Diana Marcum cast a profession, and a life, by giving a voice to Californians whom many individuals didn’t take time to note. Her favourite topics had been strivers and oddballs, the dispossessed and the individuals who dared to be delighted within the face of life’s struggles.
The veteran journalist chronicled drought and starvation and deep anxiousness from the Central Valley, which she made her dwelling for greater than twenty years. In even the darkest tales, she normally managed to ship a ray of sunshine.
Marcum, a former Los Angeles Instances reporter who received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for function writing, died Wednesday evening, in accordance with her good friend Janet Sluis. Marcum had a glioblastoma faraway from her mind in early July, however fell right into a coma shortly after surgical procedure at Fresno Neighborhood Regional Medical Middle and by no means totally recovered. She was 60.
The lifelong Californian left The Instances late in 2022 and went in on the acquisition of a second dwelling in Portugal’s Azores — a world away from Fresno — the place she had deliberate to put in writing what would have been the third of her journey memoirs.
Kevin Merida, The Instances’ government editor, described Marcum as “a rare author, with a powerful, resonant voice and beautiful observational abilities.” He recalled a day-long tour of Central Valley farms, properties and companies that the reporter took him on when he began his job two years in the past and the way there was “such respect and real affection for her at each cease we made.”
Carlos Lozano, a Instances editor who was instrumental in bringing Marcum to the newspaper in 2011, stated: “She had a giant coronary heart. She empathized with individuals. She beloved to speak and to essentially pay attention. That humanity got here throughout in each story.”
Marcum can be the primary to say that she didn’t match the usual journalism mildew.
Born in Sonoma County on Feb. 2, 1963, Marcum and her youthful brother had been raised by adoptive dad and mom within the San Bernardino County neighborhood of Loma Linda. She had a fascination with writing, and newspapers, from a younger age.
By the fourth grade, she would later recall, she advised her household she wished to turn out to be a reporter for the Los Angeles Instances. (Although younger Diana additionally mused about being an English professor or maybe toiling over her newest novel in a tiny Paris garret.)
Extra prosaic pursuits turned a necessity when each of her dad and mom died of most cancers throughout her highschool years. She shortly went to work — cobbling collectively waitressing and different odd jobs, together with giving dance classes — whereas attending courses at Crafton Hills School in Yucaipa.
“Once I met her, she was decided to work and preserve her brother out of the foster care system, which she succeeded in doing,” stated Sluis, an expensive good friend since neighborhood school days. “Diana had the perspective that life was quick, and that she wouldn’t ever actually plan for the long run.”
Marcum retained her ambition to be a author and freelanced for Southern California newspapers when she may.
“I didn’t get by means of school. I didn’t have any of the suitable credentials,” she advised an interviewer from the Nieman Basis, which granted her one in every of its prestigious journalism fellowships for 2018. “However I may write. Individuals appeared to assume I may write.”
Marcum’s distinctive voice — spare and witty — made her irresistible to editors. She first landed a workers writing job on the San Bernardino Solar, then moved to the Desert Solar in Palm Springs. On the Fresno Bee, editors gave her ever-wider latitude as an enterprise reporter and a columnist.
Her items ran the gamut, from dispatches on Barack Obama’s first inauguration to a profile of a gaggle of ice-cream-loving nuns and an ode to a taco truck that turned the glue for one small mountain city.
Whereas she initially nervous about her lack of formal training, Marcum’s view developed. “I got here to see that there are benefits to having come up my very own means,” she advised the Portuguese American Journal. “As a result of I’ll by no means be writing about ‘them.’ I’m a ‘them.’ I’ll all the time be writing about ‘us.’”
Her work quickly attracted the eye within the metropolis to the south, the place journalists acknowledged a compatriot who delivered deft profiles, whereas making no secret that she had little urge for food for the crime, fires and scandals which are mainstays of the information.
“She was a pure function author. The best way she wrote was simply so attractive and easy and evocative,” stated Steve Chawkins, himself an acclaimed author and editor at The Instances.
Weary of the every day journalism grind, Marcum took a buyout from the Bee and set off for the Azores, the Portuguese islands that had captured her fancy after she met the islands’ many Central Valley expatriates. She returned from the archipelago lifeless broke however with the uncooked materials for her first e-book.
Lozano, then serving as state editor on the Los Angeles newspaper, shortly put her to work on a collection of freelance items. Her stressed eye captured the complete pageant — from the darkish secrets and techniques of the Central Valley’s canals, to the aching lack of seven troopers who had all graduated from Clovis Excessive College, to the intricate dance of Portuguese bullfighters. Whereas nonetheless a freelancer, she made the entrance web page of The Instances 14 instances in only one yr.
Lozano pressed to provide the rising star a full-time job. However with newspapers within the midst of a chronic hiring hunch, the recruitment stalled.
When the editor lastly known as in 2011 to inform Marcum she had gotten a job on the paper, she laughed.
“She thought I used to be kidding, as a result of she had given up all hope,” recalled Lozano. “However then I advised her I wasn’t joking.”
The tales that may win her the Pulitzer Prize had been traditional Marcum. She didn’t suggest a big “venture” on the California drought — and demand months of time to do the work — however merely started speaking to individuals in communities similar to Huron, Terra Bella, Madera and Stratford.
Marcum and photographer Michael Robinson Chavez discovered the catastrophe struck haphazardly, partly due to uneven allocations from struggling water districts. That meant inexperienced crops and contented house owners operated simply throughout the way in which from desiccated fields and emptied farm camps.
The reporter would ease into her conversations along with her topics, so that they didn’t really feel like interviews, the way in which she engaged with Francisco Galvez, who was struggling to search out work across the Fresno County city of Huron.
“It felt like they had been simply taking pictures the breeze,” recalled Robinson Chavez, whose aching black-and-white images anchored the collection. “But it surely wasn’t small discuss. It was his ache. His agony. His seemingly stoic exterior vanished shortly as he spoke with Diana.”
Marcum laid out the 35-year-old Galvez’s desperation for work in plain prose, He wanted to feed his youngsters and put footwear on their ft. “For the reason that days of the Mud Bowl,” she wrote, “these have been the locations the place hassle hits first and cash doesn’t final.”
The tales echoed John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” the traditional novel that one in every of her editors, Kari Howard, had given her when she started criss-crossing the sprawling valley in the hunt for the story.
Marcum described how California’s nice agricultural underbelly withered below cloudless skies, with huge stretches of farmland slowly sagging on high of overdrawn aquifers. City wells cracked, whereas pipes spit solely mud and yellow water.
The tales learn like tone poems, introducing readers to the small-time pistachio grower who lovingly named, and cried over, his dying timber; a grocery retailer proprietor who measured the devastation in a rising pile of IOUs; and Galvez and a fellow area hand raking nonexistent weeds, a pantomime to persuade their boss that they had sufficient work to maintain them employed.
Steve Clow, now an assistant managing editor at The Instances, helped focus the tales, which then moved on to Howard for sharpening. Marcum would later describe how she and Howard, who edited the Column One function, turned so melded they acted like they shared the identical mind. The duo agreed that the tales had been much less in regards to the drought than about “individuals displaying hope and resilience and character throughout a tough time.”
Their relationship deepened when Howard was identified with most cancers in 2018. The reporter wrote a narrative about her cross-country highway journey to go to her good friend in 2021. (Although the deeply personal Howard went unnamed.) “She was dying. She advised me I wanted to simply accept that truth earlier than I bought there so we may get on with having fun with our go to,” Marcum wrote.
The piece described America’s stunning, tortured panorama, within the time of COVID-19, whereas her automotive stereo hinted at larger questions. “Maybe a greater world is drawing close to,” crooned Jackson Browne, “simply as simply, it may all disappear.” Marcum was devastated when Howard died, at 59, early final yr.
In her ultimate months at The Instances, Marcum had turn out to be, if something, extra defiant within the face of more and more noxious politics and the worldwide pandemic. She advised fellow reporters she wished to create a novel beat — centered on pleasure.
One piece described a neighborhood backyard in Woodlake that epitomized a Chinese language proverb: “If you need 100 years of prosperity, develop individuals.”
One other story painted the scene of a Cambodian evening market. A 3rd sketched a onetime social employee who walked all 4,121 streets in Santa Cruz County in the hunt for one thing elusive. Among the many small wonders the employee found: “spiraling vines of untamed cucumber dripping down fences and the way they’d bounce again like a spring if she pulled them.”
Her 11 years on the paper led to December, with a farewell word telling her colleagues she would miss “all the colourful issues to come back” at The Instances, however wished to pursue “different tasks.”
Her first journey to the Azores had spawned her critically admired 2018 memoir, “The Tenth Island: Discovering Pleasure, Magnificence, and Sudden Love within the Azores.” She had a contract to put in writing one other e-book on life within the archipelago, 1,000 miles southwest of Portugal.
Marcum had traveled extensively however stated the distant islands and their individuals had taken a grip on her soul. She described how she beloved the languid days, energetic volcanoes and plentiful distance from the bigger world. And Marcum embraced the Portuguese idea of saudade.
“It’s an indescribable longing,” she advised the Portuguese American Journal. “It’s a craving for one thing that’s simply out of attain — misplaced previously or one thing you simply can’t even title. It has one thing to do with life and dying and the sensation you get gazing on the sea.”
She joined along with her accomplice, former Fresno Bee photographer Mark Crosse, and her good friend Sluis to purchase a house on the island of Terceira. The couple had arrived there in mid-June. However their dream escape ended after solely a few weeks, when Marcum collapsed.
Her travels already had confirmed Marcum’s view that the nice in life deserved equal footing with the dangerous.
“I’m immune to giving over each sliver of consideration to the ‘essential’ stuff,” she advised PEN America in 2018. “It’s not simply that life goes on. It’s that it thrums round and beneath and regardless of something and every part.”
Instances researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this report.
