What Is Literary Journalism?

Literary journalism is a form of nonfiction that combines factual reporting with some
of the narrative techniques and stylistic strategies traditionally associated with fiction.
Also called narrative journalism.
In his ground-breaking anthology The Literary Journalists (1984), Norman Sims
observed that literary journalism "demands immersion in complex, difficult subjects.
The voice of the writer surfaces to show that an author is at work."
The term literary journalism is sometimes used interchangeably with creative
nonfiction; more often, however, it is regarded as one type of creative nonfiction.
Highly regarded literary journalists in the U.S. today include John McPhee, Jane
Kramer, Mark Singer, and Richard Rhodes. Some notable literary journalists of the
past century include Stephen Crane, Jack London, George Orwell, and Tom Wolfe.
By Richard Nordquist

Observations

"Literary journalism is not fiction--the people are real and the events
occurred--nor is it journalism in a traditional sense. There is interpretation, a
personal point of view, and (often) experimentation with structure and
chronology. Another essential element of literary journalism is its focus. Rather
than emphasizing institutions, literary journalism explores the lives of those
who are affected by those institutions."
"As defined by Thomas B. Connery, literary journalism is 'nonfiction
printed prose whose verifiable content is shaped and transformed into a story or
sketch by use of narrative and rhetorical techniques generally associated with
fiction.' Through these stories and sketches, authors 'make a statement, or
provide an interpretation, about the people and culture depicted.' Norman Sims
adds to this definition by suggesting the genre itself allows readers to 'behold
others' lives, often set within far clearer contexts than we can bring to our own.'
He goes on to suggest, 'There is something intrinsically political—and strongly
democratic—about literary journalism—something pluralistic, pro-individual,
anti-cant, and anti-elite.' Further, as John E. Hartsock points out, the bulk of
work that has been considered literary journalism is composed 'largely by
professional journalists or those writers whose industrial means of production
is to be found in the newspaper and magazine press, thus making them at least
for the interim de facto journalists.' Common to many definitions of literary
journalism is that the work itself should contain some kind of higher truth; the
stories themselves may be said to be emblematic of a larger truth."
(Amy Mattson Lauters, ed., The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane,
Literary Journalist. University of Missouri Press, 2007)
"Through dialogue, words, the presentation of the scene, you can turn over the
material to the reader. The reader is ninety-some percent of what's creative in
creative writing. A writer simply gets things started."
The term literary journalism refers to a form of writing
that combines factual reporting with fiction writing
techniques. In traditional journalism, the goal of the
reporter is to outline who, what, when, where and why.
A traditional journalist expresses the facts of the whole
story without utilizing a point of view. Literary
journalists immerse themselves in a story and create
complicated structures, symbolism, voice and character
development as strategies to convey a point of view.
The other terms that have been used to describe this
genre Adventure
■ Biography
■ Business
■ Crime story
■ Family saga
■ History
■ Popular culture
■ Science and technology
■ Sports
■ Travel

are "new journalism" and "creative nonfiction".

Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick,
Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered
Dee Dee Blancharde was a model parent: a tireless single mom taking care of her gravely ill
child. But after Dee Dee was killed, it turned out things weren’t as they appeared — and her
daughter Gypsy had never been sick at all.

By Michelle Dean

BuzzFeed Contributor

Posted on August 18, 2016, at 8:09 p.m. ET

For seven years before the murder, Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blancharde lived in a small pink
bungalow on West Volunteer Way in Springfield, Missouri. Their neighbors liked them.
“'Sweet' is the word I’d use,” a former friend of Dee Dee’s told me not too long ago. Once you
met them, people said, they were impossible to forget.

Dee Dee was 48 years old, originally from Louisiana. She was a large, affable-looking person,
which she reinforced by dressing in bright, cheerful colors. She had curly brown hair she liked
to hold back with ribbons. People who knew her remember her as generous with her time and,
when she could be, generous with money. She could make friends quickly and inspire deep
devotion. She did not have a job, but instead served as a full-time caretaker for Gypsy Rose,
her teenage daughter.
Gypsy was a tiny thing, perhaps 5 feet tall as far as anyone could guess. She was confined to a
wheelchair. Her round face was overwhelmed by a pair of owlish glasses. She was pale and
skinny, and her teeth were crumbling and painful. She had a feeding tube. Sometimes Dee Dee
had to drag an oxygen tank around with them, nasal cannula looped around Gypsy’s small
ears. Ask about her daughter's diagnoses, and Dee Dee would reel off a list as long as her arm:
chromosomal defects, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, severe asthma, sleep apnea, eye
problems. It had always been this way, Dee Dee said, ever since Gypsy was a baby. She had
spent time in neonatal intensive care. She had leukemia as a toddler.

Facebook via WISN

Gypsy (left) and Dee Dee
The endless health crises had taken a toll. Gypsy was friendly, talkative even, but her voice
was high and childlike. Dee Dee would often remind people that her daughter had brain
damage. She had to be homeschooled, because she’d never be able to keep up with other kids.
Gypsy had the mind of a child of 7, Dee Dee said. It was important to remember that in
dealing with her. She loved princess outfits and dressing up. She wore wigs and hats to cover
her small head. A curly, blonde Cinderella number seems to have been her favorite. She’s
wearing it in so many photographs of herself with her mother. She was always with her
mother.

“We are a pair of shoes,” Gypsy once said. “Never good without the other.”

Their house, like everyone else’s around them, had been built by Habitat for Humanity. It had
amenities specially built for Gypsy: a ramp up to the front door, a Jacuzzi tub to help with “my
muscles,” Gypsy told a local television station in 2008. Sometimes, on summer nights, Dee
Dee would set up a projector to play a movie on the side of her house and the children of the
neighborhood, whose parents usually couldn’t afford to send them to a movie theater, came
over for a treat. Dee Dee charged for concessions, but it was still cheaper than the local
multiplex. The money was to go to Gypsy’s treatments.
Dee Dee became particularly close with some people across the way, a single mother named
Amy Pinegar and her four children. Over years of tea and coffee, Dee Dee would tell Pinegar
her life story. She was originally from a small town in Louisiana, she said, but she’d had to
flee her abusive family with Gypsy. It was her own father, Gypsy’s grandfather, who’d been
the last straw; he’d burned Gypsy with cigarettes. So she’d lit out from her hometown for
good.

She told Pinegar that Gypsy’s father was a deadbeat, an alcoholic drug abuser who had
mocked his daughter’s disabilities, called the Special Olympics a “freak show.” As Pinegar
understood it, he'd never sent them a dime, not even when Dee Dee and Gypsy had lost
everything in Hurricane Katrina. It was a blessing that a doctor at a rescue shelter had helped
them get to the Ozarks.

Sometimes, listening, Amy Pinegar found herself overwhelmed. “I wondered,” Pinegar told
me over the phone last fall, “keeping this child alive... Is she that happy?” All she could do
was be a good neighbor and pitch in when she could. She’d drive Dee Dee and Gypsy to the
airport for their medical trips to Kansas City, bring them things from Sam’s Club. Ultimately,
they did seem happy. They went on charity trips to Disney World, met Miranda Lambert
through the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Looking back on it, Pinegar was sometimes even
jealous of them.

It was a perfect story for a human interest segment on the evening news: a family living
through tragedy and disaster, managing to build a life for themselves in spite of so many
obstacles. But the story wasn't over. One day last June, Dee Dee’s Facebook account posted an
update.

“That bitch is dead,” it read.

It was June 14, a hot Sunday afternoon that had driven a lot of people indoors to the blessings
of air-conditioning. The first few comments on the status are from friends expressing wild
disbelief. Maybe the page had been hacked. Maybe someone should call. Does anyone know
where they live? Should someone call the police, give them the address?

As they debated it, a new comment from Dee Dee’s account appeared on the status: “I fucken
SLASHED THAT FAT PIG AND RAPED HER SWEET INNOCENT DAUGHTER…HER
SCREAM WAS SOOOO FUCKEN LOUD LOL.”

Kim Blanchard, who lived nearby, was among the first to react. Though Kim had a similar last
name to the Blanchardes, she wasn’t a relative. She had met Dee Dee and Gypsy in 2009 at a
science fiction and fantasy convention held in the Ozarks, where Gypsy could wear costumes
and not be particularly out of place. “They were just perfect,” Kim said. “Here was this poor,
sick child who was being taken care of by a wonderful, patient mother who only wanted to
help everybody.”

Kim called Dee Dee’s number, but there was no answer. Kim's husband, David, suggested that
they drive on over to the house just to make sure everything was all right. When they arrived, a
crowd of worried neighbors was already gathering. Dee Dee and Gypsy had sometimes been
unreachable before, off on a medical trip without telling anyone. The windows had a
protective film on them; it was hard to see in. Knocking on the doors brought no response. But
everyone found it suspicious that Dee Dee’s new cube van, which could easily transport
Gypsy around in her wheelchair, was parked in the driveway.

Kim called 911. The police couldn’t enter the house without a warrant, but didn’t stop David
from climbing through a window. Inside, he saw nothing amiss. All the lights had been turned
off, and the air-conditioning was on high. There were no signs of a robbery, or any struggle.
All of Gypsy’s wheelchairs were still in the house. It was frightening to think about how
helpless she might be without them.

The police began taking statements while they waited for a search warrant. Kim relayed
information back to Facebook. Yes, they’d been to the house; yes, the police had been called.
Dee Dee’s online friends and acquaintances began bombarding Kim with questions. She
answered as best she could, but the status was beginning to get shared around Missouri.
“Here's the thing guys…I know everyone is very concerned,” Kim wrote on Facebook. “We
need to realize that whoever posted this can read all of this.”

The search warrant didn’t come through until 10:45 that night. The police found Dee Dee’s
body in the bedroom. She’d been stabbed, and had been dead for several days. But there was
no sign of Gypsy.

The next day, Kim organized a vigil and a GoFundMe account to take care of Dee Dee’s
funeral expenses — and possibly Gypsy’s. Everyone feared the worst. All her life, Gypsy had
evoked protective responses in people. She was so small and looked so helpless. Many people
couldn’t understand why this had happened to her. Who could prey on someone who had no
defenses?

Meanwhile, the police were starting to sort things out. A young woman named Aleah
Woodmansee had approached them. There were some things she knew, things that might be
helpful. For example, she told them, Gypsy had a secret online boyfriend.

Aleah was Amy Pinegar’s daughter, a 23-year-old who’d worked as a medical claims
investigator. She felt like a big sister to Gypsy, and evidently Gypsy felt the same. But they
were rarely alone together, as Gypsy’s mother was constantly by her side. So when Gypsy
confided in Aleah, it was through a secret Facebook account, under the name Emma Rose.

“This is my personal account my mom is still overprotective so she don’t, know about this
account,” Gypsy wrote in October 2014. Then she confessed she’d met a man on a Christian
singles site. She was in love with him, she told Aleah. Gypsy hadn’t yet told her mother. She
wrote that she knew Dee Dee wouldn’t approve, that she wasn’t allowed to date, though she
longed to grow up and have a boyfriend like other girls her age.

“In the past I told my mom something mean I says I wished ur mom was my mom instead of
my mom cus mrs Amy let Aleah date anyone she wanted so that hurt my mom,” Gypsy wrote.

The new boyfriend’s name, Gypsy revealed, was Nicholas Godejohn. They’d been
communicating for over two years. He didn’t care that she was in a wheelchair. And Gypsy
planned to marry him. They were both Catholic. They had agreed on names for their children.
She was cooking up an elaborate plan for Dee Dee to casually meet Nick at the local movie
theater, after which Gypsy was hoping they could be open about their relationship.

This wasn’t the first time Aleah had gotten clandestine messages from Gypsy about boys. She
knew that Gypsy had tried to meet men online before, that in spite of what Dee Dee said about
Gypsy’s 7-year-old mind, thoughts about romance and sex were taking root anyway. But she
was concerned. Gypsy had always seemed naive to her. In October 2014, she wrote “I’m 18.
Nick…is 24,” which made Godejohn six years older.

Plus, the way she talked about the relationship was odd. “It was like some kind of magnificent
fairy tale was unfolding,” Aleah said over coffee in Springfield last fall.

She was worried, too, about Dee Dee, who'd confronted her in 2011 about her chats with
Gypsy, telling her she was corrupting a child. “I’m not going to tell your mom about the things
you said,” she told Aleah. “But I don’t want you talking to Gypsy like that.” Dee Dee took
away Gypsy’s phone and computer for a time. Gypsy had always managed, nonetheless, to
slip through some crack in her mother’s attention, find some other way of getting to Aleah.
But the two saw each other less and less, and after the messages about Nick Godejohn in the
fall of 2014, Aleah didn't hear from Gypsy again.

Standing in front of the house half a year later with the crowd that had gathered, it occurred to
Aleah that the police should know about all this. She showed them the Facebook messages,
and they wrote the name down. The police also put a trace on the Facebook posts to Dee Dee’s
account. The IP address was registered to a Nicholas Godejohn in Big Bend, Wisconsin.

On June 15, a team of officers in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, were dispatched to

Godejohn’s house. The standoff was brief. Nick quickly surrendered. Luckily enough, Gypsy
was with him, unharmed, in excellent health. Relief flooded everyone, at least for a moment.

“Things are not always as they appear,” the Springfield sheriff said at a press conference the
next morning.

It turned out that, in fact, Gypsy hadn’t used a wheelchair from the moment she left her house
a few days earlier. She didn’t need one. She could walk just fine, there was nothing wrong
with her muscles, and she had no medication or oxygen tank with her either. Her hair was
short and spiky, but she wasn’t bald — her head had simply been shaved, all her life, to make
her appear ill. She was well-spoken, if shaken by recent events. The disabled child she’d long
been in the eyes of others was nowhere to be found. It was all a fraud, she told the police. All
of it. Every last bit. Her mother had made her do it.

“I just cried,” Aleah said, her sheer disbelief about everything that had happened
overwhelming her.

Kim Blanchard cried, too. “At that point it really became: ‘I don't know anything about this
person. What have I been believing? How could I have been so stupid?’”

“No one asked for any more documentation. No one raised an eyebrow,” Amy Pinegar told me
later. “Were they behind closed doors laughing at us” — she paused for a second —
“suckers?”

Under other circumstances, a tale of child abuse as long and as involved as what Gypsy
experienced might have inspired public sympathy. But something about the fraud element
deeply offended people, particularly those who hadn’t known Gypsy or Dee Dee at all.
Evidently there are a lot of people who are worried that others who are sick and disabled don’t
deserve their generosity. So Facebook groups began to spring up. They splintered on whether
Gypsy could be said to be blamed, whether Rod and Kristy were in some way in on the fraud.
Some groups ballooned to over 10,000 members, some of them posting every day about the
crime, voicing unfounded theories about what had happened.

If their speculation had been confined to private forums, it might have been one thing. But
more than a few of these amateur detectives were not satisfied with online discussion. They
wanted to affect the case in real time. A St. Louis–based Thought Catalog writer named
Meagan Pack was keeping track of “tips” she’d gotten from Facebook about Gypsy and Dee
Dee’s crimes and posting them to a much-referenced post. Pack told me she called the police
detective to inform him of all she’d learned. Random observers on Facebook also called the
police with their various speculations. Then, when the court hearings began, they came to
those, too. One even showed up to Dee Dee’s house when the initial “That bitch is dead”
Facebook post went viral in Springfield. She hadn’t known Gypsy or Dee Dee at all. She was
shooed away from the crime scene by the neighbors and the police.

The result was informational chaos. Kim Blanchard’s GoFundMe became a flashpoint for
online sleuths. When Dee Dee's financial fraud was revealed by the sheriff, Kim shut it down,
but not before the groups had taken it upon themselves to investigate Kim herself. Several
thought Kim and David Blanchard were lying about their involvement with Gypsy and Dee
Dee, and assumed they were relatives because of their last name.

Kristy Blanchard, meanwhile, was still gathering a lot of the news about her stepdaughter from
Facebook. That’s when she discovered that many thought she and Rod were in on Dee Dee’s
plans. Others thought Rod must have been a neglectful father who didn’t financially support
his own child. "They don't understand that I've always been supportive,” he said. “In every
way,” Kristy chimed in. In fact, if anything, Dee Dee may have had so much money — Gypsy
and Nick had escaped with about $4,000 from Dee Dee’s safe — because they were receiving
his support checks. (Dee Dee died intestate, without a will, and apparently without meaningful
assets other than that cash.)

Kristy tried, at first, to defend herself and Rod to these groups, but it turned out they were hard
to convince. “It was hell,” she said. She withdrew from all the groups and asked friends and
family to stop accepting new friend requests, which were pouring in.

The neighbors in Springfield also had this problem. “It was like, ‘Forget you!’” Amy Pinegar
said of the few attempts she made to correct the online sleuths on their factual errors. The
obsessives ended up piling confusion onto the already confusing situation Dee Dee had
created. And they proved quite resilient. At the hearing I attended in September 2015, two
people from the largest Facebook group were there. After the hearing, they made a beeline for
the local television crew and started talking to them. Gypsy’s attorney, Michael Stanfield, saw
them too, and tried to hurry out of the courtroom to confront them.
“Who were those people?” he asked the television crew. “What did they say?”

For most of the year I spent reporting this article, the case was pending and I wasn’t able to
speak to Gypsy herself. After the plea deal, that changed. I sent her a note. She called me from
prison in Missouri to talk in short conversations broken up over a few days.

Her voice is still high-pitched, though now that we know what we know, it no longer seems
unusually high at all. People heard what they wanted to. Gypsy speaks in long, beautiful
sentences. She is sometimes so eloquent in conversation that it is hard to believe anyone could
have ever spoken with her and thought her “slow,” as some put it. It reminded me of all the
doctors who wrote in her files that in spite of Gypsy’s alleged cognitive defect, she had a “rich
vocabulary.”

She was eager to talk, barely able to contain herself once she started. She wants people to
know, she said, that this wasn’t a situation where a girl killed her mom to be with her
boyfriend. This was a situation, she said, of a girl trying to escape abuse. In prison she’s
hoping to join all sorts of programs, to help people. She wants to write a book to help others in
her situation.

I asked her what I’d long been waiting to ask her: When did she realize her life was different,
that there was something wrong? “Whenever I was 19,” she said. She meant the time when she
ran away with the man at the convention in 2011. When her mother came to take her back, she
began to wonder why she wasn’t allowed to be alone, to have friends.

About her mother, her opinion seems to waver. “The doctors thought that she was so devoted
and caring,” Gypsy said. “I think she would have been the perfect mom for someone that
actually was sick. But I’m not sick. There’s that big, big difference.”

Gypsy still doesn’t feel she actively deceived anyone. “I feel like I was just as used as
everybody else,” she said. “She used me as a pawn. I was in the dark about it. The only thing I
knew was that I could walk, and that I could eat. As for everything else… Well, she’d shave
my hair off. And she’d say, ‘It’s gonna fall out anyway, so let’s keep it nice and neat!’” Gypsy
said her mother told her she had cancer, too, and would tell her that her medication was cancer
medication. She just accepted it.

As for a childlike demeanor, Gypsy grew defensive when I asked her about it. “It’s not my
fault. I can’t help it. This is my voice.”
Often, it didn’t occur to her to question any of it, and when it did, she worried about hurting
her mother’s feelings. It often seems to Gypsy, even now, that Dee Dee really thought she was
sick. “I was afraid that we were gonna get in trouble,” Gypsy said. “The line between right and
wrong…was kinda blurred, ’cause that’s the way I was taught. I just grew up that way.”

“When I think about it now,” she added, “I wish I would have reached out to somebody and
told somebody before I told Nick.”

She mostly used the internet late at night, when her mother was asleep. Nick, she said, was the
first person who had offered her real protection. She believed him. Ultimately, after everything
that happened, she said she thinks he has “anger issues.” She repeatedly takes responsibility
for the murder: “What I did was wrong. I’ll have to live with it.” But she said Nick is the one
who took “a plot between us both” and “made it into action.” Gypsy was the one who had the
idea to post about the murder on Facebook, so that the police would come check on her mom.
She recalled asking Nick, “Can we please just post something on Facebook, something
alarming, that would make people call the police?” But she said he told her what to write.

I asked, repeatedly: Are you angry? With your mom? With the doctors? She will admit only to
frustration. “It makes me frustrated that none of the other doctors could see that I was perfectly
healthy. That my legs were not skinny, like someone who was [really] paralyzed. That I
can’t... I don’t need a feeding tube. Stuff like that.” In jail, Gypsy had access to tablet
computers. She looked up the definition of Munchausen, after hearing the word so often used
to describe her situation. Her mother matched every symptom, she told me.

Every once in a while, I’d get Gypsy explaining some element of her abuse in such detail that
something in me would break. Once, feeling speechless but aware that the clock was ticking
on her phone time, I blurted out, “I’m so sorry this happened to you.” Gypsy immediately
switched into the girl she was back in those feel-good local news interviews. “It’s okay. I
mean, honestly, it’s made me a stronger person, because I truly believe that everything
happens for a reason.”

Even on the subject of her prison sentence, Gypsy is a model of radical acceptance. She’s told
people she feels freer in prison than she did when living with her mom. “This time is good for
me,” she said to me. “I’ve been raised to do what my mother taught me to do. And those things
aren’t very good.”

“She taught me to lie, and I don’t wanna lie. I want to be a good, honest person.” ●