Norman Stockwell
The late John Ross, left, and at a 2010 anti-war rally in Madison, advocated reporting from the ground. A series of his lectures was published last month.
Longtime WORT employee Norman Stockwell first crossed paths with John Ross while covering the 1988 Mexican presidential election. Their affinity for independent media and belief that journalism is a moral obligation, not just a profession, made them fast friends.
Twenty-seven years later Stockwell has fulfilled a favor Ross asked of him back in 2010: to edit and publish a book of Ross’ lectures.
“We were sitting around the kitchen table, and John said this thing really needs a publisher,” says Stockwell. “John had had a bout of liver cancer and it came back, and it was pretty clear that it was terminal. He spent his last days in Mexico with friends and passed away on Jan. 17, 2011. That’s when I took on this project and said, ‘We need to do this.’”
Ross was born in New York City in 1938. He grew up among beat poets like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; he was heavily influenced by their prose, and began writing and reading his own poetry in Greenwich Village bars.
In 1957, Ross set out for Mexico City, then made himself home among an indigenous community in the Mexican state of Michoacán.
When he returned to the United States six years later, he became the first person jailed for refusing the draft for Vietnam. In the early 1970s, he began reporting in California, Spain and Africa for The Progressive, The Nation, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and other publications.
His 1995 book Rebellion from the Roots: Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas won the American Book Award, and he received the 2005 Upton Sinclair Award for his book Murdered By Capitalism: 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left.
Ross’ dedication to storytelling from the bottom up was something he hoped to pass on to future independent reporters like himself. Stockwell agreed to help make that a reality with the editing and publishing of Rebel Reporting: John Ross Speaks to Independent Journalists.
Rebel Reporting, out last month from Hamilton Books, looks at the responsibility journalists have to document injustice while instructing them on how to effect change.
Told through a series of Ross’ lectures, the book preaches the importance of reporting on the ground, telling the stories of those most vulnerable.
“It is a moral obligation you have when people share their lives with you, an obligation to use the tools you have, which in John’s case were the rolling writer pen, the typewriter or the Mac laptop, to tell those stories to other people so they can understand and appreciate those lives,” Stockwell says.
Stockwell hopes the book will help educate and connect a new generation of independent reporters to Ross’ work.
“So much of journalism school today is preparing people for a career in a shrinking industry that is more and more about public relations and less and less about actual journalism,” he says. “It’s a breath of fresh air to young students starting out in journalism because it’s not the kind of narrow view of the profession but rather the combination of poetry and storytelling.”
Cristalyne Bell, Stockwell’s co-editor, attended Madison College when Ross gave two of the lectures included in Rebel Reporting. Bell was profoundly influenced by Ross, referring to him as an investigative poet.
Stockwell plans to launch the book in Madison on Dec. 15, with two talks about Ross with Robert W. McChesney, a journalism professor from the University of Illinois-Champaign. One will be at noon in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive; the second at 6 p.m. at Rainbow Bookstore Co-op, 426 W. Gilman St.
After years of searching for a publisher and hoping to fulfill his promise to his late friend, Stockwell is happy publication day is finally here.
“We’ve put together a really exciting package, and even though it’s made up of a bunch of disparate parts, it’s whole at the same time,” says Stockwell. “John asked me to do this, and I’m really, really pleased that it has come to fruition.”
