The Tenth Island
In memoriam: Diana Marcum, who "told stories of the forgotten" in California's drought
We lost someone, notable and wonderful, from this world last week.
Unlike most US journalists, Diana Marcum didn't have a college degree.
As she once told interviewer Millicent Borges Accardi, “my parents died before I reached college and I needed to make a living.” After “cobbling together waitressing and other odd jobs, including giving dance lessons,” she said she “started writing stories for newspapers and kept writing stories for newspapers until they hired me.” After writing for several other California papers, she began submitting feature pieces to the Los Angeles Times, purely as a freelancer. An astonishing fourteen of her stories made it to the Times front page in her first year of writing for them, before she was asked to join their staff in 2011. Carlos Lozano, who called to tell her, said “she thought I was kidding, because she had given up all hope.”
In the midst of the devastating, five-year California drought which began in that year, Diana lit out to places like Huron, Terra Bella, Madera and Stratford in the state’s agricultural Central Valley – often accompanied by photographer Michael Robinson Chavez, “whose aching black-and-white photos” would accompany her writing – to find, listen to, and tell “the stories of the forgotten … portraits of farmers and field hands coping with the drought.” She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for sharing their stories with the world; you can read some of them here.
As James Rainey wrote in her Times obituary, “the stories that would win her the Pulitzer Prize were classic Marcum. She didn’t propose a large “project” on the California drought — and demand months of time to do the work — but merely began talking to people ...”
Her friend and one-time love interest, fellow journalist Mark Arax of the Fresno Bee, who also good-naturedly competed with Diana to uncover compelling stories for that paper, recalled that:
“She was a nightmare for editors who cared more about control than language. She’d vanish for days at a time. The newsroom was a lousy place to write. The ditch bank or the coffee shop or the front seat of her car or the little back room of her bungalow were much better places.
““Where in the hell is Marcum?” became the frustration of nearly every one of her editors, which became a delight to Diana. When she finally did turn in her story, she knew it would redeem everything …”
“Blot out the byline and you knew it was a Marcum story by the third paragraph at the latest. Her pieces announced themselves for many reasons: the people she chose as subjects; the respect she gave them; the banishment of university words so that she wrote in the manner of their everyday talk; the polished and often witty leads; the sentences deceptively simple like haiku; the quieting of words that gave the reader credit for being able to figure out what she had chosen not to write, because the unspoken had its own meaning ...”
If you haven't yet happened to read any of Marcum's writing, her 2018 book, "The Tenth Island," is one delightful starting place. It came about by sheer chance, when a photographer happened to show her “a photo of a man plowing a field with oxen while talking on a cellphone in California.” And when reporting on that striking mix of ancient and modern, she “stumbled upon the Azorean diaspora in Central California and ended up at a party, out in the country, with bulls and beer and widows in black and dairy farmers and people crying while they danced to the old songs of their islands.”
That stumbled-upon party, in turn, upended her life, as she related in The Tenth Island. The book is a deeply personal memoir, weaving impulsive paths between those Portugese communities in California’s Central Valley and the nine-island chain of the Azores, west of Portugal in the mid-Atlantic Ocean, a magical place that unexpectedly began feeling to her like a true home.
She told Borges Accardi that “I think everyone gets to decide for themselves their definition of The Tenth Island. For me, at first, it was the Azorean diaspora in California. (They sometimes call themselves that.) Then, I added Boston and Toronto [where other members of that disaspora also have taken root]. But, by the end of my journey, I had a more universal definition. I now think that most people at some point in their lives are part of a Tenth Island – between places and times and clinging to things they do not want to lose.”
As Arax wrote, “Diana was anything but a force confined.” Gone far, far too soon at age 60 in August 2023, a few short weeks after surgery to remove a brain tumor. (And as well, her wonderful editor at the LA Times, Kari Howard, who died at age 59 from cancer in January 2022.) Life is fragile.
"It is a well-worn cliche for those in grief to exclaim that one should live each day as if today is your last, that too many people rush through without noticing the wonders of the world around them. Diana never had that problem. If anything, she’d sometimes drive me close to bonkers by offering a meta commentary on whatever we were experiencing at the moment. She’d stop, mid-stride, and point out the superlatives of whatever lay before us: the pinkish grandeur of the setting sun; the buoyant children sing-songing in the distance; the perfect symmetry of the trees."
– Donald Munro, writing about his friend Diana
It always tugs at the heart to discover a person you would have loved to know, only to discover she is already gone. Thank you Aron for this heartfelt tribute to this beautiful woman.