So you want to write a personal essay 🌽

My first ever op-ed was published today in Undark Magazine. Some thoughts on the process, as a journalist.

In journalism school you learn to excise yourself from the stories you report. The journalist is always there in the background, the invisible arbiter of the voices included in the piece, the overall framing, the structure of the story told, but they are just that—invisible. Objectivity is the goal.

For me, internalizing and practicing that took some work. I’d come to journalism from cultural anthropology, and in ethnographic research and writing, there’s a focus (now, though not historically) on acknowledging and being upfront about the “positionality” of the researcher, the “participant observer” conducting the interviews. There’s an understanding that just by being in a place, you can change how the people around you act. And that you inevitably bring your own biases and assumptions into the cultural contexts and environments you enter—all you can do is be aware of them. Even in embedded reporting, that’s not typical in journalism. Editors and outlets are very concerned about bias and subjectivity—as things to avoid.

So after a few years in journalism, I felt weird about pitching a personal essay—an op-ed. But I felt like I had one to write.

The family farm in Wapello, IA (left) and an oak savanna in Salina, KS (right)

I’ve lived in Iowa and Illinois my entire life; I grew up surrounded by cornfields. The scale of it is hard to convey to outsiders (looking at you, folks on the coasts). Corn (and soy) is all you see for miles along the highway. Its life cycle defines the seasons—the spring tillage, the green stalks knee-high by the fourth of July, thickening the air with humid corn sweat, the dusty fall, when the combine harvesters mow down the golden-brown fields, leaving them fallow and snow-covered in winter. The fields around my grandparents’ farm were my childhood playground. But something always felt a little off. You couldn’t eat the corn, for one. It was hard and dry. Nothing ate it, in fact—there were no cows, pigs or chickens. Each year, the harvest disappeared down the highway on semi-trucks. When part of an acre was set aside for me to grow sweet corn one year, the field corn cross-pollinated with it and it ended up equally inedible.

In college I learned why the family farm always felt a little like the memory of something lost. In classes I read about how big ag and big oil reshaped the Midwestern landscape. How the prairies, wetlands and oak savannahs that once covered my home, a complex natural system, had been plowed under and replaced with a very simple one—corn, perfected by research universities, subsidized by the federal government and now grown so intensively, with specialized machinery, engineered drainage systems and chemical inputs, that yields still increase every year, polluting the environment in the process. All that complicated my understanding of Iowa and farming.

I’m not really an agriculture reporter, but some of my first stories (radio pieces for the German public broadcaster DW) were about the sustainability of Iowa agriculture and what all the corn (mostly) turns into—ethanol. Since then, I’ve watched the Midwest become ground zero for a snaking network of carbon dioxide pipelines and sequestration wells designed to bury ethanol’s pollution underground. These projects are unpopular among locals and really just exist to take advantage of federal subsidies and keep ethanol profitable and Americans hooked on fossil fuels.

Then, the first commercial carbon sequestration plant in the U.S., in Decatur, Illinois, not far from me, leaked. It was briefly a big news story. I pitched a story about the leak around, but I kept getting told staff reporters were already on it (including by Grist, which later ran that piece linked above). I talked about it with a mentor, and they were like, “This sounds like a personal essay.” It hadn’t crossed my mind. But then, I met Undark Magazine’s senior editor for opinions and features, Corinna Wu, at the annual ScienceWriters NASW/CASW conference a month later, and decided to go for it.

The Undark Magazine homepage this morning, ft. my op-ed

At least for Undark Magazine, journalists write deeply reported personal essays. Your own experience and personal connection to the topic is what makes the essay work, but the piece has to be grounded in science and research. The challenge is weaving together your perspective and those of the researchers you interview. You don’t necessarily have to take a strong, New York Times op-ed-style stance. In my piece, I just wanted to convey the experience of living in the place where both ends of the agricultural carbon equation coexist—the polluting corn monocultures and ethanol plants and the sequestration “miracle” solution—to point out the problems in the system. Moving from Iowa to Illinois, I followed the literal carbon dioxide pipeline path from the place where big agriculture was born to the place where we’re trying to deal with its consequences—and really just making things worse.

After a lot of interviews, rounds of edits and Undark’s famously rigorous fact-checking process, the story is out today:

Opinion: Carbon Capture Scale Up Brings New Problems to the Midwest

I can share more about the process in the future—feel free to comment/reach out with any questions. That’s all for now!

Reading list

Here’s what (and whom) I’ve been reading recently (and you might be interested in too):

• A Massive Volcanic Catastrophe Could Hit the Pacific Northwest. Experts Are Sounding the Alarm (Wudan Yan, Popular Mechanics)

  • I am a sucker for an “underappreciated natural hazard” story (Kathryn Schulz’s “The Really Big One” is maybe my favorite single piece of journalism). This Popular Mechanics cover story by Wudan Yan (who also runs a fact-checking agency) has the same energy.

• Gateway: The 21st-Century Moonshot Mission (Sarah Scoles, Undark)

  • Sarah’s space reporting is always great, and I love the graphics in this piece breaking down all the parts of NASA’s planned Lunar Gateway space station. It’s also a fair analysis of (and deep dive into) the politics and controversies.

• The U.S. built a covert Cold War base under a Greenland glacier. Its secrets are now being revealed (Neil Shea, National Geographic)

  • I first learned about Camp Century, the secret, Cold War-era nuclear-powered U.S. military base hidden under the Greenland ice, in a 2023 episode of the fantastic New Hampshire Public Radio podcast Outside/In. The history of polar science is closely entwined with the history of U.S. military expansion. The story got some unexpected new life last year, when a NASA flyover of the ice sheet captured an image of the buried, abandoned base. This Nat Geo piece has some great old photography. I wasn’t familiar with Neil’s work, but he’s a reporter focused on stories in the Arctic.

• Can Tech Save Small Ski Resorts from Extinction? (Nicole Gull McElroy, Wired)

  • The ski industry is a mess of monopolies and resorts struggling against climate change. My first real job was teaching ski lessons, and I go out west to ski with my family in Colorado/Wyoming almost every year. The experience has been getting worse for a while. Is there a way to fix it?