I interviewed Michelle Shephard along with two other students in my interviewing class. I was thrilled she agreed to come. Some fellow Star interns were a tad jealous. I had 10 minutes and focused on Shephard's process as a reporter and how she deals with the challenges of her job. She was a total trooper, giving honest, thorough and funny answers. Here's the article I submitted:
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| Michelle Shephard has been on the terrorism beat since 9/11. Supplied photo. |
“It's probably taught me to go into every interview completely open-minded because you don't know what you're going to get, and to try and explain the complexities as best you can.”
Her book, published on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, is called Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone. For Shephard, the subtitle holds the most weight.
“For 10 years we've looked at these issues in such stark terms, in black-and-white terms,” she said. “Really there's very few, as Bush called them, the ‘evil-doers’ — it's politics, so much of it.”
Shephard used this open-mindedness last week on a trip to Yemen, where she interviewed the father of Anwar al Awlaki, a terrorist killed with his son by a U.S. drone last September. It’s an interesting culmination to a job that started on 9/11.
“I saw it on the TV and just called my assignment editor,” she said. That evening she stood at Ground Zero as pieces of the World Trade Center continued falling. “We didn't know how big this was.”
The day changed everything for Shephard, who had been a journalist for just over five years.
Shephard had written for The Mike, a U of T student paper, while studying political science and English.
“I’ve always liked writing, but I never thought of journalism as a career,” she said.
She was about to write LSAT tests when she was accepted for Ryerson University’s master of journalism. Shephard interned at the London Free Press and the Toronto Star before being hired full-time in 1997. She covered crime and education, but neither were a great fit.
Loving travel and lacking a beat, Shephard took hostile-environment training and started reporting on the origins of terrorism in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and beyond.
She said coming home from such poor countries takes her some time.
“Everything seems so unfair when you come back,” Shephard said. “I get mad at the clothes in my closet; I get mad that I'm in line paying $5 for a Starbucks.”
Her busy career affects others too.
“I think a lot of the time journalism can be a selfish profession. Especially when you do foreign correspondence, and you go to places that are dangerous.”
It’s not a problem for her husband Jim Rankin — a Star photojournalist she met on her first day as an intern — but Shephard knows her job has been challenging for her parents. While it’s caused some sleepless nights, it’s also brought them closer together.
“I hate that word journey, it’s so it's corny, but if it's been a journey for 10 years, they've been coming along with me,” said Shephard, the youngest of four daughters. “They're incredibly patient; they're great.”
Shephard turns 40 in August. She told Canadian Interviews that she planned to slow down after the book’s first draft, finished last May.
“I haven't slowed down at all. I know I keep saying that,” laughed Shephard, quick to her praise for a paper that has financed trips across the globe during uncertain economic times.
“I’m so fortunate. But it is exhausting. You're often jet-lagged and have this kind of double-life,” she said. “It's hard because that where my passion is now, foreign reporting.”
Shephard’s off to Guantanamo next week for the 24th time, covering the trial of the alleged planner of the 9/11 attacks. She’s extensively covered the base’s absurdity, from quirky tourist souvenirs to being told that carrying two pens threatens national security.
Her knowledge of the base helped her write Guantanamo’s Child, a 2008 biography on Canadian detainee Omar Khadr, whose surname she pronounces with an uvular push.
Shephard was among four journalists the Pentagon banned from Guantanamo after naming an officer who had volunteered his identity years before a closed trial. A media campaign ensued, successfully pressuring Obama to restore access for the four.
“We went from being persona non grata to getting an invite to the Pentagon to address a roundtable,” she said. “Four months later I'm a the Pentagon with 60 uniformed officer advising them how to have better media relations.”
It’s one of many experiences that proved to Shephard that nothing has been black-and-white in the decade of terror.
