59. Extraction

How can they speak for us if they can't even understand our land?

What a month it has been. What a year it has been. I have a lot to say this month, so let’s get down to business:

Catching you up:

Blazing Eye Sees All is already older than a month, and I can’t believe it. To all of you who’ve read the book, listened to the book, bought the book and promoted the book, I am really, really grateful. This book made me feel so crazy at times (if you’ve read it, it’s probably clear why) and it’s very heartening to have it received so well.

I think if you’ve subscribed to this newsletter for any length of time, you know how personal writing is for me. It’s all an extension of me. Each project is me figuring out the world in some way. Your support keeps me moving forward.

• In April I had the pleasure of speaking about my book with journalist Emma Epperly at a sold-out Northwest Passages event in Spokane. There’s a video, which you can watch below if you’re so inclined. It contains a dorky photo of me as a college journalist:

• Blazing Eye Sees All got write-ups in New York Magazine (“How New Age Women Turned Right”), The Wall Street Journal (“Struck by the Spirit,” which referred to the book as “an expose of derangement”) and the New York Times Book Review (“Why Are We So Fascinated By Cults?”). For a day, the book was #1 in the “occult cults and demonism” category on Amazon and I laughed very loud thinking about calling my mom to say “Hey mom, I’m number one in demonism!”

• I did a bunch of really fun podcast interviews, despite the fact that I still prefer to be the one asking questions. Sarah Edmondson and Nippy Ames, NXIVM whistleblowers and hosts of A Little Bit Culty, had me back on the show. I also spoke to my pal Brendan O’Meara¹ for a live taping of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast. And the fine folks at LAist had me on their Imperfect Paradise podcast to talk about everything from public lands ranching to New Age gurus.

• I also wrote for Airmail about a crystal pendulum used by Chad Daybell, and for

  Memoir Land
  I wrote about how my book came to be.

• The C-SPAN video is up! You can watch me and my pal Toastie, of High Country News, in conversation at Powell’s Books.

As for future appearances, I’ve got a few more tour dates planned until I retreat into the woods for the summer and into a writing hole for years. A note to anyone who may have wanted to come see me in Boston, as I had announced: I’m sorry, but that event sadly fell apart, so I won’t be there after all. Wish I could fix that, but I have no power.²

LEAH SOTTILE’S “LEAVING THE HOUSE AND INTERACTING WITH OTHER HUMANS” WORLD TOUR

May 24 at 10:15 am - In Conversation with Laura Krantz at Mountain Words Festival, Crested Butte, Colorado

June 7 at 6 pm - Common Ground Reads at Common Ground Coffee + Market, Boise, Idaho

June 8 at 7 pm - Campfire Stories at The Modern Hotel, Boise, Idaho

June 13 at 7 pm - In Conversation with Caroline Fraser about her book Murderland, Powells Books, Portland

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What Does Leah Do With Subscriber’s Hard-Earned Money?

Given everything you’ve just read, you may think wow Leah is doing really well. The sad reality of America and capitalism is that writing is not financially lucrative — that’s a reality I’ve made peace with. But it means I’m hustling constantly: I’m working on a new investigative podcast, serving as an interim editor at High Country News. I’m pitching and writing new articles all the time. I’m constantly seeding new investigations. In my spare time, I’m chipping away at a novel.

Yesterday, The New York Times poked holes in how viable it is for people to be subscribing to newsletters all the time. My immediate take: how is it any different than subscribing to newspapers all the time? But there were some interesting insights in the article. I personally can’t subscribe to every newsletter out there. And in the piece, I thought it made sense that people often unsubscribe from Substacks with low volume. Newsletters like mine.

Which made me think it’s a good time for me to explain what I’m doing here:

This newsletter, born in 2020, was a writing experiment. I’ve always promised all subscribers will get one dispatch a month — at least — from me. I take the opposite approach than most journalists: I actually think putting a lot of time and thought into an idea, be it essay or article, is better in the long run. I practice slow journalism. I value contemplation, thinking and research.

As I’ve kept this project up monthly for the past five years, I’ve stayed true to this promise. And hopefully I’ve been clear that when you subscribe to this newsletter, you are not just paying for a newsletter. You’re paying for independent journalism.

All of those projects I laid out above? They are fueled by your money. The podcast pays me, but it is so much more work that I actually get money for. You make up that difference. The articles I write pay on publication, but everything that goes into writing a pitch? That takes a huge amount of phone calls, records requests (which cost money) and reporting trips — I pay for those with your subscriptions.

My thought has always been that if you, the reader, feel like this project is something you enjoy reading each month, you’ll open your wallet for it. I’ve thought that if you valued Bundyville or Two Minutes Past Nine or Burn Wild, you might think “hey, I dig this writer’s way of doing this. I’m going to help fund her.”

As I look toward the future here, I plan to sink more time into Substack. Paid subscribers can start hanging out in the chat for this newsletter: a space I’m creating to talk about writing, reporting and books. I like talking to all of you! If you have questions, or things you’d like to see me write about, let’s chat. I’m also opening up the comments on these posts for all subscribers, which I probably should have done a long time ago.

I think independent journalism is one of the most hopeful things about my industry right now, and my intention is to start doing more reporting exclusively in this space. I’m grateful for all of you who’ve been along for this journey. And if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, or you like the projects I’ve put into the world, please consider a paid subscription.

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Nothing here smells like a car wash. (Photo by me)

In early 2003, as I entered the second semester of my senior year in college, I was eager as ever to go into the journalism world. But even before I walked across the stage in my cap and gown, the reality of the road ahead seemed difficult.

To work in journalism, the message I received is that you really had three choices: go to a distinguished grad school, move to New York City or get a low-paid job at a small newspaper and hope for the best. Grad school, say, at a place like Columbia or Northwestern, would funnel you into a pipeline of alumni who work in the highest levels of media. So getting a job might be easier. And moving to New York would allow you to work your way up through the industry, which would be just outside your front door.

For a moment, I pondered the grad school route. I already had $30,000 in student debt, what’s a little more? But I bombed the GRE³, so that choice was off the table for me.

So I could move to New York. But … I didn’t want to. I wanted to live where I wanted to live, and I asked a professor “why would I move to New York? Doesn’t everywhere need journalists? Why should they all be in one place?” The answer I got was: this is just how it is.

I didn’t leave: I got a staff job at a rural paper, and hoped for the best. But I eagerly chose this path. I need to be able to see the sky, disappear into the woods or stare out at the ocean. The Northwest, even before I really knew it, is fundamental to my character, and my happiness. I was unwilling to have an industry tell me how to live.

But now the year is 2025, and the Pacific Northwest media climate — the region where I was raised, received my education and have always worked as a journalist — is in shreds.

“The State of Local Journalism” map produced by Northwestern University should give you anxiety.

Last week, news came that Les Zaitz, the longtime Oregon journalist, will shutter the 115-year-old Malheur Enterprise — which he came out of retirement to revive. This means now all of Eastern Oregon will be lilac on the map above, produced by Northwestern University.

But, because I live and work in Oregon, what I can tell you that this map can’t is that even the counties here that are listed as having one news outlet doesn’t necessarily mean any reporters live there. Take Columbia County, Oregon — there is a newspaper there, but none of the reporters actually reside in the county. So, by that standard, this map should be a lot yellower than it is.

Media has increasingly New York-ified, and we are all suffering because of it. Fact: you absolutely cannot have a healthy democracy or journalism ecosystem if someone has to step on a plane to cover the issues of where you live.

Media is in crisis. I think everyone feels that to some extent. Do you know what’s going on in your community? Why don’t you? You are getting limited information. So you do what you can. You might pay for a subscription to The New York Times to feel like you are contributing to journalism, or to play Wordle on the toilet in the morning. Do you expect their reporters to be there to report on your school board election? Should they? Will they report on political corruption on the local level? Will they write about a police shooting? A hospital merger? The answer is no, they won’t.

And yet, knowing this, the media industry has failed to adjust. Journalism leaders have collectively mouth-breathed as the storm made landfall. Helicopter reporting, or no reporting at all, has become the norm.

In early May, I was eagerly following the reporting of Oregon Public Broadcasting and The Oregonian on a planned sweep of a large encampment of unhoused people from public land in the Deschutes National Forest. The issue brought together a mix of uniquely western topics: the lack of affordable housing, soaring housing prices, wildfires, the long tail of Grants Pass v, Johnson.

And yet, here came The New York Times.

Instead of dispatching the very good reporter who covers the Northwest for the newspaper to Bend, Oregon, we got a story on the sweep penned by Rukmini Callimachi⁴. You may remember her as the reporter who had to return a Peabody Award for bad reporting, who was somehow not fired, but reassigned.

It appears that her new beat is covering unhoused people, and the impacts of wildfire. These are topics the national “paper of record,” as people like to call it, should be covering. But why fly someone in to report on these things, instead of partnering with reporters who already live in this region?

Helicopter reporting is extractive. Full stop. And people can fight me on this one, but I believe the practice is built on the premise that your staff reporters will do a better job on a story than the people who live and work in that region. But when helicopter journalism happens, paragraphs like this occur:

The forest stretches as far as the eye can see, over multiple buttes that rise dome-like out of the ground. The ground is thick with pine needles and crunchy with cones. The air smells like the pine air freshener sold at carwashes. The R.V.s are spaced out, many tucked away under the boughs of the trees or behind escarpments and down sandy paths.

You might be saying, Leah, this description is not the point of the story. And, yes, I would agree with you — this paragraph reads to me like an editor told the writer “we need some texture here. Bring the reader to this place, and describe it.”

But a journalist has to establish credibility with readers, and this paragraph is where the story loses that for me: a Northwesterner who spends as much time as I can on public land, who knows the air in Central Oregon smells nothing like the inside of a cab. If this description could be read as so foreign to someone like me, what else isn’t accurate about this story?

This sensory description — pine tree air fresheners — contains a callousness toward nature that snubs the place entirely. It shows the perspective of this reporting/editing team: that they are so unfamiliar with wild places, and public land, their only touchstone for it is an extraction⁵ of nature.

I have sunk a lot of time into thinking about why, though, this bothers me as much as it does. If I were the writer of this piece, reading this critique, I might think “damn you really read closely looking for problems!” Well, at this point, I don’t have to look hard.

Pine tree air fresheners are a perfect metaphor, I’ve realized, to describe the aggregate problem the national media has created in reporting on this region of the country. Over the past few years as The Times, and The Atlantic, and Insider, and countless other outlets have flown into Oregon, and Portland, to write about issues the region faces, what has resulted are funhouse mirror distortions — reflections that depict some realities, but stretch others. I’ve had to question the premise anyway: why would I read a publication in New York on an issue happening within an hour drive of my house?

Just the other day, I gained some clarity on this pine tree air freshener issue. I saw a Times opinion writer (whose writing I tend to like) write on Bluesky, lambasting an elected official from Washington state, who “oozes a Pacific Northwest degrowth vibe.” I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’d never heard the term. When I looked up “degrowth,” I found this definition: “an idea that critiques the global capitalist system which pursues growth at all costs, causing human exploitation and environmental destruction.”

What’s wrong with that?

All of this has only emphasized to me how wildly misunderstood the Northwest is. Like it or not, the Northwest is a place with values all its own. It has its own unique tensions, controversies, annoyances, ways of speaking, ways of acting. It has real problems that need to be solved. It has a fraught history that trickles into everything, particularly the overwhelmingly white racial demographics. Every inch of this place was taken by force. And that happened not all that long ago.

The tacit suggestion when you fly your reporters in for a weekend is that we Northwesterners aren’t intelligent enough to tell these stories ourselves. But let me tell you: we notice when you get the story wrong not just once, or twice, but for years in a row. This is how media sows distrust.

I hope that if you read this, and you’re a decision maker in journalism, you think about pine tree air fresheners the next time you want to write a Northwest story. There really are journalists here, despite our lack of newspapers. If you’re going to write about us, please hire someone who — at the very least — knows that all the stakeholders in Oregon will laugh at you if you get our region wrong. Environmentalists would laugh at the idea of a forest smelling like an air freshener, but so would a logger, and a camper, and likely all of the people portrayed in this story. And let me tell you: getting all of those Northwest people to agree on something? That almost never happens.

1. I know, I know it’s going to shock everyone here to learn I am not really a sports person, but Brendan has a very compelling book coming out soon about Oregon superstar Steve Prefontaine, called The Front Runner. You can preorder it now.

2. Do any of us?

3. If I haven’t been clear about this before, I was never an honors or even straight B student. I blame this largely to being fucking terrible at taking tests and doing math. So for those of you out there who aren’t straight A students or would rather die than ever take another test? You are my people.

4. Callimachi started her career at the Associated Press in Oregon in 2003.

5. “Royal Pine” tree air fresheners smell like benzyl benzoate, alpha-isomethyl ionone, linalool, limonene, citronellol and geraniol.