- Darryl Holliday and Erik Rodriguez’s “How to survive a shooting” was published in the Reader in 2013.
We live in a world where you can run but you can’t hide. A colleague says a perplexing letter just came in the mail to her husband. As he’s someone “who basically scoffs at the Internet,” she told me in an e-mail, “I am wondering what list they got his name and address from.”
I told my colleague I’d see what I could find out. But if neighborhood news services now promote themselves like corner pizzerias; and if reporters now double as marketers—well, the life we chose is a desperate life and everyone in it is hustling to survive.
Holliday didn’t win the Keegan. We weren’t sure how to think about the stories he sent us. The Keegan is an award created for individual writers, not for collaborators. And his format was something we’d never had to deal with before. But this isn’t to say we weren’t intrigued and impressed. The comic-book form can be amazingly subtle and potent.
Holliday says he’s grateful to his bosses at DNAinfo for supporting his outside work instead of telling him to cut it out; but he hasn’t done any graphic journalism on his day job. “I keep them pretty separate,” he says. For DNAinfo, he covers neighborhood stories and signs letters to home owners that end, “I’m excited to work with you. . . . I look forward to meeting you soon.” That’s going the extra mile right there.
