ways. That’s what I mean with the timeline lesson. COVID-19 might’ve started with a virus in Wuhan and it might end with a vaccine, but the totality of this pandemic’s effects began decades ago and will be felt for decades more. And that’s also instructive for understanding “resilience.” It’s built or eroded by generations’ worth of intentional policy. Disasters don’t affect everyone equally. They uncover our existing faults and frailties.

In March you released a podcast with the Atlantic, called Floodlines, which covers the aftermath of the day the levees broke in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Why did you choose to tell this story through a podcast?

I have always been interested in Hurricane Katrina and what we can learn from it. It had always been a struggle to do something in writing that felt right. It was too immense of an event to capture in a way that did it justice, and the actual detail of what went wrong and why was so granular that I could get lost on individual topics for thousands of words.

But audio felt like the perfect way to convey gravity, nuance, and detail in a way that the written word can’t do as compactly. So much of the importance of any disaster is emotional, and emotions are so much better illustrated by voices, by pauses and hiccups and tears. And New Orleans is such an aural city, with so many born storytellers, that the medium just felt perfect.

A lot of your reporting has covered the fate of communities on the front lines of climate change and disasters. How do you get people to open up about traumatizing events?

Lots of times I don’t. Sometimes people just don’t want to share, and the first part of the job of doing the reporting is understanding that, and being hyperaware of trauma. One most common destructive force of trauma is that it takes people’s agency away, and my job is to respect and enhance agency, whether it means I’m getting the story or not.

Beyond that, when people do want to share their stories, my goal is to always talk about way more than just the traumatizing experience. I want to know about families and communities before and after a disaster, and I want to ask about how people have processed things. I find people generally more willing to talk about trauma if we just converse like normal people about other things first.

Subscribe here to receive next month’s issue of The Fifth Draft.