How to Write Beautiful Stories About Hideous Things
Interview with Elizabeth Bruenig on the art and ethics of writing about human suffering
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic is by Yi Ning Chiu.
Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers theology, capital punishment, and American violence. She was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the experiences of inmates on Alabama’s death row. Her collected writings about the humanitarian and ethical implications of the death penalty will be available in October 2023 as a book titled On Human Slaughter: Evil, Justice, Mercy.
Ecstatic Columnist, Yi Ning Chiu, sat down for a conversation with Elizabeth to talk about the art and ethics of writing about human suffering. The interview is edited for length and clarity.
Yi Ning Chiu: You are a writer with a background in Christian theology who engages with profoundly dark subject matter. Christian thought centers on the truth of Christ’s resurrection and promised return—basically the idea of inevitable victory. How do you adhere to that truth while writing about human suffering?
Elizabeth Bruenig: My beat as a journalist is violence in America. That’s my domain. What appeals to me about death and suffering and violence is the idea that mercy, compassion, and Jesus can meet people even in their darkest, most unsympathetic, most grueling moments.
Pope Francis always says, “Go to the margins.” When I look at the margins, this is what I see. I see a lot of darkness. But anywhere I go, I can succeed in illuminating something. I can bring some kind of compassion or some kind of mercy to people when they're really suffering, and that's very attractive to me as a vocation.
YC: That makes sense. It also sounds hard, especially when suffering is being examined in a context that people tend to have strong opinions about, like the death penalty. Is it tempting to pander to audiences who already share your perspective, or to become overly strident in an attempt to get your point across?
EB: I've self-identified for many years as a person of the Christian left. For me, I see my faith as translating into leftist political values, such as money for kids, money for disabled people, money for people who are out of work. All of these seem like logical Christian positions to hold, at least to me.
So I come at my writing knowing that there's almost no one who agrees with me—few Christians, and few people on the left. It's a very small chunk of people in the United States. I just try to write for a curious reader, and I don't write to polarize, I write to humanize. My intention is not so much to push a reader in a particular direction, but to write in a way that helps us understand the humanity of people who have been severely dehumanized.
YC: Where does that impulse to humanize come from?
EB: When I was a sophomore in high school, there was a girl who was raped at a party. The incident involved people from my high school, and I watched what happened to her. To say she was bullied afterward does even begin to describe the situation. She was tortured, and eventually had to leave our school because of how people treated her. It stuck with me my whole life.
When I got to the Washington Post I wrote about it as soon as I could, and my first Pulitzer nod was for that piece.
With people on death row, it’s similar. I just see people who have been so cruelly dehumanized. And, you know, they're not sympathetic individuals. They're not people who we identify with. Yet they are people, right? They are people just like us, and I try to bring that to the page.
YC: What’s interesting to me is that the kinds of stories you write can seem like invitations to remember how all human beings are morally frail, that all of us have the same capacity to do good or inflict harm. Yet they also seem like ethical challenges to the reader, like invitations to consider how we respond to the most dispossessed.
How do you want your readers to interact with the dual truths of human weakness and human capacity for good?
EB: Yeah, I mean, I think I am at my best morally and spiritually, when I am writing. But it's not as though I'm like that all the time. And I strongly identify with being morally frail and being morally weak.
The idea for me is mainly to close a gap between the subject and the reader, to build a bridge there. I want to demonstrate that the person you are reading about is flawed, but also has other human qualities. Then I can prevail upon the reader to consider that they too are flawed, or participants in flawed systems. We all are. Then perhaps I can close the gap between all of us a little bit, which is my hope.
YC: So there’s a moral objective driving you as a writer. How do you maintain that without having each piece turn into a lecture, or a sermon?
EB: I level with people and I consider it to be one of my duties as a writer. For example, when I write about death penalty cases, you'll notice I never leave out the crime. I feel like if you leave out the crime and you don't describe what happened, the reader won't trust you and will be suspicious—rightfully so, because you're leaving out a pretty important part of the story.
A lot of people who write on the death penalty obviously don't want to make reference to the crimes because that makes people less sympathetic. For me, that's just part of leveling with the reader and being upfront. I think that goes a long way toward keeping it out of the territory of just sermonizing; it keeps it in the territory of journalism.
I think the stories tell themselves. I clearly have my position, but I have respect for my readers, whether they agree with me or not.
YC: Once the reader finishes the story, what do you think they owe the subject? And what do writers who want to explore similar subject matter owe their subjects?
EB: For writers, when you're going out and meeting people in really dark places, you're joining them on their journey, which is what I do. I have an execution next week that I have to go to. I've been with this man, James Barber, on his journey since he got an execution date a month ago.
I've talked to him pretty consistently. I think the writer has to be completely upfront, has to be transparent about the realities of being involved in a piece. I try to be very straightforward with my subjects about what a piece can and cannot do. I let them know I'm not a criminal defense attorney. I can't get anybody off. But I can try to get the truth out there, which is what I always lead with.
For the readers, and the question of what they owe to these intensely traumatized people? Attention. In some of these cases, attention can be justice. If enough people have a problem with something it will stop. This has happened in many states with regard to death row practices. It just takes a little bit of attention and a little bit of time.
YC: That’s humbling. When it comes to sprawling social problems or humanitarian issues, simply paying attention feels like it's not enough, but it's probably all that most of us can really give.
For you, to write about so many executions, to see what people are capable of doing to one another, to see how justice can be warped, how does that cause your faith to evolve?
EB: I need Jesus more than I ever have before because writing about death nonstop just makes you think about dying. And you can't live your life preparing for your own death. You know, seeing it around every corner and so on and so forth. So I've had to come into what I think is a more mature faith in this line of work, just because it is a direct confrontation with death.
I've seen lots of people die at this point and I know I'm going to be one of them. I guess that strong sense of identification with the people who I'm there to witness is a big part of the writing.
YC: And you're writing so often about situations in which good does not clearly prevail, in which people are victims of each other, or victims of systems much bigger than any individual.
How do you think Christian writers can bring their theology to interact with these kinds of events without watering down the reality of what they’re witnessing, or compromising what they believe?
EB: Yeah, well, evil prevails occasionally on Earth. Good often prevails on Earth, too. It's worth taking a not too pessimistic view, I think. But, yeah, oftentimes evil just begets evil. When you study these kinds of situations they can become their own sort of spiritual lesson. You know, violence begets violence begets violence.
YC: That's interesting. There are spiritual dynamics in a story where violence begets violence. I hadn’t thought about that.
EB: Yeah, if you live by the sword—you know.
YC: True. How do you feel about continuing to write amidst seemingly endless cycles of violence and destruction? I can imagine some people reconsidering their work as a writer once they’ve confronted the world’s bleakness, and asking themselves if they should go into fields like social impact or public policy. Have you had these thoughts?
EB: Well, writing is what I can do. God makes butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. And I was minted out as a writer. I was in competitive essay writing in high school. I was doing it as a kid, and it's something I would still do if no one paid me. It's how I try to do good in the world. It's the tool I have.
I think every Christian has their vocation, the skill they have to offer, so the question becomes how they can offer it up for God’s purposes. For me, in my reporting, I’ve placed this unwavering focus on human life. I try to be a partisan of this whole human species we’ve got going here, to argue for its value even in the most extreme cases. For me, that’s how I’ve been able to serve, or try to serve, God. I use my writing.
Yi Ning Chiu
Writer & Teacher
Yi Ning is a writer who has contributed features to Relevant and Teen Vogue. You can find more of her work here: yiningchiu.com. Thoughts on Elizabeth’s interview? Leave a like and share in the comments!
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Thank you. This helps me think about how to approach writing about the suffering we see in the newborn ICU. Very different from death row, but no shortage of death or of spiritual lessons worth attending to.
This is so beautiful and hopeful. It strikes me there is a growing community of people who “agree with” Elizabeth Bruenig philosophically, morally and spiritually. Hopefully this is a growing faction of partisans!