Inara verzemnieks new york times
5(ish) Questions: Inara Verzemnieks and “Life in Obamacare’s Dead Zone”
February 9, 2017
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“Life in Obamacare’s Dead Zone,” Inara Verzemnieks’ story about the health insurance coverage gap, came out in the New York Times Magazine a month after the presidential election, as the media buzzed about inaccurate predictions, liberal bubbles and the mainstream media’s failure to notice what was happening in the middle of the country.
Verzemnieks had noticed. She spent months in waiting rooms and living rooms across Kansas, Missouri and Virginia to show us lives familiar enough to resonate — and far enough away to remind us that this is a world we don’t see very closely in news stories.
The fate of the Affordable Care Act quickly became a question mark after Donald Trump’s surprise election in November, and one of his first acts was to issue an executive order seeking its repeal. But politics play a fairly small role in Verzemnieks’ story. More prominent are the snapshots of patients’ everyday lives, which show in precise and often poignant detail just how much more there is to them than that “patient” label.
Verzemnieks’ reportage spans states and a wide range of players in the healthcare labyrinth; translated to literary longform, it shrinks the distance of politics.
Even the existence of facts has been dragged up for debate in the current bitterly partisan climate. Common ground is elusive. Truth gets dismissed as immaterial. Verzemnieks’ story is a reminder of the substance obscured in the promises, threats and criticisms that swirl around the healthcare battle.
Accurate reporting is critical, but it’s not enough. Storytelling may be one of few tools remaining with the power to narrow gaps in understanding by calling on our empathy—and by creating it.
I spoke with Verzemnieks, a 2007 Pulitzer finalist for feature writing, a nonfiction writing professor at the University of Iowa, by Skype in early J In 2010, Inara Verzemnieks left what she called “the best job in the world” to become a graduate student in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program (NWP). She was an award-winning journalist of 13 years, but also living a life defined by constant deadlines and constricting word counts. She was dissatisfied and looking for the next step in her career. The UI program offered her three years to not only write a book, but the experience and training to teach at a university when she was done. She accepted. “I used to say that what I loved about the newsroom was that everyone had the same shared delusion: they were all so into the idea of writing and producing great work,” says Verzemnieks. “I wanted to find that again somewhere else, and I felt Iowa was going to be the place, possibly, that would reveal that to me. And it did. It changed my life.” Verzemnieks, 44, is now an assistant professor at the NWP, which, in addition to being widely regarded as one of the top programs of its kind in the world, also distinguishes itself as one of the first programs in the country to teach and study the genre of nonfiction writing. For two-and-a-half years, Verzemnieks has taught and guided students who, like she herself, came to the UI to work on their writing. Starting out as a police reporter, Verzemnieks bounced around the newsroom until she landed a role as a features writer chronicling the arts and culture of Portland, Oregon. For her feature work for The Oregonian, she was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. She especially enjoyed what she called the “sofa beat.” She would go into someone’s home, sit on their sofa, and learn the intimate and often overlooked details of their life. “That felt like a gift,” she says, “whenever anyone would open their home to me.” At the same time, she felt a growing desire for change. She wanted to write longer, more involved stories, stories too long to fit within the columns o Inara Verzemnieks is a journalist and author based in the USA. She worked as a newspaper journalist for 13 years, writing regularly for the New York Times and the Atlantic. During this time, she won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. Inara says that she is especially interested in stories that cannot be accessed unless the writer fully immerses themselves in the lives they are trying to understand. In 2017, Inara published a memoir, Among the Living and the Dead, which retraces the steps of her grandmother and great-aunt in the wake of the Second World War, and recounts her own journey back to the remote Latvian village where her family were torn apart. The book was described by the Washington Post as ‘important’ and ‘exquisitely written’. A graduate of the University of Iowa’s Non-fiction Writing Programme, Inara now teaches creative non-fiction there as an assistant professor. Inara Verzemnieks is the author of the memoir, Among the Living and the Dead (W.W. Norton, 2017), which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and one of The Times (of London) Best Books of 2018. A Pushcart Prize winner, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, she previously worked as a newspaper journalist for thirteen years. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, and The Iowa Review. She is an assistant professor in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, where she also earned her MFA. The Value of Support "I will never forget the surge of joy I felt when I learned of my award. There is something so precious about the gift of belief—it is quite possibly the greatest gift of all because it can help us to see what we are capable of, maybe even before we realize it ourselves. Up to that point, my book had felt very tentative, a fragile little ember cupped in my palm. That someone believed in what I was doing enough to give me a way to make time and space for my book—it changed the way I saw myself and my project."Inara Verzemnieks