Construction of the Underworld

Underworld by Jeanne Marie Laskas is a powerfully moving feature that gives readers a look into the lives of hard working coal miners. Laskas was able to write such a great piece because of the amount of time and energy she spent with the miners. She did more than just interview and talk with the miners but she actually observed them and listened to their conversations with each other.

An example of her time spent with the coal miners is on page 398:

They were shy at first, eager to impress and with little other apparent motivation, welcomed me in. I followed one crew, "the E rotation"- Billy, Smitty, Scotty, Pap, Rick, Chris, Kevin, Hook, Duke, Ragu, Sparky, Charlie- who worked in the Cadiz portal, one of the two the company owned. I followed them underground, home, to church, to the strip club where they drink and gossip and taunt and jab and worry about one another.

Another example in her writing that shows how much time she spent studying the miners is one page 400:

I spent months trying to position myself and my world around these people-people who seem stuck in a bygone era that isn't bygone at all.

It seems that after spending such a great deal of time with the miners that Laskas realized that it was not the miners who were stuck in a bygone era but that it is the consumer that is stuck. This is a great example of how new ideas stem from what is being written about and can take a piece in an entirely new direction. You find new ideas and new stories while doing research-learning something new is something that should happen while writing a feature.

Another feature of features is the use of description. Writers should describe as much of what is happening as possible so that the reader can almost feel like they are there and can see what the writer sees. A few of the most descriptive sentences used is found on page 404:

Once you step off the elevator, you climb onto a manstrip, a small train car. You don't sit so much as lie on that thing, a crawling convertible, you lean way back on it so as to avoid scraping your head on the ceiling as you whiz on in through a cool, damp tunnel, mud, slush, clunk, clunk, rattle, hiss. You travel a mile in, two miles in, sometimes as far as six or seven miles in and away from the elevator shaft where you first dropped down.

Laskas's use of description and the lengthy amount of time she spent researching her story made the piece effective and made me feel more connected to the people that she wrote about.