Stu Whitney pens Sioux Falls-inspired fiction in first novel

Pigeon605 Staff

August 2, 2021

By John Hult, for Pigeon605

The voice of Stu Whitney is a known commodity in eastern South Dakota.

Those who’ve followed local sports or South Dakota politics anytime over the past 30 years know how it reads in print. 

Those who’ve heard him on radio, podcasts, television or streaming videos know how it sounds. 

Those who’ve met him in person, as I first did 14 years ago in the Argus Leader newsroom, know he sounds like that all the time. He tends to speak in complete and pointed sentences, as though writing aloud and not talking about the next day’s sports page or this year’s plans for the famous Whitney family Academy Awards party.

Which is to say he speaks as he writes, which is as he is: passionate, curious and genuine, whether you like it or not. 

Most of us liked it, most of the time. At least in the newsroom. Though even there, I can’t be entirely sure.

This much I do know: Whitney’s voice and his willingness to use it to inform, advocate and agitate in equal measure were the clearest through lines of his career at the newspaper, which ended with a buyout last November. His work was loved or hated, but rarely ignored.

In his first novel, “The COVID Chronicles,” the punchy blend of conversational and performative that defined his journalism finds itself turned up to 11, unbound by the strictures of fact and splayed unapologetically across 220 pages of reimagined recent history.

It’s a Stu Whitney product from cover to cover, and that’s no accident. The book is self-published and self-edited, save input from his immediate family and the copy editing of former co-worker Ron Hoffman.

His research on DIY publishing recommended a developmental editor to guide plot structure, but Whitney balked at the cost and potential delays from outside intervention.

He had six months of financial cushion, he reckoned, and wanted the book out the door before that gave way and his topic turned cold.

“I felt like I knew what I wanted to say, and I didn’t need to have someone lording over it and telling me, ‘Oh, you need to change this character here, have this character do that,’ ” Whitney said. “We’re talking about a global pandemic that affected everyone to some degree and using a novel to address some of that.”

He had other reasons for confidence. The plot’s nonpandemic components draw their inspiration from Whitney’s real life and career. The tale is narrated by an unnamed newspaper editor, a Detroit native who labors through the pandemic in a Sioux Falls led by a Democratic mayor whose gubernatorial aspirations and embrace of pandemic protocols put him at odds with a Trump-supporting, mask-averse GOP governor with presidential ambitions and a sharp-elbowed staff. The first chapter tells us that a man has died and that the narrator is involved, but well over a hundred pages pass before the victim’s name or the narrator’s role in his death come to light.

Astute readers with a baseline understanding of Sioux Falls news will find Easter eggs in nearly every chapter. There is a deadly downtown building collapse, a local health system reshaped by a large philanthropic donation, debates about the location of an events center and much more. 

That’s not an accident, either. To hear Whitney tell it, the book was a way to do what he has always done: spark conversation and offer insight on his community.

“This was a bit of an experiment to see if I could have the same kind of impact, sort of quasi-journalistically, as a novelist,” he said. 

There’s more to a satisfying novel than shuffling facts or imagining conversations for dramatic effect, though, as Whitney did from time to time in satirical columns with far lower stakes. There’s dialogue and character-building, the exploration of inner lives and interpersonal struggles. For that, Whitney again drew from formative personal experience, with style guidance from novelists like Jonathan Franzen, Phillip Roth and Joan Didion.

The quest to write “the kind of novel I’d like to read,” with true-to-life characters battling real demons, led him to reopen some uncomfortable chapters in his own life. He warned family and friends to brace for discomfort.

“I chose to take that risk. I chose to do it the way I think it should be done, which is to write a no-holds-barred, aggressive novel that is going to perhaps open some wounds. I didn’t want to take the easy way out,” he said. “I think people understand that that’s what novelists do: they take things from their own lives and twist it to fit what they’re doing at the time.”

Aside from social media commentary, the solitary work of the novel has kept Whitney largely out of the public eye for six months. News of his novel’s release was received enthusiastically by former readers, more enthusiastically still by the co-workers he mentored or worked alongside over the years. 

Argus Leader sports reporter Matt Zimmer may be among the first to tear through it. The Sioux Falls native first read Whitney’s work at age 10. Argus sportswriters were “like local celebrities,” when Zimmer joined the newsroom in 2003, “but Stu in particular was the guy that everyone knew because he was one of the few who were willing to stir sh*t up.”

Whether it was his left-leaning politics or bear-poking stances about how all state tournaments ought to be played in Sioux Falls, there was always something to animate Whitney’s critics.

“Stu would sit down to write something and just know his mailbox was going to fill up the next day, but he’d write it anyway,” Zimmer said. “I always admired that about him.”

Reactions to Whitney’s words could be intense in the real world too. Zimmer once sat with Whitney at the state basketball tournament as fans a few rows up hurled verbal abuse at his editor for “I’m not kidding you, three straight hours.”

If Whitney was fazed, Zimmer said, he didn’t show it. Perhaps that calm helps explain why so many of the critics stuck with him for so many years.

“I’ve found that there are a lot of people who vehemently disagree with him politically but still like him and still want to read his stuff. And then there are people who disagree with him politically and dislike him personally and still like to read his stuff.”

Zimmer credits Whitney and another longtime Argus sports reporter, Mick Garry, with helping him to develop his own voice as a writer, largely through encouragement and an openness to his ideas. 

Danielle Ferguson, an investigative reporter for South Dakota News Watch, had a similar experience. Like Zimmer, the Salem native was slightly starstruck when she arrived as an intern, in her case to a newsroom Whitney had haunted since before she was born. 

“I remember thinking ‘Oh, my God, that’s Stu Whitney. Can I even talk to him?’” Ferguson said.

A few years later, she found herself on the criminal justice beat, with Whitney as her writing coach. She pitched what would become a seven-month project, during which she tracked the progress of a formerly incarcerated man adjusting to life on the outside. She found the same open mind that Zimmer had come to appreciate.

“I was so grateful, first that he heard me out, but secondly that he encouraged me to pursue it,” she said. 

Whitney pushed her to think not just about what a reader might want to know, but how to use her writing to keep them hooked into a long-form narrative while delivering the information. The gulf in age and experience disappeared in the process of producing the best possible version of the work.

“That was a big thing,” she said. “He never made me feel dumb. That was huge for my confidence.”

Neither Ferguson nor Zimmer was surprised to hear that their former co-worker decided to write a book upon his exit from daily news – “he’d better write a book,” Ferguson remembers thinking. Both of them look forward to reading it.

I did too. Like them, I grew up reading Whitney’s work, though perhaps less of it as a nonsports fan. As a reader, I disagreed as often as anyone else. As a reporter, I also marveled at how deftly he navigated criticism. 

It’s no surprise, then, that I enjoyed every page of “The COVID Chronicles.” I’m not an unbiased judge. I know just enough about Whitney and Sioux Falls to be held at attention more readily than a reader who comes in cold. But I’m not the only one who can say that, either. He has lived here three decades, raised his family here and written for the city’s lone daily newspaper the entire time, so those who know him and the Sioux Falls history that animates his narrative represent a small but not insignificant number.

Expand the audience pool to those who know South Dakota, and that number grows considerably. Expand it again to include anyone familiar with Gov. Kristi Noem and the political winds on which she sails, and there’s potential for national interest. Finally, pull in anyone whose life was disrupted by COVID-19. That’s everyone.

Who’s to say how many people might find something to love – or hate – about Whitney’s latest endeavor?

Wherever the chips fall, the newly minted novelist is glad he tackled the task. And as always, he’s ready for the response.

“This was the stiffest challenge I’ve ever given myself as a writer,” he said. “The book is the product of that challenge. People can decide for themselves if I did a good job.”

What’s next for Whitney? Well, he admits that might need to get “a real job” at some point, but he hopes to write another book. He might return to the relative comfort zone of nonfiction, though.

“If somebody told me I had to get to work on another novel in the next two weeks, I would probably cry like a baby.”

“The COVID Chronicles” is available online at stuwhitney.com and locally at Zandbroz Variety, where Whitney will be for a book signing Aug. 14. 

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