Episode 78: Bronwen Dickey
Bronwen Dickey is a contributing editor at The Oxford American and the author of Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon.\n\nIn October 2019, her story \u201cThe Remains\u201d was published by Esquire. The story looks at forensic anthropology, and one case in particular.\n\n\u201cThe story is about a young man named Christian Gonzalez, who came to this country when he was very, very young with his family, and grew up in East Texas and considered himself, as did his friends and family, to be American,\u201d Dickey says. \u201cAnd then he was deported after kind of a weird conflagration of events, and he was deported to Mexico. He really did not know his home at all and felt very lonely there. He tried to get back into the United States, and he died in the South Texas desert.\n\nDickey opens The Remains with a scene that is very detailed, showing the forensic anthropologists doing their work on the remains of Christian Gonzalez. That work was done many years ago, though, which means Dickey had to recreate the scene through solid reporting.\n\n\u201cRecreation is one of the parts of writing that I enjoy the most,\u201d Dickey says, \u201cBecause it\u2019s kind of like going on a historical scavenger hunt a little bit, trying to find the details that\u2019ll fit into the puzzle of the picture you\u2019re trying to build.\u201d\n\nDickey has written for Esquire, Outside, Men\u2019s Journal, Pacific Standard, the New York Times, and so many more publications. She\u2019s received the Hearst Editorial Excellence Award in reporting, and a Lowell Thomas Award in travel journalism. \n\nHer story \u201cClimb Aboard, Ye Who Seek the Truth,\u201d was published by Popular Mechanics, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Magazine Award in feature writing.