Isabel Clara Ruehl at Literary Hub:
I skirted an abandoned development of some kind, half-built, its windows smashed, wild dogs on its concrete foundation barking at me not to come any closer…
This is a sentence from one of the first pieces I ever fact checked. In the passage, the writer walks from the Rome airport to the mouth of the Tiber; I’d just been hired by Harper’s Magazine, and my job was to verify the essay by Monday. It sounded easy enough. I found some derelict buildings on Google Street View—check, check (at Harper’s, we physically tick off each word that’s verified, pen-on-paper, so that our eyes don’t scan over any detail)—but how to confirm that there might be wild dogs in the area…?
I searched the internet with no yield, but I wasn’t bothered. Surely this was plausible. Still, I wanted to be thorough, so I contacted various tourism and wildlife places. “We’re sorry but we cannot answer,” one replied. So on Monday, I told my editor (himself a former checker) that this fact seemed unprovable but fine. How could we know whether the writer had seen wild dogs? I’d learned that they weren’t frequently running about Rome, but so what? To my surprise, he asked whether I’d called the airport, so I did. They were very confused.
Austin Kelley’s debut novel The Fact Checker dramatizes these questions of fact, truth, and provability as the protagonist checks an article about the Union Square Greenmarket. Narrative nonfiction exists in a gray area, somewhere between reporting and poetry, and the checker’s job is to break an essay into its component parts, confirm what’s true, and fix what’s false.
More here.
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