DEAN STONE NIGHT
New Yorker writer to speak at J-school gala
Finnegan explores the rugged world of war and drugs, plus a rowdy Missoula punk band

By Lindsay Henderson
J-School Web reporter

William Finnegan has taken on some rough projects in his 20-some years as a journalist. He has written about war-torn Mozambique, the lives of neo-Nazi skinheads, drug dealers, addicts and the anti-apartheid movement.

And raucous punk rockers from Missoula.

Finnegan, staff writer for The New Yorker since 1987, will return to Missoula in April as the distinguished journalist for this year’s Dean Stone Night festivities.

Dean Stone Night — scheduled for April 5 this year — is the annual University of Montana School of Journalism awards banquet, named for J-school founder and former dean Arthur Stone. More than $80,000 in scholarships and awards will go to journalism students this year. Finnegan will speak briefly at the banquet, after a longer lecture open to the public at 7:30 p.m. April 4 in the North Underground Lecture Hall.

Finnegan, 49, is the author of four celebrated books of narrative journalism. He has written three about Africa: "Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid," "Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters" and "A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique."

His latest work, "Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country," published in 1998, took more than six years to complete. Finnegan immersed himself in four communities across the United States. The result was a narrative piece examining the difficult lives of downwardly mobile young people.
"Their lives were seriously bleak," said Finnegan. "Everyone was on a road to prison or worse."

The story was set in New Haven, Conn., San Augustine County in East Texas, the Yakima Valley in Washington State and the Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles.

He tracked the lives of young people in all four places, ranging from the despondent son of immigrant worker parents in the Yakima to a young drug runner in New Haven .

Finnegan traveled between locations and reported in one location for weeks at a time. "Then I stayed away for six months and then came back to see how things were panning out," he said.

He found it impossible to remain disconnected from the young people he had spent so much time reporting on. "I was attached. I don’t hide it in the book," he said. "Particularly because I was writing about kids. It was a long, pretty complicated involvement with them."

But he said, "There’s depressing and then there is depressing." Although "Cold New World" wasn’t like reporting from extremely poor parts of the world or covering a war, immersion reporting can be intense. Hanging out with gang kids and skinheads wasn’t always easy.

"In order to get somebody’s language right, I spend a lot of time with them, writing down everything they say," he said. "It gets to me after a while."

He is still in touch with the people in his book. Some are doing well; others are in prison.

Finnegan is no stranger to Missoula, having completed his MFA at UM in the late 1970s. He also did a piece for The New Yorker on The Sputniks, a Missoula band, for which current Kaimin news editor Chad Dundas was the drummer .

"It was fun to take him around and introduce him as ‘the media,’ " said Dundas.

Finnegan, then 45, traveled with the band from Missoula to Chicago in lead singer Richie Rowe’s grandma’s van and documented what Finnegan called their do-it-yourself punk rock world. He didn’t have a hard time fitting in.

"We rolled into Glendive at about 4:30 in the morning after just playing in Great Falls," said Dundas. "We were running on fumes and Bill was the first one to suggest we find an old car and siphon some gas out of it."

"The piece wrote itself," Finnegan said. "They said funny things and I wrote them down."

Band members often solicited places to stay by getting up on stage and announcing that they needed a place to stay. After a sleep-over in a particularly disgusting house in Chicago, where Rowe and some of his new friends decided at 3 a.m. to wake up "the media," Finnegan threw in the towel and flew home.

"It was fairly rugged reporting," said Finnegan. "I didn’t sleep much."