Like many young writers, Donovan Webster at first wanted to write fiction. While at Kenyon College and later while working at an ad agency in New York City, the 1977 New Trier graduate diligently sent his short stories out into the world and watched the piles of rejection notices grow. He regularly sent stories to the New Yorker and got back rejection slips that “shrank over time from form letters to note cards down to business cards.”
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Then Robert Gottlieb became the editor at the New Yorker. Webster, who’d started working as an editorial assistant for Condé Nast in 1983, started writing for the Talk of the Town section. One of his more memorable assignments was a journey to Atlanta to meet with Ted Turner, who’d recently produced a video that was to be aired on CNN in the event of a nuclear attack. “Turner was anticipating this event–he was getting ready,” says Webster. “Those were the Reagan years.”
Around this time Webster and his wife were vacationing in France and came across a small cryptic story in a newspaper about “deminers” collecting unexploded bombs. He started working on a piece about the deminers for the New Yorker, but it wasn’t easy getting information about them. “They’re a top secret branch of the military in France,” he says. And by the time he finished the story Tina Brown had taken over as editor at the New Yorker. She said the story wasn’t what the magazine was looking for.
–Raul Nino
