Dispatches from the coast

By Gretchen Ammerman

Oregon Coast TODAY

“There’s a book in that.”

Words most aspiring and active writers long to hear.

They are also the (slightly modified) title of a chapter in “Storm Beat: A Journalist Reports from the Oregon Coast;” the soon-to-be-released memoir from former Oregon Coast TODAY columnist and published novelist Lori Tobias, who spent a good deal of her career as the coast reporter for the Oregonian.

“I always knew my next book was going to be a memoir,” she said. “But I also knew I had to write about my time at the Oregonian; since that’s such a big part of who I am. These are the biggest stories that have happened on the Oregon Coast in the last 15 years.”

“Storm Beat” is Tobias’ second book, coming after her debut work of fiction, “Wander,” published in 2016.

“Fiction is hard because you can do anything you want with it. It's a very big world when you have to be the one to construct it. With memoir, you’re pretty much just telling what happened.”

But she didn’t want it to be too easy.

“I set up a rule for myself that this book would not just be a rehashing of my articles.” she said. “In order for something to make it into the book, it had to have something new. I wanted to include things a person wouldn’t already know about from having read the stories in the Oregonian, or things they didn’t know about what reporters go through trying to capture and tell those stories.”

Some stories were harder to shake than others: lives lost at sea due to small but ultimately tragic decisions; a man who took his own life, possibly due to guilt over decisions made on the job. Talking to the bereaved and left behind was a particular challenge, but one that she met head-on.

“That instinct for getting to the heart of a story is really a part of who I am,” she said. “The kind of person who runs into a situation without hesitating. But it's on a case-by-case basis. I’ve never been comfortable injecting myself into someone’s grieving.”

After years of driving up and down the entire Oregon Coast to get stories (she had pitched being the reporter for just the Central Coast, but so it goes), Tobias was one of many writers affected by the downturn in print media, and went from being a staff writer to a “stringer,” being paid per story.

The positive of this was that she could choose which stories to pursue and actually say ‘no’ to others. But some, like a woman who took the life of her own six-year-old child, wouldn’t let her go.

“I thought I was done when the Oregonian asked me to write about the woman who threw her son off the Yaquina Bay Bridge,” Tobias said. “I ended up talking to his father, who told me, ‘London just wanted to be happy.’ He just really wanted to just have the chance to share about his son’s life. Giving him that opportunity helped with the tragedy of the story itself.”

Not having the full-time work — nor the identity — provided by being a staff reporter for the Oregonian was hard, but opened the window for the memoir Tobias knew was waiting to be written.

“When I got laid off from the Oregonian I was devastated,” she said. “It really helped to have something to work on, so I went through all my reporter's notebooks and made notes about what I thought should be in the book.”

Having reported on stories for so many years without being able to really dig deep, she also came up with a different way to tell Oregon Coast stories.

“I was searching for my relevance, and there wasn’t much freelancing going on out there at that point,” she said. “So I asked [Oregon Coast TODAY Publisher] Patrick [Alexander] out to lunch and pitched a column for the TODAY and he said ‘yes.’ It was a lot of fun.”

She was unprepared though for how writing for the TODAY creates national recognition, an incident that ended up in her column.

“When ‘Wander’ came out, I got to do a book signing in New York, which is every writer’s dream,” she said. “Lots of people came to the event and, when it was over, we were outside the venue and the wind was blowing hard, it was dark, it was as bad as any storm in the PNW. And then this guy comes up to me and he says ‘Are you Lori Tobias? I read about you in the Oregon Coast TODAY.’ That’s one of those ‘You can’t make this up’ stories.”

A virtual launch party, on Tuesday, Sept 1, is being sponsored by the Hoffman Center for the Arts and Oregon State University. For more information about Tobias, and to order “Storm Beat,” with a discount code, go to www.loritobias.com.