A Conversation with Thomas French

Thomas French has worked as a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times for the past twenty-four years, specializing in serial narratives—book-length stories that are published in the paper one chapter at a time. One of his projects, Angels & Demons, followed the story of a mother and her two teenage daughters who were murdered when they came to Tampa Bay on vacation from their dairy farm in northwestern Ohio. For his work on Angels & Demons French received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

French has written two nonfiction books, both based on series that originally appeared in the newspaper: Unanswered Cries chronicles another murder case while South of Heaven follows a year in the life of several students at a Florida high school.

In his spare time French teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program at Goucher College, where this interview took place in August 2005. This interview has been edited lightly.

JANET C. MCCAA: You have a very interesting professional arrangement with the St. Petersburg Times. I am curious about the specifics and about how you worked them out.

THOMAS FRENCH:: It all kind of happened without a plan. I started out with the paper as my first job out of college, doing the normal things that beginning reporters do. My first job was covering night cops, and then I covered the courts—first criminal and then civil. Both courts are really good for learning how to find narrative for stories inside the beat. Then I started doing what they call ga, which means general assignment, and covering anything and everything: hurricanes, riots, love-starved flamingos, freeze-dried pets, everything.

JCMCC: Only in Florida would you have that kind of range.

TF: You know, Florida is a great place to be a newspaper reporter; it really is. Then I started doing longer take-outs, they call them, and I came across a story in 1986 that essentially insisted on being told in a serialized form. It was about a murder case.

JCMCC: So this was actually reported for four, five, six years?

TF: Five years, counting the book version. I went to my editor and said I had this story. At that point I was doing stories once a week. I said, ok, this is on my list, and I thought ok I'll do this story. Then I went and looked at the court file, and it was the most amazing court file I had ever seen. So I came back to my editor and said two things: first of all, there is too much for one day, it has to be a two-day story; and second, we have to tell it in the way it unfolded, as opposed to giving away the ending in the first paragraph, because the details of the story are such that there is such power to it if you let it unfold. We had already reported on this case in the traditional news fashion, so we had fulfilled that obligation to our readers. And my editor said ok. I have a wonderful editor. He has been my editor ever since.

JCMCC: What is his name?

TF: His name is Neville Green. He said ok. And I started reporting on the story some more and started writing it and it grew to three days and then it grew into four days. And I worked on it for about, I am going to guess, twenty hours a day for seven days a week, for about six weeks, and then we got it in the paper. I had never done that form before. I had made one brief, not very successful attempt the year before that, but I hadn't really understood what I was doing. And so we were really only learning it right then.

The reader reaction was so intense. Not because of how I wrote it. I didn't write it very well, actually. I just stayed out of the story's way. The story was so powerful, and the form is so powerful, that...