As a former editorial assistant for the OXFORD AMERICAN, I was saddened by the death of writer Sean Rowe. When the magazine’s editors asked me to write about working with Rowe, this tribute followed.
Working with a Dangerous Writer
by Jessica Haberkern
The man’s middle name was Danger, for crying out loud. Sean Danger Rowe: award-winning journalist and certified Harrison Ford look-alike. A poet, a novelist, a jailbird. So, yes, he was a bit raw. Let’s call him…unpasteurized. He liked where his liquor took him, he said, even if that meant being thrown behind bars or in the path of a train. He was hit by a train, by the way, in 1999, and spent the next several years recovering on a friend’s farm. If The OA had a contributors’ Wall of Fame, there he’d be, documented in a single photograph wearing a leather jacket and fedora, striking a stallion’s pose in front of that very train.
I worked with Rowe two years ago on his article about dining in the Wake County Jail. A then-Editorial Assistant for The OA (best job I ever had, I swear on it), who spent much time checking the facts in articles, I was accustomed to corroborating awkward trivia with the blessing of apathetic government employees and enthusiastic Civil War relic hunters. But Rowe’s piece revealed a sort of unabashed innocence on my part. When I called him to verify that the term “chickenhead” did, in fact, refer to a prostitute that serviced crack addicts, Rowe told me I had better take his word. “And you’re sure the phrase is one word, not two?” I pressed.
He digressed and launched into a story about a sweetie in Vermont, the one who built a cabin with her bare hands, an artist in the purest sense. He liked to talk about this girl, about any girl really, and lingered over their flickering romance in between facts. He was a charmer, a poet of harmless wooing, and took to calling me “Gator Girl"—a pun on my maiden name. His phone calls to me were frequent, maybe three or four times a day for a month, and were nearly always accompanied by playful prodding.
"Hey Gator Girl, you got a fella?” he asked after I recounted my most recent dialogue with a Wake County Jail guard. The guard was befuddled when I asked him to confirm or deny whether Ramen noodles, as Rowe had written, were no longer sold in the Commissary because the flotsam byproduct clogged cell sinks.
“Yeah, something like that,” I told Rowe.
“I keep asking the same broad to marry me,” he said.
“And?”
“She perpetually says no. Would you marry me?”
How many times in a girl’s life does a man named Danger offer up an impromptu proposal? Here’s my rule of thumb for that situation: Always say yes. So I did.
Rowe would call to pass along Rick Bragg’s phone number or put me in touch with Sheriff Donny Harrison. But then he’d lament over his latest heartbreak with the lover in Vermont or pillow talk about our impending marriage. We’d live in North Carolina, he said, at the home he planned to build as a refuge for artists. I would be his editor, his gardener, his muse. He, the writer, the handyman, the Picasso to my Francoise Gilot. The Humbert Humbert to my Lolita, which, perhaps, may have been a more accurate metaphor for my barely twenty-something self: a young and aspiring writer psychologically captive to her middle-aged mentors.
Our phone conversations ended when the piece was published. And though we never met, I received Christmas cards addressed to “Gator Girl” and a signed copy of his second novel, FEVER, even after I left The OA for grad school and moved three states east.
Although Rowe, a seasoned MIAMI HERALD reporter, preferred to write nonfiction, the piece on jail food was one of the few stories he wrote for himself, about himself. “That’s a dangerous practice,” he said. “It’s dangerous because the more personal you get in a story, the harder it is to stay honest. Here I think I pulled it off, but at a price: I had to reveal things I’m not proud of to get at something bigger than me.”
I think Rowe’s unpasteurized honesty shows a man who’s gritty, tender, riotously funny, and gosh-darn passionate. In the piece I had fact-checked, Rowe focused his affections on jailhouse cuisine and the slammer in Selma, Alabama, that served the best. Why did Selma’s Podunk County Jail win Rowe’s personal poll? Because they dished up hot bacon, flakey biscuits, and honest-to-God scrambled eggs, a welcomed contrast from Wake County, where “cartilaginous” bologna and two slices of Wonder Bread could suspend your ability to poop after four days. But Rowe’s real passion lay not in the food itself, but in the unique way it seemed to evoke a brotherhood of outlaws with a collective distaste for their mealtime cuisine. Imagine a cartel of jailbirds with little more in common than the neighboring cells they’re locked in. You’ve got “Mack (trafficking), Nate (counterfeiting), Outlaw (parole violation), and J.C. (conspiracy).” It’s them against the law, the guards, and the chefs, and the only retribution they may ever see is a daily critique of dinner. Let me put it this way: At the Wake County Jail, Rowe and his entourage ate together, hated it together, and each fantasized about finding prep cooks in dark alleys.
When Rowe’s piece on jail food was republished in THE BEST CREATIVE NONFICTION VOLUME 3, he commented that in this story he failed to mention how it feels to be let out of jail. “It doesn’t feel how you thought it would. The door swings open and there’s the guard and you stop and look back at the guys you’re leaving behind. This story’s for them,” Rowe said. “And for the total stranger I’ll never meet but still care about. That’s you.”
Yes, Rowe, that’s me.
Postscript: Sean Rowe died in August 2010.
